Paracetemol - the hidden dangers

Paracetamol – that seemingly most innocuous of pain killers – is sold under various brand names such as Panadol and in the USA, Tylenol.

Almost everyone has some form of paracetamol in the house and most people take it at some time for all manner of issues – from colds and ‘flu to a hangover. It's the primary ingredient in the popular children's medicine, Calpol.

Paracetemol – along with various forms of non-steroidal anti-inflammatories (NSAIDs) such as ibuprofen – is stocked by supermarkets, the corner dairy and petrol stations. NZ is the only country in the world, other than the USA, in which pharmaceutical drugs are advertised on television – often by people who are presented as medical experts.

The fine print on a packet of 500mg Panadol pills sold in New Zealand tells you that it’s safe to take up to 4 grams a day (eight pills) for 4 days at a time but, if symptoms persist, to consult a doctor. The fact that doctors in NZ frequently prescribe the maximum daily dose of paracetamol for 3 months at a time (720 pills) goes a long way to undermining the seriousness of that piece of advice from the manufacturers.

I don’t know the number of prescriptions for paracetamol written by doctors in NZ in a year, or how many paracetamol pills and remedies containing it are bought in over the counter annually but, according to an article in the Guardian, in the UK in 2013 doctors wrote 22.5 million prescriptions for it and around 200 million packets were sold over the counter – two-thirds of all the OTC painkillers sold. 

In the USA, around 25 billion doses are sold annually.

It's a fairly safe bet that the majority of elderly people in New Zealand, especially those in rest homes, are on a persistent, maximum daily dose of the drug.

In the UK, a 2007 study found that 84% of babies are given Calpol in their first 6 months of life.

Paracetamol is the most widely prescribed and purchased analgesic in the world because it is very cheap, and compared to the dangers of long term use of the alternatives – steroids, non-steroidal anti-inflammatories (NSAIDs) and opiates – it’s considered to be fairly safe. 

But is it?

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) in the UK issued guidelines in 2013 urging doctors to review the prescription of paracetamol for osteo-arthritic pain but these were withdrawn after agitation from interested parties, notably the Royal College of General Practitioners.

The pharmacentric, symptomatic, pain elimination paradigm that most conventional health professionals are locked into, creates and maintains the patient expectation that if you are ill or in discomfort, you are prescribed a drug. For doctors confronted with that well established expectation, paracetamol is the reliable old workhorse that they think they can put just about any patient on without fear of them being harmed.

The trouble is that the reliable old workhorse may not be the bullet proof, safe old nag its manufacturers claim and medical professionals believe it is.

Paracetamol causes more deaths world-wide from overdose than any other drug. It is the most common cause of poisoning in children in NZ, and it is the single most common cause of acute liver failure in the USA, Australasia and Europe.  

Five children a day are admitted to hospital in the UK suffering from paracetamol poisoning.

In overdose – the consumption of more than the recommended maximum adult daily dose – it can be acutely hepatoxic. A paracetamol overdose that is not treated quickly enough to halt the production of the toxic metabolite NAPQ1, will result in liver damage and may result in acute liver failure and death.

It is also very easy to overdose as paracetamol is an ingredient in most 'flu and cold remedies, which may be taken at the same time as paracetamol pills. It is a common cause of overdose in children because the medicines containing it are heavily sweetened and brightly coloured like confectionary.

For people with impaired liver function due to alcohol consumption, or genetic conditions like Gilbert’s Syndrome, or who are on certain barbiturates such as phenobarbitone, or who are malnourished, or have suffered  a recent illness – as little as 5 grams in a day can be acutely hepatoxic.

Even in therapeutic doses, people on long-term maximum doses of the drug suffer impaired liver function although there is no consensus on the clinical significance of this.  But, as liver disease is frequently asymptomatic, even quite severe liver damage can be missed by physicians or attributed to factors other than paracetamol use.

In NZ, the pills sold or prescribed for adult consumption are typically 500mg with no more than 4 grams to be ingested in a given 24 hour period.  

In the USA, the recommended oral dose of the drug is 660-1000mg every 4-6 hours not to exceed 3 grams in a 24 hour period. The Food and Drug Agency (FDA) in the USA has also lowered the maximum pill dose to reduce risk of accidental overdoses. Although it is a small reduction given the amounts being prescribed and sold, it is in an indication that some health watchdogs are starting to wake up to the dangers posed by the ubiquity of the drug and the false perception that it is very safe. 

