No Respecter Of Persons

*

Mai dee, no good, he said, as the girls made comment on the shape of his body at the local massage parlour at Om Nut, where he used to go when he first arrived in the country. But even there the same winds of decay and change that had swept through the gangster's lair had also laid havoc to the past good cheer. There appeared to have been a change of management. There was some excited chatter as she automatically took his custom off the girl at the door; because the big girl knew he liked her, was comfortable with her. And she had strong fingers. But the massage lasted barely the hour, unlike previous endeavours, because she knew he always tipped she always delivered. Like some lads he could name. There wasn't any enthusiasm left. Like the empty bowls rolling across a movie set, the tumble weeds on the desert highway, it was obvious the decay had sank and spread, eating up the old time line, eating up his past, so even now he couldn't conjure up the images which had once so entranced him. All that money gone to waste, that's all he could think. And yet there was much more to come. This was the break he had waited for, for so long. They weren't going to entrance and capture him any more, he was his own boss, the prince of his own domain, and the spiralling costs, the adventures of the spirit, the way they all welcomed each other beyond the barrier, it all made sense now.

The little men waving in the smoke, the aliens who had landed so long ago, the crisis that had ripped his psyche apart and left him in the mornings at the Duke of Wellington. The staff there still waved at him as he walked past; although he hadn't stopped there for a Stella Artois in what seemed like centuries. There were mountains of chaos. There were delayed reactions. There were old queens sitting at bar stools and wrists flapping in the breeze, but for all their patience, for all the deeds that had been done, those moments in the bar in the morning were the most valued of all. Like the moment before a hit, they were the only times when he felt most truly himself. There was a psychological explanation. He didn't want to know. This is the one true path, the only path; into degradation, into ultimate despair. He hadn't chosen to take it; not for now. Nate, the journalist who got the last interview with Pol Pot and was once world famous, was being repatriated back to America by the Embassy, broke, crippled by the booze, inarticulate and indeterminate, the black causes and the depths to which he had sunk made him almost impossible to talk to. Nate, he yelled out on the street as they walked along Sathon, from Saint Louis Hospital to the Surasek sky train station, and he turned and briefly talked to them, from the depths of somewhere else, his eyes sunken, his weight down, everything a failure. Going back to America. You better be careful there, too, he said.

How are you dear, Jack the appalling queen from Washington, asked. Nate mumbled something no one else could hear. Well be careful dear, Jack added. Bangkok is not the place to be if you're drinking and have no money. I love it here, he piped up. But you're not drinking, you have an apartment and you have money, Jake said. Well it was too crude to be ordered. Nate didn't say much else and drifted ahead. He probably wouldn't see him again. Do you think he will get well, dear, Jack asked. No, he said, probably not. No respecter of persons. Just as wealth is no respecter of death. He's a highly intelligent man, known the world over, he has accreditation here from the London Times for God's sake, something a lot of people would kill for, and here he is being repatriated. Not a good look. I can see the streets of America in his face. He made a lot of money out of the Pol Pot interview. It's all gone. He had an apparently beautiful property in Chesapeake Bay, wherever that is, and that's all gone. Drinking, dear, Jack asked, and he replied in the affirmative. Well it goes to show... and he dribbled off. Goes to show what, who only knew, that the day was the day and the highs were the highs, but the lows came equally fast and brutally; and swept people down into the streets and down into the gutters with astonishing rapidity; left them friendless, homeless, waiting for the dark lord to take them. And then as always Jack began his prattle about which men he had fancied at the meeting, whether or not he would go to the sauna, Babylon, that afternoon, which day his boyfriend was arriving from Malaysia. Nate had already disappeared from view by the time they reached the sky train; the sweat from the Bangkok heat prickling on their skin, the day beckoning.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/special-reports/bracket-creep-to-ensure-that-a-million-a-year-pay-higher-tax-rates/story-fn5ko0pw-1225900281312

MORE than one million Australians will have their pay rises eaten up by tax bracket creep over the next three years because neither side of politics is offering a tax cut.

Workers earning $34,000 a year will see their tax rate double from 15c in the dollar to 30c over the next three years as politicians focus on paying off the nation's debt.

And a worker on $73,000 a year will be pushed from the 30c tax bracket to 37c by 2013.

