The Ancient Marinara

The Ancient Marinara

 

He’s a Legend, and our friend

 

We wish he wouldn’t describe himself as “ancient”. That tends to put us at the edge of a category we fiercely resist.

Richard Neville, one of the founders of homepagedaily.com, was the infamous, notorious publisher and editor of Oz Magazine.and author of Hippie Hippie ShakePlay Power, amongst many others. Unrehabilitated 60s icon, iconoclast and futurist. And our friend, or at least our supporter and adviser, in the earlier and more threatened days of the Ministry of Mateship and Fair Dinkum Values, aka ‘ValuesAustralia’.

Here he is with chilling news on the grim future for the globally-heated rich:

The Old Tart Vanishes

The Old Tart Vanishes

 

Levers and pulleys of a flimsy fantasy machine

 

It’s all about perception, as they say, and in politics perception is truth.
But, as MacDonalds say, for a limited time only.

We were struck over the last few days by the sudden disappearance of what most were convinced was a terrifying, gargantuan, impenetrable, impervious monstrosity.

The heavier than lead, harder than granite monument of Speer-like dimensions to power, greed and fear, that was the Howard government has evaporated without leaving any trace but the faint and fading echoes of a few squeaking, frightened rodents as they scuttle away from the light of responsibility.

And now we are left, as if suddenly woken from a spell, blinking in the sunlight of possibilities we had forgotten how to dream of.

It began with the Apology, the Sorry that could “never” be said, when Brendan Nelson began the capitulation with his appalling speech which was, nevertheless, a capitulation. In fact he capitulated both to his party and to Kevin Rudd, and that was his problem.

Of all the living ex-Prime Ministers, only Howard was absent from Parliament House. And when we then saw him on his morning walk all we saw was a little, pathetic, weak and broken old man.

In the last week at least two of the once great and powerful who so arrogantly and righteously controlled our lives intimated that they would be leaving the ignominy of the backbenches.

On Monday night on 4 Corners we saw the remnants of the old liberal leadership ram the daggers into the back their ex-leader, who was already politically dead.

We were allowed to see the levers and pulleys of the flimsy fantasy machine they had used to hoodwink us all. And we could see clearly what weak fools they are, what fools they had been, how they had fooled us, and how they had been so comprehensively and easily intimidated and fooled by Howard.

And now on Tuesday:  WorkChoices – Howard’s ‘great legacy to the nation’, the legislation which, if it were rolled back by Labor, we were assured, would undo twelve years of ground-breaking and masterful industrial relations reforms leading to disaster, calamity and the end of the world – has been, as they report, unanimously, swiftly, quietly and ruthlessly killed off. It is as if it had never been. It has evaporated into nothingness along with every other thing the Howard government claimed it stood for.

And now, of course, there is nothing they do stand for. There is nothing left for them to stand for.

The complete repudiation of the Howard experiment by not only the people of Australia and the Labor Party but also unanimously by Howard’s own party is probably the most justified and satisfyingly comprehensive retribution in Australian political history against an unbelievably awful and corrosive man and his equally horrible fags¹. Howard’s legacy is nothing but a bitter, fading after-taste.

But for those straw-chewers from Deliverance country who revelled in hatred towards their fellow humans, in racism, in their piggy-squeals for the death penalty, because Howard gave them permission, what is left for them, now they no longer have permission? Onto whom can they now encrust themselves? Wilson Tuckey?

For an excellent analysis of the collision between narcissism and entitlement and the “death, decay and a not insubstantial stench” that the 4 Corners story stirred up, read Possum‘s insights here.

¹ which we mean, of course, in the Tom Brown’s School Days sense.

We Are Humbled…

We Are Humbled…

…and yet proud…

 to have some of our work considered worthy of inclusion amongst the writings of the doyens of the ozblogosphere in the Top 40 collection at OnlineOpinion.

The piece the judges have chosen is “The Nation That Hangs Together”.

We have been surprised by some of the comments by the usual suspects – the skinheads and the National Front seem to be alive and well and trolling around the intertubes encouraging the killing of people who are not themselves for a range of behaviours of which they happen personally to disapprove.

We would like to point out, however, that despite certain claims by these friends we are neither a Catholic pushing an anti-Protestant agenda, nor a Protestant pushing an anti-Catholic agenda.

We would also like to point out that the Enlightenment is now more than two hundred years old, if the news hasn’t yet filtered through to the particular rocks under which these people live.

Ramen.

A Man’s a Man

A Man’s a Man

Robert Burns statue in Writers Museum Edinburgh

Within the first five seconds we were hooked

 

We were on the way to work, tuned in to Radio National’s Book Show, a replay of the opening address by Andrew O’Hagan from last year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival .

