As always, for all manner of reasons, the shadow of the United States of America looms over the culture of the world. That’s a big statement I know and we can argue about it over dinner sometime.

Despite all predictions of its imminent demise, from our shitty social media feeds to the movies we critique, the online series we binge on, and the politics we follow, the idea  of America is omnipresent.

In a post-globalised world, within the 24-hour news cycle and the sodden floating morass of opinion and perspective that passes for actual information,  you will find multiple aspects of the perplexing, infuriating, compelling, impenetrable, amorphous concept of America.  

No other country on earth filters through via so many lenses and I suppose that is why everyone, whether they have been there or not, have so many strident opinions on the place and I have probably been the worst offender.

So that’s why I decided, worn out slaving for The Local, that my next journey would be to that country. I did not expect to traipse the halls of power, feel its hot breath, nor oscillate around the world of the elite and famous.  

I simply wanted to see the USA at ground level through my own personal lens and form an opinion of this land via actual experience. I hope that what I have put down is worth  reading. – Tony Sawrey  

United States president Donald Trump intends to sanction the country’s law firms who he considers to be filing ‘frivolous’ lawsuits. The memo issued March 30 is yet another step by his administration to punish those he considers to be trying to impede his government’s agenda.  

As one of the numerous directives, memos and announcements coming out of  his White House office, it is difficult to determine what specific effects this will have in the coming months. But one thing is certain, after barely three months, Trump’s  second term is generating a climate of anxiety and unease everywhere.

 In the state of Arizona in the southwest of the country, this unease is particularly  acute. Southern Arizona, much of it harsh desert, shares a 600km border with Mexico and is literally the front line where the movements of illegal immigrants, asylum  seekers and undocumented workers rub up against a United States retreating into  isolationism and xenophobia.  

Thus a government threatening to go after lawyers and their ‘frivolous’  applications (such as advocating the rights of deportees or impeding the separation  of immigrant families) may have real consequences there, as Maurice Goldman, a  Tucson-based immigration lawyer explains:  “The question becomes, how are they going to define frivolous?

Is everything in  the eyes of this administration fraud or frivolous? These are words that can just get  thrown around with no real true basis to it and it’s a way to chisel away at our system  of justice and the rule of law.”

 And of course it is not just legal organisations affected by this climate of  uncertainty. It also has implications for non-government activist groups such as  Humane Borders.

Those who chose the risky crossing of desert regions into the  United States are vulnerable to its extreme heat and since the turn of the 21st century  over 4000 people have died making the journey.

 Humane Borders’ mission is to ‘save desperate people from death by dehydration  and exposure while working to create a more just and humane border’.

They do one  simple thing, that is to maintain a series of permitted water stations in the desert  along trails used by migrants. The stations consist of blue plastic barrels filled with  fresh water placed in a shaded area with a flag attached that can be seen from a  distance.  

The work of Humane Borders and other NGO’s like them has attracted the ire  of authorities in the past. Volunteers have been threatened with prison and fines due  to their efforts to place life-saving food and water and they have been accused of  encouraging people smuggling and organised crime.  

There is no doubt that ultimately it is these types of groups and their supporters  that the current administration wants to impede.

By going after the lawyers that assist  them, they can easily isolate, criminalise and restrict their activism. But here in Arizona it’s not just the authorities Humane Borders has to be wary  of. Guillermo Jones is a volunteer with the group and goes out on regular runs into  the desert to check and refill water stations.  

“We sometimes find barrels where the spigot had been removed by border patrol  officers, draining the water. Often the barrels get shot at too. On a recent trip we  encountered someone impersonating a migrant in distress and asking for a ride. He  was trying to entrap us, as transporting people without documents is a crime.”  

The wall straddling the line between Mexico and the United States is the  President’s vision of an isolated and locked-down country-made manifest. The eight-metre high structure, festooned with razor wire, towers over the desert town of  Nogales.    

