EMPIRE BURLESQUE, PART TWO.

EMPIRE BURLESQUE

AN ENQUIRY INTO POWER. PART TWO: NOW

A SHIP THEY CALLED THE MAYFLOWER.

Soon – shortly – none will live who walked the Moon; it’s as though the Pilgrim Fathers had landed at Plymouth Rock and said Fuck Thee, O Lord, This Shit, Thou Canst Keepeth It - and sailed back to the other Plymouth, the real one. Captured Nazi techies had enabled NASA to make good on JFK’s windy bluster and in 1969 land white men on our sattelite, set them down precisely, a quarter of a million miles away. In vehicles using less computer power than a 1980s BMW, coming in on a solar wing and an Anabaptist prayer, Uncle Sam, greedy, boastful and belligerent, had finally done something beautiful, something magnificent, a new imagery filled our eyes and our consciousness, shattering and awesome - Earthrise.

And then he abandoned it.

Maybe the making habitable of near space would have blurred the focus of America’s Earthside wars of economic subjugation. At around the same time as the lunar magical mystery tours, the US Army Air Force was busy deploying Puff the Magic Dragon, an airborne Gatling gun, capable of putting a .45 calibre round into every square yard of a US football field in a little under three seconds, or to use technical language, wasting shitloads of gook villages.

EAT SHIT AND DIE, MOTHERFUCKERS

JFK’s Man-on-the-Moon rhetoric had been about smoothing US imperialistic feathers ruffled by the Commies putting Yuri Gagarin in near-Earth orbit and not about a Brave New Off-World future – mouthy, big-haired. kicking ass, and mistreating women, Kennedy was an archetypal Democrat millionaire senator; no visionary, he, even if he’d had the chance. And after Apollo fizzled-out, the closest America got to space was in the form of Captain James Tiberius Kirk, sermonising, in his cardboard starship, a prototype Obama, Yes-we-can gabshiteing from here to the Crab Nebula. There has been NASA stuff, of course, but it's been remote, telescopes and probes, artificial ambassadors, silicon pioneers, micro-processor frontiersmen; here, on the MotherShip, Uncle Sam has, instead, explored the nuances of Detention and Torture and Rape, boldly gone into civilian massacre, Shock and Awe Blitzkrieg his prime directive, first thing we do is kill all the civilians.

WARCRIME, THE FINAL FRONTIER

PATRIOTISM, THE LAST REFUGE OF THE SCOUNDREL.

FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE

The miltary expenditure – on his apparatus of global terrorism - of the United States has been and continues to be mind-boggling, had he not spent those sums on oppressing the entire world, Uncle Sam might, instead, have freed us from her gravity shackles; had his swarming satellites been deployed to something other than paranoid espionage who knows what we might have made of natural disaster, local and planetary. But he went angry and fretful, self-righteous and suspicious, God-bothering and sanctimonious to the New World and with those attitudes he seeded her. He stands today, sermonising with a big stick, his pockets empty, praise-singing his stupidity, implacable in his pig-igorant, bullet-headed, waterboarding brutishness. Uncle Sam was ever an arsehole. And yet, a man of constant sorrow, once he walked the Moon.

OOH BABY, OOH-WEE, IT'S THAT TRILLION DOLLAR BASH.

The acknowledged US spending on what it calls defence is half of the world's total military spending at one TRILLION dollars. A trillion this, a trillion that, it's the sort of figure bandied about by innumerates, like British premier, Gordon Snot, a man who couldn't twice count the change in his pocket and get the same sum. Snot understands neither language nor number, only soundbite, gibberish validated by repetition. Dubya was the same, Obama as bad, neither has any real need of and therefore no understanding of the value of money. But a trillion dollars is a fuck of a lot of money. In hundred dollar bills, the only sort, sweetheart, a million dollars looks like this:

A hundred million dollars looks like this:

And a billion dollars looks like this:

What is a trillion dollars? What does it look like? Well, it's a million million. It's a thousand billion. It's a one followed by 12 zeros.

This is what it looks like, a TRILLION dollars:

That's the man/comparison, there, tiny, in the bottom left of the illustration.

From wiki:

The military budget is that portion of the United States discretionary federal budget that is allocated to the Department of Defense. This military budget pays the salaries, training, and healthcare of uniformed and civilian personnel, maintains arms, equipment and facilities, funds operations, and develops and buys new equipment. The budget funds all branches of the U.S. military: Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard.

For the 2009 fiscal year, the base budget rose to $515.4 billion. Adding emergency discretionary spending and supplemental spending brings the sum to $651.2 billion.^[1] This does not include many military-related items that are outside of the Defense Department budget, such as nuclear weapons research, maintenance and production (about $9.3 billion, which is in the Department of Energy budget), Veterans Affairs (about $33.2 billion), interest on debt incurred in past wars, or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (which are largely funded through extra-budgetary supplements, about $170 billion in 2007). As of 2009, the United States government is spending about $1 trillion annually on defense-related purposes.

These are not just a trillion dollars of expenditure, these are a trillion lost opportunity dollars, which could have been spent on better shit. And they are a trillion dollars, and more, which America simply cannot afford to spend, he no longer has the capacity to remain a global hegemon.

Uncle Sam maintains nerly 800 military facilities worldwide, these are, to all normal intents and purposes, lawless enclaves populated by brutes, racists and bigots. In nearly all of its bases America has bullied from the host nation a special legal status for his warriors.

GANG-RAPE, IT'S A MAN'S LIFE IN THE US MILITARY. BUT NOT A WOMAN'S

In March, New York Times, yes, New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert noted, "Rape and other forms of sexual assault against women is the great shame of the US armed forces, and there is no evidence that this ghastly problem, kept out of sight as much as possible, is diminishing." He continued:

New data released by the Pentagon showed an almost 9% increase in the number of sexual assaults - 2,923 - and a 25 percent increase in such assaults reported by women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan [over the past year]. Try to imagine how bizarre it is that women in American uniforms who are enduring all the stresses related to serving in a combat zone have to also worry about defending themselves against rapists wearing the same uniform and lining up in formation right beside them.

