For reasons I have often given, I avoid using terms like ‘racist’ or ‘homophobic’.  They are too broad in their application and too often used as a form of abuse.  On their own, they are unfair.  If I do not know just what I am alleged to have done, how can I defend myself against whatever the actual charge may be?

It’s like saying I did something ‘inappropriate’ to a woman or a boy.  What?  Suggesting they should barrack for Melbourne Storm?  Eating spaghetti off a knife – or while on the mobile?

Charging someone with racism is often worse in my eyes than the conduct said to give rise to the charge.  Among other things, it is usually done in very cold blood, and with real malice – the intention to hurt another person.

Events in the sporting world this week show what mischief these charges can bring.

Sam Kerr is now about the most popular person in Australian sport.  She was charged with saying something to a police officer that was in some way ‘racist’.  A very sensible and experienced journalist spent a column discussing the implications.  He did not say what law was broken.  That would be likely to be in general terms and not detail the actual conduct alleged. 

When that was disclosed – ‘you stupid white bastard’ – the sane part of the nation was convulsed with laughter.  What a picnic for those who enjoy pure bullshit.  The ABC was driven to report on ‘a test case in the culture wars’.  In the prosecution of a crime? 

One paper went so far as to quote an ‘expert’.  Prof Fethi Mansouri, an expert in intercultural communication at Deakin University, said ‘it is very difficult to see how this can amount to being a serious racist incident’. 

Now I see that a public spokesman on the subjects of racism and soccer has publicly apologised to Sam Kerr.  His penitence derives from considering the Diversity Council of Australia’s definition of racism – it refers to ‘race-based societal power.’  The critic says ‘racism could not be committed against a white person as they are not a member of a marginalised group.’  Is it seriously suggested that judges should deprive people of legal rights by reference to this kind of Moonshine?

If the English are serious about this charge, can we ask what were the terms of imprisonment imposed on the flower of the English Establishment who jostled and abused a Muslim player of colour live on international television – thereby disgracing themselves, their nation, and the game of cricket?  (A one-way ticket to Botany Bay would have been ideal.)

A person of colour in the NRL used an unfortunate term during a match about another person of colour.  He has now repented.  He says everyone knows he is not ‘racist’ and that he did not mean his remark to be ‘racist.’  Some call for a twelve-match suspension.  It is likely that he has no other source of income.

A very experienced AFL coach made an abusive remark about the sexuality of a bruising idiot who could have killed the captain of the coach’s side.  He said he was sorry, and he copped a $20,000 fine.  That is about a quarter of the average income here.

These lapses of taste or judgment are a part of life.  Those responsible for responding to them judgmentally and with the weight of the law may think that they are high minded, but there is an aura of both unreality and unfairness in all the reactions now agitating the press.  Thinking that one race is superior to another involves a failure of logic.  Expressing that view to hurt others involves a failure of courtesy.  You cannot deal with those failures by legislation.  Unless you are in regimes like those in China, Iran, or Russia.

You debase the very currency you seek to preserve when you use the criminal law to whack people hard as a punishment for failures of judgment or taste at the fringe.  Punishment is a measure of despair.  Ask any candid judge.

And this is all blood to a tiger for the enemies of common sense and decency in the press.

Coppers are a bit like lawyers.  They may be a pain in the bum, but someone has to do it.  But those who do it for love are another matter.  As are those do who it for profit – like those who work for Rupert Murdoch.

The word vigilante comes to mind.  (Another bad one is ‘crusader’.)  The OED refers to members of a ‘vigilance committee.’  Brewer tells us that a vigilance committee was a privately formed citizen group taking upon themselves to assist in the maintenance of law and order – such as dealing with loyalists to the North in the U S, or whose function it was to intimidate Negroes.  And so we can see the seeds of the progress from the posse, to vigilante, to the lynch mob, and the KKK.  And now we have MAGA as an appalling throwback under a red baseball cap.

