Pentecost 2006: Building a Covenant for a New America

Those wedded to the idea that all US Christians, particularly evangelical Christians, are slavish supporters of Bush and the Republicans should visit Poverty is not a family value by Jim Wallis.

…whatever else the gospel of Jesus Christ is able to change about our lives - overcome our sinful habits and addictions, save our marriages and families, make us responsible people - IF the gospel that we preach does not “bring good news to the poor,” well then, it is simply not the gospel of Jesus Christ - and it is about time that we said that.

To the political leaders of this capitol city, and from the places you all live across this country, we are here to say something else: the days when you could win the support of the religious community by merely speaking the language of family values and the sacredness of life while ignoring the desperate plight of poor people in this wealthy nation and around the world are over. Because for a growing number of people of faith across the political spectrum, you will now be held accountable for how the leadership you offer and the policies you support impact the lives of those whom Jesus called “the least of these.” You see for many of us, poverty is also a life issue and as our bumper sticker says “Poverty is NOT a family value!” …

While the world fears American domination, it still looks for American leadership. And the very best defense against terrorism would be the example of the world’s strongest nation leading the world in the moral battle against poverty, disease, intolerance, and oppression.

Amen.

John Baker’s questions

If you are at all interested in writing, and enjoy good writing from a real writer, visit John Baker.

You may recall he asked five questions:

1. Why do you blog?

Because it is better than muttering to myself in the bathroom. Because I am addicted to teaching. Because I need to rant in Howard’s Australia. Because I have far too much time on my hands. Because writing is the best kind of thinking. Because “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” (That was E M Forster, I think.) Because “I blog, therefore I am.” See also Reasons to journal.

2. Which author and/or book has most influenced you?

See My canon. And it really probably is the Bible and Shakespeare. Sad, isn’t it?

3. Which three blogs do you most visit?

Lately:

1. Thin Potations. It’s a habit, really. He’s been a bit slack lately though. [Since gone private.]
2. Ahmad Shuja: MyScribbles: Write-ups of an Afghan because he is refreshingly honest, amazing for a person of his age, and an Afghan, and can tell me about the Afghan cricket team.
3. Aluminium because she is an English teacher and used to be a Diary-X friend, oh for ages now it seems. (And she reads me too.)

Actually I visit all those blogs on my blogroll. Often. Including John Baker’s, obviously.

4. Why do you read fiction?

Some just for delight in plot, character and language. Some because they are more true than non-fiction. Some because they can take me into world-views and milieus I could never otherwise experience.

5. What makes you laugh?

Fawlty Towers, no matter how often I see it. The items in my Diversions links to the right. The fact that the majority of Australians still think John Howard is a really really good Prime Minister…

No, that last one makes me want to cry.

And speaking of history…

I approached this week’s Bulletin with due cynicism when I saw it featured The 100 most influential Australians. Oh yes, I thought, wank-time! But I was wrong. Panellists Julie McCrossin, Phillip Knightley and Michael Cathcart have done such a good job I have listed this among my Best Reads of 2006, as you can see. Of course we could all suggest others, and maybe want to scrap some, but what a good introduction it is to our shared past and present, and a great tool for teachers, I would have thought. I’ll certainly be alerting my coachees to it.

Yes, John Howard is of course there, but I loved the positioning that happens on his page: you’ll have to buy the magazine to see what I mean. He is kind of, well, “buried”. This is the content on JH:

Simon Schama on history

Thanks to the Arts & Letters Daily, I just read “The History Channeler” (sic) in the Washington Post.

In a 1991 New York Times piece headlined “Clio Has a Problem,” he savaged academic practices as stultifying, overspecialized and hopelessly biased against “dramatic immediacy.” And he satirized conventional historical argument in a passage that began:

“In 1968, Wendy F. Muggins published her seminal article on manorial social structure in 17th-century Fredonia. A decade later, this orthodoxy was substantially corrected by Cuthbert C. Buggins, based on a reading of Fredonian tax records. Unaccountably, neither Muggins nor Buggins consulted local manorial records . . .”

John Howard on the Work “Choice” protests

The Great Grey Garden Gnome of Kirribilli House: “Mr Howard criticised today’s national union protest and Labor’s policy to abolish AWAs. He said the Labor Party and the union movement’s proposed changes are a dagger at the throat of Australia’s resource sector.”

