When the webmistress sleeps

KILLING US SOFTLY WITH YOUR LIES

It’s 4am, you’re walking across a bridge, a bridge to the future, your face is the mirror of Munch’s Scream. Licking your heels are the flames from Iraq. The lunatics who started the blaze are running ahead. Not that they are running away from justice, as you would expect, because justice is dying. These lunatics are on their way to rule the world.

You feel so alone on this bridge. And yet you know you are not alone. Millions of others are walking beside you, similarly baffled and distressed, gritting their teeth. Through the fog of war and the falsehoods of State, we cannot always see each other. But we can see what’s going on.

Posing as granny, Mr Wolf is sent to the World Bank to devour the poor. Another wolf, John Bolton, is sent to the UN to give war a chance. The new US ambassador to Baghdad, Mr Negroponte, is renowned in Nicaragua as a mini Saddam. (This former ambassador to Honduras is implicated in the slaughter of 10,000 citizens by “death squads”; a man well versed in the apparatus of torture, assassination and secret jails). Here comes the new Secretary of State, Condy the Oil Queen, a serial liar with a dazzling smile, who once boasted Iraq was never a threat to the West … until she was told to change her mind. The Devil in George W Bush is not without humour, as proved by his treatment of Mr Gonzales, the lawyer who mocks the Geneva Convention and says that torture is cool. Now he jangles the keys to courthouse and dungeon. On and on it goes, rippling through the entrails of the Coalition and beyond; a toxic brew of deceit, cruelty and denial.

On the bridge to the future, the icy winds blow also from the South.

In the nasty new Australia, immigration goons march into high schools and drag children off to detention centres, their classmates weeping. Among the letters-to-the-editors from holocaust survivors, who liken the scene to their own childhood kidnaps, one asks: “At what point do Australians intend to stop accepting this horror?” When they open their eyes. Years ago, some of our Liberal Party Ministers were half decent humans, until the Grey Medusa turned their hearts to stone.

Our Attorney General resists the evidence that Australians have been involved in torture - - both as accomplices and as victims - even as he flashes his Amnesty badge. Our Minister of Defence denies he knew of such crimes, until the “revelations” at Abu Ghraib, even though an Australian officer had been helping the Pentagon to deceive International Red Cross. But you know all this. To re-phrase the question of the holocaust victim, we must ask: At what point will citizens of the West accept that an addiction to oil and gold does not justify the pillage and bombing?

People chirp about an Arabian spring, but at four in the morning on the bridge of the future it looks like winter to me.

Here’s why:

The deep denial by pro war supporters of what’s being done in the name of “freedom,” is hard to shake. Not even a hundred Abu Ghraibs give them pause, or a thousand Fallujahs. "I don't need an investigation to tell me that there was no comprehensive or systematic use of inhumane tactics by the American military”, proclaims Senator Jim Talent, a Republican from Missouri, “because those guys and gals just wouldn't do it. Everything about the culture and the training in the military and at home works against that." How can you eradicate this kind of stupidity?

Last week two docos on SBS (by Danny Schechter & Robert Greenwald) nailed the deceptions of those who led us to war, as well as the lies and crimes of those who lead the troops. (Meanwhile, the bulk of the TV audience was glued to fictional depictions of vile murders in New York and Miami, happily solved by heroic forensics and a lust for justice). In one of the SBS docos a surgically masked reporter from Germany stands beside a tank in Iraq, brandishing a Geiger counter. Viewers had earlier been reminded of the use of depleted uranium (DU) by the US military in the first Gulf War and its link to the surge of children born with deformities. Despite this, DU is again being used by the freedom loving West in its missiles and armour, although the Pentagon tries to bury the issue. So here’s this masked German reporter with a crackling Geiger counter, warning a soldier: “Your tank is radioactive”. No it’s not, comes the reply. Crackle, crackle… The exchange is repeated in a surreal loop, like the dead parrot scene in Monty Python.

It’s so sad. The soldier could end up with leukaemia. Iraqi mothers will carry deformed foetuses. George Bush will be lauded as a hero. The DU denial is also symbolic. The Geiger counter is the truth revealed. The soldier is the public blocking its ears.

Sure there is a flicker of hope in the Middle East, which is due more to the death of Arafat than the genius of Bush. Let’s hope it works out better than the Afghan spring, with its harvest of heroin and, according to the Guardian, now the hub of a global network of detention centres: “one huge US jail”.

