The Angels Of Our Better Nature

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It’s been hard to be angry lately, harder to maintain the rage in the face of loving family, delightful spouse and children grown wise, patient and forgiving. My youngest daughter has returned home to Brisbane, managing a two hour plane ride that became an eight hour debacle caused by storms, planes that didn’t go and staff that should. She did it with persistence, determined staff management and the silently ticked off resolution of those who do what works rather than vent feelings that make things worse. I’m proud of her, and I’ll miss her in the weeks to come.

It reminded me of times past when I’ve had to think fast to produce the effect rather than the affect, the intervention rather than the emotion. The thing that angers me most, and most often, is the abuse of children. The sound of a crying child makes me crazy, and I have to do something, anything to make it stop. Over the years I’ve seen and heard children being yelled at, abused, shaken, dragged by the arm around shopping centres more often than anywhere else. And I know that ‘sticking your nose in’ is not only not appreciated, it’s asking for more trouble, more for the child with some left over for me. And over the years I’ve come up with a range of ways to deal with it.

I’ve ‘lost control’ of my shopping cart and crashed into the cart of someone berating a child, and followed up with profuse apologies and general bumbling that diverts and defuses. I’ve burst into song on occasions (usually to my spouse) to create a useful diversion. A favourite is singing “Dolmades!” at the deli counter, to the tune of the 60’s Dean Martin classic “Volare.” If you get the moment right you can usually get people to join in on the “Whoa-oh!” chorus.

I’ve bowled fresh melons or tinned peaches around the ankles of obnoxious, bullying parents, followed up with a loud, “Whoops, sorry.. ooh, there it is, don’t know how that got away from me..” in order to break up a ruckus with a kid on the short end of the stick. I wasn’t interfering, just distracting people and putting the bullying adult off their stride. It’s hard to be stroppy when canned peas are rolling dangerously around your heels and bouncing off your trolley.

I once stood in a checkout line watching a mother bully her five year old for several minutes and eventually broke in with “Never mind kid, when she’s old and helpless, and you’re all grown up you can put her in a home and spend all her money.” The child blinked back his tears and stared at me, silently. The mother shut her mouth, kept her back turned, and got out of there a.s.a.p.

But my proudest moment was about twelve years ago in a ghastly shopping centre on Sandgate Road in Albion, a dreary north Brisbane suburb. I was wandering aimlessly past a row of shops that featured a pharmacy next to a newsagent. As I looked to my right I saw, across the aisles of corn-pads, tampons and constipation relief, a large fat woman towering over a tot with tears streaming down her face.

As I watched the woman picked the child up and slapped it hard across the face. Without a moment’s thought I picked up the nearest thing to hand, which was a size twelve running shoe in a bargain bin at the pharmacy’s entrance, and threw it hard. I was quite shocked when, over several aisles and about fifteen feet, it hit the woman square in the back of the head. I instantly jumped back around the dividing wall into the newsagents shop.

I strolled out a minute or two later but the woman and the child were gone. I never got to see the look on the face of the vile baggage after her encounter with The Flying Footwear of Instant & Anonymous Karma. I like to think she turned around and saw no-one, just an empty and accusing silence that chilled her to the marrow. When I thought about it later I laughed my socks off. It was sublime. Down with the Tyranny Of Mean-Spirited Fat Cows In Overstretched Tracksuits! Strike one for The Forces Of Justice And Avenging Footwear. I hope she is haunted by it to this day. That she shudders when size twelve blue and white running shoes cross her path. That her child believes in the kindness of strangers and knows right from wrong, and right from left, all because of that moment.

Most of all I’m proud of the spontaneity of the act. That I didn’t hop from foot to foot with middle class angst, stricken with the immobility of the well-meaning but clueless. I didn’t think at all, I just was taken up in the moment, the act, the blow for the weak and powerless against the vile and sanctimonious bullies of the world. I acted in complete and spontaneous accord with the better angels of my nature. Which is a rare and precious moment in any life, but even better than that, I got away with it. A rare and wonderful thing indeed, one to be cherished and kept polished bright in the memory.