It is hard to think of a decent connotation.  The Macquarie is more up to date.  A ‘vigilante’ is ‘a private citizen who, usually as one of a group of such citizens, assumes the role of guardian of society in maintaining law and order, punishing wrongdoers, etc.’  That is to say, the vigilante usurps the power of the state – and in so doing, the vigilante becomes liable to being corrupted by that power.  Trump is just a hideous example.  

Ominously, the Macquarie says of ‘vigilantism’ – ‘the methods, practices, and attitudes associated with vigilantes, such as intolerance, bigotry, racism etc’.  (My emphasis.) 

In my view, the rot set in with talk-back radio, got worse with Facebook and Twitter and the like, and has now been made a most malignant cancer on us all by the spread of illiteracy and the influence of Fox News and the like here.

It is a great shame if those seeking to deal with ‘racism’ resort to means associated with its grosser culprits.  It is an old cliché, but a true one – the road to hell is paved with good intentions.  Virgil put it more crisply, I see – facilis descensus Averno (the descent to hell is easy).

For myself, I would think that if any of this stuff has to be aired in public, it could be quickly resolved by common sense, tolerance and restraint, and plain human decency – and as far away as possible from anyone remotely resembling a preacher – or an intellectual.

But with Sam Kerr looking to a four-day jury trial two years after the alleged offence, the English have completely lost the plot.  The ageing mother country has finally succumbed to the evil of banality.

Sam Kerr – racism – homophobia

(Random impressions on hearing and reading King Lear once more)

This is a play.  It is about two old men who are betrayed by their children after they pick the wrong ones to favour.  It opens with a fruity discussion about the conception of the bastard.  Did that word have its bad sense back then? 

Edmund is a bastard in both senses.  He is also the pivot between the stories of the two old men.  In a play of black hats and white hats, he is about the blackest.  He is a glitch in the social fabric – and he sets out to rip the whole thing to bits.

The reticence of Cordelia is odd.  But we must remember the remark of Bradley.  She was brought up with Goneril and Regan for sisters.  And then there is the old chestnut – but for that, there would be no play.

It is immediately obvious that the king is past it all.  He looks and sounds sclerotic.  He has left his ‘retirement’ far too late.

And King Lear betrays his office.  The first duty of a king is to preserve the kingdom.  The next is to ensure a safe succession.  Lear fails in both.  His is a shocking and dangerous folly.  And he dresses up his indulgence in a stupid and pointless game of charades.  There is more than enough fuel, here, for a tragedy.

His explosion is almost as quick as that of Leontes.  In less than ten minutes, he casts off his favourite daughter and his most trusted counsellor.  Their fault?  They declined to take part in his silly games.

The King of France has a very white hat.  (Which may be as well, because France probably did not exist then.)

The sisters show their evil immediately.  Their first moves are not to look after their father, but to protect themselves against his excess and distemper.  They are cold and loveless.  You wonder how they got and now treat their husbands.  Their protestations of love were of course faked.

One husband is a kind of corrective.  The other is as bad as his wife.

Kent is a model of loyalty.  He gives as good as he gets.  He does a great line in invective.  He is someone the audience can support.

Gloucester is cut from other cloth.  He is the journeyman courtier and politician, and he is gullible.  But he does not sell out.  He is certainly more sinned against than sinning.

Edmund, the bastard, is a poor man’s Napoleon.  He is the ultimate gambler and anyone else is just a piece that he seeks to move about the board for his benefit.  Other people serve no other function.

The fool is a kind of chorus, a mirror to the cracked king, and a source of relief to the audience.  He is also a throwback to the older and more popular forms of theatre, like the morality plays – or commedia dell ‘arte.  It may also be as well at times that he reminds us that we are watching theatre.  Auden thought that the fool uses humour as ‘a protection against tragic feeling’.

Edgar, the innocent son of Gloucester, is a white hat, and targeted for that reason.  He becomes another fool (who can bang on too much for out taste).  He will live to triumph over evil.

Oswald is a greasy shocker, the complete opposite of Kent.  Kent’s denunciation of him is a precious highlight of invective, which is nearly a lost art.

