When age can, uninvited, link the distant poppy past of The Knack with the all too adjacent Present and come up with a pun, Sir Roger is delighted that there are others still living who appreciate the troubling incongruity of those innocent days and these so shredded ones, and have gone ahead and done something about it and finished it off.
So Sir Roger is relieved that he no longer has to tolerate the unwelcome earworm.
When we swear to something, that is kind of a proper commitment.
The word “swear” comes from an ancient word that means “to speak”; to say words.
In one of the most savagely beautiful and exceptional works of fiction, the Book of John begins:
“ In the beginning was the word…”
Sir Roger prefers his own variation:
“ In the Word is the beginning.”
Speaking your word — “swearing” — makes possible the real-isation of your intention or your desire.
When you “give your word”, do you mean it as a commitment, a guarantee?
Or is your word just something you said?
If you say you will be somewhere at 1 o’clock, can people know that you will be there at 1 o’clock?
Or do they make allowances for you?
Do they tell you lunch is at 12.30 because you’re always half an hour late?
How does it make you feel to be a person that people make allowances for, that other people “manage”?
How do you relate to your word?
When you make a promise is it just “aspirational”, or is your word who you are?
When what you say is guaranteed — when you are your word, when what you say becomes what you do — then you have enormous power, because what you say unquestionably comes to pass.
People will want to hear what you speak, so that they know what is going to happen in the world and make their plans.
I don’t believe in capital punishment and I am not a murderer.
Nor am I remotely murderously inclined.
But, like you, I know that if someone threatens or touches my child I am capable of killing them without compunction.
This might give you pause next time you bray (from a safe distance) for some poor bastard’s blood.
One day they could be braying for yours.
And in the circumstances you may suddenly not agree so enthusiastically that your own execution would be such a good thing.
Or that judicial murder in general is a good thing.
Either you control your emotions or they control you.
You have your emotions or you’re at their mercy.
It’s up to you.
This thought gives you a place to stand outside your emotions.
There you can consider them from some distance if you need to.
It doesn’t mean you don’t have emotions — you always will — or that they’re bad (they’re good), or that you shouldn’t enjoy them (you should).
It just gives you choice if you need it.
And it puts you in charge of them when you need to be.
Either you run your life, or plenty of other people are happy to fill the gap and run it for you.
To get what they want.
At your expense.
It’s your call.
Thank the universe for hot showers.
So this time it’s the turn of Matthew Johns, poster boy for Rugby League – the second official poster boy for Rugby League to be shamed within weeks – and regular on the cross-dressing Footy Show.
When I was eleven years old my best friend was a catholic boy called Barry. Every Saturday afternoon we would go to the matinee at the old Capitol Theatre (1/9d up stairs front circle, or “up front” as we’d say). Value for money back then. On the way home Barry would pop into St Mary’s to do his confession and out he would bounce, all freshly forgiven and ready to sin again with impunity. I, incredulous, asked him about this and his opinion was that he could sin as much as he liked, knowing he would be forgiven next Saturday.
I thought of this yesterday as I watched Matthew Johns writhing uncomfortably with the week’s revelations of his ‘sex romp’ in New Zealand some years ago.
It seemed there was a pattern amongst many people, particularly footballers, who do whatever they like, knowing that all they need to do is effect a display of contrition and remorse and everyone will forgive you or at least get over it soon enough.
“ It caused all parties enormous pain and embarrassment,” [said Andrew Johns]. “For me personally, it’s put my family through enormous anguish and embarrassment, and has once again, and for that I can’t say ‘sorry’ enough. But the police did investigate the situation at the time, the allegation, and there were no charges laid. But there has been a lot of pain and embarrassment to a lot of people.”¹
So forget the girl. We should feel sorry for Andrew. He’s upset.
Note the carefully spin-doctored “form of words”. First, he hasn’t actually apologised. He hasn’t even said “sorry”. He has said he can’t say it enough. The question remains, can he say it at all? Does he express regret? Perhaps, but only to his family. He hasn’t expressed regret for the act itself, for his behaviour, for his attitude to the girl or his apparently misogynistic attitude to women generally.
