Here and there – The faith of Ali

23/05/2018 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The life of Muhammad Ali reminds me of the life of Miles Davis. They both show that we here in Australia have never understood how poisonous the problem of race is in America. In his new biography Ali, A Life, Jonathan Eig quotes an author in Ebony saying of the words ‘I am the greatest’:

Lingering behind those words is the bitter sarcasm of Dick Gregory, the shrill defiance of Miles Davis, the utter contempt of Malcolm X. He smiles easily, but, behind it all….is a blast furnace of race pride.

That about sums it up. People talked a lot about three things that got up their noses about Ali: his loud mouthed boasting and his cruel taunting of his opponents; his embrace of another faith, in the very unattractive Nation of Islam; and his evasion of military service and his opposition to America’s war in Vietnam.

There was one thing that got up people’s noses that they didn’t talk so much about – the incredulity and jealousy of a large part of the white population that a black man was better than any white man – and was happily sticking it right up them. That was, I think, the biggest problem facing President Obama – as now evidenced by the horrific fruit of the white backlash and the election of a president who unashamedly believes that white people are superior to black people. (I may have added that Ali’s hopeless promiscuity may have upset some – but that’s a relative issue in a nation that turns out presidents as unfaithful as many of those in the U S.)

The taunting was part of the circus act, and, I think, part of the way for the young man to mask his fear in confronting men who could kill him. It was also meant to unbalance or unnerve his opponent. Ali saw himself – correctly – as being in the entertainment industry. He invited aggravation toward himself to sell tickets. Who wants to see a brawl between friends? The author freely concedes his view that Ali often went over the top – especially with Joe Frazier. There is a record of a conversation between the two before any of their three fights. They were joking, bragging, and singing.

Ali: We don’t wanna be seen too much together, you know.

Frazier: Yeah. They’ll think we’re buddies. That’ll be bad for the gate.

Ali: Yeah. Ain’t nobody gonna pay nothing to see two buddies.

Later the relationship soured. Both suffered lasting damage from their three bouts – Frazier spent nearly two weeks in hospital after winning the first. Ali would apologise to Foreman for calling him an Uncle Tom.

Ali thought differently to most of us. In many ways, he had the mind of a child. He didn’t want to go to L A for the trials for the Rome Olympics. He was afraid of flying. He was persuaded to take the chance. So he went to a disposals store to buy a parachute – which he wore on the plane. His graduation from high school was an act of charity, and he flunked the army IQ test. He could see some big pictures with great clarity, but logic was not his go.

Ali was therefore the perfect dupe for crooks and odd-balls like the Nation of Islam. And they milked him for all he was worth, and then they denounced and betrayed him. He nevertheless maintained his faith. Mr Eig does not doubt the sincerity of that faith, and nor do I. While most fighters sought refuge and protection from the Mob, Ali found it in a religious sect. A lot of Americans would have been more at home if he had stuck with the Mob.

As for Vietnam – well, supporters of that war are as thinly spaced now as supporters of the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan or Syria. Ali’s position may well have affected that of Dr Martin Luther King. He said that America could only be saved with ‘radical moral surgery’ and ‘I can’t segregate my conscience.’ Mr Eig says:

Ali’s stand against Vietnam made him a symbol of protest against a war in which black men were dying at a wildly disproportionate rate. Black men accounted for 22% of all battle deaths when the black population in America was only 10%. Why was America spending money and tossing away lives in the name of freedom in a distant land while resisting the cause of freedom at home? Why, yet again, did the interests of black Americans seem to diverge from the interests of the nation as a whole? Ali raised these troubling questions as opposition to the war rapidly spread.

Ali based his opposition to the war on his religious beliefs.

Many great men have been tested for their religious belief. If I pass this test, I will come out stronger than ever…..All I want is justice. Will I have to get that from history?

When he said that, Ali was the heavyweight champion of the world. He had staggered that world by beating Sonny Liston – twice (although some thought both were fixed). Ali was at the height of his powers, the prime of American manhood, but the white establishment was now bent on taking out this uppity nigger.

When Ali declined to accept induction, the commissioners of the most corrupt sport on earth moved to ban him.

Never mind that they had long tolerated the mafia and professional gamblers in their sport. Never mind that Ali had not yet been convicted of a crime. Never mind that boxing’s rules contained no requirement that its champion be a Christian or an American or a supporter of America’s wars. None of that mattered. Guided by anger, prejudice, or patriotism, boxing’s rulers decided that Muhammad Ali was unfit to wear the sport’s crown because he was a Muslim who refused to fight for his country.

Ali had been fortunate early in his career in being managed by a group of right minded business people from home. They arranged very fair contracts and helped him with tax and saving for the future. But he was like a child with money. He liked the feel of cash, and he threw it away. Later he would come under the control of a promoter who had been convicted of murder.

Now a group of very senior black athletes met with Ali for hours to try to get him to change his mind about the army. President Johnson had offered him the deal given to Joe Louis – he could just put on the uniform, and fight exhibition matches. He could play down his religion in public, and remind the Nation of Islam, who had dropped him, that he was no good to them serving his term of five years – which was the maximum, that he got. ‘Everybody had a chance to ask him all the questions they wanted to. Eventually, everybody was satisfied that his stand was genuine based on his religion and that we should back him.’ Given what was involved, Ali must have had real faith.

More than four years later, Ali’s appeal against his conviction and sentence came on before the Supreme Court. The government argued that Ali was not a pacifist – he had merely said he did not want to fight the Viet Cong – ‘No Viet Cong ever called me nigger’- or for a country that treated him as a second class citizen. He was just making political statements. That argument prevailed five: three.

Justice Harlan was to write the decision. His clerk had read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and was persuaded of the sincere pacifism of this sect. His judge then changed his mind: four: four. The decision would stand, and Ali would do five years.

But this would not look too good. Then another judge came up with a technical point. The appeal board that rejected Ali’s claim had not given any basis for its finding – without knowing why his claim had been rejected, how could they have given him a fair hearing? Well, that does look thin – there is no authority except the decision referred to in the footnotes* – but the justices thought this was better than an all-white court jailing a champion on a split vote. And they did so unanimously. Ali found out about his release as he was buying orange juice at a small grocery shop in Chicago. He shouted the store.

Most of us know all about the fight against Foreman, the Rumble in the Jungle. I saw it live in the basement of a near blood-house pub in Elizabeth Street. I was amazed and enthralled – as was a large part of the world. It was a massive achievement. On reflection, both Liston and Foreman lost to Ali for similar reasons – he was able to survive and score well for seven rounds – they were used to crushing their opposition in two, and they were not equipped to go anything like the distance.

After that, you may wish to skim read. It’s mostly downhill. Dirty fights; whoring (he was in bed with two whores on the afternoon of a big fight); brain damage; corruption; theft; waste; and an uneasy peace. We were moved by the lighting of the flame at Atlanta, by the film Once Were Kings, and by the funeral.

Ali was fortunate to die when the U S still had a literate and honourable man in the White House. This is what President Obama said.

‘I am America’, he once declared. ‘I am the part that you won’t recognise. But get used to me – black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own. Get used to me.’ That’s the Ali I came to know as I came of age – not just as skilled a poet on the mic, as he was a fighter in the ring, but a man who fought for what was right. A man who fought for us. He stood with King and Mandela; stood up when it was hard; spoke out when others wouldn’t. His fight outside the ring would cost him his title and public standing. It would earn him enemies on the left and the right, make him reviled and nearly send him to jail. And his victory helped us to get used to the America we recognise today… Muhammad Ali shook up the world. And the world is better for it. We are all better for it.

