Tim Watts

For a number of years now I’ve been publishing an Annual Reading Diary in conjunction with my resolution to read at least one book a week every week of the year.

So without further ado, here’s the list for 2012:

1. “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”, Maya Angelou. Autobiography African-American poet and writer. Tackles strong themes (Early 20th C Southern US racism and poverty, child rape, family break-down etc) beautifully and without excessive morbidity or sentimentally. A worthwhile read. Buy –Borrow – Toss
2. “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”, Stieg Larsson – I resisted this for a long time, but caved when the Slate Culturefest reviewed it and gave it a tentative thumbs up. I liked it despite myself but the critiques about it’s very stereo-typically ’male’ outlook are justified. Buy –Borrow – Toss
3. “American Psycho”, Brett Easton Ellis – Genuinely shocking. I was surprised that it is actually as explicit/offensive as claimed. I was also surprised by how little plot there was. That being said, it did have amusing stretches. The soliloquies on 80s music (particually Phil Collins) are genuinely brilliant. Buy –Borrow – Toss
4. “20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth”, Xiaolu Guo. A teenage village girl runs away from her home to a series of menial jobs and unfulfilling relationships in Beijing.  A strong punk affectation, but an interesting snapshot of youth in a rapidly changing China. Buy –Borrow – Toss
5. “The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation”, Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon. An abridged graphic adaptation of the 9/11 Commission’s report on the events leading up to September 11, 2001. A surprisingly effective medium for conveying the chronology of what occurred, but less effective when dealing with the report’s policy recommendations. Buy –Borrow – Toss
6. “Zoo Quest for a Dragon”, David Attenborough. An old fashioned adventure story. In the mid-1950s, David Attenborough travels to remote Indonesia in an effort to capture a Komodo Dragon for the London Zoo and a BBC TV Series. The complete naivety of Attenborough’s three man production team (the knew next to nothing about the Dragons at the start of the trip and were ultimately prevented from removing one from the country at the end of the trip) is charming for its time but somewhat astonishing today. Buy –Borrow – Toss
7. “In Search of Civilization: Remaking a Tarnished Idea”, John Armstrong – An examination of the concept of Civilisation and it’s value in a post-modern world. I came to this with high expectations imagining an update of Kenneth Clarke, only to be disappointed. I’ve enjoyed Armstrong’s previous books (particularly ‘Conditions of Love’), but this one couldn’t hold my interest. Buy –Borrow – Toss
8. “Leaves of Grass”, Walt Whitman. Peerless poetry. Accessible on a superficial level, but always rewarding closer reading. Universally enriching. Buy –Borrow – Toss
9. “The Way of the Greeks”, Edith Hamilton. A very high quality cliff’s notes to the philosophy, history, drama and art of the ancient Greeks. A favourite of RFK, Hamilton’s work conveys the extraordinary achievements of this fertile period of history with the respect and depth necessary to do the topic justice, but in a way that is accessible to those innocent of the classics.  Buy –Borrow – Toss
10. “The Noodlemaker”, Ma Jian. A collection of short stories of modern China told through a series of drunken dinners between two friends with a shared history of conflict. Dark, satirical modern Chinese fiction. The book jacket described it as Kunderaesq and I have to be cheap and derivative and agree. Recommended. Buy –Borrow – Toss
11. “The Uninvited”, Geling Yan. More Modern Chinese Satire. An unemployed Chinese factory worker discovers that by posing as a journalist he can eat at the free buffet’s of Chinas nascent PR industry. The protagonist is drawn into a mystery but I’d already lost interest by then. Buy –Borrow – Toss
12. “A Good Fall”, Ha Jin. A collection of short stories exploring the experiences of the Chinese immigrant community in the United States. Ha Jin is a favourite author of mine and his simple prose is perfect for a collection of stories about immigrants struggling to connect in an alien environment. Buy –Borrow – Toss
13. “Mudslingers: The 25 Dirtiest Political Campaigns of All Time”, Kerwin Swint. A straightforward list book cataloging the roughest political campaigns in US history. If nothing else this is worth reading to comprehensively disabuse oneself of the notion that there was once a golden era of politics in which gentlemen debated the public interest in a Habermasian public sphere. The dirtiest campaigns in this book are frequently the oldest ones…   Buy –Borrow – Toss
14. “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned”, Wells Tower. Perfectly adequate collection of modern literary short stories. Promised much but didn’t quite transcend the genre.  Buy –Borrow – Toss
15. “Life and Fate”, Vasily Grossman – Epic historical fiction covering the sweep of the Eastern Front of WW2 from the perspective of an extended Russian Jewish family. With a scope that stretches from Stalin in the Kremlin, to a unit of Russian soldiers besieged in Pavlov’s House during the battle of Stalingrad, to a Commissar in a Russian tank battalion leading Operation Uranus, to a Russian General in a Nazi concentration camp, to a Jewish scientist working on an atomic bomb while being hounded by Stalin’s secret police, to a Jewish child walking into the gas chambers in Auschwitz the canvas of this book is awe inspiring. And all written by a Russian Jewish journalist who lived with the Red Army from Stalingrad to Berlin. It’s no coincidence that this book was named to invoke “War and Peace”. Truly one of the Great Books of the 20th Century.  Buy –Borrow – Toss
16. “The Road”, Cormac McCarthy. Father and Son travel across post-apocalyptic landscape with little hope or overt purpose. Grim, unrelenting utterly parodic of McCarthy’s oeuvre.  Buy –Borrow – Toss
17. “Me Talk Pretty One Day”, David Sedaris – Humorous autobiographical essays. I read this as a palate cleanser after The Road. Largely pointless and lacking in substance/meaning. I enjoyed this so little that it made me uncomfortable at my intellectual snobbery. Far inferior to Augusten Burroughs in this genre. Buy –Borrow – Toss
18. “If this is a Man”, Primo Levi – Adorno might have said that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz, but “If This is a Man” is not only bears witness for the most horrific event of the 20th century, but does so in an indisputably artistic manner. Levi marshals the moral power of art to leave the reader greatly shaken. Given its brief length this really should be a must read for all thinking people. Buy –Borrow – Toss
19. “American Born Chinese”,  Gene Luen Yang. Graphic novel of the school life travails of a Chinese-American Boy interspersed with the myth of the Monkey King and the Journey to the West. Works in a weird way but nothing earth shattering. Buy –Borrow – Toss
20. “Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress”, Dai Sijie. Two young school friends are sent  for re-education in rural China as part of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. They discover a cache of European novels and use them to woo a ‘Little Chinese Seamstress’. A cute concept and elegantly written  Buy –Borrow – Toss
21. “Novel without a Name”, Duong Thu Huong. A Viet-Cong unit leader travels across Vietnam to visit his home village after 10 years of guerilla warfare. Poetic and polemical. Buy –Borrow – Toss
22. “Once Upon a Moonless Night”, Dai Sijie. A Western academic seeks a Buddhist sutra once owned by last emperor of China. I’ve like Dai Sijie’s other books and I thought the concept was interesting, but the text was too florid for me to be able to get engaged with this book.  Buy –Borrow – Toss
23. “Shakespeare”, Bill Bryson. Everything you expect from Bryson. A short, light fact-filled but analysis-light account of the life and works of Will Shakespeare. Engaging but not life changing. Buy –Borrow – Toss
24. “My Reading Life”, Bob Carr. Former NSW Premier and current Minister for Foreign Affairs writes about the books that have had the greatest impact on his life. Inspired me to make a greater effort with the French and Russian classics next year. Buy –Borrow – Toss
25. “Ready, Player One”, Ernest Cline. Ecentric billionaire and creator of a massively multi-player virtual reality world dies and establishes an elaborate 80s geek culture public contest to win his bequest. Harmless science fiction. The author gave away a Delorean as part of his book tour so that’s pretty cool. Buy –Borrow – Toss
26. “Arguably”, Christopher Hitchens. A collection of more than 100 of Hitchens’ essays on history, politics and culture. First class. Talking about Hitchens’ essays is one of the few contexts in which you can use the word ‘Orwellian’ as a complimentary adjective. Buy –Borrow – Toss
27. “Inside the Canberra Press Gallery: Life in the Wedding Cake of Old Parliament House”, Rob Chalmers. 60 year veteran of the Canberra Press Gallery gives a first hand account of life in the gallery in Old Parliament House. Equal parts fascinating, rambling and salacious. A testament to the uniqueness of Australian Democracy. Buy –Borrow – Toss
28. “The Master and Marguerita”,  Mikhail Bulgakov – The Devil visits Soviet Moscow. Magic realism ensues. Quite bizare at times and not for everyone. Buy –Borrow – Toss
29. “Death Note: Vol 1 – 108“, Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata. One of the most significant Japanese Mangas. The son of the Tokyo police commissioner finds a magical note book that enables the owner to kill any individual by writing their name in the book. The story goes through the looking glass when the protagonist begins using the book to kill of the worlds criminal class and starts mind bending game of cat and mouse with a secretive super cop. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything ‘twisty-er’ than this before. Buy –Borrow – Toss
30. “Darkness at Noon“, Arthur Koesteller. An old Bolshevik is arrested and tried by the secret police for treason against the state. It’s what you would get if you combined Kafka and Orwell and added a dimension of moral responsibility (and hence complexity). One of the classics of the 20th century, though a book that you suspect will fall from public awareness as memories of the Soviet Union fade. A story that could only be written by someone who was both an ex-communist and who has been jailed for an extended period. Buy –Borrow – Toss
31. “Huey Long“, T. Harry Williams – Barnstorming biography of Louisiana demagogue, Governor and Senator, Huey Long. Anecdotes of the craft of politics abound and while this is a hefty tome, it doesn’t read long once you get into the rythms of Southern Democratic politics. Highly recommended. Buy –Borrow – Toss
32. “God is Not Great“, Christopher Hitchens. No one does polemic like Hitchens and “God is Not Great” manages to must the same passion and rage as “The God Delusion” without indulging in the same contempt and condescension for the religious. Buy –Borrow – Toss
33. “A Moveable Feast“, Ernest Hemingway – Hemingway on Hemingway (and Fitzgerald and Stein and Pound) in inter-war Paris. A pocket-sized classic filled with genuine insights on life and the artistic process. Buy –Borrow – Toss
34. “The Western Cannon: The Books and School of the Ages“, Harold Bloom – I’ve been listening to this via audiobook for the better part of a six months now (33+hours). Bloom reads it and he sounds just as sententious as you’d expect. There’s a lot of meaty substance in this and some worthy critiques of modern academic literary studies, but the bulk is reactionary pomposity. Buy –Borrow – Toss
35. “Captain China Volume 1“, Chi Wang and Jim Lai – A Chinese nationalist response to Captain America. Captain China saves President Obama from an assassination attempt. It’s exactly as bizarre as it sounds.  Buy –Borrow – Toss
36. “Stiff“, Shane Maloney. Electorate Officer for a Western Melbourne State Labor Minister is drawn into an intrigue of industrial scheming and murder. A high quality gumshoe genre book. Buy –Borrow – Toss
37. “Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds“, Kinzer, Stephen. Buy –Borrow – Toss
38. #”Burr“, Gore Vidal – The story of a Revolutionary War hero, Senator and the first Vice-President of the United States to kill someone in a duel while in office. Arguably better than “Lincoln” if only because of its close (and often defamatory) imaginings of the most prominent figures in the Revolutionary USA, but regardless a must read for anyone with an interest in early US history. Buy –Borrow – Toss
39. “The Rise of the Fifth Estate“, Greg Jericho.First hand account of the emergence of social media as a new voice in the Australian political ecosystem and the ructions that this caused for existing institutions. A great way for new-comers to catch up on the online events of the past six years.  Buy –Borrow – Toss
40. #”Joh: The Life and Political Adventures of Johannes Bjelke-Petersen“, Hugh Lunn. Recent events in Queensland inspired me to grab this one off the bookshelf for a re-read.   Buy –Borrow – Toss
41. “Ocean of Words“, Ha Jin. A collection of short stories revolving around a Chinese military base on the Chinese-Russian border during the Cultural Revolution. In addition to being a sensitive and insightful story-teller, Ha Jin focus on the individual in a totalitarian state is a valuable rejoinder to the stereo-type of the Chinese masses. Buy –Borrow – Toss
42. “Ransom: A Novel“, David Malouf – A retelling of the encounter between Priam and Achilles in the Illiad. A moving book that works on the small scale of human emotion and the larger scale of cultural expectation at the same time. Recommended. Buy –Borrow – Toss
43. “Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets“, Sudhir Venkatesh. Sociology graduate student embeds himself with a gang leader in a Chicago housing project. Told in a narrative, confessional style rather than as a sociological treatise which makes the book both accessible and surprisingly intimate. Buy –Borrow – Toss
44. “The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns“, Sasha Issenberg – In depth study of the growing application data driven, empirically social psychology tactics in modern political campaigning. The 50% of this book that is good is very good, but it meanders a lot in the middle parts by telling the story chronologically (as campaigns and political scientists floundered while trying to get rigor into what they were doing). Buy –Borrow – Toss
45. “Freedom“, Jonathan Franzen – I had put off reading this for more than 12 months as I wanted to consume it free from the climate of hype that surrounds everything that Franzen produces. You can believe the hype though as this was an extraordinary book. Frazen’s close studies of the late 20th century American middle-class and their family dynamics really are extraordinary. If you didn’t like ‘The Corrections”, you probably won’t like this either, but in many ways this book exceeded its predecessor. Buy – Borrow – Toss
46. “Leaving the Atocha Station“, Ben Lerner – An interesting read. I didn’t like it, but might recommend it. It’s a book that’s prompted a number of good debates with friends and if nothing else it’s great source material for trolling the literary set. I’m convinced there’s an aspect of satire to the book – the author is taking the piss out of the self-seriousness of the protagonist. Sentences like this are inexplicable otherwise: “It didn’t matter; every sentence, regardless of its subject, became mimetic of the action of the train, and the train mimetic of the sentence, and I felt suddenly coeval with its syntax.” But if you take it at face value, a more  cynical interpretation is that the language of literary poetry in the book is used not for satire or to create room for the projection of meaning by the reader (a theme explored by the protagonist), but merely as a signalling tool to demonstrate literary acuity. It’s all about the author rather than the reader. In the hands of a virtuoso this can be forgivable as it’s fun just to go on the ride with them, but in the hands of even just a ‘good’ writer it serves no purpose but to stroke the writer’s ego within their community of practice. It’s no better than French Philosophy. The best parts of this book were the exploration of projection/communication that come in the sections of dialogue where the protagonist is struggling to understand the local language. I thought the paragraphs where he unfolded the potential meanings of what he was hearing in Spanish were quite beautiful and close to my favourite parts of the book: eg “she might have described swimming in the lake as a child, or said that lakes reminded her of being a child, or asked me if I’d enjoyed swimming as a child, or said that what she’d said about the moon was childish.” A nice device that I would enjoy in a poem (or even series of poems) but if it was the premise of the entire book I thought it was a reach.  Buy – Borrow – Toss
47. “Don’t Go Back to Where You Came From: Why Multiculturalism Works“: Tim Soutphommasane – One of the books of the year for those interested in Australian politics and policy making. Southphommasane makes a persuasive case that the Australian model of multiculturalism, founded on the rights and obligations of citizenship, has been uniquely successful – particularly in comparison to the vastly different approaches employed in Europe. One of those rare books that has led me to think about an issue very differently after reading than before. - Buy –Borrow – Toss
48. “This is How You Lose Her“, Junot Diaz – An entire collection of short stories about male infidelity? An interesting subject for a concept album. Diaz faculty for description – particularly of women – is very impressive, but he’s also a very sensitive writer and he paints a nuanced picture of the emotional life of his characters. Reminded me of Raymond Carver’s “What we Talk About When We Talk About Love” in some respects. Buy –Borrow – Toss
49. “The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail But Some Don’t“, Nate Silver – NOT just a book about polling and political punditry, but rather a very detailed examination of the limitations of forecasting and prediction across a range of subject areas (including weather, hurricanes, earthquakes, terrorism, baseball, politics, economic forecasting). The book’s focus on the limitations of statistical forecasting is high irony given the (generally) uninformed criticisms Silver faced during the 2012 Presidential Election Campaign. Silver’s  explanation of the limitations of Fischerian statistical inference (particularly the scourge of statistical significance and overfit models) should be included in all introductory statistics courses. Buy –Borrow – Toss
50. “World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War“, Max Brooks – A pastiche of first person accounts from across the globe of a zombie apocalypse. Largely Sci-Fi escapism despite Daniel Drezner’s (partly tongue in cheek) efforts to talk up the geo-political insight of the differing international approaches to the end of the world portrayed in this book. Buy –Borrow – Toss
51. “On Our Selection“, Steele Rudd – As someone who has family roots on the Darling Downs stretching back to the days of Dad and Dave it pains me to say it, but this book has not aged well. The slapstick comedy doesn’t really translate across generations and the constant stories of animal cruelty as humour were enough to put even me off. Go to Henry Lawson if you’re looking for an Australian literary taste of this period.  Buy –Borrow – Toss
52. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love“, Raymond Carver – Brief and obtuse, but strangely  moving. I can see why this book is still considered to be so influential 30 years after it was written. I was particularly delighted to unexpectedly come across a short story (“So Much Water, So Close to Home”) that was obviously the inspiration for the Paul Kelly song “Everything’s Turning to White” and the eponym for the Album from which it comes. If you haven’t read any Carver before, this should give you a feel for the books oeuvre.  Buy –Borrow – Toss
53. “The Great Books“, David Denby – New York movie critic re-takes Columbia University’s mandatory ‘Great Books’ course in middle age wrestling with the canon of Western Civilization alongside Freshmen and Sophomores. A good, high level introduction to the Great Books coupled with a sensible discussion of the cultural role and relevance in a modern, pluralistic society. Buy –Borrow – Toss

