Author: Geoffrey Gibson

Passing Bull 235– Intolerance

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 4 Comments

 

The discussion about George Pell is like that about climate change – and, as it happens, you tend to see the same people on each side.  It is like watching a collision between Collingwood and Carlton supporters – you are either IN or you are OUT.  There is no middle ground.  People crave certainty – that is why they are suckers for simplicity – like the inane edicts of Donald Trump or the superficial nostrums of people like Nigel Farage or Boris Johnson.  (The twentieth century versions were much, much, worse.)  Too many people lack what Keats called ‘negative capability’ – they feel threatened if they are left in doubt.  We go to the footy because there we can be irrational – but we are looking for deep trouble if we go the polls with that mind-set.  Talking to such people is like addressing a brick wall.  The insecurity of these people makes them clam up.  The result is both unseemly and unsettling, but this poisoning of our public life just seems to keep getting worse.

Leafing through An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, published by David Hume fifty years before white settlement here, I read a word perfect description of this condition.

The greater part of mankind are naturally apt to be affirmative and dogmatical in their opinions; and while they see objects only on one side, and have no idea of any counterpoising argument, they throw themselves precipitately into the principles, to which they are inclined; nor have they any indulgence for those who entertain opposite sentiments. To hesitate or balance perplexes their understanding, checks their passion, and suspends their action. They are, therefore, impatient till they escape from a state, which to them is so uneasy: and they think, that they could never remove themselves far enough from it, by the violence of their affirmations and obstinacy of their belief. But could such dogmatical reasoners become sensible of the strange infirmities of human understanding, even in its most perfect state, and when most accurate and cautious in its determinations; such a reflection would naturally inspire them with more modesty and reserve, and diminish their fond opinion of themselves, and their prejudice against antagonists. The illiterate may reflect on the disposition of the learned, who, amidst all the advantages of study and reflection, are commonly still diffident in their determinations: and if any of the learned be inclined, from their natural temper, to haughtiness and obstinacy, a small tincture of Pyrrhonism [scepticism] might abate their pride, by showing them, that the few advantages, which they may have attained over their fellows, are but inconsiderable, if compared with the universal perplexity and confusion, which is inherent in human nature. In general, there is a degree of doubt, and caution, and modesty, which, in all kinds of scrutiny and decision, ought for ever to accompany a just reasoner.

The Scottish philosopher compares the reaction of the ‘illerate’ to that of the ‘learned’, and that reaction reminds us of the dour immovability of a spoiled child.  As it happens, a mistrust of experts also infects our public discussion.  We got used to it with climate change and we now have to put up with the same dummy spit on a pandemic.  We might wonder whether anything more than jealousy is in play here – but we are in deep trouble when a general mistrust of expertise – that is, advanced knowledge – may infect decisions of life and death.  If you have to rely on a pilot to bring you down safely during an electrical storm over Hong Kong, you are not inclined to belittle his tally of hours flying.

And for the removal of doubt, this intolerance of doubt is lethal in a professional person like a doctor or lawyer.

Bloopers

Malcolm Turnbull’s term as prime minister ended because his personal convictions were at odds with core Liberal Party values, and it showed.

The Australian, 20 April, 2020, Jennifer Oriel.

Offhand can you imagine bullshit more certifiable than ‘core values’?

Here and there – The curious case of George Pell

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Cardinal George Pell was sentenced to imprisonment for serious crimes against a young man in his charge.

Before that could happen, the Crown (the DPP or prosecution) had to clear three hurdles.  The DPP must have found that there was a ‘reasonable prospect of conviction.’  Then a magistrate had to consider all the evidence and conclude that the available evidence was ‘of sufficient weight to support a conviction of’ an indictable offence.  Thirdly, at the conclusion of the prosecution case, it is open to the accused to submit that a verdict of not guilty should be directed on the ground that ‘there is a defect in the evidence such that, taken at its highest, it will not sustain a verdict of guilty.’

The Crown satisfied the first two tests and as far as I know the accused did not submit that the case warranted a verdict of not guilty under the third heading above.  There were two further obstacles.  One of the protections afforded the accused is that the verdict of the jury must be unanimous. The first jury could not agree, and the verdict was only obtained on the re-trial.

The Crown case also survived on an appeal to the Court of Appeal by a majority decision.  All three justices reviewed all the evidence given by the accused, and the majority found the complainant to be a ‘compellingly credible witness’ and that the circumstantial evidence did not entail that the jury had been compelled to entertain a doubt about the guilt of the accused.

The accused then sought and obtained special leave to appeal from that decision to the High Court.  That court allowed the appeal and directed a verdict of acquittal. The seven justices unanimously concluded that there was ‘a significant possibility that an innocent person had been convicted because the evidence did not establish guilt to the requisite standard of proof.’

In R v Doney (1990) 171 CLR 207 (par.  11) the High Court said:

There is no doubt that it is a trial judge’s duty to direct such a verdict if the evidence cannot sustain a guilty verdict or, as is commonly said, if there is no evidence upon which a jury could convict.

In the case of Pell [2020] HCA 12 (par 39), the High Court said:

The function of the court of criminal appeal in determining a ground that contends that the verdict of the jury is unreasonable or cannot be supported having regard to the evidence.., in a case such as the present, proceeds upon the assumption that the evidence of the complainant was assessed by the jury to be credible and reliable. The court examines the record to see whether, notwithstanding that assessment – either by reason of inconsistencies, discrepancies, or other inadequacy; or in light of other evidence – the court is satisfied that the jury, acting rationally, ought nonetheless to have entertained a reasonable doubt as to proof of guilt.

My first reason for finding this case curious is that for a lawyer who does not practice in crime, I have great difficulty in following what if any is the substantive difference between the role of the trial judge in ruling against a submission of no case (as in Doney) and the role of the appellate court appellate court in determining whether the verdict of the jury can be found to be unreasonable.  The question then is this: if the verdict directed by the High Court is as plain as that court found, and only by reference to the evidence of the Crown, why was not the issue raised and dealt with in any of the procedures that led to the verdict in this trial?  It looks like I and others have had to foot the bill for the accommodation of the Cardinal on grounds that look to have been apparent from the start.

The second ground of curiosity relates to reviewing the video of the complainant’s evidence.  The accused argued against that course.  Not surprisingly, the Court of Appeal ruled against him.  But the High Court is at best very wary and a little terse about this practice.  Their Honours did not apparently view the videos.  In the result, a clear majority of those who saw the videos – part of the jury in the first trial, all of the jury in the second, and by a majority of justices on appeal – had no reasonable doubt about the guilt of the accused.  The verdict of acquittal was directed by those who did not see the tapes.

