In the first part of this blog series, I wrote about how I'd quit my office job of two years and intended to escape to Montreal on a 'mini-retirement' with my girlfriend. Since then, we've enjoyed Montreal as planned but have also spent additional time in England, Scotland and Holland, hatching various schemes, some of which are already underway.
Five months later, I've taken a day job again. I'm working part-time as a contract librarian in Newcastle, England. Don't squint so suspiciously though: this isn't a tail-between-the-legs return to employment after a wild period of faux-rebellion. If you must know, it's a hobby.
A part-time endeavor, my new day job takes place in a pleasant building and provides access to all the books I can eat. At £10 an hour, the paydirt is miniscule but money isn't exactly a problem thanks to the frugality, mobility and small-entrepreneurship ethics I've served over the last couple of years. I don't know how long the hobby job will hold my interests. A month? Three months? We shall see.
A day job is far more bearable if its thought of as a hobby. It's also fun to let your bosses know about this outlook: they have little hold over you as long as you consider their employment a trifle and this effect is multiplied considerably if you and the managers are on the same page.
I used to make the mistake of telling my office-based self that "this isn't the real me" and "you can shine when the whistle blows" but this line of thinking is a trap. It's far better to acknowledge that the job is a very real part of the person you are, whether you're in favour of that or not. If you're not in favour of it: escape to a better job or escape full stop.
Treat your job as you would treat cross-stitch or stamp collecting: an enthusiastically-pursued folly that you only do in your spare time.
Newcastle-under-Lyme bears little resemblence to any of my 'home towns' (my actual home town of Dudley, my adopted home town of Glasgow and the site of my mini retirement, Montreal) so its a good opportunity to learn about another town. To be honest, it's pretty shitty. Conifer trees, pampas grass, wholly unpedestrianised streets and white dogger compose the background of this sprawling English suburbia. A crumbling twentieth-century world and certainly not a place I'd want to spend too much time but there is still some anthropology to enjoy here.
Mobility is the most important thing in the world. To this end, I've not taken a permanent residence in Newcastle and instead stay in a guesthouse. Financially, the guesthouse option is approximately the same as renting an apartment (the per-night rent is higher than it would be in your own apartment but you don't have to pay council tax or utility bills and a lot of your food is catered for) but there are untold conveniences. There's no paperwork to start with: I've not had to dice with a letting agent or a landlord or the council. I simply show up and sleep. My bedroom is serviced by a cleaner, my breakfast is made for me, there's digital television should I want to watch it (though I tend to eschew this) and the wireless Internet connection is fast and free. Best of all, if I want to leave - if I take a mind to go gallivanting around the Hebrides or the States - I could do so tomorrow: mobility is the most important thing of all. It is freedom.
The only thing I had been dreading about the guesthouse arrangement was the necessity of making smalltalk with strangers over breakfast. Breakfast takes place in a communal dining room and I have never been a lark. It transpires, however, that breakfast with strangers is highly illuminating: not only do I meet people from all over the planet (a lady from Vancouver Island yesterday and a girl from Germany the day before, the exotic accents alone adding something to my day) but I have met genuinely interesting people and have learned things.
Today I met a former librarian from the north of England who has reinvented himself as musician and YouTube sensation, Will Fly. A fellow Escapologist in a way. A few days ago, I met a woman who told me to mix my Marmite with strawberry jam. An horrific suggestion, I thought, but on trying it I was pleasantly surprised. I'd only been out of bed for twenty minutes and I had discovered a new delicacy.
Speaking of which, the guesthouse breakfast menu has also introduced me to the magic of the Staffordshire Oatcake, a crepe-like thing and regional breakfast marvel.
I don't know what the allegory is to this breakfasty anecdote. Start your own breakfast club, perhaps? Don't shrink away from living communally? I think what really makes these breakfasts excellent is the high turnover of guests: it wouldn't be as enlightening if I met the same people each morning. If there's an allegory, I suppose it's to stay in a guesthouse from time to time and if you're enjoying a temporary hobby job like I am, you might want to consider a long-stay in a guesthouse. This is more specific and less metaphorical than the advice I'd normally impart but I'd recommend giving this a shot.
So that's the world around my hobby job. At the forefront, however, there are books to write and to commission for a New Escapologist spin-off books imprint, not to mention Issue Three of New Escapologist itself. As ever, get in touch, if you would like to be involved in these capers.
