Author: Geoffrey Gibson

Hasta la vista, Bernardi

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The state funded Judas routine of Cory Bernardi is a ghastly instance of what is making people sick about the major political parties.  He is spitting in the face of all of those who keep his party alive and who got him elected again to bludge off the rest of us for another six years.  He has been contemplating this treason for years while looking at the mirror.  Nothing has changed since the party got him elected again – except for one thing.  He was given a junket – a rort – to go to New York.  He there spoke to Kellyanne Conway, a leading attack dog prime time liar, and he there saw the end of western civilisation as we know it.  But Cory had an epiphany like that of his sponsor, Andrew Bolt. The second coming was at hand.

It is not surprising that a jerk like Bernardi should fall for a jerk like Trump.  They are both loudly brash, completely brainless, and deeply in love with themselves.  When you look at Trump, you find it hard to imagine any man being more in love with himself – until you see Bernardi. (Trump is at worst when signing orders and holding them up like a preening spoiled five year old child in kindergarten  Show & Tell.) And it is this self-love that makes each of them so brittle to criticism – and that’s a real problem, because they each have so much to criticise. And it is an even worse problem if you keep getting sacked for being a noisy dill.

The Australian had this to say today about our own nauseating egomaniac.

But one colleague is blunt — three-quarters of Bernardi’s motivation is “payback” against Turnbull.

He has never forgiven the Prime Minister for being dumped from the frontbench, and believes Turnbull is under the thumb of senior moderates in the party, including Pyne.

Others are brutal about Bernardi’s motivation, saying he is a “narcissistic egomaniac and a selfish bully” with “delusions of grandeur” that have been stoked by far-right commentators.

They point to comments from Bernardi’s wife, Sinead, who once quipped that their marriage was perfect because they’re “both in love with the same man”.

“Cory obviously has this huge belief in himself,” a source says.

“If you didn’t love a guy who was so in love with himself, you’d have a lot of trouble living with Cory.”

Those attributes show another trait that Bernardi has in common with Trump.  He cannot be a team player – how could a person so in love with himself think of anyone but himself?  Bernardi has not sought to hide his loathing of Turnbull and Pyne.  His attacks on both have been despicable.  The best that Trump and Bernardi can do is sound and light shows.  Trump wants a military parade and golf at Balmoral – and God bless the Speaker of the House of Commons for saying that Trump is not fit to address them; Bernardi started Party meetings with a communal rendering of the National Anthem.  Did they sing with their hands on their hearts, or did they just raise an arm in a salute?

But, sadly, Bernardi is in one respect even worse than Trump.  He claims to have God.  (Trump does, too, but that’s one of his sillier fibs.)  That makes me feel sorry for God.  In the name of heaven, how can a man who claims to follow the teaching of the son of a carpenter seek more freedom to insult and offend blackfellas on account of their race?  In a piece in the AFR this morning, Craig Emmerson referred to the damage done to the Liberal Party by the ‘religious right.’  I agree, but the damage is also in my view being suffered by religion.

It is therefore ironic that the intimation of betrayal should have downplayed news item that was second on the BBC about sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church – that also has the misfortune of hearing Bernardi call himself one of its acolytes.  Analysts say they were shocked to find that seven per cent of Catholic priests were alleged to have been involved in abuse. I think that figure sounds low for a body that denies marriage to its priests.  Yet Bernardi says God makes him deny marriage to others – even if as a result of its denial of marriage to its own, his church has discharged a swamp of evil all its own. You can see now why people’s aversion to politics is matched only by an aversion to religion – it is all very sad.

So, hasta la vista, Bernardi, you rat.  You are there on false pretences, bludging off us again.  As a keen student of the Book, you will know that Judas was decent enough to hand back the thirty pieces of silver, and that he then had the courtesy to hang himself.

Well, at least we were spared the kiss.

Passing Bull 91 – How are the mighty fallen

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 4 Comments

William Dameron Guthrie was a distinguished American lawyer. He was educated in Paris, London, and at Columbia Law School. He appeared in major cases before the Supreme Court.  He was a Storrs Lecturer at Yale and for many years a Professor of Constitutional Law at Columbia.  He was, I think, a Republican, and a consultant to the Rockefellers.  He is therefore entitled to be called a jurist, a fine lawyer and thinker from the great juristic nation that gave the world Holmes, Cardozo, and Pound. He was plainly of the elite.

In 1916, Guthrie published a collection of addresses and speeches under the title Magna Carta.  I bought it two years ago for the 800th anniversary, but it was only recently, that I looked at it properly.

The first address in the book was given in 1915 on the 700th anniversary of Magna Carta.  In my experience, Americans, or at least the sane and sensible ones, show more veneration for the achievement of Magna Carta than either we or the English do.  As the author remarked, ‘it was Magna Carta that established the greatest of all the English constitutional doctrines, that of the supremacy of the law over every official however high.’  The king is under the law because the law makes the king. Professor Guthrie then referred to the article in the Charter that said that the Crown would ‘appoint as justices, constables, sheriffs, or bailiffs only such as know the law of the realm and mean to observe it well’.  That provision is of course flouted whenever the government makes what are called ‘political appointments’ to the judiciary.

But the comment that really caught my eye is on the first page.

This ceremony must again emphasise the great truth that everything which has power to win the obedience and respect of men must have its roots deep in the past, and that the more slowly institutions have grown, so much the more enduring are they likely to prove.

Although labels are very dangerous, that proposition does seem to stand for much of what I understand the word ‘conservative’ to stand for.  It is certainly a proposition that I would embrace.

