Locks, stocks and pork barrels

I'm starting to get confused about who should be locking up whom in the fabled land of the free. Boasting 5% of the world population and a hefty 25% of the world's prison population (1 in 32 American citizens incarcerated), you have to wonder how long it'll be before there's no-one left to uphold the "law". Or whether they should just cut to the chase and reintroduce slavery. As a word.

Australia, ever the competitive adolescent, has excelled in this sport in recent years, rising to 153 per 100,000 members of the population being in prison in 2003 (with 20% of those being indigenous Australians). This, according to my calculation, puts us in 3rd place internationally, just behind those old behemoths the USA and Russia.

In fact the US is so successful at this stuff that a black man has more chance of going to prison (1 in 3) than he does of getting an education. (And if you're going to read any article I'm linking to today, make it the one in this paragraph).

Offenders include all the usual suspects, the paint-by-numbers scoundrels we're so familiar with from the idiot box, but I wonder how long it'll be before we start noticing that it's our brothers, boyfriends, wives, children that are being carted off. Such as this nefarious teacher in Atlanta, Georgia who had the audacity to jay-walk. The photo in the article says it all, with 7 brave law enforcement officers being needed to deal with the villain.

"Where I'm from, you don't associate young gentlemen in bomber jackets with the police. But he was extremely upset I had questioned his bona fides," recalled Fernandez-Armesto, a prominent British historian and former professor at Oxford. He was visiting Atlanta for a history convention.

The policeman who bravely took on this crooked jay-walker

was a good representative for the city. He was working a part-time job that day - with police consent, his superiors confirmed - for the Hilton Hotel, trying to direct pedestrians to use crosswalks.

Some commentators suggest the rise of a prison-industrial complex, a model of neo-feudalism that, to the uneducated eye, looks alot like the crime of the century. But tonight I'm left thinking about all the other "industries" that seem to be doing so well in the world's democracies - childcare, aged care, financial services, unemployment services, healthcare, toll roads, utilities, defense, education, research. How did these portfolios (and here I'm not sure whether I'm referring to government cabinets or the stock market) become so lucractive and privatised? Is there a pattern here?

Thanks to oqobo for the picture

Wag the doggerel

Did any of you (three) happen to catch The Unit last night on telly? I kept on looking up and behind me to make sure I wasn't on Candid Camera.

It's a show about a bunch of special fighters - secret soldiers, whatever - who have Boys' Own adventures each day and then get home in time for dinner. One of the characters last night even said something along the lines of "where else do you get to jump out of planes all day and go home to a warm bed at night?" or something like that - a variation on the classic army poster: Travel the world; Meet interesting people; Kill them...

I only caught bits and pieces while I was channel surfing, landing lightly on each channel for a minute or three until the continual stream of images of forensics, crime, despair, conflict and squalour drove me to the next channel. Honestly, it's gotten to the stage where I'm starting to prefer the ads.

But I did manage to pick up a few things that had me entertained. Firstly the alpha male is a black guy, which sticks out like a dog's proverbial. Then there was the independent 30-something with the lesbian haircut who is married to the young white guy (who has just joined the unit). She's the token rebel, the eduated shrew who could use some taming, demanding to find her own housing until the black guy's (black, Oprah-ish) wife convinces her to join the community - in one fabulous speech she says something about how being a woman, looking after your children, waiting for your maaaan to come home from fighting the enemy is "the history of the wooorld!!" (dramatic music, close-up of chastened young wife looking astonished - I like to think she was thinking "Frickin' Küche, Kirche, Kinder again?!"). Later she passes out or faints (or just isn't wearing makeup - I lost interest regularly, you must remember) when she sees something on the news that makes it apparent what the boys are up to that day. That I managed to make any sense of it at all is just a testament to the relentless crap on the other channels.

Anyway - later in the piece, after they've managed to rescue a bunch of hostages, killing all the "terrorists" and none of the passengers, there's a kind of horizon shot of the three of them walking back along the tarmac - guns tied to their legs with leather holsters, the sillouette reminiscent of those cowboys of old, swaggering towards the camera with their horsey gait, I swear they're chewing wheat, where's my freaking banjo when I need it?

