Days Volume Two

* * * Our Redfern backyard. "Right now, if the statistics are correct, about 15 per cent of Americans are not happy. Soon, perhaps, with the help of psycho pharmaceuticals, melancholics will become unknown. That would be an unparalleled tragedy, equivalent in scope to the annihilation of the sperm whale or the golden eagle. With no more melancholics, we would live in a world in which everyone simply accepted the status quo, in which everyone would simply be content with the given. This would constitute a nightmare worthy of Philip K Dick, a police state of Pollyannas, a flatland that offers nothing new under the sun. Why are we pushing ourselves towards such a hellish condition? The answer is simple: fear." Erick G Wilson I can see them in the crowds, pretending to be normal humans, mimicking the actions of every one else. But their distorted faces, misshapen chins, pockmarked skin, their eyes bloodshot from the excesses of the night before, their souls easily mirrored into t...

* * * "What are we to make of this obsession with happiness, an obsession that could well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse, that could result in an extermination as horrible as those foreshadowed by global warming and environmental crisis and nuclear proliferation? What drives this rage for complacency, this desperate contentment? Surely all this happiness can't be for real. How can so many people be happy in the middle of all the problems that beset our globe, not only the collective and apocalyptic ills but also those particular irritations that bedevil our everyday existence. I, for one, am afraid that this over-emphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness may be dangerous, a wanton forgetting of an essential part of a full life. I am convinced that to desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic, to settle for unrealistic abstractions. I am finally fearful of our society's efforts to espionage melancholia. Without t...

* * * "The planning for the 9/11 operation began in late 1998, and Bin Laden must have known that the United States would retaliate by invading Afghanistan. How could he not know that? But he was quite content that it should be so, because he expected that the Afghans would fight back in a long, brutal guerrilla war, as they had done when the Soviets invaded; and from that war would come a constant flow of images of innocent Afghan Muslims killed by American firepower that would decisively turn the Arab masses against their corrupt, oppressive, sold-out regimes and drive them into the arms of the revolutionaries." Gwynne Dyer, The Mess They Made. After some difficulties with the old blog, which was starting to get unwieldy after posting to it for several years, I have decided to start the second volume of Days. A window popped up asking me if I wanted to block pictures and for some reason I clicked it; and immediately quite a number of the pictures I had posted to the blog di...