MattKennard.com

Sick people swarm around me nowadays. Sick in the head and the heart, all around the film of sickness. What makes them sick? It’s inside somewhere, something deep.
It feels almost like claustrophobia, because the film is all over everyone. Something made people sick. It happened to them by accident, no one wants to be sick, but sick people, very sick, sicker than you can imagine.
All around me, so I can never escape the sickness. It’s not pestilence, it’s a state of mind this disease and sickness. It’s in the neural connectors, it’s in the synapses, it’s in the heart of everything, in the brain function. So there’s no escape.
What do you do when a whole country becomes sick? Every one is at it, every one is a little sick now; don’t fight it anymore, let it seep in, let it flow all the through.
In by the back door they slip in the lies and they blossom and we become sick, and I’m sick too now; sick with the sickness, there’s no escape, why marginalize? Move on to the summit, there’s nothing stopping the rot, let it happen, give it expression, in fact become part of it.
Everyday life in this way becomes normalized, no longer are we sick to ourselves, but you are sick to me, there’s no thread from the last to the next, just one break with decency and now you are sick, a sick child, after being a sterling baby.

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Sam sat down and wondered why he had. It was early evening and he had nothing to do so sitting seemed natural to him. But there was no purpose, he didn’t make the movement with any conscious hope for the future. It was a reflex, a habit, a computational decision. But he sat all the same. It was a blue chair, with gold frilling running around the outer portion. He pondered for a moment, becoming aware of his action and wondering if he had forgotten the reason he sat down. He realized that it was a reflex instantly, but he continued to sit there; there was nothing as pressing to get him to stand straight again. What the do, he thought. In the seat for no reason, but it was a comfortable place to be. No troubles here on the seat. No need to think anything particularly burdensome now. Just sit and think of very unspecific thoughts. Looking around was equally pointless, it was the same room Sam had sat in a thousand times before. The same walls, the same piles of detritus, the same curtain rails, the same dustbin, the same dirty plates, the same clothes clotting the floor. He turned his attention away from his visual senses and closed his eyelids tightly. Now it was interesting, even as he sat in the same place. All around were small white stars that moved as he tried to catch sight of them. Trying to make one stay still as they jumped around the underside of his eyelids was enjoyable for about twenty seconds. Then he was dazzled merely by the blackness and the stillness outside. He had noticed it before, but now it seemed to abiding component of the sojourn in the chair. Everything was frightfully lacking in motion and the stillness bought a profound quiet. Sam didn’t open his eyes now, but observed the quiet with solicitude, trying to eke out some sound from some corner of the room, a rustling piece of paper unstable on the desk, a speck of dust falling on the bed. Nothing approached as he sat with his eyes tightly squeezed. He would try further, there was nothing to stop him, he could not think of a task that he had to do for the rest of the day; when he upped from the seat he would be flooded with an anxiousness bought on by his inability to think of a task. The task was all important to Sam, without something to trouble him, he grew very bored. This knowledge impressed his thoughts and he sat without his eyes twitching. In this moment if he opened them he knew he would not be able to resist getting up and moving on to something that would not be as enjoyable and even less worthless. The blackness had until now been only interrupted by the strange eruptions of stars that played out on his retina like fireworks. But now images came into this stage. Faces started to fly across the expanse of his under-eye and they were faces he knew and was not particularly used to seeing. They were old faces, pretty faces, faces that were not of this time, old faces, fresh faces that were now old. He let them drift on their natural and refused to gather them in any direction, not sure even if he could. They didn’t go, but moved around like spinning tops, morphing in and out of coherency until there was one iridescent glow in his view that would turn intermittently into a face shape. Many were opening their mouths and they looked to be speaking. Sam couldn’t hear them even though the silence was still oppressing the room. There was a mish mash of colors seeming to talk and gradually their voice became audible. First it was just strange composite speech, straggled together phrases that sounded like gobbledegook. Like the faces though the definition was a process and it worked towards an end point. They weren’t faces he wanted to appear, they were faces he had tried to avoid for a while, perhaps many decades. Old faces, but rendered in their younger format. The words became clearer, the cadences were familiar, the voice also. It was discernably his voice, but his lips were not moving, and theirs were. So he listened to his own voice coming from these other faces buried deep in the recesses of his subconscious. They were calling him now. “We will need a return from you,” a pretty young woman said. And he thought he understood. He owed her something, she had taken care of him once and he owed her the most basic courtesy in returning the favor. But he had buried this train of thought, why had it returned on this day, at this moment, amongst all others. He continued to listen and her demands became increasingly intense, while her face morphed in and out of coherency. Sam could not even contemplate opening his eyes now, they were effectively glued by the eyelashes. He was being thrust into a confrontation that he had thought would never happen, and it was happening on the underside of his eyelids. There was a strength he had garnered and was listening with open ears to her proclamations even though he could feel the salted tears streaming down his cheeks. They kept coming as this face like a painting called out to him incessantly and told him he owed so much. Sam didn’t know how to interact as he wasn’t placed in the events taking place underneath his eyelids. The conversation then took off between the pretty lady and another figure who had achieved definition out of the gloop. It was another woman, this time less attractive and again with Sam’s voice. He was in his own echo chamber, but still his eyes stayed glued shut. He listened now to the interaction, which was indirectly about him; they didn’t say his name but it was innuendo and he was sure he owed something to both of them, and he couldn’t pay them back. Long still he sat there listening to a squabble that was rancorous and brutal and mentioned him only indirectly. He was neutral, he merely watched from the sidelines as his past was laid out before his eyes in his own voice, with the mouths of others. He knew this was some mind trick, that these faces were products of his own self projecting its own buried neurosis on the blackness occasioned by his closed eyes. But it didn’t take anything away. For the reality of this suppressed train of thought was interesting enough, that this had been cluttering his brain for so many decades, having unconscious effects on all his decisions, for decades still. That was their final revenge, the final justice in the sordid tale. That nothing happened in reality, but the mind warp changed reality from the moment it was poisoned. It was the ultimate tactic, the final poetic dealing, it was a silent, insidious hurting end.

