Alan Coleman

I remember watching the Space Shuttle launch shortly before my tenth birthday, at a small school in the Essex countryside. The sun was shining outside as  we gazed in amazement at the school television, it had buttons on the front and 3 channels. It was soon after we had a visit from an American basketball team from Weathersfield Airbase, the biggest people we’d ever seen.

The launch we watched on that wooden Televsion on the 12th April 1981 was Columbia’s first mission, STS 1. It was a memory I relived yesterday as I watched Endeavour launch its last mission, STS 134, from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida 30 years later.

What struck me about yesterdays launch was how similar it was to the first one I saw, why would it be any different? The thing is, it’s not as if I’ve been that interested in the program during the last 30 years, it’s pretty much passed me by. It’s a bit like getting into a band shortly before they split up.

Yesterdays launch was as exiting as the first time I watched it, awesome. Great watching online too, complete with Specky banter and realtime launch info. Wicked.

As the tabloids scream with excitement, “Our boys launch submarine missile attack on Gaddafi”, an important question has to asked. Where is this latest spark of genius going?

We could do what we did in Iraq the first time around in the early nineties. Make a lot of noise with tanks and planes then leave without getting our hands dirty or really achieving anything at all. Or we could do what we did in Iraq the second time around.  Justify a cripplingly expensive military campaign with lies and deceit  in order to satisfy the religious egomania of pious men (and Jesus).

In both cases it’ll be innocent families picking up the tab, both here and abroad. There, it’ll be relatives blown to pieces and ignored as collateral damage. Here it’ll be young men who could have done something with their lives being hyped up as “The bravest of the brave”, by politicians whose own offspring will be tucked away safely at a select school.

Hollywood couldn’t think up a name for the latest campaign, and I doubt even Guy Richie could either.  It’s called Operation Odyssey Dawn.

You couldn’t write it any better.

Perfect for the glorified tabloid cartoon layout of  “Our boys” in action. The perfect fit for the suited man making the chopping action outside number ten. The perfect soundbite to accompany “It is legal and it is right”, just because a public schoolchild tells the foolish poor that it is so.

Yet another military endeavour, another opportunity for men to sprout soundbites on BBC News, to go to church on Sunday and pick up accolades.

Yet another opportunity for waste.

I can’t help but pick up on the latest tabloid hysteria, what with millions of examples left strewn across London on a daily basis. It is rubbish, which probably says a lot more about the people who read the stuff and cast it aside for someone else to pick up, before and after work.

Anyway, this entry isn’t about free papers and rubbish, it’s about one particular episode that quite literally screamed up from the gutter about a month ago. You may remember, apparently a soldier had been turned away from a Hotel in Surrey because it was the establishments policy not rent rooms to servicemen.

Oh how the hysteria caught hold! From Talk Sport to Radio 4 and from the Metro to the Sun. Shock horror, the death of respect and the end of decency! What have we come to? Why oh why?! You could just see Jeremy Clarkson spitting with fury over his stupid fucking walnut dashboard. My Brother even rang me up to ask me why, like I had the answer.

The rhetoric still continues to this day, most if it aimed at how servicemen are treated in the USA, the cheap travel and the whooping high fives in the shopping mall. This isn’t the States though, and young working class men in Great Britain join the military to serve in one of the finest armed forces in the history of warfare itself, not to pick up the odd free Chai Latte at Starbucks. There’s more at stake in the military than the trivialities of daily civilian life.

The thing is, there must have been some reason in the past why this decision was made at the Hotel in question. Someone just didn’t pipe up at a meeting on Monday morning and suggest a blanket ban on servicemen based on short hair and a slightly awkward appearance. No, more likely it was a decision based on a culmination of events probably involving alcohol, violence and the Police. Anyone reading this who has served amongst the ordinary ranks will have a good idea of what went on, and are probably smiling at the thought of it. In short, they didn’t behave themselves.

And as any soldier will tell you, not having to behave properly is one of the more enjoyable aspects of service life. But you can’t have it both ways. And it’s precisely the reason that these people are barred from these kinds of places that makes them so successful in their chosen profession. No?

And what of the outraged Daily Mail readers with their rose tinted idea of soldiers as the last great hope of British decency and service? Are they going to throw open the doors of those cherished little B&Bs down in the Cotswolds? Or how about allowing a Platoon from 3 Para to have their Christmas party in the local Crouch End Gastro “Boozer”?

Don’t fancy it? No.

Tabloid newspapers: You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.

All my favourite writers are American, as is most of the music I listen too, in fact it’s difficult to think of a culture outside of our own that has given my life so much pleasure. I re-read Steinbeck’s work over and over in the same way that I’ll be listening to Sonic Youth in thirty years time. I love the place, even though at the age of thirty five I’ve never been further west than the Gower Peninsula.

In terms of culture, technology and history they’ve given us so much to be grateful for. Yet when it comes to the task of government they have always failed to live up to expectation, now we’ve reached a point where even the idea hope has about it an air of failure.

Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Obama. These names have never been capable of anything more than the repellent self interest of their own celebrity. But after everything, even after the Bush family and giving up hope of the Whitehouse ever being able to live up to Jed Bartlett, I still refuse to believe that America can’t produce a set of individuals capable of government.

After only managing half of Wolf Creek last week I wasn’t in the mood for being upset by yet more violence. As it happens, along with sex and drugs, violence is one of this films underpinning themes. So I just sighed and got on with cringing at those realistic sounds of people punching each other in the face. Horrible.

The main story involves a group of middle class friends in Florida who have pretty much no direction in life and who only have sex and drugs in common. And there’s plenty of it too. Much of the film seems to be shot to make the viewers feel as if they too are part of the permanent state of high indifference.

The story has about it an inevitable sadness that is always going to end in disaster. The disaffected American youth, living a chaotic life of no direction and reliance on drugs for escapism. This scenario gives the film a dark sense of tragedy that begins during the opening scenes and worsens towards the end.

There are messages for Americans throughout this film. They are mostly about the relationship between the embedded culture violence, lack of education and drugs. In one of the final scenes, Marty’s brother appears with a T-shirt with, Dare to resist drugs and violence?, written on it. Most of all I think the message is about respect. The idea that everyone, even those whose lives societies look down upon, deserves an amount of respect. Even if it’s something as simple as saying their name properly.

This is essentially a Teen movie for grown ups. It’s disturbingly sexy, at times upsetting but also very funny and endearing. Also, it has a superb soundtrack that really adds a sense of menace to the sweaty Florida backdrop.

Essential viewing for anyone disillusioned with the formulaic nature of Hollywood, or for anyone else who wants to see a great film.