It may be that the High Court would have reached the same result after looking at the tapes, but logic is not an absolute master when it comes to observing due process in the administration of justice.  Among other things, it would be a shame if forensic ingenuity was thought to count for more than witness integrity.  Such a view would buttress a common prejudice of the type that was immediately on show when the High Court gave its judgment.  It was obvious that the views within the nation were split, among other things on sectarian grounds, and it was vital that any judgment should be determinative both in law and on the merits.  The results so far are not good – even if, as may have been predicted, the ignorance of some parts of the press was matched only by its arrogance.

It is a very strong thing for one appellate court to overturn the finding of another appellate court on the evidence as a whole without reviewing that evidence in the same form that the first court did.  In the fullness of time, we may learn how that process differs from a decision to ban a book taken without reading the book.  And some may prefer the simple and humane approach of the majority of the Court of Appeal to the Euclidian sterility of those who reached a different result.  The former is clearly more accessible to the community at large.

This then was not an ideal way to put to rest a fierce contest that is and will long remain in the public domain.  And it is out of tune with the felt need to give victims of sexual abuse a decent hearing.  What is the message that we are sending to victims of sexual abuse by those in power?  ‘Go ahead and complain.  Then give evidence.  And be cross –examined painfully and insultingly for days.  Then watch on as the accused refuses to submit himself to the same ordeal.  Then have your version – that has not been contradicted on oath by the man who attacked you – accepted by a jury and acted on by the court’s sentencing your assailant to prison.  Then have a majority of judges also accept your version on appeal.  And then watch the prisoner walk away because another group of judges takes a different view of the evidence to the first group.  Although they did not take the time to watch you giving your evidence.  When the effect of the evidence is under our law primarily a matter for the jury.  And when your version on oath has been accepted by the jury and the accused has never had to give his version in the same way.’

The so-called ‘best evidence rule’ may be dead as a dodo, but its rationale – common sense and ordinary decency – is not.  And our law knows a long history of preference for direct oral evidence over that which is ‘only circumstantial’.  (I refer to an observation of Holt, CJ in 1701 referred to in Thayer A Preliminary Treatise on Evidence at The Common Law, Little Brown, 1898, 489.)

We are of course here discussing only the criminal standard of proof.  If the Cardinal sued for libel on an allegation of sexual abuse, the onus would be on the defendant, but only the balance of probabilities.  And as a matter of fact, he would have to go into the witness box.

Similarly, if there was an issue about whether this man could be trusted in a position with access to young men in the future, then that issue would not be determined by saying that this man should retain the trust of his employer until a court found him guilty beyond doubt of a relevant offence.  This is not the first time this man has been the subject of a complainant by someone who was found to be an honest witness.  That as I recollect it was the result of a finding of Justice Southwell in a private hearing into complaints of sexual abuse against this priest.

There have therefore been two cases involving the Cardinal where people have found in favour of the honesty of the victim.  Just how an employer might assess the significance of such a history may require some judgment.  And no such issue would properly be resolved by giving the Cardinal the benefit of the doubt.  It is those who may be hurt that have to be looked after.  Putting the interests of the employer over those in possible harm’s way is precisely the cause of so many of our present discontents.

A lot of this is unclear to me.  But two things are clear enough.  First, we would not be having this discussion if the accused had given evidence.  As far as I know, we are yet to hear why he declined to face his accuser from the witness box – a course that it is very difficult to square with his loud assertions of innocence and desire to have his day in court and see justice done.

The second is that Lindy Chamberlain must be asking what star she was born under or what bus she was run over by if Cardinal Pell could get a verdict set aside but she could not.  For we now know that not only was Lindy not guilty – she was also actually innocent.  Only the keenest of the faithful would ever say that of the Cardinal.

Passing Bull 234 – Postscript

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Postscript

According to the press today (14 April), one Australian economist said ‘savings tens of thousands of lives was a drop in the ocean compared to the long-lasting disaster caused by economic collapse’ and another said ‘What matters in these sorts of analysis is whether a life at 80 years old, beleaguered by multiple pre-existing conditions, is equivalent to a 20-year-old with their whole life left to live.’

If these quotes are in context, they are appalling.  It is putting the dollar above life and espousing the notion that moral issues can be solved by arithmetic.  While studying eugenics, did they take time out with Mein Kampf?  At least we know that our doctors are precluded from this espousal of doing harm.

Passing Bull 234– An inarticulate premise

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Last week I asked if I were a mere statistic.  Well, I may be.  The basis of our logic is a syllogism.  You have a major premise (All men are equal), a minor premise (Socrates is a man) from which the conclusion (Therefore Socrates is mortal) follows ineluctably. You quite often see arguments where a premise is not articulated.  That is not necessarily sinister.  Take an example.  ‘The team consists of fat players.  Therefore it will lose.’  The unstated premise is something like ‘Fat players are not as good as players of normal weight.’

In reporting in the press on the deaths caused by the virus, there may be unconsciously a related thinking process.  We see reports of deaths in one country regularly exceeding one thousand in a day.  That is roughly the equivalent of deaths caused by four major airline crashes, or about half the total fatalities of the attacks on the twin towers.  Any of those would get screaming headlines day after day.  How did we get so blasé about all this death?

There are I think at least two factors.  One is that it is not happening to us.  (And, on a bad day, it is happening in places where life is cheap.  You will hear hardly anything of the toll in Africa.)  The other is I think an unexpressed sentiment.  Most of these deaths are among the old and decrepit who were on their way out anyway.

On behalf of the old and decrepit who might be said to be on the way out, I protest!

News cycles are funny.  We all know the line about tomorrow’s fish and chips.  Until about six weeks ago, the unrest in Hong Kong was near the top of the BBC news every evening.  Since then – nothing.  Et praeterea nihil.  Why?  It is hard to imagine that the unleashing of the virus has endeared the regime to the youth of Hong Kong.  Have they all just drifted into acquiescence?

Bloopers

The government’s massive fiscal intervention in the Australian economy, entirely justified by the gravity of the COVID-19 crisis, will change centre-right politics in this country forever…

A strong government to build a strong nation need not mean anything like socialism.

But that is a danger.

Greg Sheridan, The Australian, 1 April., 2020

What might the word ‘socialism’ mean there?  Mandatory affordable health care, or some other demon of American wasteland?  Is that dangerous?