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My colleague at TakingBackPolitics.com, Mr. Eugene Mulero, tells the candid tale of how I found my Wabo at the Republican National Convention:

http://www.takingbackpolitics.com/2008/09/where-matt-kennard-found-his-wabo/

This post is tagged waboism

I just finished ‘Dombey and Son’ by Charles Dickens; and at the same time finished George Orwell’s masterly essay about the author. Having read Dickens before I was aware of his caricatures and propensity for Manichaeism in his overly crude characters. But Orwell touched on Dickens’s other main failing: his inability to criticise the system that reined in his Victorian period, i.e. unregulated capitalism and its imperial concomitant. Dickens verily has odious capitalists, and sometimes the demons see the error of their way and ameliorate their more malevolent sides. But the implicit supposition is that if these people could only be a bit nicer (in this case Mr. Dombey, of Dombey and Son, an imperialist speculative trading house), everything would be just dandy, and we could all live happily on top of this class-divided, imperial society.
Orwell’s criticisms being on point and apposite doesn’t detract from Dickens magnificent command over the English language, and his ability to render scenes so clearly and with such metaphorical and imaginative pungency as to be pretty much unrivalled. Strange similes bring incongruous scenes and ideas together and some stick in the memory. Some banal and demotic events become epic occurrences in the hands of Dickens libertine imagination. Check out this description of a walk into London:

She often looked with compassion, at such a time, upon the stragglers who came wandering into London, by the great high-way hard, and who, footsore and weary, and gazing fearfully at the huge town before them, as if foreboding that their misery there would be but as a drop of water in the sea, or as a grain of sea-sand on the shore, went shrinking on, cowering before the angry weather, and looking as if the very elements rejected them. Day after day, such travellers crept past, but always, as she thought, in one direction – always towards the tow. Swallowed up in one phase or other of its immensity, towards which they seemed impelled by a desperate fascination, they never returned. Food for the hospitals, the churchyards, the prisons, the river, fever, madness, vice, and death – they passed on to the monster, roaring in the distance, and were lost.

This post is tagged charles dickens, george orwell

Just read this essay by Monbiot which outlines his advice to young journalists thinking about how to find meaningful work in a corrupted media system. Much of it rings true, especially to a recent graduate of an ‘esteemed’ institution in New York, that produced such greats as former Nixon speechwriter, and all round arch-conservative ass Pat Buchanan. Have a gander.

Quotes that raise themselves to money status include:

“This career path, in other words, is counter-educational. It teaches you to do what you don’t want to do, to be what you don’t want to be. It is an exceptional person who emerges from this process with her aims and ideals intact. Indeed it is an exceptional person who emerges from this process at all. What the corporate or institutional world wants you to do is the complete opposite of what you want to do.”

“So my final piece of advice is this: when faced with the choice between engaging with reality or engaging with what Erich Fromm calls the “necrophiliac” world of wealth and power, choose life, whatever the apparent costs may be. Your peers might at first look down on you: poor Nina, she’s twenty-six and she still doesn’t own a car. But those who have put wealth and power above life are living in the world of death, in which the living put their tombstones - their framed certificates signifying acceptance to that world - upon their walls. Remember that even the editor of the Times, for all his income and prestige, is still a functionary, who must still take orders from his boss. He has less freedom than we do, and being the editor of the Times is as good as it gets.”

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Art cannot initiate social transformation by itself, but it is increasingly vital in expanding the imaginations of those working towards it. Knowledge of how the world operates that comes solely from academic books and newspaper articles often affects on our most cynical and fatalistic impulses, and these impulses are pervasive amongst young people, and they get more frequent, not less, as the bad news comes faster.

Looking at an image that connects events in ways you haven’t yet conceived, or an installation that reconstructs something you’ve read about in visceral form can propel this cynicism felt by the younger generation towards action. And it has. The possibilities for artistic collaboration and the ability to say something about the world without needing to steep it in the depressing fatalities of everyday political
discourse is becoming a sanctuary for the younger generations, fed up with what is often called ‘mainstream’ politics, although it looks increasingly extreme to me.

