The Farm.
"A new breed of missionaries is trying to convert the world. Evangelists of unbelief say religion is a relic left over from the past and stands in the way of human progress. Once the world is rid of religion, immemorial evils such as war and tyranny can be overcome, and humanity will be able to fashion a new life for itself better than any known in history. Such is the creed of anti-religious missionaries such as Richard Dawkins. While the myths of religion express enduring human realities, the myths of secular humanism serve only to conceal them. It may be a dim sense of the unreality of their beliefs makes militant atheists so vehement and dogmatic. One searches in vain in the company of militant unbelievers for signs of the creative doubt that has energgised many religious thinkers. While theologians have interrogated their beliefs for millenia, secular hmanists have yet to question their simple creed. Evangelical atheism is the mirror image of the faith it attacks - without that faith's redeeming douibts."
John Gray.
Everything comes out of the torrents of the past; always disturbed, always flung to the four winds, good times non-existent. The world was a flat, monochromatic place, leaden grey. A terrifying place. There was no coherent, single personality. The leaden grey was all that he knew, all that he had known for years. Comfort came from the familiarity of despairing routines. If he sought wealth, it was purely to fritter away. He had no belief in a brighter future, such an idea would have been laughable, if it had ever occurred to him. The cringing, sad person that he had become evolved over years, decades. The chaos arose from a doomed lifestyle. He wore his depression like a cloak, a protective armour; leaves blown on soggy ground, swirls of dark colours, orange sludge, the despair of the landscape, reaching up to melancholy. That was about the range. He wandered into the job out of these doom laden winds with no ambition, no hope of a career, just a sad determination to see our promises made a long time ago.
Somehow, out of sheer persistance, he began getting the occasional shift at the city's leading newspaper, The Sydney Morning Herald. He was perfectly happy to work Sundays, it wasn't as if anything else was going on in his life, no happy family, no picnics with friends, clothes dank with addiction sweat. The story would not normally have made it to Page Zed, much less the front. I was doing casual shifts in the wan hope of fulfilling a dream of becoming a journalist. Through the kindness of strangers, basically, secret comrades in arms, sharing inner defects and fatal flaws, I was doing casual shifts at the paper. It was working Sundays that did it. Sooner or later they noticed that I kept getting a run on Mondays, the paper wasn't getting sued and the stories weren't too badly written. In those days there was always a scrabbling desperation to know what was in the paper the next day, a lot of pages to fill and really, in a city the size of Sydney, not that much going on.
There's a register for women in unorthodox jobs, the chief of staff said. Their funding has run out and they're whinging for more. These people always want more of everybody elses money, they can't possibly stand on their own two feet. Anyway, we're desperate for tomorrow, see what you can get. We're desperate for a pic story; try and find some cute young woman carpenter, covered in saw dust, or a mechanic, grease streaking her face, dribbling down her breasts. Just make sure they're cute, we don't want some bull dyke. So I headed off to the meeting in inner-city Surry Hills with Steve, the most foul mouthed and crude of all the photographers.
Soon enough we find ourselves sitting in the middle of a room jam packed full of extremely butch looking women; we're virtually the only blokes. We didn't slot right in. I tried to feel comfortable, nothing to it, I'm a progressive kind of guy, go girls, all of that. Before the corruption and bias of our family law system ruined my naive university-derived belief in feminism. There was nowhere to sit in the jam packed crowd, the air full of righteousness and the muggy smell of 200 women crammed into a small space. Eventually they cleared a spot for us; and we sat cross legged; completely surrounded. We were late, as always, and a woman was up the front pounding on about the injustice of the government's failure to continue the funding their directory of women in unorthdox jobs, yet another blow by a patriarchy determined to keep women in the kitchen.
"There's no picture here," Steve whispered, loudly enough that at least 20 of the sisters around us could hear everywhere. "They're as ugly as sin. I'm out of here, I'm going to find something else. There's just not a shot here."
"I've got to stay and listen to this," I said.
"Well I don't, I'm gone," he said, standing up and elbowing his way through the crowd.
On and on the speaker went. In those days, before my head had cleared, I took copious notes on everything, the colour of the walls, everyting the speaker said, spontaneous thoughts on the atmosphere. I was always afraid I would forget something important.
