Blue Bag Life won the audience award at the 2022 London International Film Festival. As any artist or writer knows, “Who are you?” or “What are you?” can mean different things. We are all different people. Lisa Selby’s passion is filmmaking. She turned the camera on herself and documented her fractured life. Not everything made the cut, but there’s a raw honesty that’s appealing.
‘Disconnection is the only mothering I’ve ever known.’
‘At Primary School my nicknames were “Disease” and “Witch”. I was sure Helen gave me up because of some disease I had…I thought maybe she didn’t want to be called ‘Mum’ cause I was too dirty.’
Helen is Lisa’s mother. She left her when she was ten. Ran away with her lover and her dad brought Lisa up, a single parent. Usually, that’s the kind of thing men are good at.
Helen had six months to live when Lisa tracked her down to a filthy council house in London, where she stayed with her current—and much younger lover—her mother was unrepentant. In her fake furs, including a natty hat, with a can of Special Brew in one hand and a cigarette in the other, she explained it wasn’t really her fault. After Lisa’s birth, she had been sectioned in a psychiatric ward, which made her incapable of being a proper person, never mind a mother. Her love for drugs was stronger than her maternal instinct. She favoured opiates with a smattering of hallucinogenics.
There was always a fag in her mouth, as there was in Lisa’s. Lisa met Elliot, her boyfriend, after attending an AA meeting. A self-proclaimed alcoholic, Elliot had also been addicted to heroin, like her mum.
‘Heroin was Helen’s favourite. Heroin was Elliot’s favourite.’
We know where this is going. ‘I was drawn to the dark things in life. But this was a different kind of dark,’ admits Lisa.
‘I’ve just found out that my mum is in a hospice. She has cancer. They won’t give her chemotherapy because she’s a heroin addict. I don’t know why. I don’t know why I’m filming this. It just makes me feel less alone.’
Who are you? What are you? You decide. If life was only that simple, it could be scripted and the chaos of fucked-up lives reigned in?
Roddy Doyle makes you smile. You just need to think of that line from The Commitments, ‘We are the black men of…’ whatever it was. I’m never that grand at remembering. He wrote about the housing crisis in Dublin. But they can’t be that bad that Conor McGregor threatens to lead a posse of Irishmen to deal with the immigrant problem. Whisper it, I could claim an Irish passport too. I’m an immigrant of an emigrant, or something like that. Anyway, I like my Guinness.
Until recently, we gloried in a reading of history and the title of THE MOST OPPRESSED PEOPLE EVER.
We all know about the Irish Famine years. British indifference. Coffin ships. The Irish Diaspora and an Irish population that hovered around 7 million, yet in the 1950s and 1960s was still exporting its working men and women and was largely a rural society with half the population of 100 years earlier. Irish men and women were everywhere. They were Gone With the Wind. Sure, wasn’t Scarlett O’Hara being courted by another Irishman, Rhett Butler, who’d won his lowly estate by cheating at cards and winning a Southern Plantation?
Rosie (Sarah Greene) is our Scarlett O’Hara of the Dublin rental sector while trying to sort out housing—over 36 hours—for her three kids, while being on benefits, which brings little benefit, and only grief. Her husband is no Rhett Butler. John Paul (Moe Dunford) leaves her to it. He tries to work as many hours as God sends in the infernal underworld of Dublin’s kitchens.
The message here for those that missed the link is how letting the market sort things out is darkest doublethink, whilst helping take a hammer to poor people’s lives.
The average Dublin rent is now €2,102 a month. That is equivalent to the entire monthly take-home pay of a newly qualified teacher. Since 2015, rents have increased by 13% across the euro area, but in Ireland they’ve increased by 60%. And this is despite a rent cap on existing rental tenancies.
[creation of rentier class]
Spiralling rents are directly connected to the fact that most of the new-build housing supply is expensive, investor-fund build-to-rent, backed by government through tax breaks and incentives. In 2022, 58% of all newly built homes in greater Dublin were bought or developed by investor funds. Countless people are being locked out of buying a home by the reliance on these global vulture funds. I prefer to call them vampire funds because they seek not to buy and sell, but to extract high rents in perpetuity.
