World

Blogjams and other stories

There's one born every minute. Blogs, that is. Well, actually, one every second. That's inflation for you. There may be a million blogs in the UK, 14 million worldwide. Almost certainly more. Perhaps less.
The Guardian quotes Technorati founder Dave Sifry as saying that while the blogosphere is growing like topsy squared, the number of active blogs has been steady for the past year. "I think that this shows that even as the blogosphere is growing at a geometric pace, the 'stickiness' of the tools and the willingness to write hasn't changed much at all." There has to also be willingness to read, of course. Content will always be king, queen, wizard and jester. Though the Blog of Anne Frank doesn't have quite the same ring, does it?
Still, any eventuality's possible in a world that gives in which a blogging London call girl can land a book deal and a Channel 4 drama, even though she really may just be a bloke taking the michael.
Speaking of films, Slate has a story on the possible death of movie theatres due to film studios giving them the financial equivalent of stomach-stapling by shortening the time window till movies go to video (straight to DVD doesn't have the same dismissive thump, does it?). It mentions the idea of the 'triage' of films via test screenings, polls and focus groups, to figure out which ones would draw punters into theatres and which would be best dumped straight into the (now hugely profitable) DVD market. This, of course, already happens in New Zealand. Some US movies never make it into cinemas, and you can just see poor buggers in the video shop wondering if they had read anything good about Death to Smoochy in their trawls around the critical web. Some films get a showing at the film festivals, and the public is never sure if ones like League of Gentlemen: Apocalypse (fan-pleasing effort, with a bulging plot resembling a student's last-minute science project) or Birth (a remarkably patient Nicole Kidman-led meditation on possible reincarnation from the maker of Sexy Beast) will get a wider release.
Of course, one way we know if a film is any good is if a critic we usually agree with gives it a plug or a swerve. Suckers of the fake critic David Manning of Connecticut's Ridgfield Press can at least get their money back, thanks to an LA court. The Hollow Man, A Knight's Tale, Vertical Limit, The Animal and The Patriot all boasted glowing review lines supposedly written by Manning, but really penned by employees of Sony. The first two films are schlocky fun, but the other three did need the help. But are there really not enough soft critics round?
No room for soft sorts when it comes to Auckland's transport. If Istanbul can, despite centuries of deeply impacted history underfoot, extend its meagre underground system, and Christchurch, with its allegedly awful traffic problems can consider a subway, why can't we? Curiously enough, the NZ Herald says a sort of maybe one is indeed on the drawing board. Why the hell, though, do we have to wait 20 years for it?

Everyone is someone else’s infidel (2)

My methodology in writing Part One of this post may have been slovenly, and yes, my own website is called ‘The Bumper Book of Lies’ (a collection of short, genre fiction, not Snopes-style urban myths), but I didn’t set out to uncover a right-wing conspiracy or a shock breakdown in journalistic ethics. And now I’m going to damage my reporting credibility further by contradicting my earlier post and quoting Sting, from History Will Teach Us Nothing:

“Without the voice of reason every faith is its own curse
Without freedom from the past, things can only get worse.”
[© Sting, 1987, published by Magnetic Music Publishing Ltd, Represented by Regatta Music/Illegal Songs Inc.]

At least I made an attempt at rigorous research. All you need is a web browser and half a brain. Within hours of posting Everyone is someone else’s infidel (1), Richard Langworth, editor of Finest Hour at the Churchill Centre, replied to an email in which I’d asked him whether any record exists of why Churchill excised the two chapters from later editions:

“Hi Chris-
Your travels do take you widely. Are you still receiving CC publications? We published that quotation in FH 113 as “Quotation of the Decade?” I see Winston (grandson) has just discovered and published it.

The reigning expert on the text is Jim Muller, who prepared the new unabridged edition coming out with St Augustine Press, so I’m passing your query to him. I am sure Jim knows exactly what was excised, but whether he knows why in each particular case, I’m not sure. But I think those chapters contained some criticism which WSC deemed wise to expunge after his political career began.”
(My emphasis)

I wasn’t sure which travels Mr Langworth was referring to, but I had recently got back from the dairy... It occurred to me that he might be confusing me with someone else, so I checked. As it transpires, I’d been fortunate to get such a prompt and friendly response:

“My apologies, Chris… I thought you were the Prof. Chris Bell, who has recently rotated from the Naval War College at Newport, R.I. to the University of Alberta. Your question sounded just like one he would ask!”

