Headachy and flueey. No post for you. So have some Betty Davis instead.
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Gil Scott-Heron
Could there be any other poem to honour Gil Scott-Heron for a science fiction fan/space age believer than this?
Srebrenica: why humantarian intervention isn’t
The arrest of Ratko Mladić today has put the Srebrenica massacre back in the spotlight. It was the greatest warcrime in postwar European history and it’s our national shame. Srebrenica is the reason why I stopped believing in humanitarian interventions: here finally there had been a clearcut case, a chance to stand against the same sort of evil we had been liberated from fifty years before and we fucked it up.
In Srebrenica Holland had the opportunity to prevent genocide, but instead we enabled it. For fifty years we’ve grown up with the stories about World War II and the moral choices our parents and grandparents had to make, for fifty years we had known that we would’ve made the right choices, that we would have been part of the resistance, as every book, movie and television series told us we would’ve been. Yet at the first real test, the first chance for us to prevent the same sort of evil we had read so much about, we fucked up. Our commanders liked the Serb leaders much better — so cultured and European — than the not quite civilised Muslim combatants. Our soldiers were glad to trade in their guns and bullet proof vests for a chance to go home and tried to think too hard about the men they were supposed to protect. Our politicians spoke of a tragedy and a crime but were firm and insistent that the Netherlands were not to blame, that “our boys” had “done their best” and that there had been nothing more that they could’ve done. It would’ve been better had we not been there.
Had we not been there to establish a safe haven that wasn’t, had we not been there to give people a false sense of security, all those Bosnian Muslims wouldn’t have been trapped there and some 8,000 men and boys might still be alive today. At the very least they wouldn’t have been trapped unarmed and been handed over to their murders so easily. Our humanitarian intervention only make things worse and since then I’ve always been convinced it almost always will.
Bob Morane
Bob Morane is a Belgian pulp series created and written by Henri Vernes, first published in 1953 with some 200 novels appearing since. Rather popular in the French speaking world, it has recieved the obligatory movie and television treatments, including a recentish animation series, as well as a comics adaptation that has run for almost as long as the original series, with the first installment having been published in 1959. Interestingly, the comics were written by Vernes himself, with a number of artists as collaborators, the best of which was William Vance, now best known for his work on XIII. Some of his cover work for the series is shown above. I love the pulp look of them, which could’ve just as well be used on the original books.
The content of these comics matches the covers: pure pulp in the best possible way. Bob Morane and his heterosexual life partner Bill Ballantine get into all sorts of scrapes, working in the traditional adventuring profession of journalist, though for the most part Morane’s job is only an excuse for him to be somewhere exotic. Usually there’s some woman for Morane to flirt with, be they damsel in distress, an opponent or villain, or a fellow adventurier like Sophia Paramount. Most stories stand on their own, though there is a rough sort of continuity with various villains returning several times, especially L’Ombre Jaune, Morane’s arch enemy. Every sort of pop cultural obsession sooner or later found its way into Bob Morane plots, so where you’d have something relatively restrained as Bob and co fighting the mob or getting caught up in a revolution in a fictional Central American country in one album, the next could see them going on a dinosaur or flying saucer hunt, or getting caught up in the schemes of one of various criminal masterminds and mad scientists littering the series, or even traveling through time saving the world from L’Ombre Jaune’s latest scheme.
None of it is any great shakes as literature, or even rising to the level of a top flight adventure series like Bernard Prince or even Bruno Brazil, but as light entertainment they do well. Especially with Vance drawing, who always brings a bit of extra class to even the most formulaic of adventure series. And Bob Morane inspired perhaps the greatest French New Wave pop song; Indochine’s L’Aventurier:
Guess what didn’t happen yesterday?
It’s been incredibly annoying to have to struggle through all the coverage of one loon/conman’s (strike which is applicable) idea of when an why the world will end, all done in a jocular fashion but with a bit of whistling past the graveyard mixed in. It all makes for lazy, easy reporting and since that’s the sort of thing reporters like best, we got saturation coverage.
As an atheist this annoys me, but coming from a background of sensible protestant Christianity it offends me to see this brand of lunacy protrayed as the face of an entire religion. The socalled Rapture is a cheat, a way for people who don’t have a clue about the real meaning of their religion to get out of the hard work of being Christian. We were told in school that “the kingdom of heaven is within” and we’d have to build a new Jerusalem on Earth ourselves, rather than wait for salvation from on high. With the Rapture and everything associated with it, you can short circuit that whole tedious work of actually improving the world and get to heaven directly. It’s Christianity for wankers.
And now proper churches have to clean up the mess this particular brand of wanker left behind.