This type of non-apology “apology” is supposed to “do”, is supposed to satisfy the criticism. It addresses nothing at all. Doesn’t have to, of course. As Matthew Johns says, it was only an “allegation” which he hasn’t denied, there were no complaints, no charges laid, no case to answer. He owes nothing to anyone.
And just wait…if the Four Corners story makes things a little more uncomfortable for him, expect to see him popping up on Australian Story in full PR-managed mode to tell “his side of the story”.
Imagine him struggling to hold back the tears as he tells of the stresses of growing up under the aura of a far-more-famous-and-better-footballer-brother, Joey; trying to grow up to be your own man when your brother is so much bigger and stronger and better than you; coping with the stresses of dealing with Joey’s own emotional and drug problems.
I’m already sorry for him, so sympathetic and forgiving…and I haven’t even seen the [non-existent but potential] program yet.
As far as we know, there’s been no serious impact on Matthew Johns personally. He hasn’t lost any money, or his job, over his multiply-gismic escapade. There is, in fact, probably some grudging, if unacknowledged, envy, amongst a large number of men.
¹ UPDATES:
1. We find other sources have quoted Johns as saying, “I am very sorry for all the trauma and embarrassment this has caused for everyone, but particularly for my family…
2. He did lose his job on Channel 9.
What is generally lost in the coverage of these regularly revealed scandals is the question,
“What is Rugby League REALLY?”
What is it about? Really? What are kids learning about our culture in this “family game”? The conclusion an objective observer might reach, simply on the evidence of the behaviour of those who play it professionally, is that it is mostly about exaggeratedly blokey masculinity, violence and more or less violent sex – sex that is, clearly, at the very least hostile and aggressive to women and I think probably has the same attitude and intent as rape in war.
It does seem, from the number of times we hear about these episodes, that a team of Rugby League players having a group-fuck is not unusual, not even a ritual or a rite of passage. It seems to be just what you do when you’re away from home together.
Pizza and a gang-bang.
The question I’d like to ask Matthew Johns and anyone else who enjoys these sex romps is,
“How young do you think your own daughter will be when she has her first group fuck with a rugby league football team? 16? 18? Will you watch? Will you join in?”
Or to put it another way,
“If you saw your 18 year old daughter being taken up to a hotel room by 15 Rugby League players, what would you think and what would you do? Would you ask if you could watch, or would you join in?”
What you might also wonder is, is it possible that the only way these blokey “teammates” – or team members who mate – can contrive to have sex with each other in a marginally acceptable way is to mingle their semen together in a vessel who provides a façade of heterosexuality to the inherent homosexuality of the activity.
For myself, I can’t imagine the attraction of sticking my dick in amongst the combined gism of any number of other men, footballers or not, not even Matthew Johns’s cum. I think I would probably throw up.
But perhaps that would get a good belly laugh from Matthew Johns.
“ Hey forum members
I just became a member of this forum
(Great work by the admin, mods and seriously every member around.)
[etc. spam spam spam and spam etc…]”
we’d just like to say:
No, you didn’t. Now put your member back in your pants.
Really. We just want to acknowledge ourselves privately but publicly (it makes sense to us, anyway). It’s not meant to be onanistically self-congratulatory, except in the sense that we have achieved some things and we want to record them.
So this is a stocktake for posterity, if you like, that marks a moment, a milestone.
Yes, ValuesAustralia is two years old. This is our 712th post. Singlehanded, eh, Clubtroppo, Larvatus Prodeo, RoadtoSurfdom etc. etc.? That’s almost one a day. (There used to be a billboard for One A Day vitamin pills at the corner of Victoria Rd and Rowntree Street at Blackwattle Bay in Sydney. There was a picture of a man and a woman. The woman was saying, “I’m Jenny and I give John One A Day.” Soon a graffiti artist had added, “I’m John and I’m fucked!”)
And, yes, we’re just about fucked, ourselves. We’ve got a rotator cuff from all the typing and mouse clicking, especially during October and November last year.
(We went to the radiologist. “What seems to be the problem?” “I’ve got a sore shoulder.” “Hmm…we’ll do an ultrasound and an x-ray…… Hmm…. Hmmmmmm, our expert analysis of the ultrasound and x-ray indicates you have a sore shoulder. You’ll have to stop using it for a while.” “Thanks….What?)
