All Was Right With The World

*

Well in a way there it was, creeping through a dark forest, walking a crowded street, camped out in an upmarket condo, dining at a local Thai restaurant, in love and in passion and marked for the fall, and controlled, deeply, fatally flawed; and yet here there was comfort. For once he slept through the night. For once someone kept him company. He couldn't remember back, even now, to those times when there had been no one and his own deeply compassionate slide, here in the face of it, there in the fall, was simply an aging process he had no desire to leaarn, a time when all had been lost and he jerked across some strange interior landscape like a deranged puppet, interacting only arbitrarily with the external world, injured, damaged, very much alone. It had all changed. And the boy slept peacefully. Quiet. No customers he warned, talking of how he had to
make a trip to Pnom Penh. All was peaceful, all was quiet. These things would never be arranged. I love you, he said; and it was a practical kind of love.

Everything, everything, he beamed, peaceful, pleasure, pleasant, pleased, he pointed out the words in sequence in the dictionary and everything came marching out. Nightclubs are not for me, Alex said, but at least you are reaching out. It's something you have to do. He couldn't be sure. It's a dangerous stage, he said, 13 days without a cigarette, or anything else, and if all had been lost now all was future, possibility, hard work, time to move on, the pleasure dome, reaching, reaching for something he did not know what, for a mark that was born, for a time that was free, for a happiness that had eluded him throughout life, for that feeling he had never known: in the right place at the right time.

Consequently, of course, there were shadows; not just on his lungs but everywhere in the floating ether. The flowering plants on the balconey spoke of an urgent desire to nest. They were happy together and nothing could alter that. Pleasure dome, fast paced, he was sure there would be a new answer, that everything would turn out alright. Don't worry, the voice inside kept saying; it had never said that before. Everything will turn out alright. How is that possible. What happened to the doom laden future, the sense of tragic destiny? Who cared; everything vanished in the flesh of the moment, the flash of the moment, the sunny smile, only you, only you, you number one, and they couldn't have been happier, no matter how they met.

Boyfriend, boyfriend, the security guard's girlfriend explained when he left the key pass in the lobby, a rare bit of English battering through the impenetrable babble of Thai, and he was sure there would be an answer, sure the times would find him right, sure that everything was going to be OK. Because everything had changed. Because someone took care. Because he felt loved; and no longer starved of affection; and for laughing through the days and keeping pace with the night; and for being there; being square as they used to say; when he lay in that hotel room with the Canadian fisherman each summer; his favourite boy in Sydney, and they shared all sorts of things, not just sex, and he would always pay without question and take him to dinner without thought; and they would drink together and share their different times; and everything was alright; as it was meant to be. These times were rare. Everything had become dislocated as he grew older, hidden behind so many screens, so many shelves; and now every past artiface had disappeared; and he was again true, if not to himself; at least not in hiding. The rain splattered across the Bangkok streets. The thunder rolled high above the condos and high rise apartments; the clouds broiled, the rain soaked down. It was all, as his companion continued to sleep, truly delightful. The morning birds had awoke; the coffee was on the boil, all was right with the world; for once.

THE BIGGER STORY:

The opposition did not bring down Kevin Rudd, nor the Labor Party's factions. The answer lies within the man's complex personality
WHEN a light aircraft carrying 13 people, including nine Australians, went missing deep in the treacherous Owen Stanley Range on its way to the Kokoda Track last August, our High Commission in Papua New Guinea knew exactly what to do.

Staff, including a large military deployment, swung into action on the ground. An operations room was set up in Canberra to co-ordinate with the families.

In question time, Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said everything was being done to locate the Twin Otter turbo-prop.

But no one had reckoned on Kevin Rudd. As the day wore on, officials from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade began hearing that ships and planes were being redeployed around the region.

Without their knowledge, the prime minister had launched one of the nation's biggest overseas search-and-rescue efforts.

HMAS Success, with a Sea King helicopter aboard, two Black Hawks, a Caribou short take-off and landing plane and a search and rescue aircraft from the Australian Maritime Authority had been called in, even though the advice from PNG was that there were unlikely to be survivors.

Around midnight, Rudd called senior DFAT and military brass to the Lodge. The Prime Minister was in shirtsleeves, standing over topographical maps of the Owen Stanley Range.

Rudd had famously walked the Kokoda Track a few years before. Now he was planning the routes for the rescuers. It was, says one source, an extraordinary example of his micromanagement.

And of Rudd's belief that he was the smartest guy in the room.