"The problem.,"writes Chalmers Johnson in the Asia Times, "is exacerbated by having our troops garrisoned in overseas bases located cheek-by-jowl next to civilian populations and often preying on them like foreign conquerors. For example, sexual violence against women and girls by American GIs has been out of control in Okinawa, Japan's poorest prefecture, ever since our soldiers, marines and airmen permanently occupied it some 64 years ago. That island was the scene of the largest anti-American demonstrations since the end of World War II after the 1995 kidnapping, rape and attempted murder of a 12-year-old schoolgirl by two marines and a sailor. The problem of rape has been ubiquitous around all of our bases on every continent and has probably contributed as much to our being loathed abroad as the policies of the Bush administration or our economic exploitation of poverty-stricken countries whose raw materials we covet. The military itself has done next to nothing to protect its own female soldiers or to defend the rights of innocent bystanders forced to live next to our often racially biased and predatory troops. "The military's record of prosecuting rapists is not just lousy, it's atrocious," writes Herbert. In territories occupied by American military forces, the high command and the State Department make strenuous efforts to enact so-called Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs) that will prevent host governments from gaining jurisdiction over our troops who commit crimes overseas. The SOFAs also make it easier for our military to spirit culprits out of a country before they can be apprehended by local authorities. This issue was well illustrated by the case of an Australian teacher, a long-time resident of Japan, who in April 2002 was raped by a sailor from the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk, then based at the big naval base at Yokosuka. She identified her assailant and reported him to both Japanese and US authorities. Instead of his being arrested and effectively prosecuted, the victim herself was harassed and humiliated by the local Japanese police. Meanwhile, the US discharged the suspect from the navy but allowed him to escape Japanese law by returning him to the US, where he lives today. In the course of trying to obtain justice, the Australian teacher discovered that almost 50 years earlier, in October 1953, the Japanese and American governments signed a secret "understanding" as part of their SOFA in which Japan agreed to waive its jurisdiction if the crime was not of "national importance to Japan". The US argued strenuously for this codicil because it feared that otherwise it would face the likelihood of some 350 servicemen per year being sent to Japanese jails for sex crimes. Since that time, the US has negotiated similar wording in SOFAs with Canada, Ireland, Italy and Denmark. According to the Handbook of the Law of Visiting Forces (2001), the Japanese practice has become the norm for SOFAs throughout the world, with predictable results. In Japan, of 3,184 US military personnel who committed crimes between 2001 and 2008, 83% were not prosecuted. In Iraq, we have just signed a SOFA that bears a strong resemblance to the first postwar one we had with Japan: namely, military personnel and military contractors accused of off-duty crimes will remain in US custody while Iraqis investigate. This is, of course, a perfect opportunity to spirit the culprits out of the country before they can be charged." The US, along with Israel and India has also refused to sign international agreements on the commission of war crimes by off-base armed forces. Dubya, the great Christian patriot has also made provision for his own immunity and that of his partners in crime, the legislature, should anyone in future question their conduct. Not that they would.



BUDDDY CAN YA SPARE A DIME?

Johnson continues, "According to a growing consensus of economists and political scientists around the world, it is impossible for the United States to continue in that role -of hegemon - while emerging into full view as a crippled economic power. No such configuration has ever persisted in the history of imperialism. The University of Chicago's Robert Pape, author of the important study Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (Random House, 2005), writes: There is something absurd, even Kafkaesque, about our military empire. Jay Barr, a bankruptcy attorney, makes this point using an insightful analogy:

Whether liquidating or reorganizing, a debtor who desires bankruptcy protection must provide a list of expenses, which, if considered reasonable, are offset against income to show that only limited funds are available to repay the bankrupted creditors. Now imagine a person filing for bankruptcy claiming that he could not repay his debts because he had the astronomical expense of maintaining at least 737 facilities overseas that provide exactly zero return on the significant investment required to sustain them ... He could not qualify for liquidation without turning over many of his assets for the benefit of creditors, including the valuable foreign real estate on which he placed his bases.

In other words, the United States is not (even) seriously contemplating its own bankruptcy. It is instead ignoring the meaning of its precipitate economic decline and flirting with insolvency. Nick Turse, author of The Complex: How the Military Invades our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books, 2008), calculates that we could clear $2.6 billion if we would sell our base assets at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and earn another $2.2 billion if we did the same with Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. These are only two of our over 800 overblown military enclaves. Our unwillingness to retrench, no less liquidate, represents a striking historical failure of the imagination. In his first official visit to China since becoming Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner assured an audience of students at Beijing University, "Chinese assets [invested in the United States] are very safe." According to press reports, the students responded with loud laughter. " Well they might. Without counting-in the cost of the two so-called wars -in Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan by 2010 the US will be burdened with a budget deficit of at least $1.7 trillion; the total deficit is equivalent to 13% of US GDP - the recommended EU target is three per cent - and will take generations to straighten, if ever. The monstrous, gibbering, incoherent criminal Bush, wife-beater, drunkard, coward, draft-dodger, coke-fiend and born-again arsehole has carried off the crime of the millenium, pulverising ancient civiliastions, exporting WarCrime abroad and entrenching EarthCrime at home, ordering kidnap, rape, torture and murder whilst fabulously enriching himself and his friends and pardoning one-and-all in advance. Gordon Snot has called him Britain's best friend - although he would mean Britain's best friend after himself. There is not a snowball's chance in Hell that the new God Emperor, the impossible narcissist and God-fucking-awful Speak-Your-Moral-Weight Machine, Obama, will prosecute Bush, Power didn't arrange his election in order to stir-up any of that nonsense, fuck me, no, decent white men like Obama aren't supposed to behave like that and he won't. Given the rape and pillage at home and abroad, the American Empire is pissing in the wind, its citizens, narcotised by porn and beefburgers, too stupid to strike another match, go, start anew.

In Afghanistan, the UK and the USSR have both failed to suppress the Pashtun tribesmen, the UK tried for a century. Pakistan cannot enforce its own writ, hooked as its military and intelligence services are to the Mujahadeen, the Taliban which they, themselves, finance, control and with Uncle Sam, created, in order to piss on Ivan’s worn-out boots. It’s all bollocks, all of it. John Bull, along to wipe Uncle Sam’s foreskin, as he pisses on the natives and ejaculates over his own women, can neither supply or wisely direct enough troops even to maintain an effective police presence in this benighted wilderness, successive chumps at the MOD and in the Army claiming that every new pile of British corpses is evidence of our victory betray their men and enhance their careers. 'Twas ever thus. It’s all bollocks, all of it, a child of five could see that, bluster as that prick Obama might, it’s not his sweet, coffee-coloured ass getting blown off. And it’s not the stooge, Kharsi’s, arse getting elected either, apparently the justification for all these flag-draped coffins.

SUNDOWN ON THE UNION

Colonial wars abroad, Patriot Act oppression at home and the whole fucking country enslaved to the New Trickle-Up Economy beloved, here, of von Fawkesians and other scabs and in the States of the self-flagellating Creationists, the gun-toting, fat slobs and the bighair Rentboy Senators- the poor simply must give their money, via taxation, to the rich, so that they might borrow it back at huge interest and anyone who says different is a filthy communist; Jesus fucking wept, that is the best which the New World Order can come up with - and with the self-interested connivance of skymadeupnewsandfilth, that'll do nicely. Jump down turn around pick a bale a cotton, jump down turn around, pick a bale a day. Doesn't sound half so bad coming from a good ole JimCrow niggerboy like Obama.

Marching to the drums of Paul Revere and George Washington, America's finest slaughter multitudes, men, women, children, the elderly, the hospital patient, Bury My Heart at Fallujah, at Baghdad, at Helmand, at Guantanamo, at Khe San, at Wounded Knee; the ever blood-thirsty military-industrial complex now feasting in support if what it calls Globalisation; GI Joe, when he's not raping his comrades or napalming wedding parties, consoles himself with the thought that he's punishing the culprits of nine eleven, the worst thing, bet your sweet gang-rapin' ass, that ever happened, even though it wasn't and even though the culprits were nurtured by friends of the Bush familiy in Saudi Arabia, not the infants of Baghdad. And we wonder why it is that, wherever we are, we feel on our cheek, the hot breath of the Jihad; it isn't, though, on examination, the Jihad which should stir and offend us, but the fetid fart of a collapsing empire.

Atlanticists will argue that all this is unfair, denies America's greatness, our shared culture, Uncle Sam's belated participation in the Hitler War, omitting to mention his early fondness for the Nazi, that Decency on his part would have stopped the war in its tracks. Oh, fuck me, they cry, as though they fought there themselves, I have visited the US graveyards in Normandy so you can't say anything bad to me about the US of A. Well, we can. And do. Must.