Sudden fauvist swathes and splashes of bright primary colours, seduced by the promise of intrigue and adventure and of amazing stories.

Andrew O’Hagan: Sydney Writers’ Festival Opening (Excerpt):

“ In our house we didn’t have many books, but there was a large yellow kitchen table where my mother sat at the centre of all her evidence.

 

I grant you she wasn’t the Norton Anthology of Literature, but she knew every song that was ever sung in Glasgow. And my father, when he was there, would appear from his adventures with a crimson face and stories you wouldn’t believe. Except of course I would believe all of them, being sick in the head and the youngest of four.

 

Between them my parents barely read a book in their lives, but I’ve come to feel there was literature in everything they said. “I had a book once,” my father once told me in a moment of pride. “It was green. Do you remember that book, Nancy? It was up on top of the fridge. Green it was. Stood there for ages. Greeny-coloured.”

 

“Away ye go ya daft pig,” my mother said. “That was the telephone book, that manky battered old thing.”

 

She turned to me.

 

“He only uses it to get the numbers of people he can go and buy dogs off. Bringing them in here: as if I don’t have enough to clean.”

 

“The book was definitely green,” said my da. “Green as a pound note. And don’t listen to her: it wasn’t a phone book or anything like it. It had a story in it and everybody died, I remember that sure enough.”

 

…a large yellow kitchen table where his mother sat at the centre of all her evidence…

We were intrigued. What evidence? Evidence of what? What an opening line!

So we knew this was a writer worth listening to. And then he said the other things. The inspiring things; the dark things.

He talked of the old world and of new worlds – new worlds known only in imagination and exotic stories, in dreams. Dreams that can come true through the power of literature to pave new paths to possibility. 

“ But who were we? For me, it was the less legendary granda, the one who sailed to Sydney and came back, I heard, with packets of dates and chocolates and large foreign dolls for my mother. The memory of him was the one that described us better, for the journey to Australia was an excursion into the blue heaven of our imagination.

 

I have to tell you, I grew up to believe there is no other nation but the one you can build and honour in your head, and for kids growing up that way, in a Scotland filled with faded songs about the grandness of our destiny, the thought of new beginnings in virgin lands became a beautiful dream.

 

To travel over the sea to a place free from the torpor of national attributes – not one without its own historical controversies, and one with its own deep traditions – but nevertheless a country that seemed built to be filled with high hopes.

 

In the cold winter nights outside Glasgow, I often lay and imagined my grandfather Charlie having a hot Christmas somewhere near the Great Barrier Reef, eating strange fruits, surrounded by coloured fish, and hearing talk we’d never known. Australia was the dream state of our working class childhoods, the Xanadu of the wee small hours, and that dead old sailor was to my unquiet mind a great engineer of imagined worlds, a crown prince of enchantment, the ultimate wizard of Oz.

 

It didn’t matter what reality had to say on the matter. Australia was the place to start again. I remember families going off from Scotland never to return. They were … emigrating. And to my mind those small friends of mine are kind of legendary because of their early engagement with open possibility. It never occurred to me that they Australia would stop them from growing, but I see now that they were infantilized in the minds of those they left behind. They grew Down Under, but not for us, who would always remember those emigrating heroes as boys we waved off in the knowledge we would probably never see them again. They were the high-flying flamingoes, those boys and girls who had followed my grandfather past the Cape of Good Hope, to a place that appeared, despite its own dark shadows, to make a virtue of BECOMING rather than a prison of BELONGING.

 

I remember watching a programme with my father in the 1970s about people in Adelaide who were trying to build a community of whitewashed houses. They were drinking pink wine and smiling. I’ll never forget it. The pink wine. The smiles on them. “In this part of the world,” said the presenter, “the idea is to be all you can be.”

 

The line seemed to me at the time like a thing out of Shakespeare. I’d never heard such a concept before &mdash Be All You Can Be. The white houses. The pink wine. The smiles on them. It was like Keats, I tell you. Like Tolstoy or Virginia Woolf or F. Scott Fitgerald — all those people in their beautiful clothes at Jay Gatsby’s party, drinking this stuff — what was it called? — WINE.

 

Be All you Can Be. It was like an ancient Chinese proverb. A kind of haiku. A word from the lips of the great and bottomless pool of belief across the world.

 

“What did he say?” asked my father.

 

“Be All You Can Be,” I said.

 

He crushed a can of McEwan’s Export and threw it down by our two-bar fire.

 

“What?”

 

“Be All You Can Be.”

 

“What a load of shite,” he said.

