FOWP Updated: The Immaculate Moment of Conception

I just finished tapping in the last keystrokes of my dedication page. It is more or less done. With the most important word being 'less' I still have to figure out layout, printing and binding. The stages of which I have 0 confidence.

I won't fill you in on the dedication, in the vain hope that if you are reading this you may just be interested in actually reading my cryptic achronim one day.
Nevertheless it ended with a 'note to self' if you will a quote that I hope to use again and again in the future:

when a book opens its mouth the author should shut his. - Nietzsche

I love that old syphalitic madman, but I find this quote particularly profound. Its something all authors should keep in mind, it was prophetic that Nietzsche (fuck I hate typing his name, from now on he shall be known as 'N-dawg') jumped on this long before Dawkins coined the term 'memes'.

I think it's a practical discipline. Drucker also defined communication as 'what the listner does' that being said it is up to the speaker or communicator to make sure the listener shares the same understanding of meaning.

Saying 'that's not what I meant.' doesn't cut it.

I think all authors need to hold themselves to the bench mark of making their message as clear as possible before they release the book, and not spend the rest of their lives (and others too) trying to explain what they really meant in the book.

By this standard the worst author in history could be considered God, who's 'Thou Shall Not Kill' was clearly, not clear enough. (This is perhaps because God doesn't actually exist and that the original texts were written by early semi-literate tribes taking down oral traditions and then being collated over centuries and revised and reedited by a religious beauracracy).

So Anyway with all that preamble, I thought I'd cheat a bit and try and tell you without telling you what it is about, because frankly once I publish it, I really own it about as much as you do, (except I will have the rights to it).

The story begins with my favorite emotion - despair. I felt it and felt it pretty hard. Despair unlike other emotions has to be concieved, it takes usually two people coming together and removing all hope.

My despair had two daddies, the unlikely couple of Noam Chomsky and John Butler.

I had been stressed out in Prague because I was booked into unsafe accomodation and somewhat strapped for cash over the weekend that I was marooned there until banks opened (australian time) and I could wait the 24 hour period for a transfer of funds.

While travelling I had relentlessly kept placing myself in this predicament and it had proved to be an effective if not somewhat traumatic budgeting technique. To go days on end with hardly any cash at all, not even enough to have three meals from a supermarket.

So on the monday morning I logged onto a computer, transferred some more money to my card and hopped on the first train going to Nernberg.

As soon as I was in Germany the tension melted from me. At last I was in a country that made sense. A country that worshipped sausages.

I went to withdraw some money at the station and discovered surprisingly I had no money.

I had $16 euro in my pocket, which was exactly enough to get a nights accomodation, so I decided I'd go see if I could pay on checkout and failing that have to pony up my eating money to secure a place to stay.

I got the accomodation to what was definitely one of the top 3 hostels I have ever stayed at. The guy trusted me to not even take any collateral.

It seemed to be also fate that at this particular hostel's bookswap I would exchange 'I-robot' a poorly written interesting book for 'Deterring Democracy' by Noam Chomsky. I have read Chomsky before and was always blown away by the sheer calmness of his writing and this was a big thick book.

Anyway over the next month or so I would end up finishing the big thick book. In Rotterdam, one of the 3 cities in Europe I would actually like to live in. (the other two being Barcelona and Genova).

I was thinking about the book and all it contained whilst walking across town looking for a bike shop that could sell me a new rear wheel for Rosanante whose spokes a had pushed too far riding down from Amsterdam (and all the riding I'd done since Dusseldorf when I probably should have got it repaired/replaced).

I was listening to John Butler Trio's Grand National Album and had reached it's track 'Good Excuse' and if I didn't swear it was impossible, it seemed that JBT were going out of their way to taunt me personally.



'you don't even know which side you're fighting for' struck me particularly and I found myself walking down a major street of Rotterdam on a beautiful spring day sobbing uncontrollably.

Now I've been Anti-American since the Clinton years, always knew to chose jail over going to war and opposed to the war on terror since Sep-11-2001. I have infact if anything somewhat mellowed since Bush was in control because I have come to accept that most evil in the world is an act of sheer mindless naivety. Corporate incompetence and so fourth.

It had in other words been my assumption that most of the suffering was an oversight of less cruel ambitions. So to control oil you needed to dominate the balance of trade, sometimes with military monopoly right? and then the decimation of domestic populations was the result of a dispationate and incompetent approach to economic ends.

Deterring Democracy though, presented me with a rational framework for cruelty that made stunning crystal sense. A new notion.