Since the start of its bloody, disgusting, inhuman ethnic cleansing, the continent of North America has produced writers and painters and composers in a European tradition, facsimilised; it has delivered us mass production and pre-fabrication and skyscrapers and nuclear energy and a technology which sailed beneath the North Pole and to the Moon. It is interesting, then, and illuminating that the only original cultural form, the only new art to emerge from this blasted, bloodthirsty, repressive, greedybastard empire is a culture of Despair, Enslavement, Exploitation, of unimaginable, sustained sadistic violence, degradation and cruelty, of Hope and Solace deferred beyond the grave, of fathomless Sorrow; it is the blood-curdling song of America the Foul, rooted in filth not freedom; we know it as the Blues.

It permeates even this:




Yes we'll rally round the flag, boys, we'll rally once again,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom,
We will rally from the hillside, we'll gather from the plain,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!

(Chorus)
The Union forever! Hurrah, boys, hurrah!
Down with the traitor, up with the star;
While we rally round the flag, boys, rally once again,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!

We are springing to the call of our brothers gone before,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!
And we'll fill our vacant ranks with a million free men more,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!

Chorus

We will welcome to our numbers the loyal, true and brave,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!
And although he may be poor, not a man shall be a slave,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!

Chorus

So we're springing to the call from the East and from the West,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!
And we'll hurl the rebel crew from the land we love best,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!

Chorus

RUINATION BLUES. BEFORE THE DELUGE. THE JACKSON BROWNE ENSEMBLE

STANISLAV, A YOUNG POLISH GRAMMARIAN.

From the archive: The Apostrope Jihadists.

Is time draw near in best of good new year to come and stop for good and long time all this fucking apostrophe shit. Stanislav know exactly where is to put apostrophe's. Go down in Inverness' Poly at night and learn off resident Scotch English teacher. Also read favourite book in bed by Lady Sir Ernest Gowers - Is In Complete Plain Apostrophes' Bollocks.

Is very simple, even for unspeakable pretentious cunt who write shit over on order-order. Here is final explanation of apostrophe dilemma and come from StanislavsNoShitEnglishTeachedToRefugeeMigrant&AsylumSeekerULikeLtd.

Where is s at end of word, is apostrophe. Is fucking simple : tomatoe's, potatoe's. plum's, tosser's, wanker's and fucking imbecile's. Apostrophe sometimes means ownership of stuff, as in - these is my fucking tomatoe's and not belong to no other fuckers'. Is obvious, innit, every s an apostrophe need's . Sometimes', though, and here is fucking tricky, is apostrophe go down back of s and other times's is go up front of s; sometime's, mates, and fuck me is really complicated, can put apostrophe right up fucking front of word whether is s or is no fucking s but mean actually that word was originally, in old English maybe, spell with s up front, like sphone or sfridge or sphoto or sbus was; 'bus, mates, was originally somnibus only get shortened up. Anytime we see an apostrophe but no s is, means that word is reduced by omission of useless letter - 'pram, therefore, originally was sperambulator, or, plural, sperambulator's. In these case apostrophe means something is not there, so, and, fuck me, not make this up, instead of put original letter back, put in fucking overhead squiggle, not mean nothing only cause fucking war (- Is apostrophe here? No, is fucking here. No is over here. No is no fucking apostrophe. Is fucking pluralise, innit. Not need no fucking apostrophe. I'll fucking kill you, you fucking misapostrophising barbarian ignoramus'. You dont' deserve to fucking live. Never mind express fucking opinion on other blokes's shit.)

Imagine you in Warsaw is come and go down Acadamy and learn Polish and get bollocking for not knowing is whole other sub-set of language, take perfectly good couple of word like do & not and then squash up together and dump o and replace with with fucking meaningless squiggle and have, instead, don't, and then you get told by some cunt Oi ! can't understand squiggle-use, is off down fucking shipyard for you, matey. You is good for fuck all. Opinion not matter a fuck. Go on, fuck off outa here. Nobody care what you think. Fucking apostrophe abuser. Hanging too fucking good for you is mate. Should put up against wall be, with motherfuckers'.

So there. All straighten out. See s and put apostrophe, in front, in back, before s, after s, just shove one anywhere; sometimes is best in front of whole word, make a nice change, eh. Or, best of all, is fucking abolish apostrophe, only get poor bastard confused as fuck, innit.

As for pretentious grammarfascist prat who dismiss whole life of other citizen because of inappropriate apostrophe nonsense; well, he is one-man regiment of cunt's or cunts' ; etiquette, you see, mates, is about locking-out, humiliating supposed inferior, like in Bullingdon Club of Dave Thing; etiquette, especially grammar etiquette, is vulgar as shit; manners, au contraire, as any true belle lettriste knows, is different, means welcome, come in and have nice day - although subtext is, here we don't piss in the sink. Dismiss someone for misuse of apostrophe is not just bad manners, is down in bilges of human behaviour. But best of all is that bloke like this has nothing to say about fuck all anyway, only bitch and chide and tut-fucking-tut. Can't even do fucking insult. Is maybe cabinet minister, TonyMcNutter or Bob (God But I Am A Useless Fucking Bastard ) Ainsworth. Better not come on here, talk about apostrophe shit, get smack in fucking chop's will.

THE FRIDAY COMICS, THOSE WHACKY LEADERS OF THE FREE WORLD.

LIVING IN THE SHITEGEIST, THE SITEMETER

Twitter is a mystery to me. Seems like some form of digitised narcissism. Twittering is what Arts correspondents do, Kirsty Wark and Paul Morley and Germaine Greer, twitter-twitter, any old frothy, pretentious bollocks, just as long as they get paid. Who would want to be a twitterer ? No, really, have you seen Paul Morley ?

Facebook, too, don't know what it is, don't want to; i-things, don't know, blackberry, that, too. Not a thing to admit-to in decent company but I don't have a mobile phone. There is no special virtue in this abstinence but neither is it being Luddite - although the Luddites had some socio-economic validity to their opposition, an early manifestation of It's not the economy, Stupid - I have some IT stuff, enough. This non-engagement with the latest IT wheeze is, though, a sort of discernment, a resistance. I would jump in my car tomorrow, even with its world-famous sticky automatic transmission, and drive to Moscow or Kathmandu, having managed all these years without satnav. Genghis Kahn did it and he was on horseback. It is in our nature to cultivate a sense of direction, or we could look at the Sun, or we could ask someone for directions, do some of that communicating shit that we're so good at. Satnav is an infantilisation too far, like Fatboy Jerry Clarkson and his simile-generating engine - this car is soooo fast that your hair'll catch fire, this car is soooo extraordinary that you'll want to own one, only you can't afford one, but I can, it's for big boys, see, like a sitemeter. My ancestors - and yours - sailed the world in paper boats, what the fuck do I want with satnav?

His Holy Grumpiness, my Highlands neighbour, Mr Bob Dylan, in one if his interviews of epic grievance, remarked that Aaah-Wontsa-Pohna-Time, if people wanted the sound of a handclap on a pop record they'd run up to the 'mic and clap their fucking hands, like decent Christian or in his case, artistically pantheistic people should, fucking self-indulgent idiot, one minute at the Wailing Wall, the next at the Vatican; nowadays, there's a button on the keyboard marked "handclap." What is the point of that ? Bob's rock'n'roll credentials may be as counterfeit as much - but by no means all - of his output, indeed, given his endlessly tedious Western Swing Rockabilly it is difficult and painful to recall that he authored Highway 61 Revisited (and should in all decency, therefore, shut the fuck up with his cheesy gnomic whining, vain, silly old fart) but he was right enough in being dismayed by the digitisation of everything, even spontaneity, by GlobaMusic; it's the human handclap for me, too. But not the Stetson.

