‘The Lady’s Not for Turning…’

Photo credit: @ http://forthardknox.com/

‘The Lady’s Not for Turning’ was something Margaret Thatcher famously said referring to her decision not to enter the ERM, the European Exchange Rate Mechanism which was seen as a vital fence to climbed over if the UK was to ever seriously show its intention to become a full member of Europe.

‘To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the "U" turn, I have only one thing to say. "You turn if you want to. The lady's not for turning." I say that not only to you but to our friends overseas and also to those who are not our friends.’

Here in Thailand, Thaksin’s wife, Potjdam, has been in the news lately for all the wrong reasons because she decided that a U-turn was in fact just what she needed. Having got divorced from her husband of over 20 years, she entered Thailand (although a convicted felon from a corruption scandal). To be fair though, the divorce is widely seen as an attempt to distance herself legally from her husband in order to get access to his frozen funds. So why did she come?

This is the simple part. She came here to try to influence the election of a new government in Thailand after the previous one led by Thaksin’s brother-in-law, Somchai Wongsawat, was forced to step down through a corruption case. Just as in the old days when Thaksin himself would be seen on the TV walking round small Thai villages handing out fresh, crisp 1,000 baht notes (about 20 GBP), Potjdam’s intention was to hand out sums, much larger of course, to secure politicians’ support for her husband and ensuring that his political party would be able to stay in power. Of course we now know that this didn’t happen.

This securing of political support was important though because only then he would he have the chance to get another bite at the 2 billion dollars currently tied up in Thai banks: the product of the illegal sale of his company, Shin Corporation, to Temasek Holdings, the state owned communications company of Singapore. With his boys in power, he could easily have appointed a few favourable judges to overrule the original decision and let him have his money back. As it is, he now only has till January 4th, four days from now, to present new claims to the money and if he fails, it’s lost forever in the bottomless coffers that is the Thai state treasury.

Despite the lady’s best efforts, Thaksin looks in a desperate situation, which is why I predict a wave of bombs and general disruption in the next few days and weeks. Don’t forget the bombs that went off last New Year here in Thailand and don’t be surprised to see more.

With his closest political ally, Newin Chidchob, and all the members of his faction, having all but abandoned their relationship with Thaksin, the deadline for presenting documents to the courts to get back the 2 billion US dollars a heartbeat away, his red shirt supporters exploding (or should that be ‘imploding’) like a wet firecracker, his diplomatic passport having been removed (and a lot of talk about taking away his regular Thai one too as he’s a convicted felon now), you can see that he’s something not unlike a cornered animal (I refrained from using the word ‘rat’) though some would say that’s an appropriate symbol for the man!


Can his lady save him? Can she do a ‘mission impossible’ and somehow rescue the situation? Or should she turn and hightail it out of town? Many people believe she should, and some say that's exactly what she should do - turn and run for it like a Betty Boob character - when the trappings of wealth are gone there's not much to stay for other than to get caught up in her husband's ignominious fall from grace!

Thaksin's Day of Reckoning is getting ever closer and many people, not just Thais but also the large ex-pat community believe he is getting payback for the wrongdoings during his tenure as prime-minister. The Thais have a saying that roughly translates as 'you get what you deserve' - Som num na! Perhaps Potjdam should run and hightail it before that happens. Or perhaps like Lady Thatcher, she'll say the same thing - 'The lady's not for turning'. We'll just have to wait and see.

Handshakes ain't what they used to be...

The news about hygiene is out now and the results are disturbing. According to an article on the BBC News site - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7667499.stm scientists from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine swabbed 409 people at bus and train stations in five major cities in England and Wales. According to the research, more than one in four commuters has bacteria from faeces on their hands, an investigation suggests. The study was part of the world's first Global Hand-washing Day, dedicated to raising awareness about the importance hand hygiene plays in public health.

'We were flabbergasted by the finding that so many people had faecal bugs on their hands' said Dr Val Curtis, director of the Hygiene Centre at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

The further north the researchers went, the more often they found commuters with faecal bacteria on their hands - men in Newcastle were the worst offenders.

'In Newcastle and Liverpool, men were more likely than women to show contamination - 53% of men compared with 30% of women in Newcastle and 36% of men compared with 31% of women in Liverpool.' I'm deinitely going to remember that next time I'm in either of those places.

Newcastle - men 53%, women 30%
Liverpool - men 36%, women 31%
Birmingham - men 21%, women 26%
Cardiff - men 15%, women 29%
Euston (London) - men 6%, women 21%

Ugh...imagine when you are shaking hands with people which after all is a perfectly normal, sociable thing to do and they have the remnants from last night's vindaloo (via their intestines!) all over their hands!! It just doesn't bear thinking about!


However, the following data suggests that the urban myth about manual workers and laborers being dirty may not be as accurate as first thought.

'Manual workers had cleaner hands than other professionals, students, retired people or the unemployed.'

Ok...I'm off...where's the soap!

The Lord of War or The Word of Law?

Image credit: © blog.synthesis.net.

Sometimes, just sometimes, no matter what you do, the law catches up with you. I remember seeing that movie with Nicholas Cage about a Russian arms dealer called Yuri Orlov who travels the world selling arms and munitions to the highest bidder. This story is true in that it is based on the real exploits of one Russian arms dealer, Viktor Bout, dubbed the "Merchant of Death" who was arrested here in Thailand in March. Many believe he supplied arms to the Taliban militia, Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda terror network and former Liberian leader Charles Taylor to name just a few of the madmen of the world to make it onto his Christmas card list.

Image credit: © bangkokpost.com/2009

Viktor Bout now says: 'I was framed'. This is like the usual though funny rebuttal of the typical petty criminals so often found in British drama of the 1980s. I can just about still here in my head Del Boy uttering the same sentiments albeit in his own inimitable way - 'It's a stitch up in'it? I was framed weren't I. The fuzz were waiting for me to leave Sudan like...and that geezer wiv the turban. How was I to know he was one of 'em like terrorist geezers! I just fought he was, you know, like Paki Ali, the market trader on Camden High Street! Nuffin' to do wiv me mate! I ask ya!'

According to the imprisoned fugitive, the Americans set him up because they don't want better relations between Thailand and Russia. As he says himself, 'They have framed me because the US does not want relations between Thailand and Russia to develop more'.

It's hard to feel a patina of grief for a man who, if the film version of his exploits is to be believed, lived the 'life of Reilly' while the carnage of war that he helped supply raged on in the background of his luxury lifestyle. It is unquestionably true that if you are going to get into the arms business, you'd better have made a Mephistophelean pact with your maker that, when it's all over, you'll go willingly to shake the hand of the Grim Reaper because for sure that's where you'll be heading when the music stops and there are no more chairs to sit down on.