Democracy hates democracy.

Now of course in many contexts this doesn't make sense, but understood in the context of economic game theory it does.

The first issue, which I knew is that GNP is a terrible measure of wellbeing but this we use. Without sidetracking into all the oversights it has the crucial one for foreign policy is the understanding that GNP will only improve by

1. More productivity (making more from less) or
2. Command of more natural resources.

Number 2 is I'm told overlooked in most teaching of neo-classical economics, the allocation of resources at the start of 'the game' though has a lot to do with why most wars are fought, including the US war of Independance, pretty much every war in European History and even the US Civil war.

The second issue is that of collective bargaining.

This notion was recently illustrated by the Bush administration when they went 'free market' and got rid of the Surgeon General's collective bargaining powers on behalf of people on the pharmaceuatical benifits scheme. Instead each person was left to themselves to negotiate prices.

The veterans affairs group though provided a direct comparison as they were still able to collectively bargain, and got a much cheaper price for pharmaceuticals for vets.

It's just plain and simple, the more people you represent (through individuals delegating the bargaining role to fewer people and increasing coordination) the more bargaining power you have.

Vis-a-vis mother fuckers if you were to be an angry customer and go into McDonald's and say 'I'm deciding what to have for lunch today, what kind of prices can you do me?' vs 'I'm deciding what 120 of my school students will have for lunch today, what kind of prices can you do for me?' will have two very different results.

Now democracy represents collective bargaining on a National scale.

If someone offers you $14,000,000 a year for access to your forest you might think that's a lot of money. If someone offers you $14,000,000 a year and you represent 14 million people, it won't seem like a lot of money.

The difference between the first case and the second case is the difference between dealing with a democracy and dealing with a dictatorship (in whatever guise it takes).

Someone with absolute control over a nation doesn't have to worry about bargaining for money to support expensive health care, education, environmental restoration and other expensive social programs, you need only a little bit of cash to support whatever military regime you use to keep yourself in power.

Lavish palaces and exorbitant displays of your personal military powers are peanuts compared to feeding, clothing and educating a poor nation.

So there's two sides to this story, you have a democracy in your countr, which is good, the higher living, education and welfare standards make your country far more productive than one without it, but it is more expensive to maintain. Do you want to meet with a democracy with it's collective bargaining responsibility or some self interested dictator prick?

Now our collective moral conscious (hopefully) tells us to say that we believe in universal morals and to punish dictators whilst rewarding democracies.

Economics is clear cut in the opposite direction, punish expensive suppliers/unprofitable customers like democracies and reward and promote the cheap/profitable dictatorships.

And hence deterring democracy made it clear why attrocities committed by the so called 'good-guys' weren't acts of incompetent misguided foreign policy. They infact made sense.

It's why our collective governments prop up dictators, and only take action when they start demanding more money for social reforms. It's why foreign policy does everything in its power to undermine real democracies, hosting show elections with huge campaign donations to hand picked puppet rulers.

It isn't incompetent, it is extremely competent.

All in the economic mindset, the betrayel of East Timor by the US and Australia. The rejoicing at massacre.

On that day in Rotterdam it all made sense and I despaired because for me - there was no way out.

I felt betrayed. Betrayed by people who had made me complicit in their crimes long before I was born.

People who no doubt, embarked on these very endeavors in the name of 'our children, and our childrens children, and our children's children's children.'

But they didn't ask me.

And you really should read Deterring Democracy because then you might understand how up to my neck in blood and guts I felt. Every act of intolerable cruelty detailed, documented and unapologised for.

For what? If they had asked me, these people who did these things in my name, if they had stared through a crystal ball into the future and asked me if I actually appreciated the economic excess that has defined my life, what would I have said?

'Don't bother, ipods are pretty good, but that's about it. Just stay in school, who cares if we have to pay 50c more for a banana if YOU DON'T KILL MASSES OF INNOCENT PEOPLE'

And so it was, FOWP was concieved, of course, there's a book that makes the above point much more clearly and intelligently and I urge you all to read it and it's called 'Deterring Democracy' by Noam Chomsky. FOWP is about a feeling I felt, that I hope to capture and convey through the medium.

It's an obvious work of fiction, and frankly poorly crafted. What remains to be seen is if it does the job, if for all it's cruddiness it succeeds in making people feel, what I the author wanted them to feel - namely despair. Which is a big ask, but once it hits the shelf(s) I wont be able to tweak it to do what I want.

It will have opened its mouth, I will have shut mine.