Most people in the West are tolerant – if that’s the word – of same-sex sexual relationships, but half of us draw the line at same-sex marriages. Why is that? Most people in the world probably couldn’t care less if siblings live together, but very few approve of sexual goings-on between or among them. Almost all of them would draw the line at sibling marriages. Why is that?
What is so special about marriage? It can’t be all about children, surely, in these sophisticated times. At least, not in the West. Promiscuity is blatant, adoptions are easy, artificial insemination is routine, divorces are simple, surgical sex-changes abound, birth control is everywhere, and serial monogamy is the norm. The old ideal of “the nuclear family” has gone out the window.
Why should we (society) draw the line anywhere, as long as there are no children involved or envisioned? What would be lost, if we scrapped the idea that society needs to formally approve every marriage? Nothing. Not a damn thing. The law governing civil contracts can take care of any children.
Is it about taxes, pensions or other entitlements? It may be. The last surviving widow of a US Civil War veteran died in 2003, and the last surviving son of a US Civil War Veteran was still alive just last year. (I would want a DNA test for him, but the relevant US Government agency was still paying his pension of $70 a week.)
It was the custom for young girls to be married off to ancient Veterans specifically in order to inherit their lifetime pensions. Sex was not always required of them. Deathbed marriages were just a way for old codgers to do their friends’ families a favour. Sometimes the favours would be reciprocal. Today’s marriages of convenience are following some fine precedents.
Some private companies will not pay spouses’ lifetime benefits (pension and medical) if the age gap is greater than a designated number of years. It’s a good idea. Why don’t national governments introduce a similar measure? Or, why don’t they simply get out of the marriage-approval business altogether? (Or, busybody-ness, which is what it really is.)
The original purpose of community-approved marriage was to give tribal elders the power to ensure the stability of the ruling classes. In the earliest civilisations, marriages within the nobility had to be carefully monitored to mimimise the likelihood of factional rebellions. Marriages were designed to cement alliances of families, clans and factions.
The serfs were generally left alone to arrange their own marriages, though rulers kept a weather eye out for suspicious alliances. Slave families were deliberately split up in order to remove any temptation to plot against their masters. It happened to the Africans in the Americas, and the provenance is an old one.
The difference with same-sex relationships was the absence of children, but in actuality the ruling classes were less against homosexual marriages than for the traditional form. Long ago, empires in China were largely governed by eunuchs, whose value to emperors was that they could not produce lineages to which they might owe their primary loyalties.
National histories are cluttered with examples of military dynasties jostling for political power. As individual rights have gradually superseded community rights, the reason for the official licensing of marriages has lessened. There is no point in the custom any more, and if it were scrapped altogether, it would be no loss.
Even today, there is occasional deep suspicion by hereditary rulers of a “Pink Mafia” whose members, like Masonic lodges, might be loyal to each other at the expense of loyalty to the community as a whole or to the ruling classes. That kind of loyalty might indeed exist here and there, but formal marriage doesn’t and wouldn’t frustrate it. Some state, somewhere, ought to have the courage to give up on marriage altogether. It doesn’t serve any useful purpose any more.
Monday, March 31, 2014
Saturday, March 22, 2014
“The death of Lady Mondegreen”
Things aren’t always what they seem, in the English language. They say (“They”!) that English is the easiest language in the world to be understood in, but one of the hardest to speak well. With only 800 words (They say), a total stranger can get by, but years of practice will usually leave him a bit short of perfection. (Surely German is fifty times more difficult. It’s a wonder anybody speaks it well. And actually, when you think about it, we only have their word for it that anybody does speak it well.)
English spelling is a hodge-podge of folk-etymology and class eccentricities. Who else but the English upper class would identify one’s nightly sleep as a dietary “fast” to the point of calling the first meal of the day “break-fast”, while abbreviating it to “brekkie”? Well, until recent Centuries only upper-class clerics were literate, and claimed to know everything there was to know about the language.
An infinitely more plausible speculation is that the word we pronounce brekfust is but a dialectal variant of Scandinavian frukost, which means a meal comprising fruit (fruk) and cheese (ost). That might be folk-etymology too, but who knows? Fruit and cheese is a man’s brekkie. When we break our “fast” is when we get up in the middle of the night for a pee and raid the fridge on the way back. I know, the Vikings didn’t have fridges, but they would have shared the same nocturnal habits. ***
*** A friend has pointed out that the Scandinavian word may have originated in the German word frueh-kost meaning "early food". This seems a more likely explanation than mine; but, either way, English "break-fast" is nonsense.
It was, reportedly, an 18th-Century Earl of Sandwich who introduced his handy snack to his aristocratic chums at the roulette wheel, but his serfs had been munching pieces of bread with bacon + a wedge of cheese for many generations before. One can picture the chums laughing at his adoption of such peasant fare: “A sarney-wedge, my lord? More of a Sand-wich, what, what? Hahaha!”
Next: why is “cupboard” spelt the way it is? A cupboard is a cubby-hole with a door, and a cubby is simply a variant of a cabi-net. All cupboards have doors. A cupboard without a door is a pantry. A board that you keep cups on is a shelf. Sheesh! The bizarre spelling “cupboard” is folk-etymology deriving from upper-class eccentricity.
My personal term for this sort of rot is “muster-bin”. The imagined origins of English surnames present a long list of muster-bin falsehoods. The first person bearing the surname Smith must ha’ bin a smith by trade. The first Mr Brown must ha’ bin brown in skin or hair or eyes. The first Jones and Johnson were the sons of men named John. And so on. They simply must have been. Actually, as we say in the Caribbean, “they don’t must.” There are more plausible alternative explanations for those names. But plausibility finds it hard to beat out facile assumptions.
To Lady Mondegreen, now. Not quite a folk-etymology, because it was invented by a child who grew up to be a writer – one Sylvia Wright. In 1954, she published an essay on a verse her mother used to read to her from an 18th-Century collection of ballads:
Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where have ye been?
They have slain the Earl o' Moray,
And Lady Mondegreen.
The little girl felt desperately sad for the poor lady who died with one of Scotland’s famous martyrs, and resented the poet’s failure to mention her again in his story. Decades passed before the adult Sylvia Wright actually read the poem for herself, and learned that the killers of the Earl o’ Moray had in fact laid him on the green. Unaccompanied.
Wikipedia tells the story, and gives other examples of what are today called Mondegreens. We all have our favourites. Bob Dylan sang “the ants are my friends”, Creedence in Bad Moon Rising sang “there’s a bathroom on the right”. And, at Number One, for me, the last verse of Psalm 23, which begins “Surely good Mrs Murphy shall follow me all the days of my life”.
English spelling is a hodge-podge of folk-etymology and class eccentricities. Who else but the English upper class would identify one’s nightly sleep as a dietary “fast” to the point of calling the first meal of the day “break-fast”, while abbreviating it to “brekkie”? Well, until recent Centuries only upper-class clerics were literate, and claimed to know everything there was to know about the language.