It is as though we do this shit without even thinking Do we want to ? but just because some nerd lacking a proper job has dreamed it up - eg Vista. A sitemeter, for instance, counts the visits to this cyberplace, it logs the duration of and the geographical location of visitors. I don't know how it works, some instrument of Satan. I looked at it for a couple of weeks and found that it influenced what I wrote, as though I was the CEO of a global dissent corporation; Hmmm. things are a bit quiet in Malaysia this week, maybe do a piece about pineapples, or rubber. I now take a quick peek every couple of weeks, just to get an idea of how many people read this stuff, there is no analysis beyond that and actually I should disable it altogether, lest I be tempted. It wouldn't ever occur to me, though, that I should make it public, have it running down the side of the page, somebody has just come on and is from such-and-such a place and the last site he was looking at was so-and-so; what on Earth is that about? If someone signs their name and address in a comment, that's one thing, although no-one ever does but to have a piece of software identifying the reader's location and last-visited site is an impertinence worthy of government, isn't it, creepy, entirely contrary to the supposed anonymous nature of cyberworld, a staggering impudence, an overwhelming conceit. Not only is Big Brother watching you on behalf of the government, he is watching you on behalf of me, the Mighty Libertarian Blogger, look, that's you, City of London, or Frome, Somerset, down the side there; you can post but you can't hide, cheeky fucking bastard.

Some, of course, measure their hits as though they were their cock and the publication of site spymeters information just a form of exhibitionism, the IT-flasher, so to speak, but even that is wholly perverse, unsavoury, bragadaccio compounding an ever-indignant scattergun demagoguery, almost, actually, like a party political broadcast, innit, by some crypto-fascist grouping, it's all the wogs' fault, if there weren't any wogs we'd have decent politicians, seem to be the fatuous Chimes of Freedom, tolling through much of bloggery, the bedrock of much of this sort of stuff, wogs out, that's the thing, just watch how that ushers-in a new dawn of repectable and representative politics. Or maybe not.

If anybody wants their ISP revealed and where they have come from then just mention it; it'll only take me a second to publish it. But this being where it is, the assumption - or the default setting, as even Mr The Dyers Garden now says - will be that it is your comment and readership which matters and not your ISP.

And the moral of this story, the moral of this song is that if you see your neighbour revealing your details to all and sundry for their delectation and analysis and his own self-aggrandisement, make warmly to him the sign of Ruin and punch him, hard, in the mouth.

We will close with some community singing, led by the reverend Bob; altogether, now, You gotta lotta nerve to say you are my friend...

MORE DEAD KENNEDYS.

SWEETHEARTS OF THE RODEO

This is Huw Welshman, The Voice Of America. In tonight's news,

How did I love Ted Kennedy. let me count the ways........

Sorry, Taffy, Jon Snow here and I am the True Voice of America,
I'm still wetting myself over the God Emperor and black hunk, Obama.
Maybe some enchanted evening our eyes will meet across a crowded press conference
and he'll gesture for his secret service men to to lift me into his equal opportunities civil rights embrace....sigh. The Kennedys, too, I loved them. But not as much.

Emily Maitlis of BBC2's Newsnight, en route to cover the US General Election.
In her towel.

Kirsty Wark, the BBC's grunting hunchback transexual.
Listen, bitch, it's me, I'm the Voice of America in this Corporation,
George Boooosh, he's a pal a mines.

Actually, peepulovbritain, Isimplysaytoyou that you are all wrong.
C'est moi, Tone, le petit chien, I am le Voice of America,
they paid me enough, after all.
Tedward Kennedy, great man, did we have a free holiday with him ?
Musta done.

I DID NOT HAVE SEXUAL RALATIONS WITH THAT WOMAN

"I HAD TO BRAVELY RUN AWAY FROM THE SCENE AND TALK TO MY LAWYERS BUT AS SOON AS I'D DONE THAT I ALERTED THE POLICE THAT A YOUNG WOMAN MAY BE TRAPPED IN MY CAR. VOTE FOR ME. I'M A KENNEDY."

WEE SMALL HOURS STUFF

Je touche le chapeau a Mlle Lilith

WHAT THE PAPERS SAY, THE CALGARY HERALD

LONDON - British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Tuesday he was "angry" and "repulsive"

I am angry and repulsive, said the elderly Scotsman, in his first comments on the controversy,and I hate everybody. First off, I've got this fucking Hymie nutter, Benjamin Nazianyahu, threatening to use flamethrowers and barbecue any wogs setting foot in Jerusalem and then there's all this shit about Libya. Fuck me, all they did was wave a few flags, 'snot as though they shot down another airliner or anything, how can I fucking help it if they get hold of some SNP flags and wave them around, like fucking numpties. I can't stop them doing that in fucking Glasgow, how'm I supposed to stop a load of fucking wogs in teatowels doing it in fucking Tripoli or whatever fucking shithole it was. This is a globalised global globe, people wear Man United shirts in Uzbeki-fucking-stan, what's so special about a Saltire. But even so, I am angry and repulsive, just like people want me to be. And disappointed.

Why can't these Middle Eastern bastards just worship like decent Presbyterians? Did I mention that I'm a son-0f-the-fucking-manse - for manse think vicarage, but without the noncing, obviously - so I have a theological background myself but even so, Jews, fucking Sunny Moslems Shia Moslems, 'senough to make me join the Bee Enn fucking Pee, and the whole fucking shebang overrun with fucking American Anabaptists, Christian fucking Scientists, Lutherans, Seventh-Day Adventists and fuck knows what else. D'you know that half of those fuckers believe that the world was made in six days by some old git with a white beard, sitting up in space for trillions of years, well, forever, really, until, six thousand years ago, He just thought, I know, I'll just knock up a planet - I already done gazillions of them - and this time stick a coupla disobedient arseholes on it and make their lives fucking miserable as sin, which I'll invent and make really nice, something anybody'd wanna do and then tell them they can't do it, not unless they wanna roast their balls and tits off for the rest of Time and just to fuck everybody's head up I'll stick some twenty million year old fossils in the ground just so's they can disprove Me, and then I'll nuke the bastards Jesus fucking wept. Everyday I get up and there's some fresh band of fucking religious maniacs giving me a pain in the arse. I am very angry. And very repulsive.

And the other half, they think that it's a woman's duty to spend a lifetime having abortions, just filling up the East River with aborted foetuses and that it's a man's duty to have as much weird gay sex as he can and that it's the kids' duty to steal their parents' automatic weapons, drive down the school and shoot the fuck out of their classmates. And every bastard has to eat himself stupid and get a lawnmower attachment for his SUV, just so's he doesn't inadvertently get any exercise while mowing the fucking lawn.

Premier Brown, who hails from Limey Mexico, said that the decision to release the raghead terror bomber had not been his but if it hada been he couldn't say how he woulda jumped but that he woulda done the right thing for the country and all the homeless families and small goneoutofbusinessbusinesses.