Sooner or later the The Lord of War was bound to be caught out by The Word of Law, niet?

Bush's New Shoes (size 10)

According to the BBC reporter, Humphrey Hawksley, 'It was billed as the start of a farewell visit to help define Bush's legacy to Iraq, but turned out to be full of surprises.' That's the understatement of the year! It was great to watch the look on Bush's face when he saw the Iraqi reporter take off his shoes and throw them at him in a news conference yesterday. As they say on Anderson Cooper's show 'What were they thinking?'

Click on here for a link to the story - http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/12/14/bush.iraq/index.html

For me though, it was the beginning of my day (early morning news) and probably the highlight of my day, too! As in Thailand where I now reside, taking off your shoes and throwing them at someone is considered the height of insult as the feet in Buddhist as well as Islamic cultural traditions are considered, not just the lowest part of body, which of course they are, but also closest to the earth and the furthest away from Buddha or Allah. Thus, Bush was treated with contempt by the reporter of the highest possible magnitude short of physically attacking him. A similar event was to happen a few days later in Thailand as if proof of the Thai practice of using shoes to express an opinion in a negative way - At a rally of About 55,000 people, 'An old woman was cheered as she struck the poster [of the new Thai primeminister] with one of her shoes - one of the rudest gestures a Thai can make'.

Bush's shoe thrower said 'This is a farewell gift from the Iraqi people you dog!' Then with the second shoe, 'This is for all the widows and orphans of those killed in Iraq.'

How did Bush respond? In a post shoe-throwing interview, he declares that it was funny, 'I found it amusing!' Yes, you may have Mr. Bush, but in your very last visit to Baghdad, when you wanted to go out in a blaze of glory like one of them cowboys you so admire, in them there Westerns, you wanted to stroll into Baghdad town on a black stallion, say how great things have been over the last 8 years of occupation in Iraq, and how you made that all happen, then ride out again without incident, you have been clearly told what the Iraqi people think of you. When a man of professional standing feels compelled to do something that is so out of character, he must be pretty upset to say the least; A man who was tortured and beaten during those eight years

In the same interview, Bush says (and for me this really is 'amusing' because of it's entertainment value), 'I don't know what his beef is!' Can you believe he had the gall to say that? As if every Iraqi shares his view of the situation Iraqis now find themselves in? At least with Saddam Hussein, the power was centralised and so people could more or less keep to themselves and avoid trouble on their own doorstep. Since Bush arrived most Iraqis are afraid to go outside for fear of suicide attacks or straying into gunfights with coalition forces. And he doesn't know what the reporter's beef is? Pullleeeeease!

On the same day, Bush gave a speech to the troops stationed in Baghdad. 'Thanks to you, Iraqi is now dramatically freer, dramatically safer, dramatically better'. This continual reference to drama is interesting for that's what many people believe - war is theatre, where drama continually unfolds on TV screens and newsreels throughout the world. How telling it is then later, when the Iraqi man interviewed on the street declares, 'It's true that Bush delivered us from Saddam Hussein, but now we are living in a tragedy.'

Culturally insensitive or crass exploitation of the world's indigenous people?

Has anyone seen this ad for burgers? The one about 'Whopper Virgins'? They invite indigenous people from various places to taste the two rival burgers - http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/organgrinder/2008/dec/04/advertising-food

'What happens when you take remote villagers from Chiang Mai in Thailand who don't even know what a burger is because they don't even have a a word for it in their language and ask them to compare the Whopper versus the Big Mac in the world's purest taste test?'

Others are the Inuit from Greenland, and another one is equally pathetic and involves Transylvania farmers who are all lumped together and called, quite rudely, 'Whopper Virgins'.

In an age when we have the highest rates of literacy ever in the world and more and more people are being educated than ever before through technology, which can reach even the remotest of places, shouldn't we expect a little more cultural awareness from the educated populace of the world?

What else can you expect from the American companies who care for nothing unless it resembles the greenback? I guess it's all part of what some have called the 'Cocacolaisation of the world' - the idea that individual cultures are being eroded and being replacd by one set of huge conglomerates which express American capitalist values and nothing more.

Reflective Journal Entry: Nine

I am starting to think a lot now about using a DVD as a gateway ‘into’ the world that my thesis will represent. It will be like a house like that lady at the europeana.com portal mentioned… as Viviane Reding, the European Information Minister responsible for its launch, said - '...it's like going into a culture like you go into a house - you enter the door, then go through the corridor and then you have a choice between different rooms with a different, organised way of understanding what you are looking for.' It was originally a French idea, spearheaded by them as an antidote to American dominance culturally, which is spread by Yahoo (when it's working!) and especially Google with its project to put millions of books online after digitising them. I guess that's why they called it europeana. It had to be shut down the same day because of 10 millions hits in an hour! Should be re-opened soon according to the site...

‘We launched the Europeana.eu site on 20 November and huge use - 10 million hits an hour - meant it slowed to a crawl. We are doing our best to reopen Europeana.eu in a more robust version. Meanwhile, the site you're in now is the project development site, with a video to give you a taste of what's on the real Europeana site.’(http://dev.europeana.eu/)

Anyway, I am now thinking of finishing the written forms e.g. the exegesis and artefact, then inscribing them into a DVD along with an architecture that might resemble some idea, metaphor, or symbol of the research outcome? Something in the shape of a house would be too obvious and simple and wouldn’t ‘add value’ to the project like businessmen like to say on the Lion’s Den! Rather I need something connected to the idea of art or education or something new and novel in itself? Perhaps each click on the DVD could help them navigate their way around Guantanamo or Abu Graib prisons? This needs to be developed.

Reflective Journal Entry: Eight

‘By presenting these pathways or framings on a hybrid DVD-ROM I am ensuring that no single mode of experiencing the project is privileged. The computer monitor becomes a democratic site for the rendering of the material, and the user/reader is empowered to choose the order and manner in which s/he experiences the three pathways, including alternating between them midstream. This is a critical concern for me as it facilitates the imagining and experiencing of this practice-led research as being devoid of a logocentric host.’ (‘Streamgate PhD’ stuff)

Comment on this and think about ways that I can ensure that my project is not viewed in a special way above other parts e.g. the component of a good practise led PhD – ‘ensuring that no single mode of experiencing the project is privileged.’ I will try to present my artefact in a variety of different ways. Perhaps I can use video, audio, Powerpoint presentation slides, other slides, poems, indeed a plethora of eclectic resources, which will be democratically selected. In this way a new narrative can be created - one that is free of the old school academic constraints that have so dogged the universities of the world.

