Confirmed Dead

I've been to Cologne a few times now. Or at least I think I have. I do have crap short term memory. But with a good night's sleep, once it's in long term memory, it's in. Only, I also get insomnia. No sleep, and no in.

Site-seeing after only a couple of hours of sleep, usually bought with a hefty residual dose of temazepam, is unpleasant. Even on the hottest days, it is cold. Colours are washed out, buildings and landscapes flit past as fleeting impressions. And it *hurts*. It is life as a shade. Achilles didn't much enjoy being dead, even being a demi-god and even were he offered kingship of Hades. Being an underemployed demi-Australian, and not even offered concession pricing, it royally sucks. 

So my insomnia-riddled recollections of Cologne were of a dull, muted place. I was rather surprised then when after a solid night's sleep, I travelled into Cologne and found, well, a dull, muted place. It's not necessarily unattractive. Okay, I lie, it *is*. But individual parts can be quite beautiful, only to be lost in the dreariness of a post-war reconstructed whole.

There is the gothic cathedral. Gothic both in architectural style, and in being *precisely* the sort of place goths feel at home. Basically, it is terrifying. If other cathedrals buoy your soul towards heaven, this one just stretches it, and with all the subtlety of a gauntlet around your ankle and fish hook in your mouth. Had the Nazis had more time to develop their theology, this place could have been their Vatican. The stomp of jackboots would have been entirely too fitting (and I know I'm being entirely unfair to Cologne's resistance to the Nazi take-over).

And there are The Two Towers. The south tower can be accessed by a 509 step spiral staircase drilling straight up into the sky in an unrelenting, almost uninterrupted climb. On a previous occasion, Mein Freund's 70 year-old parents had attempted it, with one failing, one succeeding, and both subsequently requiring days of recuperation. I can with some pride that I am now an unstoppable cathedral-climbing machine, and it presented few problems, though with somewhat less pride that is partially due to six weeks of protracted weight loss meaning a strong wind could probably have just blown me to the top.

The view from the top is really rather astonishing. Not so much because it's of Cologne, which, yeah, looks rather shit, but just the sheer bloody height of the tower. At 98m, you are a LONG way above the people milling around on Domplatte. It makes you wonder again how such a structure could be built with medieval technology.

Which is probably because it wasn't. Astonishingly, Cologne Cathedral took over 600 years to finish. While the bulk of the structure was completed by 1473 after a mere 200 years, as the Groom later pointed out to me, the towers weren't actually done until 1880. I sometimes complain that the need to complete infrastructure projects within the electoral cycle of whichever politician wants their name scribbled on them can cause problems, but so clearly can an open deadline. I'm struggling to imagine what possible use a citizen of 2615 would find for a 21st century skyscraper. Perhaps whomever of our 30 generations-removed descendants survive global warming, a nuclear war or two and the odd pandemic will be able to squeeze enough power out of their photovoltaics to get up there and enjoy the view...

I don't really know how it survived WW2 either. It would have been ironic had it been shattered into rubble as had so many other cathedrals across Europe, and so soon after such a long gestation. Perhaps it was sheer willpower, a refusal to collapse, in spite of its 18 bomb strikes. Certainly, few other buildings in Cologne managed such obstinacy.

I sometimes volunteer for the WA Aviation Heritage Museum, whose star attraction is an Avro Lancaster, probably the most important bomber of the Second World War, and a technological marvel. But let's be clear - it is Evil. Under the command of Churchill's useful idiot, Butcher Harris, armadas of these Lancasters were sent crewed by incomparably brave, skilful and for 60,000 of them, doomed young men, to slaughter civilians in a gross game of realpolitik - convincing Stalin that Britain was serious about staying in the war without doing anything so distasteful as actually fighting in it (North African side shows aside).

Cologne was the other side of this mass flow equation of falling steel bombs and tumbling aluminium airframes. It was obliterated. In relatively easy range and navigable ability of Bomber Command, it was hammered on no less than 262 separate raids, killing 20,000, smashing up almost the entirety of the housing stock, and causing the evacuation of some 700,000. When the left bank was taken by the Americans on 6 March 2015, it was with only token resistance. Presumably Germanys greatest pile of rubble was no longer worth fighting over...