The second address concerned The Mayflower Compact, that means so much for Americans, with its reference to ‘just and equal laws.’

Surely, this simple, comprehensive and lofty language, in the style of the Bible open before the Pilgrims, embodies the true and invigorating spirit of our constitutional polity as it flourishes today.

The third address is in my view the most important for our purposes today.  Its title is ‘Constitutional Morality.’  It begins as follows.

The text of this address is taken from Grote’s ‘History of Greece.’ The historian, reviewing the state of Athenian democracy in the age of Cleisthenes, points out that it became necessary to create in the multitude, and through them to force upon the leading men, the rare and difficult sentiment which he terms constitutional morality.  He shows that the essence of this sentiment is self -imposed restraint, that few sentiments are more difficult to establish in a community, and that its diffusion, not merely among the majority, but throughout all classes, is the indispensable condition of a government at once free, stable and peaceable.  Whoever has studied the history of Greece knows that the Grecian democracy was ultimately overthrown by the acts of her own citizens and their disregard of constitutional morality rather than by the spears of her conquerors.

In my view, the collapse of faith in government that we are witnessing across the Western world is in large part linked to the failure to embrace what Professor Guthrie calls ‘constitutional morality’ – and in my view in each of the UK, the US and Australia, it is the parties who like to style themselves as conservative who have been in the vanguard of this collapse.   They have abandoned all ‘self-imposed restraint’.

On the next two pages of that address, this learned jurist makes observations about relying on the ‘people’ that go to the very heart of our present problems.

We are meeting again the oldest and strongest political plea of the demagogue, so often shown to be the most fallacious and dangerous doctrine that has ever appeared among men, that the people are infallible and can do no wrong, that their cry must be taken as the voice of God, and that whatever at any time seems to be the will of the majority, however ignorant and prejudiced, must be accepted as gospel.  The principal battle cry today seems to be that, if the people are now fit to rule themselves, they no longer need any checks or restraints, that the constitutional form of representative government under which we have lived and prospered has become antiquated and unsatisfactory to the masses, and that we should adopt a pure democracy and leave to the majority itself the decision of every question of government or legislation, with the power to enforce its will or impulse immediately and without restraint.

We find many political and social reformers advocating an absolute legislative body, whose edicts, in response to the wishes, interests, or prejudices of the majority, shall at once become binding on all, no matter how unjust or oppressive these edicts may be.

Remember that those remarks were made when Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitler were barely clouds the size of a man’s hand.  Today we are looking at a building called the White House and at a scarcely literate rogue bully who tweets contempt at a federal court for suggesting that the President of the United States should be under the law, a proposition established for the Crown of England more than 800 years ago.  This federal court decision could unhinge this president because it shows that he is not as powerful as he thinks he is.

How are the mighty fallen.  It took us 800 years to build this edifice, but the evidence of last century shows that it can all fall over in a hurry.

Only God knows what the good William Dameron Guthrie would make of all this.

Poet of the month: Dante, Inferno, Canto 1.

Then was the fear a little quieted
That in my heart’s lake had endured throughout
The night, which I had passed so piteously

And even as he, who, with distressful breath,
Forth issued from the sea upon the shore,
Turns to the water perilous and gazes;

So did my soul, that still was fleeing onward,
Turn itself back to re-behold the pass
Which never yet a living person left.

After my weary body I had rested,
The way resumed I on the desert slope,
So that the firm foot ever was the lower.

And lo! almost where the ascent began,
A panther light and swift exceedingly,
Which with a spotted skin was covered o’er!

Passing Bull 90  –  The Validation Fallacy

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 1 Comment

 

Does the election of Donald Trump entail that his policies have been validated in some way?  No.  His winning the election means that he did well enough, without winning the popular vote, to be first past the post.  Even if he had won the popular vote, that would not in some way validate his policies.  His win means that more people preferred his case to that of his opponent.  It is like the result of a civil action heard by a jury.  Their verdict does not say what happened in fact – it says that on the balance of probabilities (say, 51 to 49)  they preferred the case of one side to that of the other side.  For this purpose, the jury represents the nation, and in each case the verdict is inscrutable.  We do not enquire about what passed in the jury room, and we have only the haziest notion of what went through the minds of some voters.  For example, we don’t know how many people voted for Donald Trump or against his opponent, but he doubtless got a lot of votes from people who disliked both him and his policies but who disliked even more both his opponent and her policies.

So, Trump has what is called a ‘mandate,’ which the Compact OED says is ‘the authority to carry out a policy regarded as given by the electorate to a party or candidate that wins an election.’  If he has the numbers in all the right places, he can turn his policies into law; if he does not, the mandate evaporates.  The process can get muddy where there are two houses of parliament, or where the executive branch is completely separate from the legislative branch, but in any event the result of an election does not say anything about the validity or goodness of the policies of the winner.  For example, the policies of Adolf Hitler were evil before he became Chancellor, and they remained evil after he became Chancellor.  If anything, they were more evil, because he then had the power to implement them.  But otherwise, the result of the election does not bear on the worth or validity of the policies, and it is wrong to say that people objecting to or protesting against those policies are rejecting or casting doubt on the results of the election.  If you believe that abortion is morally wrong, it does not become morally right just because your side loses an election.