I can present my story about an outsider called Yudhi who (a) defies the typical interpretation of what a terrorist is (a fanatical brutal killer), and (b) re-defines the meta narrative of the world of the terrorist. The reader/hearer/seer will be able to follow the thesis I will present in their own way using the pictures, poetics, academic explanations, hyperlinks, hypertextuality in general, documentary style presentations, and Powerpoint slides. (Add – ‘Claims of originality and contribution to knowledge may be demonstrated through creative outcomes which may include artefacts such as images, music, designs, models, digital media or other outcomes such as performances and exhibitions’ below in Differences between Practice-Based and Practice-Led Research ) No one medium will be more privileged. It is in this way that we can see that, in Lucy Lyons words, ‘they are a legitimate way for artists to reclaim their work back from the historians, philosophers and critics by gaining an authoritative, academic voice through the validation of a doctorate.' ("Walls are not my friends: issues surrounding the dissemination of practice-led research within appropriate and relevant contexts" - Lucy Lyons) (taken from - AHRC Research Review Practice-Led Research in Art, Design and Architecture -)

It is this notion of reclaiming that embodies this kind of work for it is only through reclamation that we can begin to re-create new narrative forms using different media and establish for ourselves not only as legitimate ‘practitioning’ researchers, but pioneers in a new aspect of knowledge production and praxis.

Use this:

‘Abstract During the last decade, research in art and design in Finland has begun to explore new dimensions. Artists and designers have taken an active role in contextualising and interpreting the creative process in practice, as well as the products of this process, by looking at the process itself and the works produced through it. From this new point of view, the knowledge and the skills of a practising artist or designer form a central part of the research process, and this has produced a new way of doing research. In this new type of research project, part of the research is carried out as art or design practice. The central methodological question of this emerging field of research is: how can art or design practice interact with research in such a manner that they will together produce new knowledge, create a new point of view or form new, creative ways of doing research? In this article, the making and the products of making are seen as an essential part of research: they can be conceived both as answers to particular research questions and as artistic or designerly argumentation. As an object made by an artist–researcher, the artefact can also be seen as a method for collecting and preserving information and understanding. However, the artefacts seem unable to pass on their knowledge, which is relevant for the research context. Thus, the crucial task to be carried out is to give a voice to the artefact. This means interpreting the artefact. During the process of interpretation, furthermore, the artefact has to be placed into a suitable theoretical context. In this process, the final products (the artefacts) can be seen as revealing their stories, i.e. the knowledge they embody.’ (Maarit MäkeläEmail: makela.maarit@gmail.com)

This again suggests new modes of learning that have to be understood. Making the artefact ‘speak’ is like a ventriliquist trying to get a dummy to say ‘antidisestablishmentarianism’! But it has to be done.

And this:

‘Practice-based Research is an original investigation undertaken in order to gain new knowledge partly by means of practice and the outcomes of that practice. Claims of originality and contribution to knowledge may be demonstrated through creative outcomes, which may include artefacts such as images, music, designs, models, digital media or other outcomes such as performances and exhibitions Whilst the significance and context of the claims are described in words, a full understanding can only be obtained with direct reference to those outcomes. A practice-based PhD is distinguishable from a conventional PhD because creative outcomes from the research process may be included in the submission for examination and the claim for an original contribution to the field are held to be demonstrated through the original creative work.’ (http://www.creativityandcognition.com/content/view/124/131/)

In other words, the process is as important as the end product. Or, it’s better to travel than to arrive! And there’s not going to be a bias towards the written form as opposed to visual or aural. There is a democracy at work, which says all elements of the thesis are equal just like people in the eyes of the law of a country! So images, music, designs, models, digital media or other outcomes such as performances and exhibitions are all on a par with say, a table of graphs showing e.g. average rainfall in Southern Peru, or the cosine of Pi divided by the square root of 12 trillion to the power of 5, whilst spectacular academically, will not be considered more valuable or satisfactory to the academy as constituting ‘real’ ‘true’ or, ‘more valuable’ than a PhD about the composition of a typical pop song since 1972! More on this as I am leaning now tor\wards a digital PhD thesis where all of the above could figure somewhere in the intertextual milieu that I would like to create therein so that images, music, designs, models, digital media or other outcomes such as performances and exhibitions could shoulder to shoulder with a more academic interpretation of the artefact.

Reflective Journal Entry: Seven

Think about actors for my drama - in the great movie I saw recently, Ben Kingsley played the part of the professor, David Kepesh, who meets and falls in love with a beautiful young student played by Penelope Cruz. It got me thinking that Kingsley is the perfect actor to play the part of Yudhi's father, Halim. He has the right skin tone and colour. He has that Middle Eastern/Asian look. He could even be an arab given the right attire so his look is very flexible when it comes to the roles he plays on the screen.

So, my point in writing this down is not to say, like some egotistical idiot, that I'm going to get X Hollywood A-lister to play Y part, but that there is some value in picturing them as real people for it will allow me to write about them more sympathetically, and in a more real and natural way.

Who could I get to play the part of Yudhi? A good-looking Asian looking boy? That guy who was the lead in Hanif Kureshi’s ‘My Beautiful Launderette’? Must find someone and make a real effort to focus on their picture in my mind when I am writing scenes that involve him. I have to start to see this more in cinematographic way; a series of stills that move from their inert places on the page, to a place where the characters actually breathe unassisted by their author like Barthes’ notion of the author being dead.

I imagine the character of Hava like a blonde version of Minnie Driver although now she’s too old, but a younger girl with flaxen hair that as Updike says in Terrorist something that brims over at the top like beer ‘the cedar coloured patch of frizzy hair sticks out, in its moment of capture, above the elastic waistband like the head on an impatiently poured beer.’ (p.162) Ok, the allusion here is sexual and related to her pubic hair, but what I want is a metaphor, similar in the way it captures her ‘overflowingness’, her abundance of something that is both sensual, and full of the joi de vivre of life. She will be the perfect antidote to the life-denying, negaters of life that Achmed and his militants represent.

There would be no shortage of Bollywood actors that could play the ‘baddies’: Achmed, Feran, Imad, Hanif etc. But Malika would be different, someone with flair, an innate sense of self and fully confident albeit a spendthrift.

Reflective Journal entry: Six

My supervisor (Christine) has pointed out to me that I may be dodging the bullets a bit by not facing head on the problems of terrorists in society today. I responded by saying that it was never my intention to do that, but to focus on other aspects of terrorism e.g. some of the other causes and not the effects of terrorism e.g. economic hardship, repression, coercion, etc., etc. I am now wondering whether I was so wise to be so sure and so quick with my response.

It may be that others do not share my need to focus on the importance of the people who are forced to become terrorists instead of the effects that I mentioned. There are two reasons for this. First is that I think there are already a lot of writers writing about this subject e.g. the effects of terrorism in the world today aka John Updike. The second is that these people do not have a voice, an identity because of this e.g. that others make sure that all is done in absolute secrecy. They are almost never heard because they do their work without the knowledge of their families and wind up dead at the end of things. They only, at the most, give their reasons for those acts by recording them during videos, which we get to see in a news bulletin on CNN or the BBC. Beyond that we know nothing about their motivations for wanting to do it.

