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| THE LYCHEE TREE IN BUTTERFLY VALLEY (4) |
| Monday Mondays are gloomy. Sir William Stephenson, a famous Canadian WW1 aviator and later successful chemicals businessman, was a maker of the modern Western intelligence services in collusion with the Western politicians Roosevelt and Churchill during WW2. Another fine Canadian Lester Pearson was a minor functionary then and later, when America domestic politics required a proxy for same, grew the special relationship. Many others of great strength were part of it. It is still called "the special relationship" but modern operators thereof are hardly fitted to fill the shoes of its makers. Fortunately for us today Stephenson was high-minded in his overview of the colossal importance of intelligence in the defeat of unspeakable tyranny and depravity; but foresaw the menace that such an "intelligence service" had to decent society, if not kept within the limits of civility. But despite or even because of Stephenson, we are now living within the mind-control system of Western government brought about by total war of 60 years ago. George Orwell's "1984" has become reality for most of the planet. Europe has been at war with itself for 200 years in way or another, the forum for which, or proxy-war, mattering not. It has now an uneasy peace enforced by the military. After 200 years, China managed to stop warring with itself 50 years ago. It has an uneasy peace enforced by the military, too. India gave up 500 years ago. Indians now spend time insulting each other and anything Pakistani, which is better than war; but unfortunately have forgotten their 500 year peace by starting to copy the primary Western military objective of comprehensive ruin of the target society. My impression is that pockets of forgotten Africa and pockets of forgotten South America continue to slaughter away like billyo and good old times, too. We dislike ourselves. Complete surveillance and perspective of citizens is now the Western norm if not goal, as a replacement for war. Are we so pathetic? Or are we so dangerous? Or is the desire for mind-control of others a biophysic developed by glanding within certain of us? Earnest youths develop eavesdropping and biometric techniques for all humanity in the way that their grandparents developed our modern military methods. Both are and were lauded and funded. In Hong Kong the Legislative Council records state, a bit vaguely for my liking, that the number of interception warrants runs to 100s of 1,000s. It must be a job for the Chief Executive to sign each warrant "in the public interest" and on due consideration, by Law. Is there a difference between the unpaid pervert looking up women's dresses on the public transport in the forlorn hope that unsworn happiness of a sexual nature may ensue; and the paid one listening to or recording private conversations in word and print and by email on the public communications in the forlorn hope that sworn disgust of a financial or other nature may ensue? There is a disused British prison on Hong Kong Island called "The Zoo" cos that's where the Clipped-Tones, the Oyrish and the Geordies kept the animals. One can still clandestinely tour the torture rooms with their stunning views of the sea-side. The uneducated thinking behind that death camp is still with us. The Zoo should be preserved as a Museum for school-parties. More Law is passed each legislative session everywhere in the world to grant increased powers of regulation, intervention, search and detention, surveillance and conviction and detestation and devastation and oppression. Abolition is deaf and mute. All according to The Rule of Law. I am speaking as one imprisoned under all or any of these powers, these conditions daily; and yet I see no difference for those with alleged freedom from my form of imprisonment. "Business is war." I am told by an American head-hunter, once. He is still famous and well-regarded. I regarded him as insane and still do. But his methodology and phraseology were Stephenson's. My brothers and I were the first of several generations not to go to someone else's war. I was balloted for military service, having been in the cadet corps at quasi-military school. It would have lead to an infantry battalion in Vietnam but for an election of government which quashed that horrid involvement. Nor did I want to become another family cipher on a cenotaph. Nor am I even slightly surprised that the television here routinely reports Americans as having killed 3,000,000 in Vietnam, wrecking the country and being regarded as an aggressor. Are you? That killing by America is only half that of Hitler's murderers by his Final Solution and WW2 claimed more than 50,000,000 world-wide. No convictions of any sort here. Often, government regulators are not given internal exams anywhere and sometimes are; but these are naught compared with those of the learning years and years of the professions which the regulators publicly then attack and then show a medal, as it were. Anyhow, the regulators go on to regulate 1,000,000s of words of laws and rules containing standards of high moral probity for their groundlings. If business is war