Glob-a-log

All throughout history politicians have had to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous portrait painters and cartoonists, biographers and pamphleteers – all those little folks who like to get back at the great and the good (and making very decent livings from it in the meantime.)

No doubt the first cave dwellers with functioning speaking parts did not keep a civil tongue in their head for all that long. As the hammer came before the wheel and the first swear word went hand in hand with that first hammer stroke, people have always organized themselves in hierarchical groups – whereby the base of the pyramid started to shout abuse towards the top, even while the damn thing was still under construction and the pointy bits more than a bit wobbly.

These days our overlords have even more troublesome peasants snapping at their ermine-clad heels. What’s more, thanks to all kinds of new-fangled contraptions – from radio to movie theater and television to the internet – the world has become a stage where our politicians try to act in between the technologically enhanced hissing and booing of an ever-growing part of the audience.

While our current pyramid masters quite like their ever more luxurious trappings of power and simply love all those shiny toys of mass destruction, they are less enamoured with the proliferating genies of mass communications.

Some days ago an American columnist not quite compared his isolated president with the obnoxious star of a certain movie (and its miasma of sequels.) Bush’s little bestest friend Tony (who so doesn’t like that other sobriquet) was recently compared to one of the main characters of Melville’s ‘Save the wails’ epic.

Not that the rival of The George & Tony Combo has any reason to smirk. Poor Putin, some time ago, was even compared to a fairytale character – and not a mighty one like the one inspired by his historical namesake but a feeble figure of pity and fun.

As a certain famous person once sang: Uneasy lie the laurels – or something moderately close to it. So, maybe we should start holding a yearly returning Don’t Kick a Politician week – that is, after they’ll have begun to prove that they can be more than Spitting Images on our sorely tested retinas.

Sheri S. Tepper, in her novel Grass, defines humans as very small beings. While this is undoubtedly a good call, it is not exactly a full description. Douglas Adams’s Ford Prefect had to upgrade his first description of planet earth from ‘harmless’ to ‘mostly harmless.’ So, maybe Tepper, likewise, should upgrade her vision of humanity to ‘very strange small beings.’

One would think people face enough problems in the real world to keep them fully engaged for their whole, natural lives. Instead, they watch movies and want to be like Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie, beating the bad guys and finding true love in Hollywood’s Fantasyville – or they read action thrillers and Harlequin books, seeking deliverance between the covers of mighty tomes or waif-like booklets.

Maybe living in the real world is just too scary, too complex – or simply too much work and ultimately unrewarding for such very small (and very strange) beings. However, whatever the reasoning or pathology behind this is, escapism has become big business. The happening place is now the virtual world.

You can lose yourself in gaming, dressing up like dragon or unicorn, magician or prince, ice queen or temple whore – and spend the rest of your digital-bound life chasing rainbows.

You can go even further and rearrange your actual and mostly bewildering life as you see fit, wrap the world around you like a security blanket and never leave the safe surroundings of Secondlife.

Or you can opt for that old-time, groin-grind religion, the world of virtual sex. Why settle for the ever-disappointing flesh, when digital Eve or cyber Adam can fulfill your wildest dreams?

Or maybe you could – at times – ignore the rude embrace of flesh and stone, the Siren songs of phantom space and just sit down and read some poem by Jane Hirshfield:

For a wedding on Mont Tamalpais

July,
and the rich apples
once again falling.

You put them to your lips,
as you were meant to,
enter a sweetness
the earth wants to give.

Everything loves this way,
in gold honey,
in gold mountain grass,
that carries lightly the shadow of hawks,
the shadow of clouds passing by.

And the dry grasses,
the live oaks and bays,
taste the apples’ deep sweetness
because you taste it, as you were meant to,
tasting the life that is yours,

While below, the foghorns bend to their work,
bringing home what is coming home,
blessing what goes.

Right: wallet, keys, flowers – no, no flowers: the cat had done something unspeakable to the flowers. Which reminded me…

“Oy…!”

“Yes, master”, the cat said, not even bothering to take its snout out of its favourite food.

“I’m going to pick up the girlfriend from the airport now…”

Even from this distance I could hear the cat rolling its eyes.

“So you told me – twenty times already. What is this: Hell?!”

Bloody animal.

“What I mean is: I will pick her up, and then we go somewhere to eat, then to some bar – and then we come home.”

“So…? You’re taking her out. Big step for mankind: you’ve invented the date. What’s that to me?”

“Nothing - I sincerely hope. You’re not coming.”

The cat returned to its meal.

“Not that I trust you to behave when I’m gone…”

The cat was done eating. It started to lick its paws: left, right, left, right, left again.

“But I’m not going to hire a baby-sitter. So…”

“You’re not gone yet?” the cat asked - and then it yawned.

