9/11: Inside the President’s War Room, BBC 1, BBC iPlayer, produced and directed by Adam Wishart.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000z8p5/911-inside-the-presidents-war-room

Hagiography (Literary & Literary Critical Terms) any biography that idealizes or idolizes its subject

Around 3000 United States citizens were killed in what has become known as 9/11. This is A Day in the Life of President George W. Bush.

A ticking clock. The rest is a history of good guys and bad guys, when 9/11 became shorthand for President George W. Bush can-do and holding a poster of Osman Bin Laden with a ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive’. it. BBC and Apple take us back to that day with archive footage and all the Republican big hitters that were talking heads paying lip service to their former boss: Vice-President Dick Cheney, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Senior Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Ironically, Inside the President’s War Room was bookmarked by BBC 1, News at 10 and the chaotic scenes of US troops evacuating Afghanistan citizens ringing Kabul airport. In the twenty year war over $2 trillion had been spent, around 16 500 members of the US armed forces had been killed (and around 500 members of the British armed forces) with approximately ten times that numbered severally injured. With the average cost of one soldier stationed in Afghanistan estimated at around $1 million a year. Taliban spokesmen on New at 10 said they’d made more territorial gains than twenty years ago.

Civilian casualties are more difficult to estimate. Women and children figuring highly in any estimates of 171 000 to 360 000 dead. Multiply by ten for those injured.  Multiply by whatever figure you like to take into account the casualty rate in Iraq.

11th September 2001. 9.03am, President George W. Bush, is in Florida, (he was once Governor).  If you’d asked him what 9/11 was, he’d have looked bemused. He has that innate ability. But he was smiling as he listened to a teacher going through a presentation in front of seven-year-old schoolchildren. An aide whispers in the President’s ear.

Anyone that has read Robert A. Caro’s account of the ascent of Lyndon B. Johnston to the Presidency knows what happens after 9/11 was predictable. An algorithmic version of George W. Bush—even with the wonky technology of 2001, with Air Force One, for example frequently losing contact with ground signals and having to swoop over cities to pick up satellite signals and news footage—would have saved time. It would have been difficult for even a charismatic genius of John F. Kennedy standing to do any different, not go to war, even though in the Cuban Missile Crisis with nuclear Armageddon at stake, he cut a deal. But that was with bigger fry. This was just men in robes with boxcutters.  Caro argued, ‘power corrupts, but it also reveals.’ In the case of the moron’s moron, Trump, for example, it reveals a malignant evil that has diminished, but not gone away. Trump would have loved a war. Caro’s advice stands good then as it does now. ‘Turn every page and do the maths.’ Going to war in Afghanistan and Iraq was the easy part. No US President could afford not to. We’re still counting the cost.

‘I’m comfortable with the decision I made,’ former President George W. Bush tells the camera.

(Greg Palast documents how Democrat Presidential candidate, Al Gore, won the 2000-1 election, but another unfamiliar word, like ‘9/11’, entered the lexicon – ‘chad’. Let’s not confuse this with the scare tactics of the moron’s moron Trump. An appeal to the Supreme Court called for a recount of the votes in Florida.

Fast forward, just as the US Supreme Court trashed women’s right to abortion in Texas and by extension, Jane Doe is dead. But that’s an aside for women’s rights not in Afghanistan were the bad guys are pictured with bulky robes and marked out as Muslim and, therefore, other, likely to take women’s rights back to the seventh-century.)

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises: ‘How did you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.’

Green Book (2018) screenplay written by Nick Vallelonga, Brian Hayes Currie, Peter Farrelly and directed by Peter Farrelly.

This is a buddy movie and a road movie based on an odd coupling of two different cultures. It draws its authenticity from a friendship between a classical pianist and his chauffer, and one of the writers, Nick Vallelonga, witnessed it. The former is black and the latter is white. The year is 1962. John F Kennedy is newly elected, regarded as a progressive and a liberal. Voters proved that even a Roman Catholic can become President. But while JFK can schmooze with the Rat Pack, and advocate for liberal causes, he would never think of inviting Sammy Davis Junior to the Whitehouse, in the same way he could his buddy Frank Sinatra. Even though the latter had, alleged, Mafia connections.

