destruction loop



One thing I remember very vividly about the days immediately following 11th September 2001 was the apocalyptic nature of the images from New York. The idea of the city in which one lives having fire and rubble rained down upon it... Just for a moment, there was the fleeting idea in a few people's heads, including my own, that such a high-profile atrocity would motivate the governments of the West not to rain fire down on anyone else's city, ever again. How naive.

I can't imagine what it feels like to be there right now... Two things really hit me on the news yesterday - a) the sheer normality of the streets of Baghdad as late as last night: even with shops closed and malls empty, even with the Saddam billboards, it all seemed so familiar, such an everyday locality; b) the strangeness of what the radio's been saying here: buy tinned food, bottled water, batteries, a torch, blankets - with no qualification - just everyone in the UK, "do this", they're saying. Not just for those of us who live a stone's throw from one of the major train stations in the capital - everybody. The way such a small precautionary piece of advice makes me feel, and then trying to multiply that to get some sense of what it must be like in Baghdad... You feel your stomach lurch, and the only possible response is for you to head as close to Parliament square as po-po will let you get, and do some shouting...

And this isn't even the main assault yet - the "shock and awe" (ie, blitzkrieg) bombing strategy could still follow.

Jesus.

Incidentally, am I the only person who thinks the anti-war movement's new slogan should be STOP: HAMMERTIME?

"Gallows humour is the only thing keeping us sane", as Dr Henry McCoy had it.

Ever since Tony Blair pledge to stand 'shoulder-to-shoulder' with the Bush administration, there have been a lot of centre-left apologists and so-called 'moderates' claiming that Blair's intentions were good, that he was playing a clever game of cosying up to Bush in order that he might influence the US President's decisions in the direction of caution, diplomacy, and international law.

I would honestly have preferred them to have been right about that one.

Following up on an earlier post:

Israeli forces disrupt Rachel Corrie memorial service.

"Israeli forces fired teargas and stun grenades yesterday in an attempt to break up a memorial service for Rachel Corrie, the American peace activist killed by an army bulldozer in Gaza on Sunday..."

You know, you keep reminding yourself that a lot of people in the IDF have been conscripted, and the dangers of villfying them, and then they continue to reach new depths of behaviour. Fucking charming.

And maybe the two posts below clash, or maybe they don't. On the brink of war, nobody knows whether we should be ignoring the frivolous pleasures in life or clinging to them, as they say, 'now more than ever'. Should I sink into despondency because the leader of our supposedly democratic nation state is about to sanction the murder of thousands?

Nah. As a wise man said recently, "I refuse, you must have me confused, with some other guy". This is no time for giving up.

step into the light



The Talent Police are after Nelson, this time on suspicion of being the art-crime mastermind behind the above Jenny Everywhere image, produced for Queer Granny designs. It's actually not the first Jenny/Nelson/QG overlap: the site's founder Persephone produced the Music Saves Lives design in response to a conversation we'd had, and in the meantime I asked (or 'ordered', depending on your view of the writer/artist partnership in sequential art...) Nelson to put it on a character's t-shirt. See?

Anyway, good a place as any to mention the impending completion of our next Jenny Everywhere strip. Funnily enough, it contains references to Slashville and Timbaland which I was worried I'd find dated and boring by the time it went online - however, the former has a new season on Channel 4, and I've dug out and been appreciating the latter's Indecent Proposal album again - so everything old is new again. Things like that usually work out, even if nothing else does.

E-mails from Rachel Corrie, the 23-year old American peace activist crushed to death by a bulldozer at the weekend as she tried to prevent the Israeli army destroying homes in the Gaza Strip, sent to her family in the month or so before. Just read them.

Extracts (I hesitate to use the word 'highlights'):

"[N]o amount of reading, attendance at conferences, documentary viewing and word of mouth could have prepared me for the reality of the situation here. You just can't imagine it unless you see it - and even then you are always well aware that your experience of it is not at all the reality: what with the difficulties the Israeli army would face if they shot an unarmed US citizen, and with the fact that I have money to buy water when the army destroys wells, and the fact, of course, that I have the option of leaving. Nobody in my family has been shot, driving in their car, by a rocket launcher from a tower at the end of a major street in my hometown. I have a home. I am allowed to go see the ocean. When I leave for school or work I can be relatively certain that there will not be a heavily armed soldier waiting halfway between Mud Bay and downtown Olympia at a checkpoint with the power to decide whether I can go about my business, and whether I can get home again when I'm done."