Roddy Doyle (2021) Life Without Children.
Life Without Children, ten short stories, set during Covid and Lockdown they’re readable, but unremarkable. I’ve already forgotten them before I read the last story. Something about memes and a man searching the streets of Dublin for his son. Doyle’s a Booker Prize winner. He isn’t going to come back and bite you on the arse. Being the son of an immigrant means you don’t have to arse-lick. Nobody cares what you think. I don’t jump in like Conor McGregor. I question when I read books like this, if they posted these stories to various agencies and competitions, how would they fare? You tell me—not about Roddy Doyle’s achievements—about Life Without Children? I’d love a little of that magic dust. And yes, that’s being small-minded. Read on.
The end of the world is nigh. That’s not religious dogma, but the science of global warming. Hundreds of millions will die. Perhaps billions. The mass extinction of non-human species on land and sea has already begun. But Inside the Bruderhof is a joyous look at communal living in a religious community. But then again, I’m a big fan of utopia. The flip- side of Brave New World was Aldous Huxley’s Utopia. An island nation where everything was going swimmingly until a takeover bid called democracy with an injection of neo-liberalism was just another way of saying dictatorship, and not of the proletariat. Remember onscreen when hard-bitten cop Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis looking pretty dinky in Amish costume got together in Witness. ‘Worlds apart’ was the tagline. The Bruderhof aren’t Amish, they don’t, for example, travel about in horse and cart, but director Emma Pentecost in this forty-minute documentary goes for that angle of cute otherness.
Eighteen-year-old Hannah, who plays a major role in this documentary, puts it bluntly, ‘It feels like I’m from a different time zone… Someone from the middle-ages shows up in London and stays in those ages… That way of life. I kinda feel like a foreigner.’ She probably doesn’t even realise she’s a ginger.
Ford and McGillis had to protect an eight-year-old boy in a corrupt world. Here we’ve got the before and after. Hannah is leaving the idyllic countryside setting of Darvell in Sussex and moving fifty-six miles to inner city Peckham (of Fools and Horses fame) to find work for a year, outside the community.
Hannah, the eldest of three children leaves behind her father, Bernard, and mother, Rachel, and around three hundred other people in the community she has known all her life to ask a very important question of herself: Does she want to remain part of the Bruderhof?
Ironcially, she moves into another Bruderhof community, with house parents, but in London, which isn’t the London I knew when I hitchhiked down there when I was nineteen. A London of smash and grab and no time for anything but money, money, money and fuck-you more money. This is a different kind of cloistered freedom Hanna experiences with other girls on the same quest. For the first time in her life, for example, she’s handling hard cash and toying with eight-inch heeled shoes in Rye Market.
‘One thing I have learned is how empty life is,’ she concludes. ‘And how we fill our life with stuff. It’s just so unnecessary.’
Amen to that. The question who am I? becomes what am I? (A question we all need to ask ourselves, and there’s a category of hell for Trump supporters and Tories.)
Aged 21, Hannah knows, like the other youngsters, she must commit or leave the Bruder community. Her father tells the narrator that around 25% to 30% of young people in the community do not commit to staying and do leave. That it is not a utopia or a democracy. ‘But it’s healthy, them leaving’.
‘People move where they’re told. People move internationally. It’s a way of life where you have to give up that kinda stuff, or you shouldn’t join.’
There are a few types of jobs, but everybody that is able works. And the domestic duties are taken predominantly by the females. Men work the land and workshops that produce, for example, wooden chairs and toys for classrooms and day-care centres.
Bernard says, ‘People come here and see gender segregation. But it’s no big deal. Nobody is getting paid.’
What is also noticeable to the viewer is there are no people of colour in the Bruder community. Is playing the white man, literal, metaphysical or other?
