The Angry Exile: What the hell is Obama talking about here?

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? [...] We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

The Hangman

Into our town the Hangman came,
Smelling of gold and blood and flame.
And he paced our bricks with a diffident air,
And built his frame in the courthouse square.
The scaffold stood by the courthouse side,
Only as wide as the door was wide;
A frame as tall, or little more,
Than the capping sill of the courthouse door.
And we wondered, whenever we had the time,
Who the criminal, what the crime
That the Hangman judged with the yellow twist
of knotted hemp in his busy fist.
And innocent though we were, with dread,
We passed those eyes of buckshot lead --
Till one cried: "Hangman, who is he
For whom you raised the gallows-tree?"
Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye,
And he gave us a riddle instead of reply:
"He who serves me best," said he,
"Shall earn the rope of the gallows-tree."
And he stepped down, and laid his hand
On a man who came from another land.
And we breathed again, for another's grief
At the Hangman's hand was our relief
And the gallows-frame on the courthouse lawn
By tomorrow's sun would be struck and gone.
So we gave him way, and no one spoke,
Out of respect for his Hangman's cloak.
The next day's sun looked mildly down
On roof and street in our quiet town,
And stark and black in the morning air
Was the gallows-tree in the courthouse square.
And the Hangman stood at his usual stand
With the yellow hemp in his busy hand;
With his buckshot eye and his jaw like a pike
And his air so knowing and business-like.
And we cried, "Hangman, have you not done
Yesterday, with the foreign one?"
Then we fell silent, and stood amazed,
"Oh, not for him was the gallows raised."
He laughed a laugh as he looked at us:
"Did you think I'd gone to all this fuss
To hang one man? That's a thing I do
To stretch a rope when the rope is new."
Then one cried "Murder!" and one cried "Shame!"
And into our midst the Hangman came
To that man's place. "Do you hold," said he,
"with him that was meant for the gallows-tree?"
And he laid his hand on that one's arm.
And we shrank back in quick alarm!
And we gave him way, and no one spoke
Out of fear of his Hangman's cloak.
That night we saw with dread surprise
The Hangman's scaffold had grown in size.
Fed by the blood beneath the chute,
The gallows-tree had taken root;
Now as wide, or a little more,
Than the steps that led to the courthouse door,
As tall as the writing, or nearly as tall,
Halfway up on the courthouse wall.
The third he took -- we had all heard tell --
Was a usurer, and an infidel.
"What," said the Hangman "have you to do
With the gallows-bound, and he a Jew?"
And we cried out, "Is this one he
Who has served you well and faithfully?"
The Hangman smiled: "It's a clever scheme
to try the strength of the gallows-beam."
The fourth man's dark, accusing song
Had scratched our comfort hard and long;
"And what concern," he gave us back.
"Have you for the doomed -- the doomed and Black?"
The fifth. The sixth. And we cried again,
"Hangman, Hangman, is this the man?"
"It's a trick," he said. "that we hangmen know
For easing the trap when the trap springs slow."
And so we ceased, and asked no more,
As the Hangman tallied his bloody score.
And sun by sun, and night by night,
The gallows grew to monstrous height.
The wings of the scaffold opened wide
Till they covered the square from side to side;
And the monster cross-beam, looking down,
Cast its shadow across the town.
Then through the town the Hangman came,
Through the empty streets, and called my name --
And I looked at the gallows soaring tall,
And thought, "There is no one left at all
For hanging, and so he calls to me
To help pull down the gallows-tree."
So I went out with right good hope
To the Hangman's tree and the Hangman's rope.
He smiled at me as I came down
To the courthouse square through the silent town.
And supple and stretched in his busy hand
Was the yellow twist of the hempen strand.
And he whistled his tune as he tried the trap,
And it sprang down with a ready snap --
And then with a smile of awful command
He laid his hand upon my hand.
"You tricked me. Hangman!," I shouted then,
"That your scaffold was built for other men...
And I no henchman of yours," I cried,
"You lied to me, Hangman. Foully lied!"
Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye,
"Lied to you? Tricked you?" he said. "Not I.
For I answered straight and I told you true --
The scaffold was raised for none but you.
For who has served me more faithfully
Then you with your coward's hope?" said he,
"And where are the others who might have stood
Side by your side in the common good?"
"Dead," I whispered. And amiably
"Murdered," the Hangman corrected me:
"First the foreigner, then the Jew...
I did no more than you let me do."
Beneath the beam that blocked the sky
None had stood so alone as I.
The Hangman noosed me, and no voice there
Cried "Stop!" for me in the empty square.