I’m rambling on here. Trying to illustrate how deadly and dangerous the South was, and it didn’t need to be that Deep, for Dr Shirley (Mahershala Ali), the classical pianist. On the playlist of Southern Caucasus of Senators was hating Communists and, as Senator Old reminded them keeping ‘uppity nigras down’ (quoted in Robert A. Caro’s biography of Lyndon B. Johnson). Senator Jim Eastland also suggested ‘[he] could be standing right in the worst Mississippi flood ever known, and he’d say the niggers caused it, helped by the Communists’.

Lyndon B. Johnson despite bringing a draft of civil right bills and pushing them through the Senate wasn’t much of a believer in equality. He’d a black driver, and the future President made sure he knew his place. Having a black driver was acceptable. But, of course, they couldn’t stay in the same place, they couldn’t use the same toilet, or drink water from the same faucet, don’t even think about them drinking in the same bar.

The Green Book in the title refers to the Negro Motorists Green Book (the cover was green). A roadmap, literally a lifeline, listing where black and coloured could stop off for something to eat or drink and stay overnight, without being whipped, or lynched, or jailed on trumped up charges. Out of the way spots where they could relax.

That’s the set-up. First up is showing ‘Tony Lip’ Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen) at work as a bouncer in the Bronx. He’s handy with his fists and gives a petty gangster a beating and flings him out of the Copacabana nightclub and into the street.

‘You don’t know who I am?’ the petty gangster bawls.

Tony shrugs. He’s old school, in with the bricks. He knows all the old Dons that run the numbers and run large parts of street life. He doesn’t take shit. But the Copacabana is closing down and he’s looking for another job.

Black workmen are doing carpentry work in his kitchen and all his Italian relatives are watching a ball game in the living room. They explain (in Italian) that it wouldn’t be right leaving his wife alone with these ‘eggplants’. His wife gives them a glass of lemonade before they leave. Tony picks up the glasses the workmen have used and puts them in the trash.

Tony’s a racist. But he’s also a slob. He wins fifty bucks beating another guy in a contest to see who can eat the most hotdogs. The other guy ate twenty-three. And his wife berates him for losing that amount of money, but then he admits he ate twenty-six and pulls out the note. He’s hitting the high notes.

When he goes to see Dr Shirley he finds out he’s not a real doctor. But he’s impressed by where he stays. Above Carnegie Hall, it’s something like a castle. And Dr Shirley has a manservant and sits on a throne. As well as playing the piano, Dr Shirley speaks several languages, fluently. In other words, he’s upper-class and refined.  He’s got connections so far above the petty Dons of Bronx street life that makes small town dictator’s heads spin. When they are jailed Dr Shirley springs them by using his one phone call to phone JFK’s brother, Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General of the United States.

I’m not sure this happened in real life, but it makes for a dramatic scene, and sense of different worlds. When rubbing chalk against cheese something is sure to give. The period detail is great. And the most important thing of all, this movie is great fun.

Will you take the Covid-19 vaccine(s)?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/06/the-vaccine-miracle-how-scientists-waged-the-battle-against-covid-19

Around 20% of us are unlikely to take the Covid-19 vaccine (there are more than one type of vaccine, but it is highly unlikely you’ll get a choice—unless you’re rich—which propriety brand you will get inoculated with). These are a vocal minority, let’s call them I’d-rather- smear-my-face-with-shit group. Our French compatriots numbers are higher.

Around  15% are unsure.  We’ll wait and see group numbers could swell if there are reports of side-effects. Mavericks are sure to spring up such as Andrew Wakefield who claimed there was a link between the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine and childhood autism. He was struck off by the General Medical Council and his claims disproved, but he remains unrepentant.

My medical experience comes from playing the side of Dr Finlay’s head as an extra in Dr Finlay’s Casebook. So you could say, I’m a medical man, and I’d treat Wakefield’s claim with the contempt reserved for the moron, moron’s claim that injecting yourself with disinfectant was a cure for Covid-19.

But we all like the narrative of the underdog, the whistle-blower willing to take on the establishment and tell the truth. A.J. Cronin who wrote Dr Finlay, as a Scottish doctor, wrote what he knew. Dr Andrew Mason’s character, the narrator of The Citadel, for example, was portrayed as having working-class origins in the hungry nineteen-thirties. He is about to be struck off by the General Medical Council. But instead of apologising, he rises up and castigates them.