An infinitely more plausible speculation is that the word we pronounce brekfust is but a dialectal variant of Scandinavian frukost, which means a meal comprising fruit (fruk) and cheese (ost). That might be folk-etymology too, but who knows? Fruit and cheese is a man’s brekkie. When we break our “fast” is when we get up in the middle of the night for a pee and raid the fridge on the way back. I know, the Vikings didn’t have fridges, but they would have shared the same nocturnal habits. ***
*** A friend has pointed out that the Scandinavian word may have originated in the German word frueh-kost meaning "early food". This seems a more likely explanation than mine; but, either way, English "break-fast" is nonsense.
It was, reportedly, an 18th-Century Earl of Sandwich who introduced his handy snack to his aristocratic chums at the roulette wheel, but his serfs had been munching pieces of bread with bacon + a wedge of cheese for many generations before. One can picture the chums laughing at his adoption of such peasant fare: “A sarney-wedge, my lord? More of a Sand-wich, what, what? Hahaha!”
Next: why is “cupboard” spelt the way it is? A cupboard is a cubby-hole with a door, and a cubby is simply a variant of a cabi-net. All cupboards have doors. A cupboard without a door is a pantry. A board that you keep cups on is a shelf. Sheesh! The bizarre spelling “cupboard” is folk-etymology deriving from upper-class eccentricity.
My personal term for this sort of rot is “muster-bin”. The imagined origins of English surnames present a long list of muster-bin falsehoods. The first person bearing the surname Smith must ha’ bin a smith by trade. The first Mr Brown must ha’ bin brown in skin or hair or eyes. The first Jones and Johnson were the sons of men named John. And so on. They simply must have been. Actually, as we say in the Caribbean, “they don’t must.” There are more plausible alternative explanations for those names. But plausibility finds it hard to beat out facile assumptions.
To Lady Mondegreen, now. Not quite a folk-etymology, because it was invented by a child who grew up to be a writer – one Sylvia Wright. In 1954, she published an essay on a verse her mother used to read to her from an 18th-Century collection of ballads:
Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where have ye been?
They have slain the Earl o' Moray,
And Lady Mondegreen.
The little girl felt desperately sad for the poor lady who died with one of Scotland’s famous martyrs, and resented the poet’s failure to mention her again in his story. Decades passed before the adult Sylvia Wright actually read the poem for herself, and learned that the killers of the Earl o’ Moray had in fact laid him on the green. Unaccompanied.
Wikipedia tells the story, and gives other examples of what are today called Mondegreens. We all have our favourites. Bob Dylan sang “the ants are my friends”, Creedence in Bad Moon Rising sang “there’s a bathroom on the right”. And, at Number One, for me, the last verse of Psalm 23, which begins “Surely good Mrs Murphy shall follow me all the days of my life”.
Friday, March 14, 2014
In memory of Rachel Corrie
March 16th is the anniversary of the death of Rachel Corrie, a young American girl (aged 23) run down by an Israeli Army bulldozer in occupied Palestine while protesting the destruction of Palestinian homes.
All those of us who care about human rights should make a point of remembering her, and of respecting her physical bravery in defence of those rights. It takes a special degree of bravery to step outside the protection of one’s tribal and ethnic loyalties, in defence of members of some foreign community.
Often, there is a large element of naivety to physical bravery. Victoria Cross winners in war zones aren’t usually the sharpest knives in the drawer. Mostly, they seem to have the same mind-set as suicide bombers and kamikaze pilots – prepared to die for the sake of their fellows.
Military personnel in hospitals and ambulances, and individual medics who retrieve wounded soldiers from free-fire zones, often (usually?) presume “the enemy” won’t target them. Amazingly brave, and naïve. That describes young Rachel to a T. She seems to have believed that she would be protected by both her US citizenship and Israel’s notional human-rights ideals. Instead, a Los Angeles gang would have given her as much help.
I tend to bracket her name with that of Bradley Manning, the naïve young US Army clerk who blew the whistle on a war-crime committed in occupied Iraq by an Army helicopter crew. The killers were deemed to be acting in the best interests of the USA and were let off with a caution. Bradley was jailed for 35 years without parole, for putting a higher value on the lives of defenceless foreign civilians than on the gratification of his tribal fellows. How dare he!
During the US occupation of Vietnam, the unarmed civilian villagers of My Lai – mostly old folk and children – were hacked down en masse by an Army platoon, in the perceived best interests of the American people. Those killers, too, were let off with a caution. (I don’t know what happened to the whistle-blower of that atrocity; he probably fell out of a tall building somewhere…)
The theme common to all three incidents is the easy victory of tribal solidarity over universal human rights. One has to wonder why national leaders who condone such blatant flouting of the human-rights ideal even bother to pretend they care about the ideal. Is anybody ever taken in by the hypocrisy?
Western MSM (main-stream media) organs are currently reporting the US President’s hesitation in ordering the assassination of some obscure US citizen in Yemen. Hey, come on, man! The CIA has promised that the victim is a terrorist, a traitor, a Muslim, and a jobless layabout who picks his nose at the dinner-table. Is that not enough? Anyway, when sustained physical torture is such an everyday occurrence in the American gulag, why hesitate for an instant?
Perhaps there exists a skerrick of tribal solidarity in the President’s mind and the minds of his advisors. There certainly isn’t any sense of mercy there, or compassion. They will gladly order the slaughter of housefuls of innocents, as long as they are not fellow-citizens. I wonder how long that exemption will survive, though.
A blog of mine back in October 2012 (The war on women) speculated that those veteran soldiers and drone pilots who are not kept awake every night by their guilty consciences are well suited to become the torturers and executioners of our children and grandchildren, in a dystopian Big Brother society. Those who are kept awake by their memories are, by default, the hope of mankind. At least for as long as they manage not to kill themselves out of remorse. Ain’t that the truth?
All those of us who care about human rights should make a point of remembering her, and of respecting her physical bravery in defence of those rights. It takes a special degree of bravery to step outside the protection of one’s tribal and ethnic loyalties, in defence of members of some foreign community.
Often, there is a large element of naivety to physical bravery. Victoria Cross winners in war zones aren’t usually the sharpest knives in the drawer. Mostly, they seem to have the same mind-set as suicide bombers and kamikaze pilots – prepared to die for the sake of their fellows.
Military personnel in hospitals and ambulances, and individual medics who retrieve wounded soldiers from free-fire zones, often (usually?) presume “the enemy” won’t target them. Amazingly brave, and naïve. That describes young Rachel to a T. She seems to have believed that she would be protected by both her US citizenship and Israel’s notional human-rights ideals. Instead, a Los Angeles gang would have given her as much help.
