Tragic confidence

In August last year I posted a poem by Yehuda Amichai.

From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.

The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.

But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined
House once stood.

This comes to mind as I read in today’s Sydney Morning Herald Film on Christian children’s camp has cross to bear:

…The president of the National Association of Evangelicals, the Reverend Ted Haggard, says the movie is skewed against Christianity. Mr Haggard, who appears in the movie when Levi and Rachel attend his mega-church in Colorado Springs, told the Denver Post the film was yellow journalism, with “a strong agenda, like any Michael Moore film with the cinematography of The Blair Witch Project“.

“It does represent a small portion of the charismatic movement,” he admits, “but I think it demonises it. Secularists are hoping that evangelical Christians and radicalised Muslims are essentially the same, which is why they will love this film.”

In fact, Fischer compares her evangelising of children with Muslims being brought up in the Middle East. “Our enemies,” she says, are filling up their children’s minds. The difference is that, “excuse me, we have the truth”.

Those last four words are the core of the tragedy, aren’t they?

NSW politicians should butt out…

And this is one of them. Both Minister Carl Scully and Opposition Leader Debnam (he still is, isn’t he?) are having another populist hairy-chest show over the sentence handed down yesterday on the 18-year-old who was one of the triggers (but not the cause) of the Cronulla riots a year ago. The magistrate said what needed to be said, in my view; see Cronulla fighter betrayed our safe haven: magistrate.

In Sutherland Local Court the magistrate, Jacqueline Trad, told Osman: “By your conduct you have turned your back on your family, your culture and your real country, all for the sake of some juvenile, impulsive and misplaced allegiance.”

Good news

I don’t tell M stories here very often; he doesn’t like me to, but this is worth sharing. Recently M and I both got mobile phones under different Telstra plans, his a contract, mine a prepaid. We also had two landlines. M got rid of his landline first, and then when I decided wireless internet (you can’t really call it broadband) was at least viable, we got rid of the other landline. Now there was the rub: Telstra was not happy, so they restricted M’s calls to inward calls only! Bastards! So we fired off a complaint to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman.

How Martin Krygier ambushed the Quadranters…

And on Michael Duffy’s Counterpoint too. There they all were on the 18th September celebrating Quadrant’s 50th anniversary, and there was Martin, son of magazine founder Richard Krygier, along with the venerable Dame Leonie Kramer, P P McGuinness (the current editor) and of course the sometimes dippy Duffy, all bent on lauding John Howard’s favourite magazine, in what may also be John Howard’s favourite radio show, with the possible exception of Alan Jones at breakfast on 2GB of course. And it was all going swimmingly until the last few minutes:

Michael Duffy: Martin, can I ask you the same question? Before 1989 Quadrant had a neat role, if you like, a very specific role. What is or ought its role to be? Or does it still have a role?

Martin Krygier: Here I’d part company with my colleagues on the panel.

The joy of Akismet and the sorrow of the Right

Back in July I mentioned that Akismet was about to bin my 1000th spam comment; well up to today it has binned 2294 of the suckers! There has been a pattern lately too, a whole swag — about 200 in the past 48 hours — emanating from RIPE Network Coordination Centre in Amsterdam (a prime source of spam), which could of course mean anything, offering a mind-boggling range of pornographic options, and all linked to one post: This is so arrogant and so annoying….

According to the Sunday Telegraph today [June 18 2006], NBC have called for the Beijing Olympics to be rescheduled — so that American TV viewers can see them in prime time! Well, put that where the sun doesn’t shine, that’s all I can say…

The public art of David Humphries

Here is where I had dinner last night and a few red wines, meaning I do feel a touch seedy this morning… But what a great night it was, excellent conversation going back thirty years and more. I took the bus out to Rosebery and entered David’s studio, greeted by Jacko the red-tailed black cockatoo flying freely through as wonderful an interior garden as you could imagine. The pictures don’t do it justice.

The joy of Gnomespeak

“Gnomespeak” is the characteristic style and thought-patterns of the Great Grey Garden Gnome of Kirribilli House, aka “The Prime Minister”. It is remarkable how thoroughly this has permeated our culture in recent years. Like “Newspeak”, its purpose is to render dissent unutterable. We were told, and by “we” I mean ESL teachers at a meeting I attended around 1998, that the words “multiculturalism”, “equity”, and “disadvantaged” were from now on to be avoided. In their place we were to speak of “integration”, “cohesion”, “harmony”, “incentives” and “Australian values”.