‘commercialism? the usual guinea-chasing treatments, the unnecessary operations, the crowds of worthless pseudo-scientific propriety preparations we use…The whole profession is far too intolerant and smug…For years we’ve been bleating about the sweated conditions under which our nurses work, the wretched pittances we pay them.

Louis Pasteur, the greatest figure of all scientific medicine, was not a doctor.  

The deferential era in which the characters Dr Andrew Mason, or Dr Findlay, or indeed the author A.J.Cronin steps forward, was one when if a medical doctor told his patient to smear his or her face with shit you’d be sure to make a good job of it has passed is also a myth. Our gods are just different gods. Who is yours?

Who can we trust, when ‘I’ the online warrior knows best? (ironic since I’m writing this online).

I’m no different. I’m not the exception to the rule. Keyboard warriors believe there’s a conspiracy to keep them quiet. Like Dr Andrew Mason they’ll have their day, and their say. They’re called trolls for a reason. They won’t be struck off. They won’t be silenced. They’re the rightist of the right.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/23/conspiracy-theories-internet-survivors-truth

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/nov/29/how-to-deal-with-a-conspiracy-theorist-5g-covid-plandemic-qanon

Carl Sagan’s invisible imaginary dragon is always a step too far. Fake authority is easily bought. George Clooney goes at it with brio as a tobacco lobbyist in Up in the Air/Thank You for Smoking.

‘You can’t prove anything/ You can prove everything, given enough data’. Thought provoking killer cliché.

In Martin Ford’s apocalyptic vision in The Rise of the Robot, Technology and the Threat of Mass Unemployment, what we’re left with is our planet (and the planets closest to earth) cannibalised as the cuckoo in our nest, the next generation of robots work to eliminate uncertainty.

We don’t know if the current Covid-19 vaccine will limit the spread of disease. What we have is best guess. Those inoculated with the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, according to studies have lower viral loads than those given a placebo. This suggests they are less likely to spread the Covid-19 virus.

We wear face masks not to protect ourselves, but others, getting inoculated helps to prevent the spread of disease. In the same way, I wouldn’t cross the road while holding a three-year-old girl’s hand (Tilly) while standing at the traffic lights until I hear the beeps, because it also sets her a good example. I might get hit by a truck but I’m doing what I’m supposed to do. I’m following a code that can protect both of us. That doesn’t mean I won’t also be looking right or left and stop listening for traffic.

Philip Knightley (1997) provides a case study of all the familiar ingredients of how pharmaceutical companies evade responsibility. The Thalidomide Scandal, Where We Went Wrong. Blaming the victims. Court injunctions slowing down disclosure, while accepting no responsibility and extraneous factors as causative.  Creating a Kafkaesque bureaucratic maze to rival that of Grenfell victims—before and after. Class played a large part. The richer and more vocal middle-class victims were more likely to obtain compensation. Negligence and ruthlessness of establishment forces to finalise a settlement. In many ways it mirrors the hostile environment our Home Office and Priti Patel helped create for immigrants seeking British citizenship.    

Politics is about power. It doesn’t surprise me that Boris Johnstone’s cronies are handed tens of millions of taxpayers money for providing (fill in your own example here, such as Personal Protective Equipment) while not giving any of us a real choice. Drug companies cash in on their monopolies to hike up prices. That doesn’t surprise me either. That doesn’t mean the product they’re selling doesn’t work. American steel monopolies created quality steel. The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is new technology. Cutting edge.

Robert A. Caro says in his introduction to Working: ‘Political power shapes all of our lives. It shapes your life in little ways you might not even think about.’

The I’d-rather-smear-my-face-with-shit group, don’t want you to think. Don’t want you to read. They have their own agenda and want simple answers to complex questions.  If an airplane made of millions of complex parts becomes grounded for mechanical reasons that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fly. Our bodies are made of billions of cells.  Pharmaceutical companies and epidemiologists are the ground crew telling us they can fix it and it’s safe to fly. Sure we’ve had setbacks and crashes. But it’s not all about you, you, you, or I, I, I. We need to look at the larger community. What’s the point of clapping NHS workers while ignoring their advice? When you, your daughter or son gets sick and can’t breathe, don’t phone an ambulance. Tell them it’s just a giant hoax. The one and half million dead are faking it in the same ways six million Jews didn’t perish in death camps. The true figure is only known by us right-wingers. A vaccine is for losers. You know best. Hey, I’m going to fly.  I want to get as far away from those right-wing loonies as I can.