Border patrol pick-ups drive along the base and helicopters and drones with  infrared scanners cruise the skies. But within the local population, predominantly Hispanic and indigenous, there is a sympathy, or at least some understanding, of why  those who brave the desert do what they have to do.  

“People are scared right now,” says Guillermo, “Even those who have the right to  enter the United States are afraid to cross over the border in case they get picked up  in a sweep,” referring to recent arrests and deportations by Immigration Customs and Enforcement officials.

“But ultimately undocumented immigrant traffic will continue, and we will help them survive no matter how hard they try to stamp out our efforts in Washington DC.”  

Words & images of Maurice Goldman, top left, and the wall: Tony Sawrey  

Images: Guillermo Jones, top right, and cross: Supplied by Guillermo Jones  

by Jeff Glorfeld

A movie made 37 years ago explains the crazy world of 2025.

The US filmmaker  John Carpenter could rightly be called a cult  artist. His movies always  attract a ready audience of  knowledgeable fans, and  are usually moderately  successful, but it isn’t likely  you’ll see him on a red  carpet during awards season,  nor is he a frequent guest on the chat-show circuit.  

One of Carpenter’s  best-known films is The  Thing, made in 1982, a  creature feature about a  shape-shifting alien doing  battle with the human  occupants of a research  facility in Antarctica.

It  was a remake of a 1951  production, The Thing From  Another World, which itself  was adapted from the 1938  novella Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell.  The 1951 movie was  made at a time when the  US was in the grip of one of its periodic internal wars,  as conservative politicians ginned up a “Red Menace” to instil fear in the populace.  

According to opportunistic politicians such as muck-raking Republican senator Joe  McCarthy, The Reds – communists – were living among us, undetected, biding their  time until their Soviet masters told them to strike, with the aim of destroying the American way of life.  

The alien in the story, The Thing, had the ability to kill people and then perfectly  mimic them, allowing it to infiltrate the human community and eventually take it  over. As analogies go, it isn’t subtle but it is effective.  

One Carpenter film that is mentioned surprisingly often lately in these bruised and bewildered United States – surprisingly because when it came out in 1988 it was  not especially well received – is They Live.

Carpenter fans who love this movie will concede that it’s not without some  glaring flaws, but what makes it noteworthy today is its central theme. Now, before  we go any further, SPOILER ALERT: here comes the big reveal.

They Live came out  37 years ago, so if you were planning to rent the DVD or stream it on Netflix this  weekend, sorry.  The central plot of the movie is this: Aliens have invaded our planet Earth – or at  the very least the US part of it – and taken control. But it was a bloodless conquest,  done by stealth.

These aliens have the ability to appear perfectly human and now live and  work among us. How? Doesn’t matter, something to do with technology.

More  importantly, the aliens have co-opted key humans into their takeover, by giving them access to vast wealth and power.  Again, the analogy isn’t deep.

When Carpenter made They Live – he was the film’s  director, co-wrote the soundtrack, and wrote the screenplay, based on a 1963 short  story by Ray Nelson – the US was being ruled by a conservative government fronted  by actor Ronald Reagan.  

At the time, in an interview, Carpenter called the aliens in his movie “free  enterprisers from outer space” who are “exploiting Earth as if it’s a third-world planet.  I began watching TV again. I quickly realised that everything we see is designed to  sell us something.

The only thing they want to do is take our money.”  It doesn’t take a background in literature or cinema studies to see the similarities  between Carpenter’s outlook in They Live and the world we live in today – the world  of Trump’s USA in particular.  

The aliens remain hidden but their human partners, the ones who have betrayed  their fellow earthlings in exchange for bigger yachts, more and better holiday homes,  and larger tax loopholes, are fully revealed.

In Trump 2.0, along with the accumulation of stupefying wealth is the demolition of almost 250 years of democratic governance and the rule of law, replaced by a  mutant hyper-capitalist oligarchy run by fanatics and ideologues.  

Most upsetting is that so many people who have not been invited to join the  alien invasion party and reap the rewards have been so thoroughly deluded by the  traitorous humans that they stupidly go along with the desecration and destruction.  