Whilst the toxicity of the drug in overdose is well documented, there’s not as much known about its effects in very long-term use at high doses. Given how many people with chronic pain are prescribed the drug at maximum dose persistently, this absence of data and the apparent lack of concern from health professionals is worrying.

A 2011 UK study concluded that 1 in 5 people who used paracetemol for chronic pain lost blood through internal bleeding, the same proportion of NSAID users in the study. Older people may be more sensitive to GI tract irritation because of a general thinning of tissue, so the fact that most older people in NZ with chronic pain are on long term maximum doses of paracetamol, is very worrying.

Also of concern, are studies that indicate the drug is not very effective at reducing musculo-skeletal pain. If this is the case, the gastro-intestinal, cardio-vascular, hepatic and renal risks make its widespread, long-term, high dose use for chronic musculo-skeletal pain, untenable.

All drugs have to be metabolised and all drugs have effects on the gastro-intestinal tract and the metabolic organs other than the desired effect. The problems associated with chronic, high dose paracetamol use may be compounded by the fact that it is often used in conjunction with a range of other drugs. 

The more fragile the person, the more likely it is that there will be side effects, and that those side effects may well outweigh any benefits of the drug. 

It’s also logical that, what is reckoned to be a safe dose of any given drug, is not a constant – it varies between individuals and any given person’s tolerance levels may change over time, and may change very quickly.

On the horrors of poaching

It's heartening that so many people are angry about the horrors of wild animal poaching in Africa and the utterly despicable "sport" of trophy hunting. There's little I find more revolting than those narcissistic, over-privileged pin-heads who travel to Africa to kill virtually captive animals for what they deem to be "sport". 

The idea of killing elephants for their ivory or rhinos for their horn or any other example of monstrously wasteful, cruel slaughter of other species fills me with grief and rage. 

So, I'm supportive of animal rights activism and kudos to Ricky Gervais who has been a powerful influence via social media in taking a stand against these monstrous activities.

However, I do get disturbed by the incessant flow of graphic images of extreme human cruelty against animals. I acknowledge that such images raise awareness of, and anger about the appalling destruction of the world's wild life – and the millions of domestic victims as well – but they do little to expose the roots of the matter and they don't help people to an understanding of what actually needs to be done to stop it. 

A while back Ricky Gervais tweeted a photo of what he described as a  "poacher hunter" - a heavily tattooed, muscular young woman toting an assault rifle almost as big as her.  

People, whose individual footprint on the planet is probably many times that of an entire African village, whooped with delight at the idea of the foot soldiers of the world's most destructive and wasteful empire using their martial skills and technology to "hunt" African poachers. 

They seemed unaware of the irony in the fact that a lot of the poachers these Americans are said to be "hunting" are poor Africans who illegally hunt elephants and rhino to feed the fetishistic desires and obsessions of very rich, non-Africans. 

As it happens, the decorated ex-soldier turned "poacher-hunter" who got some folk on Twitter all aflutter is actually an ex-US army diesel mechanic turned model for American arms manufacturers and traders. The photo was from a series of shots promoting guns and associated military and para-military accoutrements. 

The organisation she now works for is a charity set up by an American ex-soldier to deploy other US army veterans to protect African wild life by training local rangers. So, Kinessa Johns and her colleagues are not "poacher hunters" but "ranger trainers", which doesn't have quite the same bush cred.

The charity also claims that the activity helps those ex-soldiers who have PTSD developed when serving American global interests in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I'm surely not alone in seeing the irony in psychologically damaged working class, white, surplus to requirements defenders of global American interests taking their people hunting skills and hardware to Africa to train some Africans to defend some African wild life against other Africans. 

Before Europeans enslaved millions of Africans, and colonised and divided up the entire continent to suit their imperial ambitions, Africa's diverse peoples lived in relative harmony with all those species that we, in the developed world, now get emotional and sentimental about.  

People from the first world were the enslavers, the colonisers, the collectors, the exploiters and the habitat destroyers. They were, and still are, the trophy hunters. It is mostly wealthy white people who own and manage the wildlife farms where wealthy white inadequates can pay to shoot captive big game. 