Translation (from the Chinese): “The people I really represent don’t like it.” And who are those people? See the statement by Professor David Peetz in the box to the right.

Crash-tackling the stereotype

Some of you remember my fifteen minutes of fame in 2002. There had been mutterings around The Mine about “Asians” and “coaching” (cheating?) and not playing Rugby…

How amused I was then last night to get an email from one of my (”Asian”) coachees to say he couldn’t attend this week as he would be playing Rugby League in The Shire.

He’s an athlete too.

Poem

Notice the new page? Have a look.

An earlier version of “Marie” (as a prose-poem) was published in the very last Neos. The voice is entirely that of an Aboriginal woman I got to know in the mid 1980s in Glebe. Everything in the poem she said at one time or another, often as I shared a white wine or two in her room. She was the “concierge” in a kind of flop-house I was living in while I went through my mid-life crisis and a period of unemployment. She was, it was said, schizophrenic, and certainly not many of us have conversations with our television sets, especially when the set is switched off. But over time I saw that “Marie’s” ramblings actually made sense…

The poem tries to capture that.

By the way, there was a happier ending in real life. One day “Marie” met a woman in the city, a fellow-inmate of the orphanage or girls’ home. This person had done well, and invited Marie to come and live with her and her family, which she did. A while later Marie came to visit me at the flop-house. “The other day,” she said, “I went down to the beach and there was a storm, and I realised that I hadn’t caused it.”

As time goes by… Meeting Madam and a Buddhist.

It has been a week for running into people, one way or another. Delenio will know who I mean when I mention that I saw G, a former colleague, especially in many a GPS debate, a couple of days ago. He looks different, healthy and very friendly. He’s pretty much done with teaching and is very much into Buddhism these days. He hadn’t heard about my becoming involved with South Sydney Uniting Church, but could relate to the need for a spiritual home. He certainly seems to have found his, and that is great.

By the way, I do not put great store on the exclusive truth claims of any religion, including my own; as soon as religions seriously go down that track you can be sure they are wrong. But that’s a matter for another day.

Tonight I saw Madam in Elizabeth Street, and this will mean most to The Rabbit, after whom she asked. She was pleased to hear about the English teaching. She is still doing some catering, she tells me, has some Japanese students staying with her, and is enjoying the freedom of not running a cafe. She seems to be over her Bulgarian period. (Mind you, I liked him.)

Her cafe was a bit like Rick’s. If smaller. Much smaller. And there was no piano. But it was as much a haven for all kinds of refugees as Rick’s ever was. I am sure The Rabbit remembers it with as much affection as I do.

Ah, Cafe Max. I haven’t really taken to its replacement.

Rick’s Cafe Casablanca

I really love the movie Casablanca, which is the same age as I am, or pretty close…

And now it appears, so I saw on ABC’s Foreign Correspondent tonight, that an American named Kathy Kriger has brought it to life in the city the movie celebrated. It looks great, and the Rick’s Cafe website is just a delight. She has a blog too: Salon Privé.

Welcome to my Salon Privé and please take a seat at the table. This is a dinner conversation and all the usual subjects are welcome: politics, food, music, film, design, religion, travel, drink, business, gossip, shopping…ok, even sports. So make sure your glass is topped up, and let’s start the meal…

Do yourself a favour: go there online like me or, if you are very lucky, in actuality. Looks like a great idea beautifully done.

Yesterday

I was hoping to go to Pitt Street Uniting Church, but, aside from the cold weather, I found I was unwell yesterday afternoon and evening; maybe something I ate. I must go there sometime though: check their page. Yesterday there was an ecumenical service, requested apparently by Unions NSW, as part of the week of activities on the IR so-called reforms “Work Choices” — see the “Your Rights at Work” box on the right of this page. Didn’t get much publicity, did it? The only church-related activity this weekend in Sydney, to judge from the news, was That Wedding in Manly.

I should have mentioned, too, last Friday that I had lunch with Lord Malcolm at a coffee shop close to home. He is still very unwell, and hasn’t been helped by some further stupidity on the housing front. There was no Sunday lunch gathering yesterday.

