History

Here and there – Religious fanatics

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

When the play Richard II begins, some big-hitting magnates are at each other’s throats.  One character refers to some ‘soon-believing adversaries’ (1.1.101). The Oxford editor gives ‘easy-to-convince’ for ‘soon-believing’. Another word is ‘gullible,’ for which the Oxford English Dictionary gives ‘capable of being gulled; easily duped.’  But Shakespeare’s phrase has a cool feel to it.  It catches the ear, and there is no reference to causation.

We have recently seen a lot of soon-believing or gullible types in the UK and the US.  Many have fallen for snake-oil salesmen like Farage or Trump. But it’s not just mountebanks and cranks who prey on soon-believers.  Religious fanatics just love them.  It’s amazing how fanatics and soon-believers find each other out.

Throughout history, religious fanatics have engaged in murder and terrorism.  A horrifying instance is described by Mario Vargas Llosa in his novel The War of the End of the World.  It is based on events in Brazil near the end of the nineteenth century known as the War of Canudos.

It happened in a very poor part of semi-arid backlands of Brazil and it was driven by poor people who had been left behind.  It took place soon after Brazil became a republic, and shortly after slavery had been abolished.  A charismatic preacher called Antonio Consulheiro, who became known as the Counselor, predicted that the world would end at the turn of the century.  People soon believed him.  He developed a large following.  A lot of these people had been bandits, and they knew about killing. The faithful believed that the Republic was the work of Satan, and they said Brazil had done wrong in seeking to separate church and state.  They liked them fused in the empire.  They settled in a town called Canudos.

The government sought to weed them out, but the fanatics, who did not fear death, repelled three different moves against them by regular troops.  The town, or what was left of it, eventually fell.  The carnage and starvation and cruelty were beyond description.  About 30,000 died. Very few prisoners were taken. The Counselor had died before the fall, but they dug him up, and the photo resembles another murderous mystic, Rasputin.  The remains of Canudos resembled the remains of Mosul.

The novel deals with all this horror around seven main actors.  The three historical fanatics commence with the Counselor. He is a prayerful ascetic who prefers war and death to any kind of religious corruption.  He is, if you like, a Catholic puritan.  Then there is a Scot called Galileo Gall who is a kind of permanent revolutionary. When he tries to indoctrinate the illiterate crazies with a secular socialist vision, the results are entertaining.  Then there is Colonel Moreira César, a career soldier who is a cold blooded killer.  He saves ammunition by throat-slitting and is so named.

There are two political adversaries.  The Baron de Canabrava is old time nobility and a naturally suave politician and leader of men.  His wife Estela is a gorgeous aristocrat not built to face these horrors.  The opposition is led by Epaminondas Gonçalves, a nouveau newspaper man of plastic standards who spins the yarn that Canudos is an anti-republican plot sponsored by England.  He, too, finds plenty of soon-believers.

But the two main characters are I think fictitious.  One is a journalist who works for Gonçalves having worked for the baron.  He wears thick glasses and is referred to throughout as ‘the nearsighted journalist.’  He is intelligent and inquisitive, but nervy, and his nerves send him into spasms of sneezing.  He is locked in at Canudos under siege, and his glasses shatter.  He is therefore effectively blind. For company he has three rejects from a circus, A Bearded Lady, a Dwarf, and an Idiot.  This is high theatre. The near-sighted journalist is a kind of Greek chorus, although as the novel goes on, he gets more involved.

The principal character for me is Jurema.  She is a plain, decent human being who is much put upon and abused.  She represents suffering humanity – and, perhaps, God.  She is like Brecht’s Mother Courage.  The stories of the near-sighted journalist and Jurema form the literary or emotional heart of this novel.

And it is a real epic.  If you wanted to plot it on a literary graph, you might draw a line from Euripides to Cervantes to Dostoevsky to Faulkner to McCarthy to Marquez.  This is a seriously big book.  The Nobel Prize winning author thought it was his best.  It is not to be entered into unadvisedly.  The violence, cruelty, and starvation are awful.  Rape appears to have been a national past-time, as well as an incident if not instrument of war.

This is the baron addressing Gonçalves.

I admit that I have become obsolete.  I functioned better in the old system, when it was a question of getting people to follow established customs and practices, of negotiating, persuading, using diplomacy and politesse.  That’s all over and done with today of course.  The hour has come for action, daring, violence, even crimes.  What is needed now is a total dissociation of politics from morality.

Does that ring a bell?  When did you last hear the word ‘politesse’? Later, the baron says:

Let us keep our Republic from turning into what so many other Latin American republics have: a grotesque witches’ Sabbath where all is chaos, military uprisings, corruption, demagogy…’

Sadly, they’re still there.

Others had to compromise to meet the new order.  When César is ordered to retreat, we get this.

‘You know I had to resign myself to conspiring with corrupt petty politicians.’  Moreira César’s voice rises and falls abruptly, even absurdly. ‘Do you mean to tell me that we’ve lied to the country in vain?’ 

The book might prove that the depravity of war is capable of being described by an artist other than Goya, but the book also reminds of an essential truth.

‘It’s easier to imagine the death of one person than those of a hundred or a thousand’, the baron murmured. ‘When multiplied, suffering becomes abstract.  It is not easy to be moved by abstract things.’

‘Unless one has seen first one, then ten, a hundred, a thousand, thousands suffer,’ the nearsighted journalist answered.  ‘If the death of Gentil de Castro was absurd, many of those in Canudos died for reasons no less absurd.’

Two words that recur in this book are equally revolting – honour and martyr.  Jurema is advised to knock back a proposal from Pajeu, a once vicious soon-believer.

‘But we can’t break the news to him all at once.  We mustn’t hurt his feelings.  People like Pajeu are so sensible that it’s like a terrible malady.  Another thing that’s always amazed me about people like him is their touchy sense of honour.  It’s as though they were one great open wound.  They don’t have a thing to their names, but they possess a surpassing sense of honour.  It’s their form of wealth’.

Exactly – that’s why those who have not got one are so jealous of their citizenship, and so anxious to prevent others getting into their club. It’s their only form of wealth.  Soon-believers are very big on exclusion.  Just look at Trump and Muslims.

The great strength of this book is in its epic architecture.  But even in translation, we come across wonderful writing.  Here is the baron reflecting on his wife Estela and her maid, Sebastiana.

As he saw her settle in the armchair at Estela’s bedside, the thought ran through the baron’s mind that she was still a woman with a firm, beautiful, admirably preserved figure.  Just like Estela, he said to himself.  And in a wave of nostalgia, he remembered that in the first years of their marriage he had come to feel such intense jealousy that it kept him awake nights on seeing the camaraderie, the inviolable intimacy that existed between the two women.  He went back to the dining room, and saw through a window that the night sky was covered with clouds that hid the stars.  He remembered, smiling, that because of his feelings of jealousy, he had one day asked Estela to dismiss Sebastiana; the argument that had ensued had been the most serious one of their entire married life.  He entered the dining room with the vivid painful image, still intact, of the baroness, her cheeks on fire, defending her maidservant and repeating over and over that if Sebastiana left, she was leaving too.  This memory, which had long remained a spark setting his desire aflame, moved him to the depths now.  He felt like weeping.

The gullible are always with us – and inside us.  There’s one born every minute. We often read of people putting their life savings into a gold mine or Bitcoin.  The soon-believers here surrendered body and soul to the Counselor.  They believed him because they wanted what he was offering and they had not been brought up to know better.  The people of the blessed Jesus reviled others as Protestants, Freemasons, and dogs.  For their pains, the whole tribe gets wiped out.  Well, every faith has its failures and cancers, but on the basis of this great novel, it is not easy to see any part of South America being improved by religion of any kind at all.

This is as strong a novel as I have read.

Here and there – Macaulay on Glencoe, zealots, and superior orders

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 3 Comments

 

The Clan McDonald (or Macdonald) of Glencoe was a band of robbers.  Most Highlanders were.  The Campbells of Argyle hated them and they had ruthlessly preyed on a man named Breadalbane.  The British Crown offered money to all Highlanders to take an oath of allegiance by 31 December 1691.  Anyone who did not do so in time would be treated a traitor and outside the law.  Breadalbane was in charge of handling the money. The Highland chiefs dragged their feet but they came in.  The McDonald chief left it to the last day – but no one there could take his oath.  He finally got sworn six days later.  That the McDonald chief was outside the law was good news for the Campbells, Breadalbane and for the Scots Prime Minister, Sir John Dalrymple, known as the Master of Stair.  Dalrymple had hoped to strike at a number of clans. In a letter written in this expectation, he said ‘I hope the soldiers will not trouble the government with prisoners.’  Then he found out that McDonald had sworn his oath after the cut-off.  He resolved to strike at that clan.  Without saying that McDonald had taken the oath late, Dalrymple put an order before King William that said:

As for Mac Ian of Glencoe [the McDonald chief] and that tribe, if they can be well distinguished from the other Highlanders, it will be proper for the vindication of public justice to extirpate that set of thieves.

You can get an argument about what ‘extirpate’ might mean there – clean the glen out of these bandits by rooting them out (as the Scots  king swore to ‘root out’ heresies), or wipe  them out in the sense of killing all, including women and children?  A soldier killing a bandit might seek to rely on that order as a defence – but killing a woman or child?

The design of the Master of Stair was ‘to butcher the whole race of thieves, the whole damnable race.’  But the troops would not just march in and execute the condemned outlaws.  Dalrymple was afraid that most of them would escape. ‘Better not meddle with them than meddle to no purpose.  When the thing is resolved, let it be secret and sudden.’ Macbeth himself might have said that.  The troops accepted the hospitality of the clan at Glencoe for twelve days.  Then at five o’clock in the morning, the troops started to kill men, women and children.  But they used firearms, and three quarters of the clan escaped the fate of their chief.

Macaulay could understand the hatred of Argyle and Breadalbane for the McDonalds, but Dalrymple – ‘one of the first men of his time, a jurist, a statesman, a fine scholar, an eloquent orator’?

To what cause are we to ascribe so strange an antipathy?….The most probable conjecture is that he was actuated by an inordinate, an unscrupulous, a remorseless zeal for what seemed to him to be the interest of the State.  This explanation may startle those who have not considered how large a proportion of the blackest crimes recorded in history is to be ascribed to ill regulated public spirit.  We daily see men do for their party, for their sect, for their country, for their favourite schemes of political and social reform, what they would not do to enrich or avenge themselves.  A temptation addressed to our private cupidity or to our private animosity, whatever virtue we have takes the alarm.  But virtue itself may contribute to the fall of him who imagines that it is in his power, by violating some general rule of morality, to confer an important benefit on a church on a commonwealth, on mankind.  He silences the remonstrances of conscience, and hardens his heart against the most touching spectacles of misery, by repeating to himself that his intentions are pure, that his objects are noble, that he is doing a little evil for the sake of a great good.  By degrees he comes altogether to forget the turpitude of the means in the excellence of the end, and at length perpetrates without one internal twinge acts which would shock a buccaneer. There is no reason to believe that Dominic would, for the best archbishopric in Christendom, have incited ferocious marauders to plunder and slaughter a peaceful and industrious population, that Everard Digby would, for a dukedom, have blown a large assembly of people into the air, or that Robespierre would have murdered for hire one of the thousands whom he murdered from philanthropy.

This analysis is vital.  There we have a description of our greatest enemy – the zealot who has God or the people on his side; the quintessential Catholic terrorist, Guy Fawkes; Robespierre and the people of la patrie; Osama bin Laden and the religion of Islam – all responsible for some of ‘the blackest crimes recorded in history’, and all convinced of the blackest falsity mankind has been guilty of – that the ends justify the means.   

Dostoevsky put it this way.

One cannot live by rebellion, and I want to live.  Tell me straight out, I call on you –imagine me: imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving them peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, that same child who was beating her chest with her little fist, and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears – would you agree to be the architect on such conditions?  Tell me the truth.

So the great Russian writer, in The Brothers Karamazov, foretold the misery that would flow over all of the Russias from the righteousness of Marx, Lenin and Stalin.

In the House of the Dead, Dostoevsky explained how we are corrupted by power.

Whoever has experienced the power, the unrestrained ability to humiliate another human being….automatically loses power over his own sensations.  Tyranny is a habit, it has its own organic life, it develops finally into a disease.  The habit can kill and coarsen the very best man to the level of a beast.  Blood and power intoxicate…The man and the citizen die with the tyrant forever; the return to human dignity, to repentance, to regeneration becomes almost impossible.

Those words are deathless because they are so true, but they have frightening ramifications for Donald Trump.

Shortly before citing those words, Paul Johnson referred to some equally relevant remarks of Joseph Conrad in Under Western Eyes in 1911:

In a real revolution, the best characters do not come to the front.  A violent revolution falls into the hands of narrow-minded fanatics and of tyrannical hypocrites at first.  Afterwards come the turn of all the pretentious intellectual failures of the time.  Such are the chiefs and the leaders.  You will notice that I have left out the mere rogues.  The scrupulous and the just, the noble humane and devoted natures, the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a revolution, but it passes away from them…..Hopes grotesquely betrayed, ideals caricatured – that is the definition of revolutionary success.

All that is so true of the French and Russian revolutions.  A Marxist historian applied this kind of learning to the Communist Party under Stalin: ‘The whole party became an organization of torturers and oppressors.  No one was innocent and all Communists were accomplices in the coercion of society.  Thus the party acquired a new species of moral unity, and embarked on a course from which there was no turning back.’  George Orwell saw all this.

