Poetry

Passing bull 47- Statutory bull

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

 

Lawyers have given up hope of getting sense out of acts of parliament, but you rarely see bullshit of the quality on display in the CFA Act in Victoria.

s. 6A Accountability of Authority

(1) The Authority is subject to the general direction and control of the Minister in the performance of its functions and the exercise of its powers.

(2) The Minister may from time to time give written directions to the Authority.

The net result is that the heading is misleading.  The Authority is not accountable at all.  The Minister is.  Well we know that.  If the Board doesn’t toe the government line, the Minister fires it.  Why bother to have a board?

Now cop this

s.6B Objective

The objective of the Authority in performing its functions and exercising its powers under this Act is to—

(a) contribute to a whole of sector approach to emergency management;

(b) promote a culture within the emergency management sector of community focus, interoperability and public value.

That is Grange quality bullshit – world class.  They nearly used the word ‘holistic’ in a statute.  It gets picked up in the EBA that may be the final monument to the bullshit of the IR Club.  It is more than 400 pages long.  How would you like to run a business under that kind of diktat?

3.1.5. A joint approach on “productivity policies” that embrace the drivers

and enablers of performance and are consistently applied.

3.1.6. recognising that a productivity model recognises the changing

knowledge requirements of employees covered by this agreement

in all phases of the enterprise activity and also caters for:

(a) increasing requirement for innovation

(b) accelerating adoption of technology

(c) management of risk

(d) motivation of a diverse workforce

(e) working conditions as a work value differentiator

‘Drivers’ and ‘enablers’!  That is premier grand cru bullshit.

But there is a part of the CFA Act that is intelligible.

s. 6F Recognition of Authority as a volunteer-based organisation

The Parliament recognises that the Authority is first and foremost a volunteer-based organisation, in which volunteer officers and members are supported by employees in a fully integrated manner.

How does Danny Boy square that with handing control over the CFA to those who are not volunteers?  Don’t ask Danny Boy.  Ask the Premier of Victoria.  A tiny minority gets a veto over the parliament preferred volunteers.  Danny Boy must have some kind of dispensing power – like James II.

That king got run out of town.

 

Ali again

For the first time I can recall, The Economist obituary ran to two pages.  It contained the following.

Denied entry to diners on a southern tour, he made one of his raps of it: ‘Man, it was really a let-down drag.  For all those miles I had to eat out of a bag.’  Told in a Louisville hamburger joint, when he went in wearing his Olympic gold medal, that they still didn’t serve niggers, he said that was fine; he didn’t eat them.  But under the joshing lay depth upon depth of furious resentment…..Black heavyweights who were not new men like him, still managed by white mobsters and dutifully silent about politics, he called Uncle Toms and ‘great white hopes’, and mimicked their grunts and shuffles…like bears or apes.  It became a habit, turned most viciously against Frazier and Foreman, funny and appalling both at once.

Ali was not a saint.  (Does Islam have them?)  He was just the greatest.

 

Poet of the month: Anna Akhmatova

6

Lightly the weeks are flying,

What has happened, I can’t take in.

Just as, my dearest, the white

Nights first watched you in prison,

So they gaze down

With their warm aquiline eyes and

Of your cross transcendent

And of death I hear them speak.

Passing Bull 46 – How low can we go?

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 5 Comments

 

It wasn’t hard to guess who were the sponsors of Greg Sheridan’s attack on the Prime Minister in today’s Australian, but the inanity and vulgarity are breathtaking even by our standards.  The white-anting is said to reflect internal grief about the refusal of the PM ‘to campaign on key Liberal issues such as national security’.

The Prime Minister’s decision to tour a mattress factory on Thursday when the coffins carrying the remains of Australian soldiers killed in the Vietnam conflict were returned through the RAAF base at Richmond, in Sydney, has left some liberals astonished, confused.  They regard the politics of this decision-making as bizarre.

The official line, that Turnbull and Bill Shorten stayed away so as not to detract from the occasion, is nonsensical.  A respectful, non-campaigning prime ministerial presence would have underlined the nation’s gratitude to the fallen.

Without any overt politicising, the benefit to the PM of pictures of him welcoming home the coffins would have been very powerful.  Many Liberals think that any recent previous Liberal PM would have been there as a matter of course.

This is worse than bullshit.  It is revolting.  Our politicians are on the nose because they lack decency, taste, and balls.  The typical stunt that revolts us is a politician seeking to gain votes out of a sombre event, one that should never be tainted by politics.  One such event is the public return of our war dead.  Any politician who sought to make political capital of that would most politely be described as a jerk.  Yet when the P M and the Leader of the Opposition reach accord on respecting this basic level of decency, Sheridan says they are being ‘nonsensical.’  He, and his spiteful backers in the party, think that Turnbull should have made capital out of this photo-op, but that he should have done so covertly, rather than overtly.  Get out there and be political – but lie about it.  It takes a disgusting level of chutzpah to seek votes for welcoming back coffins of young men that his political party sent to their deaths on false premises.  The only thing that Sheridan is right about is that any recent previous Liberal PM would have been there as a matter of course.  Of course they would – that is just why they are so much on the nose.

I had proposed to vote informal, but Mr Sheridan has persuaded that I should vote for Mr Turnbull.  He is, I fear, our last best hope for any decency in Australian public life.

Poet of the month: Anna Akhmatova

I

They took you away at daybreak.  Half wak-

ing, as though at a wake, I followed.

In the dark chamber children were crying,

In the image-case, candlelight guttered.

At your lips, the chill of an ikon,

A deathly sweat at your brow.

I shall go creep to our wailing wall,

Crawl to the Kremlin towers.