How quick are the warmongers to chant Bush is right, while his actions are wrong. We’re back to the jungle: back to the end justifies the means. How can this be acceptable? It is the ethic of the criminal. It is the ethic of the Nazi. It is the ethic of the Inquisition, of the damned, of the demented. It is the ethic of the Bush White House.

It is still chilly on the bridge to the future, though a little less lonely on this anniversary dawn of the invasion, the sunlight struggling against the fog, the people struggling for justice. No-one knows how many we are. When will it end?

www.richardneville.com

www.internetweekly.org was the source of discovery for the artwork of paranoia, from the files of Japanese ads for psychiatric drugs.

The Italian Job: High Noon in Baghdad

HUSH HUSH WHISPER WHO DARES, NEOCON KILLERS ARE SAYING THEIR PRAYERS

The only thing unusual about the hail of bullets that struck the car of Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena in Baghdad, was that this time the US said sorry. Since the start of the invasion, occupation forces have wiped out numerous carloads of Iraqis. This little girl was splashed with the blood of her parents as they were shot while driving home. Where is she now? Who knows? The killers are immunised from prosecution. (In February, Australian soldiers added to the car passenger tally). These incidents happen so often, it might be the military's idea of target practice.

Whether or not Iraq ever achieves a genuine democracy - one capable of exiling the Pentagon and dismantling its bases - there will come a time when White House appeasers, the Murdoch propagandists, the neo colonialists ...  will stand fearful before their mirrors and their makers. By what moral code, they will ask themselves in aguish, did I sanction the bombing of cities in far away countries whose citizens offered no threat? One day, the images of dead & limbless Iraqi children suppressed by the mass media and revealed on blogs will fester in their unconscious.   

Restless at 4am they will shout in the dark: We even bombed wedding guests and claimed they were terrorists. One day the Generals and spin-artists will yearn for Alzheimers, in order to quell the ghosts of the slain. Why did we refuse to acknowledge the scale of the slaughter? So blinded were we by imperial hubris, so hungry for blood, we bombed mosques, hospitals and Al Jazeera; we razed cities, we installed puppets, we turned the population against us, then washed down our guilt with propaganda and oil. So many dead, we didn't keep count. So many warned us but we didn't listen. The war against terror gave birth to more terror. Yet nothing stood in our way - not the Geneva Conventions, not the laws against torture, not the innocence of children, not the loss of our name.  The streets ran with blood, our critics we hunted.

Why did it take us take so long to admit there were no WMD's in Iraq, apart from the ones we imported. (Depleted uranium, cluster bombs, napalm, gun ships, vacuum bombs. Dr. Khalid ash-Shaykhli, an official at Iraq's health ministry, has confirmed that US forces used mustard gas, nerve gas, and other incendiary chemicals on Fallujah).

Al Qaida never set foot in Iraq until we did. Then George Bush became its star recruiter. Over 100,000 Iraqis paid the price for 9/11, in which they played no part, not even Saddam Hussein. The President talked endlessly about spreading freedom, but what he spread was cliché and fear. Our troops so hated the people whose country they occupied, that prisoners were molested for digital amusement - and they were the lucky ones. In a secret string of gulags, inmates were disappeared off the face of the earth. Even if a case became public, the perpetrator was rewarded. The CIA man in Kabul, who chained an Afghan boy naked to a concrete floor until he froze to death, was promoted. Mostly secrets stayed safe because the media was embedded. Difficult witnesses were dealt with by snipers.

On top of all this was black ops, pillage and profits, including Halliburton's ongoing festival of embezzlement. And we wonder why the US is no longer seen as beacon of freedom. Why didn't I realise that by supporting the doctrine of pre-emptive strikes, I was also trashing the 1648 treaty of Westphalia, which came into being for an excellent reason - to stop sovereign states attacking each other unless they were under imminent threat. Al Qaida was never a State. The reasons for the invasions have been revised retrospectively. It now seems we went to Afghanistan to help with the opium crop. We went to Iraq to impose democracy, which only leaves 45 more tyrannies left to invade. Except that some of these are our allies. Pakistan is a dictatorship. Uzbekistan is a Stalinist hellhole. Saudi Arabia is a monarchy. Egypt is our offshore torture chamber. North Korea can claim the doctrine of pre-emption to bomb the West. Thanks a lot, George. You've watched High Noon so many times, you think you're Gary Cooper playing the sheriff. Trouble is, your methods put you at one with the crooks.