The bastard’s betrayal of his father is pure evil.  He does it for his advancement.  And it leads to horrifying results.  Who said that ‘motiveless’ malignity was the worst kind of evil?

Lear is now quite mad, but not so mad that he cannot reflect that he has taken too little care for the poor and oppressed.  (That may be an unusual reflection for a king of that or any other period.)

The storm scene is like an explosion of Mahler or Jackson Pollock.  Is man no more than this?  (It is usually far too long and too loud – even on CD.  It has to be grotesque, but not in volume.)

The revenge on Gloucester is a deliberate affront to the audience.  Cornwall speaks of revenges ‘we are bound to take’.  So – here is a categorical imperative for evil – derived from Satan?

Goneril and Regan are now beyond redemption.  Regan gets the most nauseating line on our stage about how a blind man may get to Dover, but the line ‘tigers not daughters’ comes from a husband.  (Indeed, we now recall from an earlier tragedy the ‘wilderness of tigers’ that was so inhumanly cruel to another faded commander in his stricken condition.)

And so, on to Dover.  It is about now, if you are like me, that survival becomes a life and death issue for the audience.  It may to some resemble surviving Apocalypse Now.  Who can say ‘I am at the worst’?  ‘It is time’s plague when madmen lead the blind.’  Reality and morality all dissolve in chaos.  The very notion of humanity is repudiated.  We have returned to the primal slime we thought we had left behind.

Has our stage seen this since the Greeks about two thousand years beforehand?  The descent is spattered with lines that stay with you.  ‘It smells of humanity.’  At times. the audience in the stalls shares with the characters on the stage the sense that they are going where no one has been before.

The predators are now fully engaged in preying on each other.  Do they do this in the jungle?

As in the Roman plays, the repeated reference to the ‘mighty gods’ reminds us that this ‘great stage of fools’ has nothing of what we call religion at all.  (Not that the current models supply workable armour against evil.)

When Cordelia returns, she is a paragon.  Of what?  Her inability to play the game led to all Hell breaking loose.  Now she is a model of perfection.  Who has to die.  A heretic might ask whether it has all been worth it.

Near the end, the evil of the sisters and the bastard teeters on caricature.  (‘An interlude!’  ‘If not, I’ll ne’er trust medicine.’)  But the duel is good theatre – and a form of relief.  The Greeks never made it to this kind of drama.

Edmund convinces a captain he appoints to murder Cordelia of the merit of the defence of superior orders – and he then fires Albany.  Some may take with a grain of salt his apparent contrition at the end.

There has long been contention about the blinding of Gloucester and the murder of Cordelia.  It is all too much for some.  It is as well to remember the caution of Dr Johnson that ‘our author well knew what would please the audience for which he wrote.’  They did not just whip and put people in the stocks back then.  They hanged, drew and quartered them in public.  It was a very popular event – as would be the guillotine much later in France.

And Goneril has the perfect bell-ringer for Donald Trump.

So if I do. The laws are mine, not thine.

Who can arraign me for’t?

‘Is this the promised end?’

Well, at least Albany has been released from one of the worst marriages ever – and he has lived to tell the tale.  That in itself is something.

Philosophy does not have much to say about Shakespeare, but Auden quotes Pascal to good effect.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed.  The entire universe need not arm himself to crush him.  A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.

All our dignity, then, consists in thought.

And ‘thought’ is not a term that comes readily to the mind when we reflect on King Lear.  But it is something to bear in mind when we think of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, or Donald Trump – not one of whom has ever seen this play, or heard its poetry, or absorbed its teaching.

My discussion with colleagues whose views I respect has not produced a satisfactory explanation of the conduct of Walter Sofronoff, KC, let alone a defence.

I wish to raise three issues.