By the time I got back to the office I had extensive notes from the speakers and various people I had interviewed, a woman carpenter, a plumber, an electrician; they were nice, although I wasn't so sure about their separatist plea, a woman wants a woman, they don't want men in their house. How is that not sexist?
Back in the office, I wrote up the story on the anitquated computer system, made it as interesting as possible, assuming as my fingers rattled across the keyboard that the sorry would never get a run. It might have been important to the people involved, but it wasn't earth shattering. Journalists are always being targetted by groups whose funding has run out; noble cause after noble cause.
Next day the story was on the front page, my very first front page story. It was the picture that did it, of course, and I learnt forever the value of a good photograph in dragging an otherwise nondescript story onto the front or higher in the book. A large photograph, run wide and deep, of a drop dead georgeous young woman, maybe 23, adorned the page. She was carrying a ladder, with the Opera House in the background. Her white overalls were stained delicately with paint; the uppper flats just loose enough to provoke the imagination of males around the city; nothing short of an absolute spunk. Can I help you carry that? a hundred thousand voices asked. Can I lick the paint off your breasts. Can I see what's under those overalls, the delicate tracings of signs of labour.
I never got a thank you from the organisers of the Women In Unorthodox Jobs Directory; funnily enough. But later that day the chief of staff leant across the desk and shook my hand; congratulations, you've got the job, he said. I was a full time journalist. It was one of the proudest days of my life.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.newstatesman.com/200802210016
News that Cuba's Fidel Castro is stepping down brings an end to the longest, and most controversial, presidency in the world.
The 81-year-old leader, who has been ill for some years, said in a letter published on a state newspaper's website: "It would be a betrayal of my conscience to accept a responsibility requiring more mobility and dedication than I am physically able to offer."
The final words of his message promised "I will be careful", possibly a wry reference to the more than 600 assassination attempts he has survived since becoming president.
Fidel Castro Ruz has ruled Cuba for 49 years, despite unrelenting efforts by the US to kill or overthrow him, and has outlived most of those who led the Cuban revolution with him.
His legacy is fiercely disputed: clearly a man of charisma and courage, he has always understood getting and retaining power better than the art of government. Having led a nationalist revolution against a brutal dictatorship, he instituted a more effective one of his own.
Castro seized power in 1959 in a country that had one of the highest per capita incomes in the Americas. Today it lags behind most of the hemisphere. But he has left it with a rate of infant mortality lower than that of the US, and health and education systems that support a long-lived and literate population, albeit one restricted in what it is allowed to read.
As a student in the 1950s, Castro shared the widespread discontent with the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, the army officer who had dominated Cuban politics since the 1930s, first as kingmaker and then as millionaire dictator and mafia henchman. Fidel thought of standing for parliament, but became convinced that anything short of armed struggle was futile.
His claim to be a hero of the revolution is based on two disastrous revolutionary expeditions. The first was the assault on the Moncada barracks in Santiago on 26 July 1953. Fidel and his brother Raú led 160 rebels in a misconceived and bungled attack that even lost the element of surprise when Castro crashed one of the cars in the convoy: 61 rebels were killed and most of the others, including Fidel, were captured. Many were summarily executed.
Fidel escaped the death sentence and was sentenced instead to 15 years in prison. Amnestied 15 months later, Fidel and his younger brother Raú went to Mexico where they met the Argentinian revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara and plotted their return. This was his second disastrous military expedition. Castro and 81 followers crammed into a motor yacht, now enshrined in a large glass case in Havana as one of the world's more unusual revolutionary monuments, and sailed for Cuba with the aim of starting an armed uprising. Within days, 70 of the band were killed, wounded or captured. The survivors, who included Fidel, Guevara, Raú and Camilo Cienfuegos, made it to the Sierra Maestra mountains where, with the support of existing peasant movements, they finally succeeded in launching a guerrilla campaign.
Castro's guerrillas never numbered more than 1,000, but he appropriated credit for a revolution made by many hands: socialists, social democrats, trade unionists, students and democratic liberals - a coalition so broad that, in 1958, the US recognised the hopelessness of the Batista regime and withdrew military support. On 1 January 1959, Batista fled. Castro's moment had arrived. By February, he had been sworn in as prime minister.
Maxine McKew before she unseated the Prime Minister.
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