buggery.org

G’night folks, happy new year. Thanks to everyone who commented, emailed, or just read this blog over the last twelve months. Hope I’ve made your visits worthwhile. My hope for 2005 is that it will build on the successes of 2004, provide opportunities for growth and learning, and not be quite so discoloured by death, destruction and mayhem as the last few.

As a final parting shot, here’s an image from today’s Age which, like probably every paper in the world, included a “2004 in review” liftout today. And what would a new year’s eve liftout be without a round-up of famous folks who’ve died this year?

Ronald Reagan, actor … what trashy 80s horror movie was he in again?

Fred Phelps and his band of crazy hipsters at [godhatesfags dot com] have excelled themselves yet again.

Imbued, no doubt, with substantial quantities of Christmas cheer, Phelps has issued a press release headed “Thank God for Tsunami and 2000 dead Swedes!!!” which explains that the Sumatran earthquake and subsequent tsunamis were sent by God as punishment … to Sweden.

Sweden, you see, has laws prohibiting incitement of hatred of and violence against people on the grounds of, among other things, sexual preference. Unlike many countries, however, you don’t get exempted from this law just because you wear a funny collar and deliver your incitement from a church pulpit. Earlier this year Swedish tubthumper Ake Green found this out the hard way when he delivered a sermon in which he allegedly described homosexuality as “abnormal, a horrible cancerous tumor in the body of society,” and homosexual people as “perverts, whose sexual drive the Devil has used as his strongest weapon against God.”

So God (reasons Fred Phelps in this presser) decided to punish the wicked Swedes by raining down destruction on Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand. Why South-East Asia, Fred? Why would He not direct His wrath with a bit more precision? Maybe take out one of Stockholm’s many fine homo bars and discos?

I know He works in mysterious ways and all, but frankly I think His aim would be a bit better.

(The press release is available on the god-hates-huckabees website. I won’t be linking to them lest they picket my funeral.)

So we have reached, once again, the arbitrary point in the Earth’s circuit around the sun which marks the end of one year and the beginning of another.

It wasn’t the easiest year on record – on reflection, we had an awful lot riding on 2004 – but it has been a good year. Below the fold, the year in pictures: one photograph from each month from January to December, and a few words of explanation. (more…)

Susan Sontag is dead.

On hearing this news, I went to my bookcase and found my copy of AIDS and Its Metaphors, which I read in the early 1990s. I was travelling in Europe at the time (the price tag on the back of the book says “78000”: I think I bought it in Czechoslovakia, or perhaps Poland).

Sontag’s essay had a significant impact on me in those days; I guess it still informs my thinking (and, now, writing) about AIDS and the way it is conceptualised. There are too few good books about AIDS: this is one of them.

Not all metaphors applied to illness and their treatment are equally unsavory and distorting. The one I am most eager to see retired – more than ever since the emergence of AIDS – is the military metaphor. Its converse, the medical model of the public weal, is probably more dangerous and far-reaching in its consequences, since it not only provides a persuasive justification for authoritarian rule but implicitly suggests the necessity of state-sponsored repression and violence (the equivalent of surgical removal or chemical control of the offending or “unhealthy” parts of the body politic). But the effect of the military imagery on thinking about sickness and health is far from inconsequential. It overmobilizes, it overdescribes, and it powerfully contributes to the excommunicating and stigmatizing of the ill.

No, it is not desirable for medicine, any more that for war, to be “total.” Neither is the crisis created by AIDS a “total” anything. We are not being invaded. The body is not a battlefield. The ill are neither unavoidable casualties nor the enemy. We – medicine, society – are not authorized to fight back by any means whatever. . . . About that metaphor, the military one, I would say, if I may paraphrase Lucretius: Give it back to the war-makers.

I remember reading these words, somewhere in Eastern Europe at the height of our own cold war. They helped me understand what was going on around me on so many levels.

Like most brilliant people, not everything that Sontag said and wrote has stood the test of time (I’m thinking of her admiration of Leni Reifenstahl and her intemperate comments about the 9/11 attacks) but there is always some truth to be found, and stimulus for thought. We need more of that.

• Update, 5 PM: Bentkid’s “respectful, loving note on Susan Sontag” is beautiful, moving, and unmissable. Go there now.

It’s been 2½ days since the earthquake, and picture just gets worse and worse. We had some friends over for dinner on the 27th and they commented on the fact that, when they went to bed the night before, the news media were still talking about a few hundred dead – how could they have got it so wrong?