The narrator quizzes a young lady in the kitchen, chopping vegetables, ‘Have you ever questioned the division of jobs?’
Answer, ‘Yes as a young woman, as a teenager, but as I grew older I came to understand the significance of why it is, we do what we do, here.
‘I’ve never been so free in my life. Because we are under no pressure to follow anything, but to follow Christ.
‘And we do that in a free way, by taking care of our kids, taking care of other people’s kids.
‘We have our roles, it’s a traditional thing, but not a bad thing, it’s a wonderful thing.’
Hardy, aged 26, presents the flip-side of the community. The one that got away, but ‘if you ask me, I couldn’t live anywhere else’, he says, while being filmed angling.
He moved to UK, 2010. He grew up in Bruderhof. As a child he described it as ‘paradise’. Rebel, typical teenage behaviour, ‘the grass is greener’. He left with his family of five siblings when he was fourteen, with the blessing of the community. They returned, well mostly, a few of them didn’t. That didn’t make them bad people.
Hannah’s father Bernard concludes, ‘We’re not utopia. The Bruderhof works because everybody has given up their life.’
The narrator asked Hardy, ‘Why did you come back?’
Hardy, ‘I never felt the same sense of belonging anywhere else.’
Narrator, ‘Some people might say you’re running away from real life by moving back here’.
‘I don’t think the Bruderhof is an escape from reality. We’re not trying to get away from the terrible things in the world. From a selfish point of view, I think I’d probably be happier living elsewhere. I knew it’d take sacrifice. I’d have to give up what I’d have to do with my life.
After a month away Hannah has more or less made her mind up. ‘All the people of the Bruderhof have committed themselves to a cause, there’s that meaning that gets you out of bed in the morning. If it wasn’t for my faith, yeh—I’d see no point in life’.
There’s a lot of good faith in the Bruder community. It would have been interesting to see it during lockdown with the corona virus. I’m sure with green field and sunshine they’d have handled it better that most. Generally, people with strong religious beliefs live longer, happier, lives. But there’s always the bad apple. That’s the story I want to hear most. Paradise is great, but after the fall is more interesting. The four horseman of the apocalypse are already in the saddle. I believe that. I truly do. Perhaps the Bruder community can teach us something useful about the way we should live, but I think it’s too late for most of us. Perhaps for all of us.
#MeToo in the Middle-Ages – A supposed legal right in medieval Europe, allowing feudal lords to have sex with subordinate women on their wedding night (or whenever).
#MeToo in the twenty-first century, Scotland’s former First Minister Alex Salmond, March 2020, at the High Court in Edinburgh, was found not guilty of thirteen charges of sexual misconduct, including an attempted rape in which the witness, ‘woman H’ (identities were kept secret and actor’s voices used for dramatic purposes) alleged that after dinner in 2014, at Bute House, she was sexually assaulted and Alex Salmond held her down on a bed and would have raped her, but he passed out drunk. This charge was found ‘Not Proven’ (a verdict that only exists in Scotland’s courts). One charge was thrown out by the procurator fiscal’s office before going to trial.
‘Woman A’, one of ten women, alleged, for example, Alex Salmond had placed his hand on her thigh while in his chauffeur-driven car and had sexually assaulted her.
Salmond’s Queen’s Counsel, the bumptious Gordon Jackson, Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, was himself censored after being overhead naming some of the women witnesses on board the Edinburgh to Glasgow train. Salmond had crowdfunded his defence costs and reached his target of over £80 000 claiming he was being unjustly vilified.
Jackson was more forthright in his train journey. The same old tactics that victimise the victim which mean, on average, 95% of rape allegations never reach court and aren’t prosecuted by the procurator fiscal, were referred to by the QC: ‘All I need to do is put a smell on her’.
Discredit, discredit, discredit.
Jackson also referred to Salmond as sexual bully and being a nightmare to work for, but not being quite the kind of person that should be on sex-offender register. He was, in effect, one of the middle-class chaps that had made a mistake and it was his fame that had got him punished. He was being victimised.