I tend to bracket her name with that of Bradley Manning, the naïve young US Army clerk who blew the whistle on a war-crime committed in occupied Iraq by an Army helicopter crew. The killers were deemed to be acting in the best interests of the USA and were let off with a caution. Bradley was jailed for 35 years without parole, for putting a higher value on the lives of defenceless foreign civilians than on the gratification of his tribal fellows. How dare he!
During the US occupation of Vietnam, the unarmed civilian villagers of My Lai – mostly old folk and children – were hacked down en masse by an Army platoon, in the perceived best interests of the American people. Those killers, too, were let off with a caution. (I don’t know what happened to the whistle-blower of that atrocity; he probably fell out of a tall building somewhere…)
The theme common to all three incidents is the easy victory of tribal solidarity over universal human rights. One has to wonder why national leaders who condone such blatant flouting of the human-rights ideal even bother to pretend they care about the ideal. Is anybody ever taken in by the hypocrisy?
Western MSM (main-stream media) organs are currently reporting the US President’s hesitation in ordering the assassination of some obscure US citizen in Yemen. Hey, come on, man! The CIA has promised that the victim is a terrorist, a traitor, a Muslim, and a jobless layabout who picks his nose at the dinner-table. Is that not enough? Anyway, when sustained physical torture is such an everyday occurrence in the American gulag, why hesitate for an instant?
Perhaps there exists a skerrick of tribal solidarity in the President’s mind and the minds of his advisors. There certainly isn’t any sense of mercy there, or compassion. They will gladly order the slaughter of housefuls of innocents, as long as they are not fellow-citizens. I wonder how long that exemption will survive, though.
A blog of mine back in October 2012 (The war on women) speculated that those veteran soldiers and drone pilots who are not kept awake every night by their guilty consciences are well suited to become the torturers and executioners of our children and grandchildren, in a dystopian Big Brother society. Those who are kept awake by their memories are, by default, the hope of mankind. At least for as long as they manage not to kill themselves out of remorse. Ain’t that the truth?
Sunday, March 9, 2014
Turning left at Galveston
Everybody’s life has turning-points, and it’s a fascinating study. If one had taken a different bus, or visited a different house, or met a different person, one’s life today might have been quite, quite, different. Turning-points galore! But there is usually only one incident that actually defines one’s life, and it can be fun searching for it.
In my blog called Turning
Point in November last year, I reported that the famous American author Mark
Twain identified his personal turning point as when he contracted measles
(deliberately) at the age of twelve. The incident changed the entire course of
his life.
I identified my own personal turning point as having occurred at age 26, when I baulked at the prospect of a long wait to be interviewed by the US Immigration Office in London. With a long time to wait until my number would be called, I hurried around to the Canadian Consulate to see whether Canada’s queue was more manageable. They saw me right away, and I never went back.
I identified my own personal turning point as having occurred at age 26, when I baulked at the prospect of a long wait to be interviewed by the US Immigration Office in London. With a long time to wait until my number would be called, I hurried around to the Canadian Consulate to see whether Canada’s queue was more manageable. They saw me right away, and I never went back.
Leaving Australia to
“see the world” was always my ambition, from when I was a boy. It never
occurred to me not to go, so my eventual departure can’t be claimed as a
turning point. Catching a boat to London was one of Linda’s turning
points, although it was the thing to do for young Aussies in those days, so it
wasn’t a big deal.
Actually, she was all set to marry a stolid chap from her home town, until a domestic tiff persuaded her to put the wedding on hold. She went off on a cruise to Fiji, came back and planned the wedding again, had second thoughts (or was it third thoughts?), cancelled it altogether, and booked her passage.
Actually, she was all set to marry a stolid chap from her home town, until a domestic tiff persuaded her to put the wedding on hold. She went off on a cruise to Fiji, came back and planned the wedding again, had second thoughts (or was it third thoughts?), cancelled it altogether, and booked her passage.
In London she
answered Louise’s ad on an Earl’s Court notice-board for a travelling companion
in Europe. That deal lasted until a blazing row one night in Greece prompted
her to storm out and hitch a ride to the nearest Youth Hostel. That was her
life’s true turning-point. There happened to be an English-language movie
playing at the local cinema, and – well, I wrote about that in Zorba the
Greek in January 2012. It wasn’t love at first sight for us, but I was a
more compatible travelling companion than Louise, apparently.
Our son Ross’s
turning point has been harder to identify. There was never a chance that he
would stay in Cayman. Local success is much too easy to achieve. There are no
challenges to win, only money to be made, and he is even less interested in
money than I am. We both feel a compulsion to do things the hard way.
A Scuba instructor, a
submarine pilot taking tourists 800 feet down into the local trench, a mechanic
on the bigger submarine… boring, boring! Bumming around Australia for a couple
of years… unfulfilling. So back home in Cayman, aged 24, he hitched a ride with
some American yachties to Galveston, Texas, and that was his turning
point. That was the re-set button.
Turning left at
Galveston, he drifted along the Gulf Coast, working odd jobs in exchange for
bed and board. While cleaning car engines for a dollar an hour in Mexico City,
he lucked into a career modelling clothes and doing TV commercials for a
hundred dollars an hour. Pride of place in my bedroom today hangs Coca Cola’s
calendar for the year 2000, with Ross on the page for July. But easy money
couldn’t compete with the lure of a hippies’ life in Guatemala and points
south.
One of the hippy communes in the region had attracted an adventurous Norwegian girl and her toddler, and they attracted Ross. Another child was conceived in Ecuador, and the tender trap sprang shut.
At age 38, his life
is still a work in progress. Fatherhood has slowed him down and focused his
attention, but it would be rash to conclude it has stopped him. I don’t know
where he’ll go from here, or if there will be another major turning-point. In
theory, he still owns a tree-house in Guatemala [Not the Swiss Family
Robinson, August 2013], so who knows?
Sunday, February 23, 2014
Might the US Dollar collapse?
Actually, it has been slowly collapsing for many years. Better questions are: is the collapse speeding up, and where might the collapse end? Could the buck in your pocket ever become as worthless as the Zimbabwe Dollar, for instance?
Prices are always going up and down, as we know. Houses are falling, at the moment, in the West; supermarket items are rising. Currency prices are volatile. One US Dollar buys a lot more Jamaican Dollars than it did ten years ago, but not quite as many Japanese Yen, and not as much gold or silver.
Everything is relative. “The Dollar” (everybody’s Dollar) has collapsed relative to goods and services that have increased in price. Those items haven’t necessarily increased in value – except when measured against the currency in which you pay for them, and when. In terms of the 1971 Dollar, a lot; in 2011 Dollars, not so much.
On the other hand, The Dollar is booming relative to things that have decreased in price, such as houses. Given all the goods and services produced by the USA, and all the assets held there, how could the US Dollar conceivably collapse? Against what benchmark could a currency resting on a base so fantastically strong and comprehensive possibly collapse? The short answer is: the accumulated debt of the Federal government, that financed its huge overseas empire.
