How Bush Rules

This is a picture of the Chiang Mai Flower festival, where I went with the kids in January; running up the credit cards but enjoying the escape. It covered 80 hectares, and the orchid section alone was enormous; from the world's tiniest and rarest orchids to common ones like these. The kids were bored witless but I loved it. Still reading How Bush Rules, whjich is a fascinating study on the abuse of power and the pig ignorance of the ruling classes. Our own Prime Minister here in Australia John Howard has made great play of beiong a good friend of George Bush; including those cloying scenes from his last trip to Washington, when he was given the full treatment, the evening ball, the military parades, not so sure about the 21 gun salute but all that sort of thing. The two of them standing at the podium backing each other up, patting each other on the back. Bush said something to the effect; he might not be the prettiest thing; but if he says something you can take it to the bank. Here in Australia he's called the rodent for his double crossing and superficial nature; the Opposition's denigration of him as "clever" or conniving well and truly starting to stick; as we drive through deserted towns, shut shops, no one on the streets; no life; the homogenous conformity of a nightmare culture created by these tyrannical born to rule idiots.

The nation has suffered enough; but there is nowhere to turn. If you're 30 years and you began voting at 18 you've never known anyone else but Howard; and the lure of the other side as some sort of national saviour is strong. But labour leader Kevin Rudd, Crudd as my father repeatedly calls him, will be just as bad, just as hypocritical, just as out of touch with ordinary working people; and the well oiled machine that is the Labor party will produce just as many inequities as Howard.

Early in the year a desperate Howard, trying to focus the drifting nation's attention, said "If you change the Prime Minister you change the country". And everyone went: "Yes!!!!". He hasn't made that mistake again.

THE STORY CONTINUES:

"He couldn't quite see how he could go to the Mardi Gras with the two young ones, but he would have liked the almost therapeutic abandonment of the ocasion. Perhaps the mother-in-law would mind the kids. He roped his friend Stephen into helping him with them on somie of the after-work cruise arounds to openings and launches in the month long Mardi Gras festival leading up to the parade.

"They were certainly the only children at most of the events, a statement which appealed to Stephen. Whereas in the past these events would have been just the beginning of a long night out, they always had to leave early as he headed home to get the kids to bed. Stephen was one of his few old gay friends who had accepted his shift in sexuality.

"Most of them thought he was no longer being true to himself. If a married man left his wife and took up on the scene, he was applauded. If you moved the other way, you were a betrayer, of yourself, of the community. 'I've got two kids now', he'd told an old friend proudly one night, shortly after Henrietta's birth. 'I don't know you any more', the friend said, and walked away."


THE BIGGER STORY:

ABC:

Pygmies move from zoo after outcry

Congo authorities say a troupe of pygmy musicians made to live at the zoo while performing at a music festival in the country's capital have been given with accommodation in a local school.

The plight of the 22 pygmies, whose tents became an attraction for curious Brazzaville zoo visitors, provoked outrage among civil rights groups in Congo.

All the other musicians playing at the July 8-14 pan-African FESPAM festival were provided with hotel rooms.

The pygmies, from Congo's north-east Likouala forest region, had been gathering wood daily in the zoo to prepare fires to cook their food, often with tourists snapping photos of them.

The Congo Government says it ordered the relocation of the pygmies late on Friday.

Organisers of the music festival, which ends later today, told Radio France International that as pygmies normally live in the forest, they had hoped to recreate their natural habitat by housing them in the zoo, which has wooded areas.

Pygmies frequently complain of being marginalised and treated with disrespect by governments in central Africa, while their jungle habitat is degraded and destroyed.