then where are the regulators' ethics left? The Romans had it as custos incorruptissimus. The Law doesn't. Roman law is never taught these days, anyway. It is far too quaint for the wizards who educate and govern us now. Entrapment is a prominent and lawful if immoral technique common enough to defeat the determined and inspired defence counsel. Is that technique taught or is it inherited or is that all that 1,000s of years of education have left us? Is entrapment of a foreign diplomat caught with too many passports for sale and an embarrassment of a government too venal to back him, a moral high point for the morality squad? Or a moral low point? I cannot tell. I say all these terrible things with distress and surprise cos I knew them hardly at all before the Lychee Tree. Mondays are gloomy. Tuesday Elections are coming! The British resisted all idea of universal suffrage for 150 years in Hong Kong until the last minute. Instead a plutocracy reigned. It still does, by multiple votes if you are one of the initiates. I am: I have 3 votes, by default. 1 is geographic and 2 are for "functional constituencies" which are business groupings. My neighbours herein and hereout have none. They did have votes for a few months but The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of The People's Republic of China abolished universal suffrage on the handover favouring an electoral college or plutocracy rather like China's and America's. Actually my voting strength tripled because of the handover. I could have had lots more votes by registering my tuppenny-ha'penny companies as voters. Then perhaps I could have sold a few shares designated as "V" shares carrying a vote not anticipated by the Law on Companies. The going rate would have been smallish and probably insufficient to warrant a candid prospectus say offering a 10% discount on placement to the market, if one looks at some of the candidacy and the resultant returns. I think I could have managed up to 10 votes in total but was embarrassed enough by the riches of the 3 that I did not ask for. They gave them to me without so much as an interview. Yes! Any old company can vote in Hong Kong if it pays the joining fee for the right business group. So can the filthy foreigners and them diplomatic missions if they are filthy rich and famous enough to belong to a "functional constituency". I wonder if votes go into a company's audited balance sheet in the assets corner or the other one. For instance, trademarks - another legal fiction - are stuck on balance sheets as assets even if you are in an allegedly- not-socially-responsible business say making fags or asbestos or junk food. What do you do with votes on a corporate merger or winding-up? Is exercise thereof a discloseable transaction? Do we care deeply enough about these salient points to stay awake? Anyway, Hong Kong will take all-comers so long as you fork out, speak nice and join the gang: and that lot don't cost a bar. Local peasants who till the soiled streets for waste-paper need not apply along with most of the populace. My own votes are suspended pro tem too till I am out of hoosegow and once more a member of decent society. "Vote early and vote often" was the phrase used by Alphonse Capone, the infamous gangster of Chicago in support of elections there. That phrase is almost used here too. Hong Kong can accurately claim, but may not wish to, that its voting system is a copy of that of Hitler's crony Mussolini who used functional constituencies to rig the electorate and that of Al Capone who used a simpler method: graft, which perversely is banned by Law in Hong Kong. To take first prize, Hong Kong Law on Elections says that if you are sentenced to death or imprisonment anywhere in the world then you cannot vote if the sentence has not been carried out. The Law does not state that one can or cannot if it has, as it were. This concept of the legal double-negative is exemplary British and so has infected the world's legal system. To be sure of the discharge of one's fullsome responsibility by Law to inform the Registrar of Electors that one qualifies to vote, one might need to circularise the governments of the 140 or more jurisdictions around the world (and each of those 50ish things of America) for a "Certificate of No Death Sentence" in the same way that one can do and many do and have done for many years in Hong Kong, by applying for a "Certificate of No Criminal Conviction". Against that mandatory injunction, one needs seriously to consider the expense and time that that would take to fulfill and to fortify. This inquisition of undeathliness of sentence, which is this? Is it Vol. 2 of Albrecht Durer's Dance of Death (from which I once had a fine bookplate made); or that of the estimable Sebastian Brant's Ship of Fools? Search me. By that mandatory injunction, the Registrar of Electors could then house a Register of Certificates of No Death Sentence available, like the main electoral roll, for public inspection but on payment of a fee to finance the cost of housing the differently sized and conditioned paperwork and booklets and honest affidavits exhibited therewith crates of entertainer memorabilia and CDs (not being Certificates of