We, in the developed world, as the inheritors of the wealth and privilege of empire, have a very different relationship to the wild life of Africa from that of the peoples who were subjugated by empire. 

People from the first world, having killed off much of their own indigenous wildlife, and in pursuit of imperial ambition destroyed vast swathes of the habitat of third world animals, now want to dictate to third world people how they should manage those animals which remain. 

Of course, we in the developed world, having learned from our masters' appalling mistakes, need to take immediate action to stop other countries from repeating them. 

But a disturbing number of people look at the damaged and depleted world their political and economic masters have created and conclude that the problem is there are too many humans and they are destroying animals and their habitats. 

The corollary for them is that to protect the animals, we need fewer humans. No prizes for guessing where those humans deemed to be surplus to requirements mostly live and what social class they occupy.

When Gervais suggests to his followers on Twitter that Chinese men need to be told "poachers' teeth" are a better virility enhancer than rhino horn, he's not only taking the easy route, he risks tapping into a deep vein of racism. 

The developed world grew rich and powerful by sucking the life blood out of Africa and today, the developed world – including its new manufacturing heart, China – is still sucking the life blood out of it.  

What Gervais and others need to get to grips with is the fact that if we really want to bring about change, we need an equally furious and wide spread condemnation of the developed world's continued exploitation of Africa's agricultural, mineral and oil wealth.

We need equally powerful demands – of governments and corporations – that Africans be allowed to manage their own resources, to invest the revenue from them in viable communities, food production, health care, education, housing and jobs instead of the bulk of the wealth being siphoned off by first world transnational corporations and the reactionary and corrupt domestic elites those corporations help keep in power.

Sentiment over endangered animals needs to be balanced by sentiment over impoverished humans – and the common root for these linked evils needs to be exposed. That is not easy but, if we are to put a stop to the plunder of this finite world, it has to be done.

A good start point is to look at how our own prodigal life styles, aspirations and expectations help determine the fate of these animals. 

Delightful, humorous, harmless fun or racist icon?

Dolls are objects that we have very special relationships with. We own them. We exert control over them, doing pretty much what we want to and with them. We may love them deeply and treasure them but we may also abuse and discard them. We give them personalities and names and project our inner most feelings onto them. We learn a great deal from our play with them – from nurturing to soldiering – and we often learn a great deal about the value that adults place on those people our dolls mimic.

Toys may be an emotional bridge between the world of adulthood and what seems to be a safer, simpler childhood world. Some adults never sever these childhood connections and stay emotionally attached to their toys; some become avid collectors of them. 

Soft toys, in both humanoid and animal form, commonly accompany children to bed. In societies and social strata in which children are sequestered in their own beds and rooms from an early age (sometimes from birth), isolated from each other and from the adults in their lives, the soft bodies of their toys provide the sense of comfort and security that comes from the proximity and touch of another being. 

We are not solitary creatures.

In patriarchal societies, boys are not expected to be nurturers or even to need much in the way of nurturing after a certain age – for fear they might grow up too soft to be ‘real men’. The traditional golliwog doll, like the teddy bear, was considered to be a suitable soft toy for a boy to cuddle and to keep him company at night.

It’s understandable that labelling a beloved childhood companion as a racist icon, touches a raw nerve in some people.

No fault lies with children who loved a golliwog doll but when those children grow up and defend the toy as "innocent" or "humorous" or "ironic", or if they construct or perpetuate outright lies to deny its historical origins – then, they are at fault.

On RNZ’s The Panel on 23^rd March, Rosemary McLeod exemplified the contradictory nature of some white people’s attachment to golliwogs. She described them as "delightful" and says she owns several of them that she keeps on display in what she calls her "politically incorrect basket".  

Ms McLeod’s labelling of her basket of golliwogs as "politically incorrect" indicates that she’s well aware the toy offends the sensibilities of some people, so it is hard to escape the conclusion that she either thinks the taking of offence is unjustified and/or, she delights in giving it.  

If Ms McLeod were to be visited at home by a black person, would she leave her basket of golliwogs out in display? More to the point perhaps is whether she would think it’s acceptable to refer to a person of colour as a "golliwog"?  

