yonmei

11:03 am: All alone at work...

Sitting at work, alone, drinking coffee, knowing there's a lot of stuff I should be about doing, and feeling remarkably unproductive.

I'm doing nanowrimo this year, and on Saturday when I was out to tea with friends, I realised that the project had just got to the scary/exciting point where what is going on in the story is mentally almost as real to me as anything else - I ended up talking a lot about lots of other things because every time I wanted to start telling about my story, I hit the brakes and diverged elsewhere. Because when you start talking about these fictional characters that really do not yet exist for anyone else, it is very easy to sound completely insane. This is why I like collaborations so much: shared insanity.

And there's the US elections, and all. 20th January 2009: exactly a week after my 42nd birthday, President-Elect Obama rides the big car with ex-President Bush. Bush's first act as President was to reinstate the Global Gag Rule, and that proved both symbolic of and prescient for the next eight years. (Obama says he will repeal it, and that he will sign an act that will ensure doctors and hospitals don't have the right to refuse abortions to women who need them... which will be grand, if he does it.)

On Saturday lunchtime, I went to a demo organised by kids from my old school, to demand that Obama close down Guantanamo Bay. It was held on the Mound, and was mostly (at a guess) other kids from my old school, which seems to have become much more activist politically since I left - well, at a guess, over the past six years.

I so much want Obama's first act to be something as symbolic and as prescient of what I hope the next eight years may be. What the US government has never acknowledged - not any branch of it - is that the transport of prisoners to the gulags in Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere in the world was a war crime. Regardless of how they were treated when they got there - the further issues of torture, denial of habeus corpus, denial of a fair trial, all of which are further crimes: these people were prisoners of war/kidnapped civilians illegally transported by the US, and the people responsible - ultimately, that would be Bush and Cheney - are guilty of breaching the Geneva Conventions. Will they ever be made to stand trial for their crimes? I don't hope for that - it's too big to hope for, to see Bush standing in the dock. (And if Obama did have any intention at all of getting Bush to stand trial for his crimes, he would be a fool to say so before his inauguration... not that I think he does have that intention: I just acknowledge that hi mere silence is insufficient to prove that he doesn't.)

But to close down Guantanamo Bay and Bagram Airbase and Abu Ghraib and the other gulags in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere in the world: that is within Obama's powers - is it within his will? The longer Obama were to delay in closing these places down, emptying them out, the more complicit he and his administration become in the crimes of the Bush administration.

Other people were saying, right before the election, that they wished they could just sleep or wish and be there - Wednesday morning, Obama elected. I didn't want that then, but I do now... I want to be on 21st January already, even if it means missing my holiday in London at the beginning of December, and Christmas (well, er... I always have mixed feelings about that). and my birthday (ditto)... No, really, it's just my holiday in London I'm going to miss if I do that.

Right. *wishes*

Are we there yet?

No?

Okay, back to work.

Tags: coffee, evil american politics, evil awful mondays, imagine better, work, write write write