This is not a new problem. Ancient Rome ran into financial problems when the expense of expanding and securing its empire became too much for its tax base. Its government, too, borrowed more than it could service. Its lenders lost confidence in its ability to repay its loans at all. No more loans were available, and taxes were already at a maximum. What to do?
It had to either cut back on government expenditure (mainly, the imperial army) OR devalue its currency against its benchmark – which, back then, comprised certain weights of pure gold and pure silver. What Rome did was surreptitiously reduce the proportion of silver and gold in its coins and add cheaper metals into the mix. Then it paid off its loans with the adulterated coins. What a swindle!
These days, governments issue IOUs called “currency notes”, rather than coins – and those notes are issued against no specific security at all. In effect, the governments have adopted single-entry bookkeeping. They simply think of a figure and write it on their cheque-stubs, and draw cheques like there’s no tomorrow. When they reckon the total of cheques drawn reaches the thought-up figure, they think of another figure and write that on the stub and draw more cheques.
In theory, the thought-up figures are deferred Public Revenue – tax-revenue that will be paid by taxpayers in forty years’ time, or a hundred and forty, or... whenever. In theory, national governments that commit this sort of swindle are insolvent – just as individuals would be. But individuals would be defrauding the banks whose cheque-books they were using, whereas governments are only defrauding their taxpayers with the consent of those same taxpayers, who keep voting the fraudsters back in. Why? Because the fraudsters are sweet-talkin’ rogues, that's why.
It’s a handy way for a country to pay its bills, as long as its suppliers continue to accept the cheques. Of course, sooner or later the irresponsible creation of credit (all those thought-up figures) will lead to a collapse of confidence in the cheques and the currency they’re drawn in. When that happens, the suppliers will switch to other mediums of exchange – other forms of money.
At worst, the spurned currency goes out of use, like the Zimbabwe Dollar did in recent times. The US Dollar itself? Yes, its slow collapse could suddenly accelerate; a loaf of bread could cost ten dollars, then fifty, then a hundred, and so on. Wages would have to rise, to allow people to buy the bread; then the price of bread would rise again – and so on.
Well, paper currency began as IOUs for pure gold and silver kept in warehouses, and the world might have to revert to that practice one day soon. It could be anything else kept in warehouses, as long as the item wasn’t readily available all over the place. You wouldn’t get far trying to use warehouse receipts for cans of soup as money. Soup isn’t rare. Everybody’s Mum could cook up a pot of soup-money every morning.
Wal-Mart wouldn’t give you much in exchange for a can-of-soup certificate, or a “you can trust me” certificate from some crooked Central Banker. A gold certificate? Ah, that’ll do nicely, sir.
Prices are always going up and down, as we know. Houses are falling, at the moment, in the West; supermarket items are rising. Currency prices are volatile. One US Dollar buys a lot more Jamaican Dollars than it did ten years ago, but not quite as many Japanese Yen, and not as much gold or silver.
Everything is relative. “The Dollar” (everybody’s Dollar) has collapsed relative to goods and services that have increased in price. Those items haven’t necessarily increased in value – except when measured against the currency in which you pay for them, and when. In terms of the 1971 Dollar, a lot; in 2011 Dollars, not so much.
On the other hand, The Dollar is booming relative to things that have decreased in price, such as houses. Given all the goods and services produced by the USA, and all the assets held there, how could the US Dollar conceivably collapse? Against what benchmark could a currency resting on a base so fantastically strong and comprehensive possibly collapse? The short answer is: the accumulated debt of the Federal government, that financed its huge overseas empire.
This is not a new problem. Ancient Rome ran into financial problems when the expense of expanding and securing its empire became too much for its tax base. Its government, too, borrowed more than it could service. Its lenders lost confidence in its ability to repay its loans at all. No more loans were available, and taxes were already at a maximum. What to do?
It had to either cut back on government expenditure (mainly, the imperial army) OR devalue its currency against its benchmark – which, back then, comprised certain weights of pure gold and pure silver. What Rome did was surreptitiously reduce the proportion of silver and gold in its coins and add cheaper metals into the mix. Then it paid off its loans with the adulterated coins. What a swindle!
These days, governments issue IOUs called “currency notes”, rather than coins – and those notes are issued against no specific security at all. In effect, the governments have adopted single-entry bookkeeping. They simply think of a figure and write it on their cheque-stubs, and draw cheques like there’s no tomorrow. When they reckon the total of cheques drawn reaches the thought-up figure, they think of another figure and write that on the stub and draw more cheques.
In theory, the thought-up figures are deferred Public Revenue – tax-revenue that will be paid by taxpayers in forty years’ time, or a hundred and forty, or... whenever. In theory, national governments that commit this sort of swindle are insolvent – just as individuals would be. But individuals would be defrauding the banks whose cheque-books they were using, whereas governments are only defrauding their taxpayers with the consent of those same taxpayers, who keep voting the fraudsters back in. Why? Because the fraudsters are sweet-talkin’ rogues, that's why.
It’s a handy way for a country to pay its bills, as long as its suppliers continue to accept the cheques. Of course, sooner or later the irresponsible creation of credit (all those thought-up figures) will lead to a collapse of confidence in the cheques and the currency they’re drawn in. When that happens, the suppliers will switch to other mediums of exchange – other forms of money.
At worst, the spurned currency goes out of use, like the Zimbabwe Dollar did in recent times. The US Dollar itself? Yes, its slow collapse could suddenly accelerate; a loaf of bread could cost ten dollars, then fifty, then a hundred, and so on. Wages would have to rise, to allow people to buy the bread; then the price of bread would rise again – and so on.
Well, paper currency began as IOUs for pure gold and silver kept in warehouses, and the world might have to revert to that practice one day soon. It could be anything else kept in warehouses, as long as the item wasn’t readily available all over the place. You wouldn’t get far trying to use warehouse receipts for cans of soup as money. Soup isn’t rare. Everybody’s Mum could cook up a pot of soup-money every morning.
Wal-Mart wouldn’t give you much in exchange for a can-of-soup certificate, or a “you can trust me” certificate from some crooked Central Banker. A gold certificate? Ah, that’ll do nicely, sir.
All the gold there is in Fort Knox
There’s a lot of chatter on the financial blogs about people’s declining confidence in the US Dollar (USD) as an international currency. For the past sixty years or so the US Dollar has been the world’s “reserve currency” – that is, the currency in which most international trade contracts are settled.
Now, in the face of the US Government’s reckless inflation of its money supply (creating credit out of thin air), some nations and multinational companies are beginning to look at what other currencies might be suitable. The Chinese, Russian and European currencies are the chief candidates.
