Withdrawal

My thanks to the Humor Archives for this (and the photo of Tony Blair on holiday in the post below).

Italy rules OK. OK?

Two reminders yesterday that the autonomy of the Republic of Italy isn't a given.

One. Rome's court of assizes decided that there was no case to be made against the murderer of Nicola Calipari, the Italian secret service agent who was shot while helping kidnapped journalist Giuliana Sgrena leave Iraq. Who was the murderer? An American soldier called Mario Lozano. Whatever the truth behind the events of that night (and without a trial it's unlikely we'll ever know what happened), it's hard not to see this as an act of capitulation to the United States government.

Two. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Vatican's secretary of state, announced that people should 'stop it'. He was referring to Curzio Maltese's inquiry in la Repubblica into how much the Vatican costs the Italian state. The most recent instalment, published a few days ago, looked at the ora di religione, obligatory in all Italian state schools although not for students, who can, if they or their parents wish, opt out. This isn't as easy as it sounds. The hour of religion (i.e. catholicism) is always timetabled mid-morning, rather than at the start or end of the school day; those students who choose not to take part - some of them as young as six - are usually told to 'wait in the corridor'. Alternatives? There are no alternatives. Comparative religion? Stop it!

This is already bad enough, in a country which now has half a million children from other countries and cultures in its public educational system, not all of them catholic. What's worse is the way the teaching of the hour is financed. Religious teachers are chosen by the local bishop, side-stepping the time-consuming and exhausting obstacle race of national competitions all other teachers have to undergo. They're paid, though, by the state, and their salaries cost something like €1 billion a year; in terms of occult financing to the catholic church, this is second only to the otto per mille scam I've posted about before. Not only that - they have tenure in a country where a significant part of the teaching is conducted by precari, teachers, often in their forties or fifties, who struggle from short-term contract to short-term contract, their holidays unpaid, their pensions rights undermined, their chances of a mortgage or bank loan seriously restricted.

Finally, as salt in the wound, they're actually paid more than their equivalent non-religious teachers, as a result of laws passed more than 25 years ago, laws that are still being contested in Italian courts by their lay colleagues.

No wonder Bertone wants Maltese to shut up.

Gays too precious to risk in combat, says General...

A little distraction from my holiday photos and observations: this is from The Onion, so you may have enjoyed it already. If you haven't, here's your chance.

'Gays Too Precious To Risk In Combat,' Says General

Tired of the same face, the same voice...

Further proof of woolly thought and self-delusion from Bush's poodle.

In an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, Mr Blair was asked why the public was disenchanted with him even though the economy is sound. He replied: "I've won three elections and what happens when you're in power for a long period of time, people get tired of the same face, the same voice. It's just the way it is. I know people say this is all down to Iraq and so on, but that's not true. From the moment you start in these jobs, you're taking decisions people don't like. If you survive for 10 years, you're doing well."

It's the and so on I'd like to have explained. What on earth could he mean? Other irritating little wars perhaps? Or maybe he's thinking of embarrassing house deals or arse-licking episodes in Sardinia? After all, they're all much of a muchness, aren't they, Tone? All part of the job.

They can't even bomb straight

The Pentagon was apparently working on a gay bomb, according to this article. A bomb that would release powerful aphrodisiacs, so powerful that previously heterosexual soldiers would drop their guns and dive into each other's camouflage trousers, rip off those sweat-stained green tee-shirts, grind their heaving pecs against... (Calm down, Charles).

And we're complaining?

The wackiest thing about the, er, thinking behind this idea (OK, we are talking Pentagon) is the assumption that the difference between straight men and gay men doesn't lie in the nature of sexual desire but in its quantity. The more there is, the gayer it gets!

Consistency

Remember when Dick Cheney and Henry Kissinger wanted Iran to have its own nuclear power stations? So what's changed? Oh right. That's a picture of the Shah!

(The poster was issued by Boston Edison in the 1970s. I found it in today's Repubblica.)

145, and counting...

The cover of today's Independent. In case you can't read it, the text says:

This is Kingsman Alan Jones. He was killed, aged 20, in Iraq this week, just one of the 145 British soldiers who have died in this ill-conceived conflict. His death went largely unnoticed in the bloodiest month endured by British soldiers - another grim statistic, another coffin sent home, another grieving family, another young man who died in vain.

Berlin, Belfast, Baghdad...

Good fences may make good neighbours, as Robert Frost said, but there's little doubt that the building of a 12-foot-tall wall through the middle of a city is an indication of something more destructive than a desire for neighbourliness. Yet that's what the US army is doing in Baghdad. Its purpose, according to a press release from Camp Victory, is to "protect the largest predominately (sic) Sunni neighbourhood in east Baghdad. The wall is one of the centrepieces of a new strategy by coalition and Iraqi forces to break the cycle of sectarian violence."