Some thoughts on my year in reading:

• Highlights for the year were “Life and Fate“, “If This Is a Man” and “Don’t Go Back To Where You Came From“. Heavy going in retrospect.  I really liked “This is How You Lose Her” too which is a bit lighter.
• Every literate member of the human race should make the (minor) effort to read “If This is a Man“. It’s short, it’s moving and its important.
• 20 Non-Fiction books and 33 Fiction books – a little out of kilter given that I generally aim for a 50:50 split here.
• Partial-marks on delivering on my reading goals for 2012. On the positive side I got back into Asian literature with a vengeance this year and made a real discovery with Ma Jian. On the negative side, Mishima’s The Sea of Fertility remains uncompleted and the only poetry I read this year was “Leave of Grass”. I tried Philip Larkin and found him a bit too curmudgeonly for my tastes sadly. I’ve been looking for a Ruthven Todd collection for more than 12 months now to no avail.

My reading goals for 2013 are:

• The Russians and the French  – I tried some Flaubert (“A Sentimental Education”) this year but couldn’t hack it and gave up after a few days. I’m resolved to make a greater effort next year. At the very least I’m going to break into Tolstoy – Anna Karenina has been sitting in my ‘To Read’ queue for far too long. I feel embarrassed to be 30 and not to have read any of his stuff yet given how much trash I have torn through in my life.
• Mishima - I’m definitely coming back to The Sea of Fertility this year as well. Definitely. I’m resolved.
• At Least One Classic  – having read Denby’s “Great Books” and Carr’s “My Reading Like”, I’m resolved to read at least one classic next year. I’m leaning towards Marcus Aurelius’ ‘Meditations’ at this point, but I’m open to persuasion from classically minded friends…

Rogers and Grebner were coming from a different set of questions but arriving at a similar understanding of what drove political activity. No one decided to vote in a vacuum, and interpersonal interactions mattered. In fact, their psychologically minded tests and feints were moving toward something that felt very familiar to Gerber. Rogers’s project to promote voting as popular and Grebner’s threats to expose scofflaws had, if only briefly, reconstructed small corners of late-nineteenth-century America, where voting was a community activity. Since writing his dissertation about the introduction of the secret ballot, Gerber had spent much of his time trying to isolate the slightest ways to increase turnout in the system it had created. In Gerber’s eyes, the nineteenth century, where men packed onto courthouse steps to select their leaders with raised hands or words bellowed over the din, represented a kind of Edenic political space of widespread participation.

“A lot of what gets done on campaigns gets done on the basis of anecdotal evidence, which often comes down to who is a better storyteller. Who tells a better story about what works and what doesn’t work?” says Christopher Mann, a former executive director of the New Mexico Democratic Party.
..

The people who explain politics for a living—the politicians themselves, their advisers, the media who cover them—love to reach tidy conclusions like this one. Elections are decided by charismatic personalities, strategic maneuvers, the power of rhetoric, the zeitgeist of the political moment. The explainers cloak themselves in loose-fitting theories because they offer a narrative comfort, unlike the more honest acknowledgment that elections hinge on the motivations of millions of individual human beings and their messy, illogical, often unknowable psychologies.

One night Binder asked, “Do you think your neighbors would be willing to vote for an African-American for president?” Some of the voters answered no, and Strasma watched them closely. Something in that response—perhaps a feeling of being liberated to publicly share an unpopular opinion—convinced him that the people who acknowledged their neighbors’ racism might really be confessing a view of their own. Strasma added the neighbors question to his survey and saw quickly that it worked. Those who had high Obama-support scores but ended up backing McCain said yes to it, so Strasma made it the core of a new “openness” model: another score, out of 100, that assessed how open a voter would be to casting a ballot for a black candidate.

Levitt told his students they would be smart to live below their means, so they could always have the flexibility to afford taking a different job if it was lower-paying.

Not far from Fisher, a young economist named Austin Bradford Hill was growing similarly impatient with the limits of statistics to account for cause and effect in health care. In 1923, for example, Hill received a grant from Britain’s Medical Research Council that sent him to the rural parts of Essex, east of London, to investigate why the area suffered uncommonly high mortality rates among young adults. Hill returned from Essex with an explanation that had little to do with the quality of medical care: the healthiest members of that generation quickly left the country to live in towns and cities. The whole British medical system was built on similarly misleading statistics, and Hill worried that the faulty inferences drawn from them put people’s health at risk. Hill joined the Medical Research Council’s scientific staff and began writing articles in the Lancet explaining to doctors in straightforward language what concepts like mean, median, and mode meant.

When a pollster asked if someone would be more or less likely to vote for a candidate in favor of shipping jobs overseas—a typical way of auditioning what was then a promising line of attack against Bush—they would often hear from voters across the board that it made them “less likely.” But when the AFL sent out a draft leaflet about Bush’s free-trade policies, it turned out to have little impact on the autoworkers who received it. The knowledge of factory job loss was “baked in” to their impressions of Bush, as Podhorzer liked to put it: the workers already knew what the union wanted them to think about Republican trade policy. They liked or disliked Bush regardless. But other groups, like construction workers and Republicans, did not know as much. A piece of mail that gave them information turned out to be persuasive in changing their attitudes toward Bush.

The best way to get anyone to do anything on the Democratic side—and I’m sure it’s the reverse on the Republican side—is to tell people that the Republicans are doing it. It doesn’t matter: the Republicans could be doing something completely stupid, but if you tell the Democrats they get scared and think they should do it. They all think the Republicans are smarter than they are.

The publication of Get Out the Vote! was part of a conscious effort by Gerber and Green to step out of the academy and ensure that lessons from these studies reached a nonscholarly audience. The authors believed they had made this populist mission apparent through the inclusion of an exclamation mark in the book’s title. (“This is an unusual thing,” Gerber says of the punctuation.)

The ads may have delivered sizable effects on the weeks in which they ran, the eggheads concluded, but they decayed rapidly. Much of Weeks’s folklore was right: if your goal was to move public opinion, it made sense to wait to go on TV until you would be able to sustain the buy.

You nod and watch her. She is an exceptionally beautiful girl. You think of that old saying Show me a beautiful girl and I’ll show you someone who is tired of fucking her. You doubt you would have ever tired of her, though.

You were at the age where you could fall in love with a girl over an expression, over a gesture.

