Donkeyshott & Xuitlacoche

There he is looking out of an advertisement in the pages of the Guardian: James Bond, a public schoolboy with a machine gun in his hands advertising Barclaycard and Aston Martins. Was he once a member of the Bullingdon Club too? Probably. But where can we find an alternative James Bond, the heroic and stylish story of a hard-wearing sophisticated hero of the left? How about Dale, Dr Dale T McKinley? As a youth he moved to the US from his native Zimbabwe, where he trained at Ranger school, the US equivalent of the SAS. He went on to get a PhD in Politics and while he was studying for it he travelled to El Salvador where he was with the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) and used his military skills to defend village communities. Back in North Carolina Dale became incensed when he heard the CIA were recruiting at his university. He had seen the CIA's Felix Leiters at work in Central America and hated them. With colleagues he hunted them down and physically threw the rec...

On the day after the Nobel committee gives a Frenchman the prize, lets say what's true about the Emperor's new clothes. US TV series like Lost are hyped up entertainment products with little or no lasting cultural relevance - especially outside the USA. There is a place called planet USA where J.J. Abrams and his colleagues exist. I think it must be a little like secondlife . There, human reality is the product of a lot of fictionalisation. Artificial values are manufactured and sustained in the face of Imperial wars. Stories of the American dream belie the reality of lives lived under the thumb of the US corporates, banking mafias and olygarchies. In the 1930s and 40s there were a group of people who made intelligent and thoughtful films. This progressive group was later extirpated from US cultural life by McCarthyism. And since then there has been very little of real value produced in the mainstream. What is subversive or interesting about Lost then? We can conclude, howeve...

Knowingly or unknowingly the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's good works have helped to offset an aggressive and destructive US foreign policy. The Foundation has done its best to save lives and rescue communities in Africa, while in the Middle East, US foreign policy has destroyed lives and communities. What is the Gates Foundation's answer to the conundrum of African development? It is to triage Bill Gates wealth towards helping the poorest people in Africa. The scale is different, but there is nothing new in Gates'philanthropic instincts. Helping poor Africans is a fairly traditional practice for US magnates. Generations of Rockefellers have had lots of fun raising money for African charities at $250,000 a head dinners. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation aims to rescue African communities by financing the poor, helping small farmers (in particular women) and combating disease. But when it comes to confronting neo-liberal agendas, the Foundation has had very li...

A sweet, piping voiced colleague reminded me of Bobby from the railway children. In fact she told me a story which shows she actually was Bobby. She had been travelling from Calcutta to Delhi. He mother sent her when she was 14 with her little 8 year old brother. But with warnings that as they went past one part of the journey, they shouldn't look out of the window, because there were bandits. But "Bobby" did look out and saw the bandits stealing money from people who had got off the train. So, in character, she rolled down the window and shouted at them to stop it immediately. Of course they just laughed. So she threatened to call a policeman and they laughed again, because the policemen got their cut from the robberies. Of course they boarded the train, probably to assault her, she was firey and beautiful child with long black hair. Quickly she locked the sturdy door of the compartment of her train and they banged and banged at it. The train pulled off, but still they d...

Phil Hall Sunday June 22, 2008 An 82-year-old former bomber pilot I met in the street the other day said: "Supermen. Ha! If Hitler had come over here we would have given him a proper kick up the jacksy." As Michael White suggests , British people are fond of the myth that they won't tolerate dictatorships, despite the fact that there were many fascist sympathisers in Britain in the 1930s. Yes, we do live in a relatively free and secular country - just ask any young Afghani woman studying at a college here for her opinion. But there is also evidence around us that the British government is engaging in repression. And not just in Iraq or Afghanistan, but here in Britain. Perhaps those of us who have lived for a time under dictatorships can spot some of the warning signs: • Inconvenient elections are avoided in the name of getting on with the job. • Leaders of the opposition are character-assassinated by the state media. • Institutions like the legislature begin to lose th...

How about making a parallel for religion with language that goes like this: Languages - Language - dialect - idiolect Religions - Religion - Religious Sect - idiogen The point is, for example, that that attack on religion always characterises it as monolithic or sectarian which it isn't. All religious people have an unpredictable personal variant on religious belief too. And what you say and your private opinions are similar probably to many other Christians and Muslims. For example, the "idiogen" of a Muslim woman will probably be idealistic and hopeful about the future of women in Islam in a way that her religion as a whole or her particular religious sect would not approve of. So she keeps it to herself. She values her community above her idiogen. Talk to most Christians, of course, and you will find that each person, no matter what their church says, often has quite a rich and individualistic spiritual life. Most Catholic women, I believe, expect that at some point th...