My character doesn’t have this luxury as he is never actually told of his status; rather, he is told to do individual acts of which he only half knows will lead to his own, personal involvement in the deed. And I have been looking at other theories about suicide which makes for interesting reading. More on that to come.

Reflective Journal entry: Five

I have a structure but am worried that it’s too traditional, too prescriptive, meaning that it will delimit or too narrowly define my project:

Example –

Chapter One – What is an Outsider?

(1) Some common definitions:

(1.1) The Outsider as X loner not fit to live among their peers - examples
(1.2) The Outsider as the bogeyman – fairytales (Africa – white man come to take you away)
(1.3) The Outsider as X banished/exiled e.g. Socrates – ‘What happens when a person refuses to accept the myth of the citizen, and chooses to act within the context of a different , more personal myth?’ (add more here – taken from ‘Essays from the Edge: Citizenship and the Outsider in Literature ...’)
(1.4) The Outsider as X radicalized – e.g. Dostoevsky has related how the individual is so frustrated with his own helplessness that he has become an outsider in a place where he shares his culture, religion and norms with the majority. Yet, the personal dissatisfaction, his spiritual inconsequence in his own mind creates a boundary between the self and the society isolating him from others." (taken from Papers on "Outsiders" and similar term paper topics http://www.academon.com/lib/paper/16512.html)
(1.5) The Outsider as X
(1.6) The Outsider as X

It made me realise that I needed a far more open ended starting point in which to introduce my research. I knew that if I rigidly began a story with too many predefined limits, I would soon be overwhelmed with problems related to narrowness of vision and a limited parochial overall vision of what was to come. At all costs I realized this now had to be avoided.

Reflective Journal Entry: Four

I decided this may be used somewhere in the exegesis part of the doctorate:

When I began this project, a number of issues were in my mind. The first was that I was unsure exactly what was meant by a ‘practise led’ PhD and how different it was from the traditional form of research based PhD. More importantly, I was troubled at what I saw as a crisis of legitimacy e.g. the way that this new kind of PhD was lacking in any real sense of validity e.g. coming from the traditional fellows of the academy who at the same time seemed to not accept it as a legitimate form of research and thus as really contributing anything substantive to the academy as a whole. (Add this maybe – As X says, ‘In the Australian context, the creative writing PhD is subject to ongoing political debate about research worth and cultural values for creative practice. National notions of research equivalence (the debate here often led by the sciences) intertwine with internal university problems in valuing creative projects as valid academic pursuit.’ Nigel Krauth) http://www.textjournal.com.au/april01/krauth.htm

And again:

‘We work in a discipline field that abhors conformity - and this fact relates to the continuing powerful significance of creative writing in the culture. Good creative writing continues to get noticed and have central cultural influence precisely because it doesn't give in to anything politically, socially, or theoretically institutionalised. Exciting and valuable creative writing tends to map out the unexamined, the undetermined, and the unfavoured in the culture. The process of shoe-horning creative endeavour into the academic research context is difficult enough without worrying about standardisation of assessment. I have been running a postgraduate writing program where I tell students to break literary and cultural rules and progress thereby, but then I need to get each student aside to explain that the PhD requires adherence to a swagload of academic conformities. I also have to impress upon my students that there are examiners out there who are unpredictable. 'They're worse than critics,' I say. 'They're worse than national literary award judges.' (The Creative Writing Doctorate in Australia: An Initial Survey) http://www.textjournal.com.au/april01/krauth.htm



I had concerns in other areas, too. How should I lay out the findings of my research? Should I write the artefact first and exegesis second? How would they blend together? Should the exegesis be a fully-fledged interpretation of my artefact, a novella length story about a young man forced to become a terrorist, or something else? Should it seek to guide my reader or should it be less directional, less prescriptive and more descriptive, more open-ended and, most critically, open to the reader to decide the meaning and value of the piece themselves?

I also wanted to know how I was going to present the information not having ever seen an actual completed ‘practise led’ thesis. Under normal conditions, I would have been looking at reading around the subject, perhaps 50 to 80 academic articles, as many primary sources as it took to get a feel for the research proposal: taking notes, paraphrasing, summarizing, contextualising, making links where thy were there, and drawing conclusions from what I had thus gleaned. In the ‘practise led’ project, I was starting from a completely different standpoint not really having a clear, identifiable end point in which to aim for, no clear thesis that, with a carefully thought out, pre-planned academic rigorous exercise I would be able to bring out or elucidate. Not surprisingly, for a while I struggled with this anomaly and was slowed down.

Fortunately, however, while I was pondering or researching these problems, I always had the artefact part to work on as it seemed to decide its own limits, its own parameters, its own scope given that it was not bogged down with pre-conceptions that an erstwhile PhD would have been so that comforted me and made realise that ironically the artefact was serving two functions: the first was that it reminded me that the exegesis ought to work along the same lines e.g. that it not be too concerned with traditional academic structure for example, that I didn’t need have say, a table of charts, or a 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 etc., etc. (find out the exact name here for this), a traditional Literature Review, a few pie charts, or other visual information, perhaps even an abstract if, and this is the important part, if it was primarily there to impress a committee member or reinforce outmoded research protocol.

It also served to remind me that whilst on the one hand, I was banging on about there not being too much obvious planning and obvious rigor and structure, nevertheless ipso facto it already had considerable structure and organisation of its own in the form of a 3-act story structure, characterization, plots, sub-plots, back story, action sequences etc., etc. In other words, what I was realizing was that, whatever way it was written or presented, irrespective of how it was received by my peers or the wider academy, there would be no escaping that there would be a methodology that would be at work and that is something that seems to me is often lost or simply forgotten.

Reflective Journal Entry: Three

I have been thinking how to formulate a decent Research Question but have so many competing ideas that I have been seemingly lost in a quagmire of doubt as to whether I can actually identify central, overarching one? I decided to try another tack and think about a possible log line for the artefact component. I reasoned that if I could write a decent log line, then that would help me to identify something resembling a dominant Research Question. Here's the one that I finally settled on after a few attempts. (They are a lot trickier to write than I had imagined!)

Posssible log-line:

What would you do if, one day, you were forced to help kill a family, or face the possibility that your own family would be harmed, or left, penniless? What would you do?


What would you do if, one day, you were faced with a decision that would change your life? If, through an awful twist of fate, you were forced to take part in an act, that would end up in the loss of human life, to help kill a family that was from another culture half way round the world, whom you’d never met, or face the possibility that your own family would be harmed, or left destitute, penniless on the streets of a city that they left years earlier for a better life, and that they now only half know or connect with? What would you do?