What a giant! Muhammad Ali had the clout and the gifts of Babe Ruth; he had the courage and the devotion to his people of Jackie Robinson; he may have lacked that aura of saintliness that we see in Mandela, Ghandi, and, yes, Lincoln; but because of Muhammad Ali, his nation, however defined, has changed forever, and for the better.

The book had another message for me. We should ban professional boxing. It is a cruel and unusual punishment, and we should not pay men to beat up other man and shorten their lives. This is a denial of civilisation.

*According to Wikipedia, the likely source was the book The Brethren by Woodward and Armstrong. In 2013, A TV film was released, Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight. Christopher Plummer played Justice Harlan.

Passing Bull 150 – Religious freedom

23/05/2018 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Jennifer Oriel included the following in a piece in The Australian on Monday.

CHRISTIANITY EMPOWERS OUR WESTERN TRADITION

The fix is in. Queer activists will use fear of sharia to create a moral panic about freedom of religion. Suddenly laissez-faire liberals have developed a distaste for pluralism. They claim that codifying freedom of religion will result in sharia. They fail to comprehend fundamental freedoms in context.

In the context of Western culture, religious freedom is anathema to political Islam. The best guarantee against sharia is Eurocentricity: a cultural agenda that comprises secure borders, the legal protection of fundamental freedoms, and education on the Christian foundations of Western civilisation……

Much concern about sharia in respect of the religious freedom review is artificial. It’s a beat up to prevent dissenters from queer ideology enjoying reasonable protections from militant activists……

One would expect the Ruddock review not to recommend sharia as a model of religious freedom. In the Western context, religious freedom has a particular meaning rooted in Christian scripture that supports the secular state, free will and forgiveness.

Christian religious freedom empowers the secular state. It also embodies a limited state according to Christ’s instruction: ‘Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s’ (Matthew 22:21). By contrast, much of the Islamic world is theocratic.

One of the more potent examples of the difference between religious freedom in the Christian and Islamic traditions is their comparative tolerance for it. While Christ exhorts people to come to God and issues numerous warnings to those who turn away from Him, free will is permitted and sin is forgiven. In the Koran, Muslims are taught that non-Muslims are evil and enemies. Muslims are instructed not to ‘seek the friendship of the infidels’. Jews and Christians are considered abominable.

People often assume that the 21st century jihad against America and Israel is a consequence of colonialism or interventionist foreign policy. But hatred of Christians and Jews is rooted in the Koran…..The Western conception of religious freedom incorporates pluralism. In its most basic form, pluralism is tolerance for diverse beliefs limited by the principle of no harm. A historical benefit of the Christian scriptural belief in limited state authority is that it removes the state’s incentive to monopolise religion. As such, it empowers the flourishing of diverse faiths. Consequently, violent monotheism is fundamentally incompatible with the modern West. Yet the Koran prescribes it……

Freedom of religion is not possible where that freedom is singular. Nor is the Western conception of religious freedom possible where individual liberty, including the freedom to exercise religious belief, is subjected to state control…..

The legalisation of same-sex marriage has created an unintended consequence of potentially widening the scope for state interference in personal faith matters. Australia has some of the weakest protections for religious freedom in the free world while international precedent demonstrates the use of lawfare against Christians is becoming something of a blood sport…..

Australia’s approach to religious freedom should reflect the best of the Western tradition. We believe in free will. We believe in the secular state. We believe in the inherent worth of each and every individual. We want a future where freedom of religion can animate the soul of the free world. Neither militant atheism nor hardline Islamism will light the way to liberty.

Well, there you are. Queer or militant activists have put the fix in to use fear of Islam to suggest that some people may fear Christianity – and so stand in the way of religious freedom. How this relates to the ‘21^st century jihad against America and Israel’ is not explained. Nor for that matter is religious freedom explained. Israel Folau is legally free to express his religious opinion that gay people are doomed to burn in eternal flames. What more freedom does he need?

The contention underlying this seamless rant appears to be that while we can tolerate ‘extreme’ or ‘hardline’ views in Christianity, whatever those terms may mean, we should not do so for Islam. This apparently follows from the role of Christianity in western civilisation. So much for pluralism. And as to theocratic states that favour one religion over another, how does Israel shape up? In fact, how do we shape up when our head of state has to be in communion with the Church of England?

And as for parts of scripture that are on the nose, the bible is shot through with endorsements of ethnic cleansing. That God did after all choose one people over others. It is sufficient to refer to Deuteronomy 20:16, Joshua 1:1-9, 6:17-25; and 8:24-30. For that matter, Genesis 3 has not done much for women in western civilisation. Or men.

Ms Oriel has at least two things in common with Donald Trump. She is pursued by demons – in her case, political correctness and jihadis; in Trump’s case, the deep state and witch-hunters – and moderation is not her go. She and Trump exemplify the extremism and fantasy of our time.

Bloopers

In the note from Steele to Greg Miller, the head of NAB’s wealth advice, Steele complained: ‘In terms of the broader leadership team, I am concerned about the cultural impact to both overall engagement and the potential reluctance of team members to raise future issues which could contravene NAB’s whistleblower policy given the likely perceived unfairness of the consequences and corresponding lack of trust in senior leadership to support our people.’

The Guardian, 25 April, 2018

A banker complains about a drop in bonuses. They certainly don’t get paid to speak plainly.

Us and the US – Chapter 4

15/05/2018 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

[The extracts that follow under this gravely ungrammatical title précis a book published in 2014 called ‘A Tale of Two Nations; Uncle Sam from Down Under’. That book sought to compare the key phases of history of the two nations under fourteen headings. That format will be followed in the précis. The chapter headings are Foreword;1 Motherland; 2 Conception;3 Birth; 4 Natives; 5 Frontiers; 6 Laws; 7 Revolution; 8 Migration; 9 Government; 10 Wars; 11 Race; 12 Wealth; 13 God; 14 Findings; Afterword. Each chapter is about 1400 words.]

Natives

The American Indians were not subjected to the same kind of annihilation as the Aztecs or Incas had been, but then the English had thought that the Spanish treatment of natives was cruel. One Elizabethan commentator thought that the Spanish were morally inferior ‘because with all cruel inhumanity…they subdued a naked and yielding people, whom they sought for gain….’ Were the English and then the American and Australian colonisers any better?

The American colonists found themselves in wars with the Indians without getting much help from England. The colonists long thought that London was far too tender toward the Indians. The line of the ‘frontier’ of white settlement kept getting pushed westwards until it finally disappeared about two hundred years later. One American mightily stirred by a royal proclamation limiting white expansion was a man named George Washington. He was a soldier and big-hitting landowner who had no time at all for the Indians – ‘a cruel and bloodthirsty enemy on our backs.’

The Founding Fathers had views in common about slavery and the Indians – the Indians must not be allowed to get in the way of the growth of America. When Jefferson submitted his draft Declaration of Independence to Congress, they struck out that inane clause about Negroes but they let stand a clause that referred to ‘the merciless Indian savages whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages sexes and conditions’.