...

"Now the Israeli army has actually dug up the road to Gaza, and both of the major checkpoints are closed. This means that Palestinians who want to go and register for their next quarter at university can't. People can't get to their jobs and those who are trapped on the other side can't get home; and internationals, who have a meeting tomorrow in the West Bank, won't make it. We could probably make it through if we made serious use of our international white person privilege, but that would also mean some risk of arrest and deportation, even though none of us has done anything illegal."

...

"I thought a lot about what you said on the phone about Palestinian violence not helping the situation. Sixty thousand workers from Rafah worked in Israel two years ago. Now only 600 can go to Israel for jobs. Of these 600, many have moved, because the three checkpoints between here and Ashkelon (the closest city in Israel) make what used to be a 40-minute drive, now a 12-hour or impassible journey. In addition, what Rafah identified in 1999 as sources of economic growth are all completely destroyed - the Gaza international airport (runways demolished, totally closed); the border for trade with Egypt (now with a giant Israeli sniper tower in the middle of the crossing); access to the ocean (completely cut off in the last two years by a checkpoint and the Gush Katif settlement). The count of homes destroyed in Rafah since the beginning of this intifada is up around 600, by and large people with no connection to the resistance but who happen to live along the border. I think it is maybe official now that Rafah is the poorest place in the world. There used to be a middle class here - recently.... And then the bulldozers come and take out people's vegetable farms and gardens. What is left for people? Tell me if you can think of anything. I can't.

"If any of us had our lives and welfare completely strangled, lived with children in a shrinking place where we knew, because of previous experience, that soldiers and tanks and bulldozers could come for us at any moment and destroy all the greenhouses that we had been cultivating for however long, and did this while some of us were beaten and held captive with 149 other people for several hours - do you think we might try to use somewhat violent means to protect whatever fragments remained? I think about this especially when I see orchards and greenhouses and fruit trees destroyed - just years of care and cultivation. I think about you and how long it takes to make things grow and what a labour of love it is. I really think, in a similar situation, most people would defend themselves as best they could. I think Uncle Craig would. I think probably Grandma would. I think I would."

...

"I know that from the United States, it all sounds like hyperbole. Honestly, a lot of the time the sheer kindness of the people here, coupled with the overwhelming evidence of the wilful destruction of their lives, makes it seem unreal to me. I really can't believe that something like this can happen in the world without a bigger outcry about it."

...

"Coming here is one of the better things I've ever done. So when I sound crazy, or if the Israeli military should break with their racist tendency not to injure white people, please pin the reason squarely on the fact that I am in the midst of a genocide which I am also indirectly supporting, and for which my government is largely responsible."

Sorry to have ended up quoting so much of this - but it needs to be read. It *demands* to be read. Not least of all because the slander against this ridiculously brave and compassionate young person's name has already started - 'irresponsible', they've called her. (Can you imagine the response if anyone dared to call an American victim of a suicide bombing 'irresponsible' for being in Israel? Christ.) In fact, the amount of responsibility shown here is staggering, and should put many of us to shame.

And yes, it's important not to remember a white, American victim of Israeli army aggression at the expense of the Palestinians who've died or have to live in the face of it every day... At the same time, though, this is the kind of thing that ought to make people in the West, particularly the USA, sit up and take notice of what's happening in the Occupied Territories. This could have been you. Arguably, it *should* have been - it should be all of us. There is always more that we could be doing.

In the meantime - boring admin point - a couple of people have commented that this blog doesn't have the facility whereby people can link to individual posts (permalinks? - a techy I am not). But it does, they're those little '+' symbols at the end of each post. So there.

There are several things I want to post here today, but I'm struggling with how to balance the two areas this blog focuses on - politics and pop culture - when the former seems so serious, if not bleak. I guess I'll have to alternate between light and grave and hope a balance is achieved, rather than the effect being jarring.