The violence, the randomness, and the cruelty all come to be taken as part of life, and people become what we now call ‘desensitised’.  Commenting on the butchery that followed the fall of the Bastille, the French historian Taine reflected mordantly that some mockery is found in every triumph, and ‘beneath the butcher, the buffoon becomes apparent.’  The result is that the people become less civilised.  They are degraded.  You can get an argument over whether terror or ‘the Terror’ commenced on 14 July 1789, but there is no denying that bloody violence and lawless butchery erupted on that day and continued off and on until at least the time when Napoleon put a former break on hostilities with a whiff of grapeshot.  The nation itself was destabilised for the best part of a century.

To go back to Glencoe, who was to be answerable?  It was all hushed up for a while, but word got out, and there had to be a public inquiry.  It was full and fair, and its findings went to the Scots parliament, the Estates.  The commissioners of inquiry concluded that the slaughter at Glencoe was murder, and that the cause of that crime lay in the letters of Dalrymple, the Master of Stair.  They resolved with no dissenting voice that the order signed by King William did not authorise the slaughter at Glencoe. But the Estates let Dalrymple off with a censure, while they designated the officers in charge as murderers.

Macaulay says they were wrong on both counts.

Whoever can bring himself to look at the conduct of these men with judicial impartiality will probably be of opinion that they could not, without great detriment to the commonwealth, have been treated as assassins.  They had slain no one whom they had not been positively directed by their commanding officer to slay.  That subordination without which an army would be the worst of all rabbles would be at an end, if every soldier were to be held answerable for the justice of every order in obedience to which he pulls his trigger. The Case of Glencoe was doubtless an extreme case: but it cannot easily be distinguished in principle from cases which, in war, are of ordinary occurrence.  Very terrible military executions are sometimes indispensable.  Humanity itself may require them…..It is remarkable that no member of the Scottish Parliament proposed that any of the private men of Argyle’s regiment should be prosecuted for murder.  Absolute impunity was granted to everybody below the rank of serjeant.  Yet on what principle?  Surely, if military obedience was not a valid plea, every man who shot a McDonald on that horrible night was a murderer?

Should officers have resigned rather than carry out their orders?

In this case, disobedience was assuredly a moral duty: but it does not follow that obedience was a legal crime.

That sounds to me like common sense. What about the Scots Prime Minister, the Master of Stair?

Every argument which can be urged against punishing the soldier who executes the unjust and inhuman orders of his superior is an argument for punishing with the utmost rigour of the law the superior with whom the unjust and inhuman orders originate.  Where there can be no responsibility below, there should be double responsibility above. What the parliament of Scotland ought with one voice to have demanded was, not that a poor illiterate serjeant…should be hanged in the Grassmarket, but that the real murderer, the most politic, the most eloquent, the most powerful of Scottish statesmen, should be brought to a public trial and should, if found guilty, die the death of a felon….Unhappily the Estates, by extenuating the guilt of the chief offender, and, at the same time demanding that his humble agents should be treated with a severity beyond the law, made the stain which the massacre had left on the honour of the nation broader and deeper than before.

That analysis seems fair – even if it is distorted by the author’s need to be gentle with King William, one of his heroes, and the failure to mention in this context the hatred of the Campbells for their targets, the McDonalds.  You wonder how many of these killers were reluctant, and how many were actuated by what lawyers call ‘malice’. And it must take some acquired coldness to kill in cold blood members of a family you have lived, eaten, and slept with for so long, and some of whom were morally and legally incapable of committing any crime.

But people who say that the soldiers should have rebelled rather than comply with orders are postulating a very high moral standard, one that calls for immense courage, which may not be appreciated by the dependants of the soldier so called upon.

Very few people have the still strength or firm insight of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Germany after Hitler became the Chancellor.

We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds; we have been drenched by many storms; we have learned the arts of equivocation and pretence; experience has made us suspicious of others and stopped us being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical.  Are we still of any use?  What we shall need is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, straightforward men.  Will our inward power of resistance be strong enough, and our honesty with ourselves remorseless enough, for us to find our way back to simplicity and straightforwardness?

It took a hero even to ask the question.  Moral giants like Lincoln, Bonhoeffer and Mandela come along once or twice a century.  The rest of us just hope that we don’t get called on to seek to emulate them.  If we do, and if we fail, as is most likely, then the judgment will belong not to us or the law, but to God.

This sordid affair was all Scottish.  The avengers took the view that the ends justified the means.  In doing so, they sank below the level of those whom they attacked.  It’s a lesson on how not now to respond to terrorism.  Lawyers have a saying that hard cases make bad law.  If you stretch or bend the law for a tricky or hard case, you make the law worse.  You debauch it.  That, too, is a lesson of the massacre at Glencoe.

Here and there – A Tale of Two Mountebanks

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

Sir Lewis Namier, the distinguished English historian, specialised in eighteenth century English history.  But he was born in Eastern Europe and he had a lifelong interest in European history.

In 1947, Namier published an essay called The First Mountebank Dictator.  It was about a nephew of Napoleon called Louis-Napoleon who, as Napoleon III, ruled France for a period in the nineteenth century.  The regime is called the Second Empire.  This was one of the many regimes that France went through in the century of agony that followed the fall of the Bastille.

Louis-Napoleon has not had a good press.  Many parts of this essay remind me of a contemporary figure who is not a dictator, but who is certainly a mountebank.  There are differences, but we can see the similarities. You have probably already guessed who I have in mind, but to remove any doubt, here is the OED definition of a mountebank:

An itinerant quack who from a platform appealed to his audience by means of stories, tricks, juggling and the like, often with the assistance of a professional clown.  An impudent charlatan.

Curiously, poor sad Gerry Henderson took exception to the word ‘charlatan’ being employed to the mountebank you and I now have in mind.  Appropriately, I see that Coleridge referred to ‘the Mountebanks and Zanies of Patriotism’ – a fair description of the rump of one of our political parties, or what’s left of it.

Here then are extracts from Sir Lewis Namier’s description of a mountebank.

The modern dictatorship arises amid the ruins of an inherited social and political structure, in the desolation of shattered loyalties – it is the desperate shift of communities broken from their moorings.  Disappointed, disillusioned men, uprooted and unbalanced, driven by half-conscious fears and gusts of passions, frantically seek a new rallying point and new attachments.  Their dreams and cravings projected into the void gather round some figure.  It is the monolatry of the political desert.  The more pathological the situation, the less important is the intrinsic worth of the idol.  His feet may be of clay and his face may be a blank: it is the frenzy of the worshippers which imparts to him meaning and power.

Why, of course!  We see it at once.  It’s just that we don’t have the command of either history or language to paint such a gorgeous portrait.  But don’t worry – there is plenty more to come.

Such morbid cults have by now acquired a tradition and ideology, and have evolved their own routine and political vocabulary.  With Napoleon I [Bonaparte] things were serious and real – the problems of his time and his mastery of them; he raised no bogies and whipped up no passions; he aimed at restoring sanity and consolidating the positive results of the Revolution; and if, in superposing the Empire on the Republic and in creating Realm of the West, he invoked the memories of Caesar and Charlemagne, the appeal was decorative rather than imitative.  There would have been no occasion for his dictatorship had not the living heritage of French history been obliterated by revolution; but his system has left its own unhealthy legend, a jackal-ghost which prowls in the wake of the ‘Red sceptre.’

Well, of value for us here is the catalogue of what Bonaparte wasn’t – although it’s as well to recall that he left Europe with five million dead, and he left France a smoking, spent ruin.  We go on.

Napoleon III and Boulanger were to be the plagiarists, shadowy and counterfeit, of Napoleon I; and Mussolini and Hitler were to be unconscious reproducers of the methods of Napoleon III.  For these are inherent in plebiscitarian Caesarism, or so-called ‘Caesarian democracy’, with its direct appeal to the masses: demagogical slogans; disregard of legality in spite of a professed guardianship of law and order; contempt of political parties and the parliamentary system, of the educated classes and their values; blandishments and vague, contradictory promises for all and sundry; militarism, blatant displays and shady corruption.  Panem et circenses [bread and circuses] once more – and at the end of the road, disaster.

There seventy years ago you have a word for word portrait – word for word: read them again – of our current mountebank.  Note especially the contempt for the educated classes and look at the vague contradictory promises and the shady corruption.  And remember that two the most fascist regimes that the world has known – ancient Sparta and Nazi Germany – were also among the most corrupt.

…the taciturn, shadowy impassive figure of Napoleon III has puzzled the century which has gone by, as the shrieking, convulsed, hysterical figure of Hitler will puzzle the one to come.  ‘A sphinx without a riddle’ was Bismarck’s summing up of Napoleon III ‘from afar something, near at hand nothing.’ ‘Louis-Napoleon is essentially a copyist.  He can originate nothing; his opinions, his theories, his maxims, even his plots, are all borrowed and from the most dangerous of models….[Bonaparte]….  ‘His range of ideas is narrow, and there is always one which preoccupies him…..and shuts out the others….He learns little from his own meditations, for he does not balance opposite arguments; he learns nothing from conversation, for he never listens’….‘as he is ignorant uninventive and idle, you will see him flounder from one failure to another’….[his] ‘writings were not read by the soldier or by the prolétaire…  and the principle of his regime was to rest on the army and the people, and to ignore the existence of the educated classes.’

This brings us closer to the personalities of out two mountebanks.  Each was or is anything but educated but deeply troubled by those who were or are.  All that is missing – so far – from Louis-Napoleon is a massive ego masking a chasm of insecurity.  Princess Mathilde, a cousin, wanted ‘to break his head, to find out what there is in it.’  His writing was described as ‘turgid, contradictory, and baffling, both naïve and cunning’ – in other words, bullshit.  He wanted to forego parliament and the plutocracy and go with his ‘unformulated doctrine of direct contract between sovereign and masses.’  Then Namier describes the critical mistake of educated people.

They thought that because he was intellectually their inferior, they would be able to run him or get rid of him; the German conservatives – Junkers, industrialists, generals, Nationalists – thought the same about Hitler.  [And the Italians thought the same about Mussolini.]  ‘The elect of six millions executes  and does not betray the will of the people.

The pulling down and rebuilding of capitals is again a recurrent feature in the history of despots and dictators, from Nero to Mussolini and Hitler.  Self-expression, self-glorification and self-commemoration are one motive…..The careers of Napoleon III and Hitler have shown how far even a bare minimum of ideas and resources, when backed by a nation’s reminiscences or passions, can carry a man in the political desert of direct democracy’; and the books written about Napoleon III show how loath posterity is to accept the stark truth about such a man.

The phrase ‘political desert’ is good.

There was in him a streak of vulgarity.  He was sensual, dissolute, undiscriminating in his love affairs: his escapades were a form of escapism, a release…He talked high and vague idealism, uncorrelated to his actions.  He had a fixed, superstitious, childish belief in his name and star.  Risen to power, this immature weak man became a public danger.

There, near the end of the essay, we get the perfect marriage of our two mountebanks.  At their best, they’re nothing but bullshit-artists.

English was probably about the sixth language learned by Namier, but when he referred to ‘a streak of vulgarity’, he was using the word ‘vulgar’ which is based on a Latin word for the ‘common people’ or herd.  That is the perfect word for our other mountebank.

We might take as our text the opening lines of the book of Ecclesiastes.  There is nothing new under the sun.  It is risky to speculate about what Shakespeare thought of the herd, but his Roman plays and an early English historical play suggest that he had a most righteous fear of the mob. He examines an aspect of what we call ‘populism’ in Coriolanus.  This haughty patrician is the anti-populist – he refuses to bow to the plebeians.  He holds them in contempt and says so.  Plutarch said of the historical character that he ‘lacked the gravity and affability that is gotten with judgment and learning…and was wilfully given to self-opinion and obstinate mind.’  The fine English critic Tony Tanner said of Shakespeare’s character that ‘he is a prime example of what Renaissance thinkers regarded as the ill-educated prince, a man from the governing classes who is, by nature, temperament, and upbringing, unfitted and unfit to rule.’

That brings us back to our two mountebanks – again, word for word.  But Coriolanus was a tragic figure; our two mountebanks are merely preposterous.

Let me finish with a zinging one-liner from Sir Lewis:

The view that it was not a regime but a racket is not altogether unfounded.

Not with our mountebank, Mate.  There’s no doubt that there’s a racket going on there.

Here and there – Past Political Principles

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 1 Comment

 

In 1926, a series of eight lectures was given at King’s College, London on the political principles of notable prime ministers of the nineteenth century.  Learned people spoke of politicians from a different time.  The essays were edited by F Hearnshaw and published by Macmillan and Co under the title Prime Ministers of the Nineteenth Century.  The lectures make fascinating reading – not least at a time when it is not easy to detect principle in politics anywhere.

Before looking at some of the PMs, one commentator recalled that in Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith spoke of ‘that crafty and insidious animal vulgarly called a statesman or politician.’  Well, we all have a fair idea of what it takes to be a politician.  What is a statesman?

There are many politicians; there are few statesmen.  A statesman, I take it, is a man who performs some constructive work, who guides a country through a difficult crisis, who restores its prosperity and self-confidence after a period of disaster or distress, whose career marks an epoch in its history.

That seems fair enough, although the ‘epoch’ barrier may be too high.  But as the same speaker said, a person can hardly aspire to that status before serving an apprenticeship, generally a long one, in party politics.

