*
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"What are we to make of this obsession with happiness, an obsession that could well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse, that could result in an extermination as horrible as those foreshadowed by global warming and environmental crisis and nuclear proliferation? What drives this rage for complacency, this desperate contentment? Surely all this happiness can't be for real. How can so many people be happy in the middle of all the problems that beset our globe, not only the collective and apocalyptic ills but also those particular irritations that bedevil our everyday existence. I, for one, am afraid that this over-emphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness may be dangerous, a wanton forgetting of an essential part of a full life. I am convinced that to desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic, to settle for unrealistic abstractions. I am finally fearful of our society's efforts to espionage melancholia. Without the agitations of the soul, would all of our magnificently yearning towers topple? Would our heart-torn symphonies cease?"
Eric G. Wilson: Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy.
Was it just a matter of picking some point in the past? The fractious divide, the melancholy that had ruled him. Not melancholy exactly, a flat monochromatic living on the bottom of a lead aquarium despair that crushed everything, making survival even more remote. There were kisses, there were splattering moments, there had been the courage to be different, although even that now just seemed eccentric. People had so many opportunities these days. They flashed around in their smart cars and smart jobs, they were utterly professional. He interviewed them. They were friendly, although if they only knew they were so different. None of it mattered. Pad in hand he fired questions and took down the answers. He knew exactly what work wanted. It wasn't self censorship he practised as much as just knowing exactly what they wanted. There were days and days when the confrontation, the routines of the job, were meaningless. That wasn't today.
They told him their income, they told him about their children, they told him about their jobs and revealed far more than any normal person would normally reveal. He didn't understand it, but he had it down pat. The chimera, the wisp, the person who wasn't really there, just a cypher for others. He was absent within himself, and that made him a perfect reporter. He didn't put a spin on anything because there was no spin to be had. He didn't believe in anything, not anymore. Those desperate days when he believed in a wonderful future, when he rationalised that all that suffering would make him an artist of note, all that was gone. All his friends had gone. Their funerals passed, sometimes he didn't even make it; was away for work. Work had come first, even in death, and that he lived to regret, although they would never know. It was all about karma, building it, making up for mistakes.
He was gone now down the long line. His first works were all lost. When he was 14 or 15 he wrote a long verse poem about the souls lining up before God, a ceaseless procession of the dammed. He laboured over the intense vision; infused it with a intensely sad lyricism, laboured over the technicalities. All these origins, these births of words, were imbued with a sense of dislocation and destiny, a sadness and a longing, if not for love then for an embrace from the universe itself. He didn't know how he could go on, what the future held. He had no confidence in his badly bashed self. He was born misshapen and deformed; there was no altering that. Even in his earliest binges, he cried out for help; none ever came.
These mounting shadows, armies of the dammed, faceless shadowed disembodied souls, it was a spectacle before a cruel God, as had been his own suffering. That winding road, those darkest moments, the belts snaking out and that awful brutality, all of it washed away. He walked miles down the steep, isolated road, far steeper in his imagination than they were, he discovered when he went back in his fifties, in reality. Don't worry, be happy, they chanted; and none of that was him. He sought refuge from the battering somewhere inside himself; somewhere beyond the physical realm where the pain and the tears could never reach. There were worse batterings, he knew that intellectually, there were more terrible childhoods, but to him it had been a nightmare without end.
It led so early on, younger even than my own teenage children, to walking along the beach waiting to die, waiting for the two packets of aspirin he had swallowed to take effect. His knowledge of pharmacology was to improve in later life. They didn't kill him, but left him with a tender stomach basically for the rest of his life. The waves echoed up at him, the frothing white fear, terror, sadness, as he waited to stumble, collapse, for his consciousness to give way. It never did. He sat on the beach and cried and cried. No one came near him, no one asked him what the matter was. No one came to help. There would never be any help. He waited and could hear the voices calling out from the surf, an infinite melancholy. If you're not going to die, if this isn't going to work, what then? Where is there to go in this infinite torture? Could he face another bashing, even on the day he tried to commit suicide? Could he stare them down and survive, somewhere deep inside? There was, in the end, only one solution: escape. He had to flee. And that, shortly afterwards, was exactly what he did. And that, in the end, was when it all began.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/iemmas-day-from-hell-might-be-just-the-start/2008/02/26/1203788345705.html
MORRIS Iemma woke yesterday to a new poll that showed his popularity had plummeted to 34% — the lowest approval rating for a NSW premier in 10 years.
But what was more frightening for the Premier than the 18-point drop since last year's election was the timing of the Nielsen poll.
It was taken before the Wollongong council sex and corruption scandal engulfed his Government, which raises the question: How bad is it now?
All indications are that things are pretty dire. On the first day of Parliament for the year, Mr Iemma was dogged by the Wollongong scandal — which involves sex, property development approvals and alleged bribery at the Labor-dominated council — and by the trial on child sex charges of former minister Milton Orkopoulos.
The Premier was forced to defend his Ports Minister, Joe Tripodi, who has been accused of helping arrange a $200,000-a-year job for his mate Joe Scimone, despite Mr Scimone's being implicated in the Wollongong scandal.
Mr Iemma refused Opposition demands to fire Mr Tripodi. And his Police Minister, David Campbell, was forced to deny that Mr Scimone — who has also been accused of sexually harassing several women at Wollongong — had been his campaign manager.
http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSN2740414820080227
By Carey Gillam
DAYTON, Ohio (Reuters) - This former manufacturing hub, now struggling with skyrocketing unemployment and foreclosures, presents a microcosm of woes faced by America's working class -- and voters are seeking answers from U.S. presidential candidates.
Once a thriving hub for the U.S. auto industry, the Dayton metropolitan area now has thousands of out-of-work auto employees and one of the nation's highest foreclosure rates. A local food pantry for the unemployed handed out 286,000 meals last year, up from 47,000 in 2004.
"It's a tough place to be right now," said 51-year-old Rick Tincher, who once earned $80,000 a year making auto parts and now mows grass and picks up part-time jobs to make ends meet. "People are struggling."
This week, as Sens. Hillary Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois fight for the Democratic presidential nomination, Ohio is a key battleground.
Ohio holds its nominating contest on Tuesday and polls show the race in the state -- once a Clinton stronghold -- tightening as Obama gains momentum in the bid to represent Democrats in the November presidential election.
Opinion polls show Clinton, who would be the first woman U.S. president, has strong support from Ohio women and elderly voters. Obama, who would be the first black U.S. president, garners favor from young people and college-educated voters.
But both candidates see support from Ohio's deeply rooted blue-collar base as essential. Each stresses remedies for unemployment and onerous health care costs. Both pledge to renegotiate trade deals that they say encouraged the movement of U.S. manufacturing jobs overseas.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/27/business/media/27cnd-buckley.html?ref=us
William F. Buckley Jr., who marshaled polysyllabic exuberance, famously arched eyebrows and a refined, perspicacious mind to elevate conservatism to the center of American political discourse, died Wednesday at his home in Stamford, Conn.
Mr Buckley, 82, suffered from diabetes and emphysema, his son Christopher said, although the exact cause of death was not immediately known. He was found at his desk in the study of his home, his son said. “He might have been working on a column,” Mr. Buckley said.
Mr. Buckley’s winningly capricious personality, replete with ten-dollar words and a darting tongue writers loved to compare with an anteater’s, hosted one of television’s longest-running programs, “Firing Line,” and founded and shepherded the influential conservative magazine, “National Review.”
He also found time to write at least 45 books, ranging from sailing odysseys to spy novels to celebrations of his own dashing daily life, and edit five more. He published a book-length history of the magazine in 2007.
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