“So if you need me for something – anything bad happens – with the house … or to you…”

“Yes?”

“Then you can always call me.”

“You don’t have a mobile, you idiot.”

“Ah yes, you’re right. It was something else, of course. I remember now…”

“Yesss…?”

“When we come back, I do not want to hear you, or see you or even suspect you’re around.”

“Or I could just lock the two of you out.” the cat said.

“No, no.” I said; “You do not want to do that.”

“Oh?”

“Think ‘very scary man’, think ax, think ‘Heeeere’s JOHNNY…!’ Believe me, you do not want to go there.”

The cat yawned.

I pointed at it and said:

“You! Even the sainted Ms Gonick couldn’t love you! Now, I will see you – and I repeat: I will see you T O M O R R O W !!!”

“Yes, boss.” the cat said, and saluted.

I shook my head, put on my coat.

Wallet, check. Keys, check. Flowers… Oh, bugger.

Ah, the joys of having a cat…

Well, the next few hours – and hopefully the rest of the night – would be gloriously girlfriend-filled and conspicuously cat-free. I closed the door behind me, whistling an old Leonard Cohen song (by way of Jeff Buckley).

I think I heard the cat say ‘Wanker’ but decided to ignore it: It’s bad luck to interrupt a good whistle.

(Well, someone has to invent those old sayings.)

People used to say: There are no pockets in a shroud. Nowadays, of course, most folks wouldn’t be seen dead in a shroud, so, as sayings go, this one is not exactly dancing on the tip of many tongues. These days, people would not get the meaning anyway.

Once, the pockets & shrouds expression was used to remind people that life was short, so that they’d better focus on more spiritual matters – i.e. not mess up so badly that they’d spend the afterlife in a place where a simple shroud would last not all that much longer than the proverbial snowball.

These days, when someone would be gauche enough to bring up the small matter of everyone’s certain and shared future, a nervous and awkward jocularity would follow this faux pas – to avoid a silence, which in itself could have served to remind people of that final and, above all, quiet destination.

The only lesson though that modern people would take from the old saying, would be that, since life is so short, you should stuff it with frenzied activity, needless complications and lots of expensive and quite useless stuff. And never mind those archaic fears of the Pit. The Bible’s Man is born in sin has been replaced with L’Oréal’s Because you’re worth it.

So, when people are not in the actual pursuit of the latest book about happiness, they will project their depressing fixations on all things mineral, vegetable or animal – or waste their time with mad quests of endurance, to mortify their terminally bored body and mind.

To make matters much, much worse though: spring is approaching, again, like some beast slouching towards Jerusalem – with all the highly predictable brouhaha about this year’s ‘what to wear at the beach‘ and countless articles about the latest diets and dire warnings about skin cancer, anorexia and chlamedia.

After spring: summer. The season of pointless blockbuster movies, prequels & sequels all; the season of endless barbecues and bad summer hits, displayed shamelessly in public places, of fat men in loud shirts and their fat wives in even louder voices, of children screaming through every pore of extended daylight…

Hobbes wrote of lives ‘made solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. If only we’d have it so good – for nothing has changed but this: that ’short’ has turned into ‘endlessly drawn-out’.

Let’s hear it for those good old shrouds – and maybe an updated version of the saying, so, that after a long, long life, spent in haste and wanton wastefulness, we should finally be ready to acknowledge that Every shroud has a silver lining.

Only one day to go till the girlfriend arrived – and the cat was getting restless. It doesn’t like company. In fact, it already hates sharing this place with me, let alone with someone else.

Right now it was trying for a state of denial – or blissful ignorance – but failing. You could almost see its nerves slowly unravelling.

“Have you ever thought of donating to a sperm bank?” I asked.

“What?!”

“Well, you’re certainly vain enough and you don’t have a girlfriend who comes to visit you.”

“Oh, go boil a frog!”

“Or maybe I should try and find a nice lady cat for you. Then me and the girlfriend could take the two of you dancing or something. You would look so cute, doing the donkey.”

“Shut up!”

“Then we could dress you up nicely, like one of those doggies American pop stars keep dragging around. Such fun.”

The cat screamed and ran out of the room, nearly dislodging the cat flap. It really was becoming a nervous wreck.

Which reminded me…

“What you need is a holiday!’ I shouted in the general direction of the kitchen; “Maybe some relaxing cruise.”

“Bastard!” shouted the cat.

Then silence ruled again – and all was well in my world.

One more day, till the girlfriend arrived.

My thoughts went this way and that way, meandering like a happy brook, through a landscape filled with all kinds of pleasant distractions – none of them looking even remotely like a sperm bank, I might add.

Life was good.

Then more cat’s curses coming from the kitchen, the sound of breaking glass, more curses and more glasses swept from a shelf. The poor little brute really was cracking up.