In other words, he must be an insidious and crafty animal before he can become something greater and better.  He may have all the qualities of a great statesman, but he has little chance of showing them unless he also has the support which the party machine alone can give him, and which he must earn by party service.

The trouble is that a lot of decent people don’t want to be seen getting their hands dirty – they are reluctant to set foot in the swamp, and some get out of it too soon after they have sampled it.  These remarks also remind us that although we have electoral laws that deal with political parties, for the most part the parties run their affairs as they see fit.  The system of ‘party government which Great Britain has given to the world’ is in large part beyond the control of government.  How could it be otherwise?

The first of the PMs is George Canning.  He had a disability – his mother.  One future Whig PM ‘regarded the son of an actress as de facto incapacitated from being Prime Minister of England.’  His mother, it was said, raised a ‘brood of illegitimate children, but Canning’s uncle sent him to Eton and Oxford.

Canning was brilliant and vain, but he got on.  He went over the heads of the party and appealed to the people.  The Times demurred.  Mr Canning, it said, was ‘acting very improperly in rubbing shoulders with business men, and in exciting the clamours of the crowd.’  You must remember that democracy was a dirty word then, but Canning was seen ‘to be wielding the thunderbolts of an enormous popularity….He had not relied on or made use of the party machine as such.  He had smashed it, and that is not an easy thing to do then or now.’

Well we don’t to reflect on a recent U S example, but Disraeli ‘never saw Canning but once’ and never forgot ‘the melody of that voice….the tumult of that ethereal brow.’  Gladstone as a child literally sat at Canning’s feet and said ‘I was bred under the shadow of the great name of Canning.’  We don’t hear talk like that now.  Canning’s liberalism shaped English foreign policy until the end of the century.  Metternich said Canning was ‘a whole revolution in himself alone’ and Coleridge said that Canning ‘flashed such a light about the constitution that it was difficult to see the ruins of the fabric through it.’

His Grace the Duke of Wellington could not stoop to the swamp.  He was ‘suspicious, autocratic, sparing of thanks, possessed of a very long memory for offences, and a very short memory for services….the Duke had an intellectual contempt for his social equals, and a social contempt for his intellectual equals.’  He believed that ‘all reform is bad because all Reform ends up being Radical.’  In short, his Grace was a one man political landslide.  But it was in some part his intervention that allowed the great Reform Act to pass, and avert a possible civil war.  The English aristocracy would intervene to similar effect again in 1869 and 1911.

Sir Robert Peel is remembered as the man who gave England its police – Bobbies or Peelers – and the man who repealed the protectionist Corn Laws.  He had along political career, and an intense sense of duty – national duty, not party commitment.  He showed his sense of principal while in opposition.  He disclaimed ‘factious’ opposition, and as a Tory he claimed it was necessary to support a Whig government when it espoused Conservative principles.  He detested ‘anti-governmental principles’ for their own sake and he preferred the claims of public authority to those of political doctrine.  As a corollary, he refused to flirt with Radicals or try to outbid the Whigs and restate the Tory case in radical terms.

A man of principle indeed!  We could do with some Orange Peel, as he was of course known, around here.  As a result, one colleague described him as ‘an iceberg with a slight thaw on the surface’; another compared his smile to the gleam of the silver plate of a coffin lid.  He would be dismembered in the House of Commons by Disraeli.

Lord Palmerston was something of a ladies’ man and was welcomed by the English public as a jingoist.  Again, contemporary events are uncomfortable.  His lecture is becomingly droll.  We forget that ‘though history is about dead men, they were not always dead.’  One critic had described Palmerston in a way that made him look like ‘a cross between a successful bookmaker and Carmen.’  The lecturer then makes the point ‘that it is always easier to find a man’s principles at the beginning of his career than at the end, because in the later stages principles are so lamentably apt to become obscured by practice.’  We are warned of the danger of studying a person’s career from the wrong end – by staring at the end rather than the beginning.  And we are reminded of the perennial danger of hindsight with an anecdote from a novel of M. Maurois.  ‘Let us remember, we men of the Middle Ages, that tomorrow we start for the Hundred Years War.’

The lecturer has a great line on the statesman’s upbringing:

His formal education, conducted with becoming pomp at Harrow and Cambridge, was of the type that lends dignity to a man’s obituary without unduly modifying his attainments.

A later PM made a similar remark about the impact of Oxford on her career, and a few at Oxford haven’t forgotten it.  Palmerston spent a lot of time in the War Office, and he was known to conduct serious controversies with cheery gusto.  He once officially informed the Military Secretary that ‘the war will be carried on with as much courtesy as a State of Contest in its nature admits.’

The cornerstone of his foreign policy was national interest.  ‘We have no eternal allies and no permanent enemies.  Our interests are eternal, and those interests, it is our duty to follow.’  The Americans could learn from this man.  He wanted England to be ‘the champion of justice and right’ – provided that she – England – was the sole ruler of what that task might entail.

Here is an anecdote from another source.  In his late seventies, Palmerston, the ladies’ man, was cited a co-respondent in a divorce.  He was accused of adultery.  The aggrieved husband was Mr O’Kane.  Polite society had a new gag: ‘While the lady was certainly Kane, was Palmerston able?’

Lord John Russell was another survivor.  His portrait reveals an aesthete and man of enlightenment.  He could be very prosaic.  ‘My dear Melbourne, I am afraid you do not take exercise enough or eat and drink more than enough.  One of the two may do, but not both together.’  That’s not the kind of stuff to get men walking over hot coals for you.  His greatest achievement, more than thirty years before he became PM for the second time, was to pilot through the great Reform Act of 1832.  But for that legislation, the whole course of British history may have been very different.  His father, the ninth Duke of Bedford, once reproved him for ‘giving great offence to your followers in the House of Commons by not being courteous to them, by treating them superciliously, and de haut en bas, by not listening with sufficient patience to their solicitations or remonstrances.’  The lecturer says that by ‘study, by diligent attendance, and by frequent and fearless intervention in debate, he had made himself a House of Commons man of the best type.’  But doubtless parts of the swamp repelled him.

Now we come to the first of two undisputed titans.  The grandfather of the next PM in these lectures had migrated to England sixty years before he was born.  Benjamin Disraeli, the grandson of an Italian Jew, was the leader of the Tory Party, the Prime Minister of England, and he would become the closest confidant and adviser to the most powerful monarch in the entire world, and whom he, Disraeli, would anoint as the Empress of India.  It is a truly remarkable story.

It had not always been so smooth.  Disraeli had been a frightful dandy, and he had an acid tongue.  The queen had called him ‘detestable, unprincipled, reckless & not respectable.’  Her husband had dismissed him as ‘having not one single element of the gentleman in his composition.’  Well, Her Majesty and His Royal Highness may have had held strong views, but they were free to change their mind.  And Disraeli could ‘work’ the queen.  He said that with her, you had to ‘lay it on with a trowel’ – and he did so, ever so shamelessly; and he was always careful to heap honour and praise on the late Prince.  Her Majesty loved it, and she loathed poor Mr Gladstone.  She felt like he addressed her like he was addressing a public meeting.

And besides, having a PM with a background in finance might be useful.  In 1875, the bankruptcy of the Sultan of Turkey left the Khedive of Egypt wanting to sell his shares in the Suez Canal.  The French were in the market.  Disraeli was determined to get this stake in the Canal.  He could not get the money from Parliament as it was in recess.  He sent his private secretary to ask Baron Rothschild for a loan of 4,000,000 pounds.  Baron Rothschild asked two questions:  ‘When?’, and after eating a grape and spitting out a grape skin, ‘What is your security?’  (The crown jewels?)  The money was available next day to the British government at 2 ½ %, and a one-off fee of 100,000 pounds.  Disraeli wrote: ‘It is just settled: you have it Madam.’  The Queen was ‘in ecstasies,’ but she was keen to hear how her Prime Minister had got the ‘great sum.’

These were the days of great debates with Gladstone and others about affairs in Europe and elsewhere.  They really were titans the like of which we have not seen.  Disraeli was instrumental in settling the affairs of Europe – and Bismarck greatly admired him at the Congress of Berlin.  ‘Der alte Jude, das ist der Mann.’

Not long after this, the French nation would be convulsed by controversy over the fate of a Jewish officer named Dreyfus, and it is more than a little difficult to imagine the third generation of a migrant Jewish family becoming Prime Minister of any country in Europe at that time.

As a baptised Jew, Disraeli had a mature view of religion.  He saw his religion as a fusion of two faiths and had a definition of the Church that appeals to me immensely – ‘a sacred corporation for the promotion and maintenance in Europe of certain Asian principles’.  I wonder how that went down in drawing rooms in Bath.

The lecturer drily observes that Disraeli ‘escaped the permanent infantile paralysis which is often the consequence of a public school curriculum.’  (These lectures were given in 1926 – it looks like the Great War had shattered faith in the English education system.)  He once said that ‘we put our money on the wrong horse’.  As the lecturer, the editor, says ‘he perhaps did not sufficiently realise that in the Balkans all horses are wrong horses.  The pitiful victims of atrocities lack nothing but opportunity in order themselves to become atrocious.  That is a truth which the painful experiences of the last half century have taught us.’  Too many have not learned that truth about the Middle East even after the painful experiences of the last half century.’

Disraeli also comes down to us as the Tory who effectively brought democracy to England with the ‘leap in the dark’ of the reform laws in 1869.  The Tories were becoming Conservatives.

Gladstone was different in so many ways.  The Whigs were becoming Liberals.  All this was before the Labor Party was thought of.  Gladstone was a man of the most formidable intellect, integrity and industry.  He had one very English trait.  The Spectator said of him: ‘Mr Gladstone has done less to lay down any systematised course of action than almost any man of his political standing.’  As the lecture says, ‘He was essentially an empiric, docile to the teachings of experience.’  That is precisely the instinct of the common law – don’t look at questions in the abstract; wait until the issue arises on the evidence.

He started off opposing reform in 1832 and defended slavery, but conscience and intellect led him to radical change, and, as the lecture said, ‘his courage forced him to accept the teachings of his conscience, at whatever cost to himself.’  There is the key to the man.  This intensely religious man came to the view that the enforcement of a State religion was not right in a modern state.  He advocated the removal of Jewish disabilities.  ‘I am deeply convinced that all systems, whether religious or political, which rest on a principle of absolutism, must of necessity be feeble and ineffective.’  That I think is a liberal way of thought.  But he repudiated laissez-faire and he would not ‘hesitate to apply the full powers of the State to ameliorate social anomalies.’  How does that square with our Liberals?  Or his wish to nationalise the railways?  He was never a Little Englander, and he learned to appeal straight to the people, saying that he preferred liberty to authority.

On foreign policy, he challenged he challenged Turkish rule ‘not on the ground of national interest, but in the name of justice to the oppressed.’  The lecturer said: ‘There cannot be much doubt that, but for Gladstone, the England of the seventies would have accepted the Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria as placidly as we have accepted those in Armenia.’

The last of these PMs, the Marquess of Salisbury, is the model of a true and decent Conservative politician – and statesman.  Unusually in English politics, Salisbury was an intellectual.  He survived the brutality of Eton, but he never lost his horror of the mob.  ‘First-rate men will not canvass mobs; and mobs will not elect first-rate men.’  That is archetypal Victorian snobbery – until you look at people like Farage, Hanson, and Trump, and the people who vote for them.

Salisbury had the attitudes of the by-gone squire.  He distrusted book learning and experts.  He was another matter-of-fact man.  ‘I would not be too much impressed by what the soldiers tell you about the strategic importance of these places.  It is their way.  If they were allowed full scope, they would insist on the importance of garrisoning the Moon in order to protect us from Mars.’  The stain comes from the Conservative contribution to the Irish tragedy, and their fixated opposition to change by Home Rule.

So, there is the twentieth century looking back to the nineteenth.  The urbane style of the lectures is something we miss; indeed, we just about miss all style now in this kind of discussion.  The story of the emergence of the parties known as Conservatives and Liberals may tell us a lot at a time when those parties no longer stand for much at all.  There was a focus on character and leadership that we don’t feel now.  The competition for the top job is there throughout, as is the disdain of theory or ideology, but the job of climbing the greasy pole does not seem to have annihilated statesmanship as much then as it does now.  Why that may be so is a proper subject of inquiry.  You can almost hear the rush of the cascade of clichés.  In truth, you can almost see them on your television as we speak.

The Nationalists

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 1 Comment

 

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

VII

Donald, Kim and Pauline

What do Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un have in common?  Each has a hairdresser who should be shot without the benefit of anaesthetic.  Each owes his position to his daddy.  They both like expensive and dangerous toys.  They both like to be seen as winning and they love to be filmed winning for their adoring mobs who believe anything and who blindly follow them.  Neither is too bright himself, and each of them only got the job through an accident of history – and daddy.  Neither is at his best in the wee, small hours.  Each has a visceral fear of light and the outside world.  Each has an unlimited capacity for intolerance.  Neither has any room for religion.  Nor does either have much room for ideology – the self and winning are all that matters.  Each has a puerile and boundless need for self-gratification.  As a result, neither has any kind of moral compass.  Each is capable of betraying followers stupid enough to think that anyone of them might stand in the way of number one.  They are both developing a taste for travel bans.  Each is authoritarian and autocratic by instinct.

Pauline Hanson continues to show how vicious, stupid, and dangerous she is.   “I do believe there are some that want to get on with a quiet life and a good life, but you tell me, you line up a number of Muslims, who’s the good one? Who’s not?”