Maurice Ogden

Friday, 15 July 2011

What the hell is Obama talking about here?

Seriously, can someone who speaks American make sense of these remarks on the subject of America's worrying debt level and the possibility of the country losing it's top credit rating?

"...we might as well do it now – pull off the Band-Aid, eat our peas."
"They're in one week and they're out one week... You need to be here. I've been here. I've been doing Afghanistan and bin Laden and the Greek crisis. You stay here. Let's get it done."

The words are English and I can understand them just fine, but the some of the sentences have left me confused. Don't mistake this for snooty English criticism of how the Yanks use the language. They can use it any way they want or not at all as far as I'm concerned. If they want fanny to mean arse and bum to mean tramp and all those other little difference that's more than fine by me as I need only learn a little vocabulary rather than a whole language, and like lots of others I watch enough American TV that I'm pretty confident in my ability to get by. But this time, and admittedly it's not unprecedented when it comes to American presidents, I just don't know what the fuck he means.

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smokervoter · 714 weeks ago

The Band-Aids comment is in reference to when you've had an adhesive bandage on a cut or a scrape for a while, a scab has formed, and pulling it off with be painful. Eating your peas is about kids not wanting to eat their vegetables at dinner time. Band-Aids is a brand name. A 'band-aid' solution is one that only temporarily solves a problem.

Truth be told, Obama isn't nearly as articulate as he's given credit for. Half the time I don't understand him either. I think it's because he quit smoking. When he smoked his thought process was much steadier and he spoke rather fluently. I know of what I speak here. I once quit for about a month and found that I couldn't put two sentences together. Needless to say, I went back to smoking and have lived happily ever after. And I hope that fact is in evidence here as I capitalize all of my "I's", spell correctly even in the absence of a spellchecker, and hopefully answered your question clearly and concisely.

I like your blog. I came upon it via Leg-irons blogroll.

1 reply · active 714 weeks ago

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Angry_Exile 90p · 714 weeks ago

Actually I should have highlighted the Band-Aid bit as one of the few parts that made sense (same brand is available everywhere in the UK and Australia), at least in isolation. It was the strange non sequitur from sticking plasters to small, boiled legumes that made little sense. As for the second bit, well, all I can say is that unlike Clinton I suspect he did inhale. Either that or you're right and he needs the nicotine hit back, though I've seen those YouTube clips of him speaking when the autocue has broken down and he sounded as articulate as someone with severe concussion.

Thanks for the comment about the blog. Pop along anytime you feel like reading potty mouthed rantings of some deranged English guy hanging upside down off the world's arse and surrounded by deadly spiders :D

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smokervoter · 714 weeks ago

Except of course for the fact that I should have said "pulling it off will be painful". Sorry about that.

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smokervoter · 714 weeks ago

Maybe I should quit smoking again. Correction: I came upon your blog through Pat's Nurse's Tea and Cigarettes blogroll, although I do read Leg-iron's blog twice and occasionally thrice daily. I've got my dunce cap back on now.

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smokervoter · 714 weeks ago

While we're chatting here, could I ask you a question about the current attitude towards cigarette smoking in Australia?

Let me preface this by saying that from some of the things I've read about the situation, it is shredding the mental picture I have of the land from Down Under. I much prefer my notion of Crocodile Dundee and the 'No Rules Just Right' slogan of our Outback Steakhouse' chains here to some of the comments I read on that John Humphries opinion piece. There were over 400 comments! I realize that articles like that really bring out the keyboard toughies, but, jeez, some of them were really off the wall. Loads of goody-goods. Please say it ain't so.

If you were to light up in public there, would someone come up to you and order you to put it out?