Yes, I’ll take the vaccine.

#Impeachment

https://www.flickr.com/photos/11020019@N04/32459807456/

I’m a hypocrite, in the week that Britain formally leaves the European Economic Union, an act of economic mutilation the equivalent of, for example, California seceding from the United States of America, I want Scotland to opt out of Britain. My fealty is not to Nicola Sturgeon or the Scottish National Party, but to the commonwealth of the Scottish people. Put simply, the future is green and will be built on interdependence not independence. Thatcherism and trickledown economics has never worked. It simply exacerbates the existing gaps between rich and poor. The direction of travel of Boris Johnson and his ilk has not changed so we as a people, we as a nation, need to leave them to their own short-term folly—for our own good, and perhaps theirs.

Democracy is a sham. But reading Robert A.Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnon, is a reminder that sometimes it can work for the greater good. As it did from roughly the end of the second world war to the rise of Thatcherism and Reaganomics when there was—limited, some would argue, very limited—upward social mobility. Now it is downward. Poor people die sooner than rich people (and yes I do go to more funerals now) but they are doing so in such high numbers the life-expectancy of both men and women in Britain, despite technological advances, is declining.

We get Boris Johnstone’s mussed hair and, staged gravitas, as he bangs a gong at 11pm on Friday, 31^st January that ends Britain’s formal membership of the EEC after 47 years. Perhaps the one good thing is the reptilian Nigel Farage, and fellow old Etonian, will no longer be able to claim tens of thousands of Euros in allowance and will become just another stooge in the moron moron’s background team.

The defining image of the week isn’t of mussed hair of President Trump or of the Boris Johnston thatch, but a video of an eight-year-old girl easily climbing up and over a mock-up of Trump’s ‘virtually impenetrable’ wall with Mexico. Certainly, there should be calls to elect the eight-year-old girl to become President rather than the moron’s moron.

The impeachment of President Donald Trump in the chambers of the United States Senate as political theatre has turned into a damp squib. The senate has overseen fifteen previous impeachments, which included two presidents Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton. Richard Nixon resigned after the Watergate Scandal and before he could be impeached. The moron’s moron, as we know, wants much more than that and another term in office. He is liable to get it and get away with breaking the law at will.

Cato’s examination of the Annals of Congress are instructive of what democracy should look like but doesn’t. For example, the trail of Samuel Chase, in the Senate could also be applied to Bill Clinton, but not Donald Trump who has committed much greater crimes—both public and private—than request a blowjob.  

His footsteps are hunted from place to place to find indiscretions.

Listen to the words of Vice President Aaron Burr (indicted for murdering Alexander Hamilton) and his defence of the right to try Samuel Chase not in the halls of public opinion but in the Senate.

The House is a sanctuary; a citadel of law, of order, and of liberty; and it is here, here in this exalted refuge; here if anywhere, will resistance be made to the storms of political phrensy [sic] and the silent arts of corruption…  

   Or the words from Robert Byrd, who served the Senate, two centuries later.

The Senate exercised in that fine moment of drama the kind of independence, impartiality, fairness and courage that, from time to time, over the years, it has brought to bear on the great issues of the country.  

We see the opposite of that in the Senate, and in the world, generally. We see the partiality of the rich and powerful and politicians who bend at the knee. We see unfairness and a lack of moral courage. We see a President who when the call came refused to fight for his country leading other weak men who refuse to see any wrong in their leader. We see the politics of the ghetto given national stage.

We’re not comparing like with like. Samuel Chase was, by Caro’s account, an intellectual colossus whose inflammatory rhetoric led to him being impeached. The moron’s moron intellect is the kind of genius that if he went head to head with the eight-year-old, who climbed all over his pseudo-fence, I’d be backing her.

