following up

At some point yesterday, on one of the cable tv news channels, they were conducting a poll on whether "inflammatory Islamic books" should be banned/destroyed & the response was 96% in favour. Though, since it was Fox, I'm a bit surprised it wasn't unanimous.

&, in the same 24 hours,

there was a piece reporting groups in the U.S. calling for the destruction of the Harry Potter books because they were the work of the devil or some such.

& I saw Rupert Murdoch, who became a U.S. citizen so he could buy the Fox network - & who, incidentally, publishes the local weekly giveaway paper, the local daily newspaper, the local State newspaper & the only national newspaper that arrives here early in the morning & is surprised by any question about what's wrong with the concentration of media ownership - introducing Australian Prime Minister Howard who is in Washington to give the keynote address to the Deep Dish Pizza Club or the Betty Crocker Bake-off competition or whatever they call the international assembly of conservative political parties as "this great leader".

& I saw the aforesaid Little Johnnie H. having brunch with Dick Cheney & attending church with George W. & sharing a podium with Donald Rumsfeld where they both said what a free & open democratic process was being followed in the forthcoming trials of the inmates of Guantanamo Bay

& the Howard Government benevolently let "free" on some sort of containment visa the longest-incarcerated detainee in our refugee internment camps. & who, not surprisingly, was taken straight to a psychiatric hospital because seven years in a detention centre run by private industry - how can you, in all clear conscience, make a profit from concentration camps? Though, I suppose if you follow the Nazi model all things are possible - had fucked his mental processes.

& the Treasurer of the government, probably the second-most powerful man in the country, appears on stage at the largest fundamentalist church in the country, & then criticises the new Anglican Primate of Australia who expressed the view that the new industrial relations laws that are about to be brought in might disadvantage a significant percentage of the population.

Karri Kokko recently restructured a Bob Dylan title as a hay(na)ku. Let me purloin the idea & part of a song from the same album.

You
don't need
a weatherman to

know
which way
the wind blows.