Bradley Manning's Legal Defence Fund

Can be contributed to, here.

He's U.S. Army private who gave the Apache helicopter gunship attack footage to WikiLeaks. He has been held in solitary confinement for 7 months altogether, without having been convicted; the conditions of his imprisonment constitute cruel and unusual punishment, and are likely to result in long-term psychological injury.

I am in favour of Wikileaks.

Thomas Jefferson imagined a democracy of yeoman farmers informed of the affairs of their state and government. A full elementary school education of the late C19th was designed, when you look at the tests, to enable a farmer or small business-owner (the stock and seed store, the hardware store) to converse and put a point of view equally well to his neighbour and his senator.

By the end of the first decade of the C21st, we have a governement operating in almost total secrecy, and journalism as sycophantic, self-interested and uninvestigative as Pravda. After 40 years of consolidation every newpaper is owned by a corporation totally dependent on the Federal goverment for its powers and profit: Fox News and the rest depend on broadcast licences controlled by the FCC (buy those Commissioners!); the other networks, owned by comglometates which are ultimately heavy weapons-systems manufacturers, utterly dependent on Pentagon contracts.

Such confluences of interest do not make for transparency; political donations and spin in return for money is too simple and compelling an equation in a culture where the quarterly profit-sheet is literally the most important thing on earth.

Most large corporations pay no income tax: the profits are in off-shore tax-havens. The electorate has to be kept in the dark about the spin, about the bank-government financial deals, about the significance of the congressman-senator/congressional aide / lobbyist revolving door and what it costs (health-care, education, infrastructure). Because the electorate pays for it all. And because it pays for it all, he electorate has to be told that the war, the privation, the lack of education, health-care, infrastructure, housing, retirement, pensions – are all for its own dire and immediate good; belt-tightening for the war on drugs, the war on terror, the children, the troops, the flag, freedom, the continuance of the American way in the greatest nation in history. There is no heavy engineering here except for weapons-manufacture – aerospace companies, helicopter gunships, smart bombs, stealth bombers, military space-shuttles. The bridges need repair? The States and Counties don’t have the money, even if the original engineering firms still exist. The too big to fail banks have that money, because Congress and a President gave it to them, against the will of the people, and another President surrounded by bankers goes on giving it to them.

Frontline reveals to us that our tax-dollars pay for baka bazi boys for the Afghanis we need on our side: sex-slavery and gang-rape of minors. Baka bazi’s been a Central Asian custom for at least two thousand years. Well, we are great respecters of custom, here: secret and undeclared war is a custom; dropping drone-bombs on wedding-parties is a custom; training the military and police for South American dictators is a custom; indefinite detention is a custom; rendition is a custom; torture is a custom; bailing out billionaire bankers is a custom; shooting and killing old women after breaking down their doors because the FBI had the wrong address for a drug-bust is a custom; arresting and killing people for driving while black or hispanic is a custom; death in custody is a custom; promoting the killer cop is a custom; generating homelessness through catastrophic illness is a custom; homelessness by fraudulent mortgage is a custom; death by denial of medical insurance and care is a custom.

The U.S. government has become an outrage against its own citizens and everybody else.

Wikileaks is an extreme reaction to an extreme situation, a perfect case of Yin and Yang.

The leakers are not spies. They have not sold secrets, in secret, to a foreign power. Bradley Manning is in jail. His target was the electorate, the people who pay and do not know what they are paying for, and how. The leakers are employees of the institutions they disclose from; in the military they are often from military families, brought up on the sacredness of the flag. If these are the people disgusted, in my book that adds up to the standard of “the reasonable person”.

Leakers are not spies; they are whistleblowers. Assange is not a spy; he’s a publisher. His target is the electorate. He’s absolutely correct in characterizing the U.S. government as a conspiracy. The essence of conspiracy is concealment. The only counter to that is publication.

Ern Malley

Ern Malley is Australia's favourite literary hoax.

Ern and his work were concocted in 1941 to expose the supposed hollowness of modernist art and writing, and expunge the annoyance that Max Harris, the editor of Angry Penguins, had made of himself, brilliant stirrer, talented poet, communist, sympathizer, literary agitator that he was.

In the early 1940s Adelaide was small – usually described as a big country town – isolated, homphobic, xenophobic, femophobic; it persists as one of the whitest of Australian cities, and modernist art ignored by Robert Hughes / of uncertain investment value, is still ignored by the art market there.

And so James McAuley and Harold Stewart – McAuley a poet in the Australian Army, hanging around in barracks, waiting to be deployed, and his friend and co-conspirator, Stewart, hatched Ern Malley. Malley, young and dead, had been a mechanic. His sister, Ethel, discovered the poems afterwards, in a shed.

Ethel (McAuley and Stewart) submitted Ern's poems to Angry Penguins. Harris accepted them and raved, the hoax was revealed, and Harris, as an individual writer, was destroyed.

(Australia's always been a place of very odd social deaths. There appear to be no rules whatsoever, as MsWord would say of Australian English, until you do something unforeseen.)

Reading the Malley poems now shows them to be almost Edwardian in spots. I like this one for its completely straight-faced silliness:

Dürer: Innsbruck, 1495

I had often, cowled in the slumberous heavy air,
Closed my inanimate lids to find it real,
As I knew it would be, the colourful spires
And painted roofs, the high snows glimpsed at the back,
All reversed in the quiet reflecting waters —
Not knowing then that Dürer perceived it too.
Now I find that once more I have shrunk
To an interloper, robber of dead men’s dream,
I had read in books that art is not easy
But no one warned that the mind repeats
In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still
the black swan of trespass on alien waters.

Despite his ignoble, destructive, derrière-garde career, Ern's estate still grows.

Here are two hitherto unknown, signed poems, from a box of commercial property daily journals donated to the National Library of Australia. They were apparently pawned for underpants when Ern was an apprentice.

Late Rome

The sun that glitters on mechanical metal
shall not enter this shadeous vault
where the eagle proclaims the imperium. Nettle
will enter, moth, caterpillar; undoing, unwinding, fault.

But in the waste between the day and the dawning
the eagle will also be absent.
There is no Coliseum but morning.

Dualities

But do not think I am all histories
pussyfooting with tom-toms. Through spectral dance
I know the unravelling of future strings and mysteries
Fibonacci and irrational. So glance
at me, my only love. Let us leave the merely national
and outsource to the spitting stars all metempsychoses and avatars,
the mess of the confessional.

1) The complete context, including speculation as to the personal motives that might have driven the hoax, and paintings by the artists Angry Penguins reproduced, can be seen here.
2) Ern's complete corpus can be viewed here.