Well, the Indians need not have expected any mercy from that quarter, and for that reason, while both sides sought Indian help during the Revolutionary War, it was generally the British who got it. The Indians knew that the American hunger for land could never be satisfied. Any protection that they had had from England evaporated with the Declaration of Independence. Gunboats, and not just Gunboat Diplomacy, would be used to push the Indians across the Mississippi. The killing grounds under Andrew Jackson were blood-curdling. The well-known adventurer and sharpshooter David Crockett said simply: ‘We shot them like dogs’. This was ‘undistinguished destruction of all ages sexes and conditions’ that the whites had charged the Indians with in the Declaration of Independence. It was a form of bestiality that can only be explained on the footing that the white people regarded the Indians as having no more significance than being part of a hostile landscape that had to be cleared for white settlement.

It is hard to find a humane view, even a civilised one. Abraham Lincoln was the first to refer to Indians as ‘Native Americans’. Treaties were made, but not kept. In the end there was no land left to seize and no tribe left to betray. After the defeat of Custer at Little Bighorn in the Great Sioux War, the massive reaction ended with the slaughter at Wounded Knee in 1890. A poet named Helen Hunt Jackson produced an itemised account of white breaches of treaties called A Century of Dishonour. In 1877, President Hayes had said: ‘Many, if not most of our Indian wars have had their origin in broken promises and acts of injustice on our part.’

We are talking about a ‘civilised’ nation depriving an ‘uncivilised’ people of their rights, of their very being as a people. The American Indians never resolved the dilemma of assimilation, and a kind of cultural death, or staying separate. Neither have our aboriginals.

***

It is as well to remember that the Europeans that the Australian Aborigines were to confront were not the flower of the Enlightenment. Most of these white people had been cast out of their own community. And they were held in line by a brutal and inhuman regime maintained by troops not far from the bottom of their own barrel.

The instructions of Governor Phillip were silent on treating with the natives about what we might call ownership or land rights. His instructions were predicated on the assumption that title to the land had vested in the Crown. The English at Botany Bay in and after 1788 proceeded on the footing that the land that they were now occupying had belonged to no one. The Latin term is terra nullius (‘land of no one’). In 1992, the High Court of Australia said that all this was wrong, and that it was simply false to say that in 1788 Australia belonged to no one.

But for more than a century after 1788, the Aboriginal peoples of Australia were deprived of their rights by a sustained course of conduct by the governments in London and Australia that was based on an expressly racist premise. The High Court of Australia said that the Aboriginal people of the continent came to be treated as ‘a different and lower form of life whose very existence could be ignored.’ From time to time, London expressed horror at what was going on, but it was easy to be pious at that distance. The Aborigines never had the power in combat that the Maoris showed in New Zealand, and they were never offered treaties of the substantive kind offered to the Maoris – and, it might be added, that the Maoris got more return from their treaties than the American Indians ever would.

A Prime Minister, Paul Keating, said: ‘We took the traditional lands and smashed the original way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion.’ In 2008, the Parliament apologised. Many Australians were opposed to giving such an apology, and many others still mock it now.

Two things at least are clear. First, the Aborigines did not ask the white people to occupy this country and they did not consent to that course. Secondly, the Aborigines have suffered immense pain and loss as a result of the white occupation. What is there left to argue about? In both America and Australia, the white people came and took the land from the weaker native peoples who were already there and both God and humanity went clean out the window. The natives were, one American general said, just ‘destined to disappear with the forests.’

But moral outrage over sustained hypocrisy should not lead us to forget that de Tocqueville thought that whatever ‘we consider the destinies of the aborigines of North America, their calamities appear to be irremediable’, or that more recently Paul Johnson thought that the alternative to assimilation in the U S was ‘continuing friction, extravagant expectations, and new forms of exploitation by white radical intellectuals.’

How different was the American or Australian experience to that of the Boers in South Africa? They saw themselves as successors to the Hebrew Patriarch. They were the children of God in the Wilderness, and Jean Calvin had taught them that they were the elect ordained by God to rule over the land and all the natives that they found on it. Was a Bantu any more appalled by a Calvinist than an Iroquois was by a Lutheran or than a blackfella was by an Anglican?

In both America and Australia, a race that saw itself as superior annihilated whole tribes and cultures of what it saw as an inferior race; the one difference is that the American natives offered stronger resistance and that led to government responding with more armed force and duplicity.

Here and there – Two leaders – to whom do I refer?

15/05/201815/05/2018 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

He views the world as revolving around himself. He has no interest in anything that does not concern him personally.

He thrives on conflict.

He is better at tearing down than building up.

He is immensely vain.

But he is also very insecure. There was a flaw in his upbringing, and his education was at best suspect.

He cannot stand any slight on his character or upbringing. He is likely to react irrationally and violently. People doubt whether once he has got to the top he will be able to restrain himself.

He therefore hates the press, and sadly for him, his nation has plenty of quality press.

He adores being adored. He thinks that it is only natural that he should be adored.

He is therefore at his best before an adoring crowd. You can see him drawing support and relief from the adoration.

He loves rallies, parades, and ceremonies – anything to do with the military is terrific. He likes dressing up as a member of the military, and mixing with them – although deep down, he does not like or trust them.

He prefers being adored to governing.

His government program is driven by a need for revenge. One is less coy than the other about what is being avenged.

He is barely literate. His written utterances would ill become a ten year old boy. But for those who want to see, those utterances show a very bent and nasty man who could do you a lot of harm. Some people see him as being so unhinged as to be mad. The written communications of both are scarcely literate, but one unloaded one long endless tirades, while the other issues short bitchy pouts after dawn.

He knows nothing about trade, economics, international diplomacy or the law. He is the most undiplomatic person ever born. He had had little or no experience in government before getting the top job. And it shows; and just before dawn, he knows that it shows. This feeds his insecurity and anger. And it makes him worse at governing.

But his supporters say that his very inexperience is a blessing. He is untainted by the old regime that it is his mission to destroy.

Notwithstanding his ignorance of government, he occasionally indulges in micro-management when in the mood. The results are awful.

He loves to proclaim his love for his country – in part in the hope that this will fuel his country’s love for him.

But in truth his love of himself is so great that there is little room left for love of country, and none for love of God.

One relies on others wanting to appease him; the other is keen to appease his strongest opponent.

He lies all the time. That is to say, he is fundamentally dishonest. ‘Conscience’ is a word that could not be applied to him. Such a thing could only get in the way of his ego.

He therefore has no understanding or respect for the principles of decency that underlie his position.

He is therefore open to fraud and corruption, although one of them, for family reasons, is far more into nepotism than the other.

In truth, he has little respect for decency and no time or room for truth.

His propaganda team therefore has carte blanche. They may or may not accept that their dealings with people reveal that they hold other people in contempt.

He pursues scapegoats relentlessly. One premise of that pursuit is that he can do no wrong. Another premise is his capacity to lump people together and regard them as inferior – and therefore ripe for target practice.

One is more reticent than the other about identifying his scapegoats but their cadres pursue them relentlessly – and smile while they do so. This only unsettles a small number of their followers, and any dissent is brushed aside.

There is another term that could never be applied to him – tolerance. If you think that tolerance is the fine fruit and the vital root of western civilisation, he is therefore a threat of the kind that some are wont to call existential.

Another term that could never be applied to him is contemplation. He looks like he might have a nervous breakdown if he was locked in a room on his own in order to meditate.