Death) from Texan Country-and-Western lawyers; spent rifle rounds and imitation gravestones from the Philippines; and so on and on. Anyhow, an attempt to vote under sentence of death would be an unique and selfless attribute of a condemned man, certified or not. On the other hand, the choice between candidates might provoke suicide. I must say too that it would be tricky if the sentence had been carried out unless Hong Kong's esteemed Law provides for one's executors in either sense to vote on one's behalf after one's execution. An execution after an execution perhaps? Perhaps not. The Law is silent on the point having raised it. Do God's cheek muscles twitch when he sees his children dream up these things? Wednesday It being weekly race-night at Happy Valley Race Course in Hong Kong, I consider problems of odds. The obvious problem of gaol-birds, such as are we of the Lychee Tree in Butterfly Valley, is boredom and gross under-employment of the time of 1,200 souls. Now you may say that making things such as baskets and number-plates and so forth is pitching it at the right level. I disagree. Having studied the matter at first hand in a way that policy makers do not and would be horrified to do (viz. by being incarcerated themselves) I have reached these conclusions: 1. a working majority of prisoners locally and internationally-speaking are Chinese and interested in gambling and are very knowledgeable about both - being Chinese and gambling; 2. 1. above has an extra feature absent from gweilo (non-Chinese) gaols internationally in that the "tram-line" mind and thought function prevails, though not exclusively; 3. gambling reckoning of the odds is not dissimilar to problems of probablilty put out for instance on the web-sites of mathematics departments of universities internationally; and for good examples of gambling odds probs aka probability probs see www.claymath.org; the maths concept of strangeness being another example; and 4. Hong Kong inmates are not only knowledgeable about gambling odds but also desperate enough to develop their skills to take their gaolers to Court over lack of racing pages in their newspapers (same being torn out); they winning at first instance the judge being a Jockey Club member and losing on appeal the judges, not Jockey Clubbers, worried about illegal betting as if that didn't occur; 5. reckoning the odds - race fixing factored in naturally - is a deadly serious business of the incarcerated Chinese and should be encouraged not discouraged - and in a beneficial way. The probability problems advanced so authentically these days (and said to be solvable only by "trained mathematicians" who are another set-piece sub-set to "tram-line minds") by maths afficionados, should be presented as gambling problems instead. Prizes are offered already anyway so money is not part of the problems though it does raise the interesting legal point about illegal gambling on the internet. I will give you odds of 3:1 that Fermat's Last Theorem would have been cracked in under a year, instead of hanging around for some 200 years, if it had been known in the Lychee Tree in Butterfly Valley as a gambling problem with a prize for being first. Fermat's Format, see. If the gamblers on the financial derivatives markets are nutty enough to employ physicists to produce probability- and risk-elimination formulae and curves and throw 1,000,000,000s after that with no one arrested (which has happened recently, in America of course); then the gamblers in the maths departments should drop their jargon, convert to horse-racing Cantonese jargon and be not nutty but logical enough to employ Chinese gaol-birds to calculate the odds set forth on the web-sites and by the Henry Clay Institute in particular. Fermat's Format will happily meet the needs of the frustrated gambler in the maths-men; the gaol-birds and the gaolers. Money is the goal. Mankind's advance as a spiritual and scientific animal of inquiring mind is thus promoted in a modern fashion. I bet it works better than anything the academics come up with. Computers, you say? They need a constant 60 cps of electricity to even imitate a moron. Forget them pdq. Publishing results in 2 journals is no prob so long as readers can read Cantonese or Putonghua odds tables. I tip a photofinish if the prize is big enough. You also get truths and transparencies. Thursday South Sea Islanders in Fiji and the Solomon Islands today experience the 5,000 year-old advanced political thought behind all forms of government from school yards onwards: "I want it. Give it to me or I will hit you." The basic form of political thought does not offer a choice. In the Lychee Tree in Butterfly Valley we are supplied with all our wants that we are permitted to want. This form of government appears much more benign than that of the South Sea Islanders' proposals since food, water and clothing and shelter are a pre-requisite for the Lychee Tree gaol-birds; but a sort of post-requisite for the South Sea Islanders. Lychee fruit does not fall till rotten. It is much the same, I hazard, in the South Sea Islands. Friday Lunch looked unappetising for me and my stomach felt full anyway. So I skipped it to the consternation of my