My room is hot and small, overrun by books. You never wanted to be in here (it’s like being inside a sock, you said) and anytime the boys were away we slept in the living room, out on the rug.

The newest girl’s called Samantha and she’s a problem. She’s dark and heavy-browed and has a mouth like unswept glass—when you least expect it she cuts you.

Yes—it’s an opposites-attract sort of thing, it’s a great-sex sort of thing, it’s a no-thinking sort of thing. It’s wonderful! Wonderful! Until one June day Alma discovers that you are also fucking this beautiful freshman girl named Laxmi, discovers the fucking of Laxmi because she, Alma, the girlfriend, opens your journal and reads. (Oh, she had her suspicions.) She waits for you on the stoop, and when you pull up in her Saturn and notice the journal in her hand your heart plunges through you like a fat bandit through a hangman’s trap.

YOU, YUNIOR, HAVE A GIRLFRIEND named Alma, who has a long tender horse neck and a big Dominican ass that seems to exist in a fourth dimension beyond jeans. An ass that could drag the moon out of orbit. An ass she never liked until she met you. Ain’t a day that passes that you don’t want to press your face against that ass or bite the delicate sliding tendons of her neck. You love how she shivers when you bite, how she fights you with those arms that are so skinny they belong on an after-school special.

All I can manage is a memory of the first time me and Magda talked. Back at Rutgers. We were waiting for an E bus together on George Street and she was wearing purple. All sorts of purple. And that’s when I know it’s over. As soon as you start thinking about the beginning, it’s the end.

She’s sensitive, too. Takes to hurt the way water takes to paper.

That which has been is what will be,
That which is done is what will be done,
And there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there anything of which it may be said,
“See, this is new”?
It has already been in ancient times before us.
There is no remembrance of former things,
Nor will there be any remembrance of things that are to come
By those who will come after. —Ecclesiastes 1:9-11 (New King James translation)

Prediction is difficult for us for the same reason that it is so important: it is where objective and subjective reality intersect. Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge: the serenity to accept the things we cannot predict, the courage to predict the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Schelling suggests that our problems instead run deeper. When a possibility is unfamiliar to us, we do not even think about it. Instead we develop a sort of mind-blindness to it. In medicine this is called anosognosia: part of the physiology of the condition prevents a patient from recognizing that they have the condition. Some Alzheimer’s patients present in this way.

Emanuel’s concerns are actually quite common among the scientific community: climate scientists are in much broader agreement about some parts of the debate than others. A survey of climate scientists conducted in 2008 found that almost all (94 percent) were agreed that climate change is occurring now, and 84 percent were persuaded that it was the result of human activity. But there was much less agreement about the accuracy of climate computer models. The scientists held mixed views about the ability of these models to predict global temperatures, and generally skeptical ones about their capacity to model other potential effects of climate change. Just 19 percent, for instance, thought they did a good job of modeling what sea-rise levels will look like fifty years hence.

I don’t know that political betting markets like Intrade are all that good right now—the standard of competition is fairly low. Intrade is becoming more popular, but it is still small potatoes compared with the stock market or Las Vegas. In the weeks leading up to the Super Tuesday primaries in March 2012, for instance, about $1.6 million in shares were traded there; by contrast, $8 million is traded in the New York Stock Exchange in a single second. The biggest profit made by any one trader from his Super Tuesday bets was about $9,000, which is not enough to make a living, let alone to get rich.

This furious velocity of trading is something fairly new. In the 1950s, the average share of common stock in an American company was held for about six years before being traded—consistent with the idea that stocks are a long-term investment. By the 2000s, the velocity of trading had increased roughly twelvefold. Instead of being held for six years, the same share of stock was traded after just six months.

The bigger problem, however, is that the frequentist methods—in striving for immaculate statistical procedures that can’t be contaminated by the researcher’s bias—keep him hermetically sealed off from the real world. These methods discourage the researcher from considering the underlying context or plausibility of his hypothesis, something that the Bayesian method demands in the form of a prior probability. Thus, you will see apparently serious papers published on how toads can predict earthquakes, or how big-box stores like Target beget racial hate groups, which apply frequentist tests to produce “statistically significant” (but manifestly ridiculous) findings.
…
Fisherian statistical methods do not encourage us to think about which correlations imply causations and which ones do not.

As there is an exponential increase in the amount of available information, there is likewise an exponential increase in the number of hypotheses to investigate. For instance, the U.S. government now publishes data on about 45,000 economic statistics. If you want to test for relationships between all combinations of two pairs of these statistics—is there a causal relationship between the bank prime loan rate and the unemployment rate in Alabama?—that gives you literally one billion hypotheses to test.* But the number of meaningful relationships in the data—those that speak to causality rather than correlation and testify to how the world really works—is orders of magnitude smaller. Nor is it likely to be increasing at nearly so fast a rate as the information itself; there isn’t any more truth in the world than there was before the Internet or the printing press. Most of the data is just noise, as most of the universe is filled with empty space.

Bayes’s theorem is concerned with conditional probability. That is, it tells us the probability that a theory or hypothesis is true if some event has happened. Suppose you are living with a partner and come home from a business trip to discover a strange pair of underwear in your dresser drawer. You will probably ask yourself: what is the probability that your partner is cheating on you? The condition is that you have found the underwear; the hypothesis you are interested in evaluating is the probability that you are being cheated on. Bayes’s theorem, believe it or not, can give you an answer to this sort of question— provided that you know (or are willing to estimate) three quantities: First, you need to estimate the probability of the underwear’s appearing as a condition of the hypothesis being true—that is, you are being cheated upon. Let’s assume for the sake of this problem that you are a woman and your partner is a man, and the underwear in question is a pair of panties. If he’s cheating on you, it’s certainly easy enough to imagine how the panties got there. Then again, even (and perhaps especially) if he is cheating on you, you might expect him to be more careful. Let’s say that the probability of the panties’ appearing, conditional on his cheating on you, is 50 percent. Second, you need to estimate the probability of the underwear’s appearing conditional on the hypothesis being false. If he isn’t cheating, are there some innocent explanations for how they got there? Sure, although not all of them are pleasant (they could be his panties). It could be that his luggage got mixed up. It could be that a platonic female friend of his, whom you trust, stayed over one night. The panties could be a gift to you that he forgot to wrap up. None of these theories is inherently untenable, although some verge on dog-ate-my-homework excuses. Collectively you put their probability at 5 percent. Third and most important, you need what Bayesians call a prior probability (or simply a prior). What is the probability you would have assigned to him cheating on you before you found the underwear? Of course, it might be hard to be entirely objective about this now that the panties have made themselves known. (Ideally, you establish your priors before you start to examine the evidence.) But sometimes, it is possible to estimate a number like this empirically. Studies have found, for instance, that about 4 percent of married partners cheat on their spouses in any given year, so we’ll set that as our prior. If we’ve estimated these values, Bayes’s theorem can then be applied to establish a posterior possibility. This is the number that we’re interested in: how likely is it that we’re being cheated on, given that we’ve found the underwear?

Much of the most thoughtful work on the use and abuse of statistical models and the proper role of prediction comes from people in the medical profession. That is not to say there is nothing on the line when an economist makes a prediction, or a seismologist does. But because of medicine’s intimate connection with life and death, doctors tend to be appropriately cautious. In their field, stupid models kill people. It has a sobering effect.

One of the most basic applications might simply be markets for predicting macroeconomic variables like GDP and unemployment. There are already a variety of direct and indirect ways to bet on things like inflation, interest rates, and commodities prices, but no high-volume market for GDP exists. There could be a captive audience for these markets: common stocks have become more highly correlated with macroeconomic risks in recent years, so they could provide a means of hedging against them. These markets would also provide real-time information to policy makers, essentially serving as continuously updated forecasts of GDP. Adding options to the markets—bets on, say, whether GDP might grow by 5 percent, or decline by 2 percent—would punish overconfident forecasters and yield more reliable estimates of the uncertainties inherent in forecasting the economy.

Instead, economic forecasts are blunt instruments at best, rarely being able to anticipate economic turning points more than a few months in advance. Fairly often, in fact, these forecasts have failed to “predict” recessions even once they were already under way: a majority of economists did not think we were in one when the three most recent recessions, in 1990, 2001, and 2007, were later determined to have begun.

….

In reality, when a group of economists give you their GDP forecast, the true 90 percent prediction interval—based on how these forecasts have actually performed20 and not on how accurate the economists claim them to be—spans about 6.4 points of GDP (equivalent to a margin of error of plus or minus 3.2 percent).* When you hear on the news that GDP will grow by 2.5 percent next year, that means it could quite easily grow at a spectacular rate of 5.7 percent instead. Or it could fall by 0.7 percent—a fairly serious recession. Economists haven’t been able to do any better than that, and there isn’t much evidence that their forecasts are improving. The old joke about economists’ having called nine out of the last six recessions correctly has some truth to it; one actual statistic is that in the 1990s, economists predicted only 2 of the 60 recessions around the world a year ahead of time.

But the overfit model scores those extra points in essence by cheating—by fitting noise rather than signal. It actually does a much worse job of explaining the real world. As obvious as this might seem when explained in this way, many forecasters completely ignore this problem. The wide array of statistical methods available to researchers enables them to be no less fanciful—and no more scientific—than a child finding animal patterns in clouds.* “With four parameters I can fit an elephant,” the mathematician John von Neumann once said of this problem. “And with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.

During the 2008 Democratic primaries, the average poll missed by about eight points, far more than implied by its margin of error. The problems in polls of the Republican primaries of 2012 may have been even worse. In many of the major states, in fact—including Iowa, South Carolina, Florida, Michigan, Washington, Colorado, Ohio, Alabama, and Mississippi—the candidate ahead in the polls a week before the election lost.

Political news, and especially the important news that really affects the campaign, proceeds at an irregular pace. But news coverage is produced every day. Most of it is filler, packaged in the form of stories that are designed to obscure its unimportance.* Not only does political coverage often lose the signal—it frequently accentuates the noise. If there are a number of polls in a state that show the Republican ahead, it won’t make news when another one says the same thing. But if a new poll comes out showing the Democrat with the lead, it will grab headlines—even though the poll is probably an outlier and won’t predict the outcome accurately.

You can get lost in the narrative. Politics may be especially susceptible to poor predictions precisely because of its human elements: a good election engages our dramatic sensibilities.

In fact, a little knowledge may be a dangerous thing in the hands of a hedgehog with a Ph.D. One of Tetlock’s more remarkable findings is that, while foxes tend to get better at forecasting with experience, the opposite is true of hedgehogs: their performance tends to worsen as they pick up additional credentials. Tetlock believes the more facts hedgehogs have at their command, the more opportunities they have to permute and manipulate them in ways that confirm their biases.

But forecasters often resist considering these out-of-sample problems. When we expand our sample to include events further apart from us in time and space, it often means that we will encounter cases in which the relationships we are studying did not hold up as well as we are accustomed to. The model will seem to be less powerful. It will look less impressive in a PowerPoint presentation (or a journal article or a blog post). We will be forced to acknowledge that we know less about the world than we thought we did. Our personal and professional incentives almost always discourage us from doing this.
…
We forget—or we willfully ignore—that our models are simplifications of the world. We figure that if we make a mistake, it will be at the margin.

Risk, as first articulated by the economist Frank H. Knight in 1921, is something that you can put a price on. Say that you’ll win a poker hand unless your opponent draws to an inside straight: the chances of that happening are exactly 1 chance in 11. This is risk. It is not pleasant when you take a “bad beat” in poker, but at least you know the odds of it and can account for it ahead of time. In the long run, you’ll make a profit from your opponents making desperate draws with insufficient odds.

Uncertainty, on the other hand, is risk that is hard to measure. You might have some vague awareness of the demons lurking out there. You might even be acutely concerned about them. But you have no real idea how many of them there are or when they might strike. Your back-of-the-envelope estimate might be off by a factor of 100 or by a factor of 1,000; there is no good way to know. This is uncertainty. Risk greases the wheels of a free-market economy; uncertainty grinds them to a halt.

“The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair,” wrote Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series.

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist, wrote of the bubble and its inevitable end in August 2005. “This was baked into the system,” Krugman later told me. “The housing crash was not a black swan. The housing crash was the elephant in the room.”