If, as she claims, the toy is the embodiment of humorous, harmless fun, why wouldn’t she or any other white person feel free to use golliwog as a nickname for those of their fellow humans who have dark skin and tight curly black hair? And why wouldn’t black people be delighted with the name?

I have no doubt that Ms McLeod understands perfectly well the historical and contemporary realities that give rise to and are deeply embedded in racial epithets and is well aware of the harm and pain they can – and do cause.  

However, like all golliwoggers, she contrives to separate the toy from the racial epithet, and both toy and epithet from their origins in a caricature that had its genesis, and served a powerful ideological function, in a deeply and cruelly racist era.

 Ms McLeod’s fellow panellist, Tainui Stephens, blundered into the same moral and political morass when he said that he also likes golliwogs but prefers to call them "gollies"– as if leaving off the "wog" part of the name somehow cleanses them of any negative associations.

The standard golliwogger argument is that white people who are offended by the dolls are motivated by liberal guilt. These guilt feelings stem from the (incorrect) belief that there are historical links between the character and institutionalised racial discrimination and oppression.

This white liberal guilt has spawned that most oppressive of political phenomena – political correctness. 

Far from being reasonable and honourable attempts to avoid ways of saying or doing things that insult, marginalise or exclude groups of people who suffer unfair discrimination, political correctness is recast as a rigid political and moral correctitude that tries to prevent the majority of people from being able to say and do what they want – in this instance, to manufacture, sell and own golliwogs.

The spinners and weavers of this narrative are usually a lot less forthcoming (in public at least) about what they think motivates black people who are offended by golliwogs.  But those who do express their views publicly are invariably of the opinion that black people who are offended are either being over-sensitive, are also in thrall to political correctness, and/or are playing the race card.

The bottom line is that other people’s experiences, their beliefs and sensibilities are way less important than the nostalgic fondness golliwoggers have for their little black toy.

There has been a recent increase in the sale of golliwog dolls in NZ, Australia and the UK and the original golliwog has been joined by other dolls are based on the stock characters from the 19^th century American blackface minstrel tradition.

As well as the character that the traditional doll was modelled on, the (unruly) dandified coon, the cast included: the (semi-feral, naughty) piccaninny; the (stupid, lazy) field hand, and the (fat, docile) black mammy. The sexually promiscuous (usually light-skinned) wench character hasn’t made it into doll form – yet.

In an article I wrote for The Press in 2013, I asked whether anyone would think it was appropriate to have a doll based on a caricature of a person with a disability. It is unthinkable of course, yet people persist in arguing there is no harm in a doll that is based on a caricature of a black man which dates from an era in which black people were still enslaved, and which became wildly popular leading up to and during Britain's imperial zenith, and America’s Jim Crow era.

The blackface minstrel tradition in the USA goes back to the 1820s.  It may have been introduced to the USA by an English actor but it was American comic actor, Thomas Rice, who popularised the form in 1828 with a song and dance act "Jump Jim Crow", allegedly inspired by a crippled black stable hand.

Blackface minstrelsy appropriated aspects of African-American culture and created a cast of stock characters aimed initially at white audiences, which were both enthralled by the energy and humour, and comforted by the reduction of black people to a collection of heavily caricatured stereotypes.

Other ethnic and class based "comic" stereotypes existed in the music hall tradition – "the oleaginous Italian or Greek, the boozing, brawling Irishman, the sly and venal Jew, and the ubiquitous rural idiot" – not to mention the various female stereotypes played by men in drag.

These stereotypes reduced individuals and cultures to a form of burlesque – at once hugely exaggerated and grossly simplistic – with characters that could be cast as affable and lovable or as threatening and hateful depending on what was wanted at any given point in time. (1)

Blackface minstrelsy’s cast of racial stereotypes lampooned and dehumanised a specific racial group that was politically and economically powerless. In so doing, it served the interests of those who wanted to keep things that way.

Jim Crow, the capering, simple rural fool and Zip Coon, a dandified and sometimes dangerous blowhard, became so fixed in the popular imagination, their names became racial epithets and in the post-reconstruction Southern states, Jim Crow became the popular name for the segregationist legal system. The American phrase "don't know zip" may also have come from the character's name.

