He Was A Legend

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I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
Umberto Eco

Paddy Flynn is dead;....He was a great teller of tales, and unlike our common romancers, knew how to empty heaven, hell, and purgatory, faeryland and earth, to people his stories. He did not live in a shrunken world, but knew of no less ample circumstance than did Homer himself. Perhaps the Gaelic people shall by his like bring back again the ancient simplicity and amplitude of imagination.....Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.
A Teller of Tales

HAD I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
W.B. Yeats




He was a legend, supported on all sides, surrounded by acolytes. His chest had puffed out with the continuous applause. The waiters hovered expectantly, showing all due deference. Important people sat at the surrounding tables, while he sat, appropriately, next to the President, George Bush. It was a small, "intimate" dinner, his reward for being dutiful, above all for going along with the Iraq War, but his duties, his faithfulness, had been many in number. He had paid a price back home, amongst the unwashed and the ignorant who were against the War, amongst those who did not know, could never know, the complexities of leadership.

His heart was about to burst with pride. A life of service had come to this, the ultimate accolades. Someone was standing up, making a toast. He beamed, and dared to take a sip himself. He had come a long way for a little man. If only his mother had been alive to see him now, sitting at the same table as the President of the United States of America. Back home the War had not been popular. They had called him a right wing war monger. What little they knew, a leader had to make difficult decisions; and it had fallen to him, history had imposed on him, those decisions.

It was an excellent wine, as one might expect, and he took an extra long sip. If not now, when. He would be expected to make a speech. He could see the attendants in their black and whites. The Americans really knew how to do things, you had to give them that, here at the centre of things. How far he had travelled, from an ordinary, comfortable suburb in Sydney to here at the White House, in the heart of things. The people who had put him here, and who had turned on him so viciously, emphatically, at the last election, could never understand what a real leader had to understand.

The twin towers, those planes, the smoke burning, the astonishing collapse of the World Tower, the constantly repeated scenes of people running from the scene, the more than 3,000 people who had died on that fateful day, all that had changed every thing, and George had his support no matter what. They said he was the worst president in American history, and the polls were not being kind to his buddy either, but what would the peasants, the toiling masses, ever really know. A leader had to lead. An elegant band tinkled in the corner, all for them, all for him, and he took another sip, a long deep sip.

There had been the funeral recently of one of the soldiers, a funeral he couldn't shake from his conscience. A young, fit, handsome, utterly decent young man with an adoring young wife and adoring young children. And he had died a dismal death in the harsh landscape of Afghanistan. Because he had sent him there. Because the nation, history, had sent him there. But really, ultimately, he had sent him there. Things were said at the funeral, the pointlessness of war, the pointlessness of this young man's death, the overwhelming, utterly overwhelming grief of his relatives, and he had got back in his government car and been whisked away, only too glad to get away.

Because after all, he thought, as he took yet another sip of the excellent Semillon which seemed to fit so well with the excellent scotch he had had earlier, they couldn't understand the difficulties of leadership, not those boiling, inconsiderate, ungrateful masses out there. How did George cope, he wondered admirably. More than 4,000 US soldiers had died in the sands of Iraq and he didn't seem to be bothered by it. He stood tall and took the flack and told everyone they had died for a worthwhile cause. He ignored the polls and looked to history for approval.

An attentive waiter topped up his glass, surprised perhaps by how much the Australian prime minister was drinking. But it wasn't his job to be surprised, or to even notice. The things he had noticed. His brother had died in the war last month, and here were the men who sent him there, the chiefs of staff and department heads, all the so-called leaders of men. The little man from Australia took yet another sip; and the room began to swirl around his bellicose thoughts. What did he say to the families? Your son died in vain. Of course not. These doubts were not the doubts of a leader, cringing into the leather upholstery of the limousines, the thrump thrump thrump of the helicopter as he was whisked from one important event to another.