Ordinary Americans were also concerned. Google searches on the term “housing bubble” increased roughly tenfold from January 2004 through summer 2005. Interest in the term was heaviest in those states, like California, that had seen the largest run-up in housing prices—and which were about to experience the largest decline. In fact, discussion of the bubble was remarkably widespread. Instances of the two-word phrase “housing bubble” had appeared in just eight news accounts in 200120 but jumped to 3,447 references by 2005. The housing bubble was discussed about ten times per day in reputable newspapers and periodicals.

Nobody saw it coming. When you can’t state your innocence, proclaim your ignorance: this is often the first line of defense when there is a failed forecast.

Prediction is important because it connects subjective and objective reality. Karl Popper, the philosopher of science, recognized this view. For Popper, a hypothesis was not scientific unless it was falsifiable—meaning that it could be tested in the real world by means of a prediction.

Some of you may be uncomfortable with a premise that I have been hinting at and will now state explicitly: we can never make perfectly objective predictions. They will always be tainted by our subjective point of view.

Our biological instincts are not always very well adapted to the information rich modern world. Unless we work actively to become aware of the biases we introduce, the returns to additional information may be minimal—or diminishing.

A long-term study by Philip E. Tetlock of the University of Pennsylvania found that when political scientists claimed that a political outcome had absolutely no chance of occurring, it nevertheless happened about 15 percent of the time. (The political scientists are probably better than television pundits, however.)

The numbers have no way of speaking for themselves. We speak for them. We imbue them with meaning. Like Caesar, we may construe them in self-serving ways that are detached from their objective reality.

[But] men may construe things after their fashion / Clean from the purpose of the things themselves,” Shakespeare warns us through the voice of Cicero—good advice for anyone seeking to pluck through their newfound wealth of information. It was hard to tell the signal from the noise. The story the data tells us is often the one we’d like to hear, and we usually make sure that it has a happy ending.

she might have described swimming in the lake as a child, or said that lakes reminded her of being a child, or asked me if I’d enjoyed swimming as a child, or said that what she’d said about the moon was childish.

She kissed me on the lips and I felt in love with her.

The relationship I might have had in the flattering light of the subjunctive.

It didn’t matter; every sentence, regardless of its subject, became mimetic of the action of the train, and the train mimetic of the sentence, and I felt suddenly coeval with its syntax.

“The language of poetry is the exact opposite of the language of mass media,” I said, meaninglessly.

…making contact with authentic Spain, which I only defined negatively as an American-free space

On the highway to Toledo we passed several tour buses full of what looked like Americans, digital cameras already in hand, and as we drew past them I expressed infinite disdain, which I could do easily with my eyebrows, for every tourist whose gaze I met. My look accused them of supporting the war, of treating people and the relations between people like things, of being the lemmings of a murderous and spectacular empire, accused them as if I were a writer in flight from a repressive regime, rather than one of its most fraudulent grantees.

Various people greeted us and Teresa detached from me to kiss them and I was acutely aware of not being attractive enough for my surroundings; luckily I had a strategy for such situations, one I had developed over many visits to New York with the dim kids of the stars: I opened my eyes a little more widely than normal, opened them to a very specific point, raising my eyebrows and also allowing my mouth to curl up into the implication of a smile. I held this look steady once it had obtained, a look that communicated incredulity cut with familiarity, a boredom arrested only by a vaguely anthropological interest in my surroundings, a look that contained a dose of contempt I hoped could be read as political, as insinuating that, after a frivolous night, I would be returning to the front lines of some struggle that would render whatever I experienced in such company null. The goal of this look was to make my insufficiencies appear chosen, to give my unstylish hair and clothes the force of protest; I was a figure for the outside to this life, I had known it and rejected it and now was back as an ambassador from a reality more immediate and just.

She was always wrapping or unwrapping her hair or body in some sort of cloth, winding or unwinding a shawl or scarf, and whenever I imagined her, I imagined her engaged in one of these activities; I couldn’t picture her standing still, fully dressed or undressed, but only in the process of gracefully entangling or disentangling herself from fabric.

Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I’d come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity.

Although I claimed to be a poet, although my supposed talent as a writer had earned me my fellowship in Spain, I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility.

Perhaps the most surprising fact in T-Bone’s ledgers was the incredibly low wage paid to the young members who did the dirtiest and most dangerous work: selling drugs on the street. According to T-Bone’s records, they barely earned minimum wage. For all their braggadocio, to say nothing of the peer pressure to spend money on sharp clothes and cars, these young members stood little chance of ever making a solid payday unless they beat the odds and were promoted into the senior ranks. But even Price and T-Bone, it turned out, made only about thirty thousand dollars a year. Now I knew why some of the younger BK members supplemented their income by working legit jobs at McDonald’s or a car wash.

That a tenant leader—one who was respected by politicians, shop owners, the police, and others—would praise a crack gang and work so closely with its leader made me realize just how desperate people could become in the projects. But I was learning that Ms. Bailey’s compromising position also arose out of her own personal ambitions: in order to retain her authority, she had to collaborate with the other power groups, in this case the gangs, who helped shape the status quo. This resulted in the bizarre spectacle of Ms. Bailey’s publicly defending the very people who were shooting and causing trouble for her tenant families.

J.T. once asked me what sociologists had to say about gangs and inner-city poverty. I told him that some sociologists believed in a “culture of poverty”—that is, poor blacks didn’t work because they didn’t value employment as highly as other ethnic groups did, and they transmitted this attitude across generations.

“So you want me to take pride in the job, and you’re only paying me minimum wage?” J.T. countered. “It don’t sound like you think much about the job yourself.” His tone was more realistic than defensive. In fact, his rejoinder echoed the very criticisms that some sociologists applied to the “culture of poverty” view.

He liked the works of his friends, which is beautiful as loyalty but can be disastrous as judgement.

Nobody climbs on skis now and almost everybody breaks their legs but maybe it is easier in the end to break your legs than to break your heart although they say that everything breaks now and that sometimes, afterwards, many are stronger at the broken places.

Hunger is good discipline.

We would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.

We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.

Never to go on trips with anyone you do not love.

When you have two people who love each other, are happy and gay and really good work is being done by one or both of them, people are drawn to them as surely as migrating birds are drawn at night to a powerful beacon. If the two people were as solidly constructed as the beacon there would be little damage except to the birds. Those who attract people by their happiness and their performance are usually inexperienced. They do not know how not to be overrun and how to go away. They do not always learn about the food, the attractive, the charming, the soon-beloved, the generous, the understanding rich who have no bad qualities and who give each day the quality of a festival and who, when they have passed and taken the nourishment they needed, leave everything deader than the roots of any grass Attila’s horses’ hooves have ever scoured.

His talent was a natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.

To have come on all this new world of writing (Tolstoy, Chekov, Dostoyevsky, Gogol & Turgenev), with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you. You could take with you treasure with you when you traveled too.

Some people show evil as a great race horse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre. Lewis did not show evil; he just looked nasty.

Walking home I tried to think what he reminded me of and there were various things. They were all medical except toe-jam and that was a slang word. I tried to break his face down and describe it but I could only get the eyes. Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.

In those days may people went to the cafes at the corner of the Boulevard Montparnasse and the Boulevard Raspail to be seen publicly and in a way such places anticipated the columnists as the daily substitutes for immortality.

By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.

‘Huxley is a dead man,’ Miss Stein said. ‘Why do you want to read a dead man? Can’t you see he is dead?’

I could not see, then, that he was a dead man and I said that his books amused me and kept me from thinking.

‘You should only read what is truly good or is frankly bad.’

But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the splutter of blue they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, ‘Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.’

So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.

If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.

His feeling of having crashed did not consist of envy, exactly, or even entirely of having outlived himself. It was more like despair about the world’s splinteredness. The nation was fighting ugly ground wars in two countries, the planet was heating up like a toaster oven, and here at the 9:30, all around him, were hundreds of kids in the mold of the banana-bread-baking Sarah, with their sweet yearnings, their innocent entitlement—to what? To emotion. To unadulterated worship of a superspecial band. To being left to themselves to ritually repudiate, for an hour or two on a Saturday night, the cynicism and anger of their elders. They seemed, as Jessica had suggested at the meeting earlier, to bear malice toward nobody. Katz could see it in their clothing, which bespoke none of the rage and disaffection of the crowds he’d been a part of as a youngster. They gathered not in anger but in celebration of their having found, as a generation, a gentler and more respectful way of being. A way, not incidentally, more in harmony with consuming. And so said to him: die.

People came to this country for either money or freedom. If you don’t have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can’t afford to feed your kids, even if your kids are getting shot down by maniacs with assault rifles. You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to. That’s what Bill Clinton figured out—that we can’t win elections by running against personal liberties. Especially not against guns, actually.

the quiet majesty of long marriage

Integrity’s a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They’re pure hyena.

But at least this is an actual place. Washington’s all abstraction. It’s about access to power and nothing else.

No mark was left on the wall there, and yet the spot remained clear and distinct forever after. It was a little coordinate of the universe permanently charged and altered by its history. It became, that spot, a quiet third presence in the room with her and Walter on the weekends they later spent alone here.

(Dorothy was big on loyalty—it lent meaning to her not so pleasant life)

Richard had a strong (if highly intermittent) wish to be a good person, and he was scrupulously polite to people, like Dorothy, whom he considered Good.

At the Lutheran hospital, his lifelong struggle against his father ended with his father’s death. (To be dead is to be as beaten as a dad can get.)

There was, of course, nowhere better in the world to be than New York City. This fact was the foundation of her family’s satisfaction with itself, the platform from which all else could be ridiculed, the collateral of adult sophistication that bought them the right to behave like children.

At the time, she believed that it was because she was selflessly team-spirited that direct personal compliments made her so uncomfortable. The autobiographer now thinks that compliments were like a beverage she was unconsciously smart enough to deny herself even one drop of, because her thirst for them was infinite.

There were people with whom her style of self-deprecation didn’t sit well—who detected a kind of condescension in it, as if Patty, in exaggerating her own minor defects, were too obviously trying to spare the feelings of less accomplished homemakers.

Once the coup had taken place and the election was on, Field – a senator for just ninety-nine days – was quickly forgotten. Legal aid to help him fight five High Court writs stopped, promises of state government monetary aid did not materialise, and his previous ‘patrons’, the Queensland Liberal-National parties, put him at number thirty-four in the field of forty in their list of preferences when he ran as an independent in the Senate. This was nine places lower than they listed Dr. Colston whom they had rejected in favour of Field just a few months before.

Yet Field was number twelve on the ALP Senate ticket. The reason for these apparent anomalies was that each party wanted its ticket as easy to follow as possible, taking little notice of order after making sure the party occupied the first six place on the card and their main opponents the last.

The tragedy for Labor was that the ensuing Field affair and its consequences would never have occurred had three names been put up in Queensland by the ALP on the death of Senator Milliner. A smart move would have been to put up two communists and Colston. But Labor overlooked the consequences and as the vote on Burns’s nomination of Colston was about to be taken Burns said the people would see that a state government would change their vote. To which Bjelke-Petersen replied: “We will select a Labor man.

During the Parliamentary Debate in which Tom Burns nominated Mal Colston for the 1975 Queensland casual Senate vacancy:

This anti-intellectual attitude was summed up by Tom Aikens (independent, Townsville South) who told the House he was not going to make any personal attack on Dr. Colston: “I will put it mildly. Colston is one of the trendy university set, one of the trendy mob.” That was probably a more damaging smear to Colston in Queensland Parliament than the incredible fire allegations (in which Colston had been accused of arson). The Liberal member for Maryborough, Gilbert Alison, chimed in, calling out: “An academic”, to which Aikens added: “He’s worse than that.”

At Stanthorpe, Queensland’s fruit-growing centre he said: “Australians, wake up, we are on a dangerous course with these people. The Shah of Iran told me when he was here he was disturbed that we were going to communism.  Australians keep coming to me saying to do everything I can do to fight Canberra. They say they are taking us the same way their nations went in Europe. They said it couldn’t happen there too.”