The process goes on.

I remember these events: I was in Kirrawee at the time…

Dear me, I must be old. Yes, there was our heroic Robert Menzies scuttled by that bastard Eisenhower over Suez in 1956…

Well, there was more to it than that, as this week’s Background Briefing demonstrates: The Suez Crisis 1956. Do download it or read the transcript. I must say this sounds more than a bit embarrassing fifty years on:

…Stan Correy: Menzies’ patronising attitude to Nasser infuriated the Egyptian President. The most authoritative biography of Menzies was written by Alan Martin. In that book, Martin quotes a diary note from 1956. Here’s a reading of what Menzies wrote.

Watching Brazil in 2006

INTERVIEWER
Deputy minister, what do you believe is behind this recent increase in terrorist bombings?

HELPMANN
Bad sportsmanship. A ruthless minority of people seems to have forgotten certain good old fashioned virtues. They just can’t stand seeing the other fellow win. If these people would just play the game, instead of standing on the touch line heckling -

Watch Four Corners tonight…

If you have TV and live in Australia. I will catch up on it through the ABC website. It is on The Exclusive Brethren, whose New Zealand activities have drawn much comment lately, but of course they have some influence here too. At church yesterday someone said the EB make the Taliban look liberal!

No wonder Jim Belshaw is well informed!

Jim’s Personal Reflections today reveal much more of his background.

…I joined the Commonwealth Public Service as an Administrative Trainee in 1967 before moving to the Commonwealth Treasury at the start of 68 and then to the Department of Industry and Commerce as a second division officer in 1980, so by the time of the first Hawke Government I had worked at increasing levels of seniority under five Prime Ministers: Holt (briefly), Gorton, McMahon, Whitlam and Fraser…

Viewing In the Name of the Father in 2006

In February 2005 Tony Blair apologised for a gross miscarriage of justice that took place thirty-one years earlier, fuelled by a public spooked by terrorism and laws framed as part of a war on that terrorism. It is good, if inadequate, that he apologised. That case, the “Guildford Four”, was the subject of the extraordinary 1993 movie In the Name of the Father, which I have been watching tonight.

It is impossible to watch this movie today without hearing very discomforting reverberations, catching glimpses of Guantanamo, of (in this country) the oh so reassuring John Howard and the oh so pedantic Phil Ruddock and the oh so compliant Bomber Beazley. Watch it, people, and consider what in our present climate we may have been giving away. It does not hurt that we are reminded that trusting the guardians too readily can itself be perilous.

Politicians and their sleazy little games…

Get over it Iemma, and try to be a bit less incompetent when it comes to road tunnels, hospitals, schools, and then explain why, according to today’s paper, police are leaving the service faster than they can be recruited. Look, it’s not that I support the Opposition either; far from it. But this latest bit of orchestrated sleaze directed against Liberal Party candidate Greg Smith inspires nothing but loathing.

The organised attacks began within hours of Greg Smith, SC, winning pre-selection for the state election on March 24. Until then, Mr Smith, 58, had been a highly regarded law man who had risen to become the state’s deputy public prosecutor and was in charge of the NSW Department of Public Prosecutions when its director, Nicholas Cowdery, QC, was on leave.

Random notes

My colleague of thirty-four year ago, David Humphries, and I have made contact. I am having dinner with him soon. He tells me the internet is renewing all sorts of contacts. I mentioned my own a few years ago with Jay Caselberg (James A. Hartley), a novelist now living in Germany it seems. Unfortunately a “senior moment” blocked the name as I was talking to David, but (obviously) I recall it now. Then more recently there had been Scott Poynting and a class-mate of his, Ralph T, whose brother Ian T was a classmate of Simon H, who I have maintained contact with all these years. Wednesday night could prove interesting.

Lord Malcolm is still in the hospice, but the Swans winning through to the Grand Final has obviously brought him back to life. He tells me he comes home on Monday.

Is Dalkeith the Worst Movie Ever Made?

Matthew Toomey thought so when he saw it in 2002.

It is the story of a group of residents in a nursing home who adopt a greyhound, come to love it and run it in races. They profit financially and the dog becomes a superstar. The screenplay is abysmal and the acting horrendous. It’s worse than a year 11 media studies assignment. To make matters worse, the sound and picture was out of sync for the last half hour. So when people’s lips were moving on screen, I wasn’t always hearing noise. The picture kept stuttering at several stages and got stuck for at least 30 seconds during a pivotal scene at the end…