#93 Words Over The Body Of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel

July 19, 2016

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Though I can’t condemn you more – no one could

I’d gladly understand a little less

But in anger way past anger, bitterness beyond bile

I too might fail to wrestle the beast in me.

Yet it’s one thing to see la bête humaine

Another to explain quite how you came there

Relative poverty and petty degradation –

Backstairs in hotels where smoking’s a misdemeanour,

Airless in apartment blocks where the sun makes no concessions,

Arrested for small crime and once upon a time

Driving asleep at the wheel,

These count for little against you playing

Space Invaders – carry on le camion,

Bleeping the lives of others like dots on screen.

And what about the sex you used to fix yourself?

The dating app, the roving eye, a bare

Chested selfie shot against the salsa sky.

Scenario for an Amy Winehouse song, already awry.

‘Holy warrior’, how could that be you?

Whichever one you were at any time, the other came too.

The parts don’t match, p’rhaps that’s the only point.

No single mode makes sense of your existence.

For this poor patchwork you brought Perdition to the Promenade?

When you’re the only one, Bouhlel, who should be on the road to Hell.

#92 After The Truck Stopped In Nice

July 16, 2016

Forty-something man sitting on the ground: cross-legged; a little lop-sided. Hair receding, cut short (not shorn) to minimise. Shorts, t-shirt, hooded top; sandals scuffed – they’ve schlepped a few pavements, not just the beach. Wrists resting on bended knees, fingers interlocking.

The position his hands are in seems one stop short of prayer, but this man has already reached a moment of quiet contemplation; perhaps hundreds then thousands of such moments throughout the warm moistening of a Mediterranean night.

I have stopped short of saying what he’s contemplating. Because I don’t rightly know. On the one hand he is not directly contemplating the thing under the pink beach towel within touching distance of where he is sitting, because the pink beach towel is covering that thing so that no one – least of all this man – has to contemplate it simply as a thing, no longer a human being. On the other hand, the man is only there because the thing is; the thing that is, that used to be human.

Maybe this is how it works: sitting but not quite touching the thing that is, this is the closest he can get to the being that was; and if he sits there long enough, he may even be able to reconcile himself to the fact that ‘is’ and ‘was’ are irreconcilable.

Or perhaps it’s nothing of the sort, and he’s only there, looking with infinite tenderness upon the hidden corpse of a lost loved one, because he can’t contemplate being anywhere else.

#91 Letter To America: Why The World Looks At You Apathetically

July 14, 2016

There’s this guy coming round one side of the pillar and there’s another guy coming round the other side. The other guy can see the first guy but the first guy doesn’t know the other guy is there. Just when you think they’re doing a Keystone Cops routine, cue plinky-plonk piano accompaniment – there’ll be collisions and custard pies any second now, the splat, splat, splat you hear is the sound of the second guy shooting the first one repeatedly, killing him calmly and deliberately; as if this is a state execution rather than a lone ranger raging against whites and white police officers particularly.

How to read your movements, America? The lightning fast transfer from tawdry to tragic – how do you do that? And back again the other way: from killer-cop/cop-killer pathos to the bathos of men in vests who were never the target, talking too much about how they survived the shooting.

Over the years and down the decades, you’ve made the switch, done the commute so often you don’t seem to notice the distance. Awesome, for example, made banal by you bringing it to the mall. Pathetic, originally inviting sadness and pity but latterly meaning paltry and inadequate. Both pathos and bathos, in other words, now joined together in that bastard adjective of yours.

Never mind if their meanings started out drastically different; it’s not the American Way to keep two words open for business when you can size it down to one. Instead you stick to what Henry Ford would have done.

But his kind of compression can cause compassion fatigue elsewhere. America, the world outside….oh yes, there is….that doesn’t know what to make of you, would hardly know how to care for you even if it wanted to; even if some of your cities were on the point of catching fire. read more

#90 Tony Blair Revisited: Echoes and Mirrors

July 8, 2016

Voice thinned out instead of thickening with retirement, the sing-song intonation remains the same; but resonance that went with residence in No 10, has duly gone away.

