The torch has been passed to a new generation...

At a time when pop music seems to have long ago run out of ideas - when pop music as a category, in fact, seems extinct - comes news which brings me the kind of frisson I haven't felt for twenty years. Devo have done a deal with Disney (sounds like a line from The Court Jester) to create Dev2.0, a kiddie cover band reprising the Devo back catalogue.

The beauty of pop (but also, perhaps, its ultimate limitation) is that it can contain every conceivable gesture without contradiction. It is the Whitmanesque 'multitude'. Dev2.0, which should look like a nauseating sell-out (think Muppet Babies, for example) comes across as a perfectly logical extension of the Devo worldview.

In the repertoire of poses available to dinosaur-rock (and dinosaur post-punk of every kind), the most laughable has always been the pose of the band as a Promethean brotherhood, bringing empowerment from on high to The Kids. Classic example: Pink Floyd's The Wall. Modern example: Green Day. But I recall the video for Devo's Through being cool: Devo are a kind of quatermaster's corps, issuing prop rayguns to young teens, who take them onto the streets to disintegrate numerous examples of daggy, mediocre middle-aged bad taste (joggers in velour tracksuits, etc.) When Pink Floyd do it for real, it's funny; when Devo do it as a joke, it feels real. Now it is real.

From Roe to woe

It’s a rare treat to be present when a shudder passes through the zeitgeist, and this feels like one of those moments. What I refer to is a sense – suddenly everywhere in the rightside blogosphere - that the tacit assent to the notion of a pregnant woman’s right to an abortion, which has held sway for at least two decades, has quietly evaporated, almost without anyone noticing. See Currency Lad and Michelle Malkin on the subject.

In the noble pantheon of human rights, it suddenly seems difficult to make a ringing Jeffersonian endorsement of what Ann Coulter has summarized as the right of a woman to have unprotected sex with a man whose children she doesn’t want to bear. As fundamental freedoms go, I somehow can’t see Norman Rockwell doing a painting about this one.

The end is nigh

Tim Blair links to a recent scientific report which uses the familiar metaphor of the history of our planet, scaled to the compass of a 24-hour clock, to remind us just how far gone we are in our death spiral to cinderdom. While such metaphors are arresting, the sense of illumination they provide is brief and illusory.

I'm reminded of the old joke: two astrophysicists are sitting on a bus, chatting about the eventual collapse of the solar system - "Sun becomes a red giant, in about twenty billion years, expands to engulf the inner planets, earth is vaporised, sun contracts to become a cold dead rock, etc., etc." At this point, a man sitting in the seat behind them, who has overheard this conversation, reaches forward, ashen faced with fear: "Wh-what did you say?" "Well", replies one of the scientists, "we were talking about the end of the solar system in about twenty billion years."

The man falls back in his seat with a gasp of relief: "Phew! For a minute there I thought you said twenty million."

The price of success

Age environment reporter Melissa Fyfe chooses Australia Day to rub our collective noses in our failure as environmental managers. Australia apparently comes a slovenly 20th in the Environmental Performance Index. Care to guess who comes first?

"While we come in at 20 out of 133 nations, our neighbours across the Tasman must be doing something spectacular. New Zealand is, environmentally, the best performing nation in the world."

This is presumably the same New Zealand which, as a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol, is currently facing an A$934 million bill for its heinous carbon debts. If this is how Kyoto treats its success stories, how must it penalize its failures?

First, the bad news...

One of the simplest techniques used by the Mainstream Media to shape the news is pseudo-narrative sequencing. If you're reporting on A, which you approve of, and B, which you loathe, put B first in the bulletin, then follow it up with the 'good' story, which will have the effect of cancelling out the bad thing, and positioning it as a freak, an aberration which has happily been set right.

For two nights running, SBS TV news has used a report on the new far-left government of Evo Morales in Bolivia as a kind of mouthwash, to sweeten Mary Kostakidis' breath after forcing her to report the success of conservative parties elsewhere (Portugal one night, Canada the next). In both cases, the two stories were run together as a sequence, for no obvious reason other than SBS' need to follow poison with antidote.

Another version of this sequencing rule applies when running a string of vox-pop soundbites. How many times have I heard this on ABC radio? If you have Mr. Iraqi-in-the-street, feel free to have one or two saying something like "Yes, we are happy to have democracy", but always, always make sure that the last soundbite goes to the guy saying "The Americans are just as bad as Saddam".