Passing Bull 45 – The Sick Humour of Mr Dean

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 4 Comments

Mr Rowan Dean edits The Australian Spectator and he participates in political talk shows on Sky News.  He also has an occasional piece in the AFR which purports to be humorous.  Mr Dean is the ultimate partisan.  When Mr Abbott fell, Mr Dean held a well-publicised wake for the True Believers.  The current Prime Minister is too soft on too many things for Mr Dean.

On Saturday, Mr Dean had a ‘Poor Me’ piece mocking seven Australians who have known more success in life than he has.  Here are two examples of what Mr Dean regards as humour.

  1. Adam Baddes: Forced to change his name because the Good Life he presumed he was entitled to had in fact turned out to be really, really Bad thanks to endemic racism, xenophobia, intolerance etc (see above), this hugely talented sportsman and elite athlete soared to national prominence in 2013 when a five-year-old girl poked her tongue out at him and wiggled her fingers in front of her nose, thereby suggesting that Mr Baddes was descended from an obscure species of Bonobo that once thrived in the Serengeti (as indeed we all are.) Not content with having the girl put under house arrest and humiliated for life, Mr Baddes was appointed Australian of the Year and National Treasure in quick succession. The judges were particularly impressed by Mr Baddes’ heartfelt attempts to express goodwill and unite the nation by throwing imaginary spears at crowds of onlookers and by his Australia Day speech in which he poured scorn on all privileged, white, male, Anglo-Saxon, non-indigenous Australians. 10 stars.
  2. Nova Peris-Backbone: Top Olympian and role-model to Indigenous girls, Ms Backbone was more surprised than anybody when former Prime Minister Julia “La” Grillard decided that as an Indigenous female Ms Backbone should a) be catapulted into the Labor Party and b) be catapulted into the Senate despite having no interest in either. With Ms Backbone happily immersing herself in the senatorial largesse provided by mainstream taxpayers, the judges were hugely impressed by her tearful announcement that the only people worthy of criticising her are Indigenous women. 8 stars.

This is worse than bullshit.  It is vile.   Mr Dean is an ideologue who proudly asserts the rights of bigots, and says that we should all be free to insult or offend people because of their race.

I do not believe that this kind of stuff has any place in a quality newspaper.  I have written to the Editor, Michael Stutchbury, as follows.

….. I wish to complain about Rowan Dean in your newspaper.

Take Saturday’s piece.  It is not just that it is not funny – it is tasteless, and it is predictably so.   The man is, like Andrew Bolt, fixated on race.  Four targets of the Saturday piece are people of colour.  The article oozes jealousy.  His targets have done something.  Mr Dean comes across as a man who leers, sneers, and jeers. 

A colleague of mine described the letter as puerile bigotry about people who have achieved more than the author could ever hope to do.

Shouldn’t we have lost this undergraduate tribalist view of politics, that some call ‘culture wars’, back in the ‘50’s?   When I heard people like Bolt and Dean last year saying that the crowd abuse of Adam Goodes was not related to his race, I knew that they lived in their own sealed world.  I wonder whether either of them has ever stood in the outer at the AFL or NRL and heard the abuse directed to Aboriginal footballers?

I subscribe to your newspaper because I like it and I respect it.  It is close to being nauseating to find someone like Rowan Dean in the same space as Laura Tingle, Tony Walker, or Phillip Coorey.  May I suggest that your readers deserve better?  It is hard enough enduring another ghastly election without this sort of rubbish.

Frankly, it gives me no pleasure to write like this, but I think that I should.

Other people whose opinion I respect have expressed much stronger views.

Poet of the Month: Anna Akhmatova

The first husband of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova was one of a large number of people shot in 1921 under the government of Lenin.  During the worst of the purges of Stalin, known by the Russians as the ‘Yezhov terror’, Akhmatova spent seventeenth months in prison queues trying to get news of her son.  This great poet was therefore well-placed to write of terror in Russia.  The people of Leningrad in 1940 would soon be able to compare the brutality of Hitler to the terror of Stalin.

Akhmatova wrote of the period of terror in a masterpiece called a Requiem.  The extracts for this month come from that poem.  The translations are by D M Thomas in this year’s Folio Edition.

In the Epilogue of the poem the author speaks of the others outside the jails:

I should like to call you all by name,

But they have lost the lists….

I have woven for them a great shroud

Out of the poor words I heard them speak.

She said that she would accept a monument if it were placed

….here, where I stood for three hundred hours

And where they never, never opened the doors for me.

 

Here, then, is the first extract from Requiem by Anna Akhmatova.

 

Prologue

In those years only the dead smiled,

Glad to be at rest:

And Leningrad city swayed like

A needless appendix to its prisons.

It was then that the railway-yards

Were asylums of the mad;

Short were the locomotives’

Farewell songs.

Stars of death stood

Above us, and innocent Russia

Writhed under bloodstained boots, and

Under the tyres of Black Marias.

 

 

Passing Bull 44 – Outstanding hypocrisy in the Press

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

Politics and politicians are on the nose all around the world.  There is a savage reaction in the West against political parties and political elites.  Since the system as we know it has been worked by political parties run by elites, the results may be disastrous, if not terminal.  Corbyn was bad enough, but Trump is a genuine nightmare.

In Australia there is a very unhappy union between politicians and journalists.  There is much to be said for the view that our press is in large part responsible for the awfulness of our politicians.  They are far too cliquey and close to their subjects; the worst kinds of would-be journalists are tribal, and feed themselves on hits from other followers of the cult on the Internet.  The real disasters are former political staffers who then want to pose as journalists.  Instead, they become boring and loaded cheerleaders.