We’ve never paid for any advertising. We’ve never submitted ValuesAustralia to any search engine. Nevertheless, we got ourselves listed on Google within 24 hours of launching the site. We tried to register the site with dmoz.org (The Open Source Directory) – as you do – but it wasn’t taking orders, and by the time it came back on line months later, ValuesAustralia was already magically listed!
We’ve been #1 for “Australian Values” on Google, Yahoo, Live and Ask most of the time for more than a year and a half. We’re #12 for “values” on Google worldwide, out of 314,000,000 results and on google.com.au we’re #2 for “values” out of 307,000,000. We’re #1 on google worldwide and Australia for “Australian political values” out of about 400,000 results.
Our Google Page Rank is 4 (used to be 5 but they changed the algorithm) which is respectable but we’d prefer a 5 or a 6.
We’ve had over 300,000 aggregate visitors and more than 75,000 spam messages (thank you, Akismet).
Earlier this year we were consistently getting more than 1000 visitors a day – over 30,000 a month, which is okay, although nothing like the big guys.
We’ve made friends all over the world and especially in Australia. We are in the top 1% of websites worldwide. We are popular in Saudi Arabia – amongst the top 42,000 favourite sites for Saudis. (That worries us just a bit…Say hullo to Al for us…) We appreciate our readers and those who choose to comment from time to time. We thought a scarcity of comments was a Bad Thing, a Failure, but we noticed that one of the most popular, most entertaining bloggers we know of, Whatever It Is, I’m Against It, doesn’t get heaps, either – a few, but not tens like Possum or hundreds and thousands like William the PollBludger.
In May 2007 ValuesAustralia was picked up by the “Stay In Touch” column at the Sydney Morning Herald, accusing us of “rhetoric”.
One of Sir Roger’s posts was selected by ClubTroppo and On Line Opinion in January 2008 as one of the top 40 posts in Australia for 2007. We’re very proud of that.
But it’s a post we made early in 2007 that we are still most proud of. Ken Parish at ClubTroppo called it
“quite possibly the best piece of passionate, angry polemic I’ve ever read, certainly on a blog. ‘Roger Migently’ is roused to extraordinary heights of eloquence… ”
Yes, Troppo has been good to us and we mourn the passing of Missing Link and Ken’s prolonged work-induced(?) absence. We were also congratulated by Richard Neville (HomePageDaily) and Steven Poole whose Unspeak blog is our benchmark for economy, clarity, style and wit.
We have enjoyed the journey so far and we have no intention at this stage of stopping, although we have slowed down (work, you know).
Bobbo the Clown
Our favourite person in the world, of course, is the clown, Bob Correll (above), Deputy Secretary of DIC, OPM, because he wrote us the letter which inspired our outburst. As we discovered he was (and appears still to be) the person who had taken over departmental responsibility for “Borders, Compliance, Detention and Technology”, or in other words, perhaps, for keeping innocent kiddies locked up in the desert, deporting Australian citizens, supporting the failed state of Nauru, making the lives of genuine refugees a misery, doing it to please the Minister, and all at the touch of a computer key. Previously he had been the driving force behind developing and implementing Job Network, or “how to design exquisite, personalised punishment for people who are already struggling with the stress of being unemployed”. Godluvvya, Bob! How’s the Volvo? How’s the kids? How do you sleep at night?
One of the most satisfying things is how we always beat the Immigration Department on Google.
Our second favourite person is Mick Keelty, just for being such a hopeless buffoon and continually making appalling stuff-ups for us to make fun of. G’bye, Mick.
Anyway, just for the record.
(And a special “hi!” to Lang!)
Still, Values Australia is not aware of ever having been accused of being rhetorical and is not sure whether that is a criticism or a compliment.
Whatever, Values Australia is determined not to let its newfound fame go to its head.
(On a side note, if you found your email running slowly yesterday, it was probably caused by Values Australia emailing all its friends.)
As a special celebratory gift to our visitors, we offer this video which we discovered today.
The part of the “Prime Minister” is taken by T Rex; “Foreign Minister” is played by Ornitholestes, and “The Next Prime Minister” is played by Pig.
You’re welcome