The masterpiece that didn't change the world

In April 1937, when General Franco was struggling to overthrow the elected Government of Spain, he sought help from Hitler. The enemies of fascism deserved a dose of shock and awe. The Luftwaffe obliged by flattening the pesky city of Guernica, raining its bombs on homes, farms and schools; machine gunning families at the crowded outdoor markets. The world was appalled. More than a million Parisians thronged the city in protest. An enraged Picasso created the mighty canvas that many consider to be the greatest artwork of the 20th Century - Guernica. It serves to commemorate the first massive, cold blooded attack against a non military target in modern warfare; an act of savagery since surpassed and repeated many times over. The bombing of Guernica lasted three and a half hours; the bombing of Falluja has been going on for six and a half weeks, still counting. Troops were reportedly ordered to shoot all males of fighting age seen on the streets, armed or unarmed, (though many women and children copped it as well).

The assault on Guernica aroused the conscience of the world and gave us an immortal icon. The assault on Falluja revealed the complicity of the mass media and its embedded cheerleaders, as well as the deadened souls of the celebrity-sodden shopaholic cowards who are its major consumers. Falluja also gave us George Bush as Time’s “Man of the Year” (for “sticking to his guns”). But he is so much more than that, don’t you think?

Not convinced? Go here: www. fallujapictures.blogspot.com

Congratulations to Feng Qian, 22, who made history at a Beijing opera house last weekend, when she won the title of Ms Artificial Beauty. Finalists had suffered procedures to nose, ears, breasts, eyelids, the upper and lower jaw, as well as much softening of skin and removal of body hair. Will this surface sculpturing change the inner human? Probably, by boosting confidence. Self improvement by any means necessary is 21st Century religion. Future beauty pageants are likely to feature Ms Genetically Enhanced, Ms Cyborg, Ms Nanotech.

While the human body rapidly evolves, the moral stature of Western leadership continues to shrink.

WHY?

The lust for power, the re-birth of belief in nutty Old Testament prophecies, the creeping shadow of fear, including the fear that our lifestyle requires adjustment.

WHAT ARE THE SIGNS OF THIS MORAL DECLINE?
The reversal of human rights, the rewarding of public figures who behave in bad faith, the culture of lying at the highest levels of leadership.

Look again at the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Almost half of its 30 famous Articles are now more honoured in their breach than in their implementation. Not just in Uzbekistan and Pakistan, but in Washington, Westminster and Canberra.

Article 5: No one shall be subject to torture or to cruel or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Article 7: All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law.

Article 9: No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

Other Articles promote rights that are fast fading: judgement by “independent and impartial” tribunals, the presumption of innocence, the right of a public hearing, the right to seek asylum, to change nationality, to freely exchange information, regardless of frontiers, to enjoy privacy, the reasonable limitation of working hours, and the right to a standard of living adequate for health and well being ……

The three men who champion the trashing of freedoms say they are expanding freedoms with bombs, torture and lying. Tony Blair compares himself to Winston Churchill. John Winston Howard now poses in the style of Churchill and boasts he has enhanced Australia’s “confidence”. By which he means our COMPLIANCE with the world bully, our COMPLICITY in the murder of a 100,000 Iraqis, our CRUELTY to refugees. Still, Christmas is coming. A time of photo ops for politicians at Carols by Candlelight trying to look holy, a time to hit the Iraqi town of Hyt, west of Baghdad, with warplanes. According to www.english.aljazeera.net ,shops, homes and buses have been destroyed, as well as the civilians within.

Happy Chritmas.
www.richardneville.com

A Ticket to Ride

This flimsy adjunct to my long running dot com has unleashed a salvo of foam from the brownshirts. Thanks for caring, and pardon the failure to reply to each comment. At my age, every minute counts. Perhaps I’ll come to regret this blog, launched on an impulse to side-step the process of managing Go Live every time I want to shoot off my mouth at www.richardneville.com. It is also the lure of a 30 day free trial.

Wait a minute. Didn’t mean to sound rude. I WILL trawl the comments and reply to the ones that effectively challenge my viewpoint, okay?