So my question remains - how can I find a central Research Question based on this idea?

Reflective Journal Entry: Two

Reflective Journal Entry: Two

I have been struck by these words which I have been reading this morning:

'Lee and Williams, in their compelling 1999 article ‘Forged in Fire’, make the point that the PhD process will almost certainly involve ‘distress’ – that is its nature. Most PhD candidates are forced at some point to confront the fact that they are undergoing a life-changing experience – termed by one supervisor as ‘permanent head damage’. Lee and Williams suggest that...Lee and Williams suggest that this ‘distress’ should be recognised, expected and understood as necessary and productive.
Common metaphors for candidature include becoming, baptism of fire, journey of discovery, process and metamorphosis. The process of PhD development should, presumably, be one of growth in intellectual confidence, independence and originality of thinking. It would be fair to expect it to result in empowerment and ultimate entry to an elite community. These attributes – that we presume are valued by all the participants in the process – by definition are not, and should not, be easy to achieve. Our experiences as a researcher in the field and as an experienced supervisor lead us to claim that the process may involve measures of intellectual conflict and uncertainty, doubt, indecisiveness and fear – but also the beginnings of a sophisticated understanding and the pleasure of finding the voice to speak what we have learned. Supervisors (and faculties) can and should take seriously their responsibility to provide the environment where these things can happen, in a way that will assist candidates through a process of learning to claim their own knowledge.'

I have already told my wife to expect me to be a bit of a 'train wreck' at times given that I will, according to Lee and Williams (1999), be experiencing 'permanent head damage' and the like. I of course expect to benefit from this process as they say, it is 'understood as necessary and productive'. The most interesting idea here however is the last one: 'Supervisors (and faculties) can and should take seriously their responsibility to provide the environment where these things can happen, in a way that will assist candidates through a process of learning to claim their own knowledge.'

Claiming my own knowledge? I like the sound of that. This links in what I have been thinking about regarding the breakdown of the grand meta-narratives aka Derrida et al. Also I have read other things recently that have made me realise that we are all constantly at work in narrative production and whilst the grand narratives have ceased to hold their power over us, the new modes of knowledge production aka PLDs are creating now experiences and praxis elements that open up the spaces between the known areas of academic knowledge and the novel narrative structures which will ultimately replace them.

Blogging the PhD...my reflective journal

This is the area where I will be posting my thoughts on issues related to my PhD. I started this doctorate about 3 years ago and have been grappling with various aspects of it which have been kept in two forms of a reflective journal - a written diary, and an audio based tape recorded version of more or less the same details, observations, ideas, etc., etc. The latter have been and will continue to be put into written form and posted on this site.


Reflective Journal Entry: One

As my PhD is not considered a traditional one whereby a problem is identified, research conducted, and a conclusion made from the other two elements, I wanted to chart the progression of my ideas and indeed the very process of thinking that will end up becoming an artefact or finished product. This idea has come primarily from my reading of Blogging PhD Candidature: Revealing the Pedagogy by Mary-Helen Ward, a Ph.D. Candidate in the Faculty of Education at the University of Sydney and Sandra West, an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Nursing & Midwifery at the University of Sydney.

I am in full agreement with them both when they explain 'the use of blogs to enhance scholar/researcher development, through the foregrounding they make possible of the pedagogical relationship implicit in the PhD process and consequent revelation of some of the hidden pedagogical practices that underpin it.' (http://www.swin.edu.au/hosting/ijets/ijets/vol6num1/pdf/Article4Ward&West.pdf)

I see the blog as a way to unmask some of the process and dynamics that are at work in the creation of new meta-narratives, and which in my view must ultimately replace many of the old narrative structures that have been hailed as the benchmarks for the production of new knowledge and research outcomes. I agree fully with Prof. Julia Evergreen Keefer in 'Searching for a Global Master or Meta-Narrative' who states that 'In our search for a global meta-narrative, perhaps we should start with the golden rule, Love the Neighbor as Thyself, for every religion in the world, monotheistic and polytheistic, includes some version of this truth in its teachings.'

And I also agree completely with Lucy Lyons thus, 'The importance of practice-led PhDs is that they are a legitimate way for artists to reclaim their work back from the historians, philosophers and critics by gaining an authoritative, academic voice through the validation of a doctorate.' (From "Walls are not my friends: issues surrounding the dissemination of practice-led research within appropriate and relevant contexts" - Lucy Lyons) (taken from - AHRC Research Review Practice-Led Research in Art, Design and Architecture - http://72.14.235.132/search?q=cache:p9siRtV6giwJ:www.ahrc.ac.uk/About/Policy/Documents/Practice-Led_Review_Nov07.pdf+practise+led+phd+thesis&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=6&gl=th)'

It is this reclamation of legitimate forms of pedagogy that interests me greatly for what constitutes 'proper' knowledge production has been in doubt from some considerable time and has been largely been allowed to be decided, determined, by those on the inside of the academy, not those practioners who have been actually engaged in these new, hybird forms of research. As she rightly says, 'We have also indicated some areas of inquiry that might be supported to advance the theory and methods of practice-led research. In particular we have come to the conclusion that conventional ideas of contribution to knowledge or understanding may not be serving us well.'

There are two components to this Practise Led doctorate (PLD): the first is a creative component called an artefact and the second is an exegesis or mode of interpretation which connects or links itself to the research question to provide a new mode of knowledge production and pedagogical practise. The following is the original idea some three years ago for my creative component.

My artefact:

'The creative component will consist of a set of short stories of approximately 80,000 words, which aims to address, in a meaningful way, the role of the stranger in narrative fiction, the issues of culture shock and assimilation, while still retaining literary market value. The stories will center around characters who enter the economic and cultural life of a city and, through dramatic events, not only change the city, but also become catalysts for change within themselves.'

This has in fact changed considerably. Now there is only one story and it is called 'The Accidental Terrorist'. I have also retained an analysis of the stranger in narrative fiction (though not insights related to culture shock), and in relation to issues like assimilation, cultural, philosophical as well as psychological insights will also be examined.

The exegesis:

'The exegesis component will be a reflection of the key tensions and issues that arose during the construction of my creative component with reference to the mechanics and craft of writing, and an investigation of the theories that underpin the literature of the stranger. Larger questions raised by Camus about the role of the outsider, concerns about culture shock raised in texts like Almost French, my own writing about these experiences in Thailand, and other academic and literary studies on assimilation by Sartre, Levinas, and Fanon will be examined. With increasing globalization, shared physical as well as cultural space, and the ideological clash between Islam and Christianity, there is now a need for a greater understanding of ‘otherness’ in the world today.'

