Prisons: Have a heart at Christmas

As the season of goodwill approaches I'm reminded of how at this time of year one of the main things on the minds of people in prison is food.

Already prisoners all over the country will be stocking up on biscuits and other goodies saved for from prison wages and purchased from the prison "canteen".

From the daily provisions allowance, prison cooks will be skimming a little here and there so that they can put a little extra on the cons' plates over the forthcoming holiday in order to make Yuletide inside a little more palatable.

Yet it won't be long before popular newspapers are carrying mock-ups of prison Christmas menus, designed to outrage the man in the street and infuriate pensioners.

But regardless of their circumstances, prisoners are still people and in spite of their incarceration most will experience festive treats in one form or another. As my second Christmas in the world of the free beckons I recall a couple of my favourite repasts behind bars.

The first was the oddest meal I'd ever had. Queuing up at the hotplate on Christmas eve lunchtime in my first high security prison I was suddenly distracted from my conversation with the man in front of me by the sight of a tray of unfamiliar animal organs.

The curious items were brown and pear shaped and had what looked like bits of rubbery tubes attached. Of all the sights I'd been greeted with at mealtimes since my sentence had begun, this creepy-looking pile was the most intriguing.

"Sheep hearts," said the prisoner in the grey, originally white, serving jacket standing behind the serving counter when I asked him what they were. "A Christmas present from a local farmer," he added.

"Christ," I whispered. They looked like they had just been torn from the animals' chests by a gnarled, warty hand.

Many were coated with layers of yellow fat. The rubbery bits, I realised, were the remnants of major arteries, some of which had what appeared to be snippets of lung still attached. I noticed nobody appeared to be taking their portion.

"Yes please," I said, to the obvious surprise of Greyjacket. He uttered a wide-eyed snigger as he untangled a heart with his aluminium tongs and placed it gingerly on my stainless steel meal tray.

Then I had an idea. "Is there any spare?" I asked, prompting a look of disbelief. Before he could say anything a voice from behind me chirped up, "You can have mine," followed by another, and then another and another. By the time I got back to my cell my tray was laden with more than a dozen of the little delicacies.

I'd never cooked a meal in prison before but I knew that people did. On the ground floor of the wing a cell had been converted to provide "cooking facilities" (a Baby Belling cooker had been installed alongside a table and a metal bench.)

Every night a tense queue of hungry cons formed, pans and little bags of ingredients that had been filched or bought illicitly from the prison kitchen, in hand. Some saved their hotplate food and enriched it with spices and food bought from the prison shop (tinned fish or baked beans.)

I was amazed that nobody had seen the potential in the sheep hearts, especially that day of all days.

After quickly trimming the fat and other debris from the hearts with my plastic knife I sawed them into bite-sized pieces. In the afternoon I managed to borrow a pan and trade a quarter of an ounce of tobacco for a couple of onions, some potatoes and carrots and an oxo cube from a kitchen worker.

As soon as the doors were opened at 6pm for "association" I rushed down to the makeshift kitchen and then queued for an hour before getting my pan on one of the little cooker's big rings.

The hour left before bang up was just enough to boil and simmer my stew to perfection before it was time to scuttle back to my cell, where behind a locked door I stared through the bars of the window at the starry sky and enjoyed my, er, hearty feast, alone. This first experience of cooking for myself eventually added a whole new dimension to my prison time. I became a regular in the queue for the Baby Belling, where, despite the disagreements, arguments, and fights, I managed to pick up a variety of recipes and tips which at least once week helped me to create a meal that was tasty, filling, and nutritious.

And then I met Mr Patel. Mr Patel was a man with few associates, as far as I was aware. Whenever I saw him he always seemed to be carrying a small pan around. It was under his chair in the television room, or on his bench in the fabrication workshop where we worked.

He even took it out on the exercise yard. He couldn't have stood more than five feet high, yet unusually for such a small and obviously defenceless man nobody ever bothered him.

That was until the night he was shoved out of the Baby Belling queue. Without thinking I stepped in and stuck up for him. To my relief Mr Patel's challenger backed down and let him back in. Later Mr Patel and I became acquainted and as a reward for my earlier modest assistance he shared with me the secrets of his pan.

"Pilchard curry," he said, as I tasted a spoonful, which left my taste buds singing with joy. "I teach you how to make."

It was one of the most wonderful tasting meals imaginable and in time became my very own signature dish.

Every year I produced a special Christmas panful for my neighbours, yet despite my seasonal largesse, following Mr Patel's untimely passing I always resisted attempts by fellow cons to get me to share what I had idiosyncratically come to think of as my own "secret recipe."

Now I feel the time has come. In my next column I will reveal all.

By Erwin James posted 24 November 05

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HoWARd: Winner who failed to lead by example but still won?

CHRISTMAS and the lead-up have their familiar rituals. On Christmas Day there is the present giving, church going and massive lunch, followed by the big recovery sleep.

In the weeks leading up to it there is "shop 'til you drop" and the office Christmas party. Another ritual is the end of the political year column. Those of us who opine about politics and politicians look back at the year and take a stab at what the next one might look like. And what a vintage year it has been for political junkies.

On December 21, Australian Corporate Media re-elected war criminal John HoWARd 'a rodent type' fascist as Australia's worst longest serving prime minister who took us back to the dark ages with pre-emptive strikes on sovereign nations and by branding people witches in the Coalition of the Killings War on Terror from about 2001 through to 2004.