Because of his character flaws, he has no friends, and his relations with women are fraught. Each of the three women who got close to one committed suicide, or tried to, and for one of the suicides, it was her second attempt. The other has not been able to keep his hands off women, and his third marriage is obviously stressed – his third wife stalks about like a startled POW. (Perhaps she is.)

He doesn’t drink but his taste for food is very odd.

They have different views on military service. Although one was knocked back for officer training – twice – he was rightly decorated for bravery in battle. The other evaded military service with the same dedication with which he would later evade paying tax. Another word you could never apply to him is patriot – at least if being a patriot means doing the right thing by your country where you could evade such service by a mix of cowardice and deceit.

He would like life tenure – but only one gets it.

Because of those defects in his make-up, he is the worst possible person to lead his country. But he manages – just – to persuade enough people to support him to enable him to get the top job. On one view, neither of them ever got a majority vote, and the same people who supported each of them must know that when the end comes, he will turn on them – viciously.

Passing Bull 149 – Books that are too long

14/05/2018 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

More than fifty years ago, I was trying to get to understand what we know as classical music. I have the clearest recollection of reading that Mendelssohn had referred to something written by Mozart as the most beautiful music he had heard. That is hardly surprising, but it might be handy to know just what piece he had in mind. Over the years I have somehow narrowed the field of inquiry to the opera Don Giovanni. There is a gorgeous trio near the end of the first act. Could this be it?

I am reading Mendelssohn, A Life in Music, by R Larry Todd (Oxford University Press, 2003). It runs to 683 pages, which is a lot for one who died so young. Surely it will have the answer? We get flirtatiously close. We get a reference on one page to Mozart’s ‘celebrated minuet’ and on another a reference to Goethe asking the young Felix to play a minuet that was ‘the most beautiful in the world.’ That may be enough for the cognoscenti, but it is not enough for me, a mere amateur. The author knows what he is referring to, and so will at least some of his readers. But not I.

The author has devoted his life to the study of Mendelssohn. The blurb says The New York Times hailed him as ‘the dean of Mendelssohn scholars in the United States.’ The text of the book runs to 569 pages. The notes, bibliography and index exceed 110 pages. That ratio will give some idea of the challenge this work poses to the general reader. It is far, far too long. It is also far, far too technical for people like me. You get the impression that if something, however unimportant, has come to the attention of the author over the decades, then it is going in the book. The result is a shapeless mass that does not leave you with a clear picture of its subject. You start to skim read, and you miss whatever point the author is trying to make. Whatever may be the worth of the book as scholarship, as a biography it is a failure – and a long, frustrating and expensive failure.

You get most of the same problems with Harvey Sachs Toscanini, Musician of Conscience (W Norton & Co, 2017). Again, the author has devoted his life to the subject One blurb refers to the ‘unbelievable detail in the book.’ What’s good about that? Who wants to read a train timetable? There are no notes, but the text runs to 864 pages. That’s not bad for a conductor. The result is the same – you skim read and miss what you might have enjoyed.

I looked up what the great critic Neville Cardus had to say about Toscanini. I’m tempted to say that he said as much in eight pages as Mr Sachs said in 800, but that would be as unfair as it would be unkind. But the truth is that we – the ordinary readers – would have been better served by a book at most half that length. Too many books of history and biography look like Wagner’s Ring Cycle – remembering that Gough Whitlam said that Wagner badly needed an editor.

Let me give an example of an anecdote given by Neville Cardus. When rehearsing in New York in the 1950’s, Toscanini invited a viola player home for dinner. The man was entranced – he would get to hear the secrets of music from the maestro in the temple. They were admitted by a butler. The maestro wolfed down his pasta and red wine and moved to the TV room. To watch TV wrestling – with fruity and ungrammatical exhortations from the world’s greatest conductor. The subject of music never arose. That anecdote is revealing in many ways. The great man relaxed by hurling abuse at overpaid charlatans and thugs. But I may have missed it in the snow storm of ‘unbelievable detail.’

May our editors live long lives and be readmitted to gainful employment. Publishers have fallen into the trap of judges with lawyers. They let them bang on too long, and they have misplaced the guillotine.

Bloopers

Headlines Monday 14 May 2018

The Australian Financial Review

Labour gains on ‘fair’ budget: poll.

The Age

Coalition on slide despite tax cuts.

The Guardian

Coalition budget fails to turn around Turnbull government’s fortunes.

The Australian

Turnbull rating soars as voters back tax cuts.

Guess who Rupert barracks for.

Here and there – Going Green with a Tory Intellectual

08/05/2018 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

We have seen before that Roger Scruton, the Conservative English philosopher, is like a refreshing breeze in a foetid room. He is an English rarity – an intellectual. What we badly need in Australia is someone who can stand up for Conservatism in a manner that is intellectually responsible – and, for that matter, honest. I am not aware of any valid claimant to that role in this country.

In his 2012 book Green Philosophy, how to think seriously about the planet, Scruton seeks to make the case that conservatives are better placed to deal with problems of the environment, like climate change, than those on the other side of politics. God only knows what he thinks about those who call themselves conservatives here who are still reluctant to acknowledge the problem, and whose peeved retardation has left us up the proverbial creek.

The book is I think twice as long as it needs to be, and there is a fetish for footnotes that borders on the North American. (And what’s the point of a footnote that says ‘See Carl von Clausewitz, On War, 1832’, or ‘See F W Maitland, Equity, Cambridge, 1909’? They are both very big books and very dangerous in the hands of the amateur.)

Scruton was heavily and publicly involved in the fight over fox hunting in England. His side lost, and you can see some scars. In talking about a fund for animal welfare, Scruton says:

…the Political Animal Lobby gave £1 million pound to the Labour Party in exchange for a promise to instigate the ban. It is worth noting that this kind of corruption of the political process elicits no cries of outrage when donor and recipient, are both ‘on the left’.

Dear me – it is not corrupt for a lobby or ginger group to advance money to a political party in return for a promise that the party will support the objectives of the group. And the suggestion that those ‘on the left’ might get better treatment suggests that the author might be afflicted with some of the resentment that so disfigures so much commentary in a paper like The Australian. And he should be aware of the problem, since he spends a lot of time speaking of the resentment of those ‘on the left.’ He even quotes Nietzsche on ressentiment.

Two pages later we get:

Shareholders rarely ask questions, and certainly not about the environmental consequences of actions that are bringing them a return on their investment.

Well, things have changed since 2012. Shareholders do ask questions. Rio Tinto has just sold all its coal holdings. At least some analysts say that one motive was not to upset conscientious fundholders. But then Scruton makes amends.

It is one of the weaknesses of the conservative position, as this has expressed itself in America, that its reasonable enthusiasm for free enterprise is seldom tempered by any recognition that free enterprise among citizens of a single nation state is very different from free enterprise conducted by a multinational company, in places to which the company and its shareholders have no civic tie.

The author argues that the problems can best be met by local action, rather than grand international schemes, and by people, including those in the markets, coming together voluntarily for that purpose, rather than by being driven there by government.

The premises of the argument may be ideological, but their justification is empirical. I will not rehearse the argument, which trips into many meadows, but I will comment on a few items. I merely say here that after the Great Financial Crisis, anyone arguing that the great currents in our lives might best be left to the markets is standing at the foot of a very high mountain that is plagued by lethal avalanches.