Compromise is not a crime. It’s an essential part of political life and life in general, but if the men we elect do not act in the interests of future generations then they shouldn’t be in office. We can no longer think locally, or national, but need to think globally, to work together to save our planet. Ironically, that means Scotland leaving Great Britain. An act of economic mutilation akin to Johnson’s betrayal, but necessary for the greater good of all and not just the super-rich few.  

Robert A. Caro (1990 [2006]) The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 2, Means of Ascent.

On page 402, towards the end of this second volume of the rise and rise of Lyndon Johnson, Robert A.Caro offers an insight into the former President’s personality.

For a President to preserve as a personal memento a photograph showing the notorious Box 13 in the possession of his political allies—a photograph which by implication provides that someone was indeed in a positon to stuff it—is startling in itself. For him to display the photograph to a hostile journalist is evidence of a psychological need so deep that its demands could not be resisted. It is continuing evidence of the fact that even his possession of the presidency had eased the insecurities of his youth.

In a week that the moron’s moron starts his impeachment trial by the Senate this is perhaps a good book to study.

There is little doubt that President Trump is guilty of all charges levelled against him from #Me too to crook too. He’s an abomination, but that didn’t stop him from becoming President. In fact, it was regarded as an asset. He would be telling others how it is.  What the Trump team did was very much like LBJ did they used the new technology of their age to target voters.

LBJ used helicopters and control of the media, primarily radio stations. He also used slush funds to generate more cash than had ever been spent in the history of Texas to buy political power.

The moron’s moron’s team, ironically, used the Obama tactics of weaponising social media. Fake Facebook accounts were targeted at key states as they are now being for the next election. Russian influence played its part, but LBJ was one of the first to realise it didn’t matter what you said, as long as you repeated it enough it had the patina of truth and then the other guy became the liar.

In a world of right and wrong and moral order LBJ would have been as screwed as any one of the moron moron’s servants. Both Presidents shared the capacity to demand total loyalty.

Caro juxtaposes LBJ’s fight for a senate seat with ‘Mr Texas’ Coke Stevenson. Think Atticus Finch here from To Kill a Mocking Bird and fling in a bit of John Wayne.  A man that built his own house by hand and dug his own fence posts and could pretty much do anything from building bridges to representing plaintiffs in court and winning the case. He never took a case where he thought the client was guilty. Prices for his services were written on chalk for all to see. He could not be bought. He had integrity. He had core beliefs where LBJ and the moron’s moron had a for-hire sign.

LBJ was an incredibly adapt creature of the political wrangling class, a lion among wolves. The moron’s moron is a child in a man’s body that nobody has said boo too—and there lies the danger. His stupidity could lead literally to the next world war. It has already helped diminished the chance of saving our planet without a massive loss of human life and biodiversity.  

Nobody much is interested in Box 13, or that old stuff called history. The guys in the photograph LBJ showed a hostile reporter are Texans that stole enough votes and stuffed them into Box 13 so that LBJ could become a Senator in the 1948 race. The equivalent would be the moron’s moron showing a New York Times reporter Trump standing in a Moscow hotel room with Putin, while Russia prostitutes piss on his bed. Or the moron’s moron standing with his hand on the shoulder of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and a speech bubble coming from the American President’s mouth asking him to dig up dirt on Joe Biden—or else.

LBJ knew that’s not the way power works. Senators might swear to be impartial, but we know that’s the kind of horseshit Coke Stevenson would have smartly wiped from his cowboy boots. 20 Republicans need to side the Democratic block vote to win the three-quarter majority to find the moron’s moron guilty. And like LBJ, the moron’s moron is always keen to leave a paperless trail. Admit to nothing, let the minions take the hits and then damn them for being crass liars, interested only in themselves and the next pay-packet. Accuse them of being greedy, of being bought.   Loyalty to self is the only thing worth preserving. Everyone else, everything else, expendable.

The greatest irony of all is that impeachment works in the moron moron’s favour. It provides proof to his followers that he’s stirred up the hornet’s nest. With no Hillary Clinton to bait, it’s the next best thing. Power follows the money. I hate to say it about the next election, but the moron’s moron—

unwriterly advice

https://unsplash.com/@olga_konono

In the bestseller written by Elizabeth Strout called My Name is Lucy Barton, the protagonist idealises another writer called Sarah Payne. That’s a long sentence. I’ll break it down.