1.  ‘Bias’ is defined in the Compact O E D as ‘an inclination or prejudice in favour of or against a particular person or thing.’  In bowls, it is the tendency of the ball to deviate from the straight because of the way the ball is weighted.  You can control the level of deviation by the weighting you apply to the ball.  Albrechtsen had fifty-one goes at it in her secret or ‘private’ correspondence with Sofronoff.  She could not have asked for more from him in his public findings.  I follow that you can regard the correspondence as incidents giving rise to an appearance of bias.  But is it not also evidence of the existence of actual bias?  I have no doubt there are loads of authority on the point, but I ask the question on behalf of the people on the 605 bus.  I suspect that any answer may savour of the metaphysical, which is not the way of our law.
2. Whether the bias is actual or apparent, why were not all findings against Sofronoff sufficient to warrant an order of the court vitiating all findings against the victim of the bias?  Mr Drummond is aggrieved by a serious failure of due process.  Has the law done enough to vindicate him?  The answer is No, if you look at the venom unleashed in the Australian today.  As to the conduct of Albrechtsen, in The Common Law, O W Holmes said that ‘when we call an act malicious in common speech, we mean that harm to another person was intended to come of it, and that such harm was desired for its own sake as an end in itself.  For the purposes of the criminal law, however, intent alone was found to be important…’
3. Who paid for the lunch?

If you have looked at the findings of Justice Kaye on the dealings between Walter Sofronoff, KC and Janet Albrechtsen, you may have thought that the latter might keep a low profile about the singular debacle wrought by the two of them in the administration of justice in this country.  It was staggeringly inept.  If you thought that, you were wrong.

The page one report in The Australian today is headed ‘DPP’s reputation remains in tatters.’  The first par. reads:

Shane Drumgold has won a Pyrrhic victory because he has failed to restore his reputation.

The last par. reads:

Each day we are learning more about prosecutorial overreach not just in the ACT, but in other jurisdictions.  If not for the work by many journalists at this newspaper, the Australian public had little idea about deeply troubling issues concerning the criminal justice system.  There is more to do on that front.

Any apology?  Au contraire.  The lady is a victim.  Her right of privacy has been infringed.

Although the finding of apprehended by Justice Sten Kaye of apprehended bias against Sofronoff is of great interest to some because it involves delving into the private communications between the former judge and myself, Drummond’s legal challenge in the ACT Supreme Court amounts to yet another own goal.  Drumgold got an order for costs, but he didn’t get his reputation back.

The rest of the piece is a diatribe against Drumgold.  There is no pretence of any balance.  The lady is a known crusader.

The effrontery and divorce from reality is Trumpian.

The piece supports the following propositions.

1.  Albrechtsen was a loaded gun – viciously loaded – against Drumgold from the start.  She still is – now, more so, in self-defence.
2.  Any pretence of impartiality on her part was just that.
3. Sofronoff must have been or should have been aware of both of the above.
4. If follows that his conduct in dealing with her is an affront to our notions of fairness and common decency.
5. As a result, public faith in the findings of this inquiry and the administration of justice has fallen.
6. As a further result, the apprehension that many judges feel about some in the press will now be seen to be justified – Albrechtsen will be seen as lowering confidence in the press (except of course for the base).
7. The Australian is not worth the paper it is written on.  (And yes, here I own up to prejudice.  I have held that view for very many years.)

But what really gets to us is just how brazen people like Rupert or Lachlan Murdoch or Donald Trump are.

Whatever else may be said of the two protagonists, they are not novices.  There were 51 communications ‘off the record’.  Sofronoff was obliged to act fairly and openly.  He entered into this correspondence on the condition that it would not be revealed to the subject of the inquiry.  Are we really asked to believe that neither saw that this was as elemental a case of conflict of interest as you could find? 

Why is not the whole report now as vitiated in law as it is in public opinion?

I was involved in conducting public hearings for thirty years.  You only have to do one to know that what happened here was outrageous.

Let me put it this way.  Your professional conduct is the subject of a public inquiry conducted by an eminent lawyer with all the credentials for that purpose.  You are being pursued in the press by someone who makes a living from that kind of campaign and public vilification.  The person hearing the matter then finds against you in very grave and personal terms.  Then you find he has been secretly corresponding with your enemy all the time.  Which of them do you want to throttle first?