There is a related problem with the phrase ‘people who pursue politics of top-down control’. The phrase ‘top-down control’ is favoured by those who get uneasy about the reach of government. But the essence of any government is precisely to achieve top-down control. That’s what ‘ruling’ entails. The name for the alternative is anarchy. You don’t alter the nature of an apple by calling it a pear.

As we remarked previously, we in Australia are committed to what is called the Welfare State. It is suicide for any politician of any colour to suggest the contrary. It will therefore be difficult to argue about the role or reach of government a priori.

Take the way we try to look after the role of the poor. We do so through bodies known as charities and through government agencies. The law relating to charities was founded, and still is in some part, on laws made during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I – before the U S or Australia were ever thought of. The English government then intervened on behalf of the poor in ways that really surprise us – and would revolt many Republicans in the U S. The Elizabethans prefigured, by three centuries, the famous statement by Lloyd George in 1908:

These problems of the sick, the infirm, of the men who cannot find a means of earning a livelihood … are problems with which it is the business of the State to deal. They are problems which the State has neglected for too long.

The role of charities today is the subject of heated argument. They don’t pay tax, and to that extent they lean on us. But their role in the system is fundamental. Scruton is I think on very thin ice in trying to put charities and NGOs in different boxes. He cannot sustain the proposition that ‘many of the best-known NGOs steer clear of politics.’ Their mere existence is the subject of political contention. It’s the same with charities. When speaking of charities, the author says:

…English law has acknowledged their social significance and granted exemption from taxes that might otherwise have impeded their work. Indeed, we rarely use the ‘NGO’ label in describing this kind of institution, for the very reason that we do not see them as competing with government or as pressing for political results. They are active but not activists.

To repeat, an apple does not cease to be an apple just because you change its epithet, or label. And that last proposition is a shocker. (An ‘activist’ is a person whose being ‘active’ irritates the person bestowing the epithet. If you turn on Sky News any one night you will hear one load of activists complaining about the activities of other loads of activists. We could expect more from the Professor.) And if you think that a charity like Red Cross has nothing to do with politics, have a look at their website; or suggest that they pay tax.

The field of inquiry is so wide, that the author is constantly at risk either of going in above his head, or revealing that he has taken his opinions on matters in which he has no expertise from very loaded sources. One example is his treatment of class actions in the U S. I am not qualified as an American lawyer, but I have considered the main issues at many ABA Conferences in the U S and at a summer school at Harvard. I think I know enough to say that on this issue, Scruton has hitched his horses to a wagon that was only ever headed in one direction.

Such problems have become abundantly apparent in America, where the English law of tort [a civil wrong like an action for negligence] has encountered a formidable accumulation of greed and vindictiveness, and lost out in the fight. In the American courts, tort cases are decided by a jury – a right guaranteed by the seventh amendment of the U S Constitution – and the jury also assesses damages. Predatory lawyers, taking advantage of ‘class-action suits’, and of the procedure whereby jury members can be challenged and removed prior to the trial, have been able to ensure that the one who can pay is the one who does pay, regardless of fault.

There’s a lot there that is misleading, but it is at best unprofessional of the author to suggest that a significant branch of the jurisprudence of America has been distorted by greedy, vindictive and predatory lawyers – and, presumably, by juries of the same temper. That is the kind of abuse or invective that we have some to expect from our soi disant conservatives – and which we go to people like Professor Scruton to avoid.

Unlike me, Scruton does see some meaning in the terms ‘left’ and ‘right.’ We are apparently talking about a state of mind. Elsewhere I said:

Left and right

I do not like and I try to avoid these terms, which come from the French Revolution, but I shall set out my understanding. The ‘left’ tend to stand for the poor and the oppressed against the interests of power and property and established institutions. The ‘right’ stand for the freedom of the individual in economic issues, and seek to preserve the current mode of distribution. The left is hopeful of government intervention and change; the right suspects government intervention and is against change. The left hankers after redistribution of wealth, but is not at its best creating it. The right stoutly opposes any redistribution of wealth, and is not at its best in celebrating it. The left is at home with tax; the right loathes it. These are matters of degree that make either term dangerous. Either can be authoritarian. On the left, that may lead to communism. On the right, you may get fascism.

That discussion shows how shaky such a label is in the premise of an argument that claims to be logically tight. But Scruton refers to something known as ‘cultural theory’ on the footing that it ‘captures tendencies within social and political thinking that help to show why there is a real, lasting and rooted difference between ‘left’ and ‘right’’. This is worrying, not least because Scruton says ‘I put no trust in its scientific credentials’ and that the relevant terms ‘do not describe theories or goals, but identities, revealed in the structure of collective choice.’ Talk like that may have unhinged Wittgenstein.

Still, the author is good enough to come clean about the lack of contribution from his professional colleagues.

What I have read of ‘practical ethics’ has not persuaded me that professional philosophers today are any good at giving advice….And I doubt that there can be such a thing as a moral expert.

I have no doubt about the latter, but if the former holds good, would it be rude to ask what we might hope to gain from this discussion?

So, while we now have access to a sensible conservative response to climate change, the scars of the old wars of ideology are still sadly apparent. For some reason it remains an issue that continues to suck in even sensible people like Roger Scruton.

Passing Bull 148 – Bull about peace

08/05/2018 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Donald Trump is bellicose – that is, he is inclined to war or fighting. The word comes from the Latin bellum for war. Trump needs conflict like you and I need oxygen. Not for him that beatitude ‘Blessed are the peacemakers.’ For that matter it is at best even money whether Trump would know what the beatitudes are.

There you have one reason why in the madness and iniquity of Washington, DC, the suggestion that Trump might be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize is as sane as suggesting that Rudi Giuliani is a competent lawyer in good standing within his profession. The most polite thing you could say about this suggestion, made by Republican members of Congress, is that it is an outstanding example of the fallacy that if A comes after B, you can infer that B caused A. You drove into the rear of my car while I was waiting at a red light; but for that fact that I got out of bed this morning, I would not have been at that intersection; therefore my getting out of bed caused the accident. That would be an outrageous example – but how much better is anything that comes out of this White House?

Besides, the proclamation of peace is premature. Because Trump is bellicose, he wants to break the deal with Iran. You can have another even money bet. If he does so, North Korea will say that all bets with the U S are off and that they will deal separately with South Korea and Japan. That would leave Trump with his mate Netanyahu – who looks and sounds like an ogre from Gulliver’s Travels – and who else?

Bloopers

At CSL, efficiency is a significant advantage for us.

CSL Limited Half Year Update, 2017-2018

Who would have it otherwise? Since CSL is a gem in my super, thank heavens they don’t go in for inefficiency.

But after Giuliani said on live television that Trump had indeed reimbursed Cohen for the payment, the president reversed his position in an extraordinary sequence of tweets – just hours before leading a national day of prayer at the White House.

The Guardian, 4 May 2018

All you need to know about America today.

Us and the U S – Chapter 3

07/05/2018 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Us and the US

[The extracts that follow under this gravely ungrammatical title précis a book published in 2014 called ‘A Tale of Two Nations; Uncle Sam from Down Under’. That book sought to compare the key phases of history of the two nations under fourteen headings. That format will be followed in the précis. The chapter headings are Foreword;1 Motherland; 2 Conception; 3 Birth; 4 Natives; 5 Frontiers; 6 Laws; 7 Revolution; 8 Migration; 9 Government; 10 Wars; 11 Race; 12 Wealth; 13 God; 14 Findings; Afterword. Each chapter is about 1400 words.]