Ah. My email was clearly smarter than I am. In the meantime, I received fascinating new information from Professor James W. Muller, from the Department of Political Science at the University of Alaska in Anchorage, who may also have been unintentionally misled by Mr Langworth into believing I was a University of Alberta Professor [memo to self: research online diplomas]:

“Seven chapters of The River War (and parts of all the others) disappeared when the book was abridged for the second edition in 1902. One of those was Chapter XXII, ‘The Return of the British Division’, the source of the passage referred to in your message, which Richard Langworth forwarded to me.

“Because the passage as you quoted it omitted one part, lacked italics, and had some errors in punctuation, I quote it here from the first edition:

‘How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical {249*} frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property — either as a child, a wife, or a concubine — must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen: all know how to die: but the influence of the religion paralyses the social developement of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is {250*} a militant and proselytising faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science — the science against which it had vainly struggled — the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.’

“The source of the passage is Winston Spencer Churchill, The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1899), II 248-50; numbers in {braces*} within the quotation show where new pages begin. With respect to the question of why Churchill omitted the passage in the second and all subsequent editions of the book, we have little hard evidence. We know that his literary agent and publisher sought a second edition of the book that would fit into a single volume, and that that required cutting long passages from the first edition. We also know that some readers and reviewers criticized the first edition for its personal passages, which they found inappropriate and unnecessary in a campaign history. We can surmise, as several biographers have, that Churchill might, on second thought, have deemed some passages indiscreet, and that he took advantage of the need to abridge the book to excise them. That this might be one such passage is suggested by Churchill’s argument in the previous chapter (II 214-15) that British imperial authorities ought not to attack the religion of native subjects.
(My emphases)

“The original source of the passage is the last of Churchill’s fifteen dispatches to The Morning Post (London), written at Assiout on Sep. 20, 1898, which appeared on p. 5 of the newspaper on Oct. 13, 1898. The newspaper editor made some small changes in what Churchill actually wrote, which was as follows:

‘How dreadful are the curses which Mahommedanism lays upon its votaries? Besides that fanatical fever, which is as rational and as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog — there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, insecurity of property, exist wherever the followers of Mahomet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace & refinement: the next of its dignity and sanctity. Individuals may show splendid qualities. But the influence of the religion is paralysing. It does indeed teach men how to die. It should rather teach them how to live. Dying is a trick very few people have been unable to pick up.’

“The original holograph dispatch, which I have quoted here, is in the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds.

“Further information on all of these points will be included in the new edition of The River War to be published later this year in two volumes by St. Augustine’s Press, which incorporates a new edition of Churchill’s dispatches from the war on the Nile in Appendix I, based for the first time on his original holograph dispatches. With all best wishes,
Yours,
Jim Muller”

[The part of the quotation that had been removed entirely from the email version I received was “Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen: all know how to die”. The other inconsistencies were in Americanised spellings and punctuation.]

Perhaps Churchill did, then, decide this passage was indiscreet, that it didn’t tally with his previous argument that the Empire shouldn’t attack the religion of native subjects. If Churchill wrote it and then thought better of it, it’s incumbent upon bloggers, political columnists and those who forward email messages to everyone in their address books to do the same before quoting him.

Ben Macintyre, in his Times column ‘How would Churchill have answered the Islamist threat?’, cited in Part One of this post, uses portions of the quotation to support his argument that Churchill would have fought the suicide bombings in London with “inexorable sternness”. So it’s disingenuous of him — as well as of those who misquoted it in blogs or forwarded WC’s “speech” to all and sundry via email — not to mention that it was edited it out of the book shortly after it was written. They could have found out that Churchill may have been less resolute than they’d assumed with a little research.

In his day, Winston Churchill was happy to describe civilisation as “sympathetic, merciful, tolerant, ready to discuss or argue, eager to avoid violence, to submit to law, to effect compromise” — when it suited him. Those qualities are mere aspirations as long as we disseminate ancient, abandoned arguments uncritically. And let’s not forget that WC himself was willing to abandon those characteristics of civilisation whenever they became inconvenient.