For its part, the National Party – fighting its first state election under a new name – approached the election with patriotic fervour. So much so that in the campaign the party put “freedom bonds” up for sale at $10 to $100, making them, intentionally, like war bonds. The party justified this by saying the ALP posed as great a threat to Australia’s freedom as the Japanese had in World War II. “The difference is that the ALP is making an invasion from within,” a spokesman said.

Joh set such a campaign pace in 1974 that he made it difficult for his ALP opponent Tucker to keep up. Tucker’s chartered plane got lost in a storm while flying to Quilpie in the West. The plane was half an hour overdue when Tucker himself used a road map to help the pilot establish where they were. Then, in Thargomindah, feelings were running so high against Labor that when Tucker introduced the local Labor candidate at a barbecue the candidate was rugby tackled by an irate local as he took the microphone.

Bjelke-Petersen described flying as the “best relaxation apart from being home”:

“You know when you get into a cockpit and get absorbed in all the instruments and takeoff and so on, it’s a tremendous feeling of relief just as you leave the ground to know that there’s no telephone, and to know that you’re right out of all the traffic and the hassles of traffic. That’s the feeling that I get in flying… We have our own aircraft, our own airstrip, as probably you know, at home and my children are used to flying. They grew up with me flying aeroplanes as I did down the years. It made no difference to my four children to get into an aeroplane or into a motorcar…

The big surprise (in 1974) was the defeat of Brisbane’s popular Lord Mayor, Alderman Clem Jones – or was it such a surprise, considering the advertising campaign mounted by his Liberal opponent, Don Cameron. He ran a series of television commercials in which he moved around in front of a big pile of roofing tiles warning people of inflation: “The ALP will cut your pay packet in half…” he shouted and jumped forward, smashing through the centre of the tiles with a mighty karate chop. The fact that he hurt his hand should be recorded.

In the event, the Whitlam government was re-elected (in 1974) – but in an election that was so close it took two weeks to be finally decided. And again it was Bjelke-Petersen who proved the biggest thorn in Labor’s side. While Labor held up pretty well in the rest of Australia it dropped 3.2% of its vote in Queensland (to 44%). And, perhaps most important of all, while Labor won its expected five Senate seats out of ten in every other state, in Queensland it could win only four. The Labor man who missed out, Dr Mal Colston, a doctor of philosophy then working as a research officer with the state Police Department, lost by just a couple of thousand votes in more than a million. It was this Queensland senate seat which was to be a vital loss for Labor.

Upon the revelation of the Gair Affair:

Whitlam reacted angrily, even threatening to go to the High Court but the delighted federal opposition rubbed salt into the wound. During question time, Anthony asked the prime minister if he had ever been taken for a ride by Bjelke-Petersen: “The premier of Queensland is a very experienced pilot, and can cope with all circumstances – high-risk or otherwise. Could the prime minister tell us whether he has ever been taken for a ride by the premier of Queensland?”
Whitlam’s reply was, as usual, not without some wit: “My understanding of the premier’s interest is that he is more interested in exploring the waters under underneath the earth than the heavens above. I am not unaware of the complaints he has against the present Australian government, and the previous two Australian governments.. [which] have wanted to ensure that the nation’s interest prevailed in the waters, under the earth and off the shore, even though the premier was speculating in them to the national disadvantage. I cannot imagine why the honourable gentleman raised the Premier’s name in this context. It might be that the honourable gentleman has in mind some quite novel action that the premier took this morning.”

In fact, there were many things that Labor did to put Queenslanders offside, and these ranged from kangaroo shooting to Medibank. Although the latter scheme was put into effect by a Queensland Politician, Bill Hayden of Ipswich, and with considerable administrative skill, there was one big political hitch which offended Queenslanders and this was the proposed special Medibank tax levy of 2 ½ per cent. A Queensland Labor government had, decades earlier, introduced free general hospitals in Queensland. Now, under Hayden’s scheme, they were going to have to pay a special additional tax for something they thought they already had. Of course the injection of much more federal money would, eventually, mean better hospital facilities. But, in the short term at least, it smacked of Queenslanders subsidising southerners. On top of that, Queensland’s existing free hospital scheme – which often involved long delays in waiting rooms – made many people willing to accept the state government’s arguments that Medibank would mean even longer queues and further bureaucratic tangles.

In September 1973, Mike Evans (Country Party President), called a press conference at a city hotel in Brisbane, at which the Country Party announced terms for the integration of the two parties (the Country Party and the DLP). This story appeared in the Australian the next day under the heading “State Country Party swallows the DLP”. The press conference was told that the state executives of both parties had agreed to form one new, as yet unnamed, party by November. The terms for integration included making the Country Party constitution “the basis for the new party”. This confirmed the impression that the DLP was disappearing and that its members would now vote Country Party. In fact, no DLP members attended the September press conference and later the state DLP secretary said it was a Country Party conference. He said the DLP might hold its own press conference, which never eventuated.

Bjelke-Petersen described the merger as “a strengthening of the anti-Labor forces in Queensland” but in the event the proposed integration was quietly dropped by the Country Party. It’s value was as much symbolic as actual. The DLP was falling out of active politics and the Country Party reasoned that if, as was expected, the DLP soon stopped contesting state elections, most of their supporters would vote for the Country Party. Which is what happened.

How bad then was the Bjelkemander in comparative terms? One means of measuring this is by the Dauer-Kelsay Index which calculates the absolute smallest percentage of electors which, in theory, could elect the government. The 1972 Queensland redistribution measured 44.9% on the Dauer-Kelsay Index, compared with a theoretically perfect redistribution of slightly over 50%. (This mean the ALP could not win power with even a theoretical 55% of the vote. After the 1977 redistribution they would have needed still more.) While that does not look too good, the last ALP redistribution, at the 1957 election, measured only 39.1% and the Playford gerrymander in South Australia reached as low as 23.4%. In 1974 Victoria registered just 40.3%.

Callaghan put the premier on the phone or in studios to answer questions that came up on talk-back programs – the first time a politician had done this in Australia.

Mr Speaker,

Throughout history, man has had to cope with many disasters. Some of these disasters have become household names – the Biblical Flood, the eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii, the Titanic.

Well, as from Friday we can add another monumental disaster that will affect every household in Queensland and the rest of Australia – Medibank.

For that reason, Mr Speaker, I wish to propose that Friday, 1st October, 1976 be designated Bill Hayden Day.

On this day, each year, from now on, as Queenslanders sit down to fill out their tax forms, they will look back and shudder.

They will remember that on Black Friday, like Frankenstein’s Monster, Hayden’s Horror was officially born.

Its pedigree was by socialism out of mismanagement, sponsors Scott and Deeble and its fodder your and my tax funds….

Now that Hayden’s Horror is loose in the land, I remind the Opposition Leader and his mates of how they fought tooth and nail to get Queensland into Medibank.

I remind the leader writers of the Courier-Mail how they thundered that Queensland would suffer unless we joined Medibank.

Well to Mr Burns and his mates and to the leader writers of the Courier-Mail let me say this: “Friday is Medibank Day. It’s your day – share it with a headache.

Callaghan also became the creative source of sharp, catchy phrases for the premier to use against his political opponents. It’s a long list but includes some very effective ones:

“death-adder unions – they strike first”;

“when you go to the unemployment office tell ‘em Gough sent you”;

“help Tom Burns fight air pollution – give him a gag”.

Callaghan even helped in stirring the coalition partners, suggesting that Bjelke-Petersen question if the less rightwing Liberals were “big ‘L’ Liberals or small ‘s’ Socialists”.

Callaghan: “When the storm troopers come Lunn, when they knock on your door I will tell them to smile”. This was Callaghan humour.

Callaghan: “Governments make news, Oppositions give only views”.

Once when (Callaghan) took a Sydney journalist to lunch the bewildered man asked a question about electorate sizes that Callaghan did not like. “Separate cheques please waiter,” he quipped. “Anyway we feed the gerrymander at 3PM.”

(Callaghan) answered the phone (to journalists) like an officer to a corporal: “Speak, it’s your ten cents,” Callaghan would say, or, before you spoke, “we deny everything”. “What do you want, a medal”? was another favourite Callaghan opener in conversations with journalists, not matter how important. Reporters who asked about the Queensland Gerrymander received more than they bargained for, or less might be more accurate: “It’s in the basement with the crocodiles,” Callaghan would say before hanging up, knowing the reporter would have to face a hostile editor for failing to come up with a story.

“I propose, he diagnoses,” Callaghan once said of his job when accused of being Allen Bjelke-Petersen. “If he has his own idea there is no way I can change it. I accept this completely – if I don’t like it I should stand for office. I see myself as the sort of servant the Egyptian pharaohs used to have – a vizier rekhmire, the eyes and ears of the pharaohs. But the pharaohs were still the pharaohs. And when the pharaoh went the vizier rekhmire went too. And when Joh goes, I go. Nothing much has changed in politics in 5,000 years.”

Allen Callaghan (Joh’s Press Sec) himself has always modestly claimed to be the humble mechanic, but such men are often also engineers: “I am just the mechanic in the pits. I make sure the machine is well oiled, that it is ready to go, that no breakdowns will occur. But the chief is the man who has to get out there and ride it. He is the Fangio. He is the one who risks political death and destruction.”

There weren’t many smiles back in October 1970 when members of Bjelke-Petersen’s own County Party cabinet moved against him. He had been premier just two years, was pushing sixty, and had failed to make the grade as a popular premier. The party had lost two by-elections – Isis and Albert – and members were understandably worried about the future. On the wooden seats around the lift well in Queensland’s old Parliament House building, Country party politicians whispered to each other and to reporters. They were saying “Bjelke-Petersen must go before we all go.” And all the while Bjelke-Petersen, apparently, had no idea of what was going on – or that’s the way he tells it. It was all “like a bad dream” – and certainly his political career should have ended with this nightmare situation on 20 October 1970.

The dissidents, however, made the mistake of sending a delegation of four the night before to warn the premier that he might as well step down, as they had the numbers among Country party parliamentarians, 16-10. And why shouldn’t they have been confident enough to tell him with a majority like that? Because Bjelke-Petersen was a boots-and-all fighter who refused to be beaten even when defeat seemed obvious to everyone else.
…

That night, Bjelke-Petersen did not go to bed. Instead, he spent all night on the telephone ringing each of his parliamentary colleagues to talk about things like cabinet posts (which the Premier handed out himself) and loyalty. He called on all his past political credits, reminding men of his campaigning for them or of the new school building in their electorate which Joh had arranged as works and housing minister. Some of the members – including many who lived on distant properties – could not be contacted at first and Bjelke-Petersen hounded switchboard operators through the night until he got what he wanted.

By next morning he had spoken to all except an old friend, Neville Hewitt, who could not be contacted. Thus prepared, Bjelke-Petersen had only one other weapon at his disposal – native cunning. Before he went into the meeting at Parliament House he arranged for Henry McKechnie (later a Minister) to, on a signal, jump to his feet and move a vote of confidence in the Premier. Bjelke-Petersen reckoned that he stood a better chance of getting supporting votes in a motion of confidence than in a motion of no confidence.

Overnight he had turned 10-16 to 11-13 and, reasoning that no one had been able to contact Neville Hewitt, produced his proxy. Then, knowing only his own vote could save him, Bjelke-Petersen refused to to a John Gorton and resign himself. Instead he voted for confidence in himself. His opponents thus could not command the votes to get rid of him. Bjelke-Petersen had won – but only the first round.

[In an interview in which Joh insisted it was not improper to own shares in companies with which the Government did business despite his own National Party censuring him for the practice]

By now Bjelke-Petersen was obviously very angry and, even in the old black and white world of television, his eyes could be seen growing smaller and sharper as they focused hard on the reporter.

Bjelke-Petersen: I urge you to mind your own business because I have made it quite clear what my attitude is.

Journalist: Are you going to tell the Country Party to mind its own business too on this one?

Bjelke-Petersen: If they attempt to tell me to sell my shares and to rearrange them like you are trying to do, I certainly will. Because I have indicated to you exactly what the position is. You know it and everybody else knows it, and I certainly have been very fair to you and to the press. You are only trying to misconstrue it so I’m not going to discuss with you when you try to create a situation such as this.