Birth

The Mayflower arrived off Cape Cod in November 1620. There were forty-one families and they were what we call Puritans. These very religious people thought that the Church of England was too much like the Church of Rome. We might now call them fanatics, or fundamentalists. They wanted a religion free of abstraction in thought and hierarchy in action. God was over all, but no mere mortal could be superior to another. They had been persecuted because they were dissenters. In the New World they could start a new life and they would have the numbers. Their country would be God’s own country because they were God’s chosen people. As John Winthrop said, ‘Wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill…. we shall be… a by-word throughout out the world.’

On their way over, they entered into a written covenant. The critical words are ‘combine ourselves together in a civil body politic.’ We may owe allegiance to an English king, but it is we who will combine to make our new world. If that combination comes into effect with the blessing of God, well, then, how can we fail? These boat people brought to the New World God, conviction, strength, and a contract. They set out as families and for good reason thought that they were exceptional. They were nothing if not American.

In 1606, the Virginia Company was formed to recover for Christ ‘a number of poure and miserable souls wrapt up into death in almost invincible ignorance.’ Well, it was unlikely that the colony set up at Jamestown could survive on the conversion of the Indians. There was capital was riding on this venture. This was not the work of government – people had sunk their own money into the company. The colony started to take hold when investors were offered land in return for their capital. Later settlers were offered land in return for labour.

The colony at Chesapeake Bay nearly went the same way as the first Virginia settlement. It was saved by the enterprise of a mercenary called Captain John Smith. Smith was candid. ‘For I am not so simple as to think that any other motive than wealth will ever erect there a Commonweale’. He wondered about people ‘making religion their colour when all their aim was nothing but present profit.’ Tobacco would do for Virginia what wool would do for Australia. The company also said the colonists would have ‘the rights of Englishmen’, and the first General Assembly of Virginia met.

Rhode Island arose for those who had had enough of the Brethren. So did Maine, parts of which had been dominated by the French. Salem was settled and The Massachusetts Bay Company was formed in 1629. Later, John Winthrop, a Cambridge man trained at Gray’s Inn, arrived. He rejoiced that the Indians had been wiped out by smallpox. Winthrop was in truth a dictator, and Salem was more intolerant than England ever had been. The purges of alleged witches at Salem are a lasting stain on the nation and a reminder of the threat that religious fanatics pose to others. They prefigured Senator McCarthy.

Maryland was named after a Catholic queen. New York was named after James II, the Duke of York, after it was changed from the Dutch New Amsterdam. William Penn arrived in Delaware for what was to be Pennsylvania. This future state was handed over for the release of a debt of £16,000. Penn was settling for the benefit of the Quakers who had been shockingly mistreated in the other settlements. Quakers from the Rhineland settled at Germanopolos. Philadelphia would be the birthplace of the American Declaration of Independence.

In the meantime, people from across Europe were settling. The American colonies were from the start far more middle class and cosmopolitan than the Australian colonies, and they were always much better equipped to lose any sense of dependence on the Mother Country.

***

The coming of the white man to Australia was not attended by any romance at all. The First Fleet assembled at Portsmouth. There were two warships, six transports, and three store ships; there were nineteen officers, eight drummers, one hundred and sixty privates, thirty wives and twelve children. There were more than seven hundred convicts, about a quarter of them women. Assembly and provisioning took months amid chaos, squalor and despair; the shopkeepers at Portsmouth lowered their shutters, while slatternly female convicts lolled on the decks with such clothing as they had.

They dropped anchor at Botany Bay on 20 January 1788, after a journey of more than eight months. They arrived a year and a half before the fall of the Bastille, a signature prison of the Old World and Ancien Régime. They did not like what they saw, now blasted by a summer heat. They found a better spot, Sydney Harbour, one as gorgeous as the two they had stopped at on the way – Rio de Janeiro (also built by convict labour) and Cape Town (whose Robben Island is now a shrine to the imprisonment of the great Nelson Mandela). On 26 January 1788 the white people hoisted an English flag. That day is celebrated by some annually as Australia Day. It does not have quite the same élan as Bastille Day or Independence Day.

Shortly afterwards, fourteen couples were joined in marriage; the colony had to be peopled. The Protestant Ascendancy also had to be preserved. On 13 February, Captain Phillip swore an oath about the real presence. There had been trouble a few days before when the women had finally been released from their ships. Some of the sailors got into the rum with the women, and there were appalling scenes of debauchery. But somehow the colony survived until the second fleet arrived two and a half years later. The financial drain might for a while have been a concern to London.

What were the convicts like? Manning Clark said: ‘When these men and women spoke for themselves before their judges, they seemed to be liars, drunkards, and cheats, flash and vulgar in dress, cheeky when addressing their jailers when on top, but quick to cringe and whine when retribution struck… they were men and women who aroused their contemporaries to disgust and apprehension, but rarely to compassion, and never to hope’.

There may have been a limit of, say seven years on their term of imprisonment, but for most it was a one way ticket – for the reason that they could never afford a return ticket. By 1800, about two thirds of the colonists at New South Wales were free. Transportation ended on the east coast in 1850. More than 160,000 convicts were transported to Australia. But free immigration was on the rise.

A Scottish military man was sent out with his own regiment after a kind of rebellion, and over a period of twelve years, Governor Macquarie encouraged emancipation. He even offered land to aborigines. A London commissioner recommended injecting terror back into transportation. This suited the sheep farmers who were squatting on crown land and becoming rich off the sheep’s back. Some of them even fancied their own kind of aristocracy. The squatters were the big hitters in the first century of the white people down under.

So, one nation started with free enterprise and the better people seeking God and their fortune; the other was a government job to get the dregs off-shore. One started with liberation and hope; the other with imprisonment and despair. That is one hell of a difference. One nation craved independence and won it; the other fears independence and ducks it.

Us and the US – Chapter 1

30/04/2018 / Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

Motherland

Our two nations, Australia and the U S, have a common parent. America was commenced by colonists from England. Australia was commenced by colonists from Great Britain – the nation of Great Britain had come about by the union of England and Scotland during the nearly two hundred years that separated the first sustained English settlements in America in 1606, and the British settlement of Australia in 1788.

Historians broadly agree that the English nation and language were founded by Germans (Anglo-Saxons) in the six hundred years or so before the Norman Conquest. They left almost nothing of the remains of the Romans or the native inhabitants who were there before the Romans came. The Anglo-Saxons brought the institution of hereditary kingship, a tradition of popular assembly, and a system of incidental laws (or dooms or decrees) to supplement or articulate existing customs. They made no attempt to codify all their laws.

The Normans, a tough northern breed that had come down into France, brought a strong central government. They opened the way for royal justice and a law that was common to all England. This is what they and we would call the ‘common law’ (la loi commune). The Normans also brought the jury, at first mainly as a tool of government, but later as a mode of trial that the English and Americans would come to regard as an essential plank in their constitution. Although the Normans came after the Germans, and although their conquest was complete, they did not contribute as much to the growth of English law as the Germans. One great American scholar said that ‘the English law is more German than the law of Germany itself’. Germany would later adopt Roman law – as had France and most of Europe. England never did so.