Questions about the legal validity of the election process are of a different order.  An election may be invalid as a matter of law if a mandatory legal process has not been followed.  But the election does not become legally invalid just because the discussion was disturbed undesirably – by, say, the covert action of a foreign power, or the overt action of a government office, either of which obviously helped one side over another – unless that disturbance is itself unlawful, and the law entails that any breach of that law makes the election invalid.  If that extreme case arose, it would not be a case of awarding the win to the runner-up – there would have to be a new election.

These distinctions have not been observed by either side of politics here or in the U S.  People want to say that the policies of Trump are beyond criticism because he won.  That is just wrong for the reasons given, and its wrongness is now demonstrated by the fact that Trump fervently spruiks it.  Trump is what is called a populist who was popular enough to get enough of the popular vote to win.  People can then make their own assessment of the contribution of this exercise in populism to Western civilisation.

In 1936, the two most popular leaders in the world were probably Adolf Hitler and F D Roosevelt – although Hitler, like Trump, did not I think get to 50% in a straight out election contest.  Hitler probably had a higher approval rating than Roosevelt, but both he and his policies remained what they were.

While Trump gets less presidential every day, his assault on truth, sense and courtesy is disorienting the best.  The Wall Street Journal savaged the Muslim ban bit said this:

The larger problem with the order is its breadth. Contrary to much bad media coverage, the order is not a “Muslim ban.” But by suspending all entries from seven Muslim-majority nations, it lets the jihadists portray the order as applying to all Muslims even though it does not. The smarter play would have been simply to order more diligent screening without a blanket ban.

 Is the argument that if there are 15 Muslims in a room, and you only ban 10 of them from leaving it, then you have not imposed a Muslim ban?  That is a simple non sequitur.  And what do the last three words ‘a blanket ban’ mean?

No wonder the bad guys think that all their birthdays have come at once.  A declaration of war on Islam is a gift to them beyond price.

As to the infamous phone call, where the spoiled child became a rabid dog, there are three questions.  If I do a deal with BHP, that is what it is, and a change in governance does not affect it – why is it not the same with a deal with the U S?  Secondly, if the deal is open to renegotiation, will Trump, who doesn’t go for win/win, want troops or warships from us?  Thirdly, what does it tell you about the White House that they think this leak would be good for Trump, including the nonsense about the vote and the crowd?  What does it say about their view of their base?

Well, as Carlyle said of the French Revolution, ‘every dog has his day, even a rabid dog.’

This month’s poet of the month means that the poems of my colleague Chris Wallace-Crabbe have been sandwiched between the poetry of Virgil and Dante.  That’s my doing, not his.

Poet of the month: Dante, The Inferno, Canto 1.

MIDWAY upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.

So bitter is it, death is little more;
But of the good to treat, which there I found,
Speak will I of the other things I saw there.

I cannot well repeat how there I entered,
So full was I of slumber at the moment
In which I had abandoned the true way.

But after I had reached a mountain’s foot,
At that point where the valley terminated,
Which had with consternation pierced my heart,

Upward I looked, and I beheld its shoulders
Vested already with that planet’s rays
Which leadeth others right by every road.

The Nationalists

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

An occasional series on the new nationalists –  dingoes and drongos like Trump, Farage, and Bernardi – and other Oz twerps.

III

The Nuremberg Offence in Washington

During the War Crimes trials at Nuremberg, some accused Germans pleaded as a defence to the crimes alleged against them that they were acting under orders.  The court found against what has come to be called the Nuremberg Defence.  You can’t justify a criminal offence by saying that you were merely carrying out orders.  The law prevails over orders, and thank God that is so.

Now Donald Trump has created the Nuremberg Offence.  He believes his orders prevail over the law.  So, when his acting Attorney General expressed a legal view that he did not like, and refused to implement an order she believed to be unlawful, he fired her.  Trump puts his orders above the law.  The last people to do this in England were the Stuart kings.  Trump’s actions have a fascist air about them.  When his first Law Officer did what she saw was her duty to the law, Trump accused her of betrayal.  This is as terrifying as it is nauseating.

Are we too quick to use the terms ‘fascism’ with Trump?  In another time, I sought to explain fascism as follows.

What do I mean by ‘fascism’?  I mean a commitment to the strongest kind of government of a people along overtly militarist and nationalist lines; a government that puts itself above the interests of any or indeed all of its members; a commitment that is driven by faith rather than logic; with an aversion to or hatred of equality, minorities, strangers, women and other deviants; a contempt for liberalism or even mercy; and a government that is prone to symbolism in weapons, uniforms, or its own charms or runes, and to a belief in a charismatic leader. 

The word came originally from the Latin word fasces, the bundle of rods and axe carried before Roman consuls as emblems of authority, and was first applied to the followers of the Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini, Il Duce, and then to the followers of Il Caudillo, Generalissimo Franco, and the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler.  Fascists are thick-skinned, thick-headed, and brutal.  They despise intellectuals – who are after all deviants – but they may have an untutored and irrational rat cunning.

As Professor Simon Blackburn of Cambridge University tersely remarks: ‘The whole cocktail is animated by a belief in regeneration through energy and struggle’ (kampf).  To an outsider, it looks like pure moonshine that is the first refuge of a ratbag and a bully, a brilliant and seductive toy for the intellectually and morally deprived, and an eternal warning of the danger of patriotism to people of good sense and good will.  But while that ‘cocktail’ may look a bit much for Plato, it looks fair for Sparta.

It also looks to me to be fair enough for Trump – and certainly so for the vile Stephen Bannon.  We know from history that people like Trump and Bannon almost unforeseeably squeak into power in the vacuum of a loss of faith that follows  a breakdown in world order, and that the times were ripe for the raw nationalism of  those two – and of Farage, Gove, and Johnson – all five of them ratbags of the first degree.