Two of the worst examples are Chris Kenny and Niki Savva.  They could not hope to pose as being objective, but they sadly think that that they are intelligent.  They live in confined echo chambers quite cut off from the world, just like the politicians in Canberra.  They are part of a useless but self-appointed elite that is quite out of touch with what they call the mainstream.

It was therefore quite a surprise to read the following from Chris Kenny in The Australian last Saturday:

There is a great and pernicious divide in Australia.  It is not between the eastern seaboard and the western plains, or between the rich and poor, city and country, black and white, or even between established citizens and refugees.  The divide is between the political/media class and the mainstream.

There is a gulf between those who consider themselves superior to the masses and want to use the nation’s status to parade their post-material concerns, and those who do the work and raise the families that make the nation what it is.

That is a reasonable statement of the problem, even if it comes from one of the worst examples of those who give rise to the problem.  And what on earth is a former Liberal staffer – attached to Lord Downer; no wonder his syntax is shot – and employed by The Australian and Sky doing referring to ‘the masses’.  Has Mr Kenny ever met one of them?  But then it all becomes clear when we get this:

In this election we are seeing the chasm open up, like a parting of the seas, as the media elites and their preferred left-of-centre politicians seek to determine what issues should be decisive.  They lecture and hector the mainstream.  Worse, they try to dictate what facts can even be discussed.  They seek to silence dissent.  They have compiled an informal list of unmentionables, facts that should not be outed: the truths whose name we dare not speak.

And then Mr Kenny goes on to ‘lecture and hector’ those poor souls who share his echo chamber, the true believers who know that Satan masquerades as the ABC and the Fairfax press.

This is all as boring and predictable as anything said by Mr Kenny in The Australian or one of those ghastly Sky chat shows that demonstrate that the chattering classes, the former chardonnay socialists, have long ago swapped sides graphically and terminally.  We reached a new all-time low recently when Peta Credlin joined Andrew Bolt for a nocturnal tryst on Sky that will be sure to upset at least three dinners a night.  It might all be boring, but the hypocrisy of Mr Kenny takes your breath away.

We get some idea of the problem from the article immediately beneath that of Mr Kenny.  It comes from the paper’s former editor, Chris Mitchell.  Mr Mitchell looks like he may be as unattractive in the flesh as he is in print.  On the same day, Mr Coorey in the AFR – part of the Anti-Christ and my paper of choice – referred to those journalists who scramble like Spitfire pilots when someone says something rude about the Liberals.  Mr Mitchell gives us a roll call of those he invokes to defend that brute Dutton – Paul Murray, Judith Sloan, Mark Latham, Andrew Bolt, Peter van Onselen, Paul Kelly, Chris Kenny, and other pilots in The Oz or Sky squadrons, the usual suspects.  There is apparently honour among sellers because Mr Mitchell informs us that Peta told Andrew that she would not criticise Niki over her bestselling book.  Here surely was grace that passeth all understanding.  And guess what – Peta’s ‘appearances throughout the week were sure-footed and incisive.’  Has tribalism got any lower than this?

And Mr Mitchell gives us an insight into the light years between him and the ‘masses’ when he says:

Latham sees Labor being trapped in a world in which the Left rejects the notion of observable truths, but ordinary voters see Safe Schools as an extreme attempt to reconstruct gender.

In the sweet name of the son of the carpenter, is there any bastard outside the Canberra bubble who knows what ‘reconstructing gender’ might mean?  Does any decent Australian give a bugger about the alleged Left/Right divide or any other of those profoundly stupid chat shows called ‘culture wars’?  Have they not yet seen that everyone else rejects all this bullshit and all those who want to wallow in it?  Does the press just not get that they are an essential part of the package that people are rejecting all around the world?

Then there is poor sad Gerard Henderson who looks like he has never smiled, let alone laughed.  Gerry must be the text-book example of a man who preaches – and, like Mr Kenny, and most of these cave-dwellers, he does preach – only to the converted.  It looks like the lawyers may have been at Gerry’s piece, because he wants to say that the Royal Commission is loaded against our George, but he concludes by saying that their behaviour raises issues of fairness.  His sub-editor said the Commission ‘fails the test of fairness.’

And Gerry has come up with some hard evidence.  Someone on the Commission staff had worked for the ABC!  Worse, Gerry had followed that person’s journalism – no ABC journalist ever escapes the gaze of either Gerry or God – and Gerry ‘happened to know that he was a vehement critic of the theological conservatives in the Catholic Church, such as Pell, layman B A Santamaria and more besides’.  Just think of it – an ABC journalist being a critic of Bob!  But the case is even worse!  Gerry just happened to run into this one-time journalist in the street – the corner of Phillip and Bent streets.  For some reason, Gerry was surprised to see the man.

Crittenden was dressed in a fine suit, well-pressed shirt and tasteful tie.  I asked him how it came to pass that a one-time left wing ABC journalist [really, Gerry, the left-wing part was otiose – we and God know they all are left-wing at Auntie] looking so CBDish so early in the morning.

Good heavens – an uppity socialist!  And what in heaven has the earliness of the morning got to do with this dastardly conspiracy?  But Satan can be devious with his disguises – just look at that unfortunate incident in the garden when he got us all damned, and one half of humanity proscribed for the ages; it was a bugger of a day for the girls.

Having mounted this massive case about his surprise ‘that a Pell critic such as Crittenden had been appointed to a senior position at the royal commission’, Gerry delivers the coup de grâce.

It would have been like appointing Andrew Bolt to a senior management position at the royal commission into trade union governance and corruption.

Poor, sad Gerry – he does not understand, and he never will, that very many Australians, including me, think that his mate Tony Abbott did a lot worse than that in appointing his mate Dyson Heydon to run that royal commission.