I hope others can take comfort in reading about my unusual worklife. As I mentioned in Part 1 of 'An Escapologist's Diary', the worst case scenario of giving it all up is that you'll fail to escape permanently and have to pick up where you left off. But even if you do that, you'll have enjoyed some freedom and will have stories to tell in the pub.
really hard to choose just one. I mainly read a lot of Stephen King or John Grisham. Maybe... "Lisey's Story" by Stephen King. It's about undying love and learning to live normally after your loved one dies, but still has a crazy element to it that attracts me to King's work. Marvelous book!
Day 5 = favorite quote
since I'm on my iPhone writing this, I'm kinda too lazy to find the exact quote. But, the quote is from Star Trek, when Captain Pike is talking to Jim at the bar after the fight. And he says something along the lines of:
"Are you gonna settle for less an ordinary life, or were you meant for something better? Something special?"
I've been applying that to my life a lot these days, especially reguarding college choices. I'm trying to convince myself to go for every dream I have, and not be weighed down by little stuff. I can do almost anything i want, as long as I really go for it.
Aaaand my ramble is done. Now I'll try to catch up on everyone else's posts!
I'm in Osaka, jet-lagged but happy, eating sashimi and about to go soak in a sento.
The sequence of views from my Airbus window this morning was fascinating. First Mongolia, snowy moonlit high plains in the grey of dawn, looking like the surface of the moon. Then China, flat and vast. The rivers and quays around Beijing are shaped by man, and the ground sparkles with new, silvery industrial buildings. Smoke stacks throw plumes.
Then there's the extraordinary promontory of Dalian, with crinkly red mountains and affluent cities; the last part of China before the Yellow Sea and North Korea. Our route, as the crow flies, should take us through North Korea, but we fly carefully around it. We don't want to be mistaken for spies.
South Korea is amazingly slender, and Seoul ( on the seatback route map) surprisingly close to the DPRK border, and not far from Pyong Yang. Through little fluffy white clouds I see Seoul's high, boxy apartment blocks. I've been watching a Korean TV show on the plane entertainment system; tidy mother and messy mother swap apartments. The Korean flats shown are in exactly these big boxes, much larger than Japanese living spaces, with gigantic sofas and hypertrophic plasma TVs with Dolby cine-surround speaker systems. The rooms are all lit with overhead fluorescent light. The tables are low, like Japanese ones, but the colours are completely different from Japanese colours.
There's a little turbulence over the Sea of Japan, but soon we're descending over Fukuoka. Japan looks like an enchanted land, so different from the lugubrious, hostile and vast landscapes the plane has traversed so far. Suddenly there are wooded mountains with little clouds nestled in nooks and temples poised on top. There are the sandy-beached islands of the Seto Inland Sea, which we'll be investigating in January. There are shiny new bridges linking the echanted Pacific isles to each other. There are sudden cities (that's Shikuoka, and here comes Osaka) poured into the plains between forested mountains. This whole thing shouldn't really be here: the archipelago has pushed a series of volcanic heads out of the sea, but they remain dreamlike and somehow enchanted.
Soon we land on the artificial island which is Kansai International airport, and I'm marveling at... Well, I'm grumbling at the fact that striking Finnish baggage handlers have ensured that our luggage wasn't on the flight. But apart from that I'm struck by the super-niceness of all the Japanese employees I deal with, and the deep sense of superlegitimacy with which they do their jobs. Complete conviction, religious (but secular) devotion.
The luggage claim girl smiles sweetly, the currency exchange man fans and flick-counts my yen like a magician, and on the train to Tennoji a trainee steward is being choreographed by a supervisor through her duties, and making white-gloved gestures as precise and attentive as those of the man who guided our airbus to its docking bay, then bowed deeply to the Finnish plane.
The speckless cleanliness of everything, the escalator animated by a Shinto kami in the form of a voice telling you to take care, the extra-schoolgirlness of the schoolgirls, the strange medieval aspect of peasants tending microscopic fields, everything confirms my feeling that Japan is a religious society posing as a secular one, and that it's poetry compared with the prose of all other societies I've known. And yet somehow this "poetry" is deeply effective; as I've been reading in my complimentary copy of the Financial Times, Japan is still vastly powerful: the four dominant blocks of our time, says the paper, are the US, Japan, Europe and China, with India and Brazil far behind. So this island that just pops out of the sea like a volcanic afterthought to continental Asia somehow continues to pack enormous civilisational clout.