3 replies · active 714 weeks ago

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Angry_Exile 90p · 714 weeks ago

Oh dear, I think I have some bad news for you. Yes, it was a disappointment for me too to move here and find that the legendary free spirited, strong willed, independent minded Ocker spirit was in fact, er, well, legendary. Aussies are no worse than Europeans, Brits or many Americans, but when told to jump through hoops they're more likely to sigh and say 'Yeah, well, if I have to' than they are to say 'Fuck off, I'm just going to do it anyway.' I'd say there's an unnecessarily large bureaucracy (though I'd say that of most countries and almost all bureaucracies of any size), a lot of regulation and an annoying nanny state. Varies from state to state of course, and as an American you'll understand that better than many of my fellow Brits, but here in Victoria it's very highly regulated and getting to the point you almost need a licence to fart and endorsed subsections for if you need to let one loose in a different direction than the one on your farting licence. In other words it's getting rather like Britain, though a lot of this regulation is more annoying than genuinely worrying. Britain is ripe to be turned into a dictatorship just as soon as it elects someone mad enough to use some of the powers created in the last ten years, while in Oz they just want you to spend your money on approvals and permissions from various people.

As for smoking, you probably know already from reading Leg-iron's and Pat Nurse's blogs that smoking is now banned in all public buildings, public transport, bars, clubs, pubs, restaurants, cafés, etc. Didn't used to be everywhere but they were going that way a state/territory at a time when I got here and the Northern Territory were the last to fall into line about 2 years ago. There are also some places where you can't smoke outdoors. For example, in the Melbourne metro area I know of three beaches and one outdoor shopping precinct - and there may be more for all I know - that have been designated non smoking by their respective local councils. You might well be told to put it out and be fined if caught smoking there, though there's the practical matter of enforcement - in the case of one of the beaches they can't fucking stop IV drug use and have to sieve the sand for syringes daily on summer mornings and weekly at this time of year, and if they can't stop people shooting up I can't see how they expect to stop smokers lighting up. Still, the anti-smoking wowsers are a vocal lot and currently they have the ear of the politicians, hence $16 a pack (our dollar or yours, about the same at the moment), no displays allowed - in some places not even allowed in a fucking tobacconist's - and this current drive towards mandatory plain packets. The illegal tobacco trade must be thinking all their Christmases must be coming at once.

That's the bad news. The good is that a lot of this shit is confined to the major urban areas. We're nearly the size of the lower 48 US states and our whole population is smaller than that of Texas on it's own, and that means there's a hell of a lot of rural Australia with towns from a few thousand people all the way down to a few dozen. Some of the really small places may be a couple of hundred miles from the police station and two or three times that to the state capital. In such places discreet smoking may happen if everyone knows everyone else and they're pretty sure the local cop's not likely to show up for a day or two - I've certainly seen smoking in an outback pub post-ban. Also some parts of the country are good for growing tobacco plants, and in fact it used to be a cash crop so there are probably a few tobacco plants growing wild here and there. I reckon the potential for home growth and the difficulty in policing such a huge and relatively unpopulated country mean that even if they went nuts and made it illegal - and ate the $10bn loss in tax revenue that'd mean - there'd still be smoking going on. As it happens I think the neo-puritans are starting to meet resistance as even my fellow ex- and non-smokers are beginning to think the smokers are getting a raw deal and to notice that the nannying is spreading beyond just smokers. Bottom line is that I'd say it's probably better than the UK for nannying in general, worse in some respects wrt smokers but better in others, but it's not as good as it was and overall the two nations are only 5-10 years apart. Wouldn't like to make firm predictions about which is likely to turn back first but I have hopes for Oz. Hard to compare to the US as I haven't been there for a fair while.

On a slight tangent and going back to the point about the large amount of empty land here, one of the nice things if you like roughing it a bit is that a day or two's drive can get you so far away from civilisation that all its rules and petty regulation feel a million miles away. When the bastards are getting to be too much there's no better place that I've been for getting away from them for a bit. It's chock full of things that want you dead, of course, but wonderfully peaceful for all that.

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smokervoter · 714 weeks ago

Excellent. You write with a lot of flair my friend. What really stuck me was that Australia is the size of the lower 48 with only 22 million people(that's right isn't it?). I'm California born and raised and have never been east of the Rockies, but they tell me it's nice. Just Los Angeles and the San Francisco area alone have 25 million people in sum.