So, I put on the head-phones, grabbed an old Leonard Cohen CD and closed my eyes.

Yup, no more cat noises. Just Leonard’s slow, low voice, singing Hallelujah.

Ah yesss: life was very good indeed.

You wouldn’t ask a ferret to cross the Mercy, a mouse to enjoy Disney or a ghost to organize a house-warming party.

To most people it is obvious that certain ingredients mix like cement shoes at a tightrope walking convention.

However, there are those who don’t understand or are unwilling to acknowledge this simple fact. Whatever lies at the roots of this - whether these people are professional party bores, wild-eyed conspiracy junkies and/or temper-tossed bloggers - is only of some passing interest to those who are paid to list and dissect pathologies.

It would be nice though, if these people could be dealt with properly. There are, of course, the Darwin awards but some problems and some people simply won’t take themselves off the board. They need, instead, some encouragement – some external force, if you like.

Come forward, the John Hurt Award.
Or: if Charles Darwin won’t come and get you, Isaac Newton will.

Each year there will be a list of people or institutions that behaved in a particularly obnoxious manner, giving offence to reason, manners and good taste. In that same year a winner will be chosen and announced - and then publicly nailed to his or her appalling stupidity and discover in one easy lesson that, whatever else might be prone to dumb mistakes and gross failures, gravity is decidedly not one of them.

On this year’s shortlist:
-For mixing religion with personal, sexual hang-ups, the Colorado Springs’ Seventh Annual Father-Daughter Purity Ball.
-For mistaking law for political orthodoxy, America’s Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals
-For mingling poetry with polemics, the Belfast founders of The Love Poetry Hate Racism campaign.

While only one person or group can win the John Hurt Award per year, others can and will be encouraged to partake in one of the heavily subsidized, individual or group travel schemes, organised by the new kid on the tour operator block, The Lemming Express.

Just two more days to go, before the girlfriend would arrive. I’d been busy putting up photos of parrots. The cat had been busy taking them down and shredding them.

It knew better though than taking down the photos of the girlfriend that I’d taped against the wardrobe - but it had been very loud and disapproving of my reading poetry aloud:

“So, love, it will be with us, both
lion and prey - our mouths so deep in richness
only the wild scent of earth will be left
to tremble, after.”

The cat yawned.

“More of that stupid Neruda?”

“Jane Hirshfield, actually. And she is still alive and well and quite able to kick you into six impossible shapes before breakfast.”

Not mightily impressed with any Jane that wasn’t moonlighting as a demonic parrot, the cat yawned again, stretched its back, yawned, stretched and then started to lick its left foreleg.

“Do cats worry about their sex appeal?” I asked.

“Now what?”

“Just this article I read.”

“So now you’re worried that stupid woman won’t have sex with you? Humans!”

“Go figure; cats don’t do poetry, don’t start a band to impress the girls… You’re such boring beasts.”

The cat held up its paw and did that cushion-to-daggers thing.

“See these?”

“Yup.”

“One more poem, one more word about that woman and these claws will make sure sex will not be an option for a very, very long time.”

Then the cat stretched its back one last time, got up and strode out of the room – or tried to: cat flaps are not particularly stride-friendly contraptions.

“And however sharply
you are tested -
this sorrow, that great love -
it too will leave on that clean knife.”

“I heard that” spoke the cat, from the kitchen.

My time to yawn.

The cat had its arsenal of retractable filet knives; I had the imaginary shadow of Suleiman, the psychotic parrot, looking over the cat’s shoulder.

So, the threat of mutually assured dissection would help to keep things nice and quiet around here – for now.

Some days…

So, the Japanese prime minister, having first made an apology of sorts concerning earlier comments about the Japanese army not being responsible for the systematic and violent rape…

Right. Let’s start anew. So, during the second world war the Japanese army created and exploited brothels, where female prisoners, so-called comfort girls, were systematically raped for years - day after day, night after night - by the Japanese army, till the end of the war.

Japan has never fully acknowledged any of its many horrific and disgusting war crimes. It hasn’t paid compensation to the civilian and military prisoners it either tortured or worked to death. It has also not acknowledged, let alone apologized for, the mass murder of Chinese citizens during the war.

Thus, it will come as no surprise that, till this day, Japan has denied any responsibility (even of the army who built, ran and frequented these brothel prisons) for the rape of all these women. The only thing the Japanese prime minister repeated again (besides his assurance that neither Japan nor the army was to blame) was that he was sorry that the women had suffered during the war.

So… if it wasn’t Japan that did it, it must have been Elvis – or Bigfoot – or the Coca Cola company – or, yes, of course, those little green men from Mars again.

From the utterly revolting Japanese prime minister to that other prince of men: Tony Blair. He didn’t quite deliver a full governmental apology, to mark the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade but he did express regrets.