A difference between today’s neo conservative climate and that of the Vietnam era, is that a number of poets, painters, writers, rockers and thinkers have sided with the party of war. For some, it is a career decision: stay with the strength. For others, it is based on an honestly held view of the world, moulded over many years. For a third group it is the shock of the view; observing the crash of the twin towers from the streets of Manhattan and/or its never ending replays, the power of which lies at the core of the collective brain like a primal trigger. Perhaps this is why Christopher Hitchens did a U-turn.

As a lifelong champion of human rights, Hitchens has every right to change his mind. At least he’s got as mind, unlike so many other ranting barrackers of Bush. But is it a mind that can be trusted? This is a question I ask of myself, as much as I ask it of those who support the war. It is so easy to become a victim of mindset, and so difficult to admit that we’re in its grasp.

About a year ago I heard Christopher Hitchens talking with Phillip Adams about events in Iraq, shortly after he had returned from touring the hotspots. Hitchens was certain it would soon calm down; that the few troublemakers would be exxtinguished, and that normality and democracy was imminent. It was a calm, lengthy discussion; Adams let him roll.
Because of Hitchens’ long experience in the Middle East, I was half inclined to accept this rosy view, until the source of the view was revealed. Hitchens had toured the warzone in the personal helicopter of Paul Wolfovitz.

The adage that power corrupts is assumed to apply to the powerful. In my experience, it is those on the edges of power who become the most corrupted.
The renegade painter taken up by the Australian Prime Minister, who lurches to the right. The brilliant scientist appointed to the coal board who suddenly sees a healthy future for fossil fuels. The sensitive journalist sent to Baghdad by Rupert Murdoch who finds “nobility” at the US high command. Choose carefully in whose helicopter you ride.

And now a message from Naomi Klein, addressed to Washington’s ambassador to Britain:
From the Guardian, Saturday December 4, 2004:

YOU ASKED FOR MY EVIDENCE, MR AMBASSADOR. HERE IT IS.

TO David T Johnson,
Acting ambassador,
US Embassy, London

Dear Mr Johnson, On November 26, your press counsellor sent a letter to the Guardian taking strong exception to a sentence in my column of the same day. The sentence read: "In Iraq, US forces and their Iraqi surrogates are no longer bothering to conceal attacks on civilian targets and are openly eliminating anyone - doctors, clerics, journalists - who dares to count the bodies." Of particular concern was the word "eliminating".

The letter suggested that my charge was "baseless" and asked the Guardian either to withdraw it, or provide "evidence of this extremely grave accusation". It is quite rare for US embassy officials to openly involve themselves in the free press of a foreign country, so I took the letter extremely seriously. But while I agree that the accusation is grave, I have no intention of withdrawing it. Here, instead, is the evidence you requested.

In April, US forces laid siege to Falluja in retaliation for the gruesome killings of four Blackwater employees. The operation was a failure, with US troops eventually handing the city back to resistance forces. The reason for the withdrawal was that the siege had sparked uprisings across the country, triggered by reports that hundreds of civilians had been killed. This information came from three main sources: 1) Doctors. USA Today reported on April 11 that "Statistics and names of the dead were gathered from four main clinics around the city and from Falluja general hospital". 2) Arab TV journalists. While doctors reported the numbers of dead, it was al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya that put a human face on those statistics. With unembedded camera crews in Falluja, both networks beamed footage of mutilated women and children throughout Iraq and the Arab-speaking world. 3) Clerics. The reports of high civilian casualties coming from journalists and doctors were seized upon by prominent clerics in Iraq. Many delivered fiery sermons condemning the attack, turning their congregants against US forces and igniting the uprising that forced US troops to withdraw.

US authorities have denied that hundreds of civilians were killed during last April's siege, and have lashed out at the sources of these reports. For instance, an unnamed "senior American officer", speaking to the New York Times last month, labelled Falluja general hospital "a centre of propaganda". But the strongest words were reserved for Arab TV networks. When asked about al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya's reports that hundreds of civilians had been killed in Falluja, Donald Rumsfeld, the US secretary of defence, replied that "what al-Jazeera is doing is vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable ... " Last month, US troops once again laid siege to Falluja - but this time the attack included a new tactic: eliminating the doctors, journalists and clerics who focused public attention on civilian casualties last time around.

Eliminating doctors
The first major operation by US marines and Iraqi soldiers was to storm Falluja general hospital, arresting doctors and placing the facility under military control. The New York Times reported that "the hospital was selected as an early target because the American military believed that it was the source of rumours about heavy casual ties", noting that "this time around, the American military intends to fight its own information war, countering or squelching what has been one of the insurgents' most potent weapons". The Los Angeles Times quoted a doctor as saying that the soldiers "stole the mobile phones" at the hospital - preventing doctors from communicating with the outside world.