Here and there – Worth

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We get a charge out of seeing people at the top of their game professionally, or in a sport, or whatever.  Obvious excellence leads us to reflect on the worth of the person showing it – and the worth of what they do for us.  ‘Worth’ like ‘dignity’ is a word that is abused, but we resort to it to describe something that we think is good and to be valued – and not, of course, just in money.  If I see someone cast a fly or drive a golf ball as well as I can imagine it, I feel good – just as I feel good when hearing Jussi Bjorling sing Nessun Dorma, or when I look at one of the bridal series of Arthur Boyd.  If you are really lucky you can get a super charged sense of grateful elevation at the foot of the Iguazzu Falls, or on the rim of the Grand Canyon, or when Mount Kanchenjunga hauls into half the horizon.

A lot moonshine is spread about advocacy, and cross-examination in particular, but once about thirty five years ago, I sat bedside Neil McPhee, QC, as he cross-examined a hard-nosed manager from the Richmond Football Club – and the little Scot knew where some of their skeletons were buried – for about twenty minutes so as to elicit concessions that neither the witness nor his counsel seemed to notice.  Here was a technique that no one can teach.  I actually held my breath at times.  I was on the edge of my seat – I could have been in the front row of the circle at Covent Garden for Fonteyn and Nureyev.  There was a worth beyond my imagining.  I have never seen anything like it.

Some sports champions have a complete aura of their worth.  Muhammad Ali was a man like no other.  He changed other people’s lives (including some of our articled clerks who got close to him on the MCG and who came back with a barely subdued sense of wonder.  They had  been in his presence, and it showed.)  Jack Nicklaus walking down the eighteenth fairway to the adulation of the crowd looked to me to be not just regal, but imperial.  He just oozed calm authority.  And Viv Richards provoked in his opponents the kind of fear normally reserved for those facing fast bowlers.  In a world cup final, the game was stagnating until Richards backed away and flayed the ball to the fence from which it rocked back about half-way to the pitch.  As the crowd became frenzied, Richie Benaud said quietly, and nasally: ‘There was an element of contempt in that stroke.’  On his day, Virat Kohli can evoke up similar emotions.  These are the kinds of moments we celebrate in sports.

These notions came to me last night as I watched a replay of the Wednesday before the Masters at Augusta in, I gather, the last few years.  They get past champions to compete over the par three holes.  Gary Player (82), Jack Nicklaus (78) and Tom Watson (68) were matched.  Three titans – three world beaters – all with their own majestic aura and each of them way beyond any measured worth.  They were obviously not what they had been.  But none of them duffed one stroke, and you could still sense an underlying steel in the players in the carnival atmosphere of the adoring multitude.  Watson beat the whole field.  And I was getting it all for just about nothing – at a time when a virus is robbing us of the balm of sports and our weekends feel barren, if not desolate.  As sports events go, you would find it hard to beat this.  Here was worth that was indeed beyond all comparison.

Then something happened that event organisers and TV producers just dream of.  As happens in these pro-am type days, caddies were given a shot.  It came to the turn Nicklaus’ caddie.  He was I think sixteen.  His practice swings showed that he was a natural whose swing had been finely honed.  He showed no sign of nerves.  He hit his tee shot cleanly and beautifully.  Replays showed Gary Player vocally celebrating the shot from the moment it took flight until the time it came to rest.  It ran to the back of the green.  Then it started to roll back.  In the direction of the hole.  And it slowly became clear that something wonderful might happen.  Which it did!  In the hole!  Pandemonium.  Then it turns out that the caddy is the grandson of the man some say is the greatest golfer ever, Jack Nicklaus, who looked every bit of his age, and who was celebrating above all others.  He just radiated his exultation.

Well, we must just hope that that ‘miracle’ does not put a spanner in the life of that young man –as Neil Crompton’s match winning goal did for him (‘the Frog’s goal’) in the 1964 Grand Final.  (I was there with my mum – right behind the Frog, although at the other end of the ground.)  The whole crowd and commentariat were suffused with benevolence.  It led to a kind of uplift which is so much needed in a frightened world where we are hourly reminded that we are not what we were cracked up to be.  It is the kind of innocent elation that you can get from the best of sport or theatre or concert.  And what kind of ratbag would wish to put a price on that result?

This is kind of boost we need for what we might hope for that notion that each of us has a certain worth or dignity merely because of our humanity.  And, as it seems to me, these great golfers are as well placed as any one to remind us of that basic truth.

Well, I am reading War and Peace for the fourth time, so I may be allowed some mysticism in my solitary sequestration sans sport.  But I have to report that Natasha does not get any easier to cope with from one reading to the next, and she just keeps exploding more loudly in the 1972 BBC version until – well you know when until.  And I have just passed that bit where Pierre – I thought it was Prince Bolkonsky, to whom I have taken a shine – allowed himself a philosophical observation on the subject of death.  When we die, Pierre (Antony Hopkins) says, we either get all the answers – or we stop asking the questions.  That notion has always seemed to me to be both fair and comfortable.  Who could ask for anything more?

Here and there – Some cold fish – and an angry ape

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Part I

When Black Saturday came, I was living in a small town in the middle of the forest with only one way out.  I was scared stiff, and I went to the pub very relieved when the wind changed that evening.  We were horrified when we woke next day to find so many dead.  It could so easily have been us. We felt the guilt of the survivors.  We needed to reach out to other people to share our burden.  On the Monday, I was trying to explain this to a modish silk in a mediation I was chairing.  After a while, I realised I was going nowhere.  I may as well have been addressing the wall.  Nothing interested this silk unless it affected her personally.  You see just this with Donald Trump.  If the conversation does not concern him personally, he drops his head and his hands like a disconsolate ourangatang.

What was I trying to do?  Well, in some ways I was just trying to say what it is to be human.  You can’t really put it in words.  There are those beautiful lines of Virgil:

Sunt lachrymae rerum

Et mentem mortalia tangunt.

Nor is it easy to translate those lines. They mean something like: ‘Even things have tears, and we are touched by [intimations of] our own mortality.’  It is very sad if you seek to share your humanity and the other person cannot find within their self the humanity to respond.

If I told you I was going to introduce you to someone who was cold, you would not be happy with that news. Your day was not about to improve.   Nor would it be much better if the epithet were ‘precise’.  Such a person might share some humanity – but it may be measured or sterilised, or both.  ‘Sterile’ is never a happy epithet for one of us, but the three sorts of personality we are looking at are people who have problems relating to the rest of us.  They get called cold fish.

Two cold fish of Shakespeare are Angelo in Measure for Measure and Cassius in Julius Caesar.  Here is the kernel of the famous portrait of Cassius the smiling assassin.

