Letters to my sons.

Dear Son,

today in Iraq a suicide bomber drove his car close to an American soldier and blew his car up. The American soldier had been handing sweets and water to Iraqi children so unsurprisingly some children were killed as well.

This act, terrible as it was at face value, needed some more spin attaching to it. According to Channel4 news, eye witnesses report that the bomber made certain that he killed as many children as possible. The BBC hasn’t reported this “fact” but it may true or it may be false. I can understand why the spin would have to be added. Think for a moment what this means if he didn’t intend kill the children. It means that they were “collatoral damage”, an accident and killing them is okay because he never meant it. Well no, it doesn’t mean that because killing civillians is never right who ever you are.

It looks like the bombers in London were suicidce bombers as well. They appear to have been young men prepared to die for something they believed in. If they had been troops in an army their deaths would be mourned in poetry and we would be extolled to remember them with the going down of the sun. They will either be painted as evil or as easily led, which is also how the opponents of the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, like to paint him.

I have existsed in a Naked Lunch world for at least 10 years now. William Burrows defined a Naked Lunch moment as when time stands still in a restaurant and you can see people holding forks at their open mouths. David Bedeale described a Naked Lunch moment in terms of watching ballet: the moment that you realise that you are watching men and women prancing around a stage, dressed in white, to music.

We live in world were it is wrong to steal, unless you have the twin mights of millitary power and the ability to write the official history after the event has happened. On the day that Australia celebrated 200 years since it’s “discovery”, an aboriginy stood on the beach at Dover and claimed the UK for his people. This act all the more absurd as aborginies had no concept of land ownership when the English arrived. Leon Trotsky signed away the countries of Estonian, Latvia and Lithuania over to a brutal and repressive Imperial Germany without first asking the people in those countries what they wanted or heeding his own rhetoric regarding capitalism. Yet we have paper sellers up and down the country extolling his political ideas and passing them off as “freedom”. The man they worship created a terrorist system, later inherited by Stalin, that murdered over 20 million people. But without a hint of irony or respect for the truth they hold banners proclaiming that George W Bush is the worlds biggest terrorist. At this present time in history he is, but in the last 100 years he is not. Modern day Nazis have Holocaust Denial, John Major had genocide-denial in Rwanda and we have a politcal party called “Respect” that doesn’t.

I can’t even take solice in the summer transfer activity with the Toon. We have lost 3 defenders, 2 midfielders and 2 strikers. So far we have one midfielder coming in, Scott Parker and Dyer has signed an extension to his contract. Compounding the loss of three defenders, Titus Bramble has an injury that could see him miss the 1st three months of the season. Things are not looking good.