Mysterons

I got the bus home yesterday and had to put up with a loud conversation from a group of teenage girls at the back of the bus. One of them seemed to be adding up the volume of her mates' conversation and sending it right back at them. Now I know that this is a habit of some people and even the source of some interesting and funny discourse but this girl's idea of punctuation was the blunt Anglo-Saxon Noun/Adjective/Verb/Adverb. After about a hundred I decided to start counting them (at risk of the repetition sending me off to sleep) but after another hundred, the frequency of use became far to high to keep up with. She will make someone a lovely fishwife. Liverpool - Capital of culture. Remember that.

There was a response on the BBC's Have Your Say in answer to the question of whether the world should send more troops to Iraq which basically said that if the people who keep complaining about the US, actually tried to help solve the problems of the world then the US would not have to fight wars. Now you can probably guess my feelings about this but the point of this particular paragraph is not to knock the US. My problem is the way that great numbers of people think that the world is a) Smaller than it actually is and b) simpler than it actually is. It seems that the people who use the term 'Free World' without irony, always think that the US/UK style democracy is the answer to all the problems. Yes there are parts of the world where the Governments act in ways that I certainly find repugnant but putting pressure on them to change and allow 'Free Elections' etc just causes friction. The UK Parliament and Judicial system evolved over millennia; the US equivalents are based on these and are basically only tinkerings with the systems of the Mother Country. They have had time to bed down and be accepted. Trying to understand how Governments in the Middle East work is, for a great many Americans/Europeans, like trying to imagine four spatial dimensions; unless you have grown up with the concept then you will either never understand it or you will have to train your mind over years. Going in with Stealth Bombers and Armalites will never be a good basis for stable Government. Having said this, there was no way that the two most recent overthrows would have happened without them. It is just that we should not be surprised when there are problems with trying to stabilise the country afterwards. As you probably found out about six sentences ago, most of this is Crass over simplification of exactly the sort I am complaining about. For a real insight, read Where is Raed ?. This is right about everything by being where everything is happening. I am not in on the gig as it were.`

I just re-read the section about the troops raiding Salam Pax's parents' home because of the meetings held there with various mysterious Sudanese people who turned out to be Carpenters fixing the kitchen. I suppose that this is a direct opposite of people over-simplifying things in that the US troops acted on intelligence which over-complicated a pretty simple situiation. Trigger happy grunts become the muscle of an over-worked intelligence service and you have a fuse and a detonator.

Back to now and here. Soundtrack is Dummy by Portishead, Weather is drizzle from a grey sky. Mood is through the floor into the basement and half way to bedrock. Delight in gloom. I feel like I am fourteen again; when I never knew why I was gloomy and therefore always enjoyed it. The wind blows dry. No turning from DC.