He thinks too much; such men are dangerous….

………………He reads much;
He is a great observer and he looks
Quite through the deeds of men: he loves no plays,
As thou dost, Antony; he hears no music;
Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort
As if he mock’d himself and scorn’d his spirit
That could be moved to smile at any thing.
Such men as he be never at heart’s ease
Whiles they behold a greater than themselves,
And therefore are they very dangerous. (1.2. 195-209)

Here is a man who only has time for himself.  There is something missing from his makeup.  Manning Clark would have said that the hand of the potter had faltered.  In Merchant of Venice,5.1.83 ff, we get: ‘The man that hath no music in himself,/ Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,/ Is fit for treasons…..Let no such man be trusted.’  You would not warm to a bloke who was said to have no music of any kind in his make-up.  He might be a walking metronome.   And we know that Cassius sees little goodness in others.  ‘For who so firm that cannot be seduced?’ (1.2.312)

From Shakespeare’s source (Plutarch) we learn that Cassius has a personal grudge – Caesar became a consul before him – and that Caesar did not fear fat luxurious men, but asked: ‘What do you think Cassius is aiming at?  I don’t like him, he looks so pale.’

Lord Angelo is the ice man.

Lord Angelo is precise;
Stands at a guard with envy; scarce confesses
That his blood flows, or that his appetite
Is more to bread than stone: hence shall we see,
If power change purpose, what our seemers be. (1.4.50-54)

Later we get the earthier version from Lucio (who is a kind of comic Greek chorus): ‘But it is certain that when he makes water his urine is congealed ice; that I know to be true.  And he is a motion generative; that’s infallible.’  (3.2.112 – 114)  (‘Motion generative’ is ‘masculine’ puppet’.)

Cassius had ambition and a grudge.  His coldness came from realising that if you want to be serious in politics, you have to put up with blood on your hands – and you must brace yourself accordingly.  The inability of Brutus to do just that brought them all undone; when Lady Macbeth sterilised herself to perfection, she went mad.  The coldness of Angelo was a front to hold down or at least hide the volcano raging under his belt – something that would certainly destroy him if it ever broke out.  But both Cassius and Angelo are what we call control freaks. They like playing the part of puppet-master.  And there is an awful lot about mortality in Measure for Measure – and, for that matter, Julius Caesar.  In the former we are told of one character who is ‘insensible of mortality and desperately mortal’ (4.2.148).  In both plays failures of humanity cross paths with visitations of mortality.  And if Angelo is the puritan and Cassius is the manipulator, they can each chill your blood when they turn really cold.

MY SECOND TOP SHELF – 5

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[These are serialised extracts of all the fifty books referred to in a book as yet unpublished called ‘My Second Top Shelf, or What Used to be Called a Liberal Education’. The content of these may change before further publication.]

COLLECTED PLAYS

Arthur Miller

Franklin Library, 1981.  Fully bound in embossed leather, with ridged spine; gold finish to pages and moiré endpapers with satin ribbon.  Introduction by the author.  Illustrated by Alan Mardon.  Limited edition.

Death of a Salesman is not an easy night out at the theatre.  Au contraire.  This play is wrenching, as wrenching for some as the tragedy of King Lear.  It is pervaded with a sense of doom – not just in the sense of that term in Lord of the Rings, as an end foretold, but in the darker sense of inevitable destruction or annihilation.  The battered, deluded Willy Loman is, like the crazy old king, bound upon a wheel of fire, and the fate of his whole family unfolds before eyes that you may wish to avert.  It is therefore as challenging as a Greek tragedy or one of Shakespeare, because it is a searing inquiry into the American Dream.  That is not something that many Americans have been all that happy to undertake.  (Indeed, the character of the White House as we speak shows a frightening capacity for delusion.)  But by the end of the play, you may be left with the impression that a champion of American business is less secure than a medieval serf.

This is Willy according to his wife:

I don’t say he’s a great man.  Willy Loman never made a lot of money.  His name was never in the paper.  He’s not the finest character that ever lived.  But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him.  So attention must be paid.  He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog.  Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.

When Willy’s boss wants to get rid of him, he responds: ‘You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away – a man is not a piece of fruit.’  He is, as his wife remarked, a human being.  But his delusion passes to his sons.  When reality catches up with his son Biff, he says: ‘I realized what a ridiculous lie my whole life has been! We’ve been talking in a dream for fifteen years.’  In the Introduction, the author says:

The play was always heroic to me, and in later years the academy’s charge that Willy lacked the ‘stature’ for the tragic hero seemed incredible to me.  I had not understood that these matters are measured by Greco-Elizabethan paragraphs which hold no mention of insurance payments, front porches, refrigerator fan belts, steering knuckles, Chevrolets, and visions seen not through the portals of Delphi, but in the blue flame of the hot-water theatre…..I set out not to ‘write a tragedy’ in this play, but to show the truth as I saw it.

The academy was dead wrong.  E pur si muove.

All My Sons is hardly any easier.  The American Dream here is punctured not by failure, but by betrayal, and a crime of the worst kind.  A businessman in a time of war betrays his nation by selling defective parts to the army.  This crime leads to the deaths of American servicemen including, it would appear, one of his own sons.  And the man says that he did it for his family.  But, as in Greek tragedy, his crime comes back on the whole family and ultimately it will only be answered by his death.  In The Wild Duck, Ibsen wrote a drama where one businessman was forced to accept moral and legal responsibility for the crime of his partner.  This affront to the American Dream would be one of the factors leading to Miller being confronted by the Houses Un-American Committee.

This is how the playwright introduces Joe Keller, the hero.

Keller is nearing sixty.  A heavy man of stolid mind and build, a business man these many years, but with the imprint of the machine-shop worker and boss still upon him.  When he reads, when he speaks, when he listens, it is with the terrible concentration of the uneducated man for whom there is still wonder in many commonly known things, a man whose judgment must be dredged out of experience and a peasantlike common sense.  A man among men.

There is no doubting that this is like a Greek tragedy.  The mother tells the son that the brother who was a pilot and has been missing for years is still alive.

Your brother’s alive darling, because if he’s dead your father killed him.  Do you understand me now?  As long as you live, that boy is alive.  God does not let a son be killed by his father.

This drama, like that of Ibsen, is both hair-raising and fundamental, and the end of this play is quite as shocking as the end of Hedda Gabler.