The golliwog family of dolls is based on these caricatures. They were derived from, and fed back into negative stereotypes that were used to justify and legitimise, not just a segregationist and cruelly oppressive legal system, but the extralegal lynchings, rapes, beatings and robberies carried out for the most part by white people, a fair number of whom were also disenfranchised and dirt poor – as a calculated policy of division, oppression and exclusion.  

This is why, in my view, the golliwog is not, and can never be just a doll.

There have been many attempts to rewrite history and recast the golliwog as a harmless toy that has nothing to do with the historical oppression of black people, let alone the continuation of it.

There are the risible claims that the term "wog" is nothing to do with the golliwog - but stands for "worthy oriental gentleman" or similar.

Another, more complex and equally wrong explanation is that the letters WOGS were stencilled on clothing issued to workers on the Suez Canal and stood for "Workers on Government Service".  Black rag dolls – a representation of a ‘ghuli’ a desert demon – belonging to the children of the Egyptian labourers were taken back as souvenirs by British soldiers returning to the UK. The soldiers called these dolls Ghuliwogs.

The creators of this marvellous fiction don’t explain why workers on a project run by a French construction firm would have had clothing marked in that way, in English. 

Nor do they bother with the fact that Frances Upton chose to dress her 1890 Golliwogg character – which she said was based on an "ugly minstrel toy" she had as a child in the USA – in the exact style of one of the stock characters of 19^th century American blackface minstrel shows.

A very confused correspondent to the Manawatu Times, a Mr Brougham (the letter was also printed in The Press) made the claim that golliwog dolls actually represent chimney sweeps and are therefore not racist.  A letter I wrote rebutting this claim was not printed.

In Britain, the standard attire for chimney sweeps was a black top hat and tails and was thought to be discarded clothing of funeral directors. The sweeps’ indentured child labourers typically dressed in rags.  Sweeps in all countries wore black, rough clothing – they certainly never dressed in brightly coloured or striped tight trousers, red or blue 19^th century style jacket, and an oversized bow tie or cravat.

Perhaps Mr Brougham was getting confused with the claim made by defenders of the Dutch Zwarte Piet tradition, that the character’s blackened face and hands represents soot from the chimneys he climbs down when delivering presents to well-behaved children. 

That sooty chimney story doesn’t explain the Zwarte Piet character’s colourful–  and clean – Rennaissance style costume, outsized red lips, black curly wig and golden earrings.

The Dutch festival of St Nicholas is a mix of pagan and Christian, and draws on Dutch and Spanish imagery. Festivals in Spain still celebrate the 'reconquista' – the Christian victory over the Moors – and Holland was a Spanish colony.  There were also strong trading and cultural links between Holland and the USA and American blackface minstrel troupes played in European theatres.

The 1850 children’s book that first established the black servant character in the St Nicholas narrative was written when slavery was still legal in the Dutch colonies. Holland was a major slave-owning and slave-trading nation and did not abolish slavery in its colonies until 1863. (2) 

To try to argue that Zwarte Piet or Golliwogg had no connection with the contemporary reality of African slavery is indefensible, both historically and morally.

There are people who just don’t know much history and who cannot be bothered to engage with it; there are people who want a version of history which doesn’t challenge their existing beliefs and practices, and there are people who have a powerful ideological agenda and who want to write out the fact of slave trading and slave owning in the countries in which these blackface traditions proliferated. 

What they all have in common is a refusal to acknowledge the fact that the repertoire of characters of blackface minstrel shows both flowed from racist and sexist attitudes and practices, and in turn helped to solidify and perpetuate them.

Of course black people were not all passive victims of this process; they re-appropriated the blackface minstrel form and used it. Most who worked in the tradition traded off the negative elements of blackface against the positive of being able to make a living that was safer and easier than the likes of picking cotton. Some used it to be openly subversive.

We in New Zealand cannot avoid engaging with this history by declaring it to be "not ours". We are recipients of those white American racist attitudes and traditions as much as we are recipients of European ones.

And we have our own uncomfortable history, traditions and contemporary realities that we need to acknowledge and to reconcile.

If people must collect and sell golliwogs, they should at least have the integrity and common decency to acknowledge where the toys came from and what role they and other negative race, class and gender stereotypes and icons have played in history – and are still playing.