Gold is also under consideration, because the total quantity of gold in the world is limited and not easily augmented – in stark contrast to paper currencies. Contracts can be priced in terms of gold whenever the contracting parties agree on its value. That value is not easily discernable these days, because there is no free market in gold. The market is manipulated daily, with unidentified buyers buying for no money down, and sellers selling gold they don’t own. The fraudsters are in charge.
For decades, gold certificates (certificates representing named quantities of pure gold) have been traded on the world’s major commodity exchanges; but those certificates’ claim to be backed by actual physical quantities of gold are often false. It has been a shell-game. Despite all the supposed concern about money-laundering, tax-dodging, terrorist financing and the like, the major world trading corporations and banks have fiddled their books with the full approval of the world’s major governments.
The world’s largest inventory of gold bullion is in Fort Knox, Kentucky – at least in theory. However, there has been no independent audit of the inventory since 1953, or even inspection! The US government flat refuses to allow such an audit, and everybody knows how unreliable unaudited figures are. Most objective critics believe that the advertised quantity and quality of gold in Fort Knox are false.
Actually, there may be no gold there at all. The former inventory may have been leased or sold to carefully selected banks that are owned and/or managed by political cronies; or it may have been replaced or adulterated by cheaper metals.
Remember: there has been no independent check at all for sixty years. None. Remember too that the US government has long been in the hands of arguably the most corrupt lobbyists, administrators and politicians the US has ever seen. Those carefully selected banks may have sold or leased every bar of it to lesser banks and brokers, and corrupt companies and individuals. All the favoured banks would have sold or lent it to their clients, including quoted investment funds.
Sometimes the sales will have been of physical bullion, sometimes of certificates (“paper gold”). Sometimes the banks will have sold certificates for the same bars of gold several times over. Each gold bar in Fort Knox used to be individually numbered and allocated to the relevant specific owner. Not any more.
When, last year, the government of Germany wanted to withdraw its specific numbered and allocated gold bars (about two per cent of the total amount claimed to be held in all US depositories), the most that could be cobbled together by the USA was a bare tenth of the requested amount, with the rest promised in seven years’ time. Dear God! And, all the bars that were grudgingly given back were unnumbered (generic), probably melted down from ingots hastily recovered from the banks, or stolen from Libya by the NATO invaders.
The fate of the gold bars may have been the same as the fate of the multi-trillion-dollars’ worth of bonds, contracts, insurance policies, etc, that were cut and bundled over and over again without audit or accountability until nobody could tell who owned what. That worldwide “derivatives market” may never be unravelled.
America’s gold inventory may never be accounted for, either. Whoever does physically hold the gold bars (whether legally or illegally may never be proved) will one day be in a position to set its price.
Now, in the face of the US Government’s reckless inflation of its money supply (creating credit out of thin air), some nations and multinational companies are beginning to look at what other currencies might be suitable. The Chinese, Russian and European currencies are the chief candidates.
Gold is also under consideration, because the total quantity of gold in the world is limited and not easily augmented – in stark contrast to paper currencies. Contracts can be priced in terms of gold whenever the contracting parties agree on its value. That value is not easily discernable these days, because there is no free market in gold. The market is manipulated daily, with unidentified buyers buying for no money down, and sellers selling gold they don’t own. The fraudsters are in charge.
For decades, gold certificates (certificates representing named quantities of pure gold) have been traded on the world’s major commodity exchanges; but those certificates’ claim to be backed by actual physical quantities of gold are often false. It has been a shell-game. Despite all the supposed concern about money-laundering, tax-dodging, terrorist financing and the like, the major world trading corporations and banks have fiddled their books with the full approval of the world’s major governments.
The world’s largest inventory of gold bullion is in Fort Knox, Kentucky – at least in theory. However, there has been no independent audit of the inventory since 1953, or even inspection! The US government flat refuses to allow such an audit, and everybody knows how unreliable unaudited figures are. Most objective critics believe that the advertised quantity and quality of gold in Fort Knox are false.
Actually, there may be no gold there at all. The former inventory may have been leased or sold to carefully selected banks that are owned and/or managed by political cronies; or it may have been replaced or adulterated by cheaper metals.
Remember: there has been no independent check at all for sixty years. None. Remember too that the US government has long been in the hands of arguably the most corrupt lobbyists, administrators and politicians the US has ever seen. Those carefully selected banks may have sold or leased every bar of it to lesser banks and brokers, and corrupt companies and individuals. All the favoured banks would have sold or lent it to their clients, including quoted investment funds.
Sometimes the sales will have been of physical bullion, sometimes of certificates (“paper gold”). Sometimes the banks will have sold certificates for the same bars of gold several times over. Each gold bar in Fort Knox used to be individually numbered and allocated to the relevant specific owner. Not any more.
When, last year, the government of Germany wanted to withdraw its specific numbered and allocated gold bars (about two per cent of the total amount claimed to be held in all US depositories), the most that could be cobbled together by the USA was a bare tenth of the requested amount, with the rest promised in seven years’ time. Dear God! And, all the bars that were grudgingly given back were unnumbered (generic), probably melted down from ingots hastily recovered from the banks, or stolen from Libya by the NATO invaders.
The fate of the gold bars may have been the same as the fate of the multi-trillion-dollars’ worth of bonds, contracts, insurance policies, etc, that were cut and bundled over and over again without audit or accountability until nobody could tell who owned what. That worldwide “derivatives market” may never be unravelled.
America’s gold inventory may never be accounted for, either. Whoever does physically hold the gold bars (whether legally or illegally may never be proved) will one day be in a position to set its price.
Saturday, February 15, 2014
Cayman’s boat-people
This blog began in 2010 as an offshoot of my weekly newspaper columns. For a while, they ran parallel – often sharing a topic although they were written separately. The newspaper had gone off-line, and an anonymous fan kindly set up this blog.
The most popular recurring subjects of the newspaper columns were unskilled migrant workers and Cuban boat-people. By the time the blog began, those crusades had pretty much run out of steam. They actually hadn’t achieved much, in the face of hostility from our local politicians and bureaucrats.
Domestic servants have always been shamefully exploited by some employers and the Immigration authorities, who regard them as little better than slaves. By law, they are indentured servants – voluntary ones, but highly vulnerable to exploitation. Employers have the legal power to short-pay them and steal from them, and deport them if they complain about that or anything else. Countless crimes go unprosecuted because witnesses have been deported.
Only a small proportion of employers are guilty of such things, but those who do are not held accountable. The guilty ones form a formidable voting bloc, and politicians are always afraid of formidable voting blocs. Jamaican female domestic servants call their conditions of employment “near slavery”, and my columns popularized the term. The Immigration authorities and the exploiters have cleaned up their act somewhat since then, but there are still too many holdouts.