Dying is indeed a trick very few people have been unable to pick up, and here we have a man who (purportedly) said, “A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to kill him.” A doctrine less reasonable when applied to your own side’s PoWs, and those serving in the armed forces at the time would have been right to wonder where WC drew the line between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and when he was likely to shift it.

I once heard Peter Gabriel remark that the true sign of a person’s intelligence is where they draw that line: “As soon as a group of people are designated as ‘them’, a remoteness, a distancing, is created right from the outset,” he says. He has also said: “When you put people in the box marked ‘them’, you can kick them around a lot more easily than when they’re in the box marked ‘us’. So I think it’s useful to try and empty the box marked ‘them’ and fill up the box marked ‘us’.”

Macintyre of the Times goes on to refer to “the outpouring of resistance on the internet, with its spontaneous black humour” and how swiftly the internet allows the world to change. Indeed, it’s capable of changing from this to this in little more than the blink of an eye. We really should thank [insert your chosen Deity here] for black humour.

The late Frank Zappa had a song called Dumb All Over. Part of it goes:

“Whoever we are
Wherever we’re from
We shoulda noticed by now
Our behaviour is dumb
And if our chances
Expect to improve
It’s gonna take a lot more
Than tryin’ to remove
The other race
Or the other whatever
From the face Of the planet altogether.”
[© 1981, 1994 The Zappa Family Trust d/b/a/ MUNCHKIN MUSIC (ASCAP). All rights reserved.]

Zappa shared some views with the humorist Bill Maher, who cautioned, in his one-man show ‘Victory Begins At Home’, that the tolerant must be careful not to tolerate the intolerant. We should also resist the urge to condemn the many for the evils of a few, or because we don’t like the sound of their names — whether we decide to call that group “terrorists”, “infidels” or, for that matter, “bloggers”.

It’s a word that gets bandied about, but my New Oxford Dictionary of English says “infidel” originally denoted a person of a religion other than one’s own, specifically a Moslem (to a Christian), a Christian (to a Moslem), or a Gentile (to a Jew). And Dr Jamal Badawi, Professor of Religious Studies and Management at St. Mary’s University and vice-chairman of the Islamic American University, says “infidel” isn’t an accurate translation of any word in the Qur’an. It was used by the Crusaders to refer to the Moslems, not the other way around.

An online glossary of terms used in reference to Islam says the word “Kafir”, which is frequently translated as “infidel”, literally means someone who covers his or her heart, somehow signifying an unbeliever. “It is a descriptive term, not a derogatory slur or a sanction for murder. Kafir does not translate to infidel, which is offensive and dehumanising, used to justify the murder of Moslems during the Crusades.” The same glossary says Mohammedan is: “an out-dated and extremely offensive word coined by orientalists to describe Moslems. Moslems reject this title since it implies they worship Mohammed, instead of The One God”. The Churchill quotation refers to “Mohammedanism” which, at the very least, is inaccurate.

Religious groups of all flavours, of course, take offence easily. Believers in Omnipotent Beings may not only be insulted by words but also alarmed that they are being used to reinforce untruths. The easy accessibility of such errors in translation underscores how much the world has changed since WC’s tirade. “Islam” is no more a “them” in the sense of it being an enemy than “Christianity” could be considered by Christians to be a unified ally.

There are lessons to be had from history if we’re willing to learn them, and we really would be “dumb all over” to dismiss Churchill’s leadership skills and experience. However, while he may have recognised the rise of dangerous movements and dictatorships in swathes of contemporary action, he had no experience of life in the 21st Century.

One of the most important historical lessons we ought by now to have learnt is that single forces rarely motivate the individual. So, since everyone is someone else’s infidel, perhaps we need a new kind of ‘Declaration of Independence’.

“Ist” in German means is. “Ist” in English usually means trouble for somebody else; it’s in Christian, after all. Fundamentalist. Islamist. Existentialist. Orientalist. Atheist. Anarchist. Fascist. Communist. Nationalist. Papist. Pacifist. Militarist. Buddhist. Zionist. Feminist. Fatalist. Racist. Dadaist. Terrorist.