The Hohenzollern Bridge is the other great tourist attraction in Cologne. Frankly, I have no idea why. It's basically three parallel, three-arched steel truss bridges, spanning the Rhine and bearing a combined total of six railway tracks and two pedestrian paths. Neither aesthetically nor structurally interesting. It does have locks. Lots and lots of locks, each representing a couple's unique [cough] Love. They now completely cover both fences separating the pedestrian paths from the rail tracks, apparently leaving little scope for future generations of Love. One possible solution are the lock chains which have have started to form, in which locks are locked to other locks to form steel dreadlocks. I assume these will continue to grow and grow until first the pedestrian paths are blocked and, finally, the bridge collapses under the burden of all that Love.

The Hohenzollern Bridge is actually now over a hundred years old and survived everything Bomber Command could throw at it, remaining a vital artery of the Wehrmacht, right until they themselves blew it up as they withdrew over the Rhine. As a result the right bank wasn't taken by the Americans until another month after the left. Interesting, that the Rhine posed the same formidable barrier to a mechanised army as it did to those Germanic refugees fleeing into the Roman Empire from the Huns some 1500 years previously.

Cologne was actually an extensive Roman Colonia (hence the name), which was probably news only to me. There's the rather impressive Romano-German Museum testifying to it. Even the charming Dormagen (as charming as the dormitory for a chem park can be, anyway) was the Legio I Germanica encampment of Durnomagus. Seeing all those copies of copies of copies of the ubiquitous Greek sculptures dug up by the side of a river some 2000 km (and for me, one week) from where the originals were chiselled is a poignant reminder of Greece's once titanic cultural hegemony. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair...

The most impressive sites in Cologne though are the smallest. In front of random houses, one finds cobble stones replaced with brass plates engraved with the names of those Jewish Germans who had lived there. It was only later when I managed to Google Translate 'Für tot erklärt'. If there is some truth in Stalin's (alleged, but probably misattributed) quote 'One death is a tragedy, a million, a statistic' then there can be no better memorial than these individual testaments. Here's to Hugo and Lina, and their young son, Richard, whom I met on the streets of Cologne.

The War (no, not that one)

I'm really bad at planning. To an extent this is a matter of choice. A well-crafted plan is usually just an invitation to whatever deities have it in for me to fuck with me some more. By avoiding conscious planning, I can instead know with absolute precision that I have no idea what will happen.

But subconscious planning - I'm rather better at that. At Köln Hauptbahnhof, I could murder a Bratwurst. I had euros (at last, now my rental car deposit had been allowed to escape Greece). Motive and a weapon. Except my stomach said no. Five minutes later, I asked again. Nope the tight clenching running the length of the GI tract was unambiguous. Octopuses have a significant proportion of their neurons running semi-autonomously in their tentacles. I think I must have been spliced with octopus genes because along with my complete spinelessness, I also have a near autonomous subset of neurons, only these lining my stomach. A literal as well as metaphoric subconscious.

It had been my designated museum day, but as of 9:30am - the Roman Museum, the Ludwig Museum, the Dom Turm. Geschlossen, geschlossen, and geschlossen. All closed, except one. It wasn't open, but it would be by the time I got there - the Shokoladmuseum. 

'Clever Girl...' By the time I got there, my stomach had metaphorically fixed with me its reptilian stare and was rumbling approvingly.

Ever since the Great Gastro Intestinal War of 2005, a protracted and messy campaign in which my stomach effectively declared itself independent of my governance, the number of sweets I can eat steadily dwindled to two - some nougats and Lindt Dark Chocolate with a Touch of Sea Salt. And the museum was run by Lindt. How did it *know*??

I had been to a chocolate factory before. Cadbury's old factory in Tasmania, was old-school 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' industrial. Molten chocolate had flowed everywhere until the interior had became a Gigeresque landscape impossible to determine where machinery finished and floor or wall began. If you listened carefully you could hear the moans of cocooned colonists and the skittering of face-huggers. But they did feed you. In a proactive and, it must be said, effective anti-theft measure they stuffed us with vast quantities of chocolate, until we wanted to puke.