It’s like the chook helping out the farmer by sharpening the axe.  They live, but so do we. As the Neil Young song goes, keep on rockin’ in the free  world.  

After many happy years living and  working in St Kilda and Wheatsheaf,  Jeff and Carol Glorfeld decided to  retire to the motherland, California.  What a great idea (said in a sarcastic  tone of voice). We’ve kept our  Aussie passports up to date and our  eyes open for cheap airfares home.  Meanwhile, we stay busy.

Jeff has a  radio show, the Down Under Hour,  music from Australia, on KKRN  88.5FM, streaming at KKRN.org.  Have a listen.  

In late January 2017 an insignificant US Republican Party dogsbody named Kellyanne Conway earned long-lasting infamy and ridicule when she told television interviewer Chuck Todd on the Meet The Press program that clearly false claims made by newly elected president Donald Trump’s press secretary,  Sean Spicer, were not lies, or “falsehoods”, but “alternative facts”.  

It’s worth remembering that Conway trotted out her logic-defying statement in defense of a lie over a trivial matter.

Trump claimed the crowd at his inauguration ceremony in Washington, DC, was the biggest ever seen, which was a demonstrable lie.  

Call it an alternative fact, or “untruth”, if you want, but The Lie is the hallmark of the Trump era in US politics.

In 2021 the fact-checking unit of the Washington Post reported that, “By the end of his term, Trump had accumulated 30,573 untruths during his presidency – averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day.”  

One of the strategies mastered by Trump and those who serve him is to deny and lie whenever confronted by inconvenient facts, and, if all else fails, profess your devout Christian faith. If you keep the lies coming fast and fantastical, any media watchdogs that might choose to check them will be overwhelmed, and the 24-hour news cycle is such that yesterday’s lies will be buried under layers of new lies.  

In my 30-plus years living in Australia, it seems to me that political discourse throughout the layers of government was often heated, sometimes rancorous, but generally took place with a policy outcome in sight.

Admittedly, some of Paul Keating’s  withering takedowns of rivals were pure theatre: “The little desiccated coconut’s under pressure and he’s attacking anything he can get his hands on,” he said of Liberal leader  and future prime minister John Howard; and for another Libs leader, John Hewson, this: “He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up;” and for Howard’s treasurer,  Peter Costello, “He’s all tip and no iceberg.”  

A lot of Trump’s shameless, cruel, thuggish behaviour has found favour among certain types of people in Australia, and not just fools carrying Nazi flags. Still, I cannot  imagine an Australian politician showing such complete lack of human decency as he and his trolls have during the recent fires in southern California.  

While the fires raged, while firefighters and first-responders were on the ground,  risking their lives, while the people of Los Angeles and its surrounding suburbs  were in the midst of experiencing devastation and loss and heartbreak, Trump and his stooges were delivering a torrent of lies to gullible and subservient media about who supposedly was at fault for the ongoing disaster.

Their completely transparent intent was to score political advantage over Democrats and culture-war opponents in  positions of authority.  

Even before the fires ignited in Los Angeles, Trump was preparing an assault on California’s progressive Democratic political structure.

Here’s a statement he made in September while still on the campaign trail: “…and the reason you have no water, you have the canals, the reason you have no water is because [California Governor] Gavin  ‘Newscum’ [his surname is Newsome] didn’t want to do it. I had it all done … So you have millions of gallons of water pouring down from the north, with the snow caps in Canada, and it is all pouring down, and they have essentially a very large faucet, and you turn the faucet, and it takes a day to turn it, it takes one day to turn it, it’s massive,  it’s as big as the wall of that building right there behind you, and you turn that, and all of the water goes into the – aimlessly into the Pacific, and if they turned it back, all of that water would come right down here and right into Los Angeles … And you have so  much water. And all those fields that are right now barren, the farmers would have all the water they needed.”  

It sounds like the mad rambling of someone in the throes of dementia, but it’s part of the formula – surround the lies with gibberish and no one knows what to make of any of it. It almost sounds funny, the old fool trash talking about things that clearly  don’t exist.