A venture that begins with the stated aim of introducing democracy to a country and ends up by dividing its capital into two by night has clearly lost its way. Sorry. Changed strategy.

ROSENQUIST: THE F-111

A man has a contract from the company making the bomber
A beam at the airport
A man in an airplane approaching a beam at the airport
A bug hitting a light bulb
A light sky blue area

The painting is a cube or a box with one empty wall space
The pattern in an elevator lobby
A wallpaper roller with hard artificial flowers
Aluminium flowers on an aluminium panel

A jet plane painted on aluminium panels
An idea of fragments of vision
A person buying a recording of the time

A vacant aluminium panel

A fancy cornice or something seemingly more human
A pulsing muscular notion to the speed on the avenue
A glimmer
A flash of static movement

An aluminium panel

A fragment of a machine the collector is already mixed up with
A couple of aluminium panels

Foodstuff

A shaft that goes in the middle of the cake from the core or mould used to bake it
A big hole in the middle of the cake
A giant birthday cake lying on a truck for a parade

The spaghetti just on the right, with the fork, has been painted orange with artists’ oil colour
The little girl is the female form in the picture
The grass in Day-Glo green colours is the change of nature in relation to the new look of the landscape

A vacant aluminium panel

An umbrella superimposed over an atom bomb blast
Someone raising his umbrella or raising his window in the morning, looking out the window and seeing a bright red and yellow atomic bomb blast, something like cherry blossom

An aperture for a view

The rod holding up the umbrella goes right down the middle of the explosion
The umbrella is realistic
The blue in the umbrella is its own colour
It’s a beach umbrella that was left up in the winter
The breath of an atomic bomb

A huge arabesque
A fold of aluminium material
A blanket
A painter’s drop cloth
Drops and residues of paint
An orange field, the image of spaghetti
A person who offers up a gift

A man in an airplane approaching a beam at the airport
A beam at the airport
A small relief to a heavy atmosphere
An artist offering up something as a small gift
An extravagance

A man has a contract from the company making the bomber

War relief

Poached from this blog, which also has an image of what might be called extreme urban fishing.

Of course, it's far more fun if you ask them to take their helmets off first.

Emergency response

PeaceReporter and Emergency, the humanitarian organization founded by Gino Strada to provide medical care to civilian victims of war, landmines and poverty, have started a petition calling for the release of Rahmatullah Hanefi, head of Emergency's hospital at Lashkargah. Rahmatullah Hanefi was instrumental in organizing the liberation of the Italian journalist, Daniele Mastrogiacomo. Following Mastrogiacomo's departure, Hanefi was seized from his home by Afghan secret police; since then, no one has been allowed to see or speak to him. No charges have been made, but there are eye-witness accounts that he is being tortured.

The petition also calls for the release of Mastrogiacomo's interpreter, Adjmal Nashkbandi, seized at the same time as the journalist .

You can sign the Italian version here. If you want it in English, click here.

Women in wartime (2)

If you'd like to see more of Patrizia Casamirra's extraordinary collection of photographs of women in wartime (in Argentina, Bosnia, Guatemala, Palestine and Rwanda), get hold of a copy of this week's Internazionale.

And don't miss the cartoon on p. 78, just next to the crossword, by the wonderful John Callahan.

Insults: Taliban style

Daniele Mastrogiacomo, the Repubblica war correspondent captured by Taliban forces in Afghanistan almost three weeks ago and released on Tuesday, has written a long, informed and moving account of his time as a prisoner. He had a particularly gruelling time of it, both physically and mentally, though not as rough as his driver, who was beheaded after having his throat cut.

The most salient parts of the article were translated by Peter Popham and published in yesterday's Independent. One detail though, is missing from Popham's edited version: the term used by the Taliban to insult the Italian journalist.

Tony Blair.

Grace... to be born and live...

Jane just sent me this photograph of a protest in Dalston Lane, in London, about houses and shops being demolished for some brand new city type development and it made me think of Grace Paley, who would no doubt be angry about such a thing.

So I looked out an interview with her, by A.M. Homes, that's a pleasure and an education to read.

The title to this post, by the way, comes from a Frank O'Hara poem, and continues... 'as variously as possible.' There can't be two writers whose lives are less similar than those of Paley and O'Hara. But I like to think that O'Hara would have endorsed wholeheartedly Paley's claim: All my habits are bad.

Women in wartime

If you happen to be in Amsterdam in March, don't miss this exhibition of photographs by Patrizia Casamirra. They're powerful, necessary works, moving yet unrhetorical. They deserve a wider audience.