Anyway, I didn't intend to string my first impressions out quite so far. I was going to say "here, jet-lagged, happy" then point you to two articles of mine which have just appeared: Discovering a new band in real time, a piece in Playground investigating a Californian band called Hecuba (photo above), and 800 Words with Alexandre Singh, my conversation with a young British lectures-based artist living in New York, published by Art in America.
Today I'm flying Finnair to Japan. It's been a couple of years, but that's okay; I like to leave long enough between trips for Japan's unfamiliarity and difference to gather afresh. Even if it's just for a few precious hours, I want to feel like a Japan virgin again.
If every time feels a little like the first time, what did the first time feel like? Well, I landed in Japan in 1992 and 1993 into a very particular time, place and culture. Anthropologists of 20th century Japanese subculture call the thing I encountered "Parco-Saison Culture". Press them for more precision and they'll distinguish those terms: the Parco Culture period actually lasted from 1975 to 1985, and the Saison period from 1983 to 1993. So technically, I arrived in "late Saison Japan". All the artifacts I saw and bought (Poison Girlfriend CDs, Sony Walkmans, copies of CUTiE magazine) are technically Late Saison Japan artifacts, bought from late Saison stores (Wave Records, Libro books). Even unrelated phenomena -- the Animal of Airs shop Hibiki Tokiwa kept in Aoyama, the Nadiff bookstore -- had close family ties to the Saison empire. Nadiff, for instance, was started by the manager of the Libro bookshop inside the Ikebukuro branch of Parco. In British terms, that's as if Magma had started life as a spin-off from Selfridges.
The Japan I witnessed in the early 90s consisted of a small hill between Shibuya Station and Yoyogi Park. Here was my hotel, the Tobu. Here was chic department store Parco, and the club where I played my concerts, the Quattro, located (it seemed bizarre at the time) atop a department store and reached by escalators which traversed the deserted sales floors after closing time. Here also were LOFT and OIOI, the Parco art gallery, the record store Wave, and the arty basement bookshop Libro (Saison Culture loves Italian names, clearly). Not far off was Muji, another specialty store owned by Seibu.
I didn't know it at the time, but my first Japan visit was circumscribed almost entirely by a world conceived and invented by one man, Seiji Tsutsumi. A novelist, award-winning poet, and one-time member of the Japanese communist party, the young Seiji inherited the department store business from his father. Yasujiro Tsutsumi founded the Seibu empire in 1912. Typically for Japan, it consisted of a department store (Seibu) and a railway line to bring people to it (the Seibu line). Seiji's half-brother Yoshiaki Tsutsumi, a much tougher cookie, inherited ten times as much as Seiji did when the old man died in 1964, and by 1990 Yoshiaki was estimated by Forbes magazine to be the richest man in the world, thanks to property and transport holdings in bubble-era Tokyo. But Seiji was the artistic one. He retired in 1991, but the Japan I first encountered bore his mark the way quattrocento Florence bore the imprint of the renaissance princes. (Like the princes, these magnates were financially corrupt, allied to the mafia, and autocratic, but that's another story, and one Seiji was well out of by the time the prison sentences were being handed down.)
While his half-brother (and rival) did business the way businessmen all over the world do, refined and cultivated Seiji got to work creating something rather more poetic; a cultural environment in Shibuya, a blend of art and commerce. A department store doesn't need an excellent art bookstore in the basement, its own culture magazine (Bikkuri House, which published 130 issues between 1974 and 1985, and whose readers were called "housers"), a concert venue, or a well-curated gallery. It doesn't need to commission arty postmodern posters and adverts from the likes of Eiko Ishioka, or music from Sakamoto and Hosono. But Seiji wanted Parco-Saison culture to have these facilities, and he had the power to make it happen. It's something we still see today -- look at the way Soichiro Fukutake, CEO of the Benesse Corporation, is revitalising the islands of the Seto Inland Sea with cultural patronage, art tourism, museums by international architects, and a series of commissions.
Seiji Tsutsumi left such a mark on shoppers that one blog account measures the separate impacts he had on a succession of Japanese generations, from the Baby Boomers and the Apathetics to the Juniors and the Blanks, and across a succession of cities (Parco brought Saison Culture to Sapporo in 1990, so the capital of Hokkaido lived its Saison a little later than Tokyo).