A tear almost welled in his eye, and he didn't know why. This was his thank you dinner, thank you for being such a good friend of America, thank you for supporting the War, thank you for never doubting me, thank you for a life time of conservatism. His bank account bulged, he would never have to worry about money again, but he couldn't shake the haunting. George was standing up now, talking loudly, making jokes about his great friend from down under. He wasn't taking in a word he said, but knew it must have been a joke as the sycophants all around, in their smart suits and their wealthy complexions, clapped and laughed and clapped some more.

He took another long deep sip of the wine, long enough to know that he had drunk too much, and all he could think of was the pictures of that young man, the tears of his widow as she demanded of him that die: why did you send him, why did you send him, tell me he didn't die in vain. And angrily, inappropriately, defying all protocol, breaching every custom and rule of polite behaviour, she had called him a murderer, before she had been led away, back to the coffin of the man she had loved so much, her children tugging at her dress, their faces full of tears. The applause crescendoed around him. It was clear from the faces, the applause, the timing, he was expected to rise and speak. He stood up, stumbled slightly, tried to gain his balance. The room swirled around him, the dazzling chandeliers, the magnificent paintings, the expectant faces, the waiters, this peak of power and luxury. And then he feinted.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/06/22/1214073053656.html

THE besieged federal Labor MP Belinda Neal could face a charge of conspiring to pervert the course of justice over her former employee's claim that the MP made her staff complete untrue statutory declarations about the Iguanas nightclub affair.

Police sources confirmed they would consider charging Ms Neal while the Prime Minister will come under pressure to expel Ms Neal from the Labor Party tonight, when her former staffer, Melissa Batten, tells Channel Nine's A Current Affair that she no longer stands by her statutory declaration about the Iguanas nightclub fracas. She wrote the statement in Ms Neal's presence.

The Herald understands she claims Ms Neal, a solicitor, instructed staff on what to put in and what to leave out of their statutory declarations about the night of June 6, when Iguanas staff alleged the MP and her husband, the NSW Education Minister, John Della Bosca, threatened and abused them.

A police source said Mrs Batten had made very similar allegations during a five-hour police interview. When asked if her allegations could result in Ms Neal facing charges of perverting the course of justice, the source said: "[Investigators] would have to be thinking along those lines."

Conspiring to pervert the course of justice carries a maximum sentence of 14 years' jail. Another option, legal experts said, would be to charge Ms Neal with being an accessory to the creation of a false statutory declaration.


http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5g3yHTaTou7p447cGBJNP-xQyKGfw

WASHINGTON (AFP) — US Senator Hillary Clinton will return to congressional politics this week before staging her first joint appearances with White House contender Barack Obama, a spokesman said Sunday.

Clinton's Senate spokesman Philippe Reines said the New York senator would be in the chamber on Tuesday and Wednesday for the first time since losing to Obama in the Democratic presidential nominating race nearly three weeks ago.

In her first public speech since conceding, Clinton told a high-school graduating class in New York on Sunday that meeting thousands of people across the nation during her primary campaign had been an "extraordinary experience."

"No one four years ago could have predicted that an African-American and a woman would have been competing for the presidency of the United States in 2008," she said in a clip aired by NY1 television.

Clinton urged the graduating class, which included a longtime volunteer to her campaign, to use their "God-given talents and abilities" not only for themselves "but for all of us to make this world a better place."

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23905741-5013404,00.html

FORMER foreign affairs minister Alexander Downer has admitted that he told lawyers for Schapelle Corby - who is on suicide watch in a Bali hospital - to consider that her brother may have been involved in the foiled drug-smuggling attempt.

Mr Downer made the admission after Corby's dumped Australian lawyer, Robin Tampoe, told a documentary he had confected her initial defence that Australian baggage-handlers had planted 4.2kg of marijuana in her bodyboard bag.

Corby, arrested at Denpasar airport in October 2004, was jailed for 20 years after a Bali court dismissed Mr Tampoe's arguments that the drugs had been planted in the bag before she left Australia.

Mr Downer yesterday said Mr Tampoe's admission - in a two-part Nine Network documentary that began last night - would not go down well with Indonesian authorities.

"To say that they have been pushing a line in the court which they now admit is not true is a very damaging thing to do," he said.