‘Racism’ is a fraught term.  I try not to us it. It involves two elements – an assertion that people can distinguished from other people by reference to their racial origin or colour, and that they can be denied rights or opportunities as a result of that distinction.  A clear example would be a club or theatre denying entry to people of colour – that is, by allowing entry only to white people.

A theatre in London will put on a play about slavery and on some nights allow entry only to people of colour – on those nights, they will deny entry to white people.  That course falls squarely within the definition of racism.

What is the rationale?  Because of the treatment of people of colour in the past, they are entitled to pursue a course that they would otherwise condemn.  Some might call this ‘playing the victim card.’

That looks to me like: ‘We are entitled to be racist in this case because we have suffered from racism in the past.’  And that looks to me to be a simple invocation of the notion that the ends justify the means.  And it apparently matters not that the people complaining of racism are now promoting it.

And that looks to me to be snapshot of a lot of the evil of the world today.

I knew him….

‘Someone must have traduced Joseph K, for without having done anything wrong, he was arrested one fine morning.’

What we have just done to Justice Lasry defies both belief and all decency.

Yes, we have dreadful problems in the way we dispose of cases in our courts, but reacting in anything like this way can only dint confidence in our judges even further. 

And make it harder for them to do their job, and for us to get the best people.  Why accept a position where you are accorded the dignity and respect not of a figure out of Franz Kafka, but of a Commissar in a novel by Boris Pasternak?

I have some experience of these things.  Good judges don’t run scared.  Nor should any judge be seen to owe fealty to the civil service of the government.

There is something rotten in the State of Victoria.

Romeo and Juliet is a play about a tragedy brought about by the meeting of two rivers – the cyclical hate and killing of the blood feud, or vendetta, and the loss of judgment than can afflict teenagers when they first feel hot passion.  One is a force for life; the other a force for death.  Both involve heat.  And in that part of the world that brought us Boccaccio and Petrarch, and the Guelphs and Ghibellines, and the Mafia, neither was in short supply.

The great American judge and jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes said that ‘the Roman law started from the blood feud, and all the authorities agree that the German law began in that way.’  The phrase ‘German law’ there means our law, since English law grew not from Roman law, but from the laws of the Angles and Saxons.  The compact OED has for vendetta ‘1 a prolonged bitter quarrel with or complaint against someone 2 a prolonged feud between families in which people are murdered in revenge for previous murders.’  That fits the Capulets and Montagues.  The problem about breaking the cycle had been looked at two thousand years before in the Oresteia.

Sex is, well, sex.  We would cease to exist without it, but all hell can break loose in that period described as puberty – which is where the thirteen-year-old Juliet, still minded by her nurse, finds herself.

When those two currents meet, you may get mayhem – of precisely the kind described in this play.  We learn immediately of ‘ancient grudge’ and ‘new mutiny,’ where ‘civil blood makes civil hands unclean,’ so that ‘a pair of star-crossed lovers take their life’ – and these ‘misadventured piteous overthrows….with their death bury their parents’ strife’. 

How else could that strife end? 

There are three key words in the lexicon of those in a blood feud – respect, insult, and honour.  You may recall the scene in Godfather III when one Mafia don quits a meeting hissing that the Godfather has not shown him enough respect – and then all hell break loose, and the building is raked with machine gun fire.

At the start of the play, Romeo thinks he’s in love with Rosaline.  That she is a Capulet does not appear to trouble him.  He’s more worried about what usually troubles boys – her commitment to ‘chastity’ (1 1 213 and 221).  His mate Benvolio suggests they gatecrash a Capulet party so that Romeo can compare Rosaline with other young women (and as we know, with one look at Juliet, Rosaline goes clean out the window).  The Montagues know this will be seen as a mortal insult by the Capulets.  They will go masked – like the trio in Don Giovanni – but Romeo knows this is not a good idea – his mind misgives (1.4.47 and 106).  Such is the rashness, and price, of the young male ego.  Another mate, Mercutio, who has about him a kind of death wish, launches into a speech about nothing, and the troop marches on – and in.