Well, you could say that of lawyers, Chinamen, prostitutes, senators, Jews – or Christian priests.  This is definitive prejudice – any member of a religious faith is to be branded and looked down on, or as being at best suspect, just because of their subscription to that faith.  It is as revolting and insidious as the Nazi invocation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

An online Cambridge course on Elizabeth I reminded me of why branding people on account of their faith is inherently bad.  For some time after England broke with Rome, a majority of the English people continued to practise as Catholics, and they did so quite contentedly.  Most of them were after all too sensible to get too agitated about something like transubstantiation.  Then Queen Mary persecuted Protestants and burned some of them at the stake.  Then martyrdom worked its charms, and the Protestant cause never looked back.  The Catholics became a feared minority, and it took centuries to bring calm to the division.  In discussing persecution in England under Mary and Elizabeth, the great English historian Macaulay said:

To punish a man because he has committed a crime, or because he is believed, though unjustly, to have committed a crime, is not persecution.  To punish a man, because we infer from the nature of some doctrine which he holds, or from the conduct of other persons who hold the same doctrines with him, that he will commit a crime, is persecution, and is, in every sense, foolish and wicked.

The evil lies in punishing large group because of the bad conduct of a few people of that group. Macaulay then applied his reasoning to laws against Catholics that were passed on the footing that some Catholics wished ill to the English sovereign.

But to argue that, because a man is a Catholic, he must think it right to murder a heretical sovereign, and that because he thinks it right he will attempt to do it, and then, to found on this conclusion a law for punishing him as if he had done it, is plain persecution.

Later Macaulay said all of the persecution of the Puritans:

But the laws passed against the Puritans have not even the wretched excuse which we have been considering.  In this case, the cruelty was equal, the danger infinitely less.  In fact, the danger was created solely by the cruelty.

Going back to the persecution of the Catholics, Macaulay said:

Since these men could not be convinced, it was determined that they should be persecuted.  Persecution produced its natural effects on them.  It found them a sect: it made them a faction.  To their hatred of the Church was now added hatred of the Crown.

We are speaking of a time when the Pope had issued a Bull against the English Queen which was a full on attack on her sovereignty and which was in truth a threat to her life (that would later be made manifest in the Armada).  The danger there was far, far more explicit and widespread than any danger now to us of terrorism from some Muslims.

It is for those reasons that the conduct of Pauline Hanson is both unforgivable and dangerous.   The Prime Minister has been very clear about the danger of demonising all Muslims – and I would be surprised if the President of the United States is not getting the same advice.

In my view the same charge can be made against the revised version of the order against Muslims that has now been issued by the President of the United States.  It is idle to contend that it is not a ban on Muslims because the word Muslims is not used in the ban or because it does not extend to all Muslims.  This ban is a form of persecution that is a product of precisely the same kind of prejudice as that which operated in England in the 16th century, and it is open to precisely the same objections.

Dickens and America – and Christmas Greetings

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

(Dickens frequently gets a run at this time of year, but not in this context.  If the note conveys a small part of the pleasure I got from the novel, then I may have contributed to Christmas.  I’m aware that tomorrow will be hard for those who have taken a hit since last Christmas, and Wolf and I offer our best wishes to you.)

The hero of Dickens’ novel Martin Chuzzlewit goes to America, frequently described in the book as the ‘U-nited States’.  The book was published in 1843-4 – after Dickens had visited America and nearly twenty years before the Union fractured into civil war over slavery.  The picture painted of the U S is very far from being pretty.

On the day that Martin first lands in New York, he meets a colonel, who he later ascertains is a conman, who runs a journal that he describes as ‘the organ of our aristocracy in this city.’

‘Oh!  There is an aristocracy here, then?’  said Martin.  ‘Of what is it composed?’

‘Of intelligence, sir,’ replied the colonel; ‘of intelligence and virtue.  And of their necessary consequence in this republic.  Dollars, sir.’

A bit later, there is another backhander.  One American says that he hoped the word ‘master’ was ‘never heard in our country… There are no masters here.’

‘All ‘owners’ are they?’ said Martin.

After describing a lunch in a New York hotel where the men are segregated from the women, Dickens describes the atmosphere among the men.

It was rather barren of interest, to say the truth; and the greater part of it may be summed up in one word.  Dollars.  All their cares, hopes, joys, affections, virtues, and associations, seemed to be melted down into dollars.  Whatever the chance contributions that fell into the slow cauldron of their talk, they made the gruel thick and slab with dollars.  Men were weighed by their dollars, measures gauged by their dollars; life was auctioneered, appraised, put up, and knocked down for its dollars.  The next respectable thing to dollars was any venture having their attainment for its end.  The more of that worthless ballast, honour and fair-dealing, which any man cast overboard from the ship of his Good Name and Good Intent, the more ample stowage-room he had for dollars.  Make commerce one huge lie and mighty theft.  Deface the banner of the nation for an idle rag; pollute it star by star; and cut out stripe by stripe as from the arm of a degraded soldier.  Do anything for dollars!  What is a flag to them!

Then, still on his first day in this place in the land of Liberty, Martin is forced to disclose to his hosts (the Norrises) at dinner that he had come over in steerage – the worst part of the ship that was reserved for the poorest migrants.

A deathlike stillness fell upon the Norrises.  If this story should get wind, their country relation had, by his imprudence, for ever disgraced them.  They were the bright particular stars of an exalted New York sphere.  There were other fashionable spheres above them, and other fashionable spheres below, and none of the stars in any of these spheres had anything to say to the stars in any other of these spheres.  But, through all the spheres it would go forth that the Norrises, deceived by gentlemanly manners and appearances, had, falling from their high estate, ‘received’ a dollarless and unknown man.  O guardian eagle of the pure Republic, had they lived for this!

It looks as if Dickens had seen what others see on the east coast of the U S – that snobbery based on the dollar can be far, far more venomous than snobbery based on birth.

Later we get a full polemic on slavery.

Again this happy chronicle has Liberty and Moral Sensibility for its high companions.  Again it breathes the blessed air of Independence; again it contemplates with pious awe that moral sense which renders unto Caesar nothing that is his; again inhales that sacred atmosphere which was the life of him – oh noble patriot, with many followers!  – who dreamed of Freedom in a slave’s embrace, and waking sold her offspring and his own in public markets.

How the wheels clank and rattle, and the tram-road shakes, as the train rushes on!  And now the engine yells, as it were lashed and tortured like a living labourer, and writhed in agony.  A poor fancy; for steel and iron are of infinitely greater account, in this commonwealth, than flesh and blood.  If the cunning work of man be urged beyond its power of endurance, it has within it the elements of its own revenge; whereas the wretched mechanism of the Divine Hand is dangerous with no such property, but may be tampered with, and crushed, and broken, at the driver’s pleasure.  Look at that engine!  It shall cost a man more dollars in the way of penalty and fine, and satisfaction of the outraged law, to deface in wantonness that senseless mass of metal, than to take the lives of twenty human creatures.  Thus the stars wink upon the bloody stripes; and Liberty pulls down her cap upon her eyes, and owns oppression in its vilest aspect, for her sister.

That is the second insult to the flag – in a nation which does not take kindly to that kind of insult.  The hero then gets into a train which is divided into three carriages – one for the gentlemen, one for ladies, and one for negroes.  The editor tells me that the reference to the ‘noble patriot’ is a reference to Jefferson who, a local poet said, returned ‘fresh from freedom’s councils to whip or seduce his black slaves’.  The word ‘seduce’ is surely wrong there.

All this takes place in a comic novel.  There is an absurd body called the Watertoast Association that appears to have no function other than to celebrate Freedom, a word used and abused ad nauseam.  But a meeting of the Association is brought to a halt by the most ghastly intelligence.  The presiding General tells the meeting that they have been seriously mistaken in a man apparently crucial to the founding of the Association.  The General has just received intelligence that the man has been and is the advocate of ‘Nigger emancipation’.

If anything beneath the sky be real, those Sons of Freedom would have pistolled, stabbed – in some way slain – that man by coward hands and murderous violence, if he had stood among them at that time.  The most confiding of their countrymen would not have wagered then; no, nor would they ever peril one dunghill straw, upon the life of any man in such a strait.  They tore the letter, cast the fragments in the air, trod down the pieces as they fell; and yelled, and groaned, and hissed, till they could cry no longer.

They immediately vote to disband the Association and decide to disburse its funds to appropriate sources – a certain constitutional judge ‘who had laid down from the Bench the noble principle that it was lawful for any white mob to murder any black man’; a Patriot who had declared from his high place in the Legislature that he and his friends would hang without trial any Abolitionist who might pay them a visit; and to aid the enforcement of those free and equal laws which render it much more criminal and dangerous to teach a negro to read and write than to roast him alive in a public city.

Presumably, this novel has not enjoyed its best sales in the South.  This is how Mark Tapley, the faithful follower of the hero, states his views about the Americans after they find out that they have been conned into buying into a swamp.

‘There’s one good thing in this place, sir,’ said Mr Tapley, scrubbing away at the linen, ‘as disposed as me to be jolly; and that is that it’s a reg’lar United States in itself.  There’s  two or three American settlers left; and they coolly comes over one, even here, sir, as if it was the wholesomest and loveliest spot in the world.  But there like the cock that went and hid itself to save his life, and was found out by the noise he made.  They can’t help crowing.  They was born to do it, and do it they must, whatever comes of it.

This is followed by a conversation between Martin and a proud local.

‘How do you like our country, sir?’ he enquired, looking at Martin.

‘Not at all.’

Chollop continued to smoke without the least appearance of emotion, until he felt disposed to speak again.  That time at length arriving, he took his pipe in his mouth and said: ‘I am not surprised to hear you say so.  It re-quires An age elevation and A preparation of the intellect.  The mind of man must be prepared for Freedom, Mr Co.’

Later, Martin has an exchange with a worthy senator.

‘What are extraordinary people you are!…  Are Mr Chollop and the class he represents an Institution here?  Are pistols with revolving barrels, sword-sticks, bowie-knives, and such things Institutions  on which you pride yourselves?  Are bloody jewels, brutal combats, savage assaults, shooting down and stabbing in the streets your Institutions!  Why, I shall hear next that Dishonour and Fraud are among the institutions of the great Republic!’

The response?

This morbid hatred of our Institutions is quite a study for the psychological observer.

There is really nothing new under the sun.  Here is how Martin and Mark comment on the United States as they leave them.

‘Why, I was a-thinking, sir, that if I was a painter and was called upon to paint the American Eagle, how should I do it?’

‘Paint it as like an eagle as you could, I suppose.’

No.  That wouldn’t do for me, sir, I would want to draw it like a Bat for its shortsightedness; like a Bantam, for its bragging; like a Magpie, for its honesty; like a Peacock, for it is vanity; like an Ostrich, for putting its head in the mud, and thanking nobody sees it – ’

‘And like a Phoenix, for its power of springing from the ashes of its faults and vices and soaring up anew into the sky.  Well, Mark.  Let us hope so.’

These views are commonly felt by visitors to the States.  They see a certain defensive preppiness; a certain false pride – and a dangerous pride; a continuing obsession with the violence of the frontier and the power of the gun; but ultimately, an engaging candour about their own freshness.

But there is a kind of fetish about patriotism.  We don’t talk much about patriotism here in Australia. The feelings of Dickens were echoed by the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville who went to the U S at about the same time as Dickens made his first visit there.  I set out his views elsewhere.

But for whatever reason, patriotism is and has been a continuing subject of interest in America.  It was brilliantly depicted by De Tocqueville in 1838 in terms which can be set out at length because they still ring true.  (We should make allowance for the fact that this is translation and that the notion of a ‘patriot’ had been strained in France after the revolution.)

‘There is one sort of patriotic attachment which principally arises from that instinctive disinterested and undefinable feeling which connects the affections of man with his birthplace.  This natural fondness is united to a taste for ancient customs, and to a reverence for ancestral traditions of the past; those who cherish it love their country as they love the mansion of their fathers.  They enjoy the tranquillity which it affords them; they cling to the peaceful habits which they have contacted within its bosom; they are attached to the reminiscences which it awakens, and they are even pleased by the state of obedience in which they are placed.  This patriotism is sometimes stimulated by religious enthusiasm, and then it is capable of making the most prodigious efforts.  It is in itself a kind of religion; it does not reason, but it acts from the impulse of faith and of sentiment.’

We can follow all this.  The author then says that in some countries the monarch was recognized as personifying the country.  This was so in France – hence the problem when there was no monarch.  This also shows the glittering respect shown to the President in the U S.  But what about the considered type of patriotism, that of someone ‘who exerts himself to promote the well-being of his country’?  This comes with the spread of knowledge – ‘it is nurtured by the laws, it grows by the exercize of civil rights, and, in the end, it is confounded with the personal interest of the citizen.’

‘But I maintain that the most powerful, and perhaps the only means of interesting men in the welfare of their country, which we still possess, is to make them partakers in the Government…….in America the people regard this prosperity as the result of its own exertions; the citizen looks upon the fortune of the public as his private interest, and he co-operates in its success, not so much from a sense of pride or duty, as from, what I shall venture to term, cupidity.’

Cupidity might, for the lack of a better word, be greed, as in the famous ‘Greed is good’ of Gordon Gekko – which you choose might be a matter of taste or grace.

‘As the American participates in all that is done in his country, he thinks himself obliged to defend whatever may be censured; for it is not only his country which is attacked upon these occasions, but it is himself.’