They're both horrid 'All Rules - Just Right' (err, Left) cities. Likewise, get out and away from them and you get back to the free-wheeling California of popular folklore. Rule of thumb for smoking - Wikipedia the voting records of the place - heavily Democrat (read: Labour) - expect pricey tickets, and for every 'crime' under the sun.

I'm not sure whats gotten into people over the past twenty years. Who really wants to be told NO all the time?

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Angry_Exile 90p · 714 weeks ago

Yep, that's our size and population to the nearest whatever. Pretty empty place when you're away from the cities. Sure, lots of places like that in the US too, but if you go bush here in the back of your mind you know it's even more remote. There are places where it's so flat, hot, dry and quiet that you can easily imagine what it's like to be the last person alive on the planet... and then an hour and a half later you meet a perfect stranger coming the other way who turns out to live ten miles away in the same city as you. This has actually happened to me once. By comparison Britain packs three times the whole Oz population into an area the size of Victoria, the second smallest state and the smallest on the mainland. Because of that the place still feels almost empty to me even though I've been here several years now.

As for comparison with California, hard for me to say as I've spent little time there and other than TV and news I don't know it well. From what I see and what you say you might find parts of Oz, especially our eastern states, a bit like California. Certainly there are some quite hefty fines for some quite trivial and victimless offences, and it doesn't seem to matter whether the Liberals (who aren't liberal in either sense, the contemporary US meaning or the classical laissez faire - more akin to the Republicans except they're generally monarchists) are in charge or Labor (who for some reason are the only people who spell the word without a 'u'). Compulsory bicycle helmets are a good example - the fine for not wearing one here in VIC is about 150 bucks. Yep, you read that right - 150 fucking dollars for choosing to accept an increased risk to your own safety which affects absolutely nobody else. I've no idea which party was running Victoria when it was brought in but neither seem interested in doing away with it and treating cyclists like adults. As in many countries, certainly including Britain but from an outsiders point of view probably the US as well, there's often a huge overlap of policy and attitude with the main parties and no difference at all on the kind of things that I care about as a libertarian. When you want the government to stop telling you what to do all the time why the fuck would you care who it is that's doing the telling?

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smokervoter · 714 weeks ago

That's a funny thing. The nanny state in California officially was kicked off twenty years ago when they made motorcycle helmets mandatory. That was the end of one of my absolute passions in life - dirt/street-biking. My Yamaha still sits out in the garage in silent homage. Couldn't handle the loss of peripheral vision and sound awareness, not to mention the bad hair.

Shortly thereafter came the start of tobacco prohibition. That was the beginning of the end of California the free.

At this point in time I can still pedal my bicycle without a helmet. But...the Mayor of Los Angeles was recently involved in a bicycle accident and gave a press conference lamenting the fact that bicycle helmets weren't mandatory. He also had bicyclist/major asshole Lance Armstrong over from the state of Texas at the news conference to push for a doubling of our state tobacco tax to fund more cancer research.

He went so far as to call it (cancer research) a potential growth industry that would help solve California's current financial woes.

Green jobs and more ad nauseam tobacco research - the nanny economy of the future.

I think I see mandatory life vests while surfing on the horizon, just beyond that outside set of waves.

1 reply · active less than 1 minute ago

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Angry_Exile 90p · 714 weeks ago

The mayor of Los Angeles is - and I choose my words with care - a twat. If he thinks a bike helmet would have been useful why the hell wasn't he wearing one anyway? My dad told me he didn't wait for seatbelts to become compulsory in Britain before using them - it seemed like a good idea so when he got a car that had them he used them. Why wait for the bloody government to order you to do it? Has LA enacted an ordinance banning nailing yourself to a table with steak knives? No? Does the mayor ever do it? No? Surprise surfuckingprise. So why doesn't the muppet apply the same line of reasoning to getting a fucking skid lid for when he's riding his pushie? As it happens it sounds like a lid wouldn't have made any difference since he's alive and able to pontificate about it, and as a politician he probably wasn't terribly logical to begin with. A cynic might even wonder whether a safe fall off the bicycle was actually deliberate and the first step in a campaign for mandatory helmets.

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