Kennard and Slyce say that all art is political because it is interpreting our world through the lens of a unique artistic mind. This is like saying all politicians are political: it’s technically true, but in reality the majority tailor their beliefs to the exigencies of their respective political systems and become model commissars. Power is the motivator, and the politics falls into line after.

The same goes for arts own commissars whose work is conceived and sold as a commodified product, complete with conscious branding and the related newspaper fanfare about ‘controversy’ or ‘celebrity buyers’. There is nothing ‘political’ about it; in fact, the branding is the antithesis of political because rather than questioning the contemporary situation, it accepts all its presuppositions – no matter how violent or unjust – and seeks to ride on the froth of money and fame that tops this wave.

True political art, as distinguished from its banal and transient cousin, is trying to change the world as it is rather than observe it. It seeks to delve into the nightmares of the contemporary consciousness, investigate the deep cavities and expose the most diligently repressed secrets and terrors. It reformulates images and signs and gives us all a means through which to reinterpret the world. Kennard’s work has often done that and visualized the contradictions and hypocrisy of work word and action. Consequently it has largely been unpalatable to the art establishment because it spurns the trendy pieties and fads of the day, which give the appearance of dissent but upset noone and perfectly fits living room wall space.

His work is not pretty in the conventional sense – who wants a dead Vietnamese child on their wall? – but in connecting the different strands that so often bypass each other in our consciousness and rendering them together, he does something important and deeply political.

Joining the dots becomes revolutionary, which surely says less about the art than the prevailing ideology, which allows us to live happily without making the connections between the violence we unleash and the dead corpses all over the Middle East, East Asia, Africa, Latin America, that are our testimony. We shouldn’t need artists to make this clear, although we should be glad they are here to do it, and glad their ranks are growing, inspiring people to join the dots.

This post is tagged peter kennard

My area was boring and good for nothing. Stuck in nowhere, at the rim of everywhere, it was, I used to write in my diary as I tried my literary hand, “A nightmare etched onto reality and then placed on my doorstep.”

The place I lived and its unfortunate modes all over the world are more politely known as The Suburbs. Monochrome and full of monomaniacs, it specialized in engineering souls who would work hard not to say anything out of turn.

Diversity arrived in the form of economics. There were very rich and very poor, both living in tandem, but choosing the suburbs for very different reasons. The rich saw it as a display of their success, most coming from modest starts. The poor were there because they were born there, and their parents were there for the same reason.

I was neither rich or poor and didn’t aspire to be either, although there were plenty of young men who wanted to be both, strangely enough.

I just got on, and moved through everything trying not to get caught up in the contingent bullshit. I was young and wanted not to be distracted by the endless symphony of triviality that seemed be trying to intrude itself on my life.

I realise now how mature that attitude was. All around me there were disputes and buttercup fights.

This post is tagged muse

Hundreds of war veterans from around New York gathered in Manhattan yesterday for the third annual “Salute Our Heroes” veterans job fair, an initiative that aims to ease the passage of war veterans back into mainstream society after they retire from the military.

The event was held at the Jacob Javits Convention Center on West 34^th street and went from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. with an eclectic collection of organizations in attendance. The gamut ran from financial companies to universities, all of which were on the look out for prospective employees.

The New York Times-sponsored event also consisted of academic workshops throughout the day centering on topics like “Resume Writing” and “Job Search Success”.

“We think it’s extremely to be represented here,” said Don Greizer, Director of the Business Development Group at Merrill Lynch, one of the biggest financial companies at the event. “Firstly, because there are just so many good candidates here. And secondly because it’s a message that we care about the people who sacrifice themselves for our country.”

Many of Merrill Lynch’s more esteemed competitors were not on show. “I’m disappointed by our competitors like Morgan Stanley and UBS,” said Greizer.

Greizer and his team had been at the last two “Salute Our Heroes” job fairs and maintained that it had worked out well for his company. “I don’t track everyone we get on board,” he said. “But there are a couple I know about that have done fantastic.”

Columbia University was also represented. “We are here to recruit veterans because we have seen that there are exceptional scholars in the military and they bring their own first-hand experience,” said Kari Blowes, Admission Officer for Columbia University General Studies Department. “Having a veteran student raises discourse in class because they bring what they’ve seen and experienced which is more than most students, especially in political science.”

Sal Manze, 66 was a Vietnam veteran and advertised the fact on his baseball cap as he sauntered around the floor of the hall. He fought for two years from 1965 to 1966. “My only gripe is they don’t interview on the spot,” he said. “Most of the companies are just giving out information rather than offering jobs. I think if they were able to hire immediately it would be great, but as it is it’s just frustrating.”

Since being discharged from the military Manze has worked mainly in finance, having a seventeen year stint at Merrill Lynch when he was younger. Now he is working a $7 an hour seasonal job as a sales associate at Macy’s. “They say age doesn’t come into it but it’s just not true,” he said. “But how can you prove it? Go to the interview with a lawyer?”

William L. Offutt is the Special Assistant of the Veterans Employment and Training Service, and he is more sanguine about the opportunities the event throws up. “The event is important because one: It is promoting and prioritizing a big section of the population that deserve recognition. Two: When employers are looking for the best they need to be able to find it, and veterans constitute a highly skilled workforce sometimes.”