Cuban refugees on ramshackle rafts and boats cross Cayman waters on their way to Honduras, where they join a long-established underground railway up to the USA. To please the Cuban government, our British police force impounds those who physically land in Cayman, and flies them to Havana. There they are excluded from the workforce, so many of the returnees must try their luck again on the next ramshackle craft they can find.
Our Police refuse help to those who pass by – however unlikely they may be to reach Honduras alive. Denying water, food, fuel and medicine to unseaworthy boats contravenes the international law of the sea – a law that saved countless native Caymanians in the islands’ seafaring days. Police boats fend off freelance rescue-attempts; policemen onshore confiscate water etc brought down to the boats, and arrest the guilty parties.
At least, they used to do. They are more observant now of their human-rights obligations – ever since the visit (at my invitation) of a representative from the International Organization for Migration (IOM). A sympathetic reporter and I met her off the plane, and told her the truth of the situation before any government officials could get to her and lie to her. Today, our authorities turn a blind eye to breaches of the formal Memorandum of Understanding with Cuba as often as not. Ours was a meagre victory, but better than nothing.
At the time of the IOM visit, I was a member of a government-appointed Human Rights Committee. I did what I could there, always well aware that they had appointed me purely to keep me quiet. The other appointees blocked my every attempt to improve the lot of the boat people and the migrants in indentured service. As ordered, they concentrated on trivialities and technicalities. In the end, I quit in a burst of publicity.
There is a Human Rights Commission, now, that operates under the same terms of reference that the Committees did. It pretends to care, but doesn’t advance the cause. Ah well, what can you do? Cayman is the regional headquarters of MI6 (Britain’s CIA), so human rights aren’t much of a priority for our colonial administrators back in London.
The most popular recurring subjects of the newspaper columns were unskilled migrant workers and Cuban boat-people. By the time the blog began, those crusades had pretty much run out of steam. They actually hadn’t achieved much, in the face of hostility from our local politicians and bureaucrats.
Domestic servants have always been shamefully exploited by some employers and the Immigration authorities, who regard them as little better than slaves. By law, they are indentured servants – voluntary ones, but highly vulnerable to exploitation. Employers have the legal power to short-pay them and steal from them, and deport them if they complain about that or anything else. Countless crimes go unprosecuted because witnesses have been deported.
Only a small proportion of employers are guilty of such things, but those who do are not held accountable. The guilty ones form a formidable voting bloc, and politicians are always afraid of formidable voting blocs. Jamaican female domestic servants call their conditions of employment “near slavery”, and my columns popularized the term. The Immigration authorities and the exploiters have cleaned up their act somewhat since then, but there are still too many holdouts.
Cuban refugees on ramshackle rafts and boats cross Cayman waters on their way to Honduras, where they join a long-established underground railway up to the USA. To please the Cuban government, our British police force impounds those who physically land in Cayman, and flies them to Havana. There they are excluded from the workforce, so many of the returnees must try their luck again on the next ramshackle craft they can find.
Our Police refuse help to those who pass by – however unlikely they may be to reach Honduras alive. Denying water, food, fuel and medicine to unseaworthy boats contravenes the international law of the sea – a law that saved countless native Caymanians in the islands’ seafaring days. Police boats fend off freelance rescue-attempts; policemen onshore confiscate water etc brought down to the boats, and arrest the guilty parties.
At least, they used to do. They are more observant now of their human-rights obligations – ever since the visit (at my invitation) of a representative from the International Organization for Migration (IOM). A sympathetic reporter and I met her off the plane, and told her the truth of the situation before any government officials could get to her and lie to her. Today, our authorities turn a blind eye to breaches of the formal Memorandum of Understanding with Cuba as often as not. Ours was a meagre victory, but better than nothing.
At the time of the IOM visit, I was a member of a government-appointed Human Rights Committee. I did what I could there, always well aware that they had appointed me purely to keep me quiet. The other appointees blocked my every attempt to improve the lot of the boat people and the migrants in indentured service. As ordered, they concentrated on trivialities and technicalities. In the end, I quit in a burst of publicity.
There is a Human Rights Commission, now, that operates under the same terms of reference that the Committees did. It pretends to care, but doesn’t advance the cause. Ah well, what can you do? Cayman is the regional headquarters of MI6 (Britain’s CIA), so human rights aren’t much of a priority for our colonial administrators back in London.
Sunday, February 9, 2014
Inside the rabbit-proof fence
As a boy I once watched a bull being killed at my uncle-in-law’s cattle station in Central Queensland. I have never forgotten the shock. A very large beast, it was, in a pen maybe thirty feet in diameter; a couple of dozen employees and their families leaned against the fence and watched the show.
A man with a rifle – an old Enfield .303 – waited patiently on the fence for the beast to stand still and in the right place, then shot it in the forehead. To my surprise, nothing happened. The man lowered his rifle; the bull stood immobile, as did the spectators. It was eerie. After five seconds – maybe seven or eight – the front knees wobbled slightly, then it collapsed in slow motion in a cloud of dust.
I blogged a while back [The Man from Snowy River, November 2012] about how my Dad used to kill a sheep every ten days, for meat. Dad carefully scraped out the brains – a finicky job that he hated. In my post I noted the difference in attitude between townies and bushies towards the lives and deaths of animals. There are few vegetarians in the bush.
The men of the district organized dingo drives once in a while, and occasionally took potshots at kangaroos. Dingoes were hated because they would kill or cripple sheep for fun (seemingly), and sheep were our livelihood. Kangaroos are classed as a pest – cute though they undoubtedly are – because they nibble the grass too close to the ground and leave none for the sheep. So do rabbits, which were a tremendous pest (though cute, of course) and had to be poisoned en masse in the 1950s because there were too many to shoot.
By rights there shouldn’t have been any dingoes or rabbits on the Darling Downs in Queensland. My Dad’s little patch of five thousand acres was inside both the official rabbit-proof fence and the dingo fence that stretched a thousand miles or so across the State. The whole purpose of the fences (erected and maintained by the State government to this day) was to keep the vermin out of where we lived, so I don’t understand why our men’s dingo-drives were necessary. Mind you, I never saw any bodies, though they talked of finding one or two each time.
The only other things killed in any quantity were snakes. Few of them in our neighbourhood were deadly (unless there was no antidote handy), but all were poisonous to some degree. We boys weren’t allowed to play beneath our house, which sat on two-foot stumps with tin caps over them to frustrate snakes’ attempts to get upstairs.
None ever did, to the best of my knowledge, although I used to imagine a nest of them underneath my bed at night. I slept with a sheet over my head, which I must have been just stupid enough to believe would save me.
Mum was a city-girl, who wasn’t raised to kill snakes. Her job was to pour boiling water on any she found inside the yard and wait till Dad got home. He would break their backs with a length of cable that he mysteriously called “the Kelly”. He had a good eye for snakes, and would watch them carefully while we boys ran and fetched him the Kelly.