And Gerry – that other royal commission can say what it likes about George, but nothing they say will come anywhere near to causing the damage that George has brought on himself and his church.

And finally, Gerry – in addition to harbouring Bolshie views, I’m a ghastly snob; I only wear shirts from Jermyn Street; I only wear ties by Hermès or Ferragamo; and I have just acquired a Zegna scarf to add to the Hermès number – so you can put me down as a card carrying communist who should go straight to the head of the Watch Lists maintained by Opus Dei and the Society of Jesus.

A Big Thank You…

….to the person who kindly sent me that wonderful hamper.  Your graceful note did not disclose your identity.  I recall some reference to being saved from the communists.  Was it, you, perhaps, Gerry?  God does after all work in mysterious ways.

Poet of the month: A D Hope

The Apotolesm of W B Yeats

Such a grand story

Of Willy Yeats,

Keeping his warm bed

Under the slates

To a tale of milkmaids

His friend relates:

 

‘At churns in Sligo

The wenches hum:

Come butter, Come butter,

Come butter,

Come! 

Every lump as

Big as my bum!’

 

A milkmaid mounting

The poet’s stair;

A blackbird trilling

His country air;

Butter and bottom,

The muse was there.

 

Sheep in the meadow,

Cows in the corn;

Come Willy Butler

Blow up your horn!

Out of such moments

Beauty is born.

Passing bull 43 – Bullshit about insults

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

Election time is a very bad time to be an Australian.  We are now squarely in the world-wide pattern of rejecting major parties.  I would prefer to avoid politics, and observe that most of our first white boat people in the First Fleet were illiterate, and undesirable, but some ideologues refuse to lie down.

More than twenty years ago, I attended an IBA conference in New York.  It had been scheduled for Nairobi, but the venue was changed to New York because of terrorist unrest in Kenya.  (The Kenyans said this was all a CIA plot.)  Our media law section was to have a session with the editor of The Kenya Times.  My American colleagues were First Amendment lawyers and ‘free speech’ fanatics.  I, not being a fanatic, was asked to look after the editor in the debate on the rostrum.  The room was packed with coloured people, and it soon became obvious that my man, the editor, who was coloured, had the numbers on his side.

The editor produced that day’s morning edition of the Murdoch tabloid of New York. The front page had a crude, full-on full-page swipe at the love life of the then wife of a crude lout called Donald Trump.  The back page hurled abuse in giant headlines at the Yankees and said: ‘Stick a fork in them.’  The front and back pages were therefore colossal and provocative insults.  They were standard fare for New York but the editor said, entirely credibly, that if he had published either of those pages in his paper, there would have been blood on the streets of Nairobi before the sun had set.

This was a sobering reminder that our tolerance of insults varies from place to place and time to time.  There are still many places in the world where I could be executed for saying that God does not exist.

Any society that has laws will have laws against killing people or physically hurting them.  We have laws, civil and criminal, about assault.  What about when the assault is verbal?  Do we have laws against insulting language?  Yes – at least where the insult is made in public.

What is involved when one person insults another?  The key meaning in the OED is ‘to assail with scornful abuse or offensive disrespect; to offer indignity to; to affront, outrage.’  If you look at the OED, for both the noun and the verb, you will see the link between ‘insult’ and ‘assault’.  An insult is a verbal kind of assault or attack by one person on another.   To ‘outrage’ someone is to do something they resent so much that they are enraged.  The usual reaction of the victim is to seek revenge.

We have laws against verbal assaults called insults because we realise that verbal assaults can be just as wounding as physical assaults.  We also know that one of the primary objects of the law is to keep the peace, and that one easy way to produce a breach of the peace is for one person to insult another, just as it is for one person to strike another.  In many cultures, an insult could lead to a duel and death.  In many cultures, a religious insult, or an insult to a family, will lead to death without the formality of a duel, much less a trial.

So, if in Australia one person approaches another in public and says ‘Your father is a coward and your mother is a slut’, that person has committed a criminal offence.  It would be silly to say that the father and mother should be left to a civil action in defamation, if they have one, or that the person directly insulted, and outraged, might inquire of a lawyer whether he or she has any form of action at all.  We think that the police should have the power to make an immediate arrest in order to keep the peace.  And it would be just as silly to say that such a law affects something called ‘freedom of speech’.  Most laws do, especially if the law expressly refers to speech.  It adds nothing to this conversation to state that inevitable result.  The question is whether such a law is warranted.  Very few people think that such a law is not warranted.

Most see such a law as essential to keeping the peace in a civilised community.  Similarly, most people think they should be able to walk down the street or go the football with their family without having to listen to or read obscenities.  There is no great issue of policy much less ideology here – we are just talking about keeping the peace.  Most people know what that is and what we should do to achieve it.

We in Australia therefore have these laws about insulting people in public.  We are much more sceptical about any suggestion that we should outlaw insulting religion or the nation.  But that scepticism need not disturb our dealing with what we regard as plain cases of insult that the law must deal with.

Similarly, laws against insulting or offensive language have been abused before.  If the coppers could not think of anything else to charge a protester with, they used to produce a ‘sheet of language.’  They don’t do that now, and abolishing a law may be an extreme way to deal with the abuse of it.

So, the Australian states have various laws about insulting or offensive behaviour in public.  Well, then, what if an insult or offence is directed at someone because of their race?  In addition to our general state laws, there is a federal law for insults based on race.  That law says that you must not publicly insult or humiliate people because of their race (Racial Discrimination act, 1975, s. 18C).  Unlike the state act, the federal act does not create a criminal offence.  You can go to jail for insulting behaviour without more under the state law, but if you insult a person on the ground of their race, you cannot be imprisoned or even charged with a breach of the law under the federal act.  The remedy for a breach of this law is a complaint to a government agency.