Journalist: I’m not trying to create any situation, Mr Premier.

Bjelke-Petersen: You are.

Bjelke-Petersen: Do you maintain your attitude that what you did was right and proper and whether you will continue to hold shaes?

Bjelke-Petersen: I haven’t got any in this particular issue as you jolly well know.

Journalist: But you have had shares in companies which have dealings with the public?

Even as (the journalist) spoke the Queensland premier rose from his chair and looked around the room and down at the reporter. “If you’re going to try to misconstrue it just for your own political propaganda,” he said as he walked past the television camera and out of the studio, “you’ve got another thing coming.” (The Journalist) wrapped it up: “Mr Premier, thanks very much.”

Bjelke-Petersen hired an outside public relations expert to help him get rid of the arch-wowser image and in December 1968 a picture of him patting a horse at Brisbane’s Doomben Racecourse appeared in the Sunday Mail. The racehorse, Kionda, unfortunately lost the first race on a protest.

(This moved his future public relations man, Allen Callaghan, then a journalist, to pin the picture on the ABC noticeboard where he worked with the notation: “A new entry into the political stakes. Expediency, by Necessity, out of Politics. His previous entry, ‘Principles’, badly scratch at the barrier”. Callaghan did not think this sort of approach would help Bjelke-Petersen’s image.)

Their original homeland was very important to the Bjelke-Peteren family, and for a long while Danish was spoken at home most of the time. When Joh’s sister Neta went off to school for the first time, she could speak only Danish. Christian and Joh however soon got in the way of speaking English (although the Premier still has trouble pronouncing z).

The implications of (Joh’s) reign were clear as far back as Thursday, 25 May 1972, when, with McMahon leading Australia as Prime Minister, the Country party in Queensland took local full-page advertisements for the coming state election featuring pictures of Bjelke-Petersen with the headline: “While Australia searches for a leader Queensland has found Joh Bjelke-Petersen – that’s why the 70s belong to Queensland.

Southern politicians should have familiarised themselves with this hard, round, brown Queensland nut (the Macadamia Nut): they are very difficult to crack, can fly off in any direction when struck, but if treated carefully yield a sweet reward.

Even before federation, the colony of Queensland preferred to do things differently. In 1898 the Queensland government wanted to have its representative to the Melbourne convention on federation elected directly by the people. All other colonies appointed their representatives from their parliaments. Queensland finally reused to send anyone.

There are special needs in Queensland, and many of these arise from the problems of decentralisation. Ten of Australia’s twenty-four most populous cities are in this state, and more people live outside Brisbane in Queensland than live in the whole of South Australia or Western Australia (1,250,000 in 1977). It is true that Western Australia is much more vast, but it’s largely empty. Queensland on the other hand is crisscrossed by roads, railways, and air routes.

The Premier’s state government aircraft idled along at an altitude of 6,000m heading North two hours out of Canberra. Joh sat impassively at the controls and pulled levers, adjusted knobs, and talked to his co-pilot, Beryl Young. In the cabin, his press secretary, Allen Callaghan, private secretary, Bill Chadwick, and a security policeman dozed trying to stay away – because it was uncomfortable to fall asleep in the cramped seats.

Then, far to the right, a thin strip of white appeared next to the blue Pacific Ocean and the Premier reached for the cabin microphone as he loved to do. Deliberately imitating commercial airline pilots he began: “This is your captain speaking” – then broke up in much laughter – “We are flying at 20,000 feet, the weather in Brisbane is fine.. and we are now crossing the border to Queensland.” Immediately the plane came awake’ everyone applauded… there were even shouts for joy… there was an incredible air of merriment: as if we had just docked in Australia after an eight month voyage from England, yet we had only been away from Queensland for two days and one night.

“I am sorry. But it is a bad sign. I am disturbed, and wonder sometimes how I’ll ever get through life.”

“One lives through it, Charlie.”

“Some things seem to kill one.”

“Then die. We must all do that. But die, as they say, game.”

“I do not wish to criticise you, Colonel …”

“Then indulge your wish, my dear friend, and refrain from criticism.”

General Jackson and I had observed the scene with some delight on the ground that what we could not prevent, we ought at least to enjoy.

Of course today’s politician must deal with a much larger electorate than ours. We had only to enchant a caucus in a conversational tone while they must thrill the multitude with brass and cymbal.

I hate the Dons worse than the devil himself—the devil is at least good company they say

“But suppose Jefferson does betray us?” Dayton’s dislike of Jefferson was far more intense than mine because he hardly knew the President and so could despise him in the abstract. I have always found that this sort of passion is the most fierce, the least rational and the very stuff of which saints and conquerors are made.

“But I don’t want to be a lawyer.”

“Well, who does? I mean what man of spirit? The law kills the lively mind. It stifles originality. But it is a stepping-stone …”

It is a good thing, you know. They say England is a nation of shopkeepers. Well, (America) is a nation of lawyers. For the lawyer, anything is possible. For the rest of us impossible.

Jefferson tended to strike the self-righteous note in much the same way as a clock strikes the hour and like a familiar clock one does not hear the sound unless one is anxious, as I confess I was, to tell, as it were, the time.

But Hamilton realized better than anyone that the world—our American world at least—loves a canting hypocrite.

Jefferson was in an excellent mood. But what new president is not? His mistakes unmade, the future bright.

Eventually all things are known. And few matter.

We rode through a meadow filled with brick kilns. Slaves were everywhere, hard at work. I was surprised to see how “bright” they were. I do not know if that word is still in use in the south, but in those days a slave with a large degree of white blood was known as “bright.” It made me most uneasy to see so many men and women whose skins were a good deal fairer than my own belonging to Mr. Jefferson. A number were remarkably handsome, particularly those belonging to the Hemings family whose most illustrious member was Jefferson’s concubine Sally, by whom he had at least five children. Recently I learned that Sally is living with one of her sons in Maryland. Apparently the son is now considered white, obliging his mother to keep her identity a secret from their neighbours in Aberdeen. “I inherited the bright slaves from my father-in-law John Wayles.” Jefferson sighed. “It is no secret—there are no secrets in Virginia—that many of them are his children.” Sally Hemings was a daughter of Wayles which made her the half-sister of Jefferson’s late wife. Certainly the girl bore a remarkable resemblance to Martha Wayles, if the portrait in the dining-room at Monticello was to be trusted. Amusing to contemplate that in bedding his fine-looking slave, Jefferson was also sleeping with his sister-in-law! One would have enjoyed hearing him moralize on that subject.

Actually the movement to abolish black slavery in the south is deeply unpopular. It is not that New Yorkers so much like the institution of slavery as they dislike the sort of righteous people who want to abolish it.

I would not trust Matt Davis to tell me the right time of day.

At the time of the execution of the King and Queen, their portraits hung on the walls of our Senate chamber (and everyone, including Mrs. Bingham, remarked how much she resembled Marie Antoinette). After the beheadings, various Republicans—including Freneau—wanted the portraits taken down. Jefferson’s view of the portraits is unknown but he did delight in the executions.

“After all,” he said to me, “was ever such a prize won with so little blood?” I said that from all accounts the prize had cost a good deal of blood.

Yet Adams’ intelligence, though limited, was profound. What he knew he knew well. Unfortunately what he did not know he did not suspect existed.

IT TOOK THE COLONEL and me several days to learn how to work together. He is not used to dictation; he also refuses to rely on memory. “After all, I am a lawyer. Therefore I need evidence—books, letters, newspapers: things I can refute!”

“But of course there were other equally famous occasions when you hit your target.” I was ready to throttle Leggett right there in the lobby. Although the Colonel’s face remained fixed in a gentle smile, the voice dropped to a deeper but still amiable register.

“Mr. Leggett, the principal difference between my friend Hamilton and me was that at the crucial moment his hand shook and mine never does.”

“What was Washington’s most notable trait?” I once asked Hamilton when we were working together on a law case. The quick smile flashed in that bright face, the malicious blue eyes shone. “Oh, Burr, self-love! Self-love! What else makes a god?

It was our peculiar tragedy—or glory—to be of an age and quality at a time and place certain to make rivals of us. Yet from the beginning we had a personal liking for one another.

Curious to think that we would almost certainly have been friends had we not been two young “heroes” at the beginning of a new nation, each aware that at the summit there is a place for only one. As it turned out, neither of us was to reach the highest place. I hurled Hamilton from the mountain-side, and myself fell.

Like Napoleon Bonaparte, Benedict Arnold was too great a man to notice weather.

One hears everything. But I tend to believe nothing.

I am afraid that as people grow old there is a tendency for them to believe that what the past ought to have been it was.

The Colonel often says, “Whenever a woman does me the honour of saying that I am father to her child, I gracefully acknowledge the compliment and disguise any suspicion that I might have to the contrary.”

None of this is quite true but Leggett feels that to be excitingly right in general is better than to be dully accurate in particular. That is why he is such an effective journalist.

That was General Washington’s office in seventeen seventy-six. He lived in this house for three months, during which he managed to lose New York City to the British. But despite his incompetence, the gods always supported him in the end. I suspect Cromwell was right: the man who does not know where he’s going goes farthest. Talleyrand used to tell me that for the great man all is accident. Obviously, he was not a great man since he survived by careful planning, by never showing his true feelings. You must learn that art, Charlie.

I always find his brilliance disturbing. We do not want the old to be sharper than we. It is bad enough that they were there first, and got the best things.

In 1804 Colonel Burr—then vice-president of the United States—shot and killed General Alexander Hamilton in a duel. Three years after this lamentable affair, Colonel Burr was arrested by order of President Thomas Jefferson and charged with treason for having wanted to break up the United States. A court presided over by Chief Justice John Marshall found Colonel Burr innocent of treason but guilty of the misdemeanour of proposing an invasion of Spanish territory in order to make himself emperor of Mexico.

Interjecting a brief homily on the art of politics, (Long) declared: “What the politician had better do is stay a politician. That is law number one with him – the law of self-preservation.”

(Long couldn’t be blamed for corruption in his machine as) “Even Jesus Christ had one apostle who had gone wrong.”

Long said he had “Halitosis of the intellect”

With delight (Long) quoted the observation of Will Rogers: “I would sure liked to have seen Huey’s face when he was woke up in the middle of the night by the President, who said ‘Lay over, Huey, I want to get in bed with you,’”.

Long to the Senate: “A mob is coming here in six months to hang the other ninety-five of you damned scoundrels, and I’m undecided whether to stick here with you or go out and lead them.”

Long: “They’ve got a set of Republican waiters on one side and a set of Democratic waiters on the other side, but no matter which set of waiters brings you the dish, the legislative grub is all prepared in the same Wall Street kitchen.”

But Louisiana was still a democracy (Long) insisted. “A perfect democracy can come close to looking like a dictatorship, a democracy in which the people are so satisfied they have no complaint.”

Long: “You will find that you cannot do without politicians. They are a necessary evil in this day and time. You may not like getting money from one source and spending it for another. But the thing for the school people to do is that if the politicians are going to steal, make them steal for the schools.”

Springing another Long innovation on the Senate, he had prepared and mounted a number of charts showing the continuing concentration of wealth in the country, and as he explained the bills, he pointed in schoolmaster fashion to data on the charts. His speech was largely a rehash of things he had said before, but in one section he struck a new and significant theme. He demonstrated on his charts that the middle-income group was being gradually squeezed out; a few members of it worked themselves up into the ‘plutocracy of one per cent’ that owned most of the wealth, but most of them sank back into the ‘general class,’ the ninety-nine percent of the people that owned very little of the wealth. “There is no Middle Class,” he proclaimed.

(A Washington reporter) asked how their host should be addressed, as governor or senator? Huey leaned back in his chair and puffed at his cigar. “They call me Kingfish down there,” he said.

Long: “They say they don’t like my methods. Well, I don’t like them either. I really don’t like to have to do things the way I do. I’d much rather get up before the legislature and say, ‘Now this is a good law and it’s for the benefit of the people, and I’d like you to vote for it in the interest of the public welfare.’ Only I know that laws ain’t made that way. You’ve got to fight fire with fire.