If he hit the snake amidships, it couldn’t spring back on him. He was pretty good at it. Only once did he have to resort to shooting one. He never kept a shotgun or a rifle, but he dug out his .45 revolver issued to him during The War (along with a box of bullets) to fight off the expected Japanese invasion.
At dusk one day a snake wriggled under the tilted barrel of chook-food and hid there. Pop lay on the ground and carefully fired six shots into the darkness. Three of them hit, which impressed us immensely. We’d never seen him shoot before, and never even knew he had the gun. What a kick that thing had. POW!
A man with a rifle – an old Enfield .303 – waited patiently on the fence for the beast to stand still and in the right place, then shot it in the forehead. To my surprise, nothing happened. The man lowered his rifle; the bull stood immobile, as did the spectators. It was eerie. After five seconds – maybe seven or eight – the front knees wobbled slightly, then it collapsed in slow motion in a cloud of dust.
I blogged a while back [The Man from Snowy River, November 2012] about how my Dad used to kill a sheep every ten days, for meat. Dad carefully scraped out the brains – a finicky job that he hated. In my post I noted the difference in attitude between townies and bushies towards the lives and deaths of animals. There are few vegetarians in the bush.
The men of the district organized dingo drives once in a while, and occasionally took potshots at kangaroos. Dingoes were hated because they would kill or cripple sheep for fun (seemingly), and sheep were our livelihood. Kangaroos are classed as a pest – cute though they undoubtedly are – because they nibble the grass too close to the ground and leave none for the sheep. So do rabbits, which were a tremendous pest (though cute, of course) and had to be poisoned en masse in the 1950s because there were too many to shoot.
By rights there shouldn’t have been any dingoes or rabbits on the Darling Downs in Queensland. My Dad’s little patch of five thousand acres was inside both the official rabbit-proof fence and the dingo fence that stretched a thousand miles or so across the State. The whole purpose of the fences (erected and maintained by the State government to this day) was to keep the vermin out of where we lived, so I don’t understand why our men’s dingo-drives were necessary. Mind you, I never saw any bodies, though they talked of finding one or two each time.
The only other things killed in any quantity were snakes. Few of them in our neighbourhood were deadly (unless there was no antidote handy), but all were poisonous to some degree. We boys weren’t allowed to play beneath our house, which sat on two-foot stumps with tin caps over them to frustrate snakes’ attempts to get upstairs.
None ever did, to the best of my knowledge, although I used to imagine a nest of them underneath my bed at night. I slept with a sheet over my head, which I must have been just stupid enough to believe would save me.
Mum was a city-girl, who wasn’t raised to kill snakes. Her job was to pour boiling water on any she found inside the yard and wait till Dad got home. He would break their backs with a length of cable that he mysteriously called “the Kelly”. He had a good eye for snakes, and would watch them carefully while we boys ran and fetched him the Kelly.
If he hit the snake amidships, it couldn’t spring back on him. He was pretty good at it. Only once did he have to resort to shooting one. He never kept a shotgun or a rifle, but he dug out his .45 revolver issued to him during The War (along with a box of bullets) to fight off the expected Japanese invasion.
At dusk one day a snake wriggled under the tilted barrel of chook-food and hid there. Pop lay on the ground and carefully fired six shots into the darkness. Three of them hit, which impressed us immensely. We’d never seen him shoot before, and never even knew he had the gun. What a kick that thing had. POW!
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
On a seventy-foot yacht
Sometimes I fret about the world my granddaughters will live in. Of course they’re only young yet, and one or both may work and live in foreign countries, like their father and I have done. But wherever they live, it might not be as comfortable for them as the world Linda and I have lived in, and I wonder how they’ll cope. Will they find work easily? Will they find what health-care they need? Will they have pensions to look forward to in their old age?
They are Norwegians, and Norway has a huge “sovereign fund” that can be called on in tough times. But will it be enough? Several European nations have already reduced their state pensions, or have stolen money from private pension funds; and several US cities have already stolen money from their former employees’ trust funds.
Over-borrowing by greedy politicians has screwed everybody. Will my girls be able to find work at all? Economic commentators tell us that the whole world economy is entering a long depression, in which employment opportunities will be severely limited. High rates of inflation may destroy the value of all paper currencies. What then?
Linda and I have never worked in any one country for long enough to acquire government pension rights, and have never been forced to pay into company pension schemes. So now, we have no pensions at all. However, we also haven’t paid Income Tax since we left Canada in 1967, and working in offshore tax-havens has allowed us to salt our savings away. In effect, we financed our own pension fund, and are drawing on it now, in our retirement. (Note to self: persuade the granddaughters to find jobs in offshore tax- havens.)
The most diligent of plans and hopes will never get it 100% right, though. I recall reading a comment made by some English woman in a newspaper interview, about how she and her husband had been forced to pull in their horns financially, after they both stopped working. “He always dreamt of spending his old age on a seventy-foot yacht with a seventeen-year-old companion,” she said. “Instead, the poor old chap has had to settle for a seventeen-foot boat with a seventy-year-old companion. Hah!”
Here’s a story from fifty years ago, from my time as an auditor with Touche Ross in London... Half a dozen of us young auditors, all in our middle twenties, were standing around the office one day during elevenses, drinking coffee. I was the sole expat, and a newbie, being lauded for my reckless bravery in having struck out on my own to see the world. It was embarrassing.
“We could never do that”, one of the group said; “the company would never give us our jobs back.” “Never mind: there are plenty of other jobs”, I said. “I might not get my job back, when I get home.” “That’s all right for you”, he said: “but we’d lose all our pension rights!” They all paled at the thought.
I had no answer to that. English pensions weren’t portable in those days, and changing employers meant starting a pension programme on the bottom rung again, and walking away from however much had been paid into the old scheme. (Australia didn’t have compulsory pensions.)
Back in our Earls Court flat, my fellow wastrels and I marvelled that a bunch of 24-year-olds would worry about benefits that lay forty years and more into the future. Ah well... I wonder if those chaps today are receiving their full entitlements to their promised pensions. I wonder if any of them are spending their retirement living on a seventy-foot yacht, with or without a seventeen-year-old companion.
They are Norwegians, and Norway has a huge “sovereign fund” that can be called on in tough times. But will it be enough? Several European nations have already reduced their state pensions, or have stolen money from private pension funds; and several US cities have already stolen money from their former employees’ trust funds.
Over-borrowing by greedy politicians has screwed everybody. Will my girls be able to find work at all? Economic commentators tell us that the whole world economy is entering a long depression, in which employment opportunities will be severely limited. High rates of inflation may destroy the value of all paper currencies. What then?
Linda and I have never worked in any one country for long enough to acquire government pension rights, and have never been forced to pay into company pension schemes. So now, we have no pensions at all. However, we also haven’t paid Income Tax since we left Canada in 1967, and working in offshore tax-havens has allowed us to salt our savings away. In effect, we financed our own pension fund, and are drawing on it now, in our retirement. (Note to self: persuade the granddaughters to find jobs in offshore tax- havens.)