The Limey debt is too big to get all on one page.


editor's note, Calgary is believed to lie in the frozen wastes of Canada, the best part of the United States.

MORE NEWS FROM SCOTLAND, BEST PART OF ENGLAND

THOSE SCOTTISH POLITICIANS

DIRECTOR ROBERT McMUELLERRICE
HEAD OF THE SCOTISH FBI

PRESIDENT HILLARY MAD DOG McCLINTON
AN EMBITTERED DANGEROUS, GLASWEGIAN LUNATIC
BELIEVED ARMED.
DO NOT APPROACH.


THE GOD-EMPEROR, McBARACK OBAMA,
THE FIRST BLACK HIGHLAND CHIEFTAIN.
MOTTO: YES WE CAN, BUT NO' JUST THE NOO.

MR McTAVISH McHOOTER, SCHOOL CAPTAIN AND
HEAD BOY OFTHE LIBERAL CLEGGY-VIKINGS GROUP.

MR IAIAIAN McGRAY, LEADER OF JOCK LABOUR,
OWES HIS POSITION TO THE DISGRACE OF
HIS PREDECESSOR, WENDY McHALIBUT,
SISTER OF DOUGLAS McHALIBUT.

GHOULISH MATRON, ANNABEL McCOLDIE,
LEADER OF THE EXTINCT JOCK TORIES,
OWES HER POSITION TO THE
DISGRACE OF HER PREDECESSOR,
LAWYER DAVID FINGERS McLETCHIE.


All of these American people claim that Justice supremo, Mr Ken "Kenny" McKenny McCaskill of that ilk is a wanker; he can't be all bad then, can he?

MR McKEN McKENNY McCASKILL, MSP, JUSTICE SECRETARY,
RELAXING IN THE TRADITIONAL SCOTTISH MANNER.

NEWS FROM SCOTLAND, BEST PART OF ENGLAND.

AL-MEGRAHI, A CROSSDRESSER'S VIEW



Jack McConnell of JockLabour was Scotland's First Minister until Mr Salmond and the Tribesmen threw him out on his arse and he was then gifted, by Gordon Brown, an African nation of his own, just so's he'd fuck off out of it.

Mr McConnell claims that Mr Kenny McCaskell's decision to free Mr al Megrahi makes Scotland a laughing stock.

Above, Mr McConnell, then First Minister, poses fetchingly in a pin-striped kilt on the streets of New York.

EMPIRE BURLESQUE

AN INQUIRY INTO POWER

PART ONE: THEN.

Where did they all come from, these crew-cut, imperial loonies, waddling, armoured, gum-chewing, coke-swigging, bellyaching around the world, kicking sand in everybody's face?

Although the United States of America will soon become a black-majority state, the roots of the American Empire lie in our own tribe, within we sorry-assed, white, anglo-saxon, protestant motherfuckers.

New Hampshire, New England, New York, Boston, Virginia, Carolina, Georgetown, the Founding Motherfuckers dressed the New World in the nomenclature of the Old, specifically of Old England and even though they have been augmented by Paddies and Spics and Hermans and po-faced Meinheers, by Chinks and Wops and Dagos and Polacks, it is a boot fashioned on an English last which stands on the world's throat; almost, as inadequates like Milliband might posit, a British empire by proxy. Two nations united by one ruling caste.

Funny how language so very easily masks intent. When Prime Minister Snot, for instance, talks of a moral compass we know that he describes the opposite - ruthless amorality harnessed to the pursuit of political opportunism, vanity, wanton deceit and wickedness at every turn, fair is foul and foul is fair - and yet he continues, is permitted to continue sermonising, skymadeupnewsandfilth reporting faithfully his every fraudulent word, it doesn't matter how scathing is Rupert's barrowboy philosopher, Jeff Randall, after the event; Mr Snot owns the highground of the headline, his words history, Randall's just white noise, just comment, like this. Bizarrely, despite all the evidence that we shouldn't, we permit Uncle Sam, too, up to his nostrils in debt, disease, larceny, blood, atrocity, racism and murder, to write the global catechism. Or some of us do.

I PITY THE POOR IMMIGRANT

When the so-called Pilgrim Fathers, like Pakistanis to Bradford, carried their own mad wee sects across the Atlantic their flight into the unknown was termed as though they were doing not their own will but God's. And so it has remained; the ethnic cleansing of an entire continent, the shackling of millions in slavery, in apartheid; the gang-raping and napalming of Otherness, all this is to God's purpose, America, the last great hope of Mankind; it has been so written and preached now for a couple of centuries at least, the Hollywood machine reinforcing it for one of those centuries. History according to Louis Meyer and John Wayne, Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise. Fuck me, God, we are in trouble.

The industrial-scale warfare of the the twentieth century and the military-industrial complex of today - War Is Prosperity - began in the nineteenth, at Gettysburg and Chickamauga and in the driving from the Plains of the native Americans, the Gatling and the Hotchkiss guns demonstrating the compassion felt by those carrying the White man's burden, the local, the indigenous made villain and slaughtered, the foundries and railroads working overtime; be it the Massacre At Wounded Knee Creek,

A LITTLE ETHNIC CLEANSING

or the Massacre at MyLai, the Torture at Abu Ghraib,

WINNING HEARTS AND MINDS

the Gang-Raping of Fallujah, the Waterboarding at Guantanamo, if Uncle Sam decides that others are sub-human, communist, moslem or some other breed of non profit-making untermenschen then his Momma'sBoy psychobastards can just cut loose, for Democracy, God and Fuhrer.

They've been doing it ever since the nineteenth century, exporting mayhem all over the globe. They don't count Iraqi or Afghani dead, only good injun's a dead injun, Praise the Lord. And pass the ammunition. So far America's crimes have been against the wog, the spic, the nigger, the jap, the slope, the ay-rab, the mex, the cuban and he has not raised his fist or his boot against we white folks - apart from when we were all doing it to Hitler - against his co-religionists, we, from the Old Country; we, meantime, have been reluctant to chastise him, fearful he might smash the crockery, it's what you call a Special Relationship, our Uncle the bullier, we the bullied. We should tell him to fuck off. What's the worst he can do?

IF SOME OTHER FUCKER HAS THEM IT'S DANGEROUS. BUT NOT IF WE HAVE THEM. THEN IT'S REALLY COOL.

ROCK OF AGES CLEFT FOR ME, LET ME HIDE MYSELF IN THEE
AND WHILE THE BOMBERS THUNDER PAST, SHELTER ME FROM BURN AND BLAST
AND THOUGH I KNOW ALL MEN ARE BROTHERS
LET THE FALLOUT FALL ON OTHERS.

a 1960s Armageddon anthem, anon.

The government of the United Rogue States of America has twice detonated nuclear weapons over civilian populations. Good job they were only Japs. Not proper humans. More like Apaches.

A SHITHOUSE NAMED DESIRE.

Holywood and its bastard spawn, Rock'n'Roll, have iconographised the Vietnam Dead Wall, sixty thousand grunts wasted in Indo-China, their names may liveth forevermore, even if they didn't make it past twenty. Yet in one US bombing spree, Operation Rolling Thunder, it is estimated that between sixty and a hundred and sixty thousand Vietnamese civilians died, the devastation and the ongoing deaths from associated toxicity make precise figures impossible; in the US assault of Indo-China, total Vietnamese deaths are estimated to be between three and four million souls, far more munitions rained down on this small country than in the whole of World War Two. And still Uncle Sam fled, hanging from a helicopter, hiding his head up his arse.