In the meantime, Sean Spicer, a punching bag for a punch drunk bully, continues his assault on language and truth.  Not only is the Executive Order not a Muslim ban, which Trump promised he would give – it is not ban at all.  The Compact OED says a ‘ban’ is ‘an official prohibition’.  Well, that’s what this is – otherwise Uncle Sam will be paying out damages forever.  Unless of course he can persuade the courts that he really is above the law. But the Press Secretary waffles on.  He says it is ‘extreme vetting’ and not a ‘ban’.

Poor Theresa May is now at the cross-roads of two nationalisms.  The nationalism that drove England out of Europe leads her to lean more heavily on the U S which is now in the hands of this nationalist ogre.  And I see in the press that the signs are that Trump will invoke the bullshit of ‘extreme vetting’ to welch on that dirty deal with us.  You would naturally not want to use either the word ‘poetic’ or the word ‘justice’ with Trump, but we shall see.

Meanwhile, the editor of The Australian doesn’t think that Trump issued a ‘Muslim ban’, and three of the most repellent people in Australia – Rowan Dean, Ross Cameron, and Mark Latham – think Trump is wonderful.  The moral and intellectual bankruptcy of what passes for conservatism in this duckpond is as frightening as it is staggering.

Nationalists

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 1 Comment

An occasional series on the new nationalists –  dingoes and drongos like Trump, Farage, and Bernardi – and other Oz twerps.

II

A bad start

The assault on truth started instantaneously.  The new president swore on the bible.  The suggestion that this man might have room for God is childish.   Then came the bullshit, and very partisan bullshit.  There is an old and wise saying about courts – the most important person there is the loser.  The same might be said for elections.  But not by this president.  He only talks to the winners.  His maxim is winners are grinners.  Winning is his only value, his only faith.  But, oh, the bullshit.

You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement the likes of which the world has never seen before. At the centre of this movement is a crucial conviction: that a nation exists to serve its citizens.

Well, I’m not sure about how the tens of millions came by, but the suggestion that this crucial conviction – that a nation exists to serve its citizens – has never been seen before is preposterous.  That is exactly what the French Revolution was all about. The Declaration of Rights recognises in a way that Trump’s  Russian friends would never be able to that the State is not an end in itself:  its purpose is only to preserve the citizens in their rights.  Article 2 says: ‘The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and inalienable rights of man.’  Still, what would Trump know about the French Revolution – or the American Revolution, or the Russian Revolution – or any history?  An essential part of his psyche is that he never notices anything that doesn’t revolve around him.  And he is after all rewriting the Industrial Revolution.

I had thought it was bullshit to say he wrote his own bullshit, but then came this:

When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice.

We believe the exact opposite down here.  Only a Bible belt septic tank, real or imaginary, could mouth that appalling nonsense.

Then came the revolting Ms Conway to renege on the first promise.  Trump would not produce his tax returns.  She did so with two lies.

We litigated this all through the election. People didn’t care.

In the meantime, the new Press Secretary made a fool of himself defending his boss’s wounded vanity about crowd size.

This was the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period ….These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong.

It’s hard to see the poor bastard ever getting over this Hitler-like tantrum, and then Ms Conway reached instant immortality by saying that Spicer was offering ‘alternative facts.’  There in one phrase was the fraud at the heart of the whole campaign.   Poor Mr Spicer was suffering from shell shock after one outing.

I believe that we have to be honest with the American people but I think sometimes we can disagree with the facts. There are certain things that we may not fully understand when we come out, but our intention is never to lie to you.

This might be called the Idiot’s Gambit.  The poor man had not learnt a thing, but in only two days, the new President had set up the Saddam fallacy.  That was, as you recall, that he was such an inveterate liar, you should believe the opposite of whatever he said.  So, people were confident, relying on this fallacy, that Trump would not keep any promise at all.  It then came as a surprise to some that he might actually keep some.

The next day, his minders made a terrible blunder. They let him out unscripted with people he had been bad mouthing.  Well he got over that in his trademark fashion – he lied.  He said it was the press who had been bad mouthing them.  And he launched into yet another attack on them and the wounds to his ego about crowd size.  All that meant so much more to him than the memorial to the CIA fallen he was showing off in front of in such a ghastly way.   And he tried to schmooze like an illiterate teenager on real life TV.

And we really appreciate what you’ve done in terms of showing us something very special.  And your whole group, these are really special, amazing people.  Very, very few people could do the job you people do.  And I want to just let you know, I am so behind you.  And I know maybe sometimes you haven’t gotten the backing that you’ve wanted, and you’re going to get so much backing.  Maybe you’re going to say, please don’t give us so much backing.  (Laughter.)  Mr. President, please, we don’t need that much backing.  (Laughter.)  But you’re going to have that.  And I think everybody in this room knows it.

It is nauseating drivel, but he keeps having to bring it back to the only thing that matters – Donald Trump.

You know, the military and the law enforcement, generally speaking, but all of it — but the military gave us tremendous percentages of votes.  We were unbelievably successful in the election with getting the vote of the military.  And probably almost everybody in this room voted for me, but I will not ask you to raise your hands if you did.  (Laughter.)  But I would guarantee a big portion, because we’re all on the same wavelength, folks.  (Applause.)  We’re all on the same wavelength, right? 

The constant applause for this rubbish adds weight to the suggestion that he brought his own claque.  Then he gets diverted by a reference to Time magazine, and he falls right into the illiterate ‘like’ mode.