I’d rather violate every one of the damn conventions and see my bills passed, than sit back in my office, all nice and proper, and watch ‘em die.

Everything I did, I’ve had to do with one hand, because I’ve had to fight with the other.”

They demanded that the Senate expel Huey himself. Former Governor Parker and others formally petitioned Vice-President Garner to appoint a committee to investigate Huey’s fitness to be a Senator, charging that the Kingfish was “personally dishonest, corrupt, and immoral.”. In a covering letter to Garner, Parker advanced another reason that Huey should be removed from public life. He said that psychiatrists had told him Huey was a “dangerous paranoiac.” Solemnly the old conservative advised how to deal with the madman: “The Senate should have him examined by experts and to save certain trouble and probable killing have him permanently incarcerated in the criminal insane asylum in Washington.”

(The first man in line in a bank run) soon appeared (at the opening of the bank), waving a check for $18,000 and confident that he, at least, would get his money. Entering the office, he was startled to see Governor Long behind the desk. Huey was waving a check himself. “The state of Louisiana has got $265,000 in this bank,” he explained genially, “and here’s the state’s check for it. There ain’t but about that much cash in the bank, and I was here before you were. You insist on drawing out your $18,000, and I’ll insist on drawing out the state’s $265,000 – and I get first draw, so there’ll be nothing left to pay you. You agree to leave yours in, and I’ll leave the state’s in, and nobody’ll be hurt. I’m staying right here till closing time at noon, in case anybody else wants to draw out.” The staggered customer had no choice but to agree to leave his money in. So also did every depositor who entered after him. The bank closed at noon still solvent, and over the weekend Huey was able to bring in enough money from other banks to keep it going.

As there was no Republican candidate, there would be no general election. Huey P. Long was a United States Senator. But until he should decide to take his seat in Washington he was also governor of Louisiana. He had just turned thirty-seven years of age.

(Long) would scrawl a circular out on several sheets of tablet paper and hand it to a secretary to be typed. He told one secretary his concept of effective political language. “Always write everything so a six-year-old child can understand it,” he said.

Politicians in a stable democratic society do not have to employ such methods, and the capacity to hate is not for them a necessary attribute. Indeed, if they possess it in too great a degree they may be handicapped; they will be led into needless quarrels. The democratic politician, as an astute Englishman pointed out long ago, should not quarrel except deliberately, when he cannot avoid being embroiled – and then he should conduct the quarrel with a cool head.

Long: “I was born into politics, a wedded man with a storm for a bride.”

Those who apply the label of demagogue to Huey or to other politicians hardly ever trouble to invest the term with any precise definition. It was coined by the ancient Greeks, who were sorely afflicted by rabble rousing orators and who described them scornfully. The demagogue, said Euripides, was ‘base-born’, ‘a man of loose tongue, intemperate, trusting to tumult, leading the populace to mischief with empty words.’ For the Greeks, the term had actuality. In a small city-state like Athens a fiery speaker could easily whip a street-corner into a frenzy with his words, could with the crowd at his back perhaps force the portals of power. Obviously such a scene could not occur in a much larger context, especially ina country as extensive and varied as the United States. But although the original concept of the demagogue has little validity for the American scene, the term has survived and is one of the most frequently used words in the national political vocabulary. It is usually applied in a special and subjective context: a demagogue is someone who arouses the people against the established order, and in this sense it has been applied to many American leaders.

Now that the enabling legislation for the roads program had been passed, Huey was anxious to get construction started. One day he went to the office of the Highway Commission and took a map of the state and drew lines on it. The first roads were to follow these lines, he said. The engineers and technicians in the office were incredulous. Huey’s road system was a patchwork pattern. There were only a few lines, representing proposed miles of paving, in each parish. In most parishes the lines led into and out of the principal town and then stopped. Huey, delighted at the engineers’ reaction, explained his purpose. He was deliberately going to bestrew the state with samplings of good highways to give the people a taste for more. Inevitably they would demand that the links be connected, and then more, and bigger, bond issues would have to be passed and more roads would be built.

The conservatives still did not realise that this governor was not going to be satisfied by the sound of his own voice.

Huey observed their response with amused contempt. “No music ever sounded one-half so refreshing as the whines and groans of the pie-eating politicians,” he said. “They say that they were steamrollered. I think that is true. The only reason that the roller didn’t pass over more of them was because there were no more in the way.”

(Long) selected the quality of the paper on which the circulars (advertising material) were printed. Mindful of the sanitary practices of his rural constituents, he instructed David: “Don’t use any of that damn smooth stuff. Use some that they can use on their backsides after they get through reading it.”

Louisiana politicians were and are much like feudal barons. They operate as rulers of geographical principalities or personal followings, independently, calculatingly, and sometimes irresponsibly or petulantly. Two barons may seem to be friends and allies, and then suddenly, because one or the other senses an advantage to be gained or is seized by a whim, they break and become enemies. Conversely, two barons may seem to be political and personal enemies, and just as suddenly and for similar reasons, they will come together as allies. Over a stretch of years the pattern can become bewilderingly complex, as leaders break, ally, and rebreak, in an endless chain of combinations. The process is peculiar to Louisiana, a product of the state’s exaggerated devotion to professional politics.

The principal theme of Huey’s attacks was that his two opponents and everybody opposed to him were in reality working together, that the whole crowd was controlled by the same corporate interests. Fuqua and Bouanchaud had both been put into the race by Parker – they were the “Parker Gold Dust Twins.” Behrmann and Sullivan, supposed enemies, were both henchmen of Wall Street: “If Behrmann took a dose of laudanum Sullivan would get sleepy in ten minutes.”

Huey felt no scruples in telling people how he was going to run his campaign in 1923. “I’m going to run for governor and I’ll tell you how I’m going to win,” he said to one man. “In every parish there is a boss, usually the sheriff. He has forty percent of the votes, forty percent are opposed to him, and twenty percent are inbetweens. I’m going into every parish and cuss out the boss. That gives me forty percent of the votes to begin with, and I’ll hoss trade ‘em out of the inbetweens.”

(The New Orleans Mayor) is reported to have said: “You can make prostitution illegal in Louisiana, but you can’t make it unpopular.”

(Long) also won many votes by promising that if elected he would force the railroads to extend their services or their lines. It was a pledge of this kind that enabled him to sweep the vote of a hamlet known as Shooter’s Station. Its people had a burning grievance – a train called the Cannonball did not stop there on its way to larger towns. When Huey spoke at Shooter’s, he timed his remarks so that they would be interrupted by the Cannonball, roaring through town with a great whistle. When the noise subsided, he looked up with an expression of surprise and said: “Folks, do you mean to tell me that the Cannonball don’t stop at Shooter’s Station? Well, you elect me and that’ll be changed.”

Huey’s use of an automobile violated one of the most respected rules of Louisiana politicians: Never campaign in a car among country people; they will resent it as a pretence of superiority and vote against you. Huey knew that the rule existed only in the politicians minds. From his observation of Vardaman and Jeff Davis during his days as a travelling salesman, he had learned that the masses were more likely to follow one of their own if that man showed that in some ways he was better than they. “That young Long fellow, now, he’s a smart one, he drives a car.”

Huey liked to cite this incident later as an example of what a politician with weak support should do. “In a political fight, when you’ve got nothing in favour of your side,” he would say, “start a row in the opposition camp.”

Of Roosevelt (Long) said scornfully: “I can take him. He’s a phony… He’s scared of me. I can outpromise him, and he knows it. People will believe me and they won’t believe him. His mother’s watchin’ him, and she won’t let him go too far, but I aint got no mother left, and if I had, she’d think anything I said was all right. He’s livin’ on an inherited income. I got nothin’, so I don’t have to bother about that.”

The story seems too good to be true – but people who should know swear that it is true. The first time that Huey P. Long campaigned in rural, Latin, Catholic south Louisiana, the local boss who had him in charge said at the beginning of the tour: “Huey, you ought to remember one thing in your speeches today. You’re from north Louisiana, but now you’re in south Louisiana. And we got a lot of Catholic voters down here.”

“I Know,” Huey answered. And throughout the day in every small town Long would begin by saying: “When I was a boy, I would get up at six o’clock in the morning on Sunday, and I would hitch our old horse up to the buggy and I would take my Catholic grandparents to mass. I would bring them home, and at ten o’clock I would hitch the old horse up again and I would take my Baptist grandparents to church.” The effect of the anecdote on audiences was obvious, and on the way back to Baton Rouge that night the local leader said admiringly: “Why, Huey, you’ve been holding out on us. I didn’t know you had any Catholic Grandparents.”

“Don’t be a damn fool,” replied Huey. “We didn’t even have a horse.”

Agnelli hung around the Windsor Hotel, drinking with the political roundsmen, slipping them judicious leaks whenever the government wanted to fly a trial balloon on some contentious issue. Talk enough bullshit, he liked to say, and sooner or later it ends up in print.

By some obscure culinary demarcation agreement, Chinese restaurants are prohibited from serving decent coffee.

Lindsay Tanner on Stiff:

“I came of age in politics in the 1980s, in the time and context in which the early Murray Whelan books are set. When I read them I recall things like sitting on an Administrative Committee inquiry into a Turkish branch which had numerous members supposedly living at the back of a small Turkish welfare centre on Sydney Road. And the western suburbs branch stacker whose explanation for the fact that the signatures on their membership applications didn’t match those in the attendance book was a wobbly table at the branch meeting.

Lindsay Tanner on Murray Whelan:

“Long-term insiders like me can attest to the fact that Murray Whelan actually is the Victorian Labor party. The peculiar composite of naivety, cunning, decency and incompetence that’s reflected in Murray is like a pastiche of my experience in my thirty years as a party member. It’s a pity we can’t get Murray to stand for a real seat, because I reckon he’d make a great Labor Premier.”

In 1934 Atatürk learned that a ship carrying relatives of fallen Allied soldiers had docked near Gallipoli and that its passengers were mounting at the site. He sent them a moving message that is now chiseled, in English translation, into a memorial stone there.

“Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives,” he wrote, “you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us, where they lie side by side in this country of ours … You, the mothers who sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears. Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land, they have become our sons as well.”

“I am leaving no sermon, no dogma, nor am I leaving as my legacy any commandment that is frozen in time or cast in stone,” (Ataturk) said shortly before his death. “Concepts of well-being for countries, for peoples and for individuals are changing. In such a world, to argue for rules that never change would be to deny the reality found in scientific knowledge and reasoned judgment.”

Yet guardians of the old order could honestly say that in their elitism, in their insistence that an “enlightened” vanguard should rule on behalf of the ignorant masses, they were in fact embracing an essential feature of Atatürk’s ideology. He had, after all, given his political party the slogan “For the People, In Spite of the People.” Popular opinion meant nothing to him, and for generations his successors scorned it as well.

Since time immemorial, Turkish life had been centered on villages and clans small enough that in each there was likely to be only one Abdullah, one Hikmet and one Fatma. Those days were gone, and as a logical result of his Westernizing impulse, Kemal decreed that each citizen must have a last name. The head of every family was ordered to choose one. Some thought first of their fathers, so today there are names like Berberolu (barber’s son), Karamehmetolu (Black Mehmet’s son) and even Yarimbiyikolu (son of the man with the half-mustache). Others took martial names like Eraslan (brave lion) or Demirel (iron hand). For those who had trouble choosing, books of names were sent to every town hall. Many people selected lyrical ones like Sangül (yellow rose) or Akyildiz (pale star). Only one name was forbidden: Atatürk (Father of the Turks). That was the name Kemal chose for himself. He embraced it, even dropping his first name, Mustafa, which he considered too Arab-sounding.

In some places I have seen women who put a piece of cloth or a towel or something like it over their heads to hide their faces, and who turn their backs or huddle themselves on the ground when a man passes by,” Kemal (Ataturk) said in one speech. “What are the meaning and sense of this behavior? Gentlemen, can the mothers and daughters of a civilized nation adopt this strange manner, this barbarous posture? It is a spectacle that makes the nation an object of ridicule. It must be remedied at once.

‘Show us not the aim without the way.
For ends and means on earth are so entangled
That changing one, you change the other too;
Each different path brings other ends in view.’