But not the Shokoladmuseum. One miserable 5g block... of MILK chocolate... DISAPPOINTED!!! If they'd shown me the empty chocolate safe, I would have emptied my (non-existent) pistol into it. As the lovely compound German name suggested, it was a museum, but they did have a significant production capability on site, all done in meticulously clean and completely automated machinery, even finding a role for a retro-futuristic six axis industrial robot - Lindt clearing lacking Cadbury's faith in the vaunted natural anti-microbial properties of chocolate. Importantly, its output was more than capable of catering to visitors' cravings.

But that would have cut into their shops profits, to which I contributed handsomely. Lest it turn on me, my stomach also got a rather nice marzipan nougat, which it consumed without complaint, and I was able to restock my supplies of Lindt Dark Chocolate with a Touch of Sea Salt, and even buy a gift for meine Freunde.

Somewhat unexpectedly the museum also included an exhibit on the cultural history of (the consumption of) chocolate, split between Mesoamerica and Europe. For the former, among the usual Aztec sculptures and blood curdling descriptions of their religious practices, there was also one nugget - much of their expansion south into the cocoa-growing tropics was to secure  their chocolate supplies. I guess of all the reasons to launch a genocidal war of oppression, chocolate has got to be one of the better ones.

The European history was rather more useful. I didn't affect my cravings (that dial already being turned to 11), but I do feel rather less guilty about them. I had foolishly believed the propaganda that chocolate was a sweet, a candy, something BAD for you. Now I know that it is 'one of the most wholesome and pretious drinks, that have been discovered to this day: because in the whole drink there is not one ingredient put in, which is either hurtful in itself or by commixtion; but all are cordial and very beneficial to our bodies, whether we be old, or young', that 'one may live moneths and years using nothing but chocolate', that by drinking it, I am signifying my rightful membership of the better classes, and that it is a good healthful tonic during my lent fast. Now excuse me while I [stuffs face with Lindt Dark Chocolate with a Touch of Sea Salt].

And I DID get my Bratwurst! With my stomach distracted by the nougat, I managed to gulp it down without immediate complaint. Eleven hours later it did retaliate with cramps, but nothing 2 pints of Reissdorf Kolsch (the world's most perfect beer), 5mg of temazepam and 1000mg of aspirin couldn't repulse. 

I might well lose this war. But not today. 

Today was mine.

PS - Peter Watts fiblet - http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=5875

Guns are boring

Guns are evil. You can excuse bolt-action rifles and shotguns, but a pistol, assault rifle or machine gun cannot fulfil its design goals without somebody getting seriously injured, or seriously dead. They can be terrifying. But they can also be that close corollary - thrilling.

There's the dull urgent thudding of the mounted M60 chewing through targets at Cu Chi tunnels and the lighter staccato of the M249 SAW in Vegas. The precise teutonic clicking of the MP-5 and the roaring rattle of the grand fathered fully automatic M16A1. And the kick of a large caliber pistol, yearning to be free, only begrudgingly staying pointed at its target. Guns can be AWESOME.

That other single-purpose implement, the sword - a knife swollen to preclude any use beyond cleaving and stabbing people - can be beautiful. The Japanese katana remains singularly so. The British 1897 Pattern swords, the marriage of industrial metallurgy to two centuries of bloody imperial experience, are, like Spitfires, the beautiful epitomes of a superseded technology. 

But steel pressure pipes, constraining the reaction byproducts of a low explosive, to force a few grams of toxic metal to high subsonic or low supersonic speeds. The burning waste heat that must be convected away before the barrel cooks itself. The residue covering everything with its acrid smell. The lubricant filming over the moving parts and anything that touches them. The noise, the thunder clap in your ear causing the shouting semi-deafness of professional soldiers everywhere.

Not beautiful. Dirty, noisy, and smelly. Seriously, what possessed Mozambique to put the AK-47 on their flag? They don't even kill efficiently. A motivated assailant can be rendered a walking corpse by a pistol without being halted, not until their neurological tissue is destroyed or cardiovascular system depressurised (ie head shot or heart shot).