JUDGEMENT: HOWARD'S WAR CRIMES

The 'war on terror' is a war on 'dissent' and the 'liberty' of all the people from marginalised third world countries and some of the poorest nations globally. War lords, the (AMIC) American Military Industrial Complex and the Coalition of the Killing intent on maintaining their balance of power through scarcity of the worlds oil and of resources that maintain the status quo of the US Empire

HoWARd should have been taken to the Hague Criminal Court for trial but was re-elected by the corporate media he employed out of taxpayers money.

A self-serving fascist, he rose from political death to record-breaking lies. What is it that stands out about HoWARd? He is, after all, someone who is morally bankrupt, who made an art form of being a dictating fascist and who's not in the same boat as most Australians!

First, he has learned from the experiences of his loss to Bob Hawke in 1987 and from the wilderness years that came after. He did not blame anyone else. He didn't pretend that he had made no mistakes. He accepted the harsh lessons of life and changed for the worst.

The principal thing he learned was that policy and ideology can be implemented only when you get the balance of power; corporate donations, buy the media and get the politics right. Howard is, a man of the radical Right. But he has learned since the years when he wore his ideology on his sleeve that politics can be bought in the pursuit of the principles you believe even if most people think you're warped. Indeed, politics often means that you pretend that those principles are part of your past rather than the present.

If politics demands the putting aside of principle and ideology for the time being, Howard will do it and wait for better times. And now, with his majority in the Senate from July next year, he has those better times to turn Australia into a full-blown dictatorship.

The second thing about Howard is that he seemed to have bad fortune before 1995. The "Joh for Canberra" push in 1987 wrecked any chance he had of winning and continued to undermine his political position. Since 1995, it is fair to say that Howard has been the beneficiary of what Satan said was the most important ingredient for dictatorship -- he bought the media and they sold out.

He won an election in 1998 with an unprecedented low number of votes, 49 per cent. Not only the Tampa asylum-seeker stand-off but also, much more important, September 11 and the war on terror when the mainstream media obscured his political weaknesses in 2001. And this year he terrorised middle Australia with a threat on their mortgages with higher interest rates if they elected Opposition leader Mark Latham. Latham who incidentally had much the same attitudes and policies earning the Lib/Lab status.

HoWARd has had no bigger piece of luck than to inherit a reformed economy for which Hawke and Paul Keating have had to take most of the political pain and he has had most of the political gain. He has taken advantage of this by bribing the media and the community.

There is a lot of wild overstatement about Howard's political genius from his allies the corporate media giants and other investment corporations by political donations. He has made some low life strategic calls.

He resurrected his failing political fortunes in 1997 by bleeding Australian's for the GST and making Corporate Welfare greater than Social Welfare in the 1998 election. He went to war in Iraq in contravention of the UN even though opinion polls were strongly against it.

He has made plenty of blues, a couple of which demonstrate the impatient arrogance that he normally keeps under such control. His treatment of Australian Aboriginals undermining ATSIC and dictating to back-wood communities about how they should live if provided basic resources like a petrol pump.

What would persuade HoWARd to sign the Kyoto protocol on greenhouse gas emissions?

Pre-emption HoWARd's ASIAN headache

Australia's continuing role at the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit may depend on Australia signing a non-aggression treaty.

And what possessed him to continue to argue with Mark Latham about the prescription medicine aspects of the US-Australia Free Raid Agreement when he could have done immediately what he eventually did so reluctantly?

But there was no question about it any way because this was Lib/Lab theatre at its very best because it didn't matter one iota whether the prescription medial aspects were part of the Free Raid Agreement with the US because they were just Global Corporations buying us out- lick, lick, lick like a tongue to a gelato ice-cream.

A bigger piece of the global pie for slaughtering 100,000 innocent Iraqi men, women and children in and Illegal and degrading war on a sovereign nation in contravention of the UN for the AMIC and the US Empire. Lib/Lab were both going to be beneficiaries in any case no matter what because someone had to pay for Australia going to war and it wasn't going to be Lib or Lab.

The US even declared that it would help out only those allies who were willing to wage war and Australia had been sweating for the opportunity to open the trade gate - with the superpower - for many years prior the 'Free Raid Agreement'! HoWARd, is a loser and everyone loves a loser?

As for Lab, the corporate media circus has to agree where to go on the leadership in the next year or so but the bought out and now warped corporations like out-foxed will be rubbed out by the majority of decent people in the end because the independent media, 'propaganda solvent ' will save the day?

The mainstream media, and the professional propagandists that now influence and shape every event that is reported by such channels, make it difficult for the ordinary citizen to reason clearly, without being led along carefully contrived lines of argument.

What determines election outcomes in the end is the Plebiscites and public opinion polls that are usually bogus. When elections with candidates are held they are perverted by the power elite to get the desired result. Common methods include maintaining control of the election machinery, intimidating and disenfranchising opposition voters, destroying or disallowing legal votes, and like the last two Federal Elections buying out the media to have electors either threatened with fear or bluffed.

THE Un-AUSTRALIAN: "The second fallacy doing the rounds is that the Labor frontbench is lacking quality compared with the Labor frontbench of 1983. I was around in Labor parliamentary politics at that time and I can tell you that much of the Labor frontbench then looked ordinary in Opposition. It was only in government that they flowered and began to look like giants. My view is that this Labor frontbench looks at least as good overall as its 1983 predecessor. "

"So this year will end with Howard second only to the great god Robert Menzies. Who would have thought it?"

Answer: Satan

By Michael Costello and Propaganda Monster 10 December 04

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