 

Of course, it wasn’t really Australia. It was the thought of it. It was the imagining of it. And the great vehicle of such powerful imagining, says O’Hagan, is literature.

“ If we are truly alive, we have a duty to connect with the planet we inherited and that others will inherit in their turn. If we are truly alive, we have a role to play — every one of us — in the realization of peace and tolerance in our time.

 

If we are truly alive, and if we know what the imagination can do, it will not be in us to sit dormant whilst the planet is ruined by unfettered commerce or whilst thousands are killed by the pre-emptive and ruinous urges of Christian or Islamic fundamentalisms.

 

If we are civilized, we imagine our way past political coercion or selfish pride.

 

We speak truth to power.

We question our media.

We spring to the defense of liberty.

We take care of the world’s resources.

We interrogate corporations and we upbraid ourselves and our hungers and our needs.

We listen to the past.

We question our feelings of superiority.

We teach our children the truth of our culture and what it has done and what it has failed to do.

We keep a close watch on this heart of mine – yours and yours and yours.

And we never forget that we are moral beings and not machines.

This is what we do if we are truly alive. This is what we do if we live close to our imaginations.

[ … ]

I believe it is a failure of the imagination that allows famine or terror to reign in the world.

A man who throws half the contents of his fridge into the trash on a Monday morning fails to imagine, next time he visits the supermarket, that whole villages in Eritrea have children gasping for a droplet of milk. The politician or the general who orders a soldier to release cruise missiles from 5000 feet does not imagine the innocent men playing cards in the teashop below. He does not imagine their loss or the grief of their loved ones. The terrorist[/tag] at the controls of a plane cannot imagine the dreams of the secretary on the 102nd floor, planning her wedding and making a bid for life.

 

Failures of the imagination are behind the conduct of our woes — and so we as we gather here to salute literature and the imagination we also come to denounce those failures of the imagination that harm and betray and destroy life.

O’Hagan finished his speech by quoting his countryman, Robbie Burns.

“ Burns was a poor man who came at last to enrich the world — and I finish with these words I seem to have known since birth, his “Marsellaise” to the human spirit. 

A Man’s A Man For A’ That

Is there for honest Poverty
That hings his head, an’ a’ that;
The coward slave – we pass him by,
We dare be poor for a’ that!
For a’ that, an’ a’ that.
Our toils obscure an’ a’ that,
The rank is but the guinea’s stamp,
The Man’s the gowd for a’ that.

What though on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hoddin grey, an’ a that;
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine;
A Man’s a Man for a’ that:
For a’ that, and a’ that,
Their tinsel show, an’ a’ that;
The honest man, tho’ e’er sae poor,
Is king o’ men for a’ that. 

Ye see yon birkie, ca’d a lord,
Wha struts, an’ stares, an’ a’ that;
Tho’ hundreds worship at his word,
He’s but a coof for a’ that:
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
His ribband, star, an’ a’ that:
The man o’ independent mind
He looks an’ laughs at a’ that. 

A prince can mak a belted knight,
A marquis, duke, an’ a’ that;
But an honest man’s abon his might,
Gude faith, he maunna fa’ that!
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
Their dignities an’ a’ that;
The pith o’ sense, an’ pride o’ worth,
Are higher rank than a’ that. 

Then let us pray that come it may,
(As come it will for a’ that,)
That Sense and Worth, o’er a’ the earth,
Shall bear the gree, an’ a’ that.
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
It’s coming yet for a’ that,
That Man to Man, the world o’er,
Shall brothers be for a’ that.

 

So Burns was part of the struggle for equality and rights and democracy, the Scottish Enlightenment. “A piece of defiant uppityness such as ‘A Man’s A Man’ could get a man hanged, or transported to a life of hard labour in Australia. Burns had seen this happen to free thinkers like Thomas Muir,” says the BBC.

A-hah! Had “A Man’s A Man” (or more correctly, “Is there for honest Poverty”) not been as overwhelmingly successful as it was, Burns himself could have been transported to Botany Bay, as fellow Scots Thomas Muir, Thomas Palmer and William Skirving were in 1794. Muir escaped in 1796 on an American ship which had been sent to rescue him. He fled to France, still in the midst of its Revolution.

America had only recently won its own independence from Britain. In France Muir worked with the famous Thomas Paine who agitated for American Independence. Paine famously wrote Common Sense and The Rights of Man – a guide to the ideas of the Enlightenment. (Muir had been a student of John Millar, Scottish philosopher and historian and author of The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks; or, An Inquiry into the Circumstances which give rise to Influence and Authority in the Different Members of Society [1771]).