Bloody-minded

Given this blog's reliance on Radio National presenter Stephen Crittenden for copy over the Summer period, I feel some comment is owed over the remarkable news that he has been counselled by ABC management for a comment made in an interview with David Hicks' counsel Major Michael Mori. Critts suggested that the prolonged detention of Hicks might finally be due to nothing other than 'bloody-mindedness' on the part of the Howard government. (Already blogged by Slattsnews and Tim Blair). Apparently he also indulged in some overly warm congratulations and good wishes to Major Mori in his closing comments. Crittenden is evidently a fairly cordial person by nature, but does tend to gush when dealing with guests of whom he approves.

Frankly, I find this no worse than any number of other 'Critticisms'. I actually have less of a problem with this kind of frank and open hostility to the Government, than with the soft, steady hum of relentless, unconscious ABC bubblethink - the funhouse mirror which we're all supposed to accept as a transparent windowpane on the real world.

In the meantime, former ABC Four Corners producer Gordon Bick visits the Age letters page today to tell us that we need a 'biased' ABC (scare quotes the Age's , not mine):

"It is necessary and essential for the ABC to always be left of centre — whichever Government is in power."

Words fail me.

The farmer and the cowman should be friends...and other movie musings

Some might see a pointed liberal convergence in the results of this year's Golden Globe awards - a movie about gay cowboys, a movie about a gay writer, and a made-for-tv drama about a transsexual - but I tend to think it's just coincidence. (And as these pages have asked before, where's Ed Wood when you need him?)

I have no plans to see Brokeback Mountain, but I wouldn't be surprised to find it a good film. Films with gay plots are like any other - there are good ones like Dog Day Afternoon or Magnolia or My Own Private Idaho, and there are dreadful ones like the screechily self-righteous American Beauty.

I suspect the prominence of Brokeback is just another sign that it's been a thin year, in a succession of thin years, for mainstream American movies. I think I first realized this when Finding Neverland got nominated for six Oscars (yeah, okay, TM), including best picture, in 2005. Finding Neverland is a perfectly pleasant little by-the-numbers costumer, (with the usual quotient of glaring anachronisms, both in material detail and social reality). But best picture? (The winner was Clint Eastwood's magnificent Million Dollar Baby).

Historical inaccuracy in movies and books is a favourite topic of mine, and perhaps one for another and longer post, but I can't help noticing that Kate Winslet is in both Neverland and one of the all-time champions of anachronism, Titanic. She's also in the surprisingly good Enigma, by Michael Apted. I have no quarrel with her here. In fact, Enigma not only pays great attention to detail, but manages to evoke, especially in the final scenes, an emotionally convincing sense of the end of the War, and the slow return to peace and civilian normality.

In this last endeavour, it is aided mightily by John Barry's score. I've often wondered what to think about Barry as a film composer, given that he really only has one mode - the soaring romantic, elegiac theme, which he achieves with a surprisingly limited musical vocabulary. But this mode works so immediately and powerfully that it seems philistine to question it. Given that directors almost always commission a composer for the express purpose of recreating his last score, Barry has probably been locked into this mode since his biggest hit, Sydney Pollack's Out of Africa (1985). But it's always been there. One needs only to think of his themes for the Bond movies, especially songs like 'You only live twice' and 'Diamonds are forever', which give them an emotional dimension - a sense of life-lessons earned with pain and the passage of time - that they otherwise would not possess.

I will always be grateful for the revelation I had as a youthful film buff, from Barry's score for Nicholas Roeg's Walkabout (1971), and I find it impossible to imagine a masterpiece like Richard Lester's Robin and Marian (1976) without his music. I still regret that the plans for Barry to score Pixar's The Incredibles never came off. That would have been something.

Know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em

Time for me to pay up. Readers might recall I blogged the urban-mythlike account of an amateur photographer in the Victorian town of Geelong who was visited by the police shortly after taking some arty sunset snaps of the Shell oil refinery on Corio Bay. I made a bet that the Age would take no steps to verify this - on the face of it - implausible story. Well, they did.

Now that the gaps in the story have been filled out, it no longer sounds like an urban myth. The man taking photos was approached, quite correctly, by a security guard, who noted his car registration and reported it to the police. None of that was in the original account: instead we had a 'men in black' scenario of police mysteriously knowing who he was, what he'd done and where he lived.