Dead slaves and dead Iraqis alike will appreciate the subtle differences between these two expressions of sentiment and will no doubt applaud the prime minister’s sensitivity.

Blair’s message of regret was somewhat overshadowed by the news that the British government has now proposed legislation that, in effect, reintroduces domestic slavery. Still, as even Jesus acknowledged: The poor will always be with us. So why not put them to work indeed?

It is nice that Western faint hearts abolished slavery by name – and the workers in sweat shops all over the world will be mightily pleased they don’t need to sing that they ain’t gonna pick no cotton no more – but slavery, like poverty, is still very much around.

Finishing on a lighter note: Britain’s Home Office should be thoroughly ashamed of itself, for refusing entry to the country to a poor, well-meaning artist, who only wants to spread around his message of peace and put an end to all street violence.

They didn’t even apologize for this - or, at the very least, expressed a politician’s empty regrets.

While in Europe 16 out of 34 countries that played qualifying games for the 2008 European Football tournament didn’t manage to score even once, South-Africa and other African Union countries keep making the same dreadful own goal by refusing to do anything about the region’s neighbour from Hell, Mugabe.

It’s the season for odd and old monsters, it seems. While the world reluctantly watched the big M. birthday-partying like a modern-day Nero, two other ancient types of uglies were either fished up or dug up. One can only hope (with most of his suffering country, no doubt) that Zimbabwe’s president will hurry to join these other two monstrosities in whatever travelling freak show they will spend the rest of eternity in formaldehyde.

It’s one of those bad-news-all-around-days-though. While the England football team were one of those who couldn’t even manage an own goal – for once – and Albion’s long suffering populace still have to wait to ram their none too sad adieux down Tony Blair’s throat, the country now also has to deal with something even more sinister than Avian Flue.

Still, there remains some glimmer of hope. It is probably true that no power in this or any other world can stop the current English football team (or the A.U.) performing as a collective of overpaid, useless gits. However, ever since the 2006 Ig Noble prize winner showed the world how to deal with one kind of collective pest, we can pray that he will use his formidable brain power to invent some Thomas Beckett machine that rids us of all the troublesome Robert’s & Tony’s who have outstayed their welcome for far too long.

“…till we are only one dark space,
a chalice filling with celestial ashes,
a drop in the pulse of a long slow river.”

“What…? the cat asked.

“Neruda” I explained, “sonnet 84.”

“Right,” said the cat, “let’s make a deal: you don’t read that shit to me and I won’t shit in your girlfriend’s suitcase, when she gets here.”

“I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.”

“I’m warning you…” the cat said.

“No, you’re not, actually. The girlfriend is coming in four days and you will be on your very best behaviour.”

“Says who?”

“Remember Suleiman…?”

The cat hissed: it remembered.

“You wouldn’t dare!” it said.

“Try me. One phone call and Suleiman will be staying here for the next week. Just like last year it will be a Hark, the cat will dance and sing, here is Suleiman the king”

I was talking to an empty room though. The cat, like Elvis, had left the building, through the huff side of the cat flap – something I would have liked to have seen the Las Vegas Elvis try.

Ah, good old aunt Sonja – and Suleiman, of course; Suleiman the Great.

The meanest-spirited, Godawful bastard son of a bitch parrot the Amazon forest had ever let loose upon an unsuspecting world.

Last year, my aunt had had to go to the hospital for some minor surgery and had made me promise to take care of the parrot.

It had not been a quiet week.

Suleiman had not taken to its new surroundings. It had loathed me but had instantly developed a truly passionate and all-encompassing hatred for the cat.

There are not many creatures that can scare the living daylights out of the cat. It’s taken care of postmen, dogs, the odd Jehovah’s witness, and all manner of flying, crawling or burrowing pests.

Old Suleiman though proved to be too much even for my cat.

I had spent the week in some trepidation and had to be very, very careful about where I kept my fingers, toes and other pointy bits. The cat though had hardly come out from under the bed and, whenever it really had to do so, for reasons of personal hygiene mostly, it had either crawled very quietly or had to run for its life.

Yes, Suleiman the Great was one mean parrot.

“There in the branches I will recognize your hair,
your image ripening in the leaves,
bringing the petals nearer my thirst,

and my mouth will fill with the taste of you,
the kiss that rose from the earth
with your blood, the blood of a lover’s fruit.”

The cat poked its head through the cat flap.

“You bastard!” it said.

“Yup. So you’ll be good, next week?”

“Yes, damn you. But I’ll get you for this!”

“No doubt.”

Well, so far, so good. As long as the bloody animal didn’t find out before the end of that week that old Suleiman had died only days after my aunt had taken him back to her place, last year.

It was worth the risk though, I decided, whistling my way to the kitchen and yet another cup of tea, ignoring the curses and looks the defeated  but still defiant cat launched my way.