The “ist” that really matters is individualist. Why do we try so hard not to be individuals? And what would we change if we stopped trying to be anything else? It’s impossible to be 100% logically consistent about it but it’s something we might strive towards, in the spirit of Churchill’s argument that we shouldn’t attack the religion of native subjects.

Everyone is someone else’s infidel (1)

Another email is lazily doing the rounds. Mine came via someone I know in the UK, prefaced by the asinine remark, “I always did like that fellow’s speeches.”

“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities — but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.”
— Winston S. Churchill, from The River War, first edition, Vol. II, pages 248-50 (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1899)

Not being one to confuse the acceptance of things at face value with a desire for historical continuity, I deleted the email. And not being one to let rabid dogs lie, about an hour later I went back and retrieved it from Deleted Items.

One of the finer things about blogging, I’m discovering, is that it encourages you to strive for clarity in your ideas. Journalists and blogging colleagues at both ends of the political spectrum can be a big help in this, but we also generate a lot of white noise.

The world needs to do a lot of thinking just now. It requires action, too, but what it doesn’t need is more hatred, the lumping-together of individuals into amorphous groups of “ists” for the sake of laziness or to support belligerent nationalism and zealotry.

I was not surprised to find that the bloggers had discovered the WC quote. But it was depressing to find that it appears on many blog sites without even the most cursory of analysis, as though it represents the ultimate and inviolable expression of truth. It’s also depressing to find this quotation framed by so much hatred, and by blinkered incitements to violence.

I didn’t yet own a copy of The River War, so I could only verify that quotation online. I could have gone to the library, of course, but I was overcome by fearful fatalistic apathy that the book might be out on loan.

The Winston Churchill online shop doesn’t offer it for sale. Volume I is available from Project Gutenberg, but Volume II appears not to be. So I wrote to Ronald J. Goodden, who is cited as the person who produced the e-text in January 2004. He replied:

Mr Bell:
I'd be happy to oblige, if possible. Which “quote” were you referring to? Please understand that this etext is from a 1902 single-volume edition.
Cheers,
Ron Goodden
Atlanta, U.S.A.

I explained how, recently, elements of the WC quote have resurfaced in one of Ben Macintyre’s Times Online columns, ‘How would Churchill have answered the Islamist threat?’, but in a contextualised and incomplete form — at least when compared with the version circulating via email.

Frustrated that Volume II of The River War appears not to be widely available, I headed to Amazon UK and bought the Adobe e-book for a couple of pounds. It’s a single volume and none of the words quoted in Macintyre’s Times article appear in this e-version, other than the phrase “the mighty stimulus of fanaticism”, which isn’t part of the more controversial quotation.

The Churchill Centre refers to the unexpurgated version of the quote, the version that most frequently appears on blog sites (including at this one). The right-wing blogs are generally critical of Macintyre for supposedly neutering the full force of WC’s message.

The Churchill Centre’s ‘Publications and Resources’ section sheds more light on the missing text:

“THE RIVER WAR
First published by Longmans Green, London: 1899 (2vols)
Woods A2
Churchill’s greatest early work: a prose epic with much relevance today. Editions through 1965 are highly collectable. All editions from 1902 had an abridged text, in which Churchill excised about 25% of the original manuscript, but also some new material. First editions have 950pp, others 456 or less. An indispensable work. The Churchill Centre is now facilitating publication of a new unabridged edition.”
(My emphases)

Don’t expect, then, to be able to find that quotation in many of the currently available editions of WC’s book. It was removed following the first edition. So, unless you’re rich and/or resourceful, you’ll be lucky to find it in print.

Does Ben Macintyre, therefore, own one of the highly collectable and unabridged early editions? He doesn’t say. I wonder where he found the text from which he quotes; has he seen a copy of the book, did he seek out the original edition in a library, or did he simply find the quotation via the internet, as I and other bloggers have done?

The average blogger might have an excuse for inconsistency and obscurity, Mr Macintyre less so. I suggest he would have done his readers a service by mentioning that what must now be the best-known quote from this book was removed from most popularly available editions long ago, and that it has only recently come back into print.