We are then left with an intellectual curio.  People do not complain about a law that makes publishing insulting words a crime, but they do campaign against a law that doesn’t make such an act a crime, and is confined to cases where the insult is made on the grounds of race.  That qualification if anything would make the insult more wounding, provocative, and dangerous.  What is the explanation of this puzzle?

You cannot help wondering whether an obsession with ideology distorts people’s views so that they lose contact not just with how ordinary people think, but with reality.

Just think of the laws covered by the following exercises involving speech.

I steal your Ph D thesis and claim it as my own.

A man telephones the mother of a child to tell her, falsely, that he has just seen the child run over on the way to school and killed.  He does so purely to hurt the mother.  She miscarries and loses her next child.

A man at a huge religious rally in the Punjab seeks to cause panic by shouting that religious opponents are attacking from another quarter.  He does so merely to test his power and to observe the chaos and death.  Hundreds, foreseeably, die.

A young man tells his best mate in strict confidence that he is gay but that he does not propose to come out in the near future.  His mate immediately goes online to tell the world.  He says that he is doing so to save his mate from cowardice and hypocrisy, and because he believes in freedom of speech.

Someone offers you a fortune to bomb the P M.

A man approaches a husband and wife in the street and abuses the wife and says she is an Asian slut.

A woman approaches the same husband and wife and says that the husband has been having an affair with her for years but she is going to terminate it because he is lousy in bed and has issues with personal hygiene, false teeth, and prostheses.

A man walks around a muslem wedding ceremony with a sign saying that the ceremony is as fake as the faith of its participants.

A man having a dispute with a highly strung Sikh neighbour calls him over to the fence to tell him in front of his family that his culture is intellectually, morally, and spiritually bankrupt.  He does so with the purpose of causing the Sikh to retaliate and so lose face in the neighbourhood, and enable him to go to law against his adversary.

A politician deliberately fans racial division to get elected.  At one rally, he says that the coloured people are the missing link with the apes.  He succeeds, but the banlieues are in flames

A blackfella goes into a bar in Alice Springs and quietly and methodically and soberly begins to insult both white and coloured people at the bar by reference to their race.

In each case, the person making the statement is intending to cause harm to another person.  Is there any moral or political difference in those cases of insult where the insult is based on race?  Has the phrase ‘freedom of speech’ any application in any example?  Should the law be silent for any of these cases?

The French Declaration of Rights of 1789 said in article 4: ‘Liberty consists of the power to do whatever is not injurious to others.’  Some principle like that must underlie any legal system of a nation that says that its citizens are free.  My freedom of speech does not give me a licence to hurt others.  It does not override my liability for using speech to break a contract, commit a crime, make a nuisance, breach the peace, or defame someone else – or for any other form of speech that the law makes unlawful or illegal.

We can argue about the extent to which any crime or civil wrong may impinge on our right to freedom of speech, but singing a hymn to that ‘freedom’, or proclaiming yourself a warrior in its defence, does not advance the argument.  The warrior is left to declaim loudly to the birds – if you seek to settle the differences that arise from conflicts between people by reference to some grand ideological prescription, the most polite word for your world view is bullshit.

If I got booked for speeding between Wodonga and Albury, and I complained that this ticket infringed my right to the absolute freedom of trade and intercourse conferred by s. 92 of the Constitution, I would be making much more sense than if I said that proceedings against me for insulting or offensive words in public infringe my right to freedom of speech.  They would both be bullshit, but there are, after all, degrees of bullshit.

So, when recently someone put out a banner up at the footy that was offensive to people of one faith, there was a general and quick display of anger and a popular wish that the law be enforced to remove the offensive banner.  And the ideologues sensibly said nothing.

Poet of the month: A D Hope

The Sleeper

Our birth is but a sleeping and a forgetting…

When the night comes, I get

Into my coffin; set

The soul’s brutal alarm;

Pull the green coverlet

Over my face; lie warm,

Deaf to the black storm.

 

Ah, but the truce is vain;

Then Chaos comes again;

The Mind’s insatiate eye

Opens on its insane

Landscape of misery,

And will not let me die.

 

A gunshot tears the brain –

That one quick crash of pain

Pays for a lasting sleep.

Be finished with it then!

What argument can keep

You from that step?

 

The argument of fear,

A whisper that I hear

A voice that haunts my bed:

‘The only sleep is here;

Suffer your nightmare; dread

The daylight of the dead.’

Passing Bull 42 – Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Refugees and Us

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 1 Comment

 

Many people outside Australia want to come to it because they are threatened or oppressed in their own country.  They are prepared to risk death to do so.  We say that their attempts to come here are illegal – unless they can afford to fly – and we use our navy to stop them.  We then justify our stopping them by saying that we have saved them from the risks of the voyage.  We are doing these people a favour.  Then we lock them up in lands that are brutal or corrupt or both.  We employ private institutions to do our SS work.  And we wait for the refugees to start burning themselves to death.

Have I missed something or is this why I will be again reminded in Cambridge that Australians are pariahs in Europe?  This is not just bullshit.  It is not just an offence against the mind.  The offence is against humanity.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer made the following remarks at the beginning of 1943 after he had been many years in a Nazi jail.  They look to me to apply to Australia word for word in its attitudes to refugees in 2016.  Has ever such a rich country been so utterly mean?

There is a very real danger of our drifting into an attitude of contempt for humanity.  We know quite well that we have no right to do so, and that it would lead us into the most sterile relation to our fellow men.  The following thoughts may keep us from such a temptation.  It means that we at once fall into the worst of blunders of our opponents.  The man who despises another will never be able to make anything of him.  Nothing that we despise in the other man is entirely absent from ourselves.  We often expect from others more than we are willing to do ourselves.  Why have we hitherto thought so intemperately about man and his frailty and temptability?  We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer…..