The YouTube clips reveal Parco's interest in sophisticated visual culture. I saw some of these commercials on my hotel TV during my first trips to Tokyo, but I didn't catch the earliest, purest phase of them. Art director Eiko Ishioka, for instance, was headhunted to make posters and TV spots for Parco in the late 70s after working for Shiseido. According to The Postmodern Arts by Nigel Wheale (Routledge, 1995): "In 1978 she directed a one-minute TV commercial to promote Parco, a new Japanese department store. The ad showed Faye Dunaway wearing a black dress against a black background, peeling and eating a hard-boiled egg. The department store name was faded up for the last few seconds of the action, and a low-key voice-over uttered a sentence in broken English: "This is film for Parco." The ad was highly successful, and Eiko rationalized its effects in terms of performance art: eating an egg was a totally "global act" done by rich and poor, advanced and developing peoples."
Much later, in 2001, I signed a deal with the Parco label Quattro (located directly across the road from the Loft store on the same Shibuya hill) and made a record for them with Emi Necozawa. It was deeply uncommercial, and sold almost nothing, but the label didn't seem to care. Perhaps that huge empire -- "Saison Culture" -- gave them a certain stability, even if it was achieved by sleight of hand. Four years later the police raided Seibu, and accusations of insider dealing and falsification of share ownership flew. The company was acquired by the owners of 7-Eleven. But Parco still stands on top of that hill in Shibuya. And although the money this time comes from a British University rather than Quattro-Parco concerts, the credit card that paid for my plane tickets carries the Saison logo.
My photograph has been on the front page of the Idler website since October. This is not news to me, so why wasn't I jumping for joy when I originally saw this? I must have been trying to feign nonchalance.
The Idler is my probably favourite periodical of all time and to be involved - even tangentially - is tantamount to a guest appearance on Doctor Who.
Here I am, sitting right next to the blinkin' editor.
Planning for Ocky Milk -- codenamed, at that point, The Friendly Album -- begins in March 2005. I've just got back to Berlin Friedrichshain (and Hisae, and the rabbit) after two months as a sound artist in residence at the Future University in Hokkaido. Japanese ideas infuse the record's concept: "I want to make something as static, as friendly, as consensual, as self-effacing, as Japan itself. It will be a feminine record and a friendly record... The values of pleasure and friendliness, modesty and elegance seem more important than ever to me right now..."
By March 22nd I'm saying the album will be "a warm record all about social connectedness, with the sprightly, breezy gait of Charles Trenet, wearing a straw boater, singing Boum. It's an Asian-sounding record, a Brazilian-sounding record, it's pentatonic enka ticky-tocky dubbed by the 1970s King Tubby. And it sounds a bit like Misora Hibari." An art show in New York with Mai Ueda interrupts things, and in September I'm still cogitating. By now the concept has become to make "random thin bucolic selfish sociable pentatonic torch" music. At the end of September I announce that I'm flying New York producer Rusty Santos (Animal Collective, Black Dice, Boredoms) to Berlin in November to work on the record with me. I lay down some Dogme-like rules of chastity which are forgotten as soon as we get to work. The record is inspired by Ozu, Caetano Veloso's experimental Araça Azul album, Webern and Harry Partch, but mostly by the sensation of having your back scratched.
With Rusty hunched behind his laptop or cross-miking his Sennheisers, we soon get some songs in the bag. By the end of November 2005 Devil Mask, Buddha Mind, Dr Cat, Moop Bears, Bonsai Tree, Pleasantness, 7000 BC, Permagasm and Ex-Erotomane have been recorded (in that order). They're odd, stilted, experimental. Rusty returns to New York and I negotiate my first novel in Paris and announce that I'll spend three months of 2006 in New York, appearing at the Whitney Biennial. By the end of December I'm heading off to Osaka (Hisae has been temporarily barred from Germany), where I'll finish the album with a mic and a laptop running Garageband. At this point I'm a bit iffy: "Some days I think what I've done so far is utterly wonderful, other days I think it's rubbish." But Hisae's deportation has given me the record's most emotional songs: Hang Low, Zanzibar and Nervous Heartbeat.
In Osaka, slightly anxious about the lack of strong conventional pop songs on the record, I record Frilly Military and Dialtone (reworkings of songs I wrote for Kahimi Karie and Emi Necozawa), The Birdcatcher (an unrecorded song written in the mid-90s) and Count Ossie In China. Finally I add I Refuse To Die, an outtake from the Otto Spooky sessions. The record is done. James Goggin's sleeve -- a saga in itself -- gets finished in June, and the record comes out in October 2006.