Inevitably, they are sprung, and by the Capulet point man, a very nasty piece of work called Tybalt, who immediately calls for his rapier to answer this ‘scorn at our solemnity’ (1.5.59 and 65).  Capulet talks him out of it at the party, but Tybalt is not satisfied.  He serves a written challenge on Montague. 

So, when the day is hot, and the Capulets are abroad, and the ‘mad blood’ is stirring, Benvolio knows a brawl is inevitable and suggests to Mercutio that they retire (3.1.1-4).  But Mercutio is as hot for a fight as Tybalt, and you know the rest.

This happens while Romeo meets, falls for, and marries Juliet in some of the most gorgeous and best-known language in our letters. 

In the result, we may overlook that within a couple of days, Romeo has killed two people, the first a Capulet, the other a relative of the prince who was scheduled to marry Juliet, and who appears to have been beyond a reproach for a young noble of that time.

Romeo kills twice in hot blood, but that was not a legal excuse then – it flouted the edict of the prince – and it was only a moral excuse if you subscribed to the law of the vendetta.  Romeo did not do so – he had seen it all before and he had had enough (1.1 174-186).  His first killing, Tybalt, is the vendetta tit for tat, pure and simple.

He kills Paris when mad with grief and bent on suicide – but only suicide in stage-mannered way.  Paris had every right to arrest Romeo as a felon – if not a ghoul – but the crazed Romeo can only respond ‘Wilt thou provoke me?  Then, have at me, boy!’  The insults flow in even in death found in heat.  (‘Boy’ was the final insult in Coriolanus.)  Then Romeo sees who he has killed and recalls that his servant had told him that ‘Paris should have married Juliet’ and he says that he will bury Paris ‘in a triumphant grave’(5.3.78 and 83) – whatever that means.  He even comes to terms with Tybalt.

Tybalt, liest thou there in thy bloody sheet?
O, what more favour can I do to thee,
Than with that hand that cut thy youth in twain
To sunder his that was thine enemy?
Forgive me, cousin!   (5.3.97-101).

It is almost Wagnerian, but it does not strike us like that.  We are wrung out – and in less than half of five hours.  We find it easier to come to grips with the youth of Juliet than that of Romeo – in practice, it is the other way around.  Girls mature faster than boys.  The difference here is I suppose, that when it became for the killing, it was the boys who went for their rapiers.  The vendetta was male thing.

Such is the power of the playwright, that it does not occur to us that had our hero not killed himself, he may have faced two counts of murder – even putting to one side the edict of his ‘moved prince’ and the ineluctable force of the vendetta.  All we know is:

A glooming peace this morning with it brings;
The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head:
Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things;
Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished:
For never was a story of more woe.
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

If the producers of the Arkangel set of the complete plays of Shakespeare had set out to show The Merchant of Venice as the worst play ever written, they have succeeded.  The problem is not so much Shylock, as the boring ordinariness and vanity of the rest of them.  And W H Auden in his Lectures on Shakespeare does not help.  He says ‘The only racial remark in the play is made by Shylock, and the Christians refute it.  Religious differences in the play are treated frivolously: the question is not one of belief, but conformity.’  That is a false dilemma, and the whole play is riddled with expressions of contempt going both ways – and taking a pound of flesh by due process of law does not sound ‘frivolous’.

There is no doubt that Auden was very seriously bright.  I at first thought he could have made a brilliant advocate.  The lectures are full of lightning flashes.  But too often, the lightning hits the dunny.  And that is fatal in advocacy. 

And if he expressed his views on Desdemona to a modern U S audience now, they would burn the place down.

But here he is on the fall of Rome as shown in Julius Caesar.

It was a society doomed not by the evil passions of selfish individuals, because such passions always exist, but by an intellectual and spiritual failure of nerve that made the society incapable of coping with its situation, which is why the noble Brutus is even more at sea in the play than the unscrupulous and brutal Antony.

A failure of nerve led to the collapse of Europe in the 1930s, and threatens the U S now. 