We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds; we have been drenched by many storms; we have learnt the arts of equivocation and pretense; experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from 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?

When I look with disgust on the sloganeering dope and the dull thug who have been in charge of this cruelty to people worse off than us, I am deeply ashamed of my own complicity.  What is the difference between me and the citizen of Munich who preferred to look the other way when Dachau was mentioned?

Poet of the Month: A D Hope

The Pleasure of Princes

What pleasures have great princes?  These: to know

Themselves reputed mad with pride or power;

To speak few words – few words and short bring low

This ancient house, that city with flame devour;

 

To make old men, their father’s enemies,

Drunk on the vintage of the former age;

To have great painters show their mistresses

Naked to the succeeding time; engage

 

The cunning of able, treacherous ministers

To serve, despite themselves, the cause they hate,

And leave a prosperous kingdom to their heirs

Nursed by the caterpillars of the state;

 

To keep their spies in good men’s hearts: to read

The malice of the wise, and act betimes;

To hear the Grand Remonstrances of greed,

Led by the pure; cheat justice of her crimes;

 

To beget worthless sons and, being old,

By starlight climb the battlements, and while

The pacing century hugs himself for cold,

Keep vigil like a lover, muse and smile,

 

And to think, to see from the grim castle steep

The midnight city below rejoice and shine:

‘There my great demon grumbles in his sleep

And dreams of his destruction, and of mine.’

Passing Bull 41 – Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Folly, Donald Trump, and not a few locals

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

My compliments to the Commissioner of the NYPD who commented on the call by Senator Cruz ‘to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighbourhoods.’  The Commissioner said: ‘We don’t need a President that doesn’t respect the values that form the foundation of this country.  There are more than 900 Muslim offices in the NYPD, many of whom also serve in the US military in combat – something that Cruz has never done.’  That is what I expect from New York’s finest – giving the bird to a bumptious Texan senator.

Well, Cruz has gone, tearily enough for a Strong Man, unloved by most, and loathed by those that knew him best in his own party.  If Trump revolts most people, Cruz frightens those best placed to assess him.

The apparent accession of Donald Trump to the position of nominee for the Presidency of the United States will do irreparable damage to the standing of that nation.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer spent many years in Nazi jails before the Nazis hanged him just before the end of the war.  He was a man of ferocious moral courage and an intellect to match that spirit.  In a series of notes headed ‘After Ten Years’ made for New Year in 1943, Bonhoeffer made observations about the state of the nation of Germany – at the beginning of 1943 – and himself.  In the part headed ‘Of folly’, Bonhoeffer made observations that apply word for word to Donald Trump.

‘Folly is a more dangerous enemy to the good than evil.  One can protest against evil; it can be unmasked and, if need be, prevented by force.  Evil always carries the seeds of its own destruction, as it makes people, at the least, uncomfortable.  Against folly we have no defence.  Neither protest nor force can touch it; reasoning is no use; facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved – indeed, the fool can counter by criticising them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions.  So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied; in fact, he can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make him aggressive.  A fool must therefore be treated more cautiously than a scoundrel; we shall never again try to convince a fool by reason, for it is both useless and dangerous.

If we are to deal adequately with folly, we must try to understand its nature.  This much is certain, that it is a moral rather than an intellectual defect.  There are people who are mentally agile but foolish, and people who are mentally slow but very far from foolish – a discovery that we make to our surprise as a result of particular situations.  We thus get the impression that folly is likely to be, not a congenital defect, but one that is acquired in certain circumstances where people make fools of themselves or allow others to make fools of them.  We notice further that this defect is less common in the unsociable and solitary than in individuals or groups that are inclined or condemned to sociability.  It seems, then, that folly is a sociological rather than a psychological problem, and that it is a special form of the operation of historical circumstances on people, a psychological by-product of definite external factors.  If we look more closely, we see that any violent display of power, whether political or religious, produces an outburst of folly in a large part of mankind; indeed, this seems actually to be a psychological and sociological law: the power of some needs the folly of the others.  It is not that certain human capacities, intellectual capacity for instance, become stunted or destroyed, but rather that the upsurge of power makes such an overwhelming impression that men are deprived of their independent judgement, and – more or less unconsciously – give up trying to assess the new state of affairs for themselves.  The fact that the fool is often stubborn must not mislead us into thinking that he is independent.  One feels in fact when talking to him, that one is dealing, not with the man himself, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like, which have taken hold of him.  He is under a spell, he is blinded, his very nature is being misused and exploited.  Having thus become a passive instrument, the fool will be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.  Here lies the danger of a diabolical exploitation that can do irreparable damage to human beings.’

Dietrich Bonhoeffer had the authority to make those observations, and we have the obligation to listen to them, because he was a man of spellbinding courage and he paid for it very dearly.  On the day that Hitler became Chancellor, Bonhoeffer gave a public address about the dangers of false leaders.  The Gestapo turned off the sound.  Bonhoeffer, a man of God, gave his life to resisting a false leader.

Poet of the month: A D Hope

Easter Hymn

Make no mistake; there will be no forgiveness;

No voice can harm you and no hand will save;

Fenced by the magic of deliberate darkness

You walk on the sharp edges of the wave;

 

Trouble with soul again the putrefaction

Where Lazarus three days rotten lies content.

Your human tears will be the seed of faction,

Murder the sequel to your sacrament.

 

The City of God is built like other cities:

Judas negotiates the loans you float;

You will meet Caiaphas upon committees;

You will be glad of Pilate’s casting vote.