This part is still very fluid, organic even. It is continually evolving although it is clear that there are several ideas that are starting to appear more salient than others. I am constantly amazed by the changeable nature of this as though it has already been written or exists somewhere else almost like Socrates' idea of the 'Forms' - the epistemological idea that there is no such thing as learning. When we feel that we have learnt something, we are in fact merely remembering it. Hence the idea of the forms is one where there exists a perfect copy of something - call it PF1 (perfect form 1). This would be the thing-in-itself, the version we see in nature. Thus, when you walk into your garden and see a tree, that is an instance of PF1. A painting of this very same tree would be PF2, and say, a dream of a tree, PF3, and so on ad infinitum. Each time we are getting away from the one 'true' form that exists and which we will never see or inhere in.

So I was thinking that there already exists a PF1 of my thesis and even though throughout this process of not having a clue about the nature of how or what the research outcome will be, as a 'practitioner', I am still able to unmask, unearth, uncover, and to borrow Socrates again, to 'remember' or 'recall' what has already existed in some other state or 'Form'. This for me is the most exciting part of the entire project.

Why is life so unfair?

We all think the world should be fair but know that it isn't. Why are some people so talented that they can do almost anything they want? Some people are even multi-talented. David Beckham can play football well and he also is handsome enough to be a world class male model. The Oscar winning actor Jocham Phoenix, star of Ladder 49, and Man in Black recently said that he was giving acting up to become a singer, so again he has at least two major talents. Likewise, Angelina Jolie has also recently said that she's giving up the same profession in order to do something else, probably become a permanent UN Ambassador, so what hope is there for the rest of us who are scraping by on a measley 'Mr. Average' lifestyle?

When I was a lot younger, I questioned how the world must work. I soon figured out that my gain must be someone else's loss. If I become a rich man, then I am in some way taking away the resources of someone else e.g. in the form of food, or money for education or for some other purpose. I still believe that today, and I rationalise it by the fact that the world only works for so long when it's in some kind of harmony, some kind of equilibrium. Once you upset anything in nature, from a bee's nest to an Australian reef, you upset it for good, and it can never be the same as it was. So, if I take not just one resource from a place, but a lot more than I actually need, and waste it on my own personal enjoyment, I am ultimately doing something that is inherently detrimental to the total welfare of the planet. Like the poet said, 'No man is an island unto himself.'

It is in this context that I saw on the news yesterday that those car ('auto' if your American!) executives from Ford, Chrysler, and GM, who went to Washington with their begging bowls almost like Oliver Twist, 'Please can I have some more?' The were asking for a princely sum of 25 billion US dollars. One would have thought that the very least they could do would be to try to find their own ways of reducing their costs, but they apparently all flew in privately owned corporate jets, one of which apparently cost over 36 million dollars! And they had the temerity to ask for (a) free handouts (without any business plan or conditions attached) and (b) that their employees accept that there will be job losses, redundancies, and pay cuts!? Um...the world really is unfair isn't it when people like this can, after all the chatter about the Wall Street banking executives being scourged in the media for their over-the-top bonuses, crowd around the corporate trough? When you think about the greed of these people, and the Bushes, and the Saudias, you can't help thinking about that famous Will Durant quote - 'The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.' That's what the Bush years were all about: the Neo Cons were the minority and us the majority, and we allowed them to turn the world into a giant business run exclusively for their benefit.

Warren Buffet is the second richest man in the world after Bill Gates and said the following which I think is also very clever.

Warren Buffet's opinion (more about how things should work) which I've always loved:

"Let's say that it was 24 hours before you were born, and a genie [magic person] appeared and said, 'What I'm going to do is let you set the rules of the society into which you will be born. You can set the economic rules and the social rules, and whatever rules you set will apply during your lifetime and your children's lifetimes.' And you'll say, 'Well, that's nice, but what's the catch?' And the genie says, 'Here's the catch. You don't know if you're going to be born rich or poor, white or black, male or female, able-bodied or infirm, intelligent or retarded."

If you had that the wish granted by the genie, what kind of world would you create and why?

God Bless America!

Did anyone see that show on Oprah Winfrey about the woman who had been hoarding everything in her house for 13 years? I've never seen anything like it and not because of the sheer volume of things that she collected over that period.

Her 11-bedroom house was wall-to-wall with every conceivable item, though being a woman, the vast majority as you can imagine, was taken up with clothes, shoes, and handbags. Despite its size, you could barely move in the house so cluttered was it with items, many of which hadn't even been taken out of their store wrappers. Even her three garages were completely jam-packed with stuff and could barely be opened because of this. Likewise her huge basement was full of household items, many never even touched from the day were first bought.It took a 10,000 square feet warehouse to store all the items once they were removed by Oprah's team amassing several tons of items in the process.What bothers me most though is not that she was sick and needed the help. (She didn't just need psychological help but medical help as well because, due to the lack of space, air couldn't circulate in the house which resulted in black fungus (the worst kind of fungus) and her's and her husband's health suffered as a consequence.) No, my problem is that here we have a woman who is clearly sick psychologically, and needs help, but who probably never missed a meal in her life (and she looked like she could easily afford to). If you can afford to live in such a large house, and can afford to continuously shop for items you don't need, you are obviously not someone who has any financial problems. Yet what was the result of all this?

Oprah, provided her with a world renowned psychologist, an expert in the area of hoarders like her, who counseled her back to normal health. Then she had her entire house, all 11 bedrooms + kitchen and dining areas (even the toilets) kitted out with the best furniture you could imagine, all free of charge?! Whoa! Wait a minute? She got a complete refurbishment of state-of-the-art furniture for what? Being a rich sick woman? I'm sorry but that's obscene! What about the millions in Dharfur or the Congo or a gazillion other places that don't even have a pot to piss in? Where's the justice in that?

This is one of my pet hates about Americans. They live way beyond their means; they have a Media that feeds them a daily diet of disinformation; they have greedy brokerage houses who not only bankrupt their own firms (Lehman Bros, Fanny Mae, Freddy Mac etc.)but in the same breath cause financial volatility around the world and then, when the shit hits the fan, they have well-meaning entrepreneurs who will happily bail them out in order for us to watch great TV. God Bless America!

A Pregnant what? A pregnant man? Get away!

Has anyone seen that guy who just had another baby today? Yes, he apparently already has one. Am I the only person to have never heard about it? Umm...how exactly does that work? I'm no scientist, but I imagine he first needs to have a womb. Actually, our 'mom-to-be' or should that be 'mom-and-dad-to-be' is a transexual, or to give the out the proper term, 'transgender'. His name is Thomas Beatie, and what possessed him to do it is something of a mystery to me. If he was originally a woman, then the obvious question is why didn't he want to have a baby when he was a woman? In other words, why change your pyscho-sexual as well as physical gender, in order to keep your womb?