But any supporter of the Second Amendment will admit it. Any honest opponent of the Second Amendment will also admit it. Guns can be thrilling. It is the strange sensation of power. I am by no means proficient with an assault rifle, but with one I could hurt a lot of unarmed people, very quickly. That is a terrifying idea, and not an abstract one - approximately annually an American does precisely that.

As an Alien living in America, the terror was persistent and distracting. Anybody could be carrying. He could. She could. What's that suspicious bulge under that dog's coat?

It wasn't rational. I know that. And expressing these fears to American colleagues simply revealed the breadth of the culture gap. Most reacted with bemusement. One, with a companionable hand on my shoulder assured me 'Don't worry - if somebody brings a gun to work, they WILL use it.' (Not helping, dude!) Another had never owned a gun and further couldn't understand why anybody would - 'Any more than I'd own a Sherman tank - what would I do with it??'. Better, but what of those who did understand?

Clearly somebody did - the ones those billboards in Newark imploring people not to murder each other were aimed at, the ones DC's impressively high gun crime statistics were documenting (in spite of its then, and subsequently ruled unconstitutional ban on firearms), and the ones who had given my colleague his 9mm scars.

Well, 'Know thy enemy'. So in 2008, I completed an intensive pistol course. After a temporary hiccough rote 'yes' ticking my way through the safety disclaimer and proudly declaring I suffered from a mental illness, we were given a brief but thoroughly professional classroom tutorial encompassing the usual firearm axioms - 'Don't point at anything you aren't willing to kill', 'Finger away from the trigger until you're ready to kill', but also more practically, given all those sliding and clanging moving parts, 'When flesh meets metal, metal always wins'. Then we blasted our way through their entire range. Aliens in America, even those of us from Earth, can't legally own firearms - and the course was after all an elaborate sales pitch - but a compromise was reached and a Glock 17 made available for rent.

I arranged further tuition from a seriously impressive instructor. Cagey about his background, but had worked in diplomatic protection and, I suspect, something rather more 'special' prior to that. He did a quick demonstration and in an unbelievably fluid motion drew and put several rounds into a tight grouping on the target 50 feet away. It wasn't the Wild West draw of a Raylan Givens, but a normal two handed grip done with the supreme economy of motion of a lifetime's experience. (He'd also actually worked in Australia, a country he wasn't particularly fond of, though given he'd never ventured beyond Alice springs and Pine Gap, he was perhaps being a little harsh.)

I subsequently attended the Firing Range fairly frequently - really as often as my budget allowed. I became steadily more proficient. But that wasn't the objective. Guns still terrified me.

Returning to Australia, reminds you just how unique the USA is. After Martin Bryant slaughtered 35 at Port Arthur in 1996, the conservative Prime Minister, John Howard drove through legislation rendering guns mostly illegal. There is still a firing range in Perth, but the guns there are chained so comprehensively they can't be turned around or even really picked up. I bought 50 rounds on the Glock 17 but it was about as realistic as a fair ground shooting gallery. Out of curiosity, I also asked whether they had anything, you know, heavier, like an MP-5. 'That's illegal.' 'Oh. Um perhaps an AR-15?' 'That's HIGHLY illegal.', her hand moving instinctively towards what was presumably a panic button under her counter. Hm - looks like shooting in Australia was a wash then...

I've often wondered about America's unique love affair with firearms, one I'd come to understand viscerally, if not intellectually. I don't hold any store in notions of 'defending liberty', not least because I for one have little idea what liberty actually is, still less how to defend it. For the Founding Fathers (and their nominal casus belli for the American Revolution) it was freedom from the Tyranny of unchecked government, either in laws invading every aspect of daily life, or in a tax-engorged (or even more terrifyingly, debt-engorged) government crowding out free enterprise. Ie an almost precise description of the current Federal and State Governments.

Even were there an armed revolt, a militia armed with small arms could do little in the face of a modern army equipped with air assets, armour and heavy weapons - just ask the Fallujahans in 2004. This is precisely why (rather conveniently) heavy weapons are not deemed protected by the Second Amendment while small arms (and only semi-automatic ones at that, are). The latter remain legal precisely because they are so ineffectual.