I had suspected that if there were a germ of truth in the story, it would probably involve an overzealous constable, which appears to have been the case. The most sensible statement so far comes from Geelong's Chief Police Inspector Wayne Carson:

"While they are not breaking any law, if you take photos (of industry) in the current climate don't be surprised to be asked by police why you are doing it."

Exactly.

The photographer, Mr. Hans Kawitzki, has come out with predictable observations that this is just like being under the Communists in his native Poland [see correction below]. (I think I hear Gerard Henderson's clipping scissors in the background). He also came out with the ever-popular:

"If this is now happening in Australia, it means the terrorists have won."

Yes, right Hans. So by that logic, if a terrorist is free to conduct photographic surveillance of a target and succeeds in blowing it up, the terrorists will have...lost? Or to put it another way, if I have a choice of two alternate terrorists-have-won scenarios, I'll choose the one in which I'm not allowed to photograph an oil refinery, rather than the one in which my legs have been blown off on the 8:42 to Flinders Street.

The Age probably thinks it's being screamingly clever by pointing out that two major Australian libraries have large holdings - much of them accessible via the Internet - of the work of Wolfgang Sievers, well-known for his striking photos of industrial installations. Sievers has been retired for decades, and I don't think even your average jihadi would be dumb enough to plan a bombing based on photos that, at their most recent, are more than twenty years old.

Update: The Age has updated this story, now with predictable advice from Liberty Victoria - whose annual general meeting is held in a bathing box at Brighton, I believe - that freedom-loving shutterbugs everywhere should refuse to follow Police advice not to photograph 'sensitive' sites. Let Freedom ring!

Further update: Mr Kawitzki has contacted this blog to point out the error I made about his nationality. He is a native of Germany and not Poland, and the comparison to restrictions on photography in Communist Poland were made by another member of the Geelong Camera Club. This was stated in the original Age report, and the error was entirely mine, resulting from a too-hasty reading of that piece. My apologies to Mr. Kawitzki.

House of cards

The renewed Identity Card push will be covered in other blogs, by better minds than mine, but I do want to make a few observations. I think I'll actually enjoy watching the Opposition and the media - whose natural disposition, as social democrats, is to support an ID card - tying themselves in knots trying to criticize Howard for putting it back on the agenda. They're already at work, bashing Howard for introducing a measure he opposed 20 years ago, when the Hawke Labor government tried to bring in the Australia Card.

I'll also be interested to observe the puzzling amnesia which seems to prevail regarding the historical circumstance under which the Australia Card was finally scuttled. In the end, it was only sunk by the last-minute discovery of a crucial drafting error in the legislation, realized by a retired senior public servant, Ewart Smith, early one morning while he was being kept awake by the carolling of magpies. This flaw would have required the legislation to be re-drafted and re-submitted to Parliament. Modern-day commentators rarely mention this, and instead vaguely refer to the legislation being 'rejected'.

For the moment, I'll just wait and see. At least we've moved on from the days when a government minister - Dr. Neal Blewett - could advise a Labor Party conference that:

It is the interests of the community that should come before the individual right…we shouldn’t get too hung up on privacy because privacy, in many ways, is a bourgeois right that is very much associated with the right to private property.

Canned

Call me petty, but I get a warm glow from the news that the paint pot and rollers, used by two moonbats to deface the Sydney Opera House in 2003 with a 'No War' message, will be destroyed by police. These effects had been seized as evidence, and the moonbats were hoping to retrieve and auction them for charity. Better still, this ensures that the pot and rollers will not end up as exhibits in the propaganda-heavy National Museum of Australia, next to Bob Brown's lifejacket.

(Also, full credit to the Age for describing the moonbats, in the linked article above, as vandals - without scare quotes - and not activists.)

SBS discriminates against refugees

If you visit the SBS website - which I don't recommend - one of the things you will see is my tax dollars swirling down the plughole of their forthcoming drama series titled Marx and Venus. Geddit? Apparently it's to be a relationship comedy-drama in five-minute episodes, featuring a whiny 29-year-old law student called Marx. According to his housemate Venus, he is given to such bon mots as "This government is stupid". He really knows how to sweet-talk a girl, does Marx.

Anyway, SBS is actually inviting the public to contribute scripts for the show. If your 5-minute script is accepted, you get 2000 of my dollars. Thing is, to be eligible, you need to be "an Australian permanent resident (or citizen)". Note the order of precedence. My question is simply, why don't those with refugee status also get their chance to write an edgy, in-your-face inner-urban relationship comedy-drama?