And it’s not something accorded to us all. When Muntadhar al-Zeidi had his moment of inspired anger and threw both his shoes at George W. Bush earlier this month he paid the full toll, and was jumped on and pounded flat by the local secret service thugs. Pounded so flat in fact that even the Americans were shocked. He’ll be paying for it for some time too: Beaten, tortured, imprisoned and tortured some more. Long after the great fathead in the White House is just a painful memory he’ll still be copping a hiding. While George was ducking I noticed the Iraqi Prime Minister didn’t even blink.

Al-Zeidi has become a symbol of civil disobedience and outraged, yet restrained, political action. No-one was hurt (except Muntadhar himself) but the message that American Emperor has no shoes was spread far and wide in a peaceful, almost comic act of pedestrian protest. The dimwit Bush was nonplussed and still short of an understanding that he is responsible for the deaths of 655,000 people. The hard faced Iraqi Prime Minister was unmoved by humanity, outrage or anything other than calculating politics.

That symbol has become a rallying cry for desperate Palestinians under Israeli gunships, for murderous Hamas thugs throwing rockets instead of shoes, for opportunist Ayatollahs and Muslim bigots, for all those who feel the heel of the U.S of A on their necks, and all those who like to crowd a bandwagon and hurl footwear indiscriminately. And yet I think this was never Al-Zeidi ‘s intent.

I don’t think there was any intent at all. I think that when he was confronted by the man who turned his country into a battlefield, the grinning idiot whose astonishingly self-satisfied ignorance caused the deaths of 655,000 Iraqis, who loosed the violence of Muslim sectarian hatreds and destroyed the justice system, the police, the army, the government, the health system, hospitals, sanitation, clean water, you name it he’s fucked it up so bad it will take generations to fix, the man just snapped.

For just a moment he was overwhelmed by the truth, and by the better angels of his nature, and heaved the Hush Puppies of Honourable Protest. Unlike Bruce Pardo, the calculating Californian in the Santa suit who took the good ole American way out of personal failure and gunned down, blew up, then burned down everyone he could, Muntadhar al-Zeidi just threw the Shoe of Justice, the Desert Boot of Public Accusation, the Footwear of Free Speech, the Slippers of Slapstick, the Brogues of Bush-Bashing, the Pumps of Purity, the Toe-warmers of Truth...

May God guide his feet to a place of peace.

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Fizz-Out At The OK Corral.

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It should have been huge. It should have been mighty: a clash of titans with the wit, skill and intellectual fireworks to keep you breathless 'til the last syllable. Hyperbole, hype and hot lead a-flyin'. A shoot-out for the ultimate prize - King Of The World, Ma!

Instead we got to see two be-suited clowns lash feebly at each other with the limp bladder-on-a-stick of ‘on-message’ drivel; prose so pale it was practically translucent, spitballs with neither spit nor balls. The two men seeking election to the White House crossed flaccid words in a debate it so boring it barely rated thirty seconds on news-bulletins crammed with the welter of detail on just how fast the sky is falling in.

Stock markets plunged, the dollar plunged, interest rates micro-plunged around the world and economists, pecuniary pundits and filthy lucremen divined from the entrails of a global economy disembowelled by greed, self-interest and, well, you know the rest. Politics, as ever, is trumped by economics. Money beats guns every time (money, for instance, buys you more ammunition). But the two men staging their sagging little slug-fest in Nashville barely noticed. The crash of falling cumulus from outside was all subsumed under ‘the economy’ a rubric so worn-out it doesn’t even rate Clinton’s killer line ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’. Or maybe it does, only without the comma.

Things you would like to hear said by someone in a shiny suit.

Obama is starting to drive me nuts. After two years of campaigning he’s developed into a parody parroting pure pap, the unthreatening black (can I say black here?) man who won’t rape your daughters, sell drugs to your sons and force you into a drive-in mosque. The head tilts back, the million-dollar smile shines, the microphone comes up and he’s turning into a night-club crooner before my eyes.