The event was funded by Columbia University, Memorial Sloan-Kettering, Merrill Lynch, NYC School Construction Authority, NYC Department of Education and the United States Postal Service. Organizations involved stretched from the NYPD to ESPN.

“I want to get into technology now,” said Tyrone Webb, 29, and a veteran of 4 years and 9 months in the U.S. Navy. “I used to be a aviation engineer, working on the engines of aircraft.”

“The problem is getting a job with a bad discharge from service is very difficult,” he said. Webb was given a dishonourable discharge because when his mother contracted cancer and he became disheartened when he was not allowed to visit her. “I started being late and just not caring. I was discharged soon after and they gave me Deentry Code 4 on my DD 214” – the discharge form – “and so it is impossible to get a job when it says ‘other than honorable discharge’ on my documents.

Since he left the military in June 2006 he has worked mainly in retail sales, phone surveys and he is currently working in a restaurant. “I am angry,” he said. “I have a lot of my plate, I think about children but I can’t have any because of my situation, I can’t even think about girlfriends.”

Charles S. Ciccolella, the Assistant Secretary or the Veterans’ Employment and Training Service (VETS) at the U.S. Department of Labor, was also present. “In America we have very low unemployment,” he said. “Last month it was 4.7% , but for vets it is about 3.8% so they do very well in the workforce. This type of event is even more pressing now because we have a skilled labour shortage in this country. There are lots of jobs in health care and education at the moment, but we don’t have enough skilled workers.

“Now we are trying to put the emphasis back on job training programs and not just getting people interviews,” he said. “And so far this annual event has been an unqualified success. When it started three years ago there were 17 events like this around the country. Over the next three weeks there will 120 all the way up to Veterans Day.”

This post is tagged 'war on terror', veterans

A group of gay rights activists descended on a West Village restaurant last night to protest an incident last summer when it had ejected a lesbian from the ladies room for looking too masculine.

The 40-strong crowd assembled at 5.30 p.m. on Seventh Avenue and Bleecker Street outside the Mexican restaurant, Caliente Cab Company, where the incident had taken place.

The protesters formed a circle on the pavement outside and spent 20 minutes chanting ‘No justice, no nachos’ and ‘Caliente Cab is not so hot’, and parading signs with the slogans saying “Freakin’ Fag Revolution” and “Smash Gender”.
The incident had taken place on 24^th June 2007 after New York City’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Pride March. Khadijah Farmer, 28, a lesbian, was using the women’s restroom at Caliente’s when a male bouncer came and ejected her from the restroom and restaurant because he said he believed she was a man and using the wrong bathroom.

A lawsuit against the restaurant has now been filed by Farmer, who works as a counselor at a residential treatment center for drug addicts. “I showed them ID to prove I wasn’t a man,” said Farmer at the demonstration. “It has happened before but I was never thrown out. This was way out of control. It makes me very sad that this can happen in 2007 in the West Village.”

Silverstein said his client had file her suit under the New York Human Rights Law, which outlaws discrimination on the basis of any outward manifestation of gender. He said they were also filing under state law which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex.

In response, the Caleinte Cab Company released a statement to the press which said that Farmers motives were suspect: “The complainant is not interested at all in getting at the truth here,” it said. “She is threatening continuous weekly protests of our business rather than expose the facts to the light of day in an appropriate forum.”

The statement from Caliente Company claimed that Farmer’s main priority had been monetary gain and the suit does ask for compensation. “The complainants representatives would not discuss any issues, nor consider the overwhelming evidence contradicting complainant’s allegations, without a prior promise of serious monetary compensation to the complainant,” their statement said.

Andrew Velez, 68, a psychoanalyst who was demonstrating, said: “Farmer was discriminated against because she doesn’t look like a traditional woman, it’s a disgrace, she showed them ID, but she was still ordered to leave. We’ve been picketing for several days now and we will continue.”

As Farmer and her attorney were being interviewed about 15 minutes into the protest two hecklers shouted “Money grabber!” from the sidewalk. The workers and management of Caliente Cab watched on passively throughout the protest.

After the demonstration there was a rally at which Farmer, Silverstein and the Rev. Anthony Johnson of the Church of New York made speeches. “We should all show solidarity as we are all God’s children,” said Rev. Johnson. “It was such a blatant act of discrimination and that is totally wrong.”

Farmer’s mother, Eliyah, was also there. “I’m really glad to see all the support today,” she said. “I told her, ‘You cannot let this happen to you’, it’s completely outrageous that she’s been discriminated against for the way she looks!”

The Caliente Cab statement ended in resolute fashion. “There has been no discrimination or violation of anyone’s civil rights or human dignity by Caliente Cab Company or anyone employed here,” it read.

Tim A. Vincent, 45, was passing by on his way to a meeting about narrative medicine at nearby restaurant Sushi Samba. “It’s ironic really,” he said, “I just got in from Lebanon, Ohio, and we don’t have any experiences like this in Lebanon, I’m probably the only Republican at this demonstration, but I agree with what the Reverand said about rights for all, that’s got to be our aspiration, I totally support this woman in her fight.”