Today's Critticism

Another glimpse inside the ABC bubble. On this morning's Radio National Breakfast, Stephen Crittenden was talking to Canadian journalist Richard Reynolds about the elections there. Stephen was puzzled by the absence of gay marriage as an election issue. He assured his guest that, if there were currently a Federal election campaign here in Australia, gay marriage would be an "absolutely electric" issue. When will these people learn that the issues which set the ABC staff canteen alight go absolutely nowhere in the real world electorate?

Faites vos jeux, messieurs

My chequebook remains open, my pen remains poised, but no sign yet of the follow-up article in the Age, on the 'Corio Bay Incident', which I was led to expect by an email from one of their editors. That message indicated an article might appear as soon as last Tuesday (10 January), but so far, nothing. I wonder what Hoyle prescribes, in cases like these?

Poster boy for jihad

In one of yesterday's posts, I mused that local terror suspect 'Jihad Jack' Thomas (centre picture) - whose image lately featured in a local, and swiftly withdrawn 'public art' project - was not exactly a poster-boy for jihad, with his pleasant open Anglo-saxon face. Fortunately we still have Abu Hamza (bottom), currently on trial in London. With publicity stills like that, he should be auditioning as a late-night horror-movie presenter, like Ghoulardi (top), or Melbourne's own fondly-remembered Deadly Ernest (top right).

(My thanks to the Deadly Ernest fansite for that image).

Backyard blitz

Victoria's notoriously soft and politically-correct Chief Commissioner of Police Christine Nixon gave a press conference yesterday calling on citizens to be on the lookout for backyard amphetamine factories in their neighbourhood. Apparently one of her main concerns is that such factories are - wait for it - a fire hazard. Gee, I never thought of that. They probably have all sorts of unsafe work practices too, to say nothing of discriminatory hiring policies, poor cultural sensitivity training for their employees, and, for all I know, a cavalier disregard for family-friendly workplace guidelines.

As if waiting for a tram isn't bad enough

You just can't make this stuff up. Rob Stary, defence lawyer for terror suspect Joseph Thomas, has complained that a poster being pasted up at Melbourne's tramstops is potentially prejudicing his client's chances of a fair trial. The poster apparently shows a photo of Thomas, with the words:
"Attention passengers - Muslim commuters may be subject to suspicion"

(As Thomas, or 'Jihad Jack' as he is known, is an Anglo, and not identifiable as a muslim at first sight, the posters are singularly pointless, even by the undemanding standards of modern political art).

I'm happy to concede that Stary might have a valid legal point. The real problem is the source of these posters. They are not some (yawn) guerilla action, but a "public art" work put up in agreement with AdShel, the company which controls advertising space at tram stops and other transport structures, and which donated the poster space. Now that attention has been drawn to the content of the posters, they have been withdrawn. Memo to AdShel: maybe it would be a good idea to check the content of material you authorize for a commercial display space before it goes up.

What only makes it funnier is that the heroic poster-warriors presumably thought they were helping Joseph Thomas. With friends like 'political artists', who needs idiots?

Melbournians can probably guess which asshat was behind the posters. Step forward Azlan McLennan, whose asinine 2004 window-display about Israeli 'terrorism' - funded by the unwilling ratepayers of Melbourne - was similarly hastily obliterated once the Councillors and bureaucrats who signed off on it actually bothered to learn what was in it. (And I'm only guessing, but were Azlan's parents big 'Narnia' fans?)

Ix-nay the Segway

Last night's ABC news bulletin had a slow-news story about the plans by Victoria Police to use those ridiculous Segways for some of their patrols (probably intended to make them seem less "threatening"). Completely local story, right? So what image does the ABC use to remind its viewers what a Segway is? Answer: blurry paparazzo stills from June 2003, showing George W. Bush stumbling off one, after his first attempt. And remember: there is no left-wing bias at the ABC.

Master class

If you haven't listened to the interview with Oliver Kamm and Douglas Murray referred to in my earlier post, please allow me to urge you to do so. If for no other reason than to listen to two Englishmen who can speak on their feet in faultless English prose, with the kind of intellectual courtesy you might have thought was extinct. To be fair to their hapless interviewer - and frequent butt of these pages - Stephen Crittenden, he is civil, if not cordial, and he even gets to the point of asking the very sensible question of why the Left oppose, in places like Iraq, the kind of values - democracy, freedom - they are historically supposed to champion.