“Thank-you. Thank-you. This next number’s about a little thing I like to call foreign policy. Play it Sam..”

“Georgia, Georgia, the whole day through, just a blah, blah, weeble, wurt, blah...”

It’s Tony Bennet in negative, or Sammy Davis Junior back from the grave with two good eyes and all the moves. Just once I’d like to hear him sound as good as he looks.

“John, you’re wrong. Senator Free-Market here is wrong, ladies and gentleman, dead-dog-stinking-up-the-driveway wrong. Mr Deregulate Everything And Trust In The Free Market here is spinning you a line of shit so wide you could pave Iraq with the stuff.

“Don’t get me wrong. He’s a hero. Yes-indeedy. Good for him. But he knows nothing from nothing about economics. Oh he’ll bang on about Corruption On Wall Street and spout piss and wind about Caring For Folks On Main Street, but that’s all. He won’t do a damn thing about it ‘cos it’s against his religion, which is Free Market, First, Last And Everything in Between.”

“And now he wants to do the same to Healthcare. He want’s to hand you a fistful of your own tax-dollars – that’s right, your own money, folks - and send you out there all on your lonesome to take on the Lawyers, Liars and Double-Dealing Bastards of the Corporate Health Insurance Industry – whose Lobbyists he never mentions by the way when he’s blowing smoke up your ass about Washington insiders – and what chance will you have then, do you think?"

“It’s another $700 billion disaster waiting for you right around the time you get old and sick and find you ain’t covered for anything incurred in the course of your ‘life’ – which is defined by the aforementioned Health Insurance Bastards as a ‘pre-existing condition’, so please clear the Hospital Foyer ‘cause you’re blocking the aisle"

“There’s something John McCain and all those nasty Free Market Republican snotbags who can’t believe he’s their candidate ain’t realised about the Free Market. And it’s this:

The Free Market Is The Me Market.

The Me First Market.

The Me First And Screw You Market.

"In fact it's the Me First, Screw You, Your Family, Your Dreams, Your Lives, Your Futures and The Horse You Rode In On Market. And they’ll charge you rent for the horse, grooming and stable fees, agistment, depreciation and relieve you of anything you have on you in small un-marked bills. Oh, and then they’ll charge you for the inconvenience of charging you. The Banks do it already (you remember them, they own your house now), and with your own money too."

“And is it just me or does the old fart get just a little too juiced when he starts talking about the military option, starts talking about bringing the boys home with ‘victory and honour’ instead of defeat. Dubya Bush already declared victory in Iraq, several times if I recall correct. But Hanoi John here, he gets a glint in the eye about it which is just a little too Dr Strangelove, a little too Henry Kiss-my-ass and call me Nixon for my liking. Personally I’d settle for bringing the boys home in anything other than a body bag."

“So, yeah I’ll talk to anyone without ‘pre-conditions’. We got enough guns pointed at everybody around the globe to make me feel like I don’t have to take any shit without having the bad guys play call my bluff. What the hell, a little bit of diplomacy might make a nice change of pace. Hell, we could even get some of our credibility back, with, you know, our allies and stuff."

“Oh and by the way, that slick little throwaway he uses about my inexperience, and that ‘we don’t have time for on-the-job training’. Well that’s grade-A bullshit. Nobody starts as Prez with all the required training. Nobody. It ain’t like you can start out on a small country and work up to the big time. And I can promise you faithfully that I will stay awake longer than Ronald Reagan, pay attention better than GW Bush and keep my dick under better control than Bill Clinton. So we’ll be well ahead of the curve there.”

“The only one who ain’t got time to learn on the job is John McCain, because he’ll be dead soon as Sarah the Pitbull learns where the launch-codes are kept and where his vitamins are inserted. Who wants to gamble the country on whether she can field-dress a dead President? C’mon, don’t be shy, lets have a show of hands here.”

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Who ya gonna call? Not him for God's sake.