But this was not the worst of the attacks on health workers. Two days earlier, a crucial emergency health clinic was bombed to rubble, as well as a medical supplies dispensary next door. Dr Sami al-Jumaili, who was working in the clinic, says the bombs took the lives of 15 medics, four nurses and 35 patients. The Los Angeles Times reported that the manager of Falluja general hospital "had told a US general the location of the downtown makeshift medical centre" before it was hit.

Whether the clinic was targeted or destroyed accidentally, the effect was the same: to eliminate many of Falluja's doctors from the war zone. As Dr Jumaili told the Independent on November 14: "There is not a single surgeon in Falluja." When fighting moved to Mosul, a similar tactic was used: on entering the city, US and Iraqi forces immediately seized control of the al-Zaharawi hospital.

Eliminating journalists
The images from last month's siege on Falluja came almost exclusively from reporters embedded with US troops. This is because Arab journalists who had covered April's siege from the civilian perspective had effectively been eliminated. Al-Jazeera had no cameras on the ground because it has been banned from reporting in Iraq indefinitely. Al-Arabiya did have an unembedded reporter, Abdel Kader Al-Saadi, in Falluja, but on November 11 US forces arrested him and held him for the length of the siege. Al-Saadi's detention has been condemned by Reporters Without Borders and the International Federation of Journalists. "We cannot ignore the possibility that he is being intimidated for just trying to do his job," the IFJ stated.

It's not the first time journalists in Iraq have faced this kind of intimidation. When US forces invaded Baghdad in April 2003, US Central Command urged all unembedded journalists to leave the city. Some insisted on staying and at least three paid with their lives. On April 8, a US aircraft bombed al-Jazeera's Baghdad offices, killing reporter Tareq Ayyoub. Al-Jazeera has documentation proving it gave the coordinates of its location to US forces.

On the same day, a US tank fired on the Palestine hotel, killing José Couso, of the Spanish network Telecinco, and Taras Protsiuk, of Reuters. Three US soldiers are facing a criminal lawsuit from Couso's family, which alleges that US forces were well aware that journalists were in the Palestine hotel and that they committed a war crime.

Eliminating clerics
Just as doctors and journalists have been targeted, so too have many of the clerics who have spoken out forcefully against the killings in Falluja. On November 11, Sheik Mahdi al-Sumaidaei, the head of the Supreme Association for Guidance and Daawa, was arrested. According to Associated Press, "Al-Sumaidaei has called on the country's Sunni minority to launch a civil disobedience campaign if the Iraqi government does not halt the attack on Falluja". On November 19, AP reported that US and Iraqi forces stormed a prominent Sunni mosque, the Abu Hanifa, in Aadhamiya, killing three people and arresting 40, including the chief cleric - another opponent of the Falluja siege. On the same day, Fox News reported that "US troops also raided a Sunni mosque in Qaim, near the Syrian border". The report described the arrests as "retaliation for opposing the Falluja offensive". Two Shia clerics associated with Moqtada al-Sadr have also been arrested in recent weeks; according to AP, "both had spoken out against the Falluja attack".

"We don't do body counts," said General Tommy Franks of US Central Command. The question is: what happens to the people who insist on counting the bodies - the doctors who must pronounce their patients dead, the journalists who document these losses, the clerics who denounce them? In Iraq, evidence is mounting that these voices are being systematically silenced through a variety of means, from mass arrests, to raids on hospitals, media bans, and overt and unexplained physical attacks.

Mr Ambassador, I believe that your government and its Iraqi surrogates are waging two wars in Iraq. One war is against the Iraqi people, and it has claimed an estimated 100,000 lives. The other is a war on witnesses.
(Additional research by Aaron Maté).

For more comment, see www.richardneville.com

The Decline of the West, The Rise of Australian Idol

Wake up Australia! Wake up Countries of the Coalition of the Killing, we're all in this up to our necks.
The Rape of Falluja

• A city reduced to rubble

• The Coalition reduced to the level of Nazis

In the future, people will ask:

What did you do while Falluja
was being destroyed?

What did you say while its citizens were slain?

What were you thinking while Falluja’s hospitals were targeted, its mosques used for executions, the wounded left to die on the streets?