Kirsty Wark also established that female workers at Bute House were advised not to work out-of-hours and to be alone with Alex Salmond. Alex Salmond and his friends suggest there was a conspiracy against him. He was right, of course, about this. It’s called POLITICS.
The latest opinion-polls suggest fifty-five percent of the Scottish population would vote to leave the British union and become an independent nation.
‘Should Scotland be an independent country? Yes or No’ was the question asked of voters in September 2014. I voted YES. The country voted NO, with a 55-45 percent split in which there was a turnout at the polls of almost 85% of registered voters. I was ungracious in defeat. You can fuck off with your Better Together campaign was how I and many others felt. A Labour Party cosying up to the Tories wiped them out in Scotland. All this is history, of course, but it’s still being played out.
The futures green and the futures SNP, but an SNP without its leading light of the 2014 Scottish referendum. Alex Salmond stood down and his ignominy was compounded by losing his Parliamentary seat to a Tory bastard. Salmond then tried to revitalise his career as a talk-show host, which would be fair enough, but like the former Communist Jimmy Reid decrying the rat race as Rector of the University of Glasgow, but writing for Rupert Murdoch’s Sun tabloid made strange bedfellows, Salmon’s show was backed by Russian television and Putin’s oligarchs. Talk on independence would leave a bad taste in anybody’s mouth.
Where does Alex Salmond go now? A footnote in history? Nicola Sturgeon, now we’re talking.
Fake news. Well, here’s a fake conviction that of the Maguire Seven: Anne Maguire, her husband Patrick, her teenage sons Vincent and Patrick, her brother Sean Smyth, her brother-in-law Guiseppe Conlon and a family friend, Patrick O’Neil. Prime minister Tony Blair was quoted on television and news media, on 10th February 2005, to apologise on behalf of the nation, for the wrongful imprisonment of the Maguire family. “They deserve to be completely and publicly exonerated”. Along with the Guilford Four, also wrongly convicted of The Guilford bombing on the 5th October 1974, they were found guilty of the crime of being Irish.
There’s a series on telly, which I’ve not seen, called, Making A Murderer about Steve Avery. Yet I know by people talking about the twists and turns of the serial story that it contained the planting of forensic evidence, blood splatters, and that he was wrongly convicted. The subtext is, fucking Americans, they’re all crazy, and it could never happen here.
Forensic evidence is the killer in any trial. I can vaguely remember a documentary questioning the nitroglycerine evidence in the Maguire Seven trial, the only physical prop the Crown Prosecution Service had for convicting them. Unlike the Guildford Four none of them had signed confessions. The documentary found the traces nitroglycerine found that convicted the Maguire Seven, could have been picked up by playing with an ordinary stack of playing cards.
“None of you broke,” says Nolan to Vincent Maguire. “We had nothing to break for,” he replies.
But in its own way that was also fake news. All of them broke, but in different ways.
Anne Marie, the youngest girl, aged seven was too young to be tagged an Irish bomb maker and terrorist. ‘Auntie Annie’s bomb-making factory’ was the kind of tabloid headlines which showed the media’s objectivity, an amplification of anti-Irish hatred. But the child was old enough for grown men in the streets to spit in her face. She was sent to live with her mother’s sister in Belfast and appeared on the programme and admitted to being a recovering alcoholic, her stories of loss alone were enough to make a man weep.
Vincent and Patrick, sixteen and fourteen, were sent down for four years and classified as Category A, prisoners in adult prison. Patrick, in particular, was broken, a boy that seemed disconnected from the world and at fourteen couldn’t tell the time, until he learned the hard way, by studying the clock face at his trial. Repeatedly beaten by the police, he said he gripped the desk while they were interrogating him and his tears made a puddle at his feet. In prison it was worse. He was classified as a suicide risk and locked up for twenty-three hours a day with a constant low light on, but he didn’t know what a suicide risk was until they told him and put that thought in his head. Every story here is of adults breaking because of their children and children broken on the wheel of injustice and separation.