My overall feeling about Ocky Milk now is that it's a murky, peculiar, sensual album. I don't think it achieves the friendliness that I started out hoping to capture, and if it aimed to scratch your back, well, the person doing the scratching is some kind of schizoid vampire with a personality composed mostly of scrambled, obscure cultural references and poor web translation. The album's evasion of coherence at every turn reminds me of Captain Beefheart's prayer: "Oh Lord, please fuck my mind for good!" But with the mind fucked by editing, by randomising, by google poetry, and by spontaneous improvisation, emotions can take over. And Ocky Milk is surprisingly coherent emotionally. What emerges is a mysterious new form of half-lit tenderness. Tenderness in another world, which is a beautiful one (laced with terror, but "what's beauty but terror we're still just able to bear?").
You can hear pop music defiantly edging its way back through the sound experimentation -- a development that will lead to the blippy-boppy Joemus, the next Momus album, and the decade's last.
'Allegory, as the sign that is pointedly set off against its meaning, has its place in art as the antithesis to the beautiful appearance (Schein) in which signifier and signified flow into each other. Dissolve this brittleness of allegory, and it forfeits all authority. That, in fact, is what happens with genre. It introduces “life” into allegories, which in turn suddenly wither like flowers' (Benjamin). Contemporary virtual realities, in their attribution of a new pseudo-life into allegories and their hyper-generic traits, could hardly be more aptly described.
In The Statesman’s Manual, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an exemplary figure of English Romanticism, champions the symbolic over the allegorical. Where the latter is read as a coordination of two empty and contingent orders of abstraction, the former is a part representative of a whole meaning ultimately grounded in empirical experience as a form of plenitude. Coleridge favours the ‘tautegory’, ‘speaking-same’, of the symbol as opposed to the ‘speaking-other’ of allegory, and it is against these arguments (albeit in a German context) that Benjamin's Trauerspiel study mounts its critique of the late Romantic conception of the symbol. Extending metaphor leads to its ruin by giving the lie to the transcendental illusion of experiential plenitude – here allegory, to contrast Coleridge's notion of an unity between action and representation, heralds the potential of collapse. Jan Mieszkowski has explored this thematic:
Allegory represents not the loss of sense or meaning, but the inability of a medium to account for the nature of its own presentation. Throughout Benjamin’s oeuvre, we find a preoccupation with models of experience – shock, dream, melancholy – for which there is an overt disjunction between the claim to the immediacy of representation – this image, this vision, etc. – and the claim to specify the identity of what is confronted. In each case, the relevant representational field – sight, consciousness, memory – threatens to collapse… In the final analysis, likeness proves to be coordination of what is unlike or dissimilar.
For the visual field, the threat of collapse intimated by allegory is modelled by the shock experience. What is particularly salient about the experience of shock is that it flashes up in a moment of immediate danger or stimulation, and thus resists attempts to generalise it with respect to the signifying order in which it appears: the threat of a collapse of signs into a ‘singularity’ happens in, and only in, the peculiarly modern temporality of shock.
I know from my correspondence that many of the readers of this blog are young and idealistic, and would like to dedicate their lives to tracking down evil and doing their bit in eradicating it. I sense their fervour to be "sleuths and slayers of evil". For these readers, today is a red-letter day. Because today -- via a source I cannot endanger by revealing -- I have unexpectedly received a quantity of statistics on evil, statistics I believe to be entirely accurate. They certainly confirm many hunches I've had about the location and habits of evil. The main thing they confirm is that evil is counter-intuitive: that it would be foolish to expect evil to be accompanied by thunderclaps and sinister music. Instead, the avid evil sleuth must seek it in much more subtle -- and much more banal -- places.
I'll start with some of the most interesting statistics revealed in the secret research:
Over 70% of all evil in the world is contained in things that we all do. This is probably the report's most important finding, and a great time-saver for the "evil sleuth". Basically, it means that when you're tracking down evil, you probably shouldn't waste your resources investigating freaks, weirdos, eccentrics, people who dress up as women, clowns, minority immigrant communities, would-be-dictators who live in hollowed-out volcanoes, and so on. Evil-doers are much more likely to be someone who lives next door and seems like "a pretty decent bloke all round".