The French observer has then set us up for this bell-ringer:

‘Nothing is more embarrassing in the ordinary intercourse of life than this irritable patriotism of the Americans’.

There is something close to the heart of America here.  The upside is ambition, drive, and personal and communal responsibility; the downside is Salem, McCarthy, and Gordon Gekko – and that nonsense about the lapel pin of Barack Obama.  In some sense, the feeling of communal responsibility and participation does seem to rest well with American patriotism; so does their prickliness if you happen to query in passing something close to American hearts.  The Americans tend to be more committed and involved in America.  The film The Godfather begins with a product of Italian immigration saying ‘I believe in America.’  Australians are not so serious about all this kind of thing, and open discussion, much less profession, is not encouraged.  If they see it in Americans, they might mumble something about people wearing their hearts on their sleeve.

Those observations of America still hold good.  What Dickens saw as an obsession with the dollar, and a readiness to keep whole peoples in subjection may well become manifest in the next President.

The anger of Dickens over slavery and what he saw as their hypocrisy is not hard to follow.  Lord Mansfield had effectively outlawed slavery at common law in the previous century.  In the current century, the British parliament had heroically banned the trade by statute in one unimpeachable crusade by Christianity.  The trade would only be ended in the U S by the deaths of more than half a million white people in the Civil War.

This is how the greatest American of all described the redemption in an address, his second, inaugural, that is now one of the title deeds of Western civilisation.  It was given not long before the speaker was gunned down in public by a vile nutter disporting his Second Amendment rights.

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained.  Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease.  Each looked for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding.  Both read the same Bible, and prayed to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other.  It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in bringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged.  The prayers of both could not be answered – that of neither has been answered fully.

As I have said elsewhere:

Lincoln then went on to say that the ‘scourge of war’ would ‘continue until all of the wealth piled up by the bondsmen’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and every drop of blood drawn with a lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword …’.   The nation that started with the Puritans was therefore redeeming itself from the sin of slavery with its own blood.  Lincoln concluded that inaugural address with the famous passage that begins:  ‘With malice toward none ….’

We might finish on a lighter note.  Seth Pecknsiff is one of the greatest shits in our letters.  When Anthony Chuzzlewit calls him a hypocrite, the latter says this to his daughter Charity:

Charity my dear, when I take my chamber candlestick tonight, remind me to be more than usually particular in praying for Mr Anthony Chuzzlewit; who has done me an injustice.

Toward the end of the novel, there is something of a showdown.  Mark Tapley is the hero’s faithful and sensible follower.  He is very much in the model of Sancho Panza.  During the showdown, Mark had blocked a door to hold in the revolting Pecksniff.

‘A short interview after such an absence!’  said Martin, sorrowfully.  ‘But we are well out of the house.  We might have placed ourselves in a false position by remaining there, even so long, Mark.’

‘I don’t know about ourselves, sir,’ he returned; ‘but somebody else would have got into a false position, if he had happened to come back again, while we was there.  I had the door already, sir.  If Pecksniff had showed his head, or had only so much as listened  behind it, I would have caught him like a walnut.  He is the sort of man,’ added Mr Tapley, musing, ‘as would squeeze soft, I know.’

The phrase ‘the sort of man as would squeeze soft’ is worth the price of the book – and a bloody expensive edition at that.

Dickens on crowd pullers

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 1 Comment

 

The rise of demagogues like Farage and Trump has greatly discomforted people like me who are scared of demagogues and the forces that empower them – or, perhaps I should say, the forces that unleash them.  People who succumb to seduction that contains its own contradictions and evidences its own falsity are at best gullible – which means ‘ready to be gulled’ or, if you prefer, conned.

The phenomenon is critically analysed by Charles Dickens in his novel Barnaby Rudge, A Tale of the Riots of ‘Eighty.  The second part of the book is largely taken up by accounts of what are known as the Gordon Riots in London in 1780.

An unbalanced Scottish lord named Lord George Gordon claimed to belong to ‘the party of the people’.  He whipped up mass hysteria in the London mob against Catholics.  The problem was not just antagonism between sects, although that had been explosive enough under both the Tudors and the Stuarts.  Many of the London poor resented Irish immigrants.  Why?  Not because they were Catholic, but because they accepted lower wages and put the locals out of work.  Or so it was felt or alleged.  Some things don’t change.

The mind and character of Gordon and his abettors are looked at in detail by Dickens, as is the terrifying progress of the riots.  They were as bad as any experienced in Paris in and after 1789, with the exception of the September Massacres. The violence was not limited to action against Catholics. These riots conditioned the English against popular intervention, and they stalled the movement for reform for about two generations.  

The hero of the novel is an idiot.  He is therefore inherently gullible.  Although there is not an ounce of evil in Barnaby, he is gulled into taking part in the carnage at London. Barnaby gets apprehended and he is convicted.  There is only one penalty.  Is it right that an idiot should hang for taking part in a riot?

It is hard to dissect what moves people to follow demagogues like Gordon or Farage or Trump.  It is hard enough to see what might go through the mind of you or me – to attempt to guess what may have gone through tens of millions of minds is absurd.  It doesn’t help much to talk about elites or insiders or the better educated or the well off.  But here is a description of the Tory squire in Georgian England given by Dickens in full flight.

Now, this gentleman had various endearing appellations among his intimate friends.  By some he was called ‘country gentlemen of the true school’, by some ‘a fine old country gentlemen’, by some ‘a sporting gentleman’, by some ‘a thorough–bred gentleman,’ by some ‘a genuine John Bull’; but they all agreed in one respect, and that was, that it was a pity there were not more like him, and that because there were not, the country was going to rack and ruin every day.  He was in the commission of the peace, and could write his name almost legibly; but his greatest qualifications were, that he was more severe with poachers, was a better shot, a harder rider, had better horses, kept better dogs, and could eat more solid food, drink more strong wine, go to bed every night more drunk and get up every morning more sober, than any man in the county.  In knowledge of horse flesh, he was almost equal to a farrier, in stable learning he surpassed his own head groom, and in gluttony not a pig on his estate was a match for him.  He had no seat in Parliament himself, but he was extremely patriotic, and usually drove his voters up to the poll with his own hands.  He was warmly attached to church and state, and never appointed to the living in his gift any but a three-bottle man and a first-rate fox-hunter.  He mistrusted the honesty of all poor people who could read and write, and had a secret jealousy of his own wife (a young lady whom he had married for what his friends called ‘the good old English reason’, that her father’s property joined his own) for possessing those accomplishments in a greater degree than himself.  In short, Barnaby being an idiot, and Grip [a pet raven] a creature of mere brute instinct, it would be very hard to say what this gentleman was.

An agent of Lord Gordon, Gashford, puts a charm on Barnaby to get him to join the movement.  His widowed mother is horrified.  When she tries to restrain Barnaby, we get this:

‘Leave the young man to his choice; he’s old enough to make it, and snap your apron-strings.  He knows, without your telling, whether he wears the sign of a loyal Englishman or not’.

There’s that rotten notion of patriotism again. (Since Trump refused both military service and the payment of tax, it would be impossible, even by his mad standards, for him to claim that he was a patriot.)

Then comes a passage that brings us straight to the USA in December 2016 with Trump’s denial of the intervention in the election of his friend and admirer Vladimir Putin.  (It would be idle for Trump to deny, again even by his own mad standards, the lethal intervention of the FBI.)

‘My good woman’, said Gashford, ‘how can you!  –Dear me!  – What do you mean by tempting, and by danger?  Do you think his lordship is a roaring lion, going about and seeking whom he may devour?  God bless me!’

‘No, no, my Lord, forgive me,’ implored the widow, lying both her hands upon his breast, and scarcely knowing what she said, or did, in the earnestness of her supplication, ‘but there are reasons why you should hear my earnest, mother’s prayer, and leave my son with me.  Oh do.  He is not in his right senses, he is not, indeed.’

‘It is a bad sign of the wickedness of these times’ said Lord George, evading her touch and colouring deeply, ‘that those who cling to the truth and support the right cause, are set down as mad.  Have you the heart to say this of your own son, unnatural mother!’

‘I am astonished at you!’  said Gashford, with a kind of meek severity.  ‘This is a very sad picture of female depravity.’

‘He has surely no appearance,’ said Lord George, glancing at Barnaby, and whispering in his secretary’s ear, ‘of being deranged?  And even if he had, we must not construe any trifling peculiarity into madness.  Which of us’ – and here he turned red again – ‘would be safe if that were made the law!

Dickens leaves us in no doubt about his view of the mob in action, ‘composed for the most part of the very scum and refuse of London’, just as Carlyle leaves us in no doubt about the September Massacres in Paris.  Dickens says:

A mob is usually a creature of very mysterious existence, particularly in a large city.  Where it comes from, or whither it goes, few men can tell.  Assembling and dispersing with equal suddenness, it is as difficult to follow to its various sources as the sea itself; nor does the parallel stop here, for the ocean is not more fickle and uncertain, more terrible when roused, more unreasonable, or more cruel.

And members of the mob tend to lock themselves in.  ‘Indeed, the sense of having gone too far to be forgiven, held the timid together no less than the bold.’  And the ultimate analogy is again made:

The more the fire crackled and raged, the wilder and more cruel the men grew; as though moving in that element, they became fiends, and change their earthly nature for the qualities that give delight in hell.

It is not hard to see the affinity between Dickens and Carlyle, but then comes the banality of the retribution.

Two cripples – both mere boys – one with a leg of wood, one who dragged his twisted limbs along by the help of a crutch, were hanged in this same Bloomsbury Square.  As the cart was about to glide from under them, it was observed that they stood with their faces from, not to, the house they had assisted to despoil; and their misery was protracted that this omission might be remedied.  Another boy was hanged in Bow Street; other young lads in various quarters of the town.  For wretched women, too, were put to death.  In a word, those who suffered as rioters were, for the most part, the weakest, meanest, and most miserable among them.  It was a most exquisite satire upon the false religious cry which had led to so much misery, that some of these people owned themselves to be Catholics, and begged to be attended by their own priests.

The irony was that those who witnessed the executions were as unattractive as those who had taken part in the riots.  Dickens had been against capital punishment, and he was certainly against public executions.  In 1860, he described the spectators coming from the execution of a murderer as ‘such a tide of ruffians as never could have flowed from any point but the Gallows.  Without any figure of speech, it turned one white and sick to behold them.’  After another hanging, Dickens regarded the conduct of the people as so ‘indescribably frightful, that I felt for some time afterwards almost as if I were living in a city of devils.’  That was the analogy that he made in Barnaby Rudge.

In his enlightening book Carlyle and Dickens, Michael Goldberg says:

Lord George, the mad visionary, and Gashford, the cunning mercenary, provide the spark which ignites the incendiary mob.  Barnaby, the imbecile, is an implicit comment on Gordon, the political fool, and Dickens originally planned to have the riot led by three escaped lunatics from Bedlam.  Thus the Gordon riots are seen as an ‘explosion of madness and nothing more’…

There was of course a good deal more involved in the events we know as the French Revolution and the analogy with the US today has ended by now on other grounds.  Trump may well be a political fool, but Farage is not.  And in a representative democracy, the mob finds expression in the ballot box rather than behind the barricades – although the French from time to time like to take to the streets for old times’ sake.

Whether you now see other analogies in the novel will depend on how you read it, and how you see the world now.  If Dickens had sought to characterise people like Malcolm Roberts or Rod Culleton in this novel, I dare say some of us may have thought that he had taken his penchant for caricature and coincidence right over the top.

Someone – I forget who – said that we go to great writers for the truth, and for my part, I think we get a fair bit of it in Barnaby Rudge.

And what of Lord Gordon?  He beat the rap for the riots in a trial presided over by the great Lord Mansfield. Mansfield’s house was burned down in the riots.   The mob was incensed against him because they thought he had given too fair a trial to a priest charged with celebrating mass.  He had directed the jury that they ‘must not infer that he is a priest because he said mass, and that he said mass because he was a priest.’   Lord George would also get a fair trial.

They conducted trials more expeditiously then, and no judge has ever been more expeditious than Mansfield.  The charge was high treason, the most serious in the book.  The penalty was death.  More than thirty witnesses were called.  Erskine made what was called ‘a very long speech’ for the defence.  The court convened at eight on Monday morning.  The jury retired at quarter to five on Tuesday morning.  They gave their verdict half an hour later.  As I said, they were more expeditious then.  At the end of the first week, we would still be listening to the opening.

Before Gordon died, the man who had instigated what we would call a pogrom against Catholics converted to Judaism.  It might make you feel for the members of the synagogue who had to live with that conversion.  But he was later convicted of defaming Marie Antoinette, and he died of typhoid fever in Newgate prison.

Lord George had befriended a con man named Cagliostro (who did a nice line in ‘an elixir of immortal youth’). This crook got tied up in the infamous Diamond Necklace Affair in France and he made an enemy of Marie Antoinette.  Lord Gordon had been appalled by the inequality he saw in France and he charged the French queen with persecuting his mate.  He was then charged with libelling her and British judges.  Erskine was not available, and Lord George conducted his own defence.  He did so with what one commentator called ‘a display of disarming ineptitude.’  When the Attorney spoke of a ‘wise and illustrious princess’, Lord George said in a stage-whisper fashion: ‘Everybody knows she is a very convenient lady.’  That might fairly be described as a high risk gambit.