So a reporter for Time magazine — and I have been on there cover, like, 14 or 15 times.  I think we have the all-time record in the history of Time Magazine.  Like, if Tom Brady is on the cover, it’s one time, because he won the Super Bowl or something, right?  (Laughter.)  I’ve been on it for 15 times this year.  I don’t think that’s a record, Mike, that can ever be broken.  Do you agree with that?  What do you think? 

After this disaster, Trump then went off to his mates at Fox News to display his immodesty again.

My CIA speech was a 10 and everybody loved it.  I had a standing ovation like you wouldn’t believe.  Everybody and it was such a success.

This was all despicable self-aggrandizement and not surprisingly a former CIA head said so, and equally unsurprisingly, Greg Sheridan got upset.

If you want to know how dangerously unbalanced Trump is, read the whole text of the CIA speech.

Now, I know a lot about West Point.  I’m a person that very strongly believes in academics.  In fact, every time I say I had an uncle who was a great professor at MIT for 35 years who did a fantastic job in so many different ways, academically — was an academic genius — and then they say, is Donald Trump an intellectual?  Trust me, I’m like a smart persona.  (Laughter.)  And I recognized immediately.  So he was number one at West Point, and he was also essentially number one at Harvard Law School.  And then he decided to go into the military.  And he ran for Congress.  And everything he’s done has been a homerun.  People like him, but much more importantly to me, everybody respects him.

If medical science does not have a diagnosis and treatment for this condition, it is time it caught up with history.  No one can stay a spoiled five year old child forever.

Finally, the English outlawed torture about 700 years ago.  Trump is in favour of it.

Foreign leaders are lining up to take candy from this baby before he learns better.  Theresa May, the reluctant nationalist, got in first.  It was oh so easy to verbal trump on NATO.  One hundred per cent!  Well, you can’t take him at his word, but she at least had something to help her in the quagmire left by some of the best liars in the world.

Meanwhile, back in Oz, that awful galah Bernardi was counting his marbles – or those he had not lost – ‘his feline eyes excellent in the twilight’, as Carlyle said of another devout plotter.  And at the other end, that awful woman Rhiannon was plotting.  Here is a real poser.  Who revolts you more, Senator Bernardi or Senator Rhiannon?  Or is it just that they come from what Bernardi’s idol calls the swamp?

As a mate said yesterday at breakfast, we can’t live four years with this.

So, here then is the first Trump gag I have heard.  A plane gets in difficulties.  There are five passengers and four chutes.

I am the greatest basketballer ever with 20 million fans.  I have to go.

Whoosh!

I am the greatest violinist ever with 40 million fans.  I have to go.

Whoosh!

I am the President of the greatest country in the world voted in with the greatest majority ever.  I am the smartest person in the world.  My people need me and I must go.

Whoosh!

That leaves the Pope and a ten year old schoolboy.

My son, I am old and have had a full life. I am ready to meet my Maker.  You are young and have everything before you.  You take the last chute.

That is very good of you, Holy Father, but there are in truth two chutes left – the smartest person in the world just took off with my school bag.

The Nationalists

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

An occasional series on the new nationalists –  dingoes and drongos like Trump, Farage, and Bernardi – and other Oz twerps.

I

A Prototype?

