unchallenged opinion is a dangerous thing. far too easily, it can masquerade as fact. all eyes gaze east. apart from those of the japanese, who bow to their buddhas and turn westerwards, regarding a thousand miles of air, perhaps reminding themselves, as only the japanese can, of what a bombing raid can lead to. all eyes gaze east. apart from those huddled underground in bomb shelters, apart from those staring across their city at distant fires and wondering how close the next one will be. i talk of the world crashing in on me. i wish i could escape the war. poor me. i'm sick of it being everywhere i turn. poor me. but i can. i can turn my television off, i can stop reading my sinister mail, i can close my ears to the conversations around me. and i can go to my yoga class, as normal, and tell myself i'm connecting to the universe. its easy to get disheartened, and count your curses. right now, i feel like one of the luckiest people on the planet. i'm well-fed, i'm sheltered. i'm safe. i live in a democracy, where people are free to protest against the government without being abducted and tortured. they flew a banner for peace from the clock tower at birmingham university. you can see 'old joe' for miles, a great academic phallus piercing the selly oak skyline. its been a while since anybody climbed the phallus. a few years back, two korean students climbed the spiral staircase, and flew from the rooftop. bad exam results. it was the end of their world. now, the tower is locked, or so they told us. but the banner flew anyway. a testament to impossibility, perhaps. echoing those impossible hopes of those who want the war ended. but who was looking at birmingham? we look east, at the other testaments to impossibility. iraqi missiles that, officially, do not exist were dropped on kuwait. disarmed? did you really believe that, for a second?? cameras gobble images greedily, and project them for their gruesomely fascinated audience around the world. we settle down to watch, aware that this will be the most captivating show of the last year, six months and nine days. in between bulletins - soft drinks; lip stick; cream that visibly reduces wrinkles injust nine days!.. we can buy anything we want. we can buy entertainment. and what entertainment! the images are not as exciting as those of eighteen months ago. a few fires, shown in infra-red... we're used to bigger and better, these days. we want collapsing towers. but we're told that this is just the beginning. stay tuned. we'll be back right after these commercials. you learn nothing from watching explosions.. look elsewhere: a four-year-old girl, the daughter of a man who had worked for Saddam's psychopathic son Uday. When the man fell under suspicion, he fled to the Kurdish safe haven in the north. The police came for his wife and tortured her to reveal his whereabouts; when she didn't break, they took his daughter and crushed her feet. She was 2 then. Today, she wears metal braces on her legs, and can only hobble.* This is a regime that will gouge out the eyes of children to force confessions from their parents and grandparents.* the man with the megaphone chastised us for not taking action. he shouted that if schoolchildren, so much younger than us, could see that war was wrong, we as wiser, more experienced adults could surely see the same. an odd argument. i saw so many things as a child. everything was clear. i knew i was right. in a child, this is acceptable. an adult should know more of subtlety, of uncertainty. any adult that is assured of their own correctness is a dangerous person. bush and blair are the real monsters, the man with the megaphone told me. i thought of the iraqi women violated with broken glass to extract confessions from their husbands. but i said nothing. you can't shout at a man with a megaphone. you can't attempt reasoned argument with someone with such certainty. i should have laughed in his face, but i felt too angry. inflammatory times feed inflammatory language. people talk of hate, of evil. people mutter about the stupidity of those who do not agree with them. we'd like to think we're better here, but we're not. evil...i watched the series where a girl with a good stock of one-liners, a sharpened stake and a huge contract from loreal can save the world... with the help of her lesbian witch friend, of course. it may be presented as fantasy but it makes as much sense as anything else to me. hell, we aren't doing such a great job of saving it the conventional way.. a line from the show: 'evil is a part of us...its natural' and guess what i thought of? but you shouldn't trust your television. evil is a concept. a convenient word for someone who acts in a manner we cannot understand. like all concepts, it should never be confused with a reality. or should it? is it part of us? 600 or more people in a Parliament, and they voted for the bombs. its easy to shoot off invective, to foist absolutes upon them.. but they voted for their own reasons. something inside them believed. not in george bush, but in the wisdom of removing a torturer, a mass-murderer and a tyrant from power. evil? hateful? these are the words of ann clwyd - a woman who was fighting to make this a fairer world while most of us were in the crib, or the womb. http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm200203/cmhansrd/cm030 read them. now compare her to saddam. blair is the real monster? blair is evil? absolutely. gassing ones own people pales into insignificance next to the introduction of tuition fees. i know... i know the real reason... but i can't accept your argument. people shout from one side, people drop bombs from the other. you're either with us or against us. really? is that what it comes down to? then i'm against you. i'm against both sides. i don't know if the certainty i've heard here is enviable or alarming. i can hear the television in the next room. the prime minister just spoke to the nation, presumably to tell us what we already know. we're going to hurt people. "The Pentagon predicts that the Iraq blitzkrieg could approximate the devastation of a nuclear explosion. "The sheer size of this has never been ... contemplated before," one Pentagon strategist boasted to CBS News. "There will not be a safe place in Baghdad." what can you say to that? except that, perhaps, there never was a safe place in baghdad. not in our lifetimes. we talk as if we know them. we know nothing, except ourselves. i can't see their black, i thought i could, once, but i turned out to have my eyes closed. i can't see your white, either. haven't been able to for years. from here, it all looks grey. there are no absolutes. this, in itself, is an absolute. all the above is opinion. and you know what they say about unchallenged opinion. should we talk about music?? ian +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. 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