His lordship was nothing if not different.  Horace Walpole said of the family: ‘They were, and are, all mad.’  A fellow MP said: ‘The noble lord has got a twist in his head, a certain whirligig which runs away with him if anything relative to religion is mentioned.’  Well, his lordship was not alone there, and it could be very dangerous to say that such a whirligig might be evidence of insanity.

Except for the disease that killed him, Lord George lived in comfort at Newgate.  He regularly gave dinners, and he gave balls once a fortnight.  After about 1791, the balls always ended with the Marseillaise.  Lord George had been circumcised and he allowed his hair to grow.  He was well liked at Newgate, even loved, but Lord George Gordon may be the only orthodox Jew in all history to have annoyed other cellmates in his slammer by the playing of the bagpipes.

Lord George passed away on 1 November 1793 after giving a final, faltering rendition of the revolutionary refrain so often described by Carlyle, ça ira.  The romance of the Scots for the French was very strong back then – and it may come back as the English turn their backs on the Continent.

Imagination and courage – and Paul Keating

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 4 Comments

Paul Keating said that Winston Churchill inspired him to go into public life.  ‘If that’s the business he’s in, I’d love to be in that business.…  I was attracted to him for his braveness, sense of adventure, compulsion, and moral clarity.’  That last phrase, ‘moral clarity’, is an interesting proposition to come from one politician talking about another. ‘Leadership, after all, is as I have so often remarked, about two things: imagination and courage… Churchill had these qualities in spades.’   Keating admired his open ‘swashbuckling’ and ‘risk – taking’ approach to politics.  ‘He was the one who was not prepared to cede Western Europe to Hitler in order to save Britain, and it was on that moral point that I always found him to be so attractive a character.’  Well, there we have the word ‘moral’ again, and Churchill was, if nothing else, a big–picture leader, the phrase in the subtitle to the book Paul Keating by Troy Bramston.

Keating found an interest in music early in his life.  ‘The arts give expression to inner feelings and impulses in a way that I think sport, with all its greatness, can’t do.’  That remark is about as un-Australian as could ever have fallen from the mouth of any politician in Australia.  But the following remark of Keating is dead true: ‘One of the sad things about my colleagues is that few of them had an inner life.’  Sadly, their outer life isn’t too bloody flash either.

Music would always play a big part in Keating’s life.  ‘Music for the mind is like electricity for a motor. Later in life when he was at his busiest, he would spend forty-five minutes charging his motor up on say Brahms or Shostakovich.  ‘I would always go down to the office in a bigger spirit.  You’ve always got to walk in the door with your imagination working.’  That, too, is a very Keating remark.

During the time of the moratorium about the Vietnam War, Jim Cairns met Keating standing at the loo in Parliament House. He expressed regret that Paul wasn’t wearing his moratorium badge.  ‘Look, Jim, that’s the difference between you and me.  I’m not here to protest; I’m here to be in charge.’  There you have a very radical difference in perspective on the role of the Labor Party – on one side, one of Labor’s great successes; on the other, one of its quintessential tragedies.

Whitlam was something of a snob intellectually.  Someone close to him said that Gough believed that you could not make it without a degree.  He was always on to Keating to get a degree.  ‘Why?  Then I’d be just like you.’  On the other hand, Kim Beazley Senior looked at Keating and said: ‘You see that man.  Watch him, because he’s a political killer.’

At the first meeting of the caucus of the Whitlam Government in December 1972, 94 men assembled – there was not one woman.  The government may have looked radical to a lot of Australians who had been anaesthetised by Menzies, but it looks Neanderthal to us.  We forget now that the opposition to Medibank was such that it had to be put before a joint sitting.

It did not take long for Keating to establish his own profile.  In 1981, Jennifer Hewett described Keating as a ‘Hell’s Angel in a suit… Keating is so sharp it hurts.  Thought, speech, dress.  He’s never had much time for half measures, for wavering.  The lines are always clear, the intensity is always dazzling.  The overriding presence is of cool, supercool, leavened by a tongue that can strike like a snake’s and claws that can scratch like a tomcat’s.’

When Hawke got elected, there was some fear that Hawke might deny Keating the Treasury portfolio.  Keating told Graham Richardson: ‘You had better tell Hawke that if he wants to remove me from the Treasury portfolio, it will be the Harry Truman doctrine of massive retaliation.  And I do mean ‘massive”.  That is an authentically Keating position: and the reference is not to Harry Truman the man, but to the nuclear bombs he released over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Keating was referring to what others would later describe as the Hiroshima option.  The Labor Party has always had more than its share of good haters, and political assassins.

The first Hawke government had a very strong ministry.  Hewson would say it was probably the best front bench since World War II.  The cabinet of the workers’ party only had two members without a university education – Keating and Mick Young.  Keating was nervous at his first stint as Treasurer. He told Max Walsh: ‘You should be here, not me’.  Andrew Peacock could recall seeing the papers shaking in Keating’s hand as he stood at the dispatch box.  That bear pit is no place for boys or girls.  Especially if you had to face Keating on a bad day.

Charm is important in politics.  When Keating met Reagan he realised immediately why Reagan was so successful.  ‘He was a completely charming individual.  Only after you saw him actually doing what he did best, you realised what personal qualities he had used to get as far as he had got.  They were not intellectual qualities, but they were gentlemanly, gregarious, and humorous.’  This respect for Reagan, with the respect for Churchill, shows that Keating was not into typing or labelling, but rather dealing with individuals on their own merits.  That, some might think, is the mark of maturity.

A fundamental part of the success of the Hawke government was the way it worked with the unions.  Bill Kelty played a major part.  He said: ‘This is a fundamental period of restructuring in the economy.  These changes are going to be better for the country, but it’s not necessarily going to make it easier for you,’ he said to the unions.  ‘The majority of the unions accepted that argument.’  As Troy Bramston remarks: ‘This is a notion foreign to most contemporary union leaders’.  You bet – and to most oppositions.

The book is littered with references to Keating filing and commenting on items in the press.  This is not something that you could imagine Churchill doing.  It does suggest some kind of insecurity in the face of what might now be loosely referred to as the establishment or the elite.  The author notes the dislike for Murdoch within the Labor Party for its role in the fall of Whitlam, but says that at about the time when Keating made his reference to the banana republic, Keating reserved a particular disdain for Fairfax.

Keating got very close to the Australian historian Manning Clark.  His newspaper archive contains several of Clark’s essays that are heavily underlined.  He greatly admired Clark’s six volume A History of Australia.  Toward the end, Clark had written: ‘With the end of the domination by the straighteners, the enlargers of life now have their chance.’  Keating would frequently pick up a bundle of CDs and head over to Clark’s house where they would listen to music.  ‘I wanted to get a handle on Manning’s personality.  I wanted to understand how he had impacted on the country, what motivated him, what drove him.  I was interested in the resonances of his personality.’  It is not easy, offhand, to think of any other Australian politician doing anything remotely like that.

When Keating reached his famous agreement with Hawke about succession at Kirribilli House, Keating asked Kelty as they left the meeting whether he thought Hawke would keep the agreement.  ‘I doubt it.  It didn’t come naturally.  It didn’t come out of a negotiated process.  Hawke’s a negotiator.  You actually keep agreements out of a negotiated settlement.  But this wasn’t negotiated.  It was almost given flippantly as a statement.’  Well, at least Keating was on notice from the start that Hawke might welch, which he subsequently did.

When Keating finally moved on Hawke, those close to Hawke begged him to stand down.  Hawke gave the fatuous response that he would not give in to ‘terrorism’.  He may have forgotten what had happened to Hayden when he got deposed.  When the faction gathered in the office of Richardson, Stephen Loosely thought they looked like a group of rebels preparing for battle.  ‘People cleaning their rifles, checking the sites, and putting extra ammunition …… It’s a little bit like that scene in The Magnificent Seven where the bandits arrive at the village to find the seven ensconced and heavily armed.  I said if Hawkie walked in the door now, it would be like Eli Wallach saying ‘Who are you and why have you come?’  One of us would have to be Steve McQueen, mate, and look up and say, ‘We deal in lead, friend.”  Keating burst out laughing.

Keating won and Hawke cried.  Hawke promised not to ‘utter one word to harm Paul or his government.’  Other caucus members sobbed.  But unlike others who would be deposed in similar passion plays, Hawke by and large did keep that promise.

It is at this point that the author summarises the achievement of Keating as Treasurer.

In May 1991, Keating surpassed Ben Chifley’s record as a Labor treasurer.  His legacy as the most significant treasurer in the post-war era, if not since Federation, was secure.  No treasurer has presided over more significant economic reforms: the float of the dollar and the deregulation of the financial system; six iterations of the Accord that moderated wage increases and helped to contain inflation; fundamental change to the taxation system, including cutting marginal income – tax rates ( from 60% to 47%), slashing company tax (from 49% to 39%) and abolishing the double taxing of dividends by introducing imputation; industry – sector deregulation, reducing tariffs, and selling government assets; introducing compulsory superannuation; and delivering for surplus budgets – the first since the early 1950s – and decreasing expenditure in real terms.  Although the recession detracted from this scorecard, the economy was to emerge from it with a record 25 years of uninterrupted growth and low inflation.  And no treasurer had been more instrumental in the delivery of a government’s political messages, its overall narrative, and thus in its electoral successes.

That seems to me to be a very fair summary, but I am biased.  Prior to that reform of the tax system, I had been paying tax at about 66%, and provisional tax on that.  Since I was taxed on receipts, then if my receipts went up, I would have to pay about a $1.30 for every dollar I received over the level of the previous financial year.  This sort of madness led people into schemes to avoid paying tax which developed into a different level of madness.  But for reasons I have never understood, I had to wait for a Labor government to do something about either sort of madness that people who falsely called themselves conservatives had simply sat and watched over like bored tomcats.  And if you look at the efforts of our treasurers since Keating, it is hard to see anyone who might come even close.

We tend to forget now how important was the part played by Keating in developing the APEC conferences.  Keating floated the idea with Clinton and then developed it as part of his intense concentration on Asia.  Greg Sheridan wrote in The Australian: ‘It was a masterful and effective performance by Keating and must be one of the few occasions in Australian diplomatic history when an Australian Prime Minister has engaged in effective shuttle diplomacy.’  When the 18 APEC leaders met, they represented more than half the world’s GDP.  In his memoirs, Clinton would claim responsibility for what Keating had done.

We tend to forget now how backward those we refer to as the Coalition could be.  Do you recall that paranoid furore when Keating guided the Queen through a door?  The Queen was so disturbed by the hysteria of the tabloid press that she raised the matter directly with Keating.  She said: ‘Take no notice of them.’  ‘Your Majesty, a British tabloid editor is a particularly low form of human life.’  Her Majesty laughed.

But when Keating took exception to having a British flag in ours, Hewson and the rest of the opposition expressed outrage.  When Parliament resumed, they ringed their desks with small plastic flags.  John Howard had referred to the golden age of the 1950’s.  This led to the signature annihilation of all that Howard stood for then and later.  You can get it on You Tube as the cultural cringe speech.  After bursts of comedy that are serene, we get:

I was told that I did not learn respect at school.  I learned one thing: I learned about self-respect and self-regard for Australia – not about some cultural cringe to a country which decided not to defend the Malayan peninsular, not to worry about Singapore, and not to give us our troops back to keep ourselves free from Japanese domination.  This was the country that you people tethered yourselves too, and even as it walked out on you and joined the Common Market, you are still looking for your MBEs and your knighthoods and all the rest of the regalia that comes with it.  You could take Australia right back down the time tunnel to the cultural cringe where you have always come from… These are the same old fogies who doffed their heads and tug the forelock to the British establishment; they now try to grind down Australian kids by denying them a technical school education and want to put a tax on the back of the poor.  The same old sterile ideology, the same old fogeyism  of the 1950s that produced the Thatcherite policies of the late 1970s is going to produce Fightback!  We will not have a bar of it.  You can go back to the 50s to your nostalgia, your Menzies, the Caseys, and the whole lot.  They were not aggressively Australian, they were not aggressively proud of our culture, and we will have no bar of you or your sterile ideology.

It was pure mayhem, and it says a lot for the magical powers of Shostakovich.  When Hewson asked Keating why he wouldn’t call an election, he got the celebrated reply: ‘The answer is, mate, I want to do you slowly.  There has to be a bit of sport in this for all of us.  In the psychological battle stakes, we are stripped down and ready to go.  I want to see those ashen-faced performances; I want more of them.’  It is a blood sport. The nastiness went both ways.  Hewson was intent on smearing Keating over the famous piggery.

The ultimate political goal is to inflict fatal damage on P K’s credibility in the eyes of the voting public (if this is what the merits of the matter justify).  We are seeking to expose a conflict of interest in circumstances that give rise to a grave suspicion that there may have been improper or reprehensible conduct on the part of PK.  We are not alleging actual impropriety, only the possibility of impropriety.

Well, if you going to do a knife job, you might at least have the courtesy to be honest about it.  This is just weasel gutlessness.

In the campaign, Keating lacerated Hewson and Howard.  ‘Even Marie Antoinette didn’t put GST on a cake’.  In the end, Keating enjoyed his sweetest triumph, the triumph for the true believers.  Later he would get to taunt Downer.  ‘How are you going over there Curly’….or old darling or Shirley Temple?