Notes:

1. The negative stereotypes and caricatures of Jews served Nazi ideologues well; and today in that most tragic of ironies, negative stereotypes and caricatures created and promulgated by Zionists promote anti-Arab feeling among Jews. 

2. Holland required former slaves to work as indentured, unpaid labourers with no legal status or protection for 10 years after abolition. (Amendment: slavery in some parts of the former Dutch colonies persisted into the 20th century.)

Welcome to the mushroom farm

Mediaworks management has determined that viewers are bored with the earnest, campaigning style of John Campbell and his team.  Campbell Live hasn't attracted enough viewers to keep it financially viable. It needed to move with the times, get with the programme, lighten up, be entertaining i.e. avoid boring people with tedious stuff like the aftermaths of earthquakes and mining disasters. 

Most importantly, it broke the cardinal rule of modern Kiwi television, if it doesn't involve Auckland or the Wellington beltway, it's not really news, or at least not for very long. Current events – in the lexicon of today's shallow, fast moving media world – means what is happening today, not what happened in the South Island 4 years ago. 

Obviously the ennui sufferers are not among the loyal core of Campbell Live viewers or the many tens of thousands who increased viewer numbers as a gesture of solidarity with the show and its presenter, and who signed petitions to keep the programme.  No, it seems that those afflicted with the dreaded viewer tedium are the potential audience, the people Mediaworks wants to attract to its 7pm slot. 

These people are members of that growing demographic - the Frivolati – those viewers who will happily consume cheap, tawdry, schlock television and clamour for more.  

It's obvious to anyone with a claim to intelligence and impartiality, that the decision to axe Campbell Live was not about advertising revenue. There is no doubt that it was ideologically driven. It gets rid of a campaigning programme which sought to hold the powerful to account, and its replacement with something more "popular", will make TV3 a more attractive proposition to corporations that may buy it – and in the process, earn monster bonuses for the current management team.  

Mediaworks could have aimed at increasing its share of the 6pm news slot and at keeping those viewers for the 7pm current events slot.  

It could have invested in promoting its news and current events programmes as heavily as, for example, it marketed that exercise in kitsch vacuity, The Bachelor. 

Instead, it has chosen to dump a successful and popular format and presenter and to dumb down the 7pm slot, going for twin talking heads (what are the odds the pairing will be a dark haired man and a blonde haired woman) to mouth the "bland insincerities" that increasingly pass for social commentary in the corporatised media.

The problem is that John Campbell and his team had become adept at producing a mix of facts and passion which could get people to engage with social issues that this government and its corporate mates want to keep hidden or well under their control.

And how better to hide those issues than under a layer of frothy nonsense which seems, on the surface, to be harmless, just good fun – a pleasant divertissement that people need because their lives are so stressful and demanding. 

But, like its equivalent in the food industry, this frothy nonsense is not just empty of intellectual and ethical "nutrition", too much of it is also highly toxic to the body politic and to the common good.

It promotes selfish, short-termist attitudes and practices that help to separate, divide and alienate people.

It often wallows in hollow sentiment while sneering at and belittling honest feelings.  

It valorises and extolls personal acquisitiveness, and disparages and misrepresents collective action.  

It defines what people need to "possess" in order both to judge themselves and to be judged by others as 'successful'.

It creates exaggerated, idealised images of how people should look and behave and, in a crude process that, at its most extreme enters the realm of the 'freak show', it creates caricatures of how people must not look or behave.  

It tells some people that they got where they are and have what they have because they are more industrious, cleverer, better looking, more deserving, and tells others that they have failed because they are lazy, feckless, stupid, ugly and undeserving.

It's socially corrosive. 

Do the people who willingly consume repetitive, predictable dross think for one moment that the slick cynics who produce it watch it themselves? 

Do they think that the plutocrats and their minions believe they've made great television, or great radio, or written great copy? 

Do they think that they, the consumers, are held in high esteem by the people who make and market this formulaic, pedestrian rubbish? 

Seriously, how much can you be said to value yourself if you value people who, even with their glossy patina of celebrity and wealth, are so obviously facile lightweights?


John Campbell may not be the best journalist or the best TV broadcaster or the best human being in the world, but he's one of the very best in all those categories in NZ.  

