Crying For Their Own Lost Souls

*



There are the women with their shopping bags and the men with their cardboard boxes, hauling their possessions from one place to the next, forever on the move, as if it mattered where they were. There is the man wrapped in the American flag. There is the woman with a Halloween mask on her face. There is the man in a ravaged overcoat, his shoes wrapped in rags, carrying a perfectly pressed white shirt on a hanger - still sheathed in a dry-cleaner's plastic. There is the man in a business suit with bare feet and a football helmet on his head. There is the woman whose clothes are covered from head to toe with Presidential campaign buttons. There is the man who walks with his face in his hands, weeping hysterically and saying over and over again: "No, no, no. He's dead. He's not dead. No, no, no. He's dead. He's not dead."

Paul Auster, The City of Glass.



Crying out, confused, exultant and despairing all in one, they looked at the shadows and barked, with a baby coming they were even more conscious than usual of the dangers surrounding them. At 3am, as a 16-year-old, he would stumble into the city's only 24 hour coffee shop, Una's at the Cross, and if not exactly like clockwork, then regularly enough to be well known there. He would try to sober up with coffee and icecream, the only thing that he could keep down. They were the days of flagrant dissolution, before he saw the real results, the human garbage that frothed in the cracks, whining, degenerate, self-obsessed thieves who'd rip you off soon as look at you; with that stale unwashed smell permeating everything, all lost, nothing to gain, rotten teeth, besmirched attitudes, a blurry haze of something that might have been.

Some days he couldn't believe that he used to find these people interesting; that he would see a drunk in the gutter and envy them because they could still drink, clouded ouzo, how was he to know where it all led. Oh sympathy. Oh learned compassion. Well read, erudite, creative, fabulously out of it; the shifts in perception were slow across decades, and now he barely had the patience to listen to them, like a burnt out drug and alcohol counsellor who no longer cared about his clients, who had been burnt by their diseased lower order functioning, their complete lack of morals, their dangerous anger and their moaning self indulgence.

Go get a job, he thought, and sometimes said, leave us alone, get yourself together, stop spying on the rest of us, sucking out everything you can for nothing because you can't be bothered to work. They moan and they moan. Everything is everybody else's fault, the government, the capitalists, the country and the culture. Itself, in themselves, these people were nothing but living ruins. They compensated for their own dysfunction with a haphazard veneer of functionality, or by clubbing together with their own kind, so that everyone they knew was the same as them, unemployed, unemployable, living in housing commission flats, with no ambitions, no dreams, their days occupied with the gossip and misadventures of their haphazard clique.

There was always a fight about something, someone had ripped somebody off, the gear wasn't as good as it used to be, back in the 70s, back in the 80s, back in the 90s. Was he using then? That was the year he lost the house, perhaps, he said, and they laughed that bitter, sad laugh of people who had dissolved themselves so often there was almost nothing left, of people who knew too well the depths they could sink to when the monster addiction took over, gripping their entrails, occupying every thought of every day, the sickness rampant, the flashes of beauty, of absolute joy, of divine relief, becoming sparcer and sparcer.

He met a classic English junky in Calcutta, and every night they would spend together, roaring around town clinging to be back of his motor bike, watching him buy grass at the cafes in the shadow of the famous Hawora Bridge, the sea of people having subsided in the early hours. This communion, these depths of communication, these wonderful moments they shared in dingy apartments and odd little rooms he had carved for himself in the slums, these infinitely discrete shadows and fluttering moans and sympathy for each other, we'll be friends forever, until we die, which could easily be tomorrow. He was running out of money. They were always running out of money. Everything they had struggled for vanished overnight.

With the children young, he tried to do the right thing, resist the tide, look under the camera images, the surface of the world, seek harder and deeper for a more eternal truth, to create masterpieces and become, yours truly, the architect of dreams. But it always came back to dingy scenes in dingy rooms, westerners shooting up, the chaos of India stretching in infinite moments all around them, to every side, the pool of complicity, of God consciousness, of absolute and unique pleasure, spreading out from their locked and bolted room, the flash of a policeman's uniform in the street outside, the depth of their understanding, their love for each other.

These were the things he had once thought, that these people were the greatest adventurers, the courageous and adventuring souls who made the world a better place, who fulfilled their intimacy and their capacity, their potential for greatness, who, in short, were the artists of tomorrow, the transfiguring voices which would make the world a better place, their beauty, their insights, their clairvoyance splashing with great effect into the mainstream culture, with money and fame and material rewards coming their way as the natural reward for their creativity, their cunning, their hard work and their bravery. Instead they became human wreckage, pieces of rubbish frothing on park benches, crying for their own lost souls and the lives they could have lived.

We could have been someone, we could have been great. And all they wanted to know was: have you got any money, do you know where can you score? Will you shout me, help me out, I'd do anything for you, you know that.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/26/world/asia/26melamine.html?ref=world

China’s Milk Scandal Now Seen as Risk in Europe

European Union regulators on Thursday ordered rigorous testing of imports containing at least 15 percent milk powder after concluding that tainted milk powder from China may well be circulating in Europe and putting children at risk.

The action, announced by the European Food Safety Agency and the European Commission, significantly expands the potential geographic reach of a milk adulteration scandal in China to now include a range of foods sold around the world. The Europeans said cookies, toffees and chocolates are the major concerns.