According to an ABC article (http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Story?id=5028746&page=1) 'Beatie said he shaves while resting his arm on his baby bump and may even consider having more children.' Yeah? Well I use my beer gut to shave so there you go! He even says, and this is the really funny part, 'It's My Right, Pregnant Man Tells Oprah.'

Something is definitely wrong with the world today. Don't get me wrong - I'm not homophobic, and I support gay & lesbian marriages, but there is something distinctly unwholesome about this, like giving pigs hearts to human patients with angina, or giving free NHS surgery of vaginal 'tucks' and labia corrective surgery to young women in order to make them feel good about themselves by having good looking, tight vaginas. Has the world gone mad?

Am I merely someone showing my age, or do other people think, like me, that this is really odd?

The Wandering Thai!

Long ago we used to hear the story of the Wandering Jew which so often permeates Western literature. Nowadays, in Asia, we have that poor old man called Thaksin Shinawatra who, it seems is a Wandering Thai without a home despite his 2 billion dollar wealth.

A former Thai prime minister, he was ousted in a bloodless coup in 2007 whilst he was giving a speech to the United Nations in New York. Off he then went to buy up an English football team called Manchester City so that he could win back the support of the Thai people who are absolutely crazy about football especially the Premier League in England.

That didn't work and he ended up selling the club because he needed the money owing to the fact that The Royal Thai government seized a large chunk of his assets held in Thai banks due to corruption charges. He was then sentenced to two years in jail in absentia whereupon (unlike another famous citizen, Socrates, who ate his hemlock rather than disobey the laws of the land) he promptly declared that the charges were politically motivated.

And now we hear that his visa has been revoked from the UK which means that when he leaves his current abode (he's holding up in China apparently and building a 30 million dollar mansion there) he'll have nowhere to go. England doesn't want him, The Phillipines doesn't either (the government under Gloria Aroyyo publicly stated so yesterday) so he is fast becoming a complete outcast. Thaksin must be thinking about the words of that song now - like Van 'the man' Morrison says: 'Gonna shout it every night, Gonna shout it every day, G.L.O.R.I.A, G.L.O.R.I.A'

Perhaps the Burmese will take him as he is known to have had strong ties (not Thais) with his former, near neighbours, the military junta, and especially General Than Shwe allowing them to traffic their drugs along the Golden Triangle, the border with China, Laos and Thailand, and lock up Nobel Prize winning citizens like Aung San Suu Kyi who won an election in the country but was then subsequently jailed as a reward for her troubles.

Poor, poor man! What dreadful luck could have befallen such a clearly talented individual? What could he have done that was wrong to invite such a terrible punishment? What pound of flesh could he have asked for to bring about such rancour and bitterness? Well, the Thai people loved him for a while. His populist policies were selling 'like hot cakes' for a time: he brought in the 30-baht health scheme, where all citizens (read the poorest of the poor who were not surprisingly the ones who voted him into power) were guaranteed medical care for less than one US dollar. The One Tambon (no, not tampon, 'tambon' which is an area or region in Thailand, One Product)OTOP program which helped promote and sell local handicraft and locally produced products around the world. Oh yes! He was flying high for a while and it seemed like he could do no wrong. But then the bubble burst and his enemies surrounded him and stole his piece of the pie when his back was turned in New York! What ingrates, I ask you!!

His biggest mistake, and one which most Thai people even now refuse to accept, was his selling off state assets. They could forgive the fact that he had his hand in the proverbial cookie jar like an underfed Pooh Bear; they could forgive his crackdown on supposed drug dealers killing 2,000 people in extra judicial killings in 3 months (and thinking he was doing the Thai economy a favour by saving the cost of a trial for each suspect); they could even forgive him for the death of 120 people in the Tak Bai incident where protesters were herded onto the back of a truck after being savagely beaten by the police (I know because I saw the video myself), in 35 degree Celcius heat, handcuffed, forced to lie face down. The official verdict was that it was an accident. Yeah! Right, sure. Whatever you say Bro! But the selling off to Temasek Holdings, a Singapore company, of radio waves that belonged to the country, not his own company, Shin Corp, that was the last straw, the one that proverbially broke the camel's back!

I think there is a home for him. He should be captured and brought to jail on the charges he has been convicted of. There is a jail in Thailand called Bang Kwang - it's not as famous as its sister prison - The Bangkok Hilton, but it's a hovel of a place that would scare the screaming be-jesus out of Dante with his infernal capital of Hell - Pandemonium! Thaksin should be arrested wherever he is like that Taiwanese ex-president yesterday, Chen Shui-bian, who we all saw on CNN, waving his handcuffed hands in protest, thrown in to the cell, the door locked and the key thrown away. He deserves nothing less for the punishment he has meted out to those who had no rights or a voice to be heard!

A Political Houdini?

Am I the only person to notice this? The political Houdini magic trick has almost been pulled off? Doesn't it seem weird how Bush has come onto the political landscape, spent the 3 trillion dollar surplus that Clinton left him on wars and degrading the American image abroad? That he deliberately engineered a crisis like 9/11 to scare the living daylights out of the American people (who lets face it, aren't the most politically savvy or worldly wise anyway given the staple diet offered to them by their media outlets).

And now, right at the end of his presidency, the economy is in crisis, markets up and down like a playground swing, the economy in freefall, and he just walks away into the sunset like a cowboy of the American past, his job done successfully? He told us we were either with him or against him and that he'd always get who he wanted, like it said on thsoe wanted posters, dead or alive. Well he sure got Sadaam Hussein but the other one seems to have eluded him yet now right at the end he doesn't even seem to be looking. Why?

An historian might say this was simply a failed presidency full of missed opportunities and poor decisions. Those more cynical might say it was a clear plan, hatched probably by Dick Chaney to steer the world towards Neo Conservative values. Who knows, maybe they engineered the whole thing - the entire presidency? The vast increase in oil revenues benefitted who exactly? Qui bono? The Saudias? The Bushes have been doing business with them for 30 years. Other oil rich countries? We will never know what secret deals have been done with others to maintain this myth of Osama Bin Laden. A man who lives in some of the harshest terrain in the mountains of Pakistan who, like Neitzshe's Ubermensch, Superman, comes down from the mountain to change the world.
And tomorrow we will be swapping Osama with Obama if the polls live up to their predictions. But what if the politicians have got together like in David Rothkoph's 'Superclass' book which has as its central premise that only about 5-6,000 people run the world from people like Bush, George Soros, Cheney, Rupert Murdoch et al and they engineer every aspect of our lives to suit their own purposes. Read up on the Council of Foreign Relations if you want to know more about the shady people he's talking about too as that organisation, many people believe, is a front for the kinds of people David Rothkoph is talking about.