The Crucible grabs and distresses us for different reasons.  It is a fraught descant on the lynch mob, and it had and continues to have so much impact because it covers ground from the Salem witch trials of the seventeenth century to the McCarthy pogroms of the twentieth century.  In the course of both, we get to see ourselves at our most fragile and lethal worst.  And this is ‘us’ – this is not an American problem any more than fascism was a German problem.

The children at Salem in 1692 suffered from hysteria in the medical sense.  The reaction of the community was hysterical in the popular sense.  If you believe in witchcraft, it works.  (Witness the effect of pointing the bone in our indigenous community.)  A ‘victim’ showing hysterical symptoms is a victim of a fear of witchcraft rather than of witchcraft itself, although the distinction may not matter.  John Hale showed a remarkable insight when he observed at Salem that the suspects showed fear not because they are guilty, but because they were suspected.  In 1841 a Boston legal commentator said that no one was safe and that the only way to avoid being accused was to become an accuser.  That script was re-written word for word during the Terror in France.

From 1950 to 1954 the Junior Senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, used The Senate Permanent Sub-committee on Investigations as his version of The House of Un-American Activities (HUAC) to pursue people who had had any association with the Communist Party.  HUAC had previously been a dodgy little affair specialising in anti-Semitism, but when the Red scare came to prominence under the boozy mania of McCarthy, real people got badly hurt without anything resembling a trial, much less due process. The Americans had in truth unleashed a latterday pogrom, and it only ceased when McCarthy over-reached and went after the Army.

One of the writers forced to appear before the HUAC was Arthur Miller.  He correctly believed that he only got his subpoena because of the identity of his fiancée.  (In an amazing commentary on the difference between the power of sex appeal and the sex appeal of power, the Chairman offered to cancel the session if he could be photographed with Marilyn Monroe.)

Miller adopted the position that had been taken before the committee by Lillian Hellman.  She said that she was willing to talk about her own political past but that she refused to testify against others.  She said:

I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group.

Hellman did not have the advantage of a beautiful lover.  Not only was he not gorgeous, but he was avowedly left wing and he was gaoled for refusing to rat.  Partly for this reason, Hellman is not as fondly remembered in some quarters as Miller.

Hellman described her experiences in the book Scoundrel Time, published in 1976.  Miller described similar experiences in a play published in 1953.  That play was The Crucible.  It was based on the events in Salem in 1692, and is a searing testimony to the ghastly power of a mob that has lost its senses.  When Miller was called before the HUAC in 1956, it reminded him of The Crucible, as life followed art.

And if you have invented Satan, you have to give him some work to do.  The failure of due process before the HUAC takes your breath away, but it got worse before the courts.  When people were charged with contempt for refusing to answer, the trials did not take long.  The prosecution called expert evidence. They called an ‘expert on Communism’ to testify that the accused had been under ‘communist discipline’.  When Miller’s counsel announced he was going to call his expert to say that Miller had not been under discipline of the Communist Party, Miller noticed ‘that from then on a negative electricity began flowing toward me from the bench and the government table.’  Miller thought his expert was good, ‘but obviously the tracks were laid and the train was going to its appointed station no matter what.’  The nation that would have been entitled to see itself as having the most advanced constitutional protection of civil rights on earth had been scared out of its senses by a big bad bear that existed mostly in the minds of the tormented.

In the Introduction, Mr Miller wrote:

It was the fact that a political, objective, knowledgeable campaign from the far Right was capable of creating not only a terror, but a new subjective reality, a veritable mystique which was gradually assuming even a holy resonance.  The wonder of it all struck me that so picayune a cause, carried forward by such manifestly ridiculous men, should be capable of paralyzing thought itself, and worse, causing to billow up such persuasive clouds of ‘mysterious’ feelings within people.  It was as though the whole country had been born anew, without a memory even of certain elemental decencies which a year or two earlier no one could have imagined could be altered, let alone forgotten.

The relevance of all this to the mess that we see across the West today is obvious.  Indeed, if you read those words again you may be frightened by the references to ‘paralyzing truth’ and ‘elemental decencies.’  The lynch mob or pogrom is simply the ‘people’ at their worst.  We are now confronted everyday by affronts committed in the name of ‘populism’ as if being popular affords some evidence or warranty of worth.  (Was there ever a politician who was more popular than Adolf Hitler was in 1936?)  What we now see is our dark under-belly being flaunted before our eyes by people stunted by envy.

Arthur Miller went on to comment on what may be described as our ‘darker purpose’ in terms that Hanna Arendt would have recognised.  He referred to ‘the tranquility of the bad man’ just as Arendt referred to the ‘banality of evil’, and to ‘the failure of the present age to find a universal moral sanction.’

I believe now, as I did not conceive then, that there are people dedicated to evil in the world; that without their perverse example, we should not know good…I believe merely that, from whatever cause, a dedication to evil, not mistaking it for good, but knowing it as evil, is possible in human beings who appear agreeable and normal.  I think now that one of the hidden weaknesses of our whole approach to our dramatic psychology is our inability to face this fact – to conceive, in effect, of Iago.

Those propositions are hugely important.

A View from the Bridge might for some bear more of a resemblance to an Italian opera – say, Cavalleria Rusticana – than  a Greek tragedy, with a heavy sauce supplied by Doctor Freud, but for the sake of Sicilian honour, the hero continues the bad run of  this author’s heroes.  The same sense of inevitability – doom – is there again.  By contrast, the author says that A Memory of Two Mondays is a ‘pathetic comedy….a kind of letter to that subculture where the sinews of the economy are rooted, that darkest Africa of our society from whose interior only the sketchiest messages ever reach our literature or the stage.’  Each of these plays is pitched well below the middle class – and territory not covered by either Ibsen or Chekhov.

In commenting on King Lear, an English scholar said that we go to great writers for the truth.  The last word may make us wobble a little at the moment, but we look to great writers – and Arthur Miller was certainly a great writer – to hold up a mirror so that we can see ourselves for what we are.  Arthur Miller says in the Introduction:

By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up new relationships between a man and men, and between men and Man.  Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us to know more, and not merely to spend our feelings.

We might then flinch at what is presented to us in the theatre, but Arthur Miller did not.  His memoire Timebends is a testament to his enduring moral and intellectual fibre – as of course are the five plays in this fine book.  This Franklin edition is lusciously presented and reminds us that if we want to try to understand the human condition, the place to go to is the theatre.  And whatever else may be said of Arthur Miller, he knew what it was to be dramatic.

Passing Bull 233 – Am I a mere statistic?