It is extraordinary to realise with what sacrifice, and courage, and how recently, people fought – and often died – for ideals which now seem so obvious and which we take for granted, and the ferocity with which the establishment opposed those ideals.

It is also salutary to note the patience with which corporations, religious zealots and governments are winding back these obvious rights and freedoms.

And it is important to understand the central role that writers played in gaining those rights and will continue to play in protecting them.

PS: If you would like to see what Andrew O’Hagan’s writing space looks like, you can visit the amazing Writers’ Rooms section at the Guardian. Other authors include Raymond Briggs (The Elephant and the Bad Baby), Caryl Phillips, Andrew Motion, Martin Amis, Alan Sillitoe, Margaret Drabble, John Mortimer, Will Self, Antonia Fraser, David Hare, Michael Frayn, and on and on — the list is much longer than this.

Bhutto

Bhutto

It wasn’t such a surprise, we suppose, but Benazir Bhutto’s reported assassination, while it saddens us as another display of humanity’s inability to grow up, confirms our contempt for religion in general and that one in particular.

Let those who constantly proselytise for their imaginary friends in the sky now loudly proclaim again how religion is the only source of morality and ethical living and how preferable it is to the evil godlessness of thoughtful, rational choices made on the basis of the verifiably real world, human needs and human relationships.

We haven’t had any particular opinion about Bhutto. We have read and heard both that she was charismatic and Pakistan’s only hope and that she was completely corrupt and as Prime Minister would be the worst possible thing to happen to Pakistan.

We simply don’t know.

We don’t think it matters.

Pakistan is a toilet, a disaster. It always has been. It is not just corrupt. It is, irretrievably, Corruption itself. And yes, we’ve been there.

It has no foreseeable hope of redemption and advancement until it gets rid of its religious madmen and its military loonies.

And that’s not going to happen.

No half-rational, half-intelligent politician, let alone an honest one, is now going to take the country on.

Sane people prefer to live.

Happy Saturnalia

Happy Saturnalia

 

Absolute relaxation and unrestrained merriment 

 

 This time of year is a traditional celebration of the birth of an extraordinary man – a long-haired mystic who revealed the secrets of the universe and forever changed the way we see the world. He is one of the most universally revered historical figures of all time.

Yes, 25 December (in the “Old Style“) is the birthday of Sir Isaac Newton.

His birthday was retrospectively celebrated in antiquity by the Romans in the festival of Saturnus, or the Saturnalia

Or perhaps the birthday of Sol Invictus, the unconquered sun. Other cultures also celebrated the winter solstice as Yule, or the birthdays of various gods.

The Romans attributed to the god Saturnus the introduction of agriculture and the arts of civilized life. Falling towards the end of December, at the season when the agricultural labours of the year were fully completed, it was celebrated in ancient times by the rustic population as a sort of joyous harvest-home, and in every age was viewed by all classes of the community as a period of absolute relaxation and unrestrained merriment.

 

During its continuance no public business could be transacted, the law courts were closed, the schools kept holiday, to commence a war was impious, to punish a malefactor involved pollution. Special indulgences were granted to the slaves of each domestic establishment; they were relieved from all ordinary toils, were permitted to wear the pileus, the badge of freedom, were granted full freedom of speech, partook of a banquet attired in the clothes of their masters, and were waited upon by them at table.

 

All ranks devoted themselves to feasting and mirth, presents were exchanged among friends, cerei or wax tapers being the common offering of the more humble to their superiors, and crowds thronged the streets.

Seems oddly familiar…

It was Newton who formalised the importance of gravity in the motion of the planets and his laws remain largely the basis on which today we are able to compute the trajectories and forces to send spacecraft to explore our solar system. (with a little help from Einstein)

One of these craft, Cassini, has been exploring Saturn and its moons and sending back amazing images. Last year it sent back this extraordinary [mosaic] image:

You will be able to notice this:

Interior to the G ring and above the brighter main rings is the pale dot of Earth. Cassini views its point of origin from over a billion kilometers (and close to a billion miles) away in the icy depths of the outer solar system.

 

This image of Saturn is eerily reminiscent of a monument to Newton that was never built.

 

Étienne-Louis Boullée was a visionary French neoclassical architect whose work greatly influenced contemporary architects and is still influential today… His style was most notably exemplified in his proposal for a cenotaph for the English scientist Isaac Newton, which would have taken the form of a sphere 150 m (500 ft) high embedded in a circular base topped with cypress trees. Though the structure was never built, its design was engraved and circulated widely in professional circles.

So Happy Saturnalia to one and all!

And as our special seasonal gift to you, here are two videos to put a smile on the face of you, your friends and family:

 

Germany vs Greece: The Millennial Match

 

 

Women: Know Your Limits