Seems to me like Bush has done very well for himself; a recovering alcoholic, born again Christian. His faith now must be as unshakeable as the Tower of Babylon. He has seemingly got everything he wanted.

All Roads Lead to …Saudia Arabia

I am now safely ensconced in Saudia Arabia (city undisclosed) working for a company as a teacher. My first impressions are mixed. As many before me, I had the impression that this country would be awash with terrorists, oppressed women, crazy drivers, inedible food but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact I have met a lot of kind people, a relaxed ambience, malls the size of Manhattan, gas prices lower than a cheeseburger, and facilities that would impress a sheikh.

I think there is a lot to be said for the impressions we get of foreign lands from our media outlets. Every other day you hear stories from Saudia Arabia of women being raped, or thieves being either beheaded or having their hands lopped off; of locals who run amok in other countries with bombs strapped to their torsos, of Arabs who consider a good day as one spent buying up everything that isn’t nailed down. Whilst some of this is undoubtedly true, as always, a little bit of discretion is necessary is one is to see the real picture.

I remember once being in college when I was about 19 and talking to a guy from Colrane, Northern Island. I had grown up listening to the BBC and other local TV channels telling me that everywhere in that forsaken land was full of mad, angry terrorists who would stop at nothing to blow up innocent people or kneecap those who didn’t toe their line (all puns intended!!) But this guy laughed when I asked him the following question – “isn’t it a bit dangerous living there?” The truth was, he’d never even seen a bomb let alone a dead body lying in the road so what does that tell us about the quality of the news we get? Well, it tells me that nothing is what it seems until you see it with your own eyes and experience it for yourself.

I had to laugh this morning when I was in a local mall. As I had a bit of time to kill before the shops opened, I picked up a local newspaper called Arab News. In it was a reference to a local Saudia lady who had the misfortune to be found with a Syrian man in a Starbucks drinking nothing other than a latte. She and the man were arrested by an organization called, and this is a funny name, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. It would seem that the lady in question had somehow contravened some or other article of this commission’s rules and was hauled to an interrogation centre for questioning whereby her mobile phone was confiscated and she was strip searched by members of the said commission (it was not mentioned as to whether the searchers were male or female).

It is hard to believe that such institutions exist and it reminds me of something from an Orwell novel e.g. 1984, where we learnt for the first time organizations like the Ministry of Truth, Ministry of Peace, Ministry of Love, and the Ministry of Plenty. But despite these anomalies, I think there is a lot to enjoy here and a freedom that few could imagine. Yes, we should be mindful of De Coqueville’s assertion that we can ‘judge a nation by the way it treats its prisoners’, especially if they are routinely tortured or beheaded as is sometimes the case in Saudia Arabia, but there is as always another side to the coin and we mustn’t ever forget that and allow our media outlets to paint a picture for us that is wholly inaccurate!

I’ll be posting more on my experiences here as they happen so stay tuned.

To be or not to be (an American…?)

Is it me, or has anyone else noticed the state of the USA today? There used to be a time when America led the world both politically and morally. She set the standards. She was looked up to. She was called ‘The world’s policeman’ for the way she held the moral as well as political clout to intervene in conflicts around the world, and had the ability to solve them. It was said too that ‘when America gets a cold, everyone else sneezes’. Now it seems that it’s America herself who’s got the cold.

Having just watched Michael Moore’s ‘Sicko’, I now see another side of this supposedly great nation; a nation clearly in decline both morally and politically. In one scene, an American woman living in Paris says that one of the reasons why America is such a bad place to live is because Americans are afraid of their government. This is a sad indictment of the realities of living in the richest country in the world; a country that is held by others as a paradigm for how to live; where people from the poorest countries of the world want to get to, to experience the ‘American dream’.

Healthcare is the main theme this time around for Michael Moore, and he makes a strong case for the way huge American drug and insurance companies are run for profit, who then pay off the politicians with cash donations, and where doctors and medical executives are given huge bonuses when they deny sick people the opportunity of a life-saving operation and who subsequently die. Even firefighters from 9/11 and volunteers to Ground Zero who all gave up their time to dig out bodies have been forced to go to Cuba for free medical care because their own government turned their back on them when they needed medical care as a direct result of their involvement in the clean up after 9/11. What kind of society is it that has bred a ‘me’ philosophy instead of a ‘we’ he asks?

America’s relationship with the rest of the world has never been worse with Americans and American interests despised globally. Undoubtedly, George Bush’s ‘You’re with us or against us’ philosophy has done a lot to divide America from many of its former allies, but there are a number of other factors that have contributed to this too. The refusal to formally sign up to the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change (when the USA is the biggest polluter and consumes two-thirds of the world’s energy), it’s invasion of Iraq (without full international approval or the ‘smoking gun’ to give it an air of legitimacy), it’s gung ho attitude to other nations that don’t follow the American political line: North Korea, Iran and the so-called aspects of the ‘Axis of Evil’, and it’s unstated insistence that militaristic solutions are not always to be kept as a last resort. The list is endless and only goes to serve further notice that America now is in a very dark place; a place from which it’s unlikely to ever recover.

When you look at the economic perspective, it doesn’t add much needed light. America has just finally accepted that it’s in a recession. What that means is that the incumbent president, whether he be the first black man, Barak Obama, or the first woman, Hilary Clinton, will inherit a nation in complete meltdown. This is like a businessman buying a new company only to find that it’s teetering on bankruptcy. And when you remember that when Bush came to power almost 8 years ago, he inherited the biggest budget surplus in American history – some three trillion dollars of tax payer’s money which he went on to spend mostly on exporting war around the world.

It is this greed and general disregard for others that so characterizes modern liberal democracies like America and is something we should all take notice of. One has only to look at other successful societies of the past: the Greeks and subsequent demise as the premier state of its day to see a common parallel; add too the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, to see that ‘what goes around, comes around.’ In other words, America is now on her way out as a major superpower. No longer can she keep on sucking other countries dry. Recently, the billionaire financier George Soros was asked the question as to why America is now in recession, to which he replied - ‘America consumes 6% more than it produces, sucking up all the savings of the world.’ I can't help but be reminded of the comment by Will Durant, “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”

So the question worth asking is how is America going to solve this problem? What will the first woman or the first black man do to heal the damage done by the Bush years? To put America back at the forefront of political leadership that it has come to accept as its rightful place in the world? It’s interesting to note too whether it would have even been possible for these two firsts (black, female president) ever having any real chance of coming about had it not been for the disaster that has resulted politically because of Bush and his Neo–Conservative policies which have so disenfranchised others around the world?

The only thing I can say with any real certainty is that I’m glad I’m not an American for the road ahead is a long, economically uncertain one, full of surprises!