And like all good little soldiers, Whiteboy gets home in one piece, goes to the fridge (as yer do when you're a hungry adolescent), finds a baseball mitt with a note in it saying "It's a boy". I was so overcome by all the testosterone references on the show that I'm having a pregnancy test myself on the weekend just to be on the safe side.

Reflecting on it today I can't help wondering how much of the storyline is influenced by wagging tails - could the universal unconscious be that cliche? Naaa.

And with today's announcement about the changes in Australia's media ownership laws one can only wonder what sorts of local tales will be wagging in the days and years to come.

Photo by Marcus Kolb

Untimely

I was reading an article today about "unconferences" and was struck by the paragraph describing emerging forms of social action:

The unconference seems an obvious step in that direction. Because they do not require the infrastructure and organization of a full-blown industry gathering, unconferences can happen more frequently. Because the cost to attend is minimal (or non-existent), anyone who wishes to can come. And because everyone at the unconference participates in some fashion, interaction, networking, and the exchange of ideas is a given. It is possible then, that the unconference is not only a unique alternative to traditional professional gatherings, but also a method for the high-tech creative workers to construct a new weak-tie community.

As the movement grows in popularity among the Creative Class, some of these gatherings will naturally gravitate towards societal issues. Rather than join Kiwanis International or the Lions Club, people may turn to the unconference system to provide a forum for open discussion and collaboration aimed at solving complex problems.

I dismissed the article thinking the writer foolishly optimistic yet a handful of hours later, here's this snippet on the Larvatus Prodeo blog:

... a new group called “union solidarity” is taking over picket actions once the union is threatened with corporate and individual fines under the Act.

The group aren’t members of the actual union involved in the dispute, and it has no formal structure, nor assets. This means it has nothing to lose in a corporate sense, and apparently also gets individuals around the Act as well (not being “members” who can then also be fined individually).

Mabye we did need this government after all.

Tomorrow's cat litter liner

Pity that crikey.com.au has decided not to allow free access to its story on the quashing of Jack Thomas' conviction. Did The Australian newspaper today really carry the headline
"Legal system releases the enemy" ? Isn't that illegal or something? Can you imagine if one of us took out an advertisement in the paper saying the same thing about any court case where someone was exonerated or found not guilty? Sheesh.

At least they got one thing right with their cartoon about the Centrelink sackings today.

Seeing stars

I noticed last night in the news that there's talk of introducing racial profiling to manage the threat to our skies, malls, lives. Why not just get them to wear a yellow star and be done with it?

I guess I'll say it then

I search newspapers for the screaming headlines that will decry Israel's horrific and immoral attack on Lebanon in recent days. Each day, every evening, I see images of white bread countries gathering their nationals home, bringing in the Marines. But not ONE country to my knowledge has had the balls to stand up and say "how dare you, Israel - YOU of all people".

Terrorism is an awful thing. But sanctioned terrorism is even worse. That Israel has been able to rain such aggression on another nation with seeming impunity has shocked me to the core. That they blew up an INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT of another country on the basis of what fringe groups within that country have done fills me with utter amazement and horror.

Shame on you, media outlets. Shame on you, governments of the world. Shame on you every human person who is looking at their feet whistling while this happens. As I watch images of foreign nationals being rescued by their countries on busses, trains and automobiles, the only thing I can compare it to is those grainy black and white film clips you see of the poor Jews during World War II, stuck in their Gulags, no-one in the world caring enough to see what was happening.

Shame on you Israel, of all people.

Heartbreak

A bunch of Italians kick a ball into a net and our prime minister is "brokenhearted" yet he "regrets" the friendly fire that killed an Iraqi bodyguard and tugs at his forelock about the hypocrisy of the Japanese who will happily decimate our largest mammals yet become grief-stricken about the fate of a goddam turnip. (Won't even bother digging up the bone with "saying sorry to the Aboriginals" on it...).

I'm feeling pretty heartbroken too. Must be that kind of a day.

Image by PhotoGraham