If Churchill edited his own text, he may himself have removed the quotation from all subsequent editions as long ago as 1902, along with much else (my e-book, for example, has just 199 pages). The abridged version contains no preface explaining how and why the edits were made. I wondered whether this particular segment had been removed more recently by the publisher, in a post-Rushdie fit of political correctness.

The Churchill Centre very helpfully thanks one Gregory Smith for finding the quotation in the unabridged edition of The River War (the site suggests it might be the “Quotation of the Decade”), and it seems to be Smith who has largely been responsible for returning it to the attention of the modern reader. Andy Guilford, another reader at the Centre, says he cannot find the infamous quote in his one-volume Prion paperback (1997) and cannot remember having heard it on a ‘Books on Tape’ audio production, either.

“The editor” responds to Mr Guilford:

“The quotation falls in Volume II, Chapter XXII, ‘Return of the British Division’, which Churchill omitted starting in 1902. Likewise culled was Chapter XXI, ‘After the Victory’ [...] The bad news is that unabridged original copies of The River War (1899 1900) cost from US$1000 up. The good news is that an entirely new two volume edition is coming, thanks to Professor James Muller and The Churchill Centre.”

At the time I published this post, Richard Langworth, the editor of Finest Hour at the Churchill Centre had not yet replied to an email l sent him asking whether any record exists of why Churchill excised the two chapters from later editions.

In the meantime, Ron Goodden wrote back to say that he had entered some key phrases from the quotation into the Gutenberg e-texts for me, but was unable to locate them in the 1902 edition of the book. “I can only assume,” he wrote, “that if the quote is indeed genuine, it comes from the much longer, original edition. Sorry.”

If any NZBC reader has a print edition of the original, unabridged book, you have more money than sense. But I’d still be more than happy to buy a photocopy from you, in order to compare it with the e-book and find out what else has been removed.

Is it, then, insignificant that the quotation isn’t in recent versions — especially as the Churchill Centre is now re-publishing the unabridged book? After all, it isn’t as though I am suggesting that the quotation never originated from WC’s pen. Whether or not the widely distributed quotation is accurate, the fact remains that at some point the author or his publisher decided — for reasons as yet unknown — to remove it and the surrounding chapters.

The fervour these words still generate might be one reason why WC might have had the foresight to do so, but I doubt it.

In any case, it’s a bit rich for anyone to accuse The Times’ columnist Macintyre of neutering the full force of WC’s message when it’s relatively easy to establish that WC did a fair bit of that himself. It has to be said, though, that Macintyre isn’t exactly clear about the source of his quotes. He states that in The River War Churchill’s account “ended in the battle of Omdurman in 1898”. In fact, even in the abridged e-book, this is Chapter 15 of 19 chapters. The volume culminates in ‘The End of the Khalifa’. And all the stuff about rabid dogs and fanatical frenzy appears neither Macintyre’s column nor is it in the widely available abridged version of the book.

Anyway, as you can see, “fearful fatalistic apathy” needn’t be terminal — it’s even possible to corroborate some facts online, with a little cursory research. But should I be worried about my “degraded sensualism”? And if I’m ever improvident (my recent credit card statements suggest that I am), and I’m occasionally slovenly or sluggish, does that make me retrograde, does that paralyse my development, too? Or would other shortcomings be required for that? And who would one contact about finding a concubine?

I feel the need to exercise some artistic licence of my own, and to speculate further about why WC may have self-censored his work.

Perhaps he realised that it was rather odd for him to be ascribing “slovenly systems of agriculture” to the followers of a particular belief system. Particularly when, rather inconveniently, the origins of agriculture lie in the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia, part of present day Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Jordan. Around those parts, they first started getting sloppy about 9500-8000 BC, and it was pretty much all downhill from there, thanks to those well-known disorderly bastards, the Sumerians.

Meanwhile Churchill’s antecedents were bashing around in caves with antlers and bones and trying to figure out how they could keep their fire alight so they could watch Aston Villa at home to Charlton Athletic.

[My thanks are due to Elisa B. for reminding me of the history of agriculture. I must have had a fatalistically apathetic spell on the day we did that in school.]

Where I grew up in the 1960s, “systems of agriculture” also tended towards the slovenly. They mainly involved Welsh hill farmers in wet duffle coats trying to drag bedraggled sheep by their hind legs out of the swamps and into their wellies before stopping in at the Chapel to bellow a few hymns in a defunct language (there were no mosques in Caergybi).