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I would never have believed it possible. Until today that is. I’m actually starting to feel something like sympathy for George W. Bush. Now hold on a minute, let’s be clear, I’m not in the least sympathetic to his knee-jerk, pseudo-folksy, misogynist, homophobic, xenophobic, islamophobic right-wing views, or his vile dynastic clan of Texan butt-monkeys. But his face last night, when he was addressing the US nation to explain why they would have to bail out the greediest, slimiest, richest bunch of evil corporate bloodsuckers since Cain’s hostile takeover of Abel Inc., well, it was tragedie of the first order. If you want to know what pathos is just take a look at the footage. By the end he looked like a depressed and senile bloodhound who’s discovered that chronic flatulence isn’t nearly the worst thing that can happen to you. And that with chronic diarrhoea no-one wants to stand next to you, even more so, in fact, than they did before.

It seems George, who was clearly out of his depth (Hooray, Harvard MBA) has finally realised that he is indeed the worst President ever. Worse by far than that devious, self-obsessed, corrupt and criminal swine and liar, tricky Dick Nixon. Worse even than previous record-holder Warren Harding who famously, honestly said “I’m not fit for this office.” George’s record is now a mountain that may be impossible for any subsequent Prez to match, ever.

It's quite a list: A disastrous Iraq war that costs $10 billion a month just to go nowhere; tax-breaks that made greedy, conniving, corporate scum even richer; deregulation of everything that kept those greedy scumbags in check; a complete failure to catch the nation’s most determined enemy – who lives in a cave; the creation of Gitmo concentration camps and torture as US policy; the greatest damage to human rights and freedoms in the nation’s history; and now a bailout of Wall Street to stave off a New Great Depression that’ll cost between $700 and $900 billion.

Oh, and a trillion dollar deficit to hand over to the next guy - I’m not even sure how many zeroes that is.

And as George stumbled through the speech, letting the American people know just how bad things will be without the bailout (“Fuck me, Toto, Kansas is gone, I mean, it’s just gone!”), I got the impression that he actually heard the words coming out of his own mouth for the first time and realised just how monumental a fuckup he’d created. The vicious, venal, mean-spirited, mendacious, pugnacious and just plain nasty little man could finally see it clear.

Yes George, with all the American people on your side, united by a common terrorist enemy, with a multi-trillion dollar (how much IS that?) budget surplus and a booming economy, you screwed it up worse than you could possibly have imagined. Worse than anyone could have imagined, you Hee-Haw, down-home, nukular Tex-mex moron. They’ll have to invent new words to describe it – 'cluster-fuck' simply isn’t big enough. You’re gonna be the lesson they teach to other Presidents on the dangers of hubris, unsubstantiated self-belief and delusions of competence.

And who’re they gonna call now?

The GOP, the Party of Guns, Oil and Paranoia, has the ever lovable John, “Bucket-mouth” McCain. Mac has gratefully cleared his campaign schedule (anything to avoid a debate with that Obama guy) and is rushing back to help the “corrupt Washington insiders” he’s been so keen to slag off put together the mother of all bailout schemes. It will be fascinating to see just what he can and will do, given his ardent belief in open-slather capitalism and a market free of any kind of government regulation.

But when it comes to big money so many seeming paradoxes, flim-flam and blatant bullshit is normal. ‘Short-selling’ is a practice ardently supported by traders, brokers and other assorted maggots, con-men and spivs outraged at the temporary ban on the practice. But there’s another term for selling something you don’t own to scare people into selling lower. It’s called ‘fraud’, and that’s a crime all around the world. Unless you have the suit, the expense account and the office on Wall Street, apparently that makes you immune from jail time and a candidate for massive government handouts.

But it has to happen, apparently. And no-one could possibly have seen it coming.

“America could slip into financial panic.” says George. And he’s clearly there to lead the charge.

So what of Obama? Well, nothing really. Nothing at all. Just a determination to smile, look good and turn up for the debates whether McCain does or not. He’s relying on his grasp of semantics to win the small-screen battle and make McCain look like the dinosaur he is (McCain thinks semantics is what the Marx Brothers got up to).