Perhaps the strongest part of the book is in its treatment of Keating’s efforts on behalf of indigenous Australians.  The Redfern speech is treated at length.  More importantly, the author makes it plain that Keating used all his political capital and political experience to get through legislation on native title against the opposition, the mining industry, most of primary industry, the states, and a lack of interest in parts of his own party.  He was careful in selecting the correct allies. One asked Keating what his attitude was.  ‘Well, basically, I reckon for 200 years we’ve been sneaking around in someone else’s backyard.’  ‘Shit, that sounds alright then.  You’re on my wavelength.’  The author says this:

No other Prime Minister had ever paid such a high priority on indigenous issues.  It was more than just a priority.  Keating was so involved in native-title negotiations that he effectively micro-managed it.  This was not design, but by necessity.  It was the High Court that made the Mabo judgement and it demanded a response from government.  But for this response to prove durable, it had to win broad acceptance from stakeholders and then passage through the Senate.  This required prime ministerial authority, and Keating set about using it.  He engaged directly with indigenous leaders, farmers, and miners.  He ran a cabinet process.  He carried the debate in the media.  And he negotiated directly with the states and the Senate cross bench, while fighting a protracted battle against the Coalition.  The odds were stacked against him, but Keating worked the political system to produce an outcome.  This was achieved while diminishing Keating’s political capital, and was of nil political benefit.  Keating brought indigenous issues from the margins of politics to the centre of government, where it has remained in the decades since.

The key here is the observation that this heroic exercise diminished Keating’s political capital and ‘was of nil political benefit’.  If that assessment is fair – and it looks fair to me – Keating stands well above other political leaders of our time in this country.   There is blue sky between him and them.

But Labor had been on power too long.  It gave way to a man who would redefine our ideas of mediocrity.  Keating was hurt by the loss, but more hurt by the separation from his wife.  After the election loss, he invited Howard to the Lodge for a cup tea.  No outgoing prime minster had shown that courtesy. ‘I thought it was important for the sake of the country, and the polity, that the Prime Minister who is leaving The Lodge doesn’t leave it as some sort of vacant possession.  I wanted the country to see and witness a generous and healthy change of government.  I showed him around, and I said some things to him which I thought were important to say.’  It is both curious and sad that no former Prime Minister had apparently thought of this.

What is the biggest regret of Keating for Labor leaders after him?  ‘While ever we borrow the monarch of another country as our head of state, we will never be as great as we are entitled to be.  It has always been a matter of wonderment to me that my colleagues could not see that.  They don’t think it is important, because they do not get the spiritual essence of what the change to a republic meant.  It means that we will be a society to our self.’

What other Australian politician speaks of the spiritual essence of a society to our self?

Passing Bull 67 – Nonsense about Rome

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 1 Comment

Rubicon by Tom Holland has been handsomely republished by the Folio Society.  It is a work of popular history that leaves you frequently wondering how long it has been since you read a statement of verifiable fact.  The style is racy.  We are told for example that Cleopatra was ‘not given to sleeping around; far from it.  Her favours were the most exclusive in the world.’  How would we know how many men or women Cleopatra slept with?

We are also told:

Roman morality did not look kindly on female forwardness.  Fragility was the ultimate marital ideal.  It was taken for granted, for instance, that ‘a matron has no need of lascivious squirmings’ – anything more than a rigid, dignified immobility was regarded as the mark of a prostitute.

But fifteen pages later we are told:

Early every December, women from the noblest families in the Republic would gather to celebrate the mysterious rights of the Good Goddess.  The festival was strictly off-limits to men.  Even their statues had to be veiled for the occasion.  Such secrecy fuelled any number of prurient male fantasies.  Every citizen knew that women were depraved and promiscuous by nature.

Those statements about the sex lives of women in ancient Rome have three things in common.  They are general.  They are not supported by evidence.  And they are not consistent.  How would we know?  It is a long time since I studied Catullus, but his erotic poetry doesn’t suggest that the heavy breathing was all male, and why did Ovid bother with The Art of Love if the boys were puckering up to cardboard cut-outs?  And what about human nature?  As the man said in that funny play, the world must be peopled.

The myth that ancient Athens and Rome were civilised dies hard.  Western civilisation is premised on the dignity of the individual.  If you want chapter and verse it is the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20, 1-17), the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5 to 70), and the Enlightenment (Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, par.4.435).

Neither Athens nor Rome accepted that premise.  The wealth of each was based on slavery and empire.  Gibbon began his first published work, the Essai, with the following words of eternal verity: L’histoire des empires est celle de la misère des hommes. ‘The history of empires is the history of the misery of mankind.’  Mr Holland appears to find nobility in the exploitation of slaves by the Romans.

This exploitation was what underpinned everything that was noblest about the Republic – its culture and citizenship, its passion for freedom, its dread of disgrace and shame.  It was not merely that the leisure which enabled a citizen to devote himself to the Republic was dependent upon the forced labour of others.  Slaves also satisfied a subtler, more baneful need.  ‘Gain cannot be made without loss to someone else’: so every Roman took for granted.  All status was relative.  What value would freedom have in a world where everyone was free?  Even the poorest citizen could know himself to be immeasurably the superior of even the best-treated slave.  Death was preferable to a life without liberty: so the entire history of the Republic had gloriously served to prove.  If a man permitted himself to be enslaved, that he thoroughly deserved his fate.  Such was the harsh logic that prevented anyone from even questioning the cruelties the slaves suffered, let alone the legitimacy of slavery itself.

What part of that would not apply to the Third Reich?  On the next page we are reminded of the practice of decimation: if a Roman general did not like the way his soldiers were performing, he would take out by lot every tenth man and have him publicly beaten to death as an example to the rest.

Here is another windy statement about the Republic.  ‘A Republic ruled by violence would hardly be a Republic at all.’  Violence was everywhere throughout the history of the Republic.  Only one of the big hitters in the last century of the Republic died in his bed.  It was the same with the Empire.  Gibbon said:

Such was the unhappy fate of the Roman emperors, that whatever might be their conduct, their fate was commonly the same. A life of pleasure or virtue, of severity or mildness, of indolence or glory, alike led to an untimely grave; and almost every reign is closed by the same disgusting repetition of slavery and murder.

For about 700 years, ancient Rome made a modern banana republic look stable.

Julius Caesar was a mass murderer.  He was at his worst in France (then known as Gaul) during election times.  He would massacre hundreds of thousands in wars he engineered for that purpose in order to improve his electoral standing in Rome.  Mr Holland tells us:

In Caesar’s energy there was something demonic and sublime.  Touched by boldness, perseverance and a yearning to be the best, it was the spirit of the Republic at its most inspiring and lethal.  No wonder that his men worshipped him, for they too were Roman, and felt privileged to be sharing in their general’s great adventure.  Battle-hardened by years of campaigning, they were in no mood to panic now at the peril of the situation.  Their faith in Caesar and their own invincibility held good.

Doubtless Hitler felt this way when he entered Paris. Mr Holland then tells us that the ancient authors – it is Plutarch – estimated that the conquest of Gaul had cost one million dead, one million more enslaved, and 800 cities taken by storm.  If Plutarch was right, Hitler let the French off lightly.  ‘Demonic’ would be an understatement: but how on earth could this be sublime?

To the Romans, no truer measure of a man could be found than his capacity to withstand grim ordeals of exhaustion and blood.  By such a reckoning, Caesar had proved himself the foremost man in the Republic.

But a little further on we are told in the context of a discussion of the libido of Caesar:

Even to men who had followed their general through unbelievable hardships, his sexual prowess spelled effeminacy.  Great though Caesar had proved himself, steel-hard in body and mind, the moral codes of the Republic were unforgiving.  A citizen could never afford to slip.  Dirt on a toga would always show.

So, we again have large statements about attitudes to sex that just ignore human nature. Are we to believe that Caesar’s soldiers thought less of him as a man because he enjoyed giving it to women as much as he enjoyed killing men?

Cicero may be the most overrated windbag in all history.  His death was pathetic.  It came with the proscription of Augustus.

After all, as Cato had taught him, there were nightmares worse than death.  Trapped by his executioners at last, Cicero leaned out from his litter and bared his throat to the sword.  This was the gesture of a gladiator, and one he had always admired.  Defeated in the greatest and deadliest of all games, he unflinchingly accepted his fate.  He died as he would surely have wished: bravely, a martyr to freedom and to freedom of speech.

That is pure bullshit.  I wonder if perhaps Mr Holland is a libertarian?

Poet of the Month: Verlaine

Pierrot

This is no moonstruck dreamer of tales

Mocking ancestral portraits overhead;

His gaiety, alas, is, like his candle, dead –

And his spectre haunts us now, thin as a rail.

There, in the terror of endless lightning,

His pale blouse, a cold wind blows, takes shape

Like a winding sheet, and his mouth agape

Seems to howl at the blind worms’ gnawing.

With the sound of a night-bird’s passing grace,

His white sleeves mark out vaguely in space

Wild foolish signs to which no one replies.

His eyes are vast holes where phosphorus burns,

And his make-up renders more frightful in turn

The bloodless face, the sharp nose, of one who dies.

Dogs, Swans, Storm boys and Grand Finals

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 5 Comments

 

This note is dedicated to my counsel, a true son of South.

It was soon after we moved to Rosedale Road, Glen Iris that I started following Melbourne.  I can’t recall where we lived before that, so I think that we moved there in about 1950.  (I can recall wanting to chisel a ‘D’ before the 24 etched into the concrete driveway: D 24 was the call sign for Police H Q, at least on radio programs.)

Neither Mac nor Norma then had any interest at all in football.  As best as I can recall, I selected Melbourne for the sound patriotic reason that it was the capital city.  My first Melbourne jumper had number 1 – Dennis Cordner, whose house in Ashburton a few of us walked around to one morning.  (Cordner was Demons royalty – even Mac looked up to him.)  Every other kid in the street, or in the school ground at Glen Iris State School, wore a Collingwood jumper or an Essendon jumper with number 10 on the back.

Some people spoke of Coleman with the same kind of soft awe as when they spoke of Bradman.  I can recall Norma taking me to the MCG to see the Lightning Premiership just so that I could see Coleman play.  (The alternative, I suppose, may have been the odd newsreel and Hopalong Cassidy at the flicks before the Saturday matinee.)  I can also recall both Mac and Norma taking me to the Southern Stand to see Typhoon Tyson run through an Australian side that I think included Keith Miller.  It was about then that I started to fret – was it worse for Australia to lose to England or for Melbourne to lose to Collingwood?  This was an agonising moral question.  It still troubles me occasionally.

My interest in Melbourne was for some time confined to listening to the games on the radio, or the wireless as we sometimes called it then.  You could hear the footy or the races on the radio as you walked past people edging their nature strips besides burning autumn leaves, the harbinger of footy – just as the longer and warmer days told you that the season was ending.  It was good to align rituals with seasons.

The footy was a lot more regular and homely then.  We got to know and respond to every ground – and, later, what pubs best serviced them.  And the games only ever started at one time.  Night footy was decades away; Sundays would be reserved for the irreligious VFA, and cast-offs from barbecues who tuned in to the VFA of the day for the fights.

Each ground had its charm – or lack of it.  The Lakeside oval at South Melbourne was a great venue – it was a place where people played footy, not a temple to Mammon and press barons.  You could confidently expect to hear the umpire addressed as ‘You bludger!’  (My mate George spent a match hearing the umpire addressed as ‘You Hitler bludger!)

Lakeside has a lot of memories, but now I only get to it for the Grand Prix.  During the height of our secular conflict in 1952, a Methodist preacher got heavy raspberries for addressing the crowd.  Well, it was after all Saturday, not Sunday.  He appealed to common decency.  ‘After all, we are all Christians.’  ‘What about the bloody umpire?’

I have a clear recollection of listening to radio talk shows on Saturday evening – as I recall, the London Stores Show and the Pelaco Inquest – and on Sunday morning – I think H V Varley, who made trousers.  Some of the commentators were, I think, Baron Ruthven, Skeeter Coghlan, Chicken Smallhorn, and Butch Gale.  I would listen to their discussion spellbound by the radio beside my bed.  Later I would acquire the habit of buying The Sporting Globe (‘the pink comic’) when the Demons won.  I think that the name the Redlegs was used as much as the name the Demons back then.  For forty or so years, the Sunday roast at East Brighton (and others would not let you drop the qualifier) would be dominated by World of Sport on Channel 7, a definitively Melbourne ritual.  Even Liza, Norma’s mum, took some interest, although of course the roast was had in the laminated kitchen, in a house that we pretended had not started life in the Housing Commission.

I can recall paying a game of school footy at Gardiner’s Creek, Glen Iris when Jim Cardwell, the secretary or manager of the MFC, came waddling down the slope and handed out membership tickets to those in Demons jumpers – including me.  I was then well and truly locked in.  I think this was about 1953.

Norma’s sister lived in Elsternwick on Williams Road opposite Rippon Lea, the last house before the railway bridge, squeezed in like a triangulated sardine can.  The whole place rattled whenever a train passed, and it always had a dank and off-putting odour for me.

My cousins John and Roger barracked for South Melbourne.  That seemed to me to go with the depressed condition of the house.  I can recall the respect that they held Smokey Clegg in, but the glory days of South were long behind them, while the Demons were about to come into their own time of glory when between 1955 and 1964 they won six premierships.

I felt very sorry for South and John and Roger – my instinct is still to refer to Sydney as ‘South’.  I also felt somehow guilty.  I can recall Melbourne beating them after they, the Demons, had been five goals behind at the start of time-on.  I would think back on that when Leo Barry took that mark to secure a flag for the Swans about five decades later.