WERE YOU?
• Swept up in the buzz about Nicole Kidman’s
new 2-minute perfume ad directed by Baz
Luhrmann, for which she received $US12 milion?

WHILE

War crimes were committed in our name

Children maimed

The wounded shot

Fleeing families gunned down by helicopters

No electricity, no food, no water, no asprin, no justice

OUR TROOPS WERE THERE!
Dozens of children now in Baghdad's Naaman hospital have lost their limbs, victims of US air strikes and artillery shells.
Our troops were there.
Of 1000 “insurgents” captured by the invaders, less than 2 per cent were foreigners.

Our troops were there.
Our media were embedded with the invaders
No major newspaper or TV outlet in America or Australia has denounced the Rape of Falluja.
The chief United Nations human rights official, Louise Arbour, has called for an investigation of abuses, including excessive force and the
deliberate targeting of civilians.

The Coalition doesn’t give a shit.
All males in Falluja aged between 15 and 55 were considered fair game.

As were doctors:
Dr Asma Khamis al-Muhannadi of Fallujah's general hospital, confirmed that she and her colleagues were tied up and beaten, when the marines stormed in. She was “with a woman in labor. The umbilical cord had not yet been cut. At that time, a US soldier shouted at one of the [Iraqi] National Guards to arrest me and tie my hands while I was helping the mother to deliver. I will never forget this incident in my life."

Dr al-Muhannadi also confirmed that American snipers killed more than 17 Iraqi doctors who had mobilized to answer a
public appeal from Falluja's doctors.

There are reports of Americans using cluster bombs and spraying white phosphorus,
a banned chemical weapon.

Let’s leave the last word to an Iraqi “girl blogger” from Baghdad, November 16/04:

“What people don't understand is that the whole military is infested with these psychopaths. In this last year we've seen murderers, torturers and xenophobes running around in tanks and guns.
I don't care what does it: I don't care if it's the tension, the fear, the 'enemy'… it's murder.
We are occupied by murderers. They aren't humans and they don't deserve any compassion”.
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com

And so we see the fruits of our illegal and immoral acts, in the unflinching prose of an Iraqi who hated Saddam Hussein. Our descendants will look back
in horror at our war crimes.

Illustration: Reg Mombassa

Related Link: www.richardneville.com

As I sat down to post the above on Sunday morning, Sydney time, news arrived of further homicidal rampages:
Eyewitness to US Forces Raiding a Mosque

"They have just shot and killed at least four of the people praying," he said in a panicked voice. "At least 10 other people are wounded now. We are on our bellies and in a very bad situation."

See Dahr Jamail http://www.antiwar.com/jamail/?articleid=4014

Watching Australian Idol

Nothing is logical in this world, including my reaction to Australian Idol. Crass, manipulative, teary, and …. thrilling.. The courage of the contestants, the craziness of the supporters, the explosions of talent. Last night’s triumphant procession of the two finalists, Casey Donovan and Anthony Callea, sweeping up the grand stairway of the Sydney Opera House, fireworks bursting above the Harbour Bridge, was a Woodstock moment for a new generation. Fun before slavery, soul before the supermodel. It’s not about the music; no, no; more the mix of guts, schmaltz, street democracy and even the blessed relief of being distracted from the Iraqi elephant in the garden.

I happened to see 16 year old Casey Donovan’s first audition, valiant, plump & defiant, and, like the three Idol judges, was blown away. There she stood. Herself, above all else; no plastic Madonna. Since then, reports of Casey’s unlikely ascent kept me interested, if not a regular viewer. (Much of the series is padding).

New talent was given air, careers boosted. I loved the way the contestants supported each other, and were supported in turn by the viewers. The judges too, were quirky and honest, the most compassionate being Marcia Hines, who first found fame in Australia as cast member of HAIR.

This musical I happened to stumble upon in New York in 1968, during its pre Broadway trials, and knew it would flash across the world. Australian Idol is not HAIR. It is not about love, pot or stopping another filthy war. And yet, something about the triumph of Australian Idol re-affirms the values of mateship, courage and mutual support that was so compelling at the core of HAIR. Never mind the $3000 a second paid by McDonalds to tout its beefy wares; the idiocy of the adlibs, the gushing sentimentality. This Idol is a celebration of cultural democracy; a reminder that between the cracks of commerce and cant, the sun still shines.

www.richardneville.com