Elizabeth Strout is Lucy Barton is Sarah Payne. ‘All life amazes me,’ is the last line in the book. And in the Buddhist world we all are each other (until we reject the illusion of Suchness and reach the shore of Nirvana, which isn’t really a shore and isn’t really Nirvaha, but the Great Void, which isn’t nothingness, or much of suchness either).

Elizabeth Strout >Lucy Barton> Sarah Payne (all writers, fictional and real).

Here’s the advice from one of them, or all of them. Take it with a lump of suchness.

‘And I think sometimes of Sarah Payne…how exhausted she became, teaching. And I think how she spoke of the fact that we only have one story, and I think I don’t know what her story was or is.’  

Writers that teach aren’t writers that write. In a way they’re second class. Writers that can’t write, teach, sutra.  More than that, teaching leaches the goodness out of Sarah Payne’s (pain’s) soul, so she can’t write. Discuss?

In terms of economics that’s true. The economic cost of doing something is not doing something else. When we do one thing, we can’t do the other. Although, of course, our bookshelves groan with learned professors. Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Caroll), C.S Lewis, J.R.R Tolkien and  Umberto Eco, for example, that teach and write. That’s the exception to the rule argument.

Is it an exception or is it a rule?

Nobody has asked me to teach and nobody asks me to write. But usually when I read a novel in which the protagonist is a writer or librarian (Stephen King’s protagonists are often writers) then I groan.

This ties in with the one story I continually write and rewrite. And in these fictional worlds none of my protagonists are writers. For a good example of a writer that continually writes the same story, his characters having different haircuts – think Irvine Welsh after Trainspotting. And he’s not even Welsh. He’s Scottish like me and tends to write about characters that think writers are well up themselves and should come down and get fucking at it. And I’m not even a fan of Irvine Welsh, I prefer Stephen King. And I’m not a fan of him either. The problem of being a writer talking about writing is to most folk it’s fucking boring and shows a lack of imagination. I’m a connoisseur because all I do is write and read stuff. I’m an exception to the rule, which isn’t a rule.  

The historian and writer Robert A. Caro nailed it when he was talking about writing and farming and how you need to pick up the vocabulary and live it to appreciate it fully. There are two ways of learning, lived experience or reading about it. I tend towards the latter. Writers have their noses pressed against a keyboard. If you want to talk about  The Snow Leopard live it like Peter Matthiessen and your vocabulary will be rich as buffalo shit, or watch David Attenborough and leave extreme environments to other writers that are less desk-bound.

If we only have one story, I’ve not perfected it yet. Maybe I never will, not in this lifetime. The secret of good writing is the secret of bad writing. You need to keep repeating the same mistakes again and again until you move on to a higher plane and realise none of it matters. And you must carry this secret into your next story.

Here’s Lucy Barton pondering the nature of time.

I think of Jeremy telling me I had to be ruthless as a writer. And I think how I did not go visit my brother and sister and my parents because I was always working on a story and there was never enough time. (But I didn’t want to go either.) There was never enough time, and then later I knew if I stayed in my marriage I would not write another book, not the kind I wanted to, and there is that as well. But really, the ruthlessness, I think, comes in grabbing onto myself, in saying: This is me…

The ultimate truth in Buddhahood is understanding and appreciating the permanent nature of eternity. The starting point is self. Arthur Miller was willing to concede that Timebends and all things may fall away, but he was going to write about them anyway. His one true story, was many storied.  

‘What writer makes money?’ Lucy Barton asks.

Certainly not me. Or 99% of other writers. I guess it’s an occupation that’s not an occupation, that’s doomed to failure for the masses.

‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad/They may not mean to but they do.’ Philip Larkin writes This Be The Verse.

Lucy Barton writes about writing about her family. ‘I kept thinking how the five of us had had a really unhealthy family, but I saw them too how our roots were twisted so tenaciously around one another’s hearts. My husband said, “But you don’t even like them.”

Any writer knows, nice people are boring. Their great secret is they’ve got nothing to hide. Molla tells Lucy Barton what we already know. For every Jesus we need a Judas.  

‘You’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about your story. You only have one.’