He has a lust for power and his ambition is gluttonous.  He was undistinguished at school, and he is only ever at ease when talking to other mediocrities.  He rose up primarily talking to those who had failed in life.  He did so by addressing those people in their own terms.   He is scarcely literate if he puts pen to paper, but in front of a crowd, he loses all control.  He loves crowds and cameras – they are his mirrors. He loves hand signals too. He can be very childish.  He doesn’t have real friends.  He affects to show emotion but he dissembles and he is a manipulator. He is not really a liar – it is just that he has only contempt for truth.  He became popular, massively so with those who were not doing so well. He came to power after a huge shift in world economics that allowed him to despise what he calls the elites.  He hammers his scapegoats all the time – shamelessly.  He said it was the elites who had caused the economic failures of his nation and the world.  He himself is very elitist, except for the things that matter.  He rarely seeks to articulate a program, but proceeds by slogans, incantations, and rants.  He loves labels, but plays more on nationalism than socialism.  He contradicts himself and he talks nonsense – but what does it matter if truth is irrelevant?   He has no conscience that we can see. He is loathed by the liberal establishment and he and his followers loathe them – he really is so jealous. He feeds on conflict and confrontation – if he is not fighting, he may have to stop and think.  He is not there to bring people together – he is there to crunch anyone standing in the way – because winning is everything.  He and the faithful sense that against all the odds, their time in the sun is at hand, and for that chance of elevation, they will cancel any doubt and suppress all decency.  He promises them the world, and it matters not that his promises are impossible to keep – their blood and their lust are both up, and they have turned out the lights in their heads.  He gives them their dignity by telling them that they are members of the greatest nation on earth – even if he and they had done little or nothing to make it so, and even if that ‘greatness’ derived from very different people. He knows that they have their citizenship which they see as threatened by outsiders.  He hates intellectuals, or just people who have been well educated.  He has a romantic view of his own history and the history of his nation – it is a history that is either imaginary or faked.  He revels in the word ‘patriot’, even though aspects of his past show an utter want of devotion to his country. He has a limited lexicon that does not extend to ‘No’ – unless out of his mouth in response to a request from his nation that he pay tax or serve in the army – see the previous sentence.  He may on a bad day refer to some mystic writer and then ramble on about drive and energy.  His magic words are struggle, rich, and power – and of course me.  He is corrupted by victory more than by power.  He and his followers are not about to share the greatness of their nation with outsiders.  He loathes foreigners and those of different faiths, even though he has no religious faith at all. (He certainly has no room in his ego for anything as inconsequential as God.)  He is remarkable for his lack of tolerance generally.  He is hopeless with women, and in company generally.  He wants to dominate all conversation, and he can rant on about the failure of the world to grasp his greatness.  He is only contradicted or even queried by others at their peril.  He is therefore surrounded by sycophants and he cannot let a person of quality get too close to him and deflect his grandeur.  He has appalling manners, a foul mouth, and an evil temper – he might perhaps be invited as a guest at a gentlemen’s club, but he would never be admitted as a member. He may be the most selfish and self-centred person ever born.  He has no interest at all in the life or fate of others unless it connects directly with his own. He will disregard all the rules to get what he wants.  He has never had limits effectively set for him, and he has never seen, much less acknowledged, his own limitations, which are immediately apparent to all but the faithful.  He has no interest in equality – he is, after all, so very different in himself. He projects his ego on to the nation – it should disregard all rules to get where it wants, and not give a damn about what any other person or nation thinks.  He gets enraged by any criticism, and provoked into making even more bizarre claims.  He goes berserk if someone questions his legitimacy – his paranoia makes the misgivings of Henry IV and Henry V about their legitimacy look trifling.  He is driven to magnify his achievements in ways that insult the intelligence of everyone else.  He becomes enraged if anyone queries the numbers at his rallies. He is at his worst when he drops his voice, gives his manual salute, and enters into a rote incantation where everything is very.  His colossal self-love leads to a very sick suspicion of anyone who is against him.  His preoccupation with face shows a deeply flawed and insecure psyche.  He has zero capacity to be left in doubt or uncertainty and he could go totally mad if asked to sit alone in a room for an hour and think. He could also go mad if he opened a newspaper and could not find his face anywhere on it.  He of course never has to say he’s sorry; among other things he never is, and he rarely has to do anything.  He will spend fortunes on the military to better the standing of his great nation in the world as he sees it – even though he dislikes if not despises the rest of the world.  He will build mighty airports and freeways and he will make the trains run on time.  He is untroubled about how to fund these mighty projects. He manipulates public opinion.  He will collapse all differences between fact and fiction.  He will in truth have ‘alternative facts’ and so confute the whole basis of Aristotelian logic. He has his own reality in his own world – it’s all just his, and it’s so bonzer, and – sotto voce – so very, very, very – patriotic.  He can leap tall buildings in a single bound. He glories in the heroic view of history because he is its ultimate hero, the most powerful man alive since Achilles. Had he been a Roman, he would have become a god ages ago.

He says that he will make his nation great again.

And some poor bastards believe him.

Am I speaking of Donald Trump or Adolf Hitler?  That’s a matter for you.

The Press v James Hird

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 3 Comments

 

May I offer three comments on recent developments in the press about the tragedy of James Hird?  And it is a tragedy – a typical Australian tragedy, of greatness brought low by ashen mediocrity.

First, the pain and suffering of Hird was in my view a foreseeable consequence of the actions of the press against him.  ‘Foreseeable’ is a word used in the law, but I do not intend it to have any legal consequences in what I have just said.  Rather, I refer to what Nathan Buckley, who seems a very decent man, meant when he said that footballers were not bullet-proof against personal attacks.  No one is.  In my view, the severity and venom of the attacks of the press on Hird were such that it was foreseeable that he would be hurt to an extent that could be life-threatening, or at least require treatment in hospital.

Secondly, since about 1975, I have been involved as a lawyer in acting for or against the press in libel and contempt matters.  I have written a book on law for journalists, and I am now retained to advise one publisher before publication.  I have acted both for and against the ABC, Murdoch, and Fairfax, on many occasions, although for more than 20 years I acted for the ABC.  I have a clear and settled view about where the balance of power lies between the press and those who claim to be hurt by it – and it lies with the money and the corporate political clout.  The press had little trouble in getting all state governments to change the laws to suit them.

Thirdly, the organs of the press that helped to put Hird in hospital are now waging a political campaign – in the case of the Murdoch press, an all-out political campaign – to get the federal government to make it lawful for them to insult or offend others on the ground of their race. That is the freedom they seek when they ask for the repeal of section 18 C. They do so under the preposterous mantra of freedom of speech. If these bullies could do the harm they did to James Hird, and get away with it, what might they do to a poor punch drunk blackfella?

The press went out to get Hird, and they succeeded, with the nauseating results that they and we could foresee. Some agents of the attacks are notorious for mocking failure and for kicking people when they’re down. Will we ever get an apology?  Not on your bloody Nellie, Mate.

Passing Bull 89 – The glory of alternative facts

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

The Trump administration is not shy about its mission to annihilate truth.  The President of the United States does not understand or respect the notion of truth.  Ms Kellyanne Conway does understand it, but she flouts it brutally.  When people talk about ‘spin’ they are engaging in euphemism.  Spin is deception wrought by evasion, equivocation, and deliberate untruth.  Ms Conway favours the last.  When the new Press Secretary harangued the press, he told a lie.  Ms Conway defended him.  She said that he had merely offered ‘alternative facts.’

You can have alternative versions, or allegations, or arguments, but how do you have alternative facts?  If I say that there are three people in this room, and you say that that there are five in the next room, that may I suppose be called ‘an alternative fact’.  But if you say that there are five people in this room, there is no basis for that curious label – you have directly contradicted me.  We both can’t be right – there are either three or five people in the room.