Obama met with GWB, along with the old fart and made clear his determination to solve the problems, look clean and 'presidential' and wholesome and make the glorious United States of America great/proud/safe/confident/whole-grain/sexy/low-tar/super-sized/low-cholesterol/insert any fatuous poll-tested adjective here.

But of specifics? Bugger all. Not a gnat’s arse of detail. The biggest problem he faces, in fact, is that he might win the election and face the biggest clean up job since King Kong’s corpse was stinking up New York. Whoever wins they’ll be neck-deep in shit from day one. And if Obama’s an unknown quantity McCain looks dangerously underdone in the economic, foreign policy, ‘rational approach to anything at all’ department. That’s the big problem with having ‘character’ as your primary qualification; it’s no substitute for understanding, skill, wit, wisdom, knowledge or a plan.

Thank God I’m not an American.

Thank God I’m not a Moroccan too. Because then I’d be forced to draw some fairly ghastly inferences from today’s news from that beautiful, sun-kissed, date-flavoured and camel-rich country.

The government there has closed down sixty Koranic schools run by Sheikh Mohamed Ben Abderrahman Al-Maghraoui (who I’m sure you’re all aware of) who decreed earlier this month that the marriage of nine-year-old girls is allowed by Islam. A wave of outrage at this “call to legalise paedophilia” in Morocco followed the publication of Sheikh Maghraoui’s decree. Apparently the Sheikh had logically extrapolated (which is allowed in Islam but not in Catholicism) from the marriage of the Prophet (blessings be upon him) to his favourite wife Ayshea, who was nine at the time they wed. Maghraoui’s decree was apparently based on his belief that the marriage was consummated immediately, which is emphatically NOT the general view among Islamic scholars. Perhaps they should be more outraged at what Maghraoui’s decree implies about the Prophet himself.

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Pope launders dirty linen with Jewish soap!

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It’s not well known in the English speaking world that for Germany the First World War didn’t end in 1918. While American doughboys were heading home from France, Germany was falling into chaos and revolution, with Communist ex-soldiers fighting Rightist ex-soldiers for control of the various German States. In Poland fighting went on even until the early 1920’s with British troops sent in to enforce the division of Prussia. Even before the 1918 armistice German states were collapsing. In Munich on the 7^th November 1918 Communists proclaimed the Bavarian Soviet Republic, overthrowing the Wittelsbach monarchy and ushering in a period of violent attacks on opponents and ‘anti-revolutionary elements’.

Among the few foreign diplomats to tough it out and stay in Munich was Eugenio Pacelli, the 43 year old Papal Nuncio (ambassador) to Germany. Before long a gang of armed ‘Reds’ stormed his home and he was confronted by angry, uniformed men threatening his life. In a display of cool courage, staring down the barrels of their guns, the inwardly terrified Pacelli talked the murderous crew into leaving empty-handed and without his scalp. It was a seminal moment for Pacelli who would be a staunch opponent of godless communism until he died, at 82, as Pope Pius XII.

The current Pope, German born Benedict XVI, has begun the process of canonising Pius XII, that is, making him a saint. But the process has stalled over the controversial issue of the Vatican’s notorious silence during the greatest evil of the twentieth century, the Nazi Holocaust. Benedict said Thursday that Pius XII spared no effort to save Jews from the Nazis, one of the strongest ever Vatican defences of a pontiff rightly accused of silence during the Holocaust. Benedict said that he wanted any prejudice against Pius to be overcome, praising Pius's "courageous and paternal dedication" in trying to save Jews.

"Wherever possible he spared no effort in intervening in their favor either directly or through instructions given to other individuals or to institutions of the Catholic Church" Benedict said, describing many interventions being "made secretly and silently, precisely because, given the concrete situation of that difficult historical moment, only in this way was it possible to avoid the worst and save the greatest number of Jews."

Hogwash. Pure, blathering bullshit.

Complete and utter bollocks.

Codswallop, crap and confabulation.