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A plume of black smoke rising from a skyscraper on 50^th street was causing mild panic even before a meeting on disaster prepardedness in New York had begun Tuesday.

It was an apt prelude to the annual ‘State of the City’s Healthcare Market’ briefing which was convened at Capriani’s Hotel on 49^th Street.

The debate between academics and professionals working in the New York healthcare sector highlighted the need for greater federal government spending and a large-scale review of how the healthcare system would deal with a large-scale disaster.

The panel was composed of Bruce Logan, the President of NY Downtown Hospital; Brendan O’Neill, a physician; Scott A. Graham, from the Red Cross in New York; and Irwin Redlender, a professor at Columbia University.

“We have no idea what a prepared New York is,” said Redlender. “I don’t personally think we’ve made much progress since 9/11. There is a huge disconnect between need and funding, it’s laughable.”

Redlender blamed a combination of the federal government underfunding and disjointed operating for the ‘bad shape’ the city was in.

Scott A. Graham was more sanguine. “We have the best disaster response in the world,” he claimed. He also took the pressure off the government and put the onus on grassroots organisation. “We’ve got to develop preparedness from the family to faith groups.”

Bruce Logan said he ‘was amazed that only 3,000 people died on 9/11’. ‘That should have been a wake-up call,’ he added. ‘The was terrible communication problems and we need additional resources from state and federal level.”

O’Neill called the goal of disaster preparedness a “journey, not a race”. He added: “Comprehensive planning needs to be the focused. The margins are small, but there are areas of great innovation.”

There was discussion of the infrastructure problems in getting a coherent and cohesive system of disaster preparedness. “We don’t know who is responsible for what,” said Redlender. “80% of infrastructure is private – do they pay? Or is it the responsibility of the government and taxpayer?” he asked. “We are in a very, very place,” he added.

Brendan O’Neill said he had ‘grave concerns’ over the current set-up. “Some things work on a small-scale, but when you get to big disasters I don’t think it’s plausible.” He continued: “We need to stop the complacency.”

Logan contrasted the response on 9/11 to the debacle in New Orleans after Hurrican Katrina. “Things went better in New York,” he said. “But it all depends on the specific disaster. 9/11 happened to be in the morning and it was a contained disaster. We had terrible trouble in the hospitals at the start but the flow of victims stopped in the afternoon, that didn’t happen in New Orleans.”

Redlender lashed out at the Bush administration. “The root of this problem of unpreparedness is at the top,” he said. “We’ve never had the Oval Office take an interest in this. “The federal government must understand what it will cost to deal with a big disaster – at the moment they don’t. We also need American people to think about but at the moment we are missing national leadership.”

After the debate was a lecture by Adam Scowcroft of the PriceWaterhouseCooper. He talked at length about the health problems currently facing New York. He said 14% of people in the state are uninsured. He also said physicians are calling for hospital restructuring and more power being given to physicians. He noted that Governor Pataki had overseen a $1.5 billion shortfall on medical expenses and that a federal audit had recommended the closure of five hospitals and the merging of 11 others.

He argued that the resulting composition was “stronger and leaner, but not meaner.” There was a problem, he said, that ‘the federal government are using hospitals to square their own fiscal problems.”

He talked at length about the advent of smart cards that are now being used widely across the city. He said physicians were ‘taking it on the chin’ and were now seeking collective bargaining and several health plan contract reforms.

The event finished with a question and answer session with the assembled health professionals and the panel. One woman expressed her dismay at the lack of information available about how to prepare for large-scale disasters. Scott detailed how the Red Cross produce packs exactly for this purpose. A physician in New York City worried about the logistics of actually getting patients to the hospital in the event of a disaster. “That is a big worry, still to this day” said Redlender.

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The surgeon who conducted the worlds first face transplant described his breakthrough at a prestigious memorial lecture at New York University last night.

Professor Bernard Devauchelle gave the 44^th V.H. Kazanjian Memorial Lecture to a packed audience at the Institute of Reconstructive Plastic Surgery.

The lecture hall was filled to the rafters with students and medical staff, many standing in the aisles because of overcrowding.

The first transplant operation was performed on 27^th November 2005 when Professor Devauchelle and his colleagues had taken the central and lower face of a brain-dead woman and grafted it onto a woman who’s face and nose had been mutilated by a dog.

“There are many problems and worries,” he said, speaking in English but with a thick French accent. “Most importantly is the fear of rejection by the recipient.”

It was a 15-hour long effort which involved intricate surgical work on nerve and muscle in the face and a harvest from the forearm of the patient. “The problem is it is impossible to live without sensitivity so we had to get it right,” he said.

At the end of the surgery his team had decamped to another city, Amiens, to give the patient a bone marrow infusion. “It was raining and horrible that night!” Devauchelle said, to laughter from the crowd.

Before this revolutionary transplant, the convention had been to surgically ‘touch-up’ badly disfigured faces. “We have to develop our methods even more,” said Devauchelle. “But if you compare the results of surgical action with that of a transplant there is just no contest, transplant wins every time.”