As it happens, shortly after I read of Ms Conway’s contribution to modern languages, I was reading The Moro Affair by Leonard Sciascia.  The writer  introducing the book said that the Italian political system was ‘drenched in a rhetoric that gave Italian political prose a horrible, ornate quality of dishonesty and meaningless incantation.’  That looks to be a fair description of what Trump intends for politics in the U S.  Later on Sciascia introduces us to the notion of a real true fact.

The White House Press Secretary was not content with polemics and lies.  He was out to murder our language.  ‘This was the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period.  These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong’.  The first statement was false.  The second was nonsense – an inauguration consists of a series of events – how can they have an ‘enthusiasm’?

Ms Conway then went on TV with other whoppers.  The President had promised to hand over his tax returns – as is the custom there.   ‘We litigated this all through the election. People didn’t care.’  Each of those statements is false, and neither affords a foundation for Trump to welch on his promise.

It is sad to see real Republicans not blush at all this raw insolence.  One stupid Congressman said that Trump was ‘having a good time.’

The commentary in The Australian was alarming.  Janet Albrechtsen gushed over the jingoism of the speech and the roars of the crowd.  Rush Limbaugh laughs.  ‘So do I.  What a four years it’s going to be.’  Chris Kenny is the most petulant man in our press and he denounced the protests as ‘mass petulance.’  Greg Sheridan showed how little there is between inanity and insanity.  He compared Trump to the Pope in their capacity to unsettle their staff by shooting their mouths off.  I don’t think you have be Catholic to be unsettled by this.  Trump made a rank ‘stump speech’ (Sheridan’s words) before a CIA memorial in which he lied and boasted in full.  He infuriated and offended many in the intelligence community, and when one of them responded, Sheridan took offence.

That Trump style is not uplifting, but nor is it a moral offence in itself.  Trump has said plenty of offensive things, but for senior and responsible people to take offence where none is intended is absurd.

Brennan’s public attack on Trump, calling his speech ‘despicable self-aggrandizement’, will do more to damage the faith of ordinary Americans, and people round the world, in the CIA’s impartiality than anything Trump has said.

All that is so wrong it takes your breath away.  Of course Trump’s behaviour before the memorial was morally offensive and despicable self-promotion.  That’s how he got the gig.

The failure of this nation to develop a decent conservative newspaper is so depressing.  The Wall Street Journal is a quality conservative paper.  It ran a piece by Peggy Noonan, who knows something about speeches by real Republicans.

He [Trump] presented himself not as Republican or a conservative, but as a populist independent.  The essential message: remember those things I said in the campaign ?  I meant them……

The Trump Wars of the past eighteen months do not now go away.  Now it becomes the Trump Civil War, every day with democrats trying to get rid of him and half the country pushing back.  To reduce it to the essentials: as long as Trump’s party hold the house, it will be stand-off.  If the Democrats take the house they will move to oust him.

The last point depends on Trump holding the Republicans – which will be hard when the subject of money comes up.  But how sane does Peggy Noonan look compared to Greg Sheridan?

A lot of the criticism of his inaugural address was wildly overblown.  There are two paths to unity – the soothing platitude or prosecuting the case and winning the argument.  Trump’s brand is always the latter.

There is a fearfully false dilemma there, a text-book case, but where the Australian sees a path to unity, the American sees Civil War.  

Poet of the month: Chris Wallace-Crabbe

LOSS

Experience was only

what you lose every day,

huge, blown-away clouds

which memory may

think to have drawn back

live to you

but those images

are all untrue

The only trick

is to write them out,

replacing moribund life

with phrases about

what verdantly might

have sprouted again

till amber clouds float up

from your table again

Passing Bull 88 – A new political fallacy

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

The syllogism is the skeleton of any argument.  (It is explained fully in a forthcoming book Language, Meaning, and Truth, by Chris Wallace-Crabbe and me.)

All men are mortal.  (The major premise.)

Obama is man. (The minor premise.)

Therefore Obama is mortal.  (The conclusion.)

Unless you can reduce any argument to that form, it is no good.  That’s one indicator that Trump has problems with the notion of rational thought.

Now check this failed attempt at a syllogism.

Bob did something that surprised me and others.

Bob therefore made me and others look foolish.

Therefore I should say of Bob………what?

The first premise does not say whether what Bob did was good or bad.  Did Bob surprise people by blowing up a convent or by endowing hospital?  The second premise does not seek to apply part of the first – rather it goes to the effect of something Bob did on other people.  That premise is unlikely therefore to be any use for predicting what Bob might do in the future, much less lead to any inference about whether that future conduct may be good or bad.

It would therefore be a fallacy to argue that the first two premises warrant a conclusion that Bob will do good things in the future or is otherwise entitled to our respect.

If there is an argument at all, it looks like one that says because we were wrong in predicting what Bob did in the past, we are less credible in predicting what he might do in the future.  But that conclusion does not follow.  It is a case of branding or, if you prefer, smearing – ‘You were wrong before.  You are therefore liable to be wrong again.’  Any prediction is wholly fallible, and one failure does not make the next one more fallible.