The World Health Organization and the United Nations Children’s Fund also expressed concern on Thursday about the Chinese milk contamination and the implications for other foods. In the United States, some consumer groups called on the Food and Drug Administration to restrict imports of foods that may contain suspected dairy ingredients from China.

Milk products in China contaminated with the industrial chemical melamine have sickened more than 50,000 young children in recent weeks.

While it is illegal to import dairy products and baby formula from China into the European Union, European nations import many processed foods containing milk powder manufactured outside of Europe. Such products could contain milk powder originating in China.

While countries throughout Asia have already pulled Chinese dairy products from supermarket shelves as a precaution, it is now clear that the danger could go beyond milk itself. In 2007, the European Union imported from China about 19,500 tons of confectionary products, such as pastry, cake and biscuits and about 1,250 tons of chocolate and other food preparations containing cocoa.

http://voanews.com/english/2008-09-25-voa44.cfm

Presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama are taking a rare break from the campaign trail to join President Bush and congressional leaders at the White House for a meeting on the U.S. financial crisis. McCain and Obama are scheduled for their first debate Friday, but that event is now in doubt. VOA National Correspondent Jim Malone has more from Washington.

Senator McCain said he is confident Congress and the Bush administration can agree on a financial bailout plan within the next few days.

But McCain stood by his decision to suspend his presidential campaign and a call to delay Friday's first presidential debate at the University of Mississippi.

"A great deal is being asked of the American people, and great care must be taken to ensure their protection," he said. "As most of you know, I am an old Navy pilot and I know when a crisis calls for all hands on deck. That is the situation in Washington at this very hour when the whole future of the American economy is in danger. I cannot carry on a campaign as though this dangerous situation had not occurred or as though a solution were at hand, which it clearly is not."

Obama echoed McCain's call for swift congressional action on a bailout plan that includes safeguards for taxpayers and homeowners.

"It is outrageous that we find ourselves in a situation where taxpayers must bear the burden and the risk for greed and irresponsibility on Wall Street and Washington," he said. "But we also know that failure to act would have grave consequences for jobs, for savings and retirement for the American people."

Obama and McCain also want to prevent Wall Street executives responsible for the financial crisis from benefiting from the bailout plan.

But Obama also made it clear that he intends to attend Friday's scheduled presidential debate in Mississippi.

"Our election is in 40 days, our economy is in crisis and our nation is fighting two wars abroad," he said. "The American people, I believe, deserve to hear directly from myself and Senator McCain about how we intend to lead our country. The times are too serious to put our campaigns on hold or to ignore the full range of issues that the next president will face."

http://www.efluxmedia.com/news_A_Peak_at_Google_Android_Phones_Goodies_24864.html

A Peak at Google Android Phone’s Goodies

Google’s new smartphone called the Dream is scheduled to be unveiled on September 23, followed by the gadget’s release on the market later on in October.

So far, the company has been fairly secretive about the device’s features, leaving everybody to wonder how the Android phone would outrun its main competitor, Apple Incorporated’s iPhone.

Nevertheless, recently leaked photos and videos have added some important pieces to the puzzle, offering quite a clear picture of what the Dream has in store for consumers. Fitted with a physical keyboard that slides from underneath the touchscreen, the smartphone enables users to run various apps simultaneously, allowing the latter to both view each other’s data and share information between them. This feature could pose a real threat to Apple’s product, since the latest update for the iPhone (the 2.1 one) has brought some security upgrades to the gadget, including a feature that prevents applications from viewing each other’s data.

Rumor has it that the Dream will also let users cut and paste text in emails, another feature that the iPhone lacks.

Moreover, the Android Market apps will be free of charge, as opposed to Apple’s ones and they are said to include BreadCrumbz, a picture-based navigation tool that focuses on user-created routes and TuneWiki, a music player that allows users to synchronize lyrics to a song’s video.

Google’s the Dream will be the first smartphone to run on the Android operating system, a software platform for mobile devices that was developed by the Open Handset Alliance, which is a consortium of 34 software, hardware and telecom companies.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24403901-662,00.html

AUSTRALIAN households have been hit so hard this year that their financial gains of the past three years have been wiped out, a Reserve Bank report has found.

Despite missing out on the worst of the global financial meltdown, householders are still going backwards.

A combination of falling house prices, the plunging sharemarket and high inflation was to blame, the Reserve's Financial Stability Review concluded.

It found the financial downturn in the first half of this year had cut household net worth so it was back to the level of early 2005, as a ratio of disposable income.

In other grim news, new home sales dropped across the nation last month and were particularly bad in Queensland - down 4.7 per cent on the previous month.

But the Reserve review said consumers in other countries were doing much worse.

It also singled out the Australian banking system for special praise, saying it was "weathering the current difficulties much better than many other financial systems".

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who is in the US, has called on the two major US political parties to bury their differences and pass a multibillion-dollar rescue package to avoid total global financial collapse.

In unusually frank comments straying into the internal politics of another country, Mr Rudd emerged from New York talks with World Bank President, Bob Zoellick, to tell reporters there was no time for the US Congress to mess about.

Today Mr Rudd will address the United Nations General Assembly in New York and argue the case for the international community to lift its game on climate change.

Back home, Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull said Mr Rudd should be in Australia managing the economy.

He said the Rudd Government should be condemned for "being out of touch, out of its depth and out of the country".



On the banks of the Parramatta River, western Sydney, NSW, Australia.