It’s a sickening confection of weasel words and syrupy, slimy nonsense that flies in the face of the historical record, without a shred of evidence, or fact, or testimony to support it. Prove it. I double-bloody-dare you. Prove it. Stack up the times, dates, places and people involved. Surely there’s nothing that can stand in the way of the evidence for such moral courage coming to light now, after all this time? Can anyone find a reason to keep secret the heroism of Pius XII now after 60-odd years?

The AP article says Pope Benedict said that on Nov. 29, 1945, 80 delegates of German concentration camps came to the Vatican and thanked Pius "for his generosity to them." It doesn’t say whether these delegates were Jews. Neither does it mention that Nazi war criminals were hiding in the Vatican waiting for false papers and a boat trip to Argentina or Brazil at the same time.

The Catholic Church’s history during World War II and afterwards is one of shame, complicity and mutual co-operation with the worst of Nazi excesses. Don’t believe me?

In 1933 Pacelli/Pius was the architect of the Reichskonkordat, a treaty between Nazi Germany and the Vatican which traded silence by the Vatican on all political matters in Germany for the freedom of the Church to collect it’s own taxes and practice the faith without hindrance. The treaty is still in force today. As Cardinal Faulhaber of Munich put it in a sermon in 1937,

"At a time when the heads of the major nations in the world faced the new Germany with cool reserve and considerable suspicion, the Catholic Church, the greatest moral power on earth, through the Concordat expressed its confidence in the new (Nazi) German government. This was a deed of immeasurable significance for the reputation of the new government abroad."

Later, when anti-Semitic persecution was ramped up in Germany Faulhaber wrote to Pacelli,

“We bishops are being asked why the Catholic Church … does not intervene on behalf of the Jews. This is not possible at this time because the struggle against the Jews would then, at the same time, become a struggle against the Catholics, and because the Jews can help themselves..”

This was the attitude that the Church adopted throughout the War: Stuff you, Jews, we’re looking out for ourselves. Not very nice is it? Not quite the noble and high-minded picture the Church would have you believe. Sleazy, slimy realpolitik - the cool calculation of self-interest and the complete abandoning of principle, in fact, which is fine if you’re a soulless thug, but it’s definitively not fine for a Pope.

Faulhaber, incidentally, ordained the young Jozeph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) as a priest in 1951. The picture at right shows Ratzinger as a seminary student in the 1940s giving the Nazi salute.

What’s more, the Catholic Church actively assisted the Nazis and their fellow fascists. In Ukraine in 1943 Catholic priests actively recruited soldiers for the 14th ‘Galician’ Waffen SS, and even blessed mass formations of a unit notorious for its brutality and murderous activities. In Croatia the appallingly brutal regime of catholic Ante Pavelic horrified even the Nazis, but Pavelic was given a private audience in April 1941 by Pius XII and praised for creating a “bastion against Bolshevism”.

Pavelic also funnelled money to the Vatican and later benefited from the policy of protecting and hiding vicious war criminals through the infamous ‘ratlines’ when the war ended in defeat. He made his escape disguised as a Catholic priest.

Throughout World War II Pope Pius XII remained almost entirely mute on the horrors of the Holocaust, despite mounting evidence and continual requests to speak out. As the attempt to beatify him continues more and more evidence of the Vatican’s sordid involvement in protecting Nazi war criminals surfaces.

A generous view would be that fear of “godless Communism” and his own personal confrontation with it pushed Pius XII to the political right and blinded him to the equally godless evils of fascism, Nazism in particular. It’s a Christian act to forgive him for his half-hearted condemnations of Nazi mass-murder during the war. It’s possible even for a generous spirit to forgive him for turning a blind eye to the Vatican ratlines that spirited the vilest of war criminals to South America. But is it possible to see anything good in his appeals for mercy for mass-murderers like the Catholic Einsatzgruppen leader Otto Ohlendorf when he refused to intercede for millions of victims of Nazism?

Either way, it’s not possible, given any fair examination of the facts, to think of this man as a hero, someone who stood up against the greatest evil of his time, a man who proved the worth of his office and his religion. He simply didn’t do so.

Pius XII a saint? You must be bloody joking.

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