To WC, Islam was not only a dangerous force but also a curse upon its followers; an extraordinarily sweeping condemnation, even considering that his quoted words are over 100 years old — not that bold strokes necessarily invalidate old words. But it was a very different world in those days. Britain still had its Empire, the Crusades were being avenged in different ways and the world’s mothers were yet to bear millions of soon-to-be premature corpses.

We do well to learn lessons from the past, but we shouldn’t transpose them onto the present without questioning them, and we certainly shouldn’t expect them to help stop what is being perpetrated by a relatively small number of suicidal individuals, supposedly against the “infidel”. More about that in my next post, Everyone is someone else’s infidel (2).

The environmentally unsound confessions of a cosseted fauxmosexual

No, the title isn’t that of a long-lost J.P. Donleavy novel. My confession is that I’m a man who cares for his skin. Big deal! you say, And so you should! In which case you may be any one — or indeed most — of the following:

a) A woman
b) A beautician
c) Living outside of New Zealand
d) None of the above.

I am, at least as far as my most retrosexual male friends are concerned, a metrosexual — better yet, as Carson Kressley might say, a “fauxmosexual”. This means, according to my friends’ definition rather than Carson’s, that I wash my face, use underarm deodorant and only have dirt under my nails when I’ve been picking up rocks.

I have grudgingly begun to agree with my friends. This is partly because I’ve spent so much time and money on cleansing, shaving and anti-ageing products at my local department store that I was recently invited back for a free facial treatment. During the course of this, I discovered to my shame that I knew far more about the products than the company’s own beautician did.

I say “to my shame”, but actually I can tell you all of these things without cringing, blushing or other major discomfort because for some time now I’ve had a girlfriend, which, I hasten to add with great glee, my supposedly macho friends do not. Not only is she young and beautiful and lovely, but my Retrosexual mates don’t have one at all. Not even an ugly one! “Well,” as Geoff Tipps might say, “It don’t sound much when you say it out loud.”

(Having a girlfriend also means I don’t need to pick up any more rocks, which is just as well because my chat-up lines were pathetic and I’d been forced to resign myself to progressively larger and less shapely rocks... “I don’t fancy yours much, pal.”)

My girlfriend tells me she likes the way I smell, and I have reason to believe she isn’t just saying that to make me feel better about being, at least by traditional Kiwi male standards, sexually ambiguous (that is, not only don’t I play rugby, I don’t want to watch it, wear stripy shirts or hang around in sports bars drinking Lion Red). It’s probably a good thing for them that none of these people knew me in the 1980s when I looked really girly.

But my cleanliness isn’t a fashion thing. I’ve always been mildly obsessive about it. I bathed and washed my hair daily even as an 11-year-old. My Mum must have thought I was a little angel, but my brother made up for that.

It’s surprising, though, that I didn’t get beaten up more often by the bullies who prowled the sprawling, violent North Wales comprehensive school I attended, wearing blazers with razor blades sewn under their lapels and with thumping great 22-lace Doc Marten boots on their adolescent feet, as though they were characters out of A Clockwork Orange. I assume their own feral tang (an unlikely collision between Sugar Puffs and diarrhoea, as I remember it) masked my perfumed pits and locks.

These days, as well as having an American Psycho-style personal hygiene routine, involving lots of these absurdly expensive, white-packaged facial products, I’m inclined to beat myself up quite a lot about the impact of my actions on the environment. What a dichotomy! All that foaming face-wash and shampoo lather would, in itself, be bad enough, but now I’ve discovered that the company that makes most of these overpriced personal care products doesn’t appear to care about the waste products they generate, our water quality, recycling or, indeed, what their customers care about. But hey, it’s an American company, so no great surprises there.

Over the years, I’ve spent literally thousands of dollars on Lab Series products. Yes, I know it’s sad, but we all have our vices. I’ve never been under any illusion that these products were going to work miracles on me, but on the other hand they haven’t done me much harm, either. And I didn’t expect them to be any more or less damaging to the environment than other soaps and detergents, but I didn’t think it could do any harm to ask.