Open-faced, hand-on-heart, put a beard on him and you could take this for a devotional picture of Our Lord, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ! Is that what he thinks – my cross to bear, I did it for the sins of the world? Or is it only how he’s playing it – playing us? Perhaps for him the distinction is false: what works is what is; and that’s the end of it.

Tony Blair, who stepped down in 2007 after 10 years as UK prime minister, has been brought back to Basra and Baghdad by publication of the Chilcot Report – the much-delayed findings of a seven-year-long inquiry chaired by senior civil servant Sir John Chilcot, into Britain’s military role in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 and the subsequent occupation of Iraq.

Chilcot has reported that Blair chose to declare an unnecessary war. This means that the British troops killed in action, one hundred and seventy-nine of them, died unnecessarily; to say nothing of thousands of civilians slaughtered and more than a million Iraqis displaced in the sectarian chaos which ensued after the occupying forces dismantled the state of Iraq.

Anticipating strong criticism from bereaved families, immediately after the high profile launch of the Chilcot Report, Blair held his own press conference at Admiralty House (nice gaff if you can get it), in which he apologised for how much hurt the war had caused, but insisted that on the basis of what he knew at the time, he would do the same again.

Although he had plenty to say (the press conference went on for two hours), Blair’s brittle voice – his, but with the bass taken out – was reduced to a tremulous echo of the tracks he recorded previously, as prime minister.

But no one asks why Iraq came top of the target list post-9/11. At the time, Western leaders surely felt the need to verify themselves in a suitably spectacular way (naming their invasion ‘Shock and Awe’ is just one indication of its essentially theatrical nature). But why, when Al Qaeda terrorists had been identified as ‘networked’, ‘de-centralised’ and even ‘postmodern’, did Tony Blair and US president George Bush attack a regime such as Saddam’s, renowned for its highly centralised bureaucracy? Unless Iraq came top of the hit list not least because in its centralised, partially modernised aspects it resembled the discarded social structure and the semi-socialist architecture which Britain and America had only recently come to despise. read more

#89 Bravery On Both Sides

July 8, 2016

‘Oh God, My God, I am safe’, the Eritrean sings.
A fine voice and such good bones might make a model of him yet,
If strong enough for years of standing at the foot of Europe, waiting.

As the hazy cliffs of Sicily have jettisoned the threat of drowning,
Of ending up bagged up as salt-cured rag and bleached bone,
Now comes the more hazardous process, where process is the hazard
That has him under heel, grinds down good bones,
Sneers and sniffs at the magic dust of brave decisions.

The courage to get in the boat; or to jump ship – Brexit.
Bumptious bumpkins breaking Britain’s delicate brokerage.
Better, they felt, than being un-London and unloved.

Once in a lifetime, no going back. Already the brokers have begun again.
Two years’ talks and that’s just the start. Negotiation,
Negotiation, negotiation – that’s what they stand for, an end in itself.
So here we are, where there’s no there, there. The centre, cynically,
Need not break nor hold – only hold back the Eritreans.

#88 A Soldier Featured In The Battle of the Somme, The First-Ever War Film, Looks Back At The Camera And The Generals Still Standing Behind It 100 Years Later

July 5, 2016

A Soldier Featured In The Battle of the Somme, The First-Ever War Film, Looks Back At The Camera And The Generals Still Standing Behind It 100 Years Later

‘You lookin’ at me?’, his eyes are saying, his

Shoulders draped with a comrade’s shelled-out body.

Dead or alive I brought him with me, I’d miss

Him madly every night, never sleeping if he were left out there like nothing much.

Go back and use the earth as camouflage, you declare

Bury myself as good as, without saying it as such.

Must be the passage of time. Didn’t know you cared enough to sever

Self from interest; still less spare a thought for mine.

Nonetheless I will agree it’s better later than never.

But first do describe to me the rest of your century.

The one I missed because I died for nothing much.

Only tell me, since you started it, how did you end this purgatory?

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