The irony is Patrick Maguire had been a member of the British Army and he and his wife Ann Marie were members of the local Tory Party (such sins are forgivable) before being convicted of terrorist offences. Sir John May who was appointed by the government to investigate the miscarriage of justice, as expected, exonerated everyone involved from the judge who bemoaned the fact he could no longer hang Anne Maguire, and the Guilford Seven but satisfied the cry for justice by sentencing her to twenty-five years, of which she served nineteen and the lowest tariff of four years given to innocent children. Sir John exonerated police officers who battered women, men and children to gain a conviction based on lies and then covered it up, even when the Balcome Street Gang came clean and said they’d done the Guilford bombing. These ranking police officers were not held to account, nor was the Crown Prosecution Service that protected them by falsifying accounts, withholding evidence and lying in a way that if happened in open court would be classified as perjury.
The jailing of the Maguire Seven was portrayed as an unfortunate accident like a comet falling from the sky and striking their home. The forensic officer who conducted the initial examination and found traces of nitroglycerine appeared on this programme to re-iterate that the results were positive and there was no procedural error. Sir John May’s job was then to find a suitable scapegoat that would satisfy everyone but the innocent. And he found it, in all place, a tea-towel. Auntie Annie’s bomb-making factory had a tea-towel in it. And with the kind of logic, Terry Pratchett delighted in, a flat planet balanced on the backs of four elephants which in turn stand on the back of a giant turtle, it was proved conclusively that Auntie Annie had handled a tea-towel, in fact, wiped her hand on it, as had her husband, children, brother, brother-in law, and a visitor. Here’s the rub, or smear, if you like, one of her visitors –not any of the Maguire Seven, who had been exonerated – but another Irish person, a terrorist had passed through the kitchen and wiped his or her hand on that dishtowel. Auntie Annie had then handled the dishtowel and the nitroglycrine had jumped like a virus to contaminate anyone nearby. Tony Blair’s apology, stuff it, no smoke without fire. Guilty of being Irish. Therefore, guilty of knowing a terrorist that washed and dried the dishes for you. A good heart is hard to find as Feargal Sharkey used to belt out.
The truth was, of course, far more mundane. The Surrey laboratory where testing was conducted had its work surfaces polluted with the substances they were testing for. A false positive is still a positive if you’re telling stories about an Englshman, an Irishman and a Scotsman walking into a Surrey laboratory and coming out contaminated with prejudice. But not only was the methodology flawed, which can happen, larger questions of justice had to be asked about why no one was called to account for torturing and beating adults and the Maguire children. It makes you laugh, of course, when the government appoints another impartial Queens Counsel to look at the tragedy at Grenfell. I’m sure he’ll be totally impartial, as Sir John was towards another despised group. God help our impartial justice system.
This is the kind of documentary series that the BBC does so well using archive footage and interviewing those that remember The Great War. We are shown a Zeppelin, which could travel at eighty miles per hour and carry two tons of explosive and told about the raid on Hull. An eyewitness remembered how shocking it was, how families sheltered under the kitchen table, the horror of twenty people being killed and the morbid fascination of a house being blown apart and being able to see into somebody’s bedroom.
Inevitably, there’s the middle-class girl, with the pucker voice, unpaid volunteers for the WD, who lied about their age, said she was twenty, but was seventeen and was sent to war to assist (auxiliary) nurses to those nurses that had formal training and were paid. She tells us they got the dirty work. She didn’t much like carrying a leg in a bucket to be incinerated.
Then we had the other middle-class chap that thought it was his duty, everyone’s duty to repel those that were going to invade our country. All the water in the English Channel couldn’t cool his ardour.
We had the girl left behind, all four-foot eleven of her, a scrap of bones and hair, working as a house maid, when she gets that telegram. She’d wrote, of course, she had, that she’d wait forever for him. Forever came too soon.