What firearms do give you are the right to be judge, jury, and executioner. Sometimes this can be done within the bounds of the law, though even then, as George Zimmerman discovered, your life will likely still be effectively over. At other times it is a right you can only exercise once, and probably bought at the cost of your own life. But it is a right completely denied to citizens of other developed countries, and I think it encourages a sense of civic responsibility absent elsewhere. Even by recusing yourself by not owning a firing arm, you are still after a fashion exercising it. It has been said that America is a nation of grown ups, while the social welfare systems of Europe and Australia have infantilised their citizens. I think this is only one half of the puzzle, and I think firearms make up the other.

The next time I could shoot again was in Houston in 2011. Shooting has always left me exhausted. Each trigger pull was with rigidly locked arms and a face held in a rictus of concentration, anticipating and dreading the next kick and roar. But this time, I apparently reached a critical threshold of competence and familiarity, and something clicked. The tension drained out of me, and the pistol (a 9mm Beretta from memory), though outwardly identical had *changed*. It was no longer something almost alive, but a lump of steel and plastic. A noisy tool for punching holes in paper, and, if I were so inclined, people. It was no longer thrilling. It was no longer terrifying.

I tried upping the dose. If pistols arguably have their place for home defence, assault rifles certainly do not (unless you have the x-ray vision to see what's on the other side of that wall your round is about to punch through). But in Texas they are legal, so I arranged private tuition with a semi-automatic AR-15. No gun is beautiful, but the AR-15 comes close to elegance. No longer really state-of-the-art but with the glacial pace of firearm development, certainly serviceable, and since being effectively open-sourced, available in myriad customisations and innovations. There was the nice sensation of control you get with any long-arm and the feeling you are carrying a military grade weapon of the type that can win wars (rather like picking up a replica Roman Gladius). It was certainly interesting and certainly entertaining, and I would like to develop more competence with it. But no, not thrilling.

In March 2014, in Cambodia I upped it to its logical limit, practically ODing, and doing my bit for post-civil war disarmament by buying up surplus munitions. First, the hand grenade, an underarm lob into a nearby water filled crater, a dive to the ground, and a satisfying water spout jetting into the air. And then just as I was walking away, a secondary spout as a previously misfired grenade already in the pond also detonated, sending me back to the ground accompanied by more than one expletive. An M79 40mm grenade launcher - somewhat disappointing, a blast like a shotgun, a near invisible projectile going I know-not-where (hopefully just not 'here'), then a distant explosion and a small plume rising from the shrubs. Then the piece-de-resistance, $450 of pyrotechnic awesomeness - an RPG-2 B4 recoilless rifle. Older than me, and harmless against modern heavy armour, but still capable of hurling a 80mm package of shaped high explosives 150 yards into the opposing hillside, where it detonated with a puff of smoke, and half a second later, a concussive boom. 

But by now, it was all just indulgence. My paranoia, even at its most delusional, had never actually extended to fear of attack by rocket launcher.

Finally, July 2015 saw me in a Firing Range near the bus station in Vilnius. Vastly different to American ranges, this was just a long room with some tables up one end, a far end shrouded in unlit darkness and an instructor to enforce safety. I rented a ubiquitous Glock 17, bought 50 rounds and punched holes in a target. I played a bit, first with one-handed grips and then trying basic draws. 

But it was boring. It was finally, GLORIOUSLY boring. I continue to respect guns, they are dangerous tools, and they incur a societal cost in blood too high in my opinion for the benefits they bring. But they are now no more concerning than the intent of the person holding them.

Mission Accomplished.

Postscript - 

I confess I returned a few days later to the range in Vilnius for some time with an AK-47. I was terrible with it, even less accurate than with the Glock (I blame the shitty iron sight), but it's hard not to admire the sheer agricultural ruggedness of it. Entirely more interesting was the elderly gentleman in the white suit firing an elegant little pistol (I didn't recognise the type), and his companion, an impassive man in his thirties firing his own pistol with frightening accuracy. And the four stunningly gorgeous young women waiting in the dingy foyer, absurdly out of place, under the watchful eyes of another minder sitting discreetly in the corner where he could keep an eye on both them and the door.

Yes. No more concerning than the intent of the person holding them.