Beazley talks tough

Kim Beazley has an ingenious theory on how to stop the carnage in Iraq: send the coalition forces home, because they're acting as a 'magnet' to..."ne'er do wells"

Coalition forces currently in Iraq have been warned to also be on the lookout for rapscallions, scallywags, scamps and scofflaws.

Neocons

Since I give a lot of stick to ABC Radio National Breakfast, it's only fair for me to mention that they recently hosted not one but two 'neocons'. I haven't listened to this session yet, so it remains to be seen if these guys get the same reverential treatment accorded to Robert Fisk, or General William Odom. Still, if you've followed the link above, you will have seen that the signs aren't promising:

With the violence continuing in Iraq on a daily basis and with support for America's involvement in Iraq waning in the United States, you might be forgiven for thinking the neoconservative moment is over.

Dream on, kids. And anyway, those evil neocons are about other things than just the democracy movement in Iraq.

Lewis 'Scooter' Libby is facing jail time for leaking the name of an undercover CIA operative

Okay class, pay attention. For the hundredth time, Libby was not indicted for blowing the cover of top-secret super-spy and Vanity Fair model Valerie Plame. He was indicted on charges of obstruction of justice and perjury - serious charges to be sure, but on grounds which have been growing ever flimsier since the indictment was brought.

Have I lost my bet?

Regular readers of this page - (pause: cue sound effect of distant crickets chirruping) - might recall an earlier post about the strange case of Mr. Graeme Angus, who had a letter published in the Melbourne Age, about a friend of his who innocently took some sunset happy snaps of a major oil refinery, in the bayside town of Geelong, and who had police on his doorstep within hours, warning him off any such photography.

In that post, I offered to bet my favourite Christmas present that the Age, for all its tub-thumping about Howard's fascist anti-terror laws, would not follow up this frankly implausible story.

In response to an enquiry, I received a very courteous and cordial reply from one of the Age's editors, advising me that they have indeed been looking further into this story, and plan to publish a follow-up report early next week. Have I lost my bet? It looks like it. As I didn't make the bet with anyone in particular, and as I doubt the editor of the Age would have much use for my present, the best course seems to make a donation - equivalent in monetary value - to an impeccable charity, such as the Red Cross.

Still, it'll be cheap at the price to have my curiosity satisfied, which is sharper than ever, given the editor's comment that there are:

"initial difficulties of substantiating the story and some contradictory
information which we need to iron out"

I'll bet there are.

In the meantime, I'll offer some wise words on wagers as a dialectical circuit-breaker, from one of my favourite books, The Age of Scandal (1950), T. H. White's riveting anecdotal history of Eighteenth Century England:

'Our ancestors were men of their hands' said G. M. Trevelyan, 'who regarded a duel as the natural issue of a quarrel, and a bet as the most authoritative solution of an argument.' They did not find it convenient 'to spend twenty minutes in confuting a man who had so little faith in his own view that he would not back it with twenty guineas'. The wager was, according to this historian, a kind of reductio ad absurdum, or a cutting of the Gordian knot in controversy.

Pining for the fjords

What is it about the Nordic countries that makes them so prone to melancholy, suicide, alcoholism and Socialist idiocy? The leader of the minority Socialist partner in Norway's coalition government is pushing for a national boycott of Israeli goods. Reminds me of the time, many years ago, when I bought a packet of imported biscuits for the office tea-club, and one of my lefty colleagues pounced on the initials SA after the manufacturer's name. In high dudgeon, she refused to consume anything produced by the apartheid regime of South Africa, blah blah, until I pointed out to her that this actually meant 'Societe Anonyme', like '& Co.' or 'Ltd'.

Clueless in Gaza

Just a few observations from Robert Fisk's appearance on Radio National this morning.

Firstly, to his credit, Fisk was unambiguous in describing Palestinian gloating over the severe illness of Ariel Sharon as a sign of the "immaturity of the Palestinian people". Can't say fairer than that.

On the other hand, Fisk answered a question I was asking myself only last night: if the Palestinians are ready for their own state, why are they making such a hash of things in the clean slate of Gaza? Simple, according to Robert: Gaza is a "rubbish dump" that no-one could seriously be expected to build a working community on. That's funny, no-one seemed to think it was a rubbish dump when the Israelis lived there.

Secondly, am I just being cynical, or did Robert show a trace of bias when describing the Israeli Labor party and its prospects as a possible government of Israel?

"We non-Israeli Westerners have always placed our faith in the Labor Party..."