We had the Scot from Glasgow, called Rabbie Burns, who heard the pipe music and joined up. A clerk, his boss, told him to be quick about it, or he’d miss the fun, home for Christmas.
The Battle of Loos, the Pals Battalion, mud up to the knees and lice feeding on every living body and rats feasting on the chest cavities of the dead. The pal that lost the pal, go forward go forward. Looks left and that man disappears. Looks right and that Tommy bites it.
At home, women take up the slack, twelve hour shifts in the munition factories, working day and night. I never thought I’d get through it, one woman worker tell us, but I did, and you get used to it.
The War to End All Wars. Here are those that did their bit and for what? The rich to get rich and the poor to get poorer. Answers not in the bank book but on the ballot box. Remember that old gag, Homes fit for heroes. How long did that last?
If there’s a drama series on BBC 4, usually, I’m watching it. After the medieval Spanish drama, The Plague, I watched Mystery Road. No subtitles needed for the latter. In many ways the six episodes of the Australian drama is condensed into one in Goldstone. Essentially, it’s the same story.
Outsider, Detective Jay Swan (Aaron Pedersen), investigating the disappearance of two missing young men, one aboriginal, one white in Mystery Road, and a young Asian female in Goldstone finds himself locked into close-knit outback town controlled by a minority of white folk for white folk and having something to hide.
Jay is the black fellah, the black Swan among whites and as a federal agent he needs to team up with local cops. In Goldstone it’s the fresh-faced and white kid Josh Waters (Alex Russell). In Mystery Road it’s red head and cranky cop Emma James (Judy Davis) whose brother and her owns most of the land on which the town depends for employment.
Land value, of course, in such an arid continent is linked to the proximity to water. Think of the plot of Jack Nicholson’s Chinatown and you won’t be far off the mark in where Mystery Road leads.
In Goldstone, think of the title of the town, and mineral wealth locked up in the land. In this stripped down version of Mystery Road, the black fellahs, the local aboriginal community have voting rights on what to do with the land. There reverence for the land, the sacred lands, stands in the way of corporate greed. The Mayor (Jacki Weaver) is brilliant as the fixer lining her own pockets and making sure everybody gets a share of the pie (she bakes pies and gives one to Swan and Waters) while the black fellahs get none.
And she and they would have got away with it if it wasn’t for those pesky kids, Swan and Waters, as they used to say in Scooby Doo.
Truth stranger than fiction? I think we need Detective Swan in Scotland, maybe he could explain why knighted billionaire who bought the old BP plant at Grangemouth, and like his fictional alter-ego in Goldstone, promised a Klondike of local jobs, which never happened, and led to mass sackings and industrial actions, but moved to Monaco for tax reasons, or non-tax reasons – he doesn’t want to pay tax – and had purchased what seemed like worthless bits of paper saying his company could drill for shale gas, when everybody knew that practice was outlawed in the United Kingdom – until this week. I’m quite willing to team up with Detective Swan. There’s certainly lots of corporate skulduggery and greed enough to be shared around.
I watched the first two episodes of McMafia and it’s great. I’ll be watching the other six. It’s based on a novel by Misha Glenny. I’ve not read it so I don’t know how good an adaptation it is. Not only does the director get the kudos of being the director, he also gets to play writer and gets half the writer’s pay. That’s the kind of leverage Theresa May would love when she’s trying and failing to work out a Brexit deal.
McMafia reminds me of The Godfather in some ways. Remember when Michael Corleone starts off a war hero and ex-marine that is squeaky clean that wants to settle down with Kay his girlfriend and start a family, and all he needs is papa’s blessing? We all know how that went.
Here we have fresh-faced Alex Godman (James Norton) that is squeaky clean and wants to settle down in London and become a successful hedge-fund billionaire and not rely on his old papa the ex-Moscow mafia boss.