 

Your truest lovers still the foolish virgins,

Your heart will sicken at the marriage feasts

Knowing they watch you from the darkened gardens

Being polite to your official guests.

Four centuries on – Shakespeare

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

Tomorrow, 23 April 2016, is a big anniversary.  I wrote the following in a book called The West Awakes.

William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616)

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford, England and he died there.  He had a good, solid education, and then he settled down to provide for his wife and children.  His business was to write plays, mainly in verse, and to manage drama in production at theatres like the Globe, and occasionally to act in them.  He prospered in that business and he appears to have died at peace with himself.  We know little about his life.  It looks quite unremarkable – except that his thirty-eight plays and his sonnets are thought to contain literature and drama as good as anything else in the world.  He is widely seen as the greatest genius in history.  His work continues to affect people in their lives all around the world.

You will not see the work of any dramatist set out in poetry in anything like what you get with Shakespeare.  Another distinction is the range of the work.  Shakespeare appears to have been as much at home with comedy as he was with tragedy, with English history plays as with Roman history plays, or with Romances.  Neither Ibsen nor Chekhov ever wrote a comedy, and you will probably get more laughs from a tragedy of Shakespeare than you will get from most of the plays of these great two playwrights.

We are talking about different categories of drama.  There is another way in which Shakespeare covered a greater range – it is the range of subject matter, the range of humanity.  Ibsen and Chekhov tended to focus on educated people of their country and their own time.  Shakespeare ranged from the Bronze Age (Troilus and Cressida) to his equivalent of a contemporary Neighbours (The Merry Wives of Windsor), from Vienna (Measure for Measure), to Athens (Timon), Elsinore (Hamlet) and Scone (Macbeth), but most importantly, from a great king (Henry V) to the drunken, cheating, womanising insult to chivalry (Falstaff); to the dregs of Eastcheap (Bardolph and Peto), and the drunken porter (Macbeth), and the whores and madams of Vienna (Measure for Measure).  Until the great king closes a loop by hanging Bardolph after repudiating Falstaff, and even afterwards, there is no way of saying where this writer was more at home, at the top of the social pile or at the bottom.  Has any other writer ever shown so much penetration and understanding of so many facets of the human condition?

But to Shakespeare the question was whether people were entertained by his plays.  They were and they still are.  To most people what comes first is the skill of the writer as a dramatist – the way he puts his story of characters on the stage and holds our interest – the way he entertains us for the duration of the play.  Poetry is for many a bonus, for some a distraction, and for others just a nuisance.

Two themes recur in the plays of this writer: the superiority of women to men; and the inferiority of the better people to the lesser people, the anti-establishment streak.  You do not find so much of these challenges to orthodoxy or these brushes with modernity in the works of Homer, Dante or Goethe.  What we have is a persistent streak of raw rebellion.  Ibsen wanted to put a torpedo under the ark of Scandinavian society, and his two most famous plays now, A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler, gave voice to women in that bleak, tawdry Northern world, but does the voice of protest ring as loudly there as it did with Shakespeare?

To an uncommitted observer who comes to review these plays as a whole in performance, these two characteristics – the feeling for women and the feeling against the Establishment – are both obvious and striking.  Why are they so little remarked upon?  Part of the reason is, perhaps, that professional critics have tended to be ageing middle class academics who live off the public purse, but who do not go to the theatre enough – like Cassius in Julius Caesar, Act 1, Scene 2, they read a lot and think too much – and who have a cloistered unawareness of the rough edges of humanity, being more at home with their iambic pentameters and people who speak softly and politely.

There are at least three reasons why the plays of Shakespeare still enthral audiences and enlighten readers all around the world.

The first is their intrinsic excellence as dramas and as poetry.  Shakespeare may or may not have been equalled as a poet, but he was never equalled as a dramatist.

The second is the range of his material, not just geographically or historically, or across the various genres of the plays, but across the whole range of the human experience for all kinds and levels of humanity.  It is these two factors that give the sense of timelessness and universality possessed by great art.  When you add the ways that many of the plays challenged the status quo at the time the plays were written, in ways that can still seem at least relevant if not positively modern, you can see why each generation keeps coming back to the plays and keeps taking something different from them.

The third factor follows from what Nietzsche called ‘the death of God’.  Shakespeare wrote of a medieval world dominated by God and the Church.  That dominance had greatly been shaken by the time of Elizabeth I, not least because of the split in the church.  Now in England and in many of its former colonies, except the United States, God and the Church are minority interests, and the hunger for ritual and myth of the rest can be pathetic to observe.  There is only so far that Elvis Presley, the Princess of Wales, the Lions or Wallabies, or the All Blacks, or a couple of bottles of red, can go to fill the vacuum.  There are times when you can almost taste the void that is close to the heart of our communal life.

Shakespeare is part of our language, and part of the fabric of our history and intellectual life.  He is for us at least what Homer was to the Greeks.  Going to the theatre – to see Shakespeare or the opera – and drawing on our cultural history is as close as many can now get to the myth and ritual it seems that most humans crave.

The director Deborah Warner referred to the observation of Laurence Olivier that with Shakespeare we touch ‘the face of God’ and said:  ‘What Shakespeare does – whoever he was – he makes you proud to be human.’  Richard Burton said:

I wondered through the book for a long time, but no other writer hit me with quite the impact of William S.  What a stupendous God he was, he is.  What chance combination of genes went to the making of that towering imagination, that brilliant gift of words, that staggering compassion, that understanding of all human frailty, that total absence of pomposity, that wit, that pun, that joy in words and the later agony.  It seems that he wrote everything worth writing and the rest of his fraternity have merely fugued on his million themes…..