Devauchelle put up pictures of the patient over the two years after the operation.

“As you can see,” he said, “in November 2006, just a year after the operation, the face is nearly perfect.”

Throughout the lecture pictures of disfigured, burnt and skinless faces were shown up on the screen, some of which were greeted with gasps from the audience.

Towards the end of his lecture, Devauchelle explored the ethical and moral dimensions of his work. He talked at length about the philosophical and psychological effect on the patient. “The patient was very enthusiastic before the operation,” he said, “but could she really say “It’s me” after she had a different face? What is identity?” he continued. “It is to 1. recognise ourselves; 2. To belong to a society; 3. To be recognised as a unique individual in the judicial system… We must try to maintain all of these in a patient.”

He continued with the criticism his work had garnered from other academics. “The first criticism is always: Is disfigurement serious enough to warrant massive plastic surgery and costs? The second is: The patient attempted suicide. The third is: Living with the face of death is not possible,” he said.

Professor Devauchelle finished with the prospects for the future in this burgeoning field. He told of the Chinese follow-ups and showed a video of surgeons there performing a similar operation. The creation of a European Network called Centaure is also underway, he said, with the French government agreeing to perform five new face transplants in the 2007-2012 period.

There was no question and answer session, but the Dean of the Institute said: “This has truly been a memorable evening. We all admire you as a physician, but also as a human being.”

Charlotte Spinner, a 3^rd year medical student at NYU, said: “I thought it was very educational, I’m inspired to go into something like this now. He showed how you can really transform peoples lives through cosmetic surgery which is something I had never really thought about before.

Evann Eisenberg, 22, a 1^st year medical student at NYU, said: “He was so passionate about his work, it was amazing. I want to be able to do something like that when I get into the real world of medicine. I’m not particularly interested in plastic surgery but that passion definitely inspired me.”

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“I’ll come if she does,” said renowned Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk when asked if he would accompany a gaggle of students to dinner. He was talking about a young lady in the group and proceeded to ditch his official dinner to trade conversation with a group of eager fans and some nubile ladies for three hours in a dive bar.

He had just finished his stint as headline speaker at a debate hosted by the respected Frontline Club entitled “Is it over for Frontline Reporting?” It was a rancorous affair that was characterised by the trade of barbs between Mr. Fisk and his ideological adversary from ABC News, Chuck Lustig.

The crux of the disagreement was Mr. Fisk’s stern denunciation of the U.S. media’s role in the build up to the war in Iraq. “We accept the term ‘embedded’ for some reason”, he said. “These journalists in Iraq are surrounded by security guards with New York Times emblazoned on their T-shirts, and the problem is they don’t tell you of these limitations.” He termed this type of journalism “Hotel journalism”.

“I’m the one who tells my journalists to wear flak jackets,” Lustig hit back, “I don’t want my journalists to never return to their families – we make life and death decisions everyday on the news desk.”

The debate exercised for an hour-and-a-half on these themes – whether journalists have a duty to extricate themselves from their institutional protections, how far citizen journalism was trumping conventional journalism and other vexed subjects. The other panelists included Fran Unsworth of the BBC, the photographer Ron Haviv, and Iraqi photojournalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad.

But Mr. Fisk saved his most acerbic comments for the dinner afterward. “He just didn’t know what he was talking about,” he said of Lustig. “He had no idea he completely lost his audience.” Fisk is according to the New York Times “probably the most famous foreign correspondent in Britain” but his tongue was as acidic as any grouchy bar-dweller. “This whole thing about 50-50 journalism is just a big joke,” he said alluding to a topic of conversation in the debate. “When they covered the liberation of the Nazi gas chambers did they ask for a quote from the Nazi spokesman to even things up?” he asked.

He went on to talk about his coverage of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon which were the scene of a massacre by Christian Phalangist militias in 1982. “I mean, when I went there I didn’t ask to speak an Israeli spokesman because I knew what had happened, it was just obscene, I didn’t need anyone to rationalize it for me!”

Fisk got more plaintive as the wine flowed. “When I was in Amsterdam recently on the lecture circuit I saw lots of couples with children and I thought, I could have had a much happier life, I could have had things a lot more simple, not seen the things I have seen, not experienced dead children and everything else. And when I look back and think about what my journalism has actually achieved I can’t think of one positive thing. Not one.”

There was a vocal demurral from the table at this painful recollection. “Well, I mean I haven’t saved one person from execution, one person from death, one person from going to jail. The only thing I can think of doing is uncovering some malfeasance of the Israeli government and that succeeded in getting Likud in to power as the Israeli public were so angry at Labour!”

Fisk had been married once, to the American journalist Lara Marlowe, but has never had children. His peripatetic has made is difficult to hold down a lasting and stable relationship long enough to commit to children and the other furnishings of a “family life”. He had been living in Beirut, Lebanon, for 25 years but traveled endlessly.