DRAFT DODGER SPUNKY BILL AT THE VIETNAM WALL.

MAH FELLOW MOTHERFUCKERS, AH FEEL YO' TITS. BUT LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, IF WE'D A HAD TO PUT UP A WALL FOR ALL THE GOOK SONSABITCHES WE OFFED, ONLY NOT ME, IT'D NEED TO BE FIFTY, SIXTY TIMES THE SIZE O THIS MOTHER, ALL THE WAY OUT THE PARK AND CLEAR ACROSS THE POTOMAC. AIN'T AMERICA WONDERFUL ? VOTE FOR HILLARY NEXT TIME. THAT BITCH'LL SHOW YOU WHAT WAR'S ALL ABOUT.

The entire US political and cultural machine, Infotainment, has somehow erased from history the millions dead, maimed and disfigured abroad and backlit the handful of ghosts at home; everyone from Oliver Stone to Bruce Springsteen, the American Billy Bragg, shifting product to a market of shameless, maudlin, tie-a-yellow-ribbon xenophobia; Oscars and Grammys all round. The maimed vets are still mistreated but Hey, haven't we got some good songs, some great movies, Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket; I never knew Clint Eastwood fought in 'Nam but I'm not surprised, he's a really fit guy for his age; the angry heartbreak of David Morrel's First Blood turned to trash by Sylvester Franchise Stallone, wash away my sins in the blood of the Saviour, John Rambo. The recent past, like the present, made fiction, easier like that; it's the American way.

The Emperors no longer serve. Obama didn't serve, Clinton didn't serve - and his pretend Mrs famously didn't dodge any bullets, either; Bush junior didn't serve, Reagan didn't serve but My, how they do that hand-on-heart shit, I would have served but I was more important at home, being a lawyer, or some other kind of All-American crook.

And the whole obscene Vietnam decade melted into showbusiness and shit journalism, it's reality hi-jacked, here, by cretinous, effete junkies like John and Yoko, to the worthless layabout careers of such as Peter Hain and Tariq Ali and the unspeakable Germaine Greer and in the States to massed choruses of, God spare us, 'sixties protest singers. We Shall Overcome our way to the top of the album charts; Kissinger, McNamara and the rest honoured at home and abroad, only grubby old Nixon copping some shit, and that for burglary, not war crimes.


THE LONG NIGGER HOLOCAUST,


"They're selling postcards of the hanging" is the first line of Mr Bob Dylan's Desolation Row and refers to the factual, printed, celebration of the lynching of an entirely innocent negro fairground worker in Dylan's home town, Hibbing, Minnesota, way up North, on the Canadian border.

Alongside Vietnam, a hundred years after the Civil War and twenty years after Hitler's war ended, a large part of the United States ran its own, good ole boy reich, KKK stormtroopers castrating, tarring-and-feathering and lynching niggers, firebombing their churches, drowning civil rights activists and generally keeping the nigger in his place - or as the Pledge of Allegiance has it :

"I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, .............

........indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.."

Gosh, if only Guido had been active then, those Imperial Wizards wouldna gone short of Pizza.

JFK was a windy, deceitful, golden boy; a vain, gobby, priapic jackanapes, propelled into the presidency by the money and connections of his father, Joe - a Nazi supporter when US Ambassador to the Court of King James in the late thirties - and seized-on by skymadeupnewsandfilth as politics made glamour-product. Whether JFK would have made good on his civil rights rhetoric is unknown but in these matters and most others he and Jacki O were as shallow and frothily insincere as their imitators, Tony and Imelda Blair, and it fell, post-Kennedy, to the apparent redneck, Lyndon Johnson, to ram home to the Deep South what Nuremberg had made clear to les collaborateurs and Quislings and Nazis and Popes in Europe.

The National Guard moved against the segregationists and policed the integration of universities, buses and washrooms; having reluctantly helped defeat fascism abroad, Uncle Sam had been institutionalising it at home , the federal government finally being forced by its wiser citizens to drag the Southern States into the twentieth century. Despite its continuing history of barbarism at home, the US has always felt able to moralise abroad, preaching from a gun barrel, grinding the unGodly beneath tank tracks.

Alone among so-called liberal democracies, Uncle Sam retains, glories in the death penalty, the madder, the sicker, the younger they are, the better. And in the home of God-fearing racism, the nigger tops the bill on Death Row, in mediaeval maximum security lockdown, in frame-ups; is per capita something like twelve times as likely as whitey to do time; despite chained and horsewhipped generations spent creating it, nigger owns an infinitesimal fraction of the national wealth, is far more likely to be unschooled, unemployed, addicted, murdered; never shoulda let them coons off the plantation. America has its own Trevor Phillipses, Keith Vazes, slimeballs, black people gone white, Mr President, suh, being one of them, Preacher Jesse Jackson another, doing very nicely, Uncle Tomming for a living, blethering, in their mansions, on their Tee-Vee shows, about the struggle. Husn now, children, Freedom's coming. Tomorrow. Or the day after. Once we done thrashed these niggers in Afghanistan. And give all yo' money to Wall Street. Jes' like always.

His gangster predecessor having set the Middle East ablaze, the Empire of Obama the First (Black Man To Be...whose DaddyWouldnaGotAJobMowingTheWhiteHouseLawn etc etc) focuses afresh on the wogs in Southern Asia, leading his lambs to the slaughter. Colonel Douglas MacGregor, US Army (retired), an adviser to the Center for Defense Information in Washington, summarizes the hopeless project in South Asia this way:

"Nothing we do will compel 125 million Muslims in Pakistan to make common cause with a United States in league with the two states that are unambiguously anti-Muslim: Israel and India."

Twenty years after the forces of the red army withdrew from Afghanistan in disgrace, the last Russian general to command them, General Boris Gromov, issued his own prediction: disaster, he insisted, will come to the thousands of new forces Obama is sending there, just as it did to the Soviet Union's, which lost some 15,000 soldiers in its own Afghan war. As in Vietnam, America is wasting lives and resources. The British tried for a hundred years to suppress these guys, threw the book at them, bombed them, in the thirties, Saddam-style, with nerve gas, the fuzzy-wuzzies are still there.

A belligerent, bankrupt, stupid empire, greedy, racist and xenophobic, half its citizens believing that God made the world in six days, the other half enslaved to pornography, many spraying one another with bullets, twenty per cent of them without health care, most of them dangerously obese, too many of them lawyers, four per cent of the world's population consuming twenty-six percent of the world's resources - and all because we wouldn't let them pray as they wanted to.

And now they venture into the caves of the world's best genetically-engineered guerilla fighters. When Ahmed isn't fighting a succession of foreign invaders, he's fighting Abdullah Abdullah, his cousin, it's what he does. Obama, the lawyer, thinking that his airy, Ivy League rhetoric and his firm-but-fair, fatuous Sunday School aphorisms will coax Ahmed from his cave is a fool, as well as a knave. Expecting his voters to believe his horseshit is one thing; expecting us to is downright rude of him.

In Part Two: Now. The Imperial Real Estate. How bankrupt America maintains eight hundred lawless military facilities, worldwide. And keeps a straight face.

WHAT THE PAPERS SAY, THE DAILY FILTH-O-MAIL.