Michael Gove, the man who betrayed Boris Johnson, interviewed Trump.  The interview and its aftermath were nauseating.  Gove was like a cheesy, flatulent poodle, begging for scraps, and too timid to ask a pointed question of the biggest political target of all.  Gove has the difficulty of all conservatives in trying to explain how a once reasonable conservative party came to be led by such a man.  It forces Gove to mangle truth as much as his subject does. ‘….but in his conversation with us, he was at pains to be gracious and generous.’  The office had ‘framed magazine covers festooned over every wall, chronicling his business achievements; Trump’s office is an echo chamber of his achievements.’  Gove does mention that the son-in-law is a trusted adviser – of man whose idea of banishing conflicts of interest is to have his sons run the business and his son-in-law run the country – or at least the Middle East.  They are some of the reasons why Gove says ‘much of the rest of the world is frankly terrified.’  Then we get this.

There is no guarantee that he will follow the best advice he gets, but before any of us are too quick to pass judgment on how successful he may be in office, we should at least acknowledge that he made fools of many of us in winning the presidential prize in the first place.

You will see that Gove does not try articulating his conclusion. This is because there is none.  In the dishonest argot of our politics now, this is just a throwaway line to get people off the point.  Our being surprised at the election says nothing about Trump, but lots about those who were persuaded to vote for a candidate who many see as incorrigibly nasty, arrogant, stupid and dishonest, and therefore a man of whom ‘the rest of the world is frankly terrified.’

I’m not into labels, but I propose one for this bullshit – the Trump fallacy.

Poet pf the month: Chris Wallace-Crabbe

SUMMONS  IN  THE  PEAK  PERIOD

A phone is ringing in the cemetery A

loud enough to be from the Resurrection.

 

You can hear it over busy morning traffic

where the living drive on to work, or merely shopping:

 

not a soul appears to have heard the summons,

but maybe they’re all sick to death of phonecalls.

 

It’s very loud; probably needs to be.

The majority have slept there for a while.

 

Still, what if this were a long-distance call,

God calling collect from paradise?

 

Through cypress fingers and elegant ironbarks

it keeps on ringing, grossly magnified

 

so that nobody fails to get the point.

It surely disturbed those paint-bright lorikeets

 

and brand-name kids dragging across to school.

The call might just have been from grandma,

 

or even for her.

Hello?  Hello?

There’s nobody awake.

Passing Bull 87 – Cheats who prosper

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

People who hold positions of trust – like Rupert Murdoch or the paper boy – have to act honestly and in good faith.  They must act in the interests of those putting trust in them and not in their own interests.

Politicians cheating on travel allowances behave as if that precept was dead.  They have not acted honestly or in good faith.  They have acted in their own interests.  What really gets up our noses is that their sense of entitlement – do you remember that word whose age had ended? – so blinds them that they treat us as if we had come down in the last shower.

Part of the problem is that there are too many rules and regulations.  These small minded greedy people then say that they are within the rules.  Even where their conduct stinks – or, as the press say, even where it fails the pub test.  (Tony Abbott or his publisher had to hand back $14,000 claimed to promote a book.)  You see a similar problem with directors and so much black letter law, and it gets hellish when industrial lawyers legislate for the workplace.  Then all sense of individual responsibility goes clean out the window.  Lawyers have a lot to answer for in the decline of our moral fabric.

In a book called Law for Directors, I said:

Of course, the obligations of directors derive from the fact that they have accepted responsibility for looking after the affairs of others – but this is also the case with members of the committee of a club, union organisers, or the elders of the church – or the person who agrees to hold the keys to his neighbour’s house or to sell his friend’s Nolan – or get me a copy of The Herald.  Nor should it shock our egalitarian  sensibilities to be told that a paper boy shares the same moral plain as the Chair of Telstra or that the meat-pie vendors at the MCG and the Chair of the ANZ Bank are both equally subject to the decrees of the Georgian Lord Chancellors and the subsequent divinations of their Antipodean acolytes.

A complete train wreck exists in the form of a man named Culleton.  His position in the Senate is in issue because of a conviction for a criminal offence and his bankruptcy.  He asked that the Senate be reconvened to consider is position.  Just think how much that exercise in futility would have cost you and me!  He said that he is not insolvent.  It’s about 40 years since I did bankruptcy cases, but I don’t think you have to be an insolvency expert or even a lawyer to know a reasonable test of solvency.  If you say that you are able to pay their debts as they fall due, the simplest way to establish that proposition is by paying them.

But more fundamentally, why should we have to wait for a court to make a formal order before this drongo is disqualified from sitting in our parliament?  Is it not enough that he has defaulted on his obligations to other Australians?  If he is that hopeless in looking after his own affairs, what possible right has a got to claim to look after mine?

Here again we have a fetish about rules that undermines ordinary decency.

What was the first move of the new regime in Washington?  To seek to abolish a committee of ethics for Congress – possibly on the ground that the next president could not spell the word.  And don’t forget that this crowd in Canberra in its last manifestation was determined to relax the general precept I started with for financial advisers.

As I say, our politicians keep treating us as if they think we came down in the last shower.

Poet of the month: Chris Wallace-Crabbe

Do I Sleep or am I Slept?

At morning there came the dream that includes all dreams,

its detail unclear, but mastery quite profound;

with no visible character

it owned all the pigeonholes:

the future was eaten away.

 

 

Perhaps it was the Word.

Needing no breath of syntax it reached out,

imposing domination on the first

half of my ordinary Sunday.

 

Clearly it had prejudged

parking spot, dates, tennis booking, proper names

just when that bill was due.

Design! Design!

 

 

On top of my questions, the answer lay

like an old cat.

 

 

Celestial timber, silent joinery,

the universe had been fitted out with shelves

on my behalf.