It's called bracket creep and it happens when the tax scales are not indexed to take account of growth in wages.

The age pension and other welfare payments are indexed twice a year but the tax system is not automatically adjusted for inflation or wages growth.

A series of election tax cuts over the past decade has largely protected Australian workers from bracket creep.

On July 1 workers received the last of the scheduled $34 billion tax cuts promised by both major parties at the the 2007 election campaign.

An analysis prepared for the Herald Sun by the Melbourne Institute shows that without tax cuts over the next two years, wage rises will push 735,000 workers into a higher tax bracket.

By the next election in three years' time, 1.14 million Australians will be in a higher tax bracket.

More than half will be pushed out of the 30c bracket into the second-highest bracket where they will pay 37c in the dollar.

A further 460,000 workers will see their tax rate double as wages growth pushes them from the 15c-in-the-dollar tax bracket into the 30c bracket.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/7923059/Afghanistan-is-an-unwinnable-war-and-our-leaders-know-it.html

Afghanistan is an unwinnable war, and our leaders know it
The only consequence of long-term conflict in Afghanistan, and anywhere else, is to increase the number of our enemies

By Stephen Vizinczey

In his must-read book, World War One: A Short History, Norman Stone identifies one of the main reasons for Hitler's appeal: the success of the German Right in persuading millions of Germans that they could have won Great War and that they lost it because they were "betrayed". The American Right did a similarly and tragically successful job with public opinion in the United States: millions of voters believe that the war in Vietnam could have been won if it hadn't been for lily-livered liberals and student protesters – and if more soldiers had been sent.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that President Obama, surrounded by super-intelligent advisers from the best universities, continues with the Afghan war because, if America were to withdraw, millions of voters would believe that a wiser and tougher leader could have won, and so the President would lose the next election. Ignorance is the greatest weakness in democracies, because leaders have to go with the majority's views.

But the war in Afghanistan was lost long before President Obama came to power, because of an iron law of human conflict: most people hate foreigners coming to their country and trying to force them to change their way of life for a better and wiser one. This was as true when the Romans invaded Britain as it is today. In the past, though, people were accustomed to being ruled by others. Now, they are not – and conflict situations give the home team, like the Taliban, advantage and likely victory.
There are exceptions to the rule, but they are few and far between. Napoleon won in the German principalities, Austria, the rest of Central Europe and Italy, because a significant part of the population had absorbed the ideas of the Enlightenment and felt and thought like the French soldiers: they wanted to be equal and wanted to be able to rise in the world, regardless of their low birth. This was the reason for Napoleon's early victories. But what sealed his fate in a few quick years was his fatal blunder of sending his troops into countries where people believed that the idea of equality was satanic. (Napoleon was the first "Great Satan", by the way.) He was beaten not only in Russia, which had greater manpower and resources, but also in Spain, which didn't.

There has to be a shared purpose between the population and foreign armies for an invasion to triumph, such as existed during the liberation of Europe in the Second World War. All the Allies had to do was to fight the German armies. The inhabitants of the continent were sick of the Nazis, even in Germany, and practically everybody rooted for a swift Allied victory.

This is not the case even among the Afghan soldiers who fight alongside us at the moment. The soldier who killed several of our troops before joining the Taliban is far more typical of these young men's true feelings than their impressive turnout for Hamid Karzai's inauguration ceremony.

When President Bush sent US forces to Afghanistan, he was effectively asking them to win a war in the Middle Ages, and therefore doomed his country to ultimate defeat. He would never have started that war except for a deep-seated faith in his country's invincibility. The almost universal belief that the "good guys always win" is the most self-destructive notion both for individuals and nations, as it conditions them to disregard the evidence of their senses – the facts.

Of course, there is the notion, particularly strong in California, home of the US weapons industry, that superior weapons make the lessons of history irrelevant. This fallacy is wrapped up in the belief that, in the end, it is our values which win wars, our assistance to agriculture, education, healthcare, and so on. But winning "hearts and minds" is the policy of mixing killing and maiming with healing, and it doesn't work. Weapons don't "settle" anything, for the reasons I set out in The Rules of Chaos, which I wrote during the Vietnam War, explaining that the longer a conflict lasts, the more people and countries it involves – to the point that no power can control it.

Picture: Peter Newman.