Silence

Politicians are really a strange breed. Too often clearly detached from reality. And certainly always spinning and focusing mainly on opinion polls and re-election strategies.

The fires of the UK shopping-riots are only just been put out but the political class (and related agencies) are fighting over who was the diving force behind the change of police tactics during the unrest.

It’s crazy. So much wasted energy and time is going into tit for tats between the British government and the police bosses on who was running the show. Is that the priority now? So off the rails!

And the list of riot suspects appearing before the courts – which stayed open for business 24/24 – is getting really ‘interesting’. A derailed society in the dock. A teacher, the daughter of a millionaire, an Olympic ‘ambassador’, an 11-year-old kid,…. So it’s certainly not just down-and-out youths from the empoverished, forgotten, parts of London. Just greedy opportunists gone over the edge. Humans with a need to have the latest Ipods, game consoles, cell phones, plasma screens,… to have a meaning in their lives. To feel ‘real’. To feel somebody. These people were already over the edge before the first window was smashed.

Human behavior is consumer driven. And image driven.

One rioter made an interesting comment on British TV. He said the banks stole so much more from the common people. True….. to a degree. Banks didn’t go burning down furniture stores that have been a family business for decades. There is financial looting – as the banks certainly did – and there is mob-raging looting and burning as those yobs did. You can’t compare apples and pears. Both issues need to be raised for sure but not put in the same trash bin. And don’t use one for an excuse for the other. Two wrongs don’t make a right.

An older man outside a job-outreach center said he doesn’t see the same energy when it comes down to seeking work. Maybe right. Maybe too simplistic.

What’s guaranteed is that the British Prime Minister will use it to talk tough and look like a real leader. The real truth is that what happened is complex and a result of decades of neglect on all levels. From investment to social-family aspects. You don’t cure the rot with a lick of paint.

For politicians human bevahior is dictated by the next news bulletin. Long term visions stretches till the next opinion poll.

From the ashes of London to…. the disgust. In the same metropolis.

A female medical expert (in HIV – but that’s not important here) was arrested and sentenced to 6 months in jail for keeping a 21-year-old Tanzanian woman as a slave in her London home. Crazy. But crazier is that she only gets 6 months penitentiary. That seems really little.

From London via Tanzania to the other side of Africa. The tiny nation of Benin in West Africa has seen piracy soaring off its coast. The Somali pirates off Africa’s east coast are a well-known, and expanding, threat. But now it seems that the same phenomenon is kicking off on the other side of the old continent too. The oceans are wide and vast, but it still seems somewhat strange that the world can’t really deal with this threat. Because obviously it’s not just an African problem as ships from many nations are being hijacked. From China to Saudi Arabia to Holland. There is so much military capability around, from planes to subs to satelittes, that it is astonishing that the pirates can still roam reasonably freely. Seek and destroy!

Staying in Africa. Corruption, financial wastage and lack of accountability are a disease that is keeping the continent from really advancing. In South Africa the president’s son-in-law got a contract worth some US$ 142.857.000 to built a new headquarter for one of the departments. But officials within that department say that there is no budget for a new building. And the normal procedures to decide on such a big spending haven’t been followed. It stinks and is one of those examples how the cancer of corruption is eating away at the building blocks of society. Sad. Very sad. Rotten to the presidential core.

Back to Africa’s West coast.

University students at Sierra Leone’s Fourah Bay College could not write their final exams some weeks back because……. there was no paper. Just no notebooks or printing-paper to do the exams. Crazy. The 4000 students were angry. Rightly so.

Human careers can depend on the availability of stationary.

It’s slightly insane how the US presidential race kicks off so early. The elections are next year November. Before that you have the parties’ conventions to elect their candidate. Before that you have a money-wasting rollercoaster of primaries starting early next year. And before that you have informal ‘straw polls’. And all that process costs billions of money that could be spent more wisely. For sure democracy can and should cost some cash because it is precious, but the campaigns in the US seem to start earlier and earlier and thus costing more and more. And money needs to come from somewhere and thus the question of whom is funding whom – and for what return – is a very pertinent one. The dirty underbelly of political financing. Very murky. Very.

And all this amidst a nation which is totally broke. So deep in the red we soon have to invent new digits.

So we just saw some Republican pre-pre-pre-selection happening and that tea-party lady seem to have come out top of the pile. For now. And after that straw-poll the Republican governor of Texas came out saying he also wants the key to the White House. So is the pre-race on republican side set for the tea party lady against the governor,…. with Palin waiting in the wings? For sure populism will get a boost.

Obama, corned it seems, then went on a mini-bus tour. So campaigning has clearly kicked off. The 2012 poll seems to be going as a contest between a second term for a bold-ish, black Democrat and either a right-wing chick or a Democrat-turned-Republican governor-with-a-reasonable-good-economic-track-record. The Democrat-in-the-White-House struggled – and still struggles – to put his dreams into reality and tackle the economic foes….., which without a doubt started already under his republican predecessor Bush Jr. The tea lady rides the populist wave but her hard-hitting rhetoric sounds good in 20 second clips but lacks content. And the govenor seems to be the balance between content and sloganesque tactics. The road is still politically long and thus it’s wait and see. But for sure the starting-gun has been fired and the race is on.

Forget Iran, Syria, Mexico, oil spills, melting ice, currency issues with China,…. It’s gonna be a race focusing on basic economic realities. And the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will linger on the sidelines. Memories to the Clinton-Bush Sr race. “It’s the economy, stupid!”

Sadly it’s gonna be loud, and full of numb slogans. An avalanche of hopes and promises. A deafening ghettoblaster of dirty attacks and money-wasting TV clips. Silence will be a luxury.

Or as Phillip Levine once wrote down. “Fact is, silence is the perfect water:
unlike rain it falls from no clouds
 to wash our minds, to ease our tired eyes,
to give heart to the thin blades of grass
fighting through the concrete for even air
dirtied by our endless stream of words.“

Throw out. NY’s punkrockers House Boat have just released a well-received new album called “The thorns of life”. It’s the lads’ second full-length. It’s cathy, acerbic punkrock with a raw pop edge. And with song titles like “A song in which I convince myself to stop being such a f* idiot” and “I live directly across the street from the outback steakhouse”,…. one can see their no-holds barred approach. The House Boat residents previously played in proven punkrock establishments like The Dopamines, Dear Landlord, The Steinways and Off With Their Heads. “The thorns of life” is the perfect album to survive the traffic rush hour.

C -Ya

collateral – August 2011 is still breathing