Matters From The Heart

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"It's never a good idea to wish for radical change without knowing exactly what shape it will take, no matter how intolerable the present may seem, because it can always get worse... The Iraq fiasco has created the potential for a big drop in the United States' influence in the world, invading a country with one-twelfth of its population illegally, without provocation, and on false pretexts, and then mismanaging the occupation so badly that it loses the subsequent guerrilla war, suggests that the United States is not only a dangerously erratic superpower but a seriously incompetent one."
The Mess They Made, Gwynne Dyer.

He arrived at the Sydney Morning Herald with a myriad of stories that would never otherwise have gotten in the paper; stories from the under belly, from his own life experience, from the inner-city, Kings Cross, Darlinghurst, from abandoned lives. There was this car that used to migrate around the block in Darlinghurst. It had stopped working and been abandoned, and a dero had taken up home in it during the day. At night a sequence of people used to make use of it, during the earlier hours of the evening a drug dealer used to peddle his wares from it, regular, reliable. Later a worker and her pimp would use it as their base. And then when they went home just before dawn, the dero would reclaim it.

No one wanted the car in front of their house; and so every time it came to rest somewhere, outside a brothel, outside a young family, whatever, sooner or later, usually sooner, the car would be pushed on, up the hill, down the hill, round the block. Curiously, it had begun to migrate in a regular pattern around a block, its exact location dependent on the time of day. I heard about this, and thought, how curious, what an hysterical story. So I put this to the news desk and after a string of successes of stories about marginalised people, they said yes, give it a go.

As luck would have it, when we arrived the dero was there, frantically trying to push the car around a corner and into a vacant lot, away from the yuppies who had originally contacted us, complaining that the council would do nothing to get rid of this damn car which kept reappearing outside their front door no matter how often they pushed it away. He had that strange denizen of the night look, unwashed no doubt smelly clothes hanging off him, a wild unshaven beard, piercing eyes of someone who just wanted to be left alone, riddled with mental illness and the strange hours before dawn, the fierce defiance of an alcoholic on hard times.

We photographed him, with or without his permission, in return for helping him push the car to where he wanted it. So he could have a peaceful few hours before the night denizens came, and commandeered the car for their own nefarious purposes. In some strangely lucid way he didn't seem so mad; as they often don't. These were the stories that I fed on; the stories that could only happen in a transforming city; a city that in those days still had a soul. Decades of chronic mismanagement has changed all that. A recant poll, as I've recorded before, suggests that one in five Sydneysiders want to leave and I'm surprised it is as low as that.

But back then; on those streets, here in the heartland where I had dwelt for so long, here were the stories that meant so much, before the heart of the mater was ripped away, before life became too difficult for anyone to care about each other anymore, when you could go out dancing and drinking at any time of the night and run into almost anybody, fellow travellers, wealthy suckers, the rich having a drink, always happy to invite you back home, for the party to continue forever, in privacy. I met so many people; played pool in lavish apartments, knocked back offer after offer, got caught in other people's lives, made friends who never lasted past the night, the month, the circumstance.

It all had that feel of a brand new adventure; freshly minted; and the voices that let their lust over come them, well he was past the age of consent now; it was all perfectly legal. He wanted to be deceived, cuckolded, lied to; he wanted to think the dance was eternal and no night more significant, more fabulous, than this very one. We tried to warn him. God spoke through strangers in the bar and said: I don't know what you're normally like, but you're very drunk. Are you alright, will everything be alright? Do you want to come home to my place, no obligation?

The clinical calm, the frozen moment, the overwhelming desire to commune, to find a better place, to escape himself. He got drunker and drunker; expecting the end of the story to make sense; for his career to coalesce, for money and grace to come his way. Instead dawn came and he was lost, so completely lost; unable even to find the semblance of a personality, unable even to pretend to be a normal human being; unbeset by the yawning dysfunction, the chaos, the fabric of things yawning at him in a thrub of strange sounds, the mesh that held the world together collapsing. How could he ever survive, out of this? There was no one to tell: the world doesn't make sense anymore, the colours concealing a different, malevolent place. Let me out, let me out, he sobbed, as the first rays came in over the buildings. But no one was listening; and this time there was no way back to a gentler frame.


THE BIGGER STORY:

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5i1dsmOfrkM0h3X835sIcLmA5d_sA

Pakistan bomb victims buried amid fresh violence

3 hours ago

LAHORE, Pakistan (AFP) — Mourners offered funeral prayers Wednesday for 27 people killed in two suicide blasts in Pakistan, as violence in the northwest of the country left another dozen people dead, officials said.

Senior police and government officials attended a special ceremony for 12 employees of the Federal Investigation Agency who died when one of the bombs targeted their headquarters in the eastern city of Lahore on Tuesday.

Security was tight for the traditional Muslim service in the country's cultural capital as grim-faced police officers raised their hands to the sky in memory of their colleagues.

The 11 civilians also killed in that attack were buried separately, as were the four people -- including two children -- who died in a second bombing Tuesday in Lahore targeting an advertising agency a few kilometres away.

Lahore police chief Malik Mohammed Iqbal said the toll had risen overnight to 27 after a victim died in hospital.

No one has claimed responsibility but Pakistani authorities said that Al-Qaeda and Taliban militants behind a wave of violence that has left 600 people dead this year were likely behind Tuesday's attacks.

"The perpetrators want to say that they are a force to be reckoned with. They want to target security forces, they want to put pressure on the new government," interior ministry spokesman Brigadier Javed Cheema told AFP.

Asked if Al-Qaeda or the Taliban were involved, Punjab province police chief Azhar Hassan Nadeem said it was "premature" to know definitively "but these organisations have a vast network with international linkages."

The parties of slain opposition leader Benazir Bhutto and of ex-premier Nawaz Sharif beat President Pervez Musharraf's allies in elections in February and are set to form a coalition government when parliament meets next week.

The two parties look set for a showdown with Musharraf, a former general who seized power in a military coup in 1999, but will also have to tackle the recent rash of attacks as one of their first priorities.

Most of the recent blasts have targeted the army, intelligence services and police in an apparent attempt to press Pakistani forces to stop military operations against insurgents.