Elizabeth Butel on Text Messages

“Writer, editor and erstwhile tutor of the dying art of reading English literature” Elizabeth Butel had a good column in the Weekend Australian Review this past weekend. Unfortunately, the Oz has not deigned to put in online, but here is an extract:

The native servants who tended Robert Louis Stevenson in his years in Western Samoa called it his “genie in the bottle”: the great writer spinning fame and money from raw black ink.

It was alchemy because they saw improbable results. A commodious house, a family supported, a stream of celebrated visitors; all emanating not from this frail, attenuated Scot but from his lifeblood, the ink he used to make his marks.

I found this suitably humbling…

I have said quite a bit about refugees and asylum seekers at various times: those links search my Big Archive. But I was suitably humbled by MyScribbles writing about June 20: World Refugee Day.

June 20 was the World Refugee Day. Did anyone notice it? Despite being an Afghan refugee and a member of the largest single refugee group in the world, I didn’t notice it come and go. Although I do not believe in the symbolic efficacy of the day, I do believe that if such days are marked properly with awareness programs, a real change can be brought about in the lives of refugees.

I believe that in an overwhelming number of cases, people become refugees when the profits of a multinational corporation are at stake or when a number of immoral, corrupt leaders play dirty politics on the international arena. However, I also strongly believe in the power of the collaborative strength of the human beings as an agent for real change. Therefore, when a day such as this is used to educate the general public and urge them to take action, it can have a real impact on the lives of the refugee population of the world…

I am not going to improve on this teenager’s statement. Visit his page and read the rest.

Later

Harper’s has published those cartoons…

The June 2006 issue of Harper’s Magazine has published those Danish cartoons in a brilliant article by Art Spiegelman, “Drawing Blood”. Unfortunately the article is not online, but is a must-read if you can get a copy. As Scott Witmer says on the Comics Journal Message Board, “Spiegelman’s reading of the Danish cartoons is astutely funny and badly needed in this debate.” It is not only funny: it is just and acute, and ought not to be offensive to anyone, Muslim or otherwise, with any degree of open mind. At the same time Spiegelman is well aware of how vicious and destructive cartoons can be.

You can get some idea of what Spiegelman says by reading this February 2006 conversation in Nation, but the Harper’s article is more considered and more wide-ranging.

Read Noel Pearson on the 7.30 Report

Well worth the effort. Action needed to stop ongoing Aboriginal crisis: Pearson.

KERRY O’BRIEN: You would be widely regarded as one of the most articulate and successful Aboriginal leaders this country has produced. How much power do you feel you and the other leaders of your community have? Real power?

NOEL PEARSON: I think the problem of Indigenous leaders is that we - in terms of time, we spend 95% of our time thinking about these problems. 95% of our knowledge is dedicated to the resolution of these problems but we have 5% of the power and conversely, politicians - this problem is only 5% of their attention, 3% of their knowledge and yet they possess 95% of the power and that’s the paradox within which we labour. That’s the paradox within which we labour but the problem is we live in a place where, as I say, we possess a fraction of the power to be able to do something about it.

Oh dear, that was unfortunate…

Australian troops mistakenly kill Iraqi minister’s bodyguard. But at least we get to hear about it promptly, which is the best you can make of it, I guess.

Why are we still there, though? Does anyone know?

Afghanistan I can understand, and there are a heap of issues much closer to home. So why does Defence Minister Nelson (minus his Donnelly) find himself having to say our new mission, for which we seem to have volunteered once the job of looking after the Japanese was over, will put our troops in more danger? Read Headlong on the road to nowhere by Paul McGeough.

THE Australian chapter of the Iraq war has to be from a script - but who wrote it? Gilbert and Sullivan … perhaps in collaboration with Joseph Heller or maybe the team from M*A*S*H?

This is the war that the Howard Government insisted we had to have, but in which it never really wanted to take part. More than three years into the conflict, George Bush has demonstrated an unambiguous determination to fight; and amid much bungling, he has paid dearly - in blood, treasure and credibility.

Australia, on the other hand, has spent its time in Iraq ducking and weaving well away from the front line, at the same time as MPs at home huff and puff and make po-faced speeches about “wartime leadership” and “being at war”.