It was the mission of this poet to put us at ease with our humanity.  There is not much else to say, except that my favourite remark about Shakespeare was made by Ralph Waldo Emerson: ‘When I read Shakespeare, I actually shade my eyes.’

Passing Bull 39 – Corporations and churches

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

 

A church has been heavying business about gay marriage.  The Business Manager of the Archdiocese of Sydney wrote to various corporations on the subject of ‘marriage equality’.  The church is politically opposed to changes in the law favoured by those who seek to promote what they call marriage equality.

The letter says that the Archdiocese is ‘a significant user of goods and services from many corporations.’  It refers to a ‘Catholic population of 600,000 within the Archdiocese accounting for 26.7% of the total population’.  The author says: ‘I only mention this to indicate the diverse and expansive demographic we serve’.  Really?

It would be interesting to know the definition of ‘Catholic’ that gets the writer over 25%.  But why is the writer so coy about saying that the church is in a position to punish people commercially unless they toe the church line on this political issue?  Does the author deny that the church is seeking to use its market power to bring political pressure to bear on people?  Does the writer believe that the rest of us just came down with the last shower?

The author wonders if it is ‘the role of a corporation such as yours’ – the letter I have was not addressed to a corporation –‘to be participating in such an important matter that impacts all of Australian society now and in the future.’  The author thinks that the conduct of this corporation on behalf of stakeholders ‘is indeed over stepping their purpose and is to be strongly resisted.’

The language is glutinous, but why does a corporation not have as much right as a church to speak on a political issue such as this?  And was the writer expressing the views of more than a quarter of the population?

Then there is a curious remark.  ‘Many people who support the traditional definition of marriage have loved ones with same-sex attraction and of course strongly object to them being discriminated against.’  Do those standing behind the author only have loved ones who are gay?  Are not some of the communicant members of the church themselves gay?  Or is that a consummation devoutly to be avoided?

The author takes objection to redefining marriage to fit ‘an ideological agenda’ that is against beliefs and faiths that have been held for ages.  Popes said much the same to Galileo, and Anglican divines said much the same to Darwin, although their menaces were not commercial.  The church’s Business Manager refers to a ‘cashed-up activist-driven media campaign.’

You wonder why a church would engage in name-calling about applying pressure when it is seeking to do precisely that.  And what’s wrong with cash?

For that matter, you wonder why the writer thought it was a good idea to make these threats – and I concede that the author would not concede that he is uttering threats – to someone like the Chairman of Partners of Maurice Blackburn.

For that matter, you wonder why if you are losing a war you do not just seek to go out with some dignity rather than stooping to the perceived vulgarity of your enemy.

But what really elevates this letter into bullshit par excellence is its unstated premise – that the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney is a discrete legal entity, a significant consumer, and a body that can and does engage commercially and politically – and, presumably, one that could sue and be sued.

Unless of course someone wanted to sue it for a breach of trust committed by one of its priests.

 

Poet of the Month W H Auden

 

Lullaby – extract

 

Lay your sleeping head, my love,

Human on my faithless arm;

Time and fevers burn away

Individual beauty from

Thoughtful children, and the grave

Proves the child ephemeral:

But in my arms till break of day

Let the living creature lie,

Mortal, guilty, but to me

The entirely beautiful.

 

Soul and body have no bounds:

To lovers as they lie upon

Her tolerant enchanted slope

In their ordinary swoon,

Grave the vision Venus sends

Of supernatural sympathy,

Universal love and hope;

While an abstract insight wakes

Among the glaciers and the rocks

The hermit’s carnal ecstasy.

Passing bull 38 – Contrite capitalists

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 1 Comment

 

 

A good moment in the film The Big Short comes at the end.  Who goes to jail for all the fraud that was so cruel to so many people in the GFC?  Sweet F A.  The audience is terse and not amused.  Grievances are building.

The other day Goldman Sachs handed over a bribe – that is what it was – to settle a lot of claims.  About five billion dollars.  Eight years on, no one has been named, much less charged, much less jailed.  Just some computer entries – everything nice and quiet, an agreement between lawyers and other suits; people who can be relied on.

Reuters reported:

Goldman also acknowledged a Justice Department statement of facts describing how the firm misled investors.

For example, Goldman’s due diligence for one issue of 2006 mortgage-backed securities showed that some of the loan pools reflected an ‘unusually high’ percentage of loans with credit and compliance programs, the Department said.

‘How do we know that we caught everything?’ asked a Goldman committee tasked with reviewing and approving mortgage-backed securities, according to the Justice Department. ‘We don’t,’ a Goldman manager said.

‘Depends on what you mean by everything? Because of the limited sampling… we don’t catch everything,’ another Goldman manager said.

Still, the committee approved the securities without requiring additional due diligence, said the Justice Department, which did not identify those involved.

How did the not guilty party, Goldman Sachs, show its contrition for its ruinous lies?

‘We are pleased to put these legacy matters behind us,’ a Goldman spokesman said in a statement. ‘Since the financial crisis, we have taken significant steps to strengthen our culture, reinforce our commitment to our clients, and ensure our governance processes are robust,’ he said.

These people are so bent that they would probably charge a fee for bullshit as gross as that.

Here again there is one law for the rich and one for you and me.  That is why the Panama Papers are so inflammatory and that it is why the knives will be out for Palmer.  He has looked after his family and mates, and welched on his workers.

The Australian showed his wife in a Hermès shirt and said that we told you so; the ABC and Fairfax were conned; and it is all the fault of the cops.  You can take that or leave it – either way, our press is complicit in the collapse of confidence in business and government.

Poet of the month: W H Auden

Epitaph on a tyrant

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,

And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;

He knew human folly like the back of his hand,

And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;

When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,

And when he cried the little children died in the streets.