Clinton and Obama pronounce themselves disgusted at the release on compassionate grounds of Mr al Megrahi. This, from the Daily Mail, suggests that maybe black man speak with forked tongue.

In Nixon and Kissinger's Vietnam episode, Uncle Sam's boys raped and murdered five hundred defenceless civilians and returned home to a heroes' welcome, an acquittal and in the case of the man in charge, a few years jail and a pardon.

Found: The monster of the My Lai massacre

Last updated at 23:07 06 October 2007

The sun had just risen over a tranquil Vietnamese hamlet, nestling in a steamy green valley of rice fields close to the South China Sea.

Hundreds of villagers were about to enjoy a simple breakfast outside their bamboo huts when a flotilla of U.S. helicopters came whirring low overhead, the draught from their giant propellers flattening the tall, yellow grass.

Old men and women, young mothers tending their children, most didn't bother to run away - they thought they had nothing to fear as the Americans routinely swept the countryside hunting the communist Viet Cong guerillas, 'the VC' in U.S. military parlance.

How could a huddle of defenceless farming people pose any threat? Moments after the soldiers had landed, however, it became clear that the villagers had made a terrible miscalculation.

Scroll down for more

Mai Lai: Between 100 and 500 people were slaughtered

With bayonet fixed, the young platoon leader instructed his men to round up everyone, regardless of their age or sex, and herd them into a partially filled, 5ft-deep irrigation ditch. "Take care of these people!" he barked.

Those five words lit the fuse for a massacre. If there was any ambiguity in their meaning, the platoon leader removed it by bludgeoning an old man into the ditch with his rifle-butt, then machine-gunning him and at least 21 others as they cowered beside him.

Over the next five hours babies were bayonetted, teenage girls were raped or forced to their knees to perform sex acts before being mutilated and killed - and their watching parents and grandparents were summarily shot as they begged for mercy.

When the bloodbath was over, the hamlet was torched.

The number of villagers who were butchered is still a matter for debate. If we believe some of the soldiers, the so-called 'body count' totalled just over a hundred.

According to records in the grim museum which the victorious Vietnamese communists have built at My Lai, however, 504 people were murdered. The youngest was just one year old and the oldest 82, and their names are etched on a broad marble wall.

One thing, however, is certain. March 16, 1968, is the most infamous date in U.S. military history - a day that far overshadows the brutality at Abu Ghraib prison and the killing of 24 civilians by U.S. Marines in Haditha in western Iraq. With lasting shame, it is remembered as the My Lai Massacre.

Of course, many Americans would prefer not to remember My Lai at all. They want to draw a veil over this most shocking episode in the humiliating, decade-long fiasco that was the Vietnam War.

Their collective amnesia was never stronger than it is today, when young servicemen are once again dying on foreign soil, for a similarly ill-defined - and seemingly unwinnable - cause.

But arch-liberal film-maker Oliver Stone is determined that the savagery to which some American soldiers lowered themselves in Vietnam must never be forgotten.

He believes that now, more than ever, the White House hawks need to learn from the past. Having made his name with a trilogy of controversial films about Vietnam (Platoon, Born On The Fourth Of July and Heaven & Earth) Stone is working on a fourth, about My Lai.

Scroll down for more

William Calley: Uniformed during the Vietnam war

"Why now? Because of Iraq. That's a major reason," the controversial director said, during a preliminary research trip to Vietnam. "It seems to me there are so many similarities between the wars in the Gulf and South-East Asia.

"Sometimes you can tell more about a war now by paralleling a previous war. I'm not seeking to denigrate the average soldier, but I think the time has come to remember events like My Lai."

Predicted to be the strongest indictment of war yet, Stone's movie will be called Pinkville, the name the GIs gave to the benighted village, and other surrounding settlements, because they were supposedly a communist stronghold.

He has already cast the hero. Bruce Willis will play General William R. Peers, the U.S. Army officer who presided over the official inquiry into the mass slaughter, and whose determination to uncover the truth blighted his career.

But, as yet, there is no word on who will portray the pivotal character in the My Lai story; the man who led the platoon by brutal example and would later be branded America's worst war criminal - Second Lieutenant William Laws Calley.

Whoever lands the part, it will certainly require a bravura performance.

For, as the Daily Mail discovered this week, when we tracked down the elusive Calley - now aged 64, and living in comfortable obscurity in Atlanta, Georgia - this comical-looking figure, standing just 5ft 3in tall and sporting a white Colonel Sanders goatee, jam-jar spectacles and a Stetson, makes a most unlikely mass murderer.

William Calley has been called the Everyman of the Vietnam War. A college drop-out from a white-collar Miami family, he drifted between jobs on the railroad and investigating insurance claims before joining the army as a trainee clerk.

Though he showed not the slightest aptitude for leadership, he was accepted into officer training school, where he is remembered for his passion for pizza, and little else.

It was during the Vietnam War that President Lyndon Johnson first popularised the phrase "hearts and minds". In a now wearily familiar refrain, he said winning them was imperative if the Viet Cong were ever to be defeated.

Rookie officers underwent a course designed to improve their respect and understanding of the distant strangers in whose land they would be fighting, entitled "Vietnam Our Host".

Calley would later claim to remember little about these lessons in winning over the locals. What he did seem to learn, however, was that everyone - old and young, male and female - was a potential enemy, capable of tripping a mine fuse, hurling a grenade or signalling to a VC sniper. As such, even civilians were not to be trusted.

It was with this dubious preparation that 2nd Lt Calley was airlifted into South Vietnam. By early 1968, soon after his arrival, the country was in the grip of the Tet Offensive: a massive push for victory which brought 80,000 North Vietnamese troops driving southwards, striking with unprecedented ferocity.

Calley was deployed to the scene of the fiercest fighting, in Quang Ngai Province, and placed in charge of a platoon of some 50 infantrymen in Charlie Company, part of the proud 23rd Infantry (Americal) Division.

While most of his charges despised the country and its people, Calley found he loved his new life in Vietnam.

Scroll down for more

William Calley: Unrepentant

Rarely able to get a date with women in Miami, where he was regarded as a nonentity and a drifter, he found he had the pick of the prettiest 'boom-boom girls' - cheap local prostitutes who touted for business around the U.S. camps.

He also relished having the power to dish out orders without rebuke - even though they were frequently ill-advised.

More than once his crass misjudgments endangered his men, and when a subordinate was shot dead because Calley marched them into danger, they secretly discussed "fragging" - or assassinating - the bungling officer universally known as Lieutenant S***head.

Meanwhile, the officers above Calley were demanding results. Charged with the mission of wiping out as many "Commies" as possible, his bosses set up "free fire zones", where anyone could be shot on the merest suspicion of collusion, and demanded daily "kill ratios".

The problem was that, for weeks on end, Charlie Company never encountered a single enemy soldier, for the VC hid in underground bunkers connected by a labyrinth of tunnels.

The Americans only knew that they were silently surrounded by VC when one of their number was picked off by a sniper - a fate that befell Calley's radio operator and best friend, Bill Weber, who died after his kidney was shattered by a bullet in February 1968.

On the eve of the massacre, another comrade had been blown up by a VC booby-trap, and so it was amid a mood of pent-up frustration and vengeance that Charlie Company was briefed by Captain Ernest Medina about the following morning's planned sweep through 'Pinkville'.

Medina's orders are heatedly disputed to this day. A highly respected commander, he has always denied telling the men to kill indiscriminately, advising them that they should use discretion and only fire at anyone who threatened their safety - but Calley insists otherwise.

