I heard the news with some sadness that Yasser Arafat had died. I hear all the stuff that he never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. I hear all the stuff about him being a terrorist rather than a politician - he was indeed, as someone said last Friday on Radio 4, no Nelson Mandela. And yet, he was a respected father to the Palestinians. He led them to partial autonomy; he stood up against the bullying and harassing policies of the Israelis and the Americans. Flawed, broken, hammered - I mourn the loss to the Palestinian people.
I finished reading Feed by M T Anderson last night. It ends with the death not only of a young girl but the probablilty that society is dying in the background. The book is set in the future when we have direct feeds from the internet into our brains - wired to our limbic system. Violet's goes wrong. It paralyses her. 
The tragedy is that she, and just about only she, understands how much the feed has already paralysed the society in which she lives. Everything has been sacrificed to consumerism - life is about being a consumer, about living the American dream, about focussing totally on hedonistic pleasure and sod the rest of the world. Titus is completely locked into the feed - he cannot cope with the emotions he has about Violet's impending death - consumerism has robbed him of his passion - she is broken and needs to be thrown away - he reacts by drug abuse and denial. His reaction is to go on a spending spree and to sit naked in his room in catatonic shock. A tragedy of young love. There isn't that much new in the book - you will find the same stuff in the much better book by Doug Coupland - Girlfriend in a Coma - which picks up a much more apocalyptic imagery. But it certainly made me think and feel and hope that the feed is not making me.
In a week when the American press slammed Global Warming as a European Conspiracy, when a Denver medical research centre said that the masive increase in winter asthma levels has nothing to do with air pollution caused by carbon emissions, when the country gears itself up for the consumer blitz of Christmas, I found the book so unsettling. It really was as though Feed was not a future prophecy but a present analysis. There's a quote from the book which I will add when I bring it down to work later...all about the oneiric era - the era of dreams...God help us!
Today, as I mess around with College paperwork - pleasing the bureaucratic overlords - my soul is grieving...grieving for Arafat, grieiving for Palestine, grieving for Violet and Titus, grieving for our planet...and wondering what in the world God can do to bring salvation. It's good for your prayer life, all this grief! Oh yes...remembrance day...
Pete
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