In part, he's one of the best in NZ because he is a very good journalist, a very good broadcaster and a very, very good person, and in part, it's because he has so little competition.

And isn't it strange that, when it comes to competition, without which we are told the market and the world as we know it would collapse, the plutocrats are silent on its value in the critically important area of keeping the public informed about all those things which affect them, their families, their communities and the world at large?

Competition for viewers these days certainly doesn't include such measures as quality, creativity, insight or scope; it doesn't even depend on novelty any more as evidenced by how boringly formulaic and unimaginative so much corporate TV is.  

No, competition for the Frivolati's short attention span is by the promotion of such intellectually and socially stimulating phenomena as a contestant farting on camera, or another having a koala shit on her. 

In light of the mushroom analogy, how very apt.

War - what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.

The Australian Women's Weekly published this photo of enlisted men forming the head of horse in a tribute to the estimated 8 million horses, mules and donkeys that were used  by and died for various armies in WW1. 

This old photo is extremely poignant but the modern commentary on it is an example of the cloying, faux patriotic sentiment that typifies the mainstream approach to WW1.

Those eight million horses, mules and donkeys did not "serve" – they were not "faithful to the end" –  they were requisitioned, transported in awful conditions and FORCED to haul guns and wagons and to carry soldiers and supplies. And they often died in the most horrible manner it is possible to imagine or were eaten by starving people.

WW1 was an imperial war; a monstrous battle between competing imperial powers – British, French, German, Ottoman and Russian – with the emerging super power, the USA, first making money out of it, then weighing in at the end to stake its claims in Europe and the Middle East.

It was a war that was largely about oil –  it was no accident that the imperial powers were rapidly moving away from coal and horse power and into oil to fuel their enormous war machines.

WW1 had NOTHING to do with our "freedom", or fighting for a ''good cause against a bad one" or "protecting our way of life".

It was a monstrous, cruel waste of human and animal lives.

It was a monstrous, cruel waste, not just of the young soldiers who died in their millions and those whose lives were blighted by being horribly injured in their bodies and minds, but of the millions of civilian casualties as well.

And it was a monstrous, cruel waste, not just the millions of hapless, press-ganged beasts of burden which suffered indescribable horrors, but of the countless millions of domestic and wild creatures that were destroyed in the turning of whole countries into battlefields.

The men who ordered young soldiers and animals into certain death, who ordered the colossal bombardments which, if they didn't blow people and animals to pieces, or drown them in stinking mud, drove them insane, and those other men who made vast fortunes out of those horrors, did not care one jot about the losses they inflicted in their pursuit of power.

If we remember anything, if we have any real feeling for the millions of humans and animals which lost their lives and suffered terribly – we must use this 100 year centenary to vow – NEVER AGAIN!

But, that vow only has meaning if we take a stand against those corporations and governments which are still wasting untold millions of human and animal lives in pursuit of profit and the power that those profits can buy.

This is why I do not wear a red poppy or attend a dawn service. 

I am old enough to remember real people who had fought in the Great War. I remember as a small child, a man who shook and jerked as if he had cerebral palsy and another with terrible gas burns to his face. I spent hours poring over the piles of sepia photos of fresh-faced young men who marched off from that small North Canterbury town to die in Galliopoli or Europe. I heard stories about them and their families, their sweethearts and the friends who stayed behind or who fought and survived. These were not distant or appropriated memories; the old woman who owned those photos knew those young men. She watched them march off and saw them stumble back. They were her immediate relatives, neighbours and friends. 

As I grew older, I began to question why we go to war and the way that those who did not fight justify it. I began to see the Anzac services and the war memorials that were centrepieces of all the small towns I knew as a child, as a prop for a set of attitudes that colludes with the sending of new generations off to fight wars in other people's countries. 

I understood my old friend's feelings; I knew that she had to justify it because how how could she have lived with it if she accepted it for what it was – millions of  lives pointlessly sacrificed on the altar of imperial ambition.

All those Australians and New Zealanders who turn Gallipoli into a tacky tourist destination, the young people who have suddenly discovered ANZAC day and attend dawn services, the kids whose parents deck them out in great-great Grandad's service medals all need to know that war is a horror; the dead are not glorious, they are simply dead, and we dishonour them if we glorify war and ignore the motives of those in whose interests wars are waged.