After the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, Antony’s funeral oration is probably the best-known speech in Shakespeare.  Antony is utterly unscrupulous, and the results are utterly brutal.  The two subsequent scenes in that play are in my view the best displays of just how vicious politics can get on our stage.  The first scene is a lynching.  The second is a Mafia like settlement of the death list compiled in the coldest blood by the winners.

(But when we come to Antony and Cleopatra – Auden’s favourite of these plays – Antony is a bored playboy, unable to break with his ‘Egyptian dish,’ and he is put away in straight sets by the man Gibbon described as a ‘crafty tyrant.’)

But his remarks on Prince Hal, later King Henry IV, really caught my eye.  He agrees with the observation of Falstaff that I do not think is sufficiently noticed: ‘Thou art essentially mad without seeming so.’

Hal has no self….He can be a continuous success because he can understand any situation, he can control himself, and he has physical and mental charm.  But he is a cold fish……The most brutal scene in Shakespeare is Henry’s wooing of Katherine. 

Whacko!  Prince Hal is all front – and nothing else.  Think of the seriously bad bastards in history, and then ask how apt that description might be for them.

Or try this for an exam question:

Sir John Falstaff is a ratbag, but if you want the real deal of the complete ratbag, go to Prince Hal.  Discuss.

Networking and identity politics are two terms I avoid.  They ooze bullshit.  But according to a piece in The Age this morning,the two terms may be related. 

The author refers to article ‘Why Women Build Less Powerful Relationships Than Men’.  It aimed to address ‘an additional layer’ –

….by looking at personal hesitation, relational morality and gendered modesty.  And, even more specifically, women who feel uncomfortable with the exploitative nature of networking, and women who often network with lower level peers due to lack of confidence in their own network contribution…

Later the author suggests that networking for women should be –

….curated in a way that is well informed, thoughtful and empathetic to women’s needs instead of the ‘utilitarian or instrumental’ events we’ve historically had to sit through….focussing on one-on-one relationships rather than larger team bonding exercises, which can be less intimidating to form and are more likely to be pursued with purpose.

As it seems to me, the inarticulate premise is that at least when it comes to networking, women are different to men, and have special needs.

I do not subscribe to that view, which looks at best unfortunate to me.

And I would like to get the views on ‘gendered modesty’ from Kylie Minogue or Taylor Swift.

Identity politics.

Two letters to The Age

PUBLISHED

Dear Editor,

I have trouble following the difference in the moral standing of a tradie bagging a duck with a shottie, and a surgeon taking a trout with a dry fly.  Nevertheless, I understand and respect the views of those who wish to ban duck hunting.  That is a matter on which reasonable minds may differ, but the case of the government that duck shooting is recreation for the people is dreadful nonsense. 

The leading recreation for the populus of ancient Rome was viewing gladiators at the Colosseum.  It reached its pinnacle with throwing Christians to the lions.  Later in England, hanging, drawing and quartering was a real day out for the masses.  Even under Queen Victoria, there was nothing like an afternoon out at the gallows at Tyburn.  The pick pockets had a picnic among a people entranced.

The possibilities are endless.  What about a hanging at half time at the Grand Final at the MCG to add a different sauce to the Four ‘n Twenty?

Yours truly,

NOT PUBLISHED

Dear Editor,

Australia Day has meant, at best, nothing to me for half my life. 

Other nations celebrate what they call ‘independence’.  We have never become independent of the English Crown, and the opening of a jail is hardly an occasion to celebrate.

The U S and France celebrate their nationhood on sacred days in July.  Each was, they say, the day they seized power from the old regime.  Each was the start of a period of shocking violence and killing and a form of civil war.  Of course, people of colour never got the benefit of all that guff about liberty, equality, and fraternity.

It was the same here after 26 January 1788 – except that here the white people took over under what they now concede were false imperialist pretenses, and more than two centuries later, we are still yet to come to terms with the victims of our most grievous wrongs.

How then can we celebrate such a day? 

Because we as a nation have not owned up or grown up.

Yours truly

Duck shooting – Australia Day