General Incoherencies about the weekend
Well, I’ve finally celebrated (if that is what one does with a commercially inflicted saccharine greed exchange) Father’s Day with my parents. I haven’t cooked for them for ages, and certainly not in this house. But tonight we enjoyed roast pork and jus, fresh home-made pasta, sliced beetroot in citrus sauce and steamed snow-peas, followed by a beautiful sweet terrine made by my chef-in-training son. I do like laying a good table, and even more watching the faces of those who consume what I have prepared. To have my parents enjoy my cooking is a special treasure. I am so lucky in that I have discovered them as interesting people and friends before it was too late!

Then we watched The Forsythe Saga on the ABC, and I realised how far we had come in the way in which the interactions expected of families have changed in the last hundred or so years, yet the way in which people interact are still pretty much the same. I think because I have a friend whom I suspect of being in a relationship that is every bit as controlling as that between Soames and Irene Forsythe that I find myself, for once in my life, heartily disliking a red headed character (as most who know me know, I would dearly love to have been a real red head *sigh*). But at the same time I feel sorry for both of them. Soames for confusing wants, desires and possession and Irene for having to make a choice to marry so as to live comfortably. Thank goodness that to a certain extent the choice of marriage or poverty is no longer quite as extreme in our Western culture. The question then becomes one of does it have to be that way for every woman who does not live in those countries that are counted to belong to ‘the West’?

With the first anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Centre in New York and the damage to the Pentagon in Washington DC, I find myself more and more bothered by the way in which the lack of general knowledge about the central tenets of Islam is being used as a means of creating “a monster”, a bogey-man to frighten children (in this case voters who might otherwise ask awkward questions) and who is being used to set in place knee-jerk reaction laws that nibble away yet again at the freedoms our current style of parliamentary democracy and public discourse has allowed us to develop. I find myself becoming very cynical as to why the meme of war is being promulgated and who would benefit through the conduct of such a war.
The President of the USA maintains he has information that somebody other than the criminal mastermind, Osama bin Ladin, is a danger to world peace. But, and here my cynical nature starts to question things, is that because the mountains of al Queda’s strongholds are proving too difficult for the American soldiers? Or is it that the President of Iraq an easier target, and would offer a chance to finish off something that was begun a long time ago.

I am reminded yet again of the Tom Clancy novel, Executive Orders, where the leader of an “Islamic” state in the general vicinity of Iraq/Iran is found to have been the ‘mastermind’ behind the events in previous novels that had devastated the USA. And a totally unfounded but insidious thought floats through my imagination … is this a case of life imitating art, or is life allowing art to influence events? Much of the rhetoric that is being spouted by pundits and commentators strikes me as being of a less than investigative nature, which would make the clarity of the situation available to those of us who are going to have to watch our sons and daughters be drafted for someone else’s war – again!