The most diligent of plans and hopes will never get it 100% right, though. I recall reading a comment made by some English woman in a newspaper interview, about how she and her husband had been forced to pull in their horns financially, after they both stopped working. “He always dreamt of spending his old age on a seventy-foot yacht with a seventeen-year-old companion,” she said. “Instead, the poor old chap has had to settle for a seventeen-foot boat with a seventy-year-old companion. Hah!”
Here’s a story from fifty years ago, from my time as an auditor with Touche Ross in London... Half a dozen of us young auditors, all in our middle twenties, were standing around the office one day during elevenses, drinking coffee. I was the sole expat, and a newbie, being lauded for my reckless bravery in having struck out on my own to see the world. It was embarrassing.
“We could never do that”, one of the group said; “the company would never give us our jobs back.” “Never mind: there are plenty of other jobs”, I said. “I might not get my job back, when I get home.” “That’s all right for you”, he said: “but we’d lose all our pension rights!” They all paled at the thought.
I had no answer to that. English pensions weren’t portable in those days, and changing employers meant starting a pension programme on the bottom rung again, and walking away from however much had been paid into the old scheme. (Australia didn’t have compulsory pensions.)
Back in our Earls Court flat, my fellow wastrels and I marvelled that a bunch of 24-year-olds would worry about benefits that lay forty years and more into the future. Ah well... I wonder if those chaps today are receiving their full entitlements to their promised pensions. I wonder if any of them are spending their retirement living on a seventy-foot yacht, with or without a seventeen-year-old companion.
Thursday, January 23, 2014
Lady Agatha’s legacy
Crichton the butler had assumed leadership of a small group of survivors shipwrecked on a desert island; Lady Agatha was one of three sisters who hoped to snare him in marriage; and I was Lady Agatha. I was too bad an actor to be a star in The Admirable Crichton, and except for singing in the chorus in H.M.S.Pinafore in the New Hebrides in my 30s, I never trod the boards again.
Why on earth a drama teacher at an all-boys boarding school would choose a play with female characters, God only knows. We stage-females were extremely self-conscious. This was the 1950s, in the most conservative state in Australia, for goodness sake. Looking back: our director must have been a skilled persuader indeed, to keep us rehearsing for weeks without any of us drifting quietly off into the night.
Why is it, that school plays are included in the education of young children? Children’s stage skills aren’t important in later life, although there are exceptions. I encouraged Ross (my son) to volunteer for school concerts when he was young, and I wept with love and pride when at the age of four he brought the house down with his recital of The Hare and the Tortoise.
The local radio station interviewed him afterwards, but he didn’t have much to say. He liked being on stage, though, and did a fine Mowgli in The Jungle Book (Disney's version) nine years later. I coached him to identify with his character. It’s an axiom of show business that acting is all about sincerity, and that if you can fake that, you’ve got it made. True, that!
His various stage appearances did prove useful when he arrived in Mexico City, barefoot and penniless. Well, not literally barefoot and penniless, but his first job in the City was washing car engines for a dollar an hour. By a fluke of circumstance that’s far too unlikely to be worth relating, he was offered a job modelling clothes.
That morphed into catwalk shows and TV commercials at $100 an hour (!), and occasional TV interviews in Spanish. Unfortunately for his parents’ hopes of a well financed retirement, he got bored with the job after a few months and hit the hippy trail in Guatemala and points south. Ah well, what can you do?
His experience of TV interviews came in handy for me when I came under siege by Cayman’s political establishment in the year 2000. (My blog-post Confessions of a Subversive in October 2012 tells how I became persona non grata to the politicians; I won’t repeat it here.) On this occasion the Immigration Board took exception to some strong-ish criticism in my newspaper column, and invited me to explain why I shouldn’t be deported as a public nuisance.
The owners of our local TV station at this time were staunch freedom-of-speech advocates, and had me interviewed three times in a week. After watching the first one on the evening news, Ross said I must always look into the camera, not at the interviewer. Watching myself, I appreciated what a world of difference the change made.
The interviews made the political gangsters look like the bullies they were, at a time (by happy coincidence) when they were being secretly subverted in our local mini-parliament. My sound-bites may conceivably have been a factor in the success of the coup d’état. But, whether or not, my chief persecutor was fired from the Board immediately after it, and I helped her replacement draft a public apology for the threat made to me. That was nice.
Why on earth a drama teacher at an all-boys boarding school would choose a play with female characters, God only knows. We stage-females were extremely self-conscious. This was the 1950s, in the most conservative state in Australia, for goodness sake. Looking back: our director must have been a skilled persuader indeed, to keep us rehearsing for weeks without any of us drifting quietly off into the night.
Why is it, that school plays are included in the education of young children? Children’s stage skills aren’t important in later life, although there are exceptions. I encouraged Ross (my son) to volunteer for school concerts when he was young, and I wept with love and pride when at the age of four he brought the house down with his recital of The Hare and the Tortoise.
The local radio station interviewed him afterwards, but he didn’t have much to say. He liked being on stage, though, and did a fine Mowgli in The Jungle Book (Disney's version) nine years later. I coached him to identify with his character. It’s an axiom of show business that acting is all about sincerity, and that if you can fake that, you’ve got it made. True, that!
His various stage appearances did prove useful when he arrived in Mexico City, barefoot and penniless. Well, not literally barefoot and penniless, but his first job in the City was washing car engines for a dollar an hour. By a fluke of circumstance that’s far too unlikely to be worth relating, he was offered a job modelling clothes.
That morphed into catwalk shows and TV commercials at $100 an hour (!), and occasional TV interviews in Spanish. Unfortunately for his parents’ hopes of a well financed retirement, he got bored with the job after a few months and hit the hippy trail in Guatemala and points south. Ah well, what can you do?
His experience of TV interviews came in handy for me when I came under siege by Cayman’s political establishment in the year 2000. (My blog-post Confessions of a Subversive in October 2012 tells how I became persona non grata to the politicians; I won’t repeat it here.) On this occasion the Immigration Board took exception to some strong-ish criticism in my newspaper column, and invited me to explain why I shouldn’t be deported as a public nuisance.
The owners of our local TV station at this time were staunch freedom-of-speech advocates, and had me interviewed three times in a week. After watching the first one on the evening news, Ross said I must always look into the camera, not at the interviewer. Watching myself, I appreciated what a world of difference the change made.
The interviews made the political gangsters look like the bullies they were, at a time (by happy coincidence) when they were being secretly subverted in our local mini-parliament. My sound-bites may conceivably have been a factor in the success of the coup d’état. But, whether or not, my chief persecutor was fired from the Board immediately after it, and I helped her replacement draft a public apology for the threat made to me. That was nice.
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