Second Class Warriors

*

I recall a schoolboy coming home
Through fields of cane
To a house of tin and timber
And in the sky
A rain of falling cinders
From time to time
The waste memory-wastes
I recall a boy in bigger pants
Like everyone
Just waiting for a chance
His father’s watch
He left it in the showers
From time to time
The waste memory-wastes
I recall a bigger brighter world
A world of books
And silent times in thought
And then the railroad
The railroad takes him home
Through fields of cattle
Through fields of cane
From time to time
The waste memory-wastes
The waste memory-wastes
Further, longer, higher, older

Cattle and Cane, The Go Betweens.

He couldn't believe he had been robbed, yet again. Show the slightest vulnerability and they attack. These are the country's allegedly "most vulnerable". But it's perfectly alright for them to call us "white c...s". Why? Was the grumbling old right winger rising in him again, that one who had embarrassed him before, ranting against the injustices perpetrated by the pack mentality of the left. And yet he, too, had once been happy to accept the label "marshmallow left"; so long ago. So long ago there had been love and triumph and long wild nights as de rigeur; as the way things were. Stumbling, because you hadn't had a night out unless you experienced at least one black out. "I was thinking of making a pass at you," he said; and the handsome young man looked startled, and put his feet back in the car. "Were you?"

From all these days to ancient days, when Tennessee Williams haunted the back of cinemas looking for trade and the Dancer from the Dance bloke moaned about caring for his mother, about how all his friends were dying of AIDS. About how the great gay liberation movement had descended to a few ragged queens shuffling their pride porn collections from rented apartment to rented apartment, deteriorating in quality as they grew sicker and their finances dried up. And the fabulous nights dried up. And everything dried up. And rather than turning heads and hearts; they attracted nothing but a sympathetic stare from the young. How could you have let yourself go so badly? Time was cruel, but to the untouched, to the fantasist, to the secret lovers, to the young and young at heart, time was indifferent. They would never grow old.

Something to be, something to say you had been. That was the phrase that rang in those far off days, when he wrote deep and meaningful, fractured, incoherent, barely readable stories about the encroaching sterility of the modern world, the crystalline frost eating into the fabric of everything. How sad he had been, for no accountable reason. Living life on the bottom of a lead aquarium, squashed by the weight of the liquid mercury which passed for water in this terrifying place. There would be no saving grace. Except in oblivion, which he constantly sought. Except in the adventures he thought would mark him out; smashed as, never trust a man who doesn't drink. The increasing contrast between his private life and the mainstream job he now held down ultimately led to a schitzsophrenic break. The crippled dwarf hiding behind all those shields, it just wouldn't come out.

And so, ultimately, these strange constructions formed on the back of a wave of alcohol and other substances; abuse; oblivion. It was cute when he was stumbling into Una's at 3am as a young looking 16-year-old, and Una, a German woman who had come out here and established Sydney's first 24-hour coffee shop, would sober him up with black coffee and icecream, and all around him the voices: "He should be at home with his mother". But oblivion, desperate incoherence, a deep drunkenness; all of it was increasingly pathetic for a man in his 30s, 40s, 50s. There would always be people circling, that he had learnt. They were never well intentioned. They circled in the school yard and they circled in later life; and the deeper darknesses which had haunted his every waking moment, they were gone amidst the clutter of lost loves and uncompleted projects.

What was the lesson, if any? Live each day at a time, don't waste whatever you have left? Be humbled. Show an attitude of gratitude. He didn't think so. The lesson was one of narrative strength, of structure, of the broad sweep of people's lives. Don't take anyone for granted. Don't jump to conclusions. And so he smiled, in what he thought was a gracious way, and did not rise to the bait; the jackals sliding off him into the night. I'm so horny I'd f... a monkey, the rent boy loudly declared; and the old queen literally put his wallet back in his pocket. Easy availability cheapened the price. The desperate grunts. The frantic backs and forths; preying they would come quickly. So many young faces populated these tortured dreams; this life so far from any suburban normality. Television had changed us; media had changed us. And now what had once been a glittering surface was opaque, shot through with contradictions, complexities. He was sacred and he was ready; but the person he had waited for all his life, that great love which would override physical abnormalities and psychic tortures, the crippled, drunken dwarf who had lived so triumphantly in all his dreams, was not to be. He passed by every opportunity; and instead opened the door to strangers.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,25681459-661,00.html

VICTORIA'S first swine-flu fatality remained critically ill at a country hospital for several hours because no intensive-care beds were available anywhere in the state, his family claim.

Anthony Splatt, 35, died on Saturday, two days after collapsing at his Colac home, becoming the second Australian to die from the flu strain.

Last night, his devastated parents Brian and Judith told of their nightmare, saying they believed their son had to wait about three hours while fighting for his life for a bed to be found, eventually at Maroondah Hospital early on Friday.

"His poor GP was pacing the floor in Colac because he was getting sicker and sicker," said Mrs Splatt, a nurse.

An angry Brian Splatt, 73, said: "There were no beds in Victoria. It seemed like forever (before a bed was found).

"We hope in a way his death makes more intensive care beds available."

The family told how Anthony, described by his shattered mum as "a gentle giant", had appeared to be suffering only a common cold last week.

"Anthony appeared to have an ordinary common cold with the usual symptoms," his mum said.

"He didn't complain (but) he was probably feeling a lot worse than he let on.

"He collapsed when he went to get up on Thursday."

http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-06-23-voa26.cfm

Iranian film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf describes the declared victory of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran's recent presidential elections as a "coup d'etat."

Makhmalbaf says the present situation in Iran is not the result of voting irregularities, but a true and proper "coup d'etat."

Addressing the foreign media in Rome, the man who has become the official spokesman abroad for Mir Hossein Mousavi, spoke out strongly about the situation in Iran following the presidential election.

No peace

Makhmalbaf says opposition candidate Mousavi was preparing his victory speech when military commanders came to tell him he could not be the winner. He adds that the people of Iran do not want to be ruled by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for the next four years and there will be no peace in Iran if he is the leader.

Makhmalbaf spoke of the slogans called out by the people in Iran, saying they do not want the atomic bomb, but democracy. The people, he says, feel they have been robbed of their vote and that Mr. Ahmadinejad is not their president. He says they shout out that they do not want a dictatorship, but a free society.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,24897,25682399-601,00.html

AT first you don't realise the young woman is actually dying.

She's lying on the ground, people around her, looking stunned.

Her eyes swell. She looks traumatised. Her eyes swell even more.

It's all happening so quickly that it's hard to work out what's going on - all you can see now are her swollen white eyes.

She could be any woman in Iran - a young Iranian woman with all her adult life ahead of her.

Except that she's been caught at the receiving end of her government's crackdown.

Suddenly you see blood start coming from her mouth. Then men around her begin screaming. It's not clear what they're shouting, but within seconds the shouts go from cries for help to shouts of horror.

Then she dies. She dies in 10 seconds. We sit in an internet cafe in Tehran and watch her die.

Since we first watched the video, the world has come to know the woman as Neda.

But before the world saw Neda Salehi Agha Soltan's death, the video had gripped the internet cafes of Tehran that particular day. There's a different one each day.

In this strange civil war, internet cafes have become the command-and-control centres of the opposition.

A man who had been sitting opposite me in a booth called me over - he gave me headphones and wanted me to watch and hear the 26-year-old music student dying during Saturday's protest in Tehran. Then he showed me others. Then someone else in the cafe beckoned me to their terminal. They had photos they wanted me to see.
We're all sitting at our computers in a suburb of Tehran, looking at the latest pictures from the city's killing fields.