The backstory is a bit Bill Browderish. Bill Browder, of course, is on Putin’s hit list for exposing how the Russian state stole his fortune and killed his friends. Then, of course, we’ve got the problem with polonium. It’s meant to be as rare as decent Brotherhood of Man single, but real people, former ‘businessmen’ from Moscow seem to keel over dead from uranium poisoning. That’s no good propaganda for Russia or the McMafia.
Here American actor David Strathairn plays former Moscovite and Jewish member of the Knesset, Semiyon Kleiman who aims to topple his former nemesis Vadim Kalyagin (Merab Ninidze, who looks a bit like the current Swansea manager, contact your local M16 agent). Kalyagin is the kind of guy that is not on Putin’s hit list, the kind of guy that is on Putin’s speed dial. The kind of man that Bill Browder would recognise as a state-sponsored assassin.
McMafia doesn’t mean there’s a Scottish branch. They’re not like the Masons. Well, maybe they are a bit. But it refers to a bit of advice Kleiman gives young Goldman, McDonalds is the number one for fast food because quite simply there are more of them and they are everywhere. McKleiman and McGoldman must multiple until McKalyagin is reduced to washing cars and not laundering money. Worth watching. Go along for the ride.
The Vietnam War, in ten parts, is the best thing on television. Déjà vu seems quite apt, with the United States divided in a way not seen since those for and against the War and those that voted for the moron’s moron as President and those that hate everything he stands for. I’m not a citizen of the United States, but I’m in the latter camp. President Trump, like so many others, was a draft dodger. The metric used to measure military success against the North Vietnamese was body count. Poor and black Americans had the highest conscription and causality rate in Vietnam, but poor and white was next in line. Military hawks argued what was needed was more men and more resources and more firepower. Napalm, Agent Orange, and blowing everything up didn’t work because the American soldier was 8000 miles from home. Here the North Korean soldiers talk about their experiences and how the Ho Chin Min trail was repaired no matter how many times it was bombed, no matter how many lives were lost. It was their county. For all the talk of democracy South Korean was governed by one dictator after another and neither John F Kennedy nor successive Presidents believed in this war. Nor did they believe in the Cold War rhetoric of not allowing another country to fall into Communist hands, but to say so would make them unelectable. America paid the bills for De Gaulle’s French colonialists to take over their former colony after the second world war. Then they paid for a South Korean dictatorship that spiralled into internecine civil war between factions of Buddhists and the Catholic leadership. Let’s just say we know how this ends – badly.
It’s perhaps also worth looking at Michael Herr’s Dispatches, described by John Le Carre as ‘The Best Book I Have Read on Men and War in our Time’. This is how it is for the grunts. ‘Breathing In’:
Going out at night the medics gave you pills. Dexedrine breath the dead snakes kept too long in a jar. I never saw the need for them myself, a little contact or anything that even sounded like contact would give me more speed than I could bear. When-ever I heard something outside of our clenched little circle I’d practically flip, hoping to God I wasn’t the only one who’d noticed it.
Here we’ve got it first-hand interviews with who are drafted, press men, Pentagon staff, anti-war protesters and soldiers from the victorious North Korean army. Deakon W Crocker (Jnr) enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. His family remember him as being idealistic. Kennedy’s siren call ‘do not think what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,’ had him believing in a better world. One which he was prepared to die for. Only he wasn’t. He wanted to live. He was scared of dying. Wanted to go on leave. Wanted out of it. Wisdom came too late. Paul Hardcastle’s British pop number 1 hit, 19, showed the average age of those that died in Vietnam. Crocker was nineteen when he died in a pointless war. Spare a thought for the estimated one- million plus Vietnamese killed.
The draft-dodger President has the world gearing up for another war. One the hawks thing we can win. The North parallel in Korea has around 20 million people in it. All the commander in chief has to do is press a button. Problem solved. All the combined firepower of the second world war in one splinter of a warhead. He’s already boasted about using the biggest bunker-busting bomb. The moron moron’s President’s marshmallow problem. There’ll be no return home. Only grunts.
odonnellgrunting 