Evil people probably strike us as trustworthy: It goes without saying that shifty, criminal-looking types are at a very big disadvantage when it comes to getting away with crime: everybody is watching them like a hawk. No, like successful confidence-tricksters, evil people need to inspire trust, to lull us off our guard. They're more likely to be popular than unpopular -- everybody loved Bernie Madoff! Which brings us to...
Insiders: Evil-doers are massively more likely (88%, according to the secret report) to be insiders than outsiders. In other words, they are completely integrated into the infrastructure. They are, to all intents and purposes, legitimate. Throughout November sociologist Laurie Taylor broadcast three very courageous and revealing programmes about white-collar crime in Britain. The overwhelming impression these programmes give is that white-collar crime happens on a scale which makes car thieves, drug-dealers and other criminals who clog up prisons look like jaywalkers. And yet white-collar crime is almost never punished. That's because it's so integral to the system we live in that it passes for legitimacy, and for normality.
All that isn't behind us now: There's a tendency to think that evil is something that happened in the past, but doesn't happen now. The research knocks this over completely: of all the evil ever committed, it tells us, a stunning 56% of it is still happening right now. It's just not happening where you expect. The trouble for an aspiring evil sleuth is that humanity, massively, has a tendency to close barn doors after the horses have bolted. We're always looking back, trying to "prevent" the last crisis rather than thinking laterally and forward to prevent the next one. For instance, armed police currently patrol Akihabara because a man killed seven people there in a freak incident last year. But lightning doesn't strike twice. Clearly, the police should be patrolling the district where the next freak incident will occur. Now, that could be anywhere. But we have one resource-saving tip: it probably won't be Akihabara again. No need to send men there, then.
Evil is a habit: A good deal of the literature of evil focuses on premeditated acts the perp knows to be evil. (This is also what the law considers the most evil type of evil.) Raskolnikov, in Crime and Punishment, decides to kill an old pawn broker to see what it feels like to be evil. Sure, it makes an interesting story, but in the real world evil doesn't work like that. The research shows that a whopping 92% of all evil currently being perpetrated in the world is an unintended and often unacknowledged side-effect of what we think of as perfectly normal, innocuous behaviours, like driving cars or eating food. What's more, rather than intentional acts, evil tends to be a habit. It's what you do when you're on auto-pilot.
Evil is obedience: It's hard to overcome those formative years in which your parents tried to convince you that you were being "naughty" when you disobeyed. But the evidence proves that more evil occurs through obedience than through disobedience. There's a good reason for this: the disobedient really have to think through what they're doing, because they're probably going to be punished for it. Disobedient acts are therefore subject to all sorts of cost-benefit analysis and moral scrutiny that obedient acts aren't. Disobedient acts are generally more intelligent acts.
Over here, not over there: When President Bush outlined an "axis of evil", all the nations named were, unsurprisingly, quite far away from the place where Bush made the speech. Using new evil-location technology developed by Google (the company whose motto is, of course, "Don't Be Evil!"), the report reveals that the world's greatest source of evil was located in the same room as Bush while he gave the speech. The technology isn't yet able to locate specific individuals, but my bet would be on Dick Cheney.
There are no evil opinions, only evil framings: We have a tendency to judge people's evil levels by their expressed opinions: "Oh, he believes x, he's an evil cunt." Tempting though this is to believe (if it were the case, evil sleuths would just have to sit around in bars all day waiting for people to express evil opinions), it's barking up the wrong tree. Evil resides in the way the question is framed, not the opinion you express once you accept the framing. For instance, people arguing whether the term "prawny" (I just made it up) is needlessly offensive or justifiably offensive to prawns both agree that it's offensive. They're therefore "on the same page" with the idea that being a prawn is generally A Bad Thing. Evil resides in their agreement, rather than their disagreement. If you're keen to find it, look for it not in their conscious, calculated, publicly-stated opinions, but in the things they both take for granted.
Evil can be controlled: There's good news built into the finding that evil is close to home. An evil that is inside us is an evil that we can alter, if we only allow ourselves to see it, assume responsibility for it, and consciously change it. Gandhi said: "Be the change you want to see in the world." Jackson said: "I'm looking at the man in the mirror, I'm asking him to change his ways."
I was going to say "Go forth, young sleuths of evil, and change the world!" But you can probably achieve more by staying at home with a mirror.
"Opposition and crossbench senators have handed the Government a trigger for an early election on climate change by voting down its emissions trading scheme for the second time."