So what makes me say that Aramis (which is owned by Estée Lauder) doesn’t care about the environment? Well, I wrote to them, and their reply would tend to suggest that they’ve been colluding with George W. Bush to destroy as swiftly as possible the world as we know it, and that they’ve employed an automaton — a Woman of Mass Denial — to help them to do it. It was an easy mistake to make: I thought they were trying to make me look younger, but in fact they are dastardly Evildoers, intent on poisoning everybody and destroying the planet. I’m so gullible sometimes.

When I first went to the ‘Ask An Expert’ section of the Aramis Lab Series For Men website I just wanted to know whether the “gentle scrubbing particles” in Lab Series’ Multi-Action Face Wash are made of plastic. You see, when you use this stuff to wash your face, it leaves a residue of strange blue beads behind in the washbasin, and they appear to be composed of something that doesn’t dissolve in hot water.

OK, this isn’t exactly the Exxon Valdez disaster, but why exactly would I want to send a daily consignment of tiny plastic beads into the wastewater just to make my face feel smooth after I’ve shaved? Can’t they make these things out of something biodegradable, like, er… apricot pits or something?

Anyway, a couple of weeks went by and, as you do, I forgot completely about having written to Aramis. I assumed my web form query had been swallowed by the internet and lost forever. Life, and my rigorous personal cleansing regime, went on. But then, a bloated email squelched into my inbox. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that it had been written by Donald Rumsfeld, masquerading as a woman — yes, the aforementioned WMD:

-----Original Message-----
From: ConsumerCommunications-Lauder@esteelauder.com
Sent: Tuesday, June 21, 2005 5:07 PM
To: Chris Bell
Subject: Case #2,122,598

Dear Mr. Bell,

Thank you for your interest in Aramis.

As you may know, Aramis is one of the Estie Lauder Companies, Inc. As a global organisation, the Estie Lauder Companies share your concern and recognise the importance of protecting and preserving the environment.

Recycling has always occurred at the manufacturing stage, where worldwide manufacturing programs take maximum advantage of locally available options.

No standardised approved test exists to substantiate 'biodegradable', 'environmentally safe', or 'eco-friendly'. We therefore do not make these claims for our products. However, we have no reason to believe our products are not any of the above.

We trust that the above addresses your concern.

Sincerely,

Justine Vella
Consumer Communications Manager

2,122,598

THIS E-MAIL IS INTENDED ONLY FOR THE ADDRESSEE(S) AND MAY CONTAIN CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION. IF YOU ARE NOT THE INTENDED RECIPIENT, YOU ARE HEREBY NOTIFIED THAT ANY USE OF THIS INFORMATION OR DISSEMINATION, DISTRIBUTION OR COPYING OF THIS E-MAIL IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED. IF YOU HAVE RECEIVED THIS E-MAIL IN ERROR, PLEASE NOTIFY THE SENDER IMMEDIATELY BY RETURN E-MAIL AND DELETE THE ORIGINAL MESSAGE.THANK YOU.

Oh, the delicious “and now fuck off” tone of that final line! Oh, the bellowing arrogance of that disclaimer! Oh, the joy at discovering that neither Ms Vella nor the personal assistant who is likely saddled with her correspondence know how to spell their own employer’s name! And what about that number in the subject line and ominously added at the end for luck? Can I really be the 2,122,598th poor sod that Ms Vella has shrugged off with a vacuous, flak-crafted email? She seems to wear that number like a badge of honour, like a bomber pilot after a precision raid.

How convenient that no standardised approved test exists to substantiate “biodegradable”. How about creating your own test in one of your labs (if they exist), or referring to Greenpeace, or asking a country like Germany that has some experience in recycling and environmental impact? But no, why bother! “Estie” makes no such claims for her products, so who cares. We’ll all go down together, in a petrochemical-fuelled cart without a catalytic converter. After all, worldwide manufacturing programs take maximum advantage of locally available options. What a marvellous way of saying, “We don’t know or care what the manufacturers do — we’re in product marketing, stupid.”

