The Python that Exploded

Common Sense
John Maxwell

William Burroughs should be alive at this hour if only to savour the latest news about ganja - marijuana. Scientific experiments on rats indicate that the clinical use of marijuana could make people feel better by helping control anxiety and depression by promoting brain cell growth.

According to a report in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, a synthetic chemical similar to the active ingredient in marijuana makes new cells grow in rat brains. What is more, in rats this cell growth appears to be linked with reducing anxiety and depression. The results suggest that marijuana, or its derivatives, could actually be good for the brain.

What will they think of next?

A report from the Florida Everglades sounds more like a parable than a true story, but it is a true story. It appears that Florida is becoming increasingly infested by Burmese pythons, sold by pet stores years ago to parents who either forgot, or never knew, Ogden Nash's celebrated 'couplet' about small animals:

"The trouble with a kitten is that
It very soon becomes a cat."

In the case of pythons there is no phase change, they just keep getting bigger and hungrier, and the adorable little wrigglers must soon be turned out to pasture, which, in Florida, means the Everglades. There, the pythons find their true destiny and continue growing until some natural or unnatural disaster puts an end to the process.

This week, a 13-foot python lost his lunch, fatally. The snake had overpowered a six-foot long alligator and was in the process of swallowing him whole when the alligator, still alive, began to try to claw his way out of the python. The messy result was an exploding python, still enveloping, in death, its saurian lunch.

I don't know why this story reminds me of what's been happening to the United States over the past several years, particularly in places like Cuba, Vietnam, Somalia, Venezuela and Iraq, to name a few. On Thursday, in Salamanca, Spain, the Ibero-American summit of Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries unanimously called on the United States to give up its almost half-century-long war against Cuba - to end the blockade and to give up, to Venezuela, that felonious friend of the Bush family, 'Bambi' Posada Carriles.

Fidel Castro wasn't even at the summit, although he'd been invited. The Latins acted not on emotion, but on principle.

"We ask the US government to fulfil 13 successive resolutions approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations to put an end to the financial, commercial and economic blockade which it maintains against Cuba," the ministers said in a statement.

"We reaffirm once more in defence of the free exchange and transparent practice of international trade, that unilateral coercive measures which affect the welfare of people and obstruct integration processes are unacceptable," the ministers said.

Cuba says the blockade/embargo is an illegal act of war and has cost the Cuban people $82 billion in addition to the more conventional aggressions, terrorist attacks, deadly sabotage, biological warfare and the false imprisonment of five Cubans engaged in anti-terrorism intelligence work in Florida.

The Haitian people yet haven't calculated what the US owes them, but it must also be substantial. Their problem is slightly different from the Cubans' - the United States pretends that Haiti doesn't really exist and that its people are not really entitled to human rights.

Meanwhile, back in Washington's halls of justice the American python-in-chief, one Karl Rove, appears on the verge of a new career, defending himself in court against the charge that he conspired to break US law by 'outing' Valerie Plame, a CIA undercover officer, in an attempt to revenge the administration against the truth-telling of Ms Plame's husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

Truth-telling is not among the strong points of the present administration. The administration has been condemned by the General Accounting Office of the US Congress for buying reporters and news coverage, in effect, using public money to distort public opinion. President Bush was at it again, last week.

This time the Looking Glass President was allegedly engaging in what Newsday says was "billed as a folksy question-and-answer session in which President George W Bush would talk to soldiers about their activities in Iraq and assure them of popular support".

The folksy chat turned out to be a rehearsed advertorial for the president, with American troops hauled from the battlegrounds to act as the president's 'straight men'. So, now the war effort includes using soldiers to support the Republican Party.

Some people appear to be shocked that Mr Bush should stoop so low as to arrange a kind of Potemkin fireside chat. After the disasters of Iraq, Katrina, DeLay, Rove/Judith Miller and the new SEC enquiry into the financial behaviour of the Majority Leader in the Senate, plus his guttering polls, I consider that the president has got to do what he has to do: defy reality hoping that someone will take notice.

We are watching the disintegration of the military industrial complex prefigured in the collapse of its public image. The edifice itself will take some time to disintegrate and collapse, but the facade is being blown off, strip by strip.

Blogging and press freedom

As recently as two years ago many of the stories which now show Bush and his backers for what they really are would never have been published, and if they had, would not have been noticed, or followed up.

But in the last two years new technology has freed up the press to the people: blogging software has enabled anyone to be a publisher, and in A J Liebling's words - "freedom of the press belongs to those who own one".

The blog has become the poor man's press and the public interest is alive and well in all sorts of quarters. The media, as McLuhan said, is becoming the message.

Seven years ago hundreds of blue-chip journalists, as I call them, were in Cuba to cover the philosophical heavyweight championship fight of the century between Pope John Paul II and Fidel Castro.

These two represented, for the press, the champions of Light and Darkness, respectively. But the Drudge Report nixed all that. The Drudge Report is, I hear, a kind of drop box for journalists with stories they could not print, mainly for ethical reasons, but wanted published. Give it to Drudge and it would be printed with no troublesome questions of journalistic standards interfering.

When Drudge printed the blue-dress report, the blue-chip reporters took off from Cuba, a flight of starlings, pursued by an eagle. These days Drudge is outnumbered, outwritten and outflanked by thousands of ordinary people, including a sizeable presence of real journalists with real journalistic ethics. The quality, like the bloggers themselves, is uneven. But that does not matter.

As in any other kind of random sampling, given a large enough sample, statistical probability indicates that the result will be pretty much a reflection of the total population.

But there is another, very powerful factor - blogging is interactive, so that any given blog is constantly refreshed and corrected from time to time, by its readers/members. This is truly public opinion in action - informed public opinion - sometimes rude and rough, but generally rational, full of common sense and the courage to call a spade a spade.

Three years ago when the United States was preparing war in Iraq, millions of people round the world came out on the streets to register their disagreement. At that time, the New York Times described this demonstration of worldwide public opinion as "The Other Superpower".

The NYTspoke more truly than they knew. In the old days it took a great deal of money to set up a newspaper or a radio station. Eventually, it was the big money that controlled freedom of speech, freedom of expression; freedom of the press, as Liebling said, belonged to the owners.

Today, as the greed of the military/industrial/transnational complex is causing the world to overheat and melt the Arctic Ice cap, so is the power of the media owners melting like ice cream on a hot pavement.

The technology of cell phones, laptop and handheld computers, small hard drives combine to lower the cost of publishing, the power of the Time-Warners, the Disneys and the network news is also melting. They won't disappear for some time, but the introduction of the video IPod is bound to make as serious inroads into television as television made into magazines.

Podcasters will now be able to podcast their news videos or their mini-features. With the technology available on the basic Macintosh computer for audio and video editing, you can now change the world in your attic while you starve like a proper poet.

The new landscape will also mean that nation states and the bureaucracies which maintain them will become even less relevant since the political parties and electoral machines will no longer be able to control informed public opinion and Bush-league advertorials will be even less relevant, as, thankfully, will people like Karl Rove, George Bush and Judith Miller.

The pythons have bitten off much more than they can chew: as we say in jamaica, their eyes have always been bigger than their bellies. Some of the biggest bangs to come will be the sound of pythons exploding.