Thirdly, and I'll admit this is close to hair-splitting, but Robert was emphatic in describing the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin as an "Israeli terrorist". Is this kind of assassination terrorism? Maybe. Was Lee Harvey Oswald a "terrorist"? I'm only splitting these hairs because I have a hunch that Robert would not be so quick to describe suicide bombers as terrorists, and he seems to get a distinct buzz out of being able to use the words "Israeli" and "terrorist" together like that.

In signing off, Radio National host Stephen Crittenden was typically muted in his thanks:

"As always, BRILLIANT to talk to you..."

Forgive and forget, especially forget

BBC news is currently running the tear-jerking story of Helene Castel, who has finally been arrested for robbing a bank 24 years ago. She had fled to Mexico, and made a new life there as a psychotherapist, but was arrested four days before her case would have expired under the relevant statute of limitations. Not surprisingly, she comes equipped with a ready fund of psychobabble: she needs to live through this, to be "reborn in France to be whole". Well, I suppose it sounds better in French.

If you read the BBC report, you will realize that Mme Castel doesn't sound like your ordinary bank robber, but the report is puzzlingly silent as to what might have driven an apparently educated person to commit a major crime. It makes a single oblique reference to a charge of "armed robbery in an organised group". Who might that group be? The Hole-in-the-Wall gang, the Wild Bunch? Mais non, it's Action Directe, one of the many radical lefty criminal gangs which sprang up in the more affluent parts of Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. Now try to imagine that same BBC report if Mme Castel had been convicted of jaywalking, and was found to have been a member of the National Front 20 years ago. French leftwing newspaper Liberation protests that Mme Castel has been denied her "right to forget". The BBC, at least, is prepared to respect that right.

Take me to your leader

In the unlikely event that you have come to this site before seeing Tim Blair, please let me urge you to visit this post - one of the weirdest stories, and certainly one of the funniest comment threads I've read for a long time. In short, it's about a UN resolution to establish diplomatic relations with extraterrestrials.

Apart from the comedy value, it made me nostalgic for a certain era in science-fiction writing, in which the aliens - if they were benevolent - always made a beeline for the UN headquarters to begin their dealings with the earthmen. Arthur C. Clarke's best novel, Childhood's End (1954), has just such a scenario - the Overlord Karellen becomes best buddies with UN Secretary General Stormgren, who becomes his sole conduit for interaction with the poor doomed human race - the President never rates a mention. In fact, there is a rather prescient passage in this novel, concerning the UN. When we first meet Stormgren, he is looking out of his lofty office window, at an anti-Overlord protest in the street far below:

"He sometimes wondered if it was a good thing for any man to work at such an altitude above his fellow humans. Detachment was all very well, but it could so easily turn to indifference".

Indeed.

And I'm sorry to say I guffawed when recently re-viewing Close Encounters of the Third Kind, at the scene in which a convoy of UN trucks suddenly rockets over a sand dune in the Gobi desert, blue banners flying heroically, like finalists in the Paris-Dakar rally.

Rubber Dickie

Sorry about that title, the significance of which will become apparent shortly. I saw this still from the new George Clooney movie Syriana about three times before I realized it was George himself. What struck me next was just how much George, with a few extra pounds and a salt-and-pepper beard, looks like...Philip K. Dick. It then occurred to me that, in a funny way, George is well situated to make a fantasy project of mine - a biopic of Phil Dick, that would probably intertwine elements of his autobiographical alternate history novel Radio Free Albemuth.

The political slant of RFA would superficially appeal to George - a dystopian America in which a Nixonesque thug becomes President and turns the country into a police state, the kind George already thinks it is. For reasons touched on elsewhere, Dick is able to turn this material into a masterpiece, a million miles from the dreary moonbat propaganda it might otherwise be. But as George reads into the book, he might find reasons to lose interest: Dick makes rather too much fun of Berkeley radical culture, and arrives at the conclusion that left-wing fascism and right-wing fascism are indistinguishable. Still, that's what script doctors are for.

The notion of a biography that blurs fantasy and reality is territory that George is already familiar with, in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, his biopic of Gong Show host Chuck Barris. In fact, the whole idea is very Phildickian - Phil's life story gets optioned by a big Hollywood star, and is turned into an unrecognizable fantasy. Just as, at the end of RFA, Dick's sci-fi novels are being re-written as pro-government tracts while he languishes in a labour camp.

Even stranger, but still true to the Dickian worldview, is this. (And checkout the name of the Animation team leader - Frankenburger. A perfect PKD joke).