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

In the discussion about the virus that threatens the world, we can see two sides forming.  One wants all possible steps to be taken by government now to stop the spread and reduce the risk.  The other favours less intervention with a view to keeping the economy going for as long as decently possible.  If you put it that way, a lot depends on the scope of the term ‘decently.’

Those on the side of the economy – if I can put it that way – are fond of quoting statistics.  They refer to other causes of death.  Death from this virus may or may not be excelled by deaths by influenza, pneumonia, road accident, or gun use, in the United States.  But how is that a reference to one cause of death might logically affect the way that we deal with another cause of death?

I have to confess a personal interest.  By reason of my age and health – especially the heart and the lungs – I would be a luscious target for the virus, and one of the first to be thrown overboard if those in control determined that the life boats were insufficient and that they had to decide who should be saved – which is, as I understand it, the position in at least Italy right now.  While it may be possible to envisage such a phase of death-sentencing triage, allowing people to play God over the lives of other people is abhorrent to any reasonable notion about the rule of law, or, for that matter, civilisation.  In the fullness of time, I will be a statistic.  But it is appalling to think that other people might see themselves as empowered to say when my humanity should succumb to arithmetic.

Some colour is given to the argument for the economy by saying that we are at ‘war’ with the virus.  The short answer is that government cannot claim new rights or powers, that affect our rights and powers, merely by claiming to affix a different label.  And we should remember not just the hollowness but the danger of the term ‘war on terror.’  The results were not pretty.

And while I am about it, the Second World War was a real war, but for the most part parliament kept its normal routine. There is something than worse than odd in suggesting that this crisis makes parliament unnecessary.

In a book about Terror and the Police State, I said:

In his book Bloodlands, Professor Snyder estimates that Hitler and Stalin murdered more than fourteen million people between Berlin and Moscow in twelve years.  While it may be within the power of the human mind to plan murder on such a scale, it is hardly within our power to comprehend the human evil that is required – or of the injury to mankind…….

If you accept as an article of faith that each of us has our own dignity or worth just because we are human, then it is wrong for anyone to treat anyone else as a mere number.  We are at risk of doing just that when we seek to compile numbers of the victims of the three regimes that we have been looking at. 

The essential crime of both Hitler and Stalin was that they degraded humanity by denying the right to dignity, by denying the very humanity, of people beyond count – by denying the humanity of one man, woman, and child multiplied to our version of infinity.  Every one of those victims – every one – had a life and a worth that came with that life that was damaged or extinguished.  …..Professor Richard Snyder endorsed the proposition that ‘the key to both National Socialism and Stalinism was their ability to deprive groups of human beings of their right to be regarded as human,’ and when we descend to statistics, we might do the same. 

In short, a government that treats me or anyone else as a disposable statistic resembles those governments that we least admire.

Bloopers

But if the present crisis does not convince our leaders of the dangers of big government, nothing will.

The Australian, 27 March, 2029, Maurice Newman

It is a terrible time to be a small government ideologue.

The Guardian, 28 March 2020, Katherine Murphy

Those quotes might stand for the difference between two media groups on the current crisis.  It is frankly hard to see our present trials as an ad for less government.  And it is appalling to think that a government appointed Mr Newman as Chair of the ABC.

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 10 Comments

Here and there – REWARDS OF PATIENCE

Doctor Christopher Rawson Penfold was a medical practitioner near Brighton in England.  He emigrated to Australia to the area around what we now call Adelaide with his wife Mary.  In 1844, just eight years after this convict free colony started, they purchased 500 acres of ‘the choicest land’ for the sum of £1200.  It was from the estate of Sir Maitland Mackgill.  Mary Penfold farmed the land while her husband developed his medical practice.  She looked after the early wine-making on the new estate.  The first wines were made from Grenache and were prescribed as tonic wines for anaemic patients.  In the early years, the Penfolds also grew barley which was made into beer and sold at a place where wagon trains ended with an appropriate name – World’s End Pub.

That is how the wine-making business we know as Penfolds started.  Its slogan was ‘1844 to evermore’ and one of its premium wines was and is Magill Estate.  Penfolds is one of the world’s biggest and best wine-making businesses.  It is at least as good as the French at the bottom end of the market, and it has one label that can match it with the French at the very top.  It is a business that Australians can be proud of and it makes wines that they – including me – can enjoy.  If doctors get dirty about your consumption of Penfolds, remind them of the subject of the first miracle.

A couple of months before the ANZACS landed at Gallipoli, Max Schubert was born to Lutheran parents in a German community at the edge of the Barossa Valley in South Australian.  This was not an easy time for Australians of German descent, and there were lots of such people in the wine-making areas of South Australia.  The Barossa Valley was then the most significant wine-making area in Australia.  Its specialty was and still is the variety known as Shiraz or, sometimes, Hermitage.  Young Max joined Penfolds as a messenger boy.  By 1948, he had become the chief wine-maker, a position he held until 1975.  Max spent his whole working life at Penfolds.  The exception was his war service.  He volunteered against the express wishes of Penfolds to fight the Germans.  He did so in North Africa, Crete, and the Middle East before fighting the Japanese in New Guinea – where he contracted malaria.  That is an extraordinary record of service – to his country as well as to Penfolds.  It is also an extraordinary story of survival.

In 1949, Max was sent to France and Spain to learn more about fortified wines.  They were then the mainstay of production – and the first port of call for serious drunks.  He of course went to Bordeaux.  He visited wine-makers with names to conjure with – Chateau Lafite Rothschild, Chateau Latour and Chateau Margaux.   He there tasted very aged wines.  When he got back, he wanted to try to make a wine that would age as well as these great Bordeaux wines.  He did so, and he succeeded.  When he died in 1994 at the age of 79, The New York Times said that his wine known as the Grange had won more wine show prizes than any other Australian wine and was regarded as the flagship of the Australian wine-making industry.  It is in truth a household name –even if most of us cannot afford the $700 or so one bottle costs on release.  The story of Penfolds, and of the Grange in particular, justifies the wording of the title of this book.

The book includes an address given by Max Schubert where he speaks of the beginning of this great wine.

It was during my initial visit to the major wine-growing areas of Europe in 1950 that the idea of producing an Australian red wine capable of staying alive for a minimum of twenty years and comparable with those produced in Bordeaux first entered my mind.  I was fortunate to be taken under the wing of Monsieur Christian Cruise, one of the most respected and highly qualified of the old school of France at that time and he afforded me, among other things, the rare opportunity of tasting and evaluating wines between 40 and 50 years old, which were still sound and possessed magnificent bouquet and flavour.  They were of tremendous value from an educational point of view and imbued in me a desire to do something to lift the rather mediocre standard of Australian red wine in general at that time.