Fisk then dropped the bombshell that he had got his hands on video footage from the Armenian Genocide of 1915 by Turkey. This topic is currently hot as a bill was recently passed by Congress which for the first term applied the term “genocide” to the conflict of 1915. “I went into a Church in Lebanon and saw these pictures and I asked about them and I was told they had film footage and I saw it – there are dead bodies and everything. I’m going to make a documentary about it.”

After eight bottles of wine and some winding conversation, the bill finally came: $500. “Oh my God,” said Fisk, visibly shocked. “The Independent will pay,” he said, talking of his cash-strapped newspaper.

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My first month at Columbia University Journalism School in New York had been rolling along at pedestrian pace: A cat up a tree in Queens, a serial candy thief in Brooklyn, a flock of chickens on the loose in
downtown Manhattan. Somehow my heart was still working.

Then the President of Iran decided to show up on campus on Monday and it all got a bit more interesting. The hottest story in the world was suddenly on our doorstep and the world’s media and an eclectic spray
of crackpot activists descended on campus.

President Ahmadinejad was on a visit to talk at the United Nations, but the President of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger, had successfully invited him to speak at the World Leaders Forum, which sparked an unbelievable amount of vituperation in the New York media. “The Evil has Landed,’ screamed the front-page of the Daily News. ‘A Monster with Chutzpah,’ ran the New York Post.

As I arrived outside the university in the morning there was a group of activists complete with signs showing Ahmadinejad’s body contorted into the shape of a swastika.

One man had a baseball cap with the words, ‘Nuke ‘Em’ written across the top. ‘You’re a journalist,’ he said. ‘An honourable profession for someone who wants to destroy everything good in the world. Who do you
write for?’ A magazine in England called the New Statesman “What’s it position?” Ah, pretty neutral. ‘Ah that means left-wing! Is it mostly represented by homosexuals and communists?’

Impatient to hear his thoughts on the event I asked about the hat. ‘We should nuke ‘em; in fact, we should get Mecca and Medina first.’ He pointed to his Indonesian wife, who was about thirty years younger than
him. ‘Where she comes from the Muslims are killing and raping nuns, it’s not a pretty picture.’

After hearing I was English, he gave his name as Enoch Powell and his age as 63, saying proudly that he is a ’small investment capitalist’.

We were cut off by a loud racket behind. A Muslim man was holding up a sign saying, “May Allah make a mushroom cloud over Israel.” ‘Terrorist! Muslim terrorist!’ shouted the baying crowd. Then the police
led him away before not before Mr. Powell dived for him, pushing him against a car before police broke it up.

I caught up with Yousef Al-Kattab as he was led away by police. He was 39. ‘I bought this sign because I want peace,’ he said with a straight face. ‘I don’t even like Ahmadinejad, I’m a Sunni Muslim, I don’t
support Iran. But I pray for an attack on Israel’.

The general public was not allowed past the front gates and inside there were rival demonstrations going on between students.

Judd Lindenfield was a 19-year-old economics student at Columbia. “This is a private institution, I don’t have to pay to hear him speak his words of hate and violence,” he said.

Rahmin Mehdizadeh was a 30-year-old post graduate architecture student from Iran. “I’m against his point of view,” he said. “But I think most of the time the media changes reality and distorts what he actually
says, of course he should be allowed to speak here.”

When it got underway most students were perplexed by the forthright introduction by university president, Lee Bollinger. In his email to all the students the day before he had tried to cool the frenetic atmosphere: “I ask that each of us make special efforts to respect the different views people have about the event and to recognize the different ways it affects members of our community,” he wrote.

At the speech he railed against Ahmadinejad, calling him an ‘petty and cruel dictator’ and saying he lacked the ‘intellectual courage to answer questions’, which begged the question, Why ask him, then?

The loudest laugh came when the President said, “In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country … I don’t know who’s told you that we have this.”

After the circus was over, the highly-charged masses dispersed with relative calm, and the 160 journalism students began what they were hoping would the biggest story of their lives.

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Evo Morales is the first indigenous president of Bolivia. He is the real deal. He nationalized the oil and gas industries against strong opposition from Brazil and other countries with a big stake in the economy. Obviously the business press have called him authoritarian, and he will probably be compared to Hitler by the Bush administration before long a la Chavez.

Just to recap, Morales was elected by a landslide.

Bolivia is what is often called a polarized country: in this case it is the rich pale-skinned elite and everyone else. They hate Morales, obviously. He’s reversing their entrenched economic power and trying to create a better and more equal society - something new to Bolivia.

If you read Eduardo Galeano’s book Open Vein’s of Latin America it becomes clear the degree to which Bolivia was built on slavery, genocide and turbo capitalism. Evo is reversing 500 years of history, and obviously this cannot be tolerated by the imperial masters.

He’s also found time to criticise the Catholic Church, which is never a bad thing: their support for the dictatorship in Argentina is currently surfacing, and we all know their record through the 20^th century. And on top of this criticism, Evo has promised to teach indigenous religions in schools as well as Catholicism, which is a great move forward for the indigenous people who have been excluded from their own society for too long.