I have no reason to believe that the WMD is an actual, living person. But, oh! What pleasure I took in replying to “Ms Vella”:

-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Bell
Sent: Tuesday, June 21, 2005 5:55 PM
To: ConsumerCommunications-Lauder@esteelauder.com
Subject: RE: Case #2,122,598

Dear Ms Vella,

Yours is precisely the kind of evasive response a PR person might give to a hostile query. As I've been an Aramis customer for 25 years, I think it would be reasonable for me to expect a less ambiguous response from your company.

I used the facility on your website to ask a perfectly straightforward question about a specific Aramis Lab Series product: Are the exfoliation beads in Lab Series Multi-Action Face Wash made out of plastic, yes or no?

If they are (as indeed they appear to be), and as these bi-products are likely to end up being dispersed in New Zealand's wastewater, you would have every reason for believing that they are neither 'biodegradable' nor 'environmentally safe', and therefore certainly not 'eco-friendly'.

(Incidentally, I believe you'll find that your paymasters are the Estée, rather than Estie, Lauder Companies.)

So, no, your response does nothing to address my concerns and I am therefore seriously considering ceasing to use your products and publicising your unsatisfactory response via my website. And yes, I do note your disclaimer.

Yours sincerely,
Chris Bell

I now await Ms Vella’s response, taut-skinned… Well, I have to use up the rest of my Multi-Action Face Wash, don’t I. It cost me a bloody fortune.

A Blowhard on Struggle Street

Retread Australian Labor Party leader Kim Beazley has found himself in an unfamiliar position recently, ahead of John Howard’s Coalition in the latest polls.

Usually the media would be analysing what the man has done right, talking about turnarounds and that kind of thing, but Beazley has done almost nothing to contribute to Labor’s recent resurgence. The Coalition’s planned industrial changes are extremely unpopular, but it is the unions, not the ALP, that have taken the initiative with a series of television ads ramming home the implications of Howard’s new regime.

The changes, to be pushed through the now government-controlled Senate in the next couple of months, will damage the interests and power of Labor’s traditional support base of workers and unions. Those workers know full well what is coming and why, so it didn’t really take a lot to get them mobilised.

But the unions have managed to reach out through their advertising to a large constituency of marginal, often non-unionised, workers and create a very significant wedge, the first really effective wedge that has been created against Howard.

Beazley’s performance on the issue has been almost as abysmal as the government’s. His performance over proposed tax cuts was even worse, yet both of these issues should have played well to Labor’s heartland.

Never one to use one word where twenty will do, Beazley has so far missed the best opportunity he may ever have to really differentiate the ALP from the government.

The one word I am referring to is “battlers”. It is a word Howard has used to devastating effect to ally himself with a vast amorphous group of people who feel they are doing it hard for Australia. The unsung heroes of Struggle Street, one and all. True blue, mate.

Howard was still rolling the term out during the recent debate over tax cuts, appealing to the battlers while giving money to the privileged. It’s a great term because it embraces small businesses as well as workers and if you can do that you will win every election from now until kingdom come.

But where Howard seems to do this effortlessly, even when at his most hypocritical, you can never quite be sure who Beazley is appealing to. Instead of that one concise powerful term, a term that he could now make his own and steal off Howard forever, Beazley gives long tedious lists of the types of people who will suffer under the new laws.

Here he is talking about tax: “Those seven million Australians those nurses, those truckies, those people on the waterfront and on the building sites worked for the wealth of this country and they deserve a decent tax cut.”

On the surface this may seem fair enough, except when you are left off the list. What about the panel beaters, Kim?

"Doh! I forgot the panel beaters!"

"We say you can do a decent cut for folks on up to $100,000 and have their aspirations met and still do the right thing by the hardworking nurses, the truckies, the panel beaters, the men and women who are around about the $50,000 to $60,000 level who are treated so contemptuously."

And so on. Endlessly.

Beazley seems always to be reaching for some kind of grandeur in his pontificating, while Howard simply lets that one simple word “battlers” work its magic over and over again.
It is getting to the point where when I see Beazley appear on TV, I rush out to make a cuppa or an emergency dental appointment.

Anything.

Judge dread

The resignation of Sandra Day O'Connor will send the online punditry ablaze. Slate is covering every angle saying why they'll miss her, what the papers say (and again) and covering the selection process. O'Connor has been the pivot point in the US Supreme Court on many key decisions. Now the President has a chance to leave his mark on the highest judicial body in the land.