The instructions were clear, he says. They were to exterminate every last man, woman and child. Today, his platoon remains divided: some agree with Medina's version, others with Calley's.

One crucial element of Medina's orders is not in doubt, however. He warned the U.S. soldiers that My Lai was among a huddle of villages harbouring one of the VC's strongest battalions, and that they were about to face their fiercest battle.

At dawn the following morning, it quickly became evident that this was yet another piece of false information. In fact, just one Vietnamese man of combat age was found in the village. That wasn't about to deter Calley, however. He didn't see people - only targets.

"We weren't in My Lai to kill human beings, really," he said later. "We were there to kill an ideology that is carried by - I don't know - pawns, blobs, pieces of flesh. I was there to destroy an intangible idea. To destroy communism. Killing those men in My Lai didn't haunt me."

His actions would have been inexcusable even if he really had only killed 'men' but among the 22 people - at a very conservative estimate - whom he personally shot was a child of about two, who was trying to run away.

According to a fellow soldier, Calley caught the infant by the arms, swung him into the ditch, and despatched him with a single bullet.

Calley also bears responsibility for ordering his men to follow his lead. Warned of the dire consequences of disobeying, Private Paul Meadlo fired into the ditch for several minutes before breaking down in tears.

Another GI was so sickened that he shot himself in the foot to avoid taking part; the only American casualty that day.

Bizarrely, however, at one point 24-year-old Calley was seized by the need to maintain propriety. When he saw a GI force a woman to her knees by the hair and threaten to blow up her child with a grenade unless she performed a sex act, he became enraged. "Pull up your pants, soldier!" he snarled, brandishing his M16 menacingly.

Just 20 people survived the massacre, ten of whom are alive today. Most owe their lives to U.S. helicopter captain Hugh Thompson. Patrolling over My Lai, he saw what was happening, and airlifted as many villagers as he could to safety.

Thompson, who died last year, confronted Calley and urged him to stop the killing, but the Second Lieutenant refused to defer to his superior, saying: "Down here on the ground, I run the show."

For many months afterwards, the massacre was covered up. Utterly unrepentant, Calley went away on leave and then signed on for an extra stint in Vietnam.

Back in America, however, the story slowly began to leak out. Returning to civilian life in a country awash with anti-war fever, disaffected members of Charlie Company began to tell their story to investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, among others.

Aware of the damage that news of an American atrocity would cause, Richard Nixon, who had succeeded Johnson as president, tried desperately to downplay it.

But when army photographer Ron Haeberle sold the shockingly candid colour photographs he had smuggled away from My Lai to Life magazine for $50,000, the truth could no longer be hidden.

Of all the soldiers who faced the My Lai court martial, William Calley was the only man to be convicted. Damned by the evidence of men he led, in 1971 he was found guilty of 22 murders and sentenced to life with hard labour; but then events took a twist which today seems almost as incomprehensible as the massacre itself.

Instead of dismissing Calley as a cold-blooded killer, the majority of ordinary Americans accepted his claim - that he was simply a patriotic soldier, faithfully acting out his duty - and viewed him as a heroic martyr.

Even in the peace movement some were willing to believe he was merely a lowly scapegoat for the real architects of the war: a theory Oliver Stone will doubtless explore.

Nixon sensed which way the wind was blowing and within a few days, Calley was quietly transferred from the tough military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to house arrest in a comfortable apartment at Fort Benning, Georgia, where was able to drink alcohol and entertain his girlfriend.

He served three years there before being paroled in 1974 with a tacit presidential pardon.

Free to resume his life at 31, Calley ditched the girl who had loyally stood by him during his years in custody, and married Penny Vick, the daughter of a wealthy jeweller in Columbus, Georgia.

Their wedding was the society event of the year. They were serenaded by the local sheriff, a baritone, and guests included the Mayor of Columbus and the judge who granted his liberty.

The newlyweds moved into a smart, detached bungalow, and Calley qualified as a master gemmologist. When his father-in-law retired, he took over the reins of the lucrative family business - a position beyond his dreams before he served in Vietnam.

By all accounts, Calley was accepted without question as a pillar of the community. Always smartly attired, he managed the jewellers until two years ago, when - after a series of heated rows about the way the store should be run - he left his wife.

He now lives 90 miles away in Atlanta, where the Daily Mail found him sharing a smart midtown apartment with their 27-year-old son, a brilliant PhD computer student also called William Laws Calley.

His path has not always run smoothly, however. For a time he ran a nice little sideline as a speaker on the college lecture circuit - sickeningly charging a fee to give sanitised talks about My Lai. But he was forced to give up when he was heckled by the students.

According to one neighbour - a former policewoman who remarked that Calley "doesn't look big enough to snap a twig in half" - during his middle years he also developed a drink problem.

Perhaps he turned to the bottle to blot out his memories, though his close friend Al Fleming, an award-winning local TV newsman, says he is now at ease with himself.

"William did have nightmares for a while, but not now," Fleming told the Mail. "I'm sure he didn't like doing what he did, but he shows no sense of remorse at all. He's not like a lot of Vietnam veterans; suicidal and sick. He's just an ordinary guy."

An ordinary guy? Visiting My Lai last week, we spoke to people who remember the day William Calley came to their village, and regard him rather differently. A dignified woman of 82, wearing a traditional black trouser suit, Mrs Hai Thi Quy's wrinkled face contorted with pain as she recalled how her family were forced into the ditch, where her mother and two children, aged six and 16, were murdered beside her.

"They just started shooting people and pushing them into the canal," she said. "People were screaming, but the American soldiers said nothing, and their faces were so hard. They even shot a pregnant woman.

"They just killed and killed. The bullets came down like rain. One man grabbed my mother's hair and pushed her face down into the water and shot her."

Mrs Quy was shot in the back, but recovered in a U.S. military clinic after being rescued by the helicopter hero, Hugh Thompson.

Understandably, she still feels angry - yet, like all the survivors we interviewed, she showed an uplifting spirit of forgiveness. The director of the My Lai Museum, Mr Pham Thanh Cong - who lost his mother and three siblings but escaped with bullet wounds - even extended an olive branch to Calley.

"If the government will allow it, I invite him here, not to scold him or reprimand him, but to try and understand why he ordered the killing," Mr Cong said. "If he comes here, he and I could become friends. We could confide and talk to each other. We really want him to come back and see the truth."

From a man who has suffered so much, it was a remarkable gesture. Sadly, however, William Calley - who has never demonstrated the slightest desire to make his peace with the Vietnamese people - was not even willing to discuss it this week. Unless, of course, he received a fat fee.

"Meet me in the lobby of the nearest bank at opening time tomorrow, and give me a certified cheque for $25,000, then I'll talk to you for precisely one hour," he drawled nauseatingly.

When we showed up at the appointed hour, armed not with a cheque but a list of pertinent questions, Calley scuttled away from the line of fire. It was an option the man who led the My Lai Massacre never afforded to his innocent victims.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Clinton's pretend husband, Spunky Bill, was a draft dodger, like Dubya; had either of them gone to Vietnam, they might have come away with a different point of view, but probably not.

Obama insists that he will maintain the very best fighting forces in the world.

RELAXING AFTER THE PARTY.

nb it is probably too late to send these boys pizza but fresh opportunities for the von Fawkesians will surely arise.