So, the first point about our common parent is fundamental. England’s laws and constitution – their constitution grew out of the common law – were entirely home grown. Unlike most of Europe, the English never adopted the Roman model. They were always determined to go their own way. You can now better see the differences between England and the Continent to this day. Had either nation been created by France, Germany, Spain or Italy, the result would have been unimaginably different.

The period called the Middle Ages was characterised by feudalism. The Roman Empire had maintained order. When it collapsed, Europe entered a dark phase of disorder and violence called the Dark Ages. People looked to a strong man for protection. He gave that in return for loyal service. The vassal paid homage to his lord by taking the hand of the lord between his own and affirming that ‘I am your man’. This feudal bond was tied to the land and it worked up to the king. Lords held land from the king and common people held land from a lord and they owed obligations to that lord. Medieval people loved hierarchies.

Now, most wealth came from the possession of land and ownership rested with a ruling caste. The land was worked by peasants who were tied to the land. The power of government cascaded down through intermediaries. These feudal ties and differences in caste were very prominent in the French and Russian Revolutions. Six hundred years before the Russians cremated feudalism in a nation–breaking conflagration, the English king in his parliament had made a law that represented a political compromise between the nobility that held the land and those who actually managed the land. It was a law that cut clean across the whole idea of what we call ‘feudalism’.

Here is the second fundamental point about our common parent. By the time that England became a colonising force and then an imperial power, feudalism had ceased to matter to it. The English were very far advanced in the destruction of caste and the promotion of the ideal of legal equality. Things were very different on the Continent.

Before England founded either of our two nations, it had undergone two cataclysms that we now see as being essential to its nature. To resolve a civil war, the barons forced King John to agree to the terms of what is known as the Great Charter, or Magna Carta. We see it as England’s first statute. It is revered as much in the U S as it is in the U K. What it showed was that the king had had to negotiate if he wanted to keep his crown and that he had had to agree to accept express limitations on his powers. The king also had to accept his general obligation to obey the law. The fact that the king had been driven to negotiate is at least as important as the two most famous clauses: ‘No man shall be taken or imprisoned … except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. To none will we sell, to none will we deny or delay right or justice.’ If the king, too, had to negotiate, then he too was a politician. Most importantly, the people through the lawyers – the common lawyers – could now say that the king was under the law because the law made the king. This is the real beginning of what we call the rule of law. That is central to England’s view of itself and is the third elemental difference between it and other colonising powers.

The other cataclysm, the Reformation, was nominally about religion but was really about politics. Henry VIII wanted an heir but because of a conflict of interest, the pope refused to give him a divorce. The English revolted. They gave themselves religious home rule. They would run their own church free from interference from another power. They did this through their parliament, so greatly enhancing its power. This is the fourth huge difference between England and other colonial powers – just look at the role of religion in the French and Russian revolutions. And the lawyers were into this ruckus up to their necks. How many of the failings of governments in Spain, France, Italy and Greece were due to their failures to tame their church?

So, by the time that we get to the two English revolutions of the 17^th century, the English had put clear and reasonably firm limits on the supremacy of the crown, and they had broken the supremacy of the church. A strong legal profession had destroyed the clergy’s monopoly of learning. There was broad agreement that only the parliament could make laws and that the judiciary had to be independent. The battleground was to be the distribution of the executive and revenue powers between the crown and the parliament. That issue led to two revolutions in England, and then one in America.

It was put to bed, finally, during the 17^th century. The conflicts with the Stuart kings were resolved in favour of parliament in the Bill of Rights. This is the platform of the English constitution as it stands today. It provided the basis of the American Declaration of Independence, and Australia’s Constitution would be set out in the schedule to an English Act of Parliament.

The fifth defining element of England as our parent was its subscription to representative government through parliament, and a reverence for the healing and binding powers of the law. Things were very, very different across the Channel.

Here and there – The Wars of the Roses on the BBC

30/04/2018 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

In 1964, the year of the Demons’ last flag, the BBC made a televised recording called The Wars of the Roses. It consisted of a heavily edited version of four plays: Henry VI Parts I, 2, and 3, and Richard III. The editing didn’t involve just cutting – new dialogue was added. You can if you like try to spot the additions. I couldn’t be bothered (and I suspect that my ear may be as dodgy as my palate). The issue may in one sense be sterile, since it is unlikely that anyone will chance their arms by putting on the whole of the Henry VI trilogy in this country – they don’t try it often in England. We get either an abridgement, or nothing.

This TV show was a huge undertaking. The set was both massive and novel, and the cast was of the kind called ‘stellar’ in the popular press, although the producers were prepared to chance their arms. The show was recorded over eight weeks with many stars who had been involved in a recent Stratford production of the four plays.

One object of the production was to demonstrate the relevance of many themes of the plays to modern politics. The director, Peter Hall, said:

I became more and more fascinated by the contortions of politicians, and by the corrupting seductions experienced by anybody who wields power.

The RSC issued a three CD set of the trilogy in 2016. The show was shot in black and white and its grainy appearance lacks the definition of High Noon, but it is a great and historical production.

Each of the three parts is punishingly long – far too long to be taken in one hit in comfort. When the BBC replayed the series, they did so in eleven parts. The truth is that all four of these plays are too long, at least for Australian audiences. Many years ago, I saw the RSC do the Full Monty on Richard III at the Barbican, and it was an ordeal for back and bum of Wagnerian dimensions

Before watching the series, you may wish to look at the supplement that has interviews with two surviving stars – David Warner (Henry VI) and Janet Suzman (Joan of Arc and Lady Anne). Both would go on to wonderful careers, but each was hesitant at this stage, and their selection carried risk. Warner was offered his role after three auditions. He said he couldn’t believe it, and that he spent the first few days apologising for his selection. It was a great choice. His face, which is on the cover, was made to express the pain and indecision of a pious disaster. Of his part, Kenneth Tynan would say ‘I have seen nothing more Christ-like in modern theatre.’ Either the critic had a queer view of Christ, or he missed that part where this idle fop disinherited his son so that he could hold on to power for a few years more. (And I am a Tynan fan.)

When offered the role of Joan la Pucelle, Suzman asked who was she? ‘Joan of Arc, you bloody idiot.’ Then she turned up on the set, and all ‘the big guns were there.’ I’m not personally familiar with how the hierarchy in the theatre manifests itself to relative novices, but I imagine you could get the kind of snakiness you may find among some barristers and test cricketers – that is, naked bitchiness. Suzman says the editing was a corrective to a ‘biblical’ view of Shakespeare. Her features then, and fifty years on, radiate a kind of strength – of a kind, perhaps, that the Lady Anne lacked.

One of the big guns that may have put the wind up Janet Suzman was Peggy Ashcroft. She plays Margaret of Anjou, the queen of Henry VI, and the ‘she-wolf of France.’ She appears in every segment, and is the driving force for a lot of the action as the proud wife of an anaemic king, and the protective mother of his betrayed heir. She starts as the young French girl who is wooed into a negotiated marriage, becomes the de facto ruler of England, and the serial killer of the enemies of her house, and ends as a savage old hag at risk of being accused of witchcraft (which they all believed in back then.)

Since the actress was fifty-six when she played this part, pulling it off would be a feat – but pull it off, she did. Here is how a contemporary critic saw what appears to have been the original stage production.