Chinese cell-mates who fell silent for a change and chomped the additional with misplaced gratitude. Instead I read "Captain Corelli's Mandolin" a love story set in Greece and a belly laugh and tears it gave me, unlike lunch. The book is descriptive and soon reminds me of my own days long gone of the Meltemi and sailing in Greece and walking lonely island hills with my girl. Putting down my book, the cell is quiet. I have been so enjoying the book that I have not noticed that lunch is finished and, this is strange, 29 out of 31 men in the cell are all deeply asleep. The other fellow awake and looking satisfied with his lot is the cell-keep. I think I will go with the traditional and available diet of bread and water and save the sleep for night-time. Someone has joggled someone's elbow today when administering the sedative to the bean soup. Saturday The English language press has deteriorated into a 2 minute silence. I am driven to find out what is happening from the racy Chinese press which is entertaining, too. Lots of naked ladies therein are no influence of course on my editorial judgment. Pay no attention to that aspect. None at all. Modest, covered-up, flat-chested Hong Kong has more on show than sex-drenched, confused America. I am amazed by the Americans' magazines' solemn articles just in and well-thumbed before me, They describe rubbing on "testosterone gel" onto "hairless skin"as if aphrodisiacs were a new idea and guaranteed to work. Quackery is not a crime if written in jargon. This applies to all professions, I think. More tele-flaming-phone today in the gabbletorium, but it's working. Sunday I read in colour. Each letter, for instance of my no-squint-print Bible, has a different colour so the printed page becomes an organised riot of colour, white worms of spaces wriggling down the page. It has always been like this so I do not even notice it now unless I notice it. The effect is less if I am tired. If I concentrate on English newspaper print I can read it in black. Chinese newspapers are, though more interesting in their content and unstudied exuberance, more difficult to read since the print is often in colour. So I am sub-consciously converting the print into other colours but only for English words, of course. All coloured English print is hard for me to read. The barbed-wire Cantonese print just stays as patterns to my eye. Here are the colours: a is brown; b is dark brown; c is salmon pink; d is green or brown; e is yellow; f is green; g is red; h is blue; i is white; j is pink; k is green or pale pink; l is white-grey; m is light blue; n is darker blue; o is white or black; p is dark blue or brown; q is purpley-red; r is blue; s is red or yellow; t is green; u is grey; v is salmon pink; w is amber orange; x is white and black together; y is yellow or pink; z is blue or black; 1 is white; 2 is salmon pink; 3 is yellow; 4 is blue; 5 is green; 6 is red; 7 is light blue; 8 is pale yellow; 9 is brown; 0 is white or black. So the word "rhythm" appears to me as blue blue pink green blue blue; and "birthday" appears to me as brown white blue green blue green brown pink; and so on. Perhaps I learnt the colours as a tiny child from the class-room wall alphabet and it stuck. It has always been this way. I believe that colour is more often associated with musical keys and tones. I listen in colour too. It is hard to explain how one "hears" "colour". I cannot do it. But it is pleasurable and rich. Hymns, rock concerts, piano concerti and all are technicolor glories to my ears, as you can see. What a lovely gift from God and simple. Monday Having watched too much Chinese television in the Lychee Tree in Butterfly Valley, I have (a) fallen in love with 5 actresses all at the same time; and (b) concluded that if they are in the flesh anything like their characters played: sulky jealous, pouting, despondent, useless and coquettish also all at the same time; then one might as well stay on in the Lychee Tree forever, to avoid a menace to society at large and oneself in particular. It is just a phase I am going through or else I have lost it or found it. Today I am to leave the Lychee Tree and walk down Butterfly Valley towards the city. My time here done and now the Lychee tree shall grow more fruit, breathe and live without me. How odd that a sense of faint regret comes over me. After a year of inactivity or investigation, depending on one's view, the police suddenly charged me to come before Court the last working day before my release. They want to keep me inside, but fail when the Court sees through the ruse. It is all too coordinated and pat to be ignored. So I am not going to. Another 6 months of different bilge-water awaits my boots' attention. Best is not to be surprised, whether by the police or government lawyers oppressing one with Court procedures; or whether by the man arrested and brought here today carrying not 1 but 3 dildos of large and imaginative redness of design - all unabashedly displayed and duly written up in prison records of our new inmate's personal property. The audience rolled in the aisles and then a little later, I go to see my family on a long holiday. |
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