The way information travels in situations like this is highly organic. In a disaster of these proportions, the outermost, least-affected areas are the first to report, so initially the picture looks a lot less worrying. A large earthquake, some big waves, a few hundred dead. Communications to the worst-hit areas are cut off, so the full scale of what has happened is impossible to discern at first. Details emerge from the outside in. So the death toll mounts – it was 200 on the 26th, 4000 on the 27th, 15,000 on the 28th and stands at about 30,000 this morning.

With this event, many of the affected areas have very poor communications infrastructure to begin with, and in the worst-hit areas, everything – phone lines, power supplies, roads, bridges – is gone. So the death toll will mount for some time to come. The news media are further hampered by the fact that two of the worst-affected areas, Sri Lanka and Aceh, are civil war zones, with nervous governments tightly restricting any media access at the best of times.

Only this morning have the news media moved on from talking about reported deaths to speculation about how high the toll will finally go. “Tsunami toll predicted to pass 50,000,” says the Age this morning, but even that seems conservative, only a few hours after that paper rolled off the presses. The ABC is already reporting that “Tens of thousands more bodies have been found in the sea and wreckage of coastal towns around the Indian Ocean, pushing the death toll from Sunday’s tsunami close to 60,000.”

It just gets worse.

Moments ago:

Hello I’m Sandy Roberts with a Seven News Update. The government has warned that the death toll from the Asian tsunamis could rise substantially higher than the seven Australians confirmed dead so far…

I guess the 26,993+ other corpses don’t count.

I’ve added a little dinky linky at the bottom of each entry on buggery.org which allows you to quickly post that entry to del.icio.us, if that’s your bag. I think it works. If you’re a del.icio.us user, you might like to do me favour by trying it out and letting me know if there’s any problems. I’d appreciate that.

Rescuers carry a body of a fisherwoman killed after a tsunami hit the area in the southern Indian city of Chennai on December 26. (Reuters photo)

Terrible, awful things happening on our doorstep yesterday – but for once this is the work of nature, not man. The earthquake and subsequent tsunamis have wrought terrible destruction in our region and I dread the humanitarian crisis which will undoubtedly follow.

The first I heard of this was on the SBS World News yesterday evening, and it seemed clear then that it would get much worse. It has, and it will further. The death toll – currently 11,500 – will undoubtedly rise. Millions of people are homeless across South East Asia, in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India, Thailand, Burma and the Maldives. The waves reached as far as the East coast of Africa. Amazing.

Christmas is over for another year.

We had an easy, pleasant day, great food and just enough company. Brent slow-cooked an amazing stuffed pork loin on the new barbecue, which we had in the early evening. Grilled prawns with onion and fennel, cabbage and tomato salads, siena cake and pot brownies to finish. Pimm’s with dry ginger ale, fresh fruit and cucumber slices … watermelon and berry punch … King Island brie, English stilton, Caerphilly … a tray of fresh mangoes, slices of watermelon. Brent’s herb damper (cooked on the barbie in the Furphy oven, which you can see in the post below) which became bruschetta later in the day. Christmas is about food. Lots of it.

Spoke to Mum on the phone from Wollongong and to the Canadian family in Edmonton, where it was still Christmas eve. Christmas is about family.

In the lead-up to the fête, I put together an iTunes playlist of Christmas music including such classics as the David Bowie/Bing Crosby “Little Drummer Boy”, Otis Redding’s “White Christmas”, the Aussie classic “Six White Boomers” and Pansy Division’s Queercore masterpiece “Homo Christmas” … an eclectic mix. Christmas is about music which, thankfully, we don’t have to hear all year round.

Took some time out during the hot part of the day to turn the music down and enjoy the quiet and sunshine before the guests arrived. Brent and Ryan napped while I sat in the garden and read, listening to the pork sizzling on the grill. Christmas is a time for peace.

On Christmas Eve especially, and again during the day, I paused often to remember my friends in Sydney, outside Australia and especially those who’ve gone from this world. Christmas is about absent friends.

Now it’s Boxing Day … blissfully quiet in the house, sunny and warm outside, but not too hot. Brent’s listening to his new iPod and reading some trashy novel, Pepe has taken a bag of leftovers and gone to visit a mate, Amanda Vanstone is using Christmas as a cover for expelling asylum seekers, and I’m off for a nap.

Peace on Earth.

Guess who got a new barbecue for Christmas?