The method of production seemed fairly straightforward, but with several unorthodox features, and I felt that it would only be a matter of undertaking a complete survey of vineyards to find the correct varietal grape material.  Then, with a modified approach to take account of differing conditions such as climate, soil, raw material and techniques generally, it would not be impossible to produce a wine which could stand on its own feet and would be capable of improvement year by year for a minimum of twenty years.  In other words, something different and lasting.  The grape material used in Bordeaux consisted of our basic varieties…..Only cabernet sauvignon and malbec were available in South Australia at the time, but  surveys showed that they were in such short supply as to make them impracticable commercially….I elected to use hermitage or shiraz only (which was in plentiful supply) knowing full well that if I was careful enough in the choice of area and vineyard and coupled that with the correct production procedure, I would be able to make the type and style of wine I wanted…..It was finally decided that the raw material for the first experimental Grange Hermitage would be a mixture of shiraz grapes from two separate vineyards and areas consisting of Penfolds Grange vineyards at Magill in the foothills overlooking Adelaide and a private vineyard some distance south of Adelaide.

So began an Australian success story.  This book contains a comprehensive overview and tasting notes of nearly every wine that Penfolds ever produced including Grange, St Henri, Bin 389 and the ultimate fall-back of the author, Koonunga Hill, which, at about $10 a bottle is as good a value for wine as you can find anywhere in the world.

Andrew Caillard is a Master of Wine.  This book is effectively put out by Penfolds once every five years and contains on Penfolds styles by leading experts from around the world.

Someone once said that Max Schubert smoked Gauloise cigarettes.  If he did, that would have supplied a real motive for making one very big wine because they could kill a brown dog at thirty yards.  But whether Max smoked those cigarettes or not, he made an enduring contribution to the Australian story.  He helped us to shed that ghastly thing called the cringe.  On a good day, we can play cricket and footy well.  But we can also make a bloody good wine – and without any evident help from on high.

MY SECOND TOP SHELF – 4

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

[These are serialised extracts of all the fifty books referred to in a book as yet unpublished called ‘My Second Top Shelf, or What Used to be Called a Liberal Education’. The content of these may change before further publication.]

CATCH 22

Joseph Heller

Folio Society, 2004; bound in illustrated boards, slip-cased, colour illustrations by Neil Packer; introduction by Malcolm Bradbury.

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind.   Orr was crazy and could be grounded.   All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions.  Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he were sane he had to fly them.  If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to, but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

If you think that Joseph Heller was a one trick pony, then in my view, you’re dead wrong.  Apart from his other novels, there is his autobiography.  It deals with his life beginning as a son of Russian Jewish parents on Coney Island.  It is a great read, and a fascinating insight into a healthy slice of American social history.  Two things struck me through my reading of the entire book.  One was the candour that the author presents – he carries conviction with everything he says.  This is a writer who confides in you and whom you may trust.  The other was the assurance with which he writes.  Put the two together, and you know you are reading the work of an extremely powerful mind.  That is perhaps not surprising in a man who wrote a novel as strong and famous as Catch 22.

Heller flew fifty missions as a bombardier in the USAF out of Italy in the Second World War.  When he took up writing, he had an unusual model for his novels.  He would begin with the opening line, and not start writing until he had written the last line.  Catch 22 starts this way:

It was love at first sight.

The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.

It ends this way.

‘So long, Chaplain.  Thanks, Danby’.

‘How do you feel, Yossarian?’

‘Fine.  No, I’m very frightened.’

‘That’ good,’ said Major Danby.  ‘It proves you’re still alive.  It won’t be fun.’

Yossarian started out.  ‘Yes it will.’

‘I mean it Yossarian.  You’ll have to keep on your toes every minute of the day.  They’ll bend heaven and earth to catch you’.

‘I’ll keep on my toes every minute.’

‘You’ have to jump.’

‘I’ll jump.’

‘Jump!’  Major Danby cried.

Yossarian jumped.  Nately’s whore was hiding just outside the door.  The knife came down missing him by inches, and he took off.

Most humour involves an assault on logic, but you can see how artlessly this writer grabs our attention and doesn’t let go.

Catch 22 is about the efforts of the crews of US bombers in the Mediterranean to remain sane while fighting in the Second World War.  There is a rich treasury of books about madness – like Don Quixote and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – and an even bigger treasury of books against war – like The Red Badge of Courage and All Quiet on the Western Front – Catch 22 happens to combine the two.

What we have is theatre of the absurd in which farce and tragedy play their parts in very black humour.  Being the Chaplain was not easy with those boys.  Colonel Cathcart – who lives mainly to be celebrated in The Saturday Evening Post – makes a statement that the Chaplain had refused to take part in conducting prayer meetings in the briefing room before each mission.  When an officer relays this allegation to the Chaplain, his response is that Colonel Cathcart gave up the idea himself once he realised enlisted men pray to the same God as officers.  So, the Chaplain is asked if he believes in God.  Of course.  But you told Colonel Cathcart that atheism is not against the law.  It is not.  ‘But that’s still no reason to say so, Chaplain, is it?’  The interview had begun:

Chaplain, I once studied Latin.  I think it’s only fair to warn you of that before I ask my next question.  Doesn’t the word Anabaptist simply mean that you’re not a Baptist?

So, who was the fractious colonel?

Colonel Cathcart was a slick, successful, slipshod, unhappy man who lumbered when he walked and who wanted to be a general.  He was dashing and dejected, poised and chagrined.  He was complacent and insecure, daring in the administrative stratagems he employed to bring himself to the attention of his superiors and craven in his concern that his schemes might all backfire.  He was handsome and unattractive, a swashbuckling, beefy conceited man who was putting on fat and was tormented chronically by prolonged seizures of apprehension.

As you may have gathered, his relationship with the Chaplain had got off to a rocky start.  The colonel thought they should have prayers before each mission.  The Saturday Evening Post had a feature of an English colonel doing just that.  In a cut version, the conversation went like this.

‘But don’t give us any of this Kingdom of God or Valley of Death stuff.  That’s too negative’.

‘Save me, O God; for the waters are come into..’

No waters.

‘…there we sat down, yea, we wept..’

No waters.

‘I’m sorry, sir, but just about all the prayers I know are rather sombre in tone and make at least some passing reference to God.’

‘Why can’t we pray for something good like a tighter bomb pattern?’

‘We’ll allocate about a minute and a half…’

‘….it doesn’t include the time necessary to excuse the atheists from the room and admit the enlisted men.’