I only saw two of those Melbourne premiership wins – 1956 and 1964 – but on a good day I could still now reel off the names of a few of the main players.  Of course that whole era was, at least for Melbourne supporters, dominated by Ron Barassi.  He was a wonderful specimen of humanity, a wicked enthusiast and a magical figure who just attracted all eyes whenever he got near the ball.  After he left Melbourne, I would have to wait for about 40 years till I saw someone playing for my team who had anything like the same magnetic power of attraction.  That would be Billy Slater playing for the Melbourne Storm.

I certainly did not see the 1954 grand final in which Footscray, the Bulldogs, comfortably beat Melbourne.  It was one of those games featuring Barassi and the great Ted Whitten.  I can barely recall listening to the game, but I can clearly recall being accused of spending some part of the afternoon throwing bricks at the chooks of the family next door.  (My bedroom window overlooked their outside dunny – from which young Betty, as I will call her, would look up and flash it.)  I can’t remember much about the game, except that people were excited that the Bulldogs had at last won their first flag.  And apparently, the chooks next door were not happy.  (I have since seen a homemade film of the game with a phantom call by Ted Whitten.)

They were very different times then.  Some years ago I heard a radio interview with the guy who played fullback for the Bulldogs that day.  I think his name was Herb Henderson.  He was an apprentice butcher and he duly put in his Saturday morning shift on Grand Final day.  He then went home to Thornbury to get his gear – and probably put it in one of those little TAA plastic bags – before driving to the MCG for the game.  When he got there, he found that he’d left his boots at home.  So he asked the man in the blue coat in the car park – do you remember the men in the blue coats? – to look after his spot while he went back to Thornbury to get his boots.  He said that he made it back just in time to hear the end of Charlie Sutton’s pre-match address.  Charlie was a robust captain coach who, I think, would now be called an on-baller.  One version of that address that I have heard has Charlie saying: ‘You fellas look after the ball; I’ll look after the other stuff.’  And Charlie bloody well did, with the consequences that I have referred to.  Well, we won’t see much of that this Saturday.  Some of us might regret that.

I can remember being at the 1956 Grand Final – at least I think it was 1956, the year that we had the Olympic Games.  The crowd was huge – they were on the roof, and I think in part over the fence.  The record shows the crowd was 115, 000, but there were ugly scenes as 20,000 got turned away.  I’ve forgotten who I was with, but I was in front of the old scoreboard, on the terrace.  I wanted to go to the dunny and I went down in front of that parapet – and I then got lifted up off my feet in the crush.  It was terrifying.  Mercifully, a bloke reached over the parapet and pulled me out of the crush and suggested that I go back to where I had come from and just sit on it – while standing up.  Well we won, and it was against Collingwood.

The Melbourne v Collingwood rivalry was a kind of class war that got more and more stupid as the Smokers got more and more plebeian and the Pies got more and more drenched in white collars.  But it took off one day when Bluey Adams came on as nineteenth man, spotted someone in black and white, made a bee-line for him, and cleaned him up.  A mate of mine swears that he can still hear the sweet crunching sound of Noel McMahon running through Bobby Rose, and watching him leave the ground on a stretcher before a quieter Collingwood crowd.  Their revenge came in 1958 when they denied the Demons their fourth consecutive flag.  Mac, who never saw a game, said that Hooker Harrison had got Barassi in.  That may not have been too hard, but what would Mac know?

I saw Melbourne beat Collingwood in 1964.  We had thrashed them in the semi-final and I was extremely nervous about the rematch.  I was to sit with my mother, but I went with my mate John Burns to see the two preliminary games.  We knocked over some tall boys to soothe our nerves.  (Do you remember those anodised aluminium drinking cups that came in pigskin pouches that were handed out at 21sts?)  We were standing right behind the Punt Road goal, and the seats for Norma and me were right behind that goal about six rows back.

I therefore had a perfect view of the two extraordinary goals of Ray Gabelich.  The first he just grabbed out of the air from, I think, a throw in and got his boot to it as he was being dragged to the ground; the second he ran for about 100 yards and kept fumbling the ball until he finally got to the goal square and put it through.  There was mass hysteria of Nuremberg proportions.  Then I think it was Hassa Mann who got the ball to Neil Crompton (the Frog), who had followed his rover down the field from the back pocket, and who lined up from about 45 yards and put it through.  I had a perfect view of that one too.  The crowd was even more insane, and Burns said that from where he was standing, he feared that I might levitate.  The Frog was a very good footballer and cricketer (for Victoria), but people only ever wanted to talk about that goal.

The next year the most insanely stupid administration in the history of sport sacked the most successful coach in the history of VFL football, Norm Smith, and the Demons came under a curse like that of the Boston Red Sox when they let Babe Ruth go.  Our first game after the sacking was at Coburg for some reason.  Phil Gibbs interviewed me for TV.  I said, sagely – ‘there is more to this than meets the eye.’  In truth, it was probably just the arrogance and inanity of Australian sports administrators.  Then Barassi went to Carlton, and we were left, like Cleopatra, with mere boys.  Then Melbourne spent a generation waiting for the return of the Man, and then we found that he was out of miracles for us.

I can recall the day that South (the Swans) made it to the finals for the first time in the living memory of my cousins.  I had to attend two weddings that afternoon, but out of deference to my cousins, I was determined to listen to the game via an earpiece from my little plastic transistor.  I just had to pray that the cord would not come out and impugn a sacred moment.

The first wedding was an Italian one in some indiscriminate suburb that I have forgotten.  A bearded priest in a suspicious looking white gown kept waving us forward.  We kept resisting.  But he kept waving us.  So we moved down near the front.  Then he said – and I can recall this precisely – ‘I will give some of the service in English for the benefit of the white people present.’  The word was ‘white’.  Well, Sport, you magical herald of multiculturalism, one of those bloody white people just wants to listen to the bloody footy.  White people are like that.

We scampered away to the second wedding.  It was a Greek wedding in, I think, East Melbourne, somewhere.  The game was still going, and I still had to fight to listen to it.  As I recall it, this service was rather more mobile, and I can’t recall what language it was given – my interest was elsewhere.

And now looking back, I can’t even recall who bloody well won, or whether Bobby Skilton was playing or not.

In the late 60’s, I went to the outer on a regular basis to watch the Demons take their medicine. I went with John Wardle.  He was doing medicine.  When it came time for him to study at St V’s, we used to look carefully at the three quarter time scores of other games.  If the Pies were getting done, it might get ugly at St V’s casualty that night.  (More than four decades later, I was instructed by Slaters in a big case.  The solicitor had been brought up in Port Adelaide.  He told me that if Port got done, the blinds at home would be pulled down, and the children sent to bed without dinner.)  A lot of that raw tribalism has been dulled by television and money, although you can still find pockets of it west of Broken Hill.

Early in the ‘70s I went with an Irish Mick Carlton mate to watch Carlton in a Grand Final.  (I see that it was 1972.)  We decided to do it in style and go to Vlado’s steakhouse for lunch, and not just some pub.  There were no prices on show.  Big Jack comfortably devoured his mountainous steak.  I got through about half of mine.  Then came the bill.  Disaster!  No credit cards.  We would be short of big cans to stand on at the game!  We stood right up at the back (so I would have a sporting chance of reaching the loo).  There were 112,000 there, and Carlton reversed an earlier result and won.  Big Jack came back to our place very tired and emotional.  It had after all been a big day.  Our hall moved when he did, and he burst into tears when I put on Verdi.  The crowd, he said, sang the Slaves’ Chorus at Verdi’s funeral.

Jack was wont to devour large slices of life, but I have seen other mates reduced to tears by Jussi Bjorling while we communed after yet another Demons’ disaster.  I would say that I have seen three losses for every Melbourne win – I hardly got to go in the glory days.  I can recall John Wardle asking me to put on music of great things beaten, and I can remember a former Olympic rower getting very teary over the great male duet Au fond du temple saint (especially as sung by Jussi Bjorling and Robert Merrill).

After Barassi left Melbourne as its coach, the Demons made the Grand Final on two occasions.  As was utterly predictable, they were ritually slaughtered in each.  I had made a very smart tactical move before each of those games – for the first, I was at Iguazzu Falls; for the second, I was at Gallipoli.  In each case, the distance was both safe and mollifying.  (My middle name is McPherson, the maiden name of Mac’s mother.  The McPhersons too once made a very smart tactical move.  They were a day late for the battle of Culloden.  They may have forgotten that steam trains had not yet been invented.)

During the ‘80s I tried to ease the pain of Grand Final Day by going to the Old Boys’ breakfast, and then entertaining a select bunch of coudabeens and wannabes for lunch before watching the game live at home.  (Wedge got to the first, but he was immediately put under a life ban when he got home.  Just how he got home is the big question.)  Then we would go the Malvern Hotel.  Before the first of these challenges to decency and medical science, I had spent hours and days compiling a tape of great things beaten.  I still have it – a cassette.  It is a relic of schmalz and kitsch – but it was a good release for us withdrawn Anglo-Saxons.  As well as music, they got Richard Burton and John Gielgud.  The killer was the Maori farewell.  It slays drunks.

But then there was that magical day at the Western Oval in 1987.  If we won and Hawthorn beat Geelong, we would be in our first finals since 1964.  (That does seem a very short drought now.)  The Doggies broke free, and we prayed that they would put us to sleep mercifully.  Then Our Son – the most graceful footballer I’ve seen – rose again.  He did so twice!  We got ahead, Dunstall put Hawthorn in front, and grown men cried – all the way to Young & Jackson’s.  I took my girls to watch the boys in training, and they asked me why I was crying.  ‘Bloody long time between drinks, Girls.’

Then came the apocalypse at the misbegotten and frozen Waverley when an anal Baptist with whistle addiction called out Jimmy Stynes after the bell and then sweetly gave the ball to the only bastard on the ground that could make the distance, and I turned round and saw the faces of the GIs who had entered Belsen.  My mate, now a criminal silk, said he was prepared to do time.  I reflected on the education of my daughters on the subject of the blood feud and the vendetta.  Then I – or Freud, or God – threw a lever in my soul or psyche that ensured that no mere game would ever get so dangerously close to me again.  I think that day comes within the phrase ‘soul-destroying.’  Shit, it was a hard road back home from the end of the bloody earth.  (Imagine going to New Zealand to watch the Wallabies get yet another lacing!)

The Demons got so bad that when the Melbourne Storm was created, I was very glad to attend the first game.  I soon became attracted to the game for a number of reasons – when you followed the Demons, you did not go to see the football, but to enjoy a lunch beforehand, and the AFL, as it had then become, was not minded to give us too many bloody games at home on a Saturday afternoon.  Another reason for the attraction was the ferocious snobbery about League – even in Sydney.

So, I followed the Storm, and I patronised the Greeks in Swan Street before or after the game for that purpose.  My patronage of Salonas became an indispensable part of a civilised existence.  Most of the time I went to the Greeks and the footy on my own.  I took the late Jim Kennon one night.  He left at half time after perceptively noting that they were passing the ball backwards.  I took my mate George, a hopeless Pies addict from the Malvern Hotel.  We had a very good lunch.  The game was awful.  So we went back to the Greeks and had an even better dinner.  The ambulance, in the form of George’s wife, arrived to a scene of mild carnage.

Then there was the sheer bliss of our first flag.  I think this was 1999.  We were down and out at half time, but we came back and won with a penalty try.  And Little Johnnie Howard was there to share the pain, going through one of his preposterous little sportsman phases in a St George jumper.  You can have even money that that is still the only NRL game that Little Johnnie has ever been to.

I have been fortunate to watch players like Billy Slater and Cameron Smith.  Men have taken their sons to the Storm just so that they could say that they had seen Billy Slater.  In his own way, Smith impresses me now as much as Barassi did when I was a boy – he quite possibly has far more impact on the games he plays because of the nature of the role of captain in NRL footy, and because Smith in number 9 is pivotal in either attack or defence.  He is certainly the coolest player in any sport that I have seen since Steve Waugh.  (I would pair the two as captains.)

We have won four flags – you can put to one side that fascist nonsense from those bastards in Sydney who did not appreciate our version of double entry accounting – and the club has persistently rewarded its members and supporters as well as any of them could decently ask for.  My sense is that the only football club in Australia that could match it for coaching and leadership at the moment is Hawthorn.  (As it happens both clubs will lose their current leaders at about the same time.)

So, I will have a split of allegiance between the Bulldogs and South (the Swans) on Saturday.  I will just have to resolve that as best I can, but rather than put the kiss of death on my boys, I will stay silent about what might happen in the game at Sydney on the following day.  The Sharks will be as popular with the crowd as the Doggies will be, but we are used to that up there.  We do after all give Sydney so many reasons to be jealous.  Among other things, we invented the best code of footy on earth.

I will however say this.  The Storm boys are resolved.  The big question is whether I can steel myself to watch the game live, or if I should put on Verdi’s Rigoletto or La Traviata – or perhaps La Forza del Destino! – and sneak a peek at the scoreboard between scenes.  At my age, a man has to look after his heart – even with the benefit of the 1987 by-pass.

And yes, it is 52 years this Saturday since the Frog slotted the sealer; and yes, the Red Sox finally broke free of their curse for selling Babe Ruth; but I have it in my water that it took them a lot longer than 52 bloody years, at least to win a World Series; and yes, even the great Barassi might have to give right of way to the Babe.

Good luck to all who take part in either game.  These games are proper and decent national rites.  Am I still allowed to say that they are tests of manhood?