Molla hasn’t got a secret. Lucy Barton has, she’s a writer.

A writer’s job is the same as Buddah’s, to hold every moment and to let it go, simultaneously. Here is Lucy Barton watching her dad, inhabiting him.

I remember only watching my father’s face so high above me, and I saw his lips become reddish with that candied apple that he ate because he had to…

And I remember this: he was interested in what he was watching. He had an interest in it.

Pay attention. Here’s Sarah Payne the writer giving Lucy Barton some advice about writing what you want to write, but the real advice comes at the end after rallying against stupid people that fail to understand.

‘Never ever defend your work.’   

It seems counterintuitive, but even a fool you don’t like can point out you’ve got your shoes on the wrong feet. In my writing it happens to me all the time. Insight is not a closed gate, but a gate you must leave open. Pay attention to your faults. Then with good karma you may not repeat them indefinitely. It’s nothing personal.

At the end of all lifetimes is the question a disgruntled admirer asks Sarah Payne.

He said, “What is your job as a writer of fiction?”

And she said that her job as a writer of fiction was to report on the human condition, to tell us who we are and what we think and what we do.

Amen. Go forth and multiply words.  

Lies, damned lies and end-of-the-world economics.

King of Nineveh

Truth can be ugly – there’s no money in it. Everything is connected. The Third World War has begun. Us against nature and we’re losing because we won’t recognise we’re all one.

I can go biblical on you.

Jonah 2:3 Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah, the second time, saying, ‘Arise, go to Trumptown and proclaim to it the message I tell you.’

Jonah went to Trumptown and proclaimed the message, ‘Yet forty years, and Trumptown and all the earth will be overthrown.’

I can go historical on you. Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, vol. 1.

The Hill country had been ‘a beautiful trap, baited with water’.

It was still beautiful –even more beautiful perhaps because woods covered so much of it now…the reality was rock. It was a land of stone…

The low line on the hills was an “isohyet” (from the Greek: isos, equal; hystos, rain) – a line drawn on the map so that all points have equal rainfall. That particular isohyet showed the westernmost limits to the United States along which the average rainfall averages thirty inches, when combined with two other factors—rate of evaporation (very high in Hill Country since most of it comes in spring or autumn thunderstorms)—is the bare minimum needed to grow crops successfully…And when, in the twentieth century, meteorologists began charting isohyets, they would draw the crucial thirty-inch isohyet along the 98^th meridian—almost exactly the border of the Hill Country.

I can go scientific on you (while not really understanding the science, but in the same way, believing twentieth century meteorologists were proven right, again and again, this is called the null hypothesis in science, trying to prove they were wrong).

Robin McKie, Science Editor gives us the latest figure on the scorecard. Imagine those war rooms were they pushed forward models of planes and tanks in a simulated battlefield being put on show before the latest international climate meeting in Madrid (which is a waste of time and energy).

UN Environmental Programme report for the end of October 2019 showed total carbon emissions showed the equivalent of 55 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide. Putting the earth on course for the equivalent of 3.2C by the end of the century.

We know how this works, figures like that are underestimates, in the same way that contractors bidding to build a road underestimate knowing they can charge more later, because you’ll  need to pay.

We’re living in the Hill County. It’s called Planet Earth.

I can go economics on you. The costs of war are more than the cost of continued peace.

Global temperature kept below 2C.

Damage such as rising seas, land erosion, spread of deserts and hundreds of million refugees on the move and destruction of fragile ecosystems that depend on none of these things happening.

Estimated bill, $200 billion a year by 2030.

$40 trillion a year if temperatures were allowed to reach 3C or more.  

Runaway-global warming (equivalent of Moore’s law in computing) comes into effect. We can save the world. We don’t need to put on sackcloth and ashes as the King of Nineveh did, but we need to share. We need equality in all things big and small. We need to become more human and stop believing convenient lies. I don’t see that happening any time soon. We really do need a miracle. If you have children, and they ask you what did you do during the war?   

What’s your answer.    

• Will he stay or will he go?
• worth a look?
• The Whale (2022) directed by Darren Aronofsky, based on a stage-play written by Samuel D. Hunter.
• Celtic 5—0 Aberdeen
• Damon Galgut (2021) The Promise.