‘  There are no atheists in my outfit.  Atheism is against the law, isn’t it?’

‘No’

‘Then it’s un-American.’

‘I just assumed you would want the enlisted men to be present, since they would be going along on the same mission.’

‘Well, I don’t.  They’ve got a God and a chaplain of their own, haven’t they?’

‘No, sir.’

‘You mean they pray to the same God we do?

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And He listens?’

‘I think so, sir.’

‘Well, I’ll be damned…..Honestly, now, Chaplain, you wouldn’t want your sister to marry an enlisted man, would you?’

‘My sister is an enlisted man, sir.’

‘Are you trying to be funny?’

‘She’s a master sergeant in the Marines.’

The colonel had never liked the Chaplain and now he loathed and distrusted him.

Groucho Marx and Spike Milligan and Lenny Bruce would relate to this, but this great novel is an enduring reflection on the human condition.  No wonder it took off like a rocket during the Vietnam War and is still going strong after so many more fiascos that have more than a touch of madness about them.

[These are serialised extracts of all the fifty books referred to in a book as yet unpublished called ‘My Second Top Shelf, or What Used to be Called a Liberal Education’. The content of these may change before further publication.]

CATCH 22

Joseph Heller

Folio Society, 2004; bound in illustrated boards, slip-cased, colour illustrations by Neil Packer; introduction by Malcolm Bradbury.

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind.   Orr was crazy and could be grounded.   All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions.  Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he were sane he had to fly them.  If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to, but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

If you think that Joseph Heller was a one trick pony, then in my view, you’re dead wrong.  Apart from his other novels, there is his autobiography.  It deals with his life beginning as a son of Russian Jewish parents on Coney Island.  It is a great read, and a fascinating insight into a healthy slice of American social history.  Two things struck me through my reading of the entire book.  One was the candour that the author presents – he carries conviction with everything he says.  This is a writer who confides in you and whom you may trust.  The other was the assurance with which he writes.  Put the two together, and you know you are reading the work of an extremely powerful mind.  That is perhaps not surprising in a man who wrote a novel as strong and famous as Catch 22.

Heller flew fifty missions as a bombardier in the USAF out of Italy in the Second World War.  When he took up writing, he had an unusual model for his novels.  He would begin with the opening line, and not start writing until he had written the last line.  Catch 22 starts this way:

It was love at first sight.

The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.

It ends this way.

‘So long, Chaplain.  Thanks, Danby’.

‘How do you feel, Yossarian?’

‘Fine.  No, I’m very frightened.’

‘That’ good,’ said Major Danby.  ‘It proves you’re still alive.  It won’t be fun.’

Yossarian started out.  ‘Yes it will.’

‘I mean it Yossarian.  You’ll have to keep on your toes every minute of the day.  They’ll bend heaven and earth to catch you’.

‘I’ll keep on my toes every minute.’

‘You’ have to jump.’

‘I’ll jump.’

‘Jump!’  Major Danby cried.

Yossarian jumped.  Nately’s whore was hiding just outside the door.  The knife came down missing him by inches, and he took off.

Most humour involves an assault on logic, but you can see how artlessly this writer grabs our attention and doesn’t let go.

Catch 22 is about the efforts of the crews of US bombers in the Mediterranean to remain sane while fighting in the Second World War.  There is a rich treasury of books about madness – like Don Quixote and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – and an even bigger treasury of books against war – like The Red Badge of Courage and All Quiet on the Western Front – Catch 22 happens to combine the two.

What we have is theatre of the absurd in which farce and tragedy play their parts in very black humour.  Being the Chaplain was not easy with those boys.  Colonel Cathcart – who lives mainly to be celebrated in The Saturday Evening Post – makes a statement that the Chaplain had refused to take part in conducting prayer meetings in the briefing room before each mission.  When an officer relays this allegation to the Chaplain, his response is that Colonel Cathcart gave up the idea himself once he realised enlisted men pray to the same God as officers.  So, the Chaplain is asked if he believes in God.  Of course.  But you told Colonel Cathcart that atheism is not against the law.  It is not.  ‘But that’s still no reason to say so, Chaplain, is it?’  The interview had begun:

Chaplain, I once studied Latin.  I think it’s only fair to warn you of that before I ask my next question.  Doesn’t the word Anabaptist simply mean that you’re not a Baptist?

So, who was the fractious colonel?

Colonel Cathcart was a slick, successful, slipshod, unhappy man who lumbered when he walked and who wanted to be a general.  He was dashing and dejected, poised and chagrined.  He was complacent and insecure, daring in the administrative stratagems he employed to bring himself to the attention of his superiors and craven in his concern that his schemes might all backfire.  He was handsome and unattractive, a swashbuckling, beefy conceited man who was putting on fat and was tormented chronically by prolonged seizures of apprehension.

As you may have gathered, his relationship with the Chaplain had got off to a rocky start.  The colonel thought they should have prayers before each mission.  The Saturday Evening Post had a feature of an English colonel doing just that.  In a cut version, the conversation went like this.

‘But don’t give us any of this Kingdom of God or Valley of Death stuff.  That’s too negative’.

‘Save me, O God; for the waters are come into..’

No waters.

‘…there we sat down, yea, we wept..’

No waters.

‘I’m sorry, sir, but just about all the prayers I know are rather sombre in tone and make at least some passing reference to God.’

‘Why can’t we pray for something good like a tighter bomb pattern?’

‘We’ll allocate about a minute and a half…’

‘….it doesn’t include the time necessary to excuse the atheists from the room and admit the enlisted men.’

‘  There are no atheists in my outfit.  Atheism is against the law, isn’t it?’

‘No’

‘Then it’s un-American.’

‘I just assumed you would want the enlisted men to be present, since they would be going along on the same mission.’

‘Well, I don’t.  They’ve got a God and a chaplain of their own, haven’t they?’

‘No, sir.’

‘You mean they pray to the same God we do?

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And He listens?’

‘I think so, sir.’

‘Well, I’ll be damned…..Honestly, now, Chaplain, you wouldn’t want your sister to marry an enlisted man, would you?’

‘My sister is an enlisted man, sir.’

‘Are you trying to be funny?’

‘She’s a master sergeant in the Marines.’

The colonel had never liked the Chaplain and now he loathed and distrusted him.

Groucho Marx and Spike Milligan and Lenny Bruce would relate to this, but this great novel is an enduring reflection on the human condition.  No wonder it took off like a rocket during the Vietnam War and is still going strong after so many more fiascos that have more than a touch of madness about them.