.. the quite marvellous, fearsome performance of Dame Peggy Ashcroft as Margaret of Anjou, who skipped on to the stage, a lightfooted, ginger, sub-deb sub-bitch at about 11.35 a.m. and was last seen, a bedraggled crone with glittering eye, rambling and cussing with undiminished fury, 11 hours later, having grown before our eyes into a vexed and contumacious queen, a battle-axe and a maniac monster of rage and cruelty.. even the stoniest gaze was momentarily lowered from this gorgon.

Peggy Ashcroft said of her part as Margaret that she was:

….a Dark Lady if ever there was one – and prototype for Cressida, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth – was Shakespeare’s first ‘heroine’ – if such she can be called… It takes four plays to make her one of the great female characters in Shakespeare – and the full-length portrait has been seen only in The Wars of the Roses cycle – but she has facets that are not touched on in any other.

Margaret’s feral growls and hideous curses could cost you some sleep.

Janet Suzman is vital and gamin, and utterly followable as Joan of Arc. The scene where the big hitters elect to pick either a white rose (York) or a red rose (Lancaster) resembles heavy chested Harley riders. What are they missing that makes them show of so dangerously? In truth these magnates resemble the Mafia more than the Hell’s Angels. And the Mafia and the feudal system both evolve out of the same disorder – the failure of central government to provide security drives people to make other arrangements. They seek protection elsewhere. You look after me and I will look after you.

These lords and knights have that marvellous medieval accompaniment – their ‘powers’. Their puissance, another word much used in these times, leads others to pledge allegiance – to their liege lords. It is I suppose the kind of thing you see in shows like House of Cards, but there is something less prosaic about ‘powers’ than poll ratings or factions or unions or think tanks or talk shows.

We are talking about chess played with extreme prejudice. The magnates are like the knights and bishops, or even rooks, except that the rules are there to be flouted. The concept of allegiance was at best fluid. The followers – the powers – of the Duke of Burgundy or Lord Gloucester were as solid and reliable as the Tory ministers of Mrs Theresa May.

I will not mention all the players. The cast includes Roy Dotrice, Brewster Mason, Eric Porter, and the others mentioned here. The rose pickers include Donald Sinden as Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, and William Squire as Suffolk (the wooer and lover of Margaret). Sinden’s voice reminds me of Drambuie. There is something about it that makes it instantly recognizable, rather like the deflated Kevin Spacey.

When I lived in South Yarra, I could walk to and from work in the east end of Collins St, about thirty-five minutes each way, and in about four months listen to all thirty-eight plays. (It was then that I was glad that I had seen Cymbeline and Troilus and Cressida because I would not be doing so again; and Cyril Cusack’s Iago put me off Othello for life.) I suppose I had heard A Winter’s Tale on four or five occasions, before one day, out of nowhere, on the tan, I recognized the voice of the lead – there was no doubt it was William Squire who played Hunter in nearly all the twenty or so episodes of Callan. And in this trilogy there is also a lot of that eyebrow rolling and nasally drawled incredulity. It is bliss for Callan fans.

Gloucester (Paul Hardwick) is the definitive politician and the unfortunate Winchester (Nicholas Selby) is played like Joel Grey in Cabaret. Both could have walked straight out of Yes, Minister.

The Jack Cade sequence was to my mind hopelessly over the top, and too violent. Indeed, there are many scenes of horrific violence. We get to see what a blood feud can really look like, generation after generation. Janet Suzman remarked on the violence, and the role of cabbages in the decapitations. She said people were fainting all over the place.

One of my favourite scenes from this playwright is the confrontation between Queen Margaret and the Duke of York. She taunts him about his progeny.

And where’s that valiant crookback prodigy,

Dicky your boy, that with his grumbling voice

Was wont to cheer his dad in mutinies?

Well, we’ll get to see this Dicky in full murderous flight in the next episode, but this French-born woman steels herself not just to extinguish her womanhood, but her humanity. She will mock not just knighthood, but fatherhood. She rubs the nose of York into the blood of Rutland (his son) on a handkerchief. She says she mocks him to make him mad so that she can sing and dance. She puts a paper crown on the head of the man who would be king and says:

Ay, marry, sir, now he looks like a king

Ay, this is he who took King Henry’s chair

And this is he was his adopted heir.

But how is it that great Plantagenet

Is crowned so soon, and broke his solemn oath?

Off with the crown, and with the crown his head!

And whilst we breathe, take time to do him dead!

The BBC version is not for children. Margaret by now is oozing hate, and we start to get that old Greek feeling of whole houses being cursed. (In the McKellen film, Annette Bening as Queen Elizabeth gave meaning to the phrase ‘Ay me! I see the ruin of my house’ – ‘Welcome destruction, blood, and massacre’. She was right.) The violence was perhaps not so surprising after the assassination of Kennedy, and the beginning of the war in Vietnam. And the Cold War was stepping up, so mutilation by a sickle in the area of the groin may have then had different significance. We have now been exposed to so much more horror, that this level of explicitness looks as unnecessary as it is unkind.

In the final part, we see evil made manifest in Richard III played by Ian Holm. Richard III is a master class in the kind of stunt pulled by Peisistratus that was made whole by Mussolini and perfected by Hitler. The part as played by Ian Holm is so threatening because it is underdone. It’s as if the producers wanted to comment on the ‘banality of evil’ that Hannah Arendt saw in Eichmann. (He was one of those mass murderers who went to work with mass death in his brief case.) What we are presented with here is not motiveless malignity, but wanton evil. Most people can get hot for sex; the world must be peopled; but some people, sadly, get hot for evil.

Ian Holm was born to act. For this role he also brings the advantages of relative youth and shortness of size. He said:

I played Richard very much as a cog in the historical wheel, and not as an individual character. We tried very hard to get away from the Olivier/Irving image of the great Machiavellian villain.

When Richard is confronted with his bloody past, we get the kind of apologia that Fox News reserves for Donald Trump.

Look, what is done cannot now be amended.

Men shall deal unadvisedly sometimes

Which afterhours gives leisure to repent.

The scene where Richard confronts Anne is difficult, because it is revolting. But we have been rudely reminded that quite revolting people – including racist morons – might appeal to people who don’t mind being revolted, or who just don’t care. And we are also reminded of the difference between the power of sex appeal – that this king had none of – and the sex appeal of power. When we say that power corrupts, it is not just the wielder who can be corrupted, but those who come within its thrall. The regimes we least admire work on dragging people down to their level and then locking them into the regime by their complicity.

All that and more is on show here in this remarkable trilogy for the preservation of which we owe much thanks.

PS. May I add a note about Hunter? Callan worked for the British spooks. He was dragooned into it, and to do dirty hit jobs, because they got to him in the Big House. He has come up the hard way. His only mate is a scruffy Cockney cab driver called Lonely. Hunter is from the Establishment. So is another agent, Toby Meares. They are observing from afar Callan on a dangerous mission to meet a deadly Russian killer. Hunter scowls – he’s good at that – when Meares expresses a moral qualm about the danger to Callan.

Well, then, what would you do if you were in my position, Meares?

Well, on reflection, I think I would do nothing, Sir.

In that case, I would applaud your reticence, Meares.

Oh, don’t applaud, Sir – that way your right hand might know what your left hand is doing.

If you watch William Squire in The Wars of the Roses – he is Buckingham at the end – you will see immediately why he was a natural for the part of Hunter – and why he continues to play a substantial part in my entertainment. As it happens, Buckingham is one of the most vapid and watery liars the world has known. He is the Platonic form of the kind of politician who drives the rest of us mad.