But then his pet media pals pick it up, clean it up, and suddenly the focus isn’t on the victims but on supposed scapegoats: Democratic politicians; the Mayor of  Los Angeles, Karen Bass, a black woman; Kristin Crowley, the first openly LGBTIQA+  person to serve as Los Angeles fire chief; and a tiny endangered fish, the smelt.  

As Trump and his minions embraced and amplified the lies, officials who could have been working on recovery efforts, instead were forced to spend hours defending themselves from false accusations.  

On January 20, as he was taking the oath of office to become US president for a second term, Trump took a moment to further denigrate the people who battled the Los Angeles flames. “From weeks ago, without even a token of defense, they’re raging through the houses and communities.”  

“Without even a token of defense”, he said. I wonder how the thousands of first responders with boots on the ground, putting their lives on the line, feel about that.    

After many happy years living in Victoria and working at The Age,  journalist and former Wheatsheaf resident Jeff Glorfeld, and his wife  Carol, went back to California, the land of his birth, where in the past  seven years he has survived bushfires, snowstorms and drought. And  Trump. And Covid. And Trump again. The cicadas and locusts didn’t arrive. Well, not yet. Jeff is also the voice behind The Down Under Hour which is broadcast every Wednesday at 1pm, in California, on  radio KKRN 88.5FM. The show can be live-streamed at KKRN.org. In Victoria that’s 7am Thursday. Several programs have been archived on the website – well worth a look!  

Don’t you hate sentences that start with I’m not a — but,…They are often followed with things like I’m not a racist but, or I’m not homophobic but.  

Well, if you do, please don’t read any further because I’m not a conspiracy theorist but hearing the news about Trumpy and his sidekick Elon trying to take over their bit of the world has me worried. So read on to try and understand my deluded  conspiracy theory if you’re that way inclined.  

It is no secret that Trump, Putin and old mate Kim Jong Un, the Supreme Leader of North Korea, are chums. Putin recently delivered a gift to Kim, Russia’s version of a bulletproof limo a couple of weeks ago.

The two bandits could be seen laughing and cajoling as they cruised the countryside of the peninsula, probably running over the beggars as they pushed it through its paces.  

So that makes a foursome with Trump, Elon, Kim and Putin, and as they say in the theatre, there’s no show without Punch, and for me Punch is Xi Jinping, China’s top dog.

Then throw in Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu who has just demolished the  Gaza Strip and killed a fair portion of the population, so it’s now ripe for tourist resort development, and that makes five.  

My theory is that this bunch of misfits, who would look equally at home in the front bar of the Star Wars movie, are the most powerful dudes in the world.

It is my  concept that behind closed doors the horse trading began a long time ago.  I have never heard this sort of direct rhetoric in politics before, particularly from America, where Trump is talking about taking over Greenland, Canada and taking back the Panama Canal.  

Canada’s prime minister has just quit, almost as if he wasn’t up for the fight. And Mark Zuckerberg has dismissed the fact checkers from Facebook. Again, getting ready for some political moves that seem to be afoot or just getting on the good side of Trump.  

South Korea’s politics are in a mess, so Trump only has to withdraw his 30,000 troops from the demilitarized zone for that little applecart to tip over.  

And what’s next? Russia getting the green light to take over Ukraine I suppose,  which has large reserves of titanium, lithium, beryllium, uranium, iron ore,  manganese and coal.

The first four of these elements are essential for making nuclear and other weapons. Then what happens with China, which has bases around the Antarctic to our south and plenty of friendly ports to our north, courtesy of years of buyoffs?

First it will be Taiwan, then a hop, skip and jump to the land down under and there wouldn’t be a damn thing we could do about it with our limited military resources.

Now this is just a theory from my overactive imagination so don’t hop on a jet to New Zealand yet. But there are some facts that underpin my deliberations, and these set out the next few years as incredibly interesting and historic and maybe a little unsettling.  I told you not to read it, rant  over…