Fabric ~ The Underlying Structure

I am officially in exile. Let this be a lesson. Never go thinking you can change the world on bread and blogs alone. I have been banned. From a blog about elections. From a blog all about democracy. Oh yes. We knew we were outing grim realities that no-one was in the mood to face. Yes we did. And we were surprised that we survived the several weeks we managed. Rising early in the mornings for our 6 o'clock bowl of news and cup of cereal. Neglecting our other duties. Not cleaning our bathroom in preference of tuning into the abc hourly news broadcast. Letting the hairs on our chin grow long as we feverishly composed blasphemous issue after issue.

Oh yes. We knew we were living on the edge. And yet we felt compelled. By what I cannot say. Perhaps secure in the knowledge that no matter what we wrote somebody would flog us for it. We had nothing to lose. So we just posted what we thought. And what we saw. And we answered our detractors sometimes. And we were even Madame LeFarge. For a wee while. And we maintained our humor despite the rampant petulance of our tormentors. Yes. We were quite heroic actually. We even nearly cast ourselves into the heaving seething furnace of Mount Doom at one point. Or perhaps we were nearly pushed. However. Matters not. We were reborn. And we discovered our inner complexities. Our multiple facets. Our lighter side and our side that is willing to face shadow, being shadow itself. Oh yes. We became quite phrasaeic at times.

Alone. One even campaigned for the release of ones fellow exiles. And one was successful. For one was not the only banned member. Oh no. One was one of four. Including the ubique Jeffrey Schuster (who would have thought). Oh yes. One was quite successful in campaigning for the release of ones fellow inmates. Or should I say, ex-mates. For ex-iled they all were. But one cannot really be bothered petitioning for ones own un-exilation. For one would rather put up ones feet and have a wee rest after all that tireless seeking of truth and exposing of things that cannot be spoken.

So. What did I do? What possibly could that two-bit one pixel upstart emigre the meek have done? Oh dear. She posted about untouchable subjects. Yes. She did. And why did she do that? Yahweh only knows. Perhaps it was holocaust remembrance week that did it. Perhaps it was the trip to the Sydney Jewish Museum that day. For she went there, in her searching for answers. And what she found was disturbing. What she found, was how difficult it is to stomach frank bleak honesty. Yes. It made her wince it did. And it confirmed my convictions. Never again. Never again war. Never again torture. Never again in any form. It is not excusable to any degree. No matter whose army, whose government, whose blade or whose bullet. None of it is acceptable. An election alone cannot protect us from these things. A tick in a box on a piece of paper is not in itself enough if it is not accompanied by the denouncement of all tortures. And she said these uncomfortable things, to greater and lesser degree.

But did it end there? Oh no. She exceeded herself. She dug up history good and true. What was in it for her? You may ask. Well, nothing. Nothing but her conscience (she always was conscientious). For she remembered the last gulf war. In which Saddam Hussein was to have been overthrown. But was not. She remembered her stunned silence as she opened the Daily News one day in 1993 to find Saddam Hussein had suddenly become a paragon of hope for international relations within the Middle East! She was confused at the time. And dismayed. Something was terribly wrong. But she was a meek and mild artist back then. And she kept her misgivings to herself. Because nobody would probably want to hear them. And she went on indulging herself in the arts on her meager cleaners wage (which was really all anyone needed back then) living on art and bread and cheap red wine. What a hopeless idealist she was.

Anyway. This time around she decided to take action. Oh yes she supports democracy alright. To the end. But she is aware that to keep democracy alive and well, it needs to be strong enough to accept dissent. It needs to be gentle enough to for-go it's detractors. It needs to be brave enough to admit it's failings and supple enough to smile.

So what did she do? Well. She just went about observing all the tears in the fabric really. For the fabric is torn. Oh yes it is. When a fabric has threads running all one way it only has weft. And without warp when taken off the loom, the fabric falls apart in our hands. Unbound threads. We must reweave this fabric, or we shall all perish.

Anyway. After surviving three tormentous weeks in a thicket of polar opposites she did see a few small changes. Although she would have liked to have seen more. She saw someone confess that war is not all peaches and cream. She saw someone denounce violence, once.

Ah well. In the meantime Iraq Blog Count has reached 100 blogs. Almost without fanfare. 102 actually. And guess what. That makes being in exile all worthwhile. Because, I would never have started reading blogs if I hadn't been reading the Sydney Star Observer in a Sydney Pub one evening. And I would never have been in that pub if my seventh great great great (greats x7 generations) grandfather had not been exiled from somewhere for offending someone and landed of all places in some small village... and etc etc till several hundred years later there is me sitting in the pub reading an elitist free rantmag published on newsprint in one colour with the ink smudging in a puddle of con-joined beer-rings. Yes. If all that hadn't happened I may never have read about Salam Pax. And I may never have read his whole blog in one sitting. And I may never have read Riverbend's first post, or G's photoblog or Raed's return, or Zeyad's epiphany. And that's the way it is really. Just a bunch of people sharing their greatest dreams and their darkest hours. That's all blogging is about.

Oh damn. I have done it again. Taken up too much space. Somebody ban me.