Now, inevitably, there is a confected campaign to get rid of him. Under the guise of some asinine aspirations to change the location of the capital from the La Paz to Sucre, the opposition movement is trying to get rid of Morales – they recently staged a million strong rally. I wouldn’t be surprised if the neoliberal hierarchy in the US government and the financial institutions that run our world are not somehow involved – in fact, it’s a sure bet.

If the axis of evil get rid of Morales they will inflict another generation of pillage and misery on this country — just like what happened to Nicaragua in the 1980s and 90s when the democratically elected Sandinistas were liquidated by a bunch of Reagan-financed fascists. Let’s hope Evo survives and the powers of exploitation are dealt another blow a la Chavez.

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Ron Paul is on the right-wing fringes of the Republican party: he is a libertarian, and he really believes that shit. He thinks that the central government shouldn’t have helped the victims of Hurricane Katrina because it wasn’t fair spending the tax dollars of people not effected on the people dying in the streets.

But yet, outside this Randian dystopia he wants to build, he is saying some interesting things about the actions of the CIA and bringing up an issue that has been buried deep in the memory hole for Americans and the British viz the destruction of Iranian democracy in 1953.

When Prime Minister Mossadegh decided to nationalise the oil industry he was stepping on imperial toes and was soon replaced, via the CIA, by a nice moderate dictator that was willing to siphon his countries goods off cheap - the Shah, a lovely man.

Anyway, good on Paul — at least someone’s got the balls to talk about it.

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I want Barack Obama to win the race to the White House. He’s the lesser of many evils. He’s the only candidate to have voted against the slaughter in Iraq, he’s promised healthcare for every American, and he’s not from the same rich kid fraternity milieu as the President and everyone else.

But this idea that he is extremely progressive doesn’t hold. I know politics is a dirty business but he has said some really unsavoury things vis-a-vis Israel, Iran, Pakistan and other things on the neocon agenda.

Israel is the most lawless militaristic state in the Middle East by quite a way. According to Obama:

We must preserve our total commitment to our unique defense relationship with Israel by fully funding military assistance and continuing work on the Arrow and related missile defense programs. This would help Israel maintain its military edge and deter and repel attacks from as far as Tehran and as close as Gaza. And when Israel is attacked, we must stand up for Israel’s legitimate right to defend itself. Last summer, Hezbollah attacked Israel. By using Lebanon as an outpost for terrorism, and innocent people as shields, Hezbollah has also engulfed that entire nation in violence and conflict, and threatened the fledgling movement for democracy there.

Hezbollah attacked Israel? Are you sure?

And on Iran he’s no better:

<The big question is going to be, if Iran is resistant to these pressures, including economic sanctions, which I hope will be imposed if they do not cooperate, at what point are we going to, if any, are we going to take military action?

Yes, that was a rhetorical question from Barack.

On Pakistan he’s even worse:

If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.

So he loves Israel, the most widely condemned state at the UN, which is currently liquidating a whole nation and building a wall around it’s people; he wants economic sanctions on Iran and probably surgical strikes, and if the dictator in Pakistan isn’t being enough of a toady he’s going to bomb them too.

And this is the great liberal hope. The new JFK, apparently, which is an accurate comparison: JFK of course started the humanitarian disaster of the Vietnam War in 1962.

In fact, another salient analogy is with Jimmy Carter and Barack’s foreign policy adviser is Zbigniew Brzezinski who served under Carter as National Security Adviser in the 1970s and also under Johnson when the Vietnam War was really going off in the mid-to-late 1960s (Brzezinski was an avid proponent of that particular bloodbath).

Amongst other singularly despicable actions, Brzezinski tried to suppress the memo which showed the insouciant support from Kissinger and General Ford for the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975, which would eventually be one of the most successful genocides of the 20^th century.

And this guy is Barack’s ‘progressive’ choice for the voice on his shoulder about foreign affairs. Scary stuff.

Obama is not Bush, but don’t believe the hype.

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After abject failure in Iraq the post-Petraeus debate has now shifted to blaming the victims. Not only were they ungrateful at being attacked by the US and Britain (and having 750,000 of their kind killed), now those pesky Arabs have the gall to start a civil war.

The front page of the New York Times lamented how the poor little Iraqis were getting in a twist about oil because of sectarian arguments, and this was – oh, please, no - making the Bush administration look bad. They wanted it as one of the ‘benchmarks … as a sign that they are making headway toward creating an effective government.’ But the Iraqis are too pugnacious to do what we want.

And, of course, there was a op-ed a few pages later to buttress this conception by Roger Cohen who noted that Iraq has:

… the drawback of tending toward [its] self-destruction in the absence of a strongman to resolve contradiction through force.

What Cohen deigns to forget is that Proconsul Paul Bremer decided to disband the whole security forces infrastructure after the invasion, putting thousands of people out of work and causing untold amount of confusion and anger. Thomas Ricks’s work Fiasco documents this extensively.

In fact, in the aftermath of the invasion there was much less violence, it was the cack-handed work of Bremer and his superiors that created the carnage since.

But this is all too close to home. This makes the warmongers look too incompetent and sadistic. So now it is the Iraqis fault that they were attacked and bombed to smithereens. Stupid, aren’t they?

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