On the evening of June 2 this year, the Labor Prime Minister was at it again. This time, he was holding court in his Parliament House suite to a handful of the country's top miners over drinks. It was at the height of the furore over the new mining tax and Rudd had been advised to extend the hand of friendship to guests such as BHP Billiton chief Marius Kloppers, Minerals and Metals Group boss, Andrew Michelmore, Xstrata Coal's Peter Freyberg.

The cream of business, arguably with the future of the nation's economy in their hands, they were ripe for some charm from the PM. Instead Rudd began skiting about his international credentials.

" I am," he announced to this startled group of senior executives of global business "the most globally recognised person here."

Perhaps he meant it as a joke, but there had been too many cases of inappropriate remarks, too many indications that Rudd's personality was getting in the way of his -- and Labor's -- credibility and success. A few weeks later, he was gone but we will never understand exactly why till we better understand the temperament of the man we called Kevin07.

THIS week, as Kevin Rudd flew back to Brisbane to start the post-Lodge chapter of his life, everyone had a story to tell about our 26th prime minister.

Some were charming, some perplexing, some damning in their portrait of a man who, until a few days ago, wielded the kind of power which silences critics. Now, with Rudd's departure, there are many people no longer concerned about holding back. The Kokoda incident, for example, was first told to one of our reporters at the time. Only now, however, has permission been given to publish it. There are many more stories about a man who, despite his television and Twitter celebrity, remains something of a mystery.

For the past few years, he has dominated the national political conversation: swarmed by schoolgirls, the poster boy of social networking, the avuncular visitor to nursing homes, cobber-in-chief on the ground with our troops in Afghanistan, the compassionate leader apologising to indigenous Australians.

Millions of words have been written about him, yet this complex and contradictory Queenslander has confounded us at times, no more so than now, with his rapid departure.

How could a man so bright, so driven, so positioned for achievement and success come undone so badly and, for some, so suddenly?

THE British statesman, David Owen argues in his book, In Sickness and in Power, that many great political leaders have suffered from hubris, something Owen believes should be redefined as a medical condition.

In ancient Greece, he writes, a hubristic act was one in which a "powerful figure, puffed up with overweening pride and self-confidence, treated others with insolence and contempt". It's not difficult to see Rudd in these words, easy to charge him with narcissism, defined as a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and a lack of empathy or other glib labels of human behaviour.

Easy, because Rudd, despite his chirpy Kevin 07 image, has always had a pretty bad press from those who have known him up close. In David Marr's Quarterly Essay on Rudd he writes that at the Australian National University in the late 1970s, "fellow students remember him as 'painfully correct, a bit of a sociopath' ".

Years ago, even former Queensland premier Wayne Goss, who was a supporter of his former Cabinet Office chief said: "Kevin has worked hard at becoming normal. He's come close but I don't think he'll ever quite get there." Many who worked with him in Queensland openly loathe him.

Helen Trinca and staff writers, The Australian.

KABUL, Afghanistan — Six militants armed with suicide bombs stormed the compound of an American contractor working for the United States Agency for International Development in the northern city of Kunduz on Friday, killing four security officers in an assault that left all the attackers dead, according to Afghan officials and the aid contractor.

The security officers killed included one Briton, one German and two Afghans who worked for Edinburgh International, the firm guarding the Kunduz compound of D.A.I., a consulting company that contracts with the American development aid agency to help bolster governance, development and economic growth in other countries.

The Kunduz assault was the latest in a string of Taliban attacks on foreign workers and compounds, especially those doing development work, in what has seemed to be a response to American and NATO forces increasing the pace of their military operations throughout the country.

Many of these attacks have come in Kandahar, the hub of southern Afghanistan, where militants have been killing political leaders, foreign workers and their Afghan colleagues, including a young Afghan woman who worked for D.A.I. who was gunned down in April just a few hundred yards from her office as she drove home in a motorized rickshaw.

KABUL, Afghanistan — Six militants armed with suicide bombs stormed the compound of an American contractor working for the United States Agency for International Development in the northern city of Kunduz on Friday, killing four security officers in an assault that left all the attackers dead, according to Afghan officials and the aid contractor.

The security officers killed included one Briton, one German and two Afghans who worked for Edinburgh International, the firm guarding the Kunduz compound of D.A.I., a consulting company that contracts with the American development aid agency to help bolster governance, development and economic growth in other countries.

The Kunduz assault was the latest in a string of Taliban attacks on foreign workers and compounds, especially those doing development work, in what has seemed to be a response to American and NATO forces increasing the pace of their military operations throughout the country.

Many of these attacks have come in Kandahar, the hub of southern Afghanistan, where militants have been killing political leaders, foreign workers and their Afghan colleagues, including a young Afghan woman who worked for D.A.I. who was gunned down in April just a few hundred yards from her office as she drove home in a motorized rickshaw.