FERDINAND LASSALLE: Franz von Sickingen

‘My father considered that one day the cup would overflow and the Party would depose him or force him to resign; and that the opposition must propagate this idea.’

‘And Rubashov?’

‘Rubashov laughed at my father, and repeated that he was a fool and a Don Quixote. Then he declared that No. 1 was no accidental phenomenon, but the embodiment of a certain human characteristic – namely, of an absolute belief in the infallibility of one’s own conviction, from which he drew the strength for his complete unscrupulousness. Hence he would never resign from power of his own free will, and could only be removed by violence. One could hope for nothing from the Party either, for No. 1 held all the threads in his hand, and had made the Party bureaucracy his accomplice, who would stand and fall with him, and knew it.’

‘The greatest criminals in history,’ Ivanov went on, ‘are not of the type Nero and Fouché, but of the type Gandhi and Tolstoy. Gandhi’s inner voice has done more to prevent the liberation of India than the British guns. To sell oneself for thirty pieces of silver is an honest transaction; but to sell oneself to one’s own conscience is to abandon mankind. History is a priori amoral; it has no conscience. To want to conduct history according to the maxims of the Sunday school means to leave everything as it is. You know that as well as I do. You know the stakes in this game, and here you come talking about Bogrov’s whimpering… .’
…

Rubashov shrugged his shoulders. ‘Admit,’ he said, ‘that humanism and politics, respect for the individual and social progress, are incompatible. Admit, that Gandhi is a catastrophe for India; that chasteness in the choice of means leads to political impotence. In negatives we agree. But look where the other alternative has led us… .’

‘Well,’ asked Ivanov. ‘Where?’

Rubashov rubbed his pince-nez on his sleeve, and looked at him shortsightedly. ‘What a mess,’ he said, ‘what a mess we have made of our golden age.’

‘The greatest criminals in history,’ Ivanov went on, ‘are not of the type Nero and Fouché, but of the type Gandhi and Tolstoy. Gandhi’s inner voice has done more to prevent the liberation of India than the British guns. To sell oneself for thirty pieces of silver is an honest transaction; but to sell oneself to one’s own conscience is to abandon mankind. History is a priori amoral; it has no conscience. To want to conduct history according to the maxims of the Sunday school means to leave everything as it is. You know that as well as I do. You know the stakes in this game, and here you come talking about Bogrov’s whimpering… .’

FUNNY – THAT YOU FELT IT AT ONCE… .

FELT WHAT? EXPLAIN! tapped Rubashov, sitting up on the bunk.

No. 402 seemed to think it over. After a short hesitation he tapped: TONIGHT POLITICAL DIFFERENCES ARE BEING SETTLED… .

Rubashov understood. He sat leaning against the wall, in the dark, waiting to hear more. But No. 402 said no more. After a while, Rubashov tapped: EXECUTIONS?

YES, answered 402 laconically.

HOW DO YOU KNOW? asked Rubashov.

FROM HARE-LIP.

AT WHAT TIME?

DON’T KNOW. And, after a pause: SOON.

KNOW THE NAMES? asked Rubashov.

NO, answered No. 402. After another pause he added: OF YOUR SORT. POLITICAL DIVERGENCES.

‘When the existence of the Church is threatened, she is released from the commandments of morality. With unity as the end, the use of every means is sanctified, even cunning, treachery, violence, simony, prison, death. For all order is for the sake of the community, and the individual must be sacrificed to the common good.’

DIETRICH VON NIEHEIM, BISHOP OF VERDEN: De schismate libri 111, A.D. 1411

‘In your pamphlets,’ continued Rubashov in the same dry tone of voice, ‘of which you admit to be the author, there frequently appear phrases such as this: that we have suffered a defeat, that a catastrophe has befallen the Party, and that we must start afresh and change our policy fundamentally. That is defeatism. It is demoralizing and it lames the Party’s fighting spirit.’

‘I only know,’ said Richard, ‘that one must tell people the truth, as they know it already, in any case. It is ridiculous to pretend to them.’

‘The last congress of the Party,’ Rubashov went on, ‘stated in a resolution that the Party has not suffered a defeat and has merely carried out a strategic retreat; and that there is no reason whatever for changing its previous policy.’

….
You wrote: “The remains of the revolutionary movement must be gathered together and all powers hostile to tyranny must unite; we must stop our old internal struggles and start the common fight afresh.” That is wrong. The Party must not join the Moderates. It is they who in all good faith have countless times betrayed the movement, and they will do it again next time, and the time after next. He who compromises with them buries the revolution. You wrote: “When the house is on fire, all must help to quench it; if we go on quarrelling about doctrines, we will all be burnt to ashes.” That is wrong. We fight against the fire with water; the others do with oil. Therefore we must first decide which is the right method, water or oil, before uniting the fire-brigades. One cannot conduct politics that way. It is impossible to form a policy with passion and despair. The Party’s course is sharply defined, like a narrow path in the mountains. The slightest false step, right or left, takes one down the precipice. The air is thin; he who becomes dizzy is lost.’

Rubashov stood stiffly between the bed and the bucket, held his breath, and waited for the first scream. He remembered that the first scream, in which terror still predominated over physical pain, was usually the worst; what followed was already more bearable, one got used to it and after a time one could even draw conclusions on the method of torture from the tone and rhythm of the screams. Towards the end, most people behaved in the same way, however different they were in temperament and voice: the screams became weaker, changed over into whining and choking. Usually the door would slam soon after.

…
The keys would jangle again; and the first scream of the next victim often came even before they had touched him, at the mere sight of the men in the doorway.

‘Unhappy poet! But it’s your own fault, my dear fellow. You shouldn’t have treated him so carelessly and rudely. Now you’re paying for it. You should be thankful that you got off comparatively lightly.’

‘But who on earth is he?’ asked Ivan, clenching his fists in excitement.

The visitor stared at Ivan and answered with a question: ‘You won’t get violent, will you? We’re all unstable people here … There won’t be any calls for the doctor, injections or any disturbances of that sort, will there?’

‘No, no!’ exclaimed Ivan. ‘Tell me, who is he?’

‘Very well,’ replied the visitor, and said slowly and gravely: ‘At Patriarch’s Ponds yesterday you met Satan.’

‘It’s not proper …’

‘I won’t hear any objection,’ Koroviev whispered right in his ear. ‘We don’t do this sort of thing but foreigners do. You’ll offend him, Nikanor Ivanovich, and that might be awkward. You’ve earned it …’
‘It’s strictly forbidden …’ whispered the chairman in a tiny voice, with a furtive glance around.

‘Where are the witnesses?’ hissed Koroviev into his other ear. ‘I ask you—where are they? Come, now …’

There then happened what the chairman later described as a miracle—the package jumped into his briefcase of its own accord, after which he found himself, feeling weak and battered, on the staircase. A storm of thoughts was whirling round inside his head. Among them were the villa in Nice, the trained cat, relief that there had been no witnesses and his wife’s pleasure at the complimentary tickets. Yet despite these mostly comforting thoughts, in the depths of his soul the chairman still felt the pricking of a little needle. It was the needle of unease.

Koestler’s decision to abandon Communism almost as soon as he had been freed from Spain—because of the hysterical faking of the Moscow purge trials in 1938—was expressed in such brilliantly diagnostic and dialectical terms that it bears quoting:

It is a logical contradiction when with uncanny regularity the leadership sees itself obliged to undertake more and more bloody operations within the movement, and in the same breath insists that the movement is healthy. Such an accumulation of grave surgical interventions points with much greater likelihood to the existence of a much more serious illness.

A prescient Edmund Burke on the early days of the French Revolution:

“It is known; that armies have hitherto yielded a very precarious and uncertain obedience to any senate, or popular authority; and they will least of all yield it to an assembly which is only to have a continuance of two years. The officers must totally lose the characteristic disposition of military men, if they see with perfect submission and due admiration, the dominion of pleaders; especially when they find that they have a new court to pay to an endless succession of those pleaders; whose military policy, and the genius of whose command, (if they should have any,) must be as uncertain as their duration is transient. In the weakness of one kind of authority, and in the fluctuation of all, the officers of an army will remain for some time mutinous and full of faction, until some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself. Armies will obey him on his personal account. There is no other way of securing military obedience in this state of things. But the moment in which that event shall happen, the person who really commands the army is your master, the master (that is little) of your king, the master of your Assembly, the master of your whole republic.”

As Thomas Mallon, one of the city’s few resident literary novelists, once put it: Washington novels, such as they are, tend to be found on racks at National Airport, the raised gold letters of their titles promising a bomb on Air Force One or a terrorist kidnapping of the First Lady. There’s a reason for all the goofiness. A serious novelist must take his characters seriously, regard them as three-dimensional creatures with inner lives and authentic moral crises; and that’s just what, out of a certain democratic pride, Americans refuse to do with their politicians.
..

Fiction somehow declines the responsibility of creating a realistic Washington in favor of various genre approaches.

…
No, the fact is that Washington is and always has been irretrievably bogged down in process. And process doesn’t generally make for electrifying pros

I happen to like Stanislas/Constantine. When dealing with an incensed young Bosnian who accused him of being a government stooge, he responds with some gravity by saying:

“Yes. For the sake of my country, and perhaps a little for the sake of my soul, I have given up the deep peace of being in opposition.”

This is one of the more profoundly mature, and also among the most tragic, of the signals that (Rebecca) West’s ear was attuned to pick up.

It’s important to remember that many people, before the war, could look at Hitler and see a man with whom business could be done. Winston Churchill, in a 1935 essay from his book Great Contemporaries, had this to say:

“It is not possible to form a just judgment of a public figure who has attained the enormous dimensions of Adolf Hitler until his life work as a whole is before us. Although no subsequent political action can condone wrong deeds, history is replete with examples of men who have risen to power by employing stern, grim, and even frightful methods, but who, nevertheless, when their life is revealed as a whole, have been regarded as great figures whose lives have enriched the story of mankind. So may it be with Hitler.”

I’ve always thought that—coming as it did two years after Hitler’s seizure of power—this was a bit lenient. Churchill raised his eyebrows all right at the maltreatment of the German Jews, and at the pace of German re-armament, but (as he had done earlier with Mussolini) could not withhold admiration for Hitler’s Kampf itself:

“The story of that struggle cannot be read without admiration for the courage, the perseverance, and the vital force which enabled him to challenge, defy, conciliate, or overcome all the authorities or resistances which barred his path.”

“Jesus Christ,” he exclaimed, “you work for Stark and you call somebody a son-of-a-bitch.”

I just looked at him. I’d been over all that ground before. I had been over it a thousand times with a thousand people. Hotel lobbies and dinner tables and club cars and street corners and bedrooms and filling stations. Sometimes they didn’t say it just exactly that way and sometimes they didn’t say it at all, but it was there. Oh, I’d fixed them, all right. I knew how to roll with that punch and give it right back in the gut. I ought to have known, I’d had plenty of practice.

But you get tired. In a way it is too easy, and so it isn’t fun anymore. And then you get so you don’t get mad anymore, it has happened so often. But those aren’t the reasons. It is just that those people who say that to you – or don’t say it – aren’t right and they aren’t wrong. If it were absolutely either way, you wouldn’t have to think about it, you could just shut your eyes and let them have it in the gut. But the trouble is, they are half right and half wrong, and in the end that is what paralyses you. Trying to sort out the one from the other. You can’t explain it to them, for there isn’t ever time and there is always that look on their faces. So you get to a point in the end where you don’t even let them have it in the gut. You just look at them, and it is like a dream or something remembered from a long time back or like they weren’t there at all.

“Yeah, and he wanted the one last damned thing you can’t inherit. And you know what it is?” He started at Adam’s face.

“What?” Adam said, after a long pause.

“Goodness. Yeah, just plain, simple goodness. Well you can’t inherit that from anybody. You gotta make it, Doc. If you want it. And you got to make it out of badness. Badness. And you know why, Doc?” He raised his bulk up in the broken-down wreck of an overstuffed chair he was in, and leaned forward, his hands on his knees, his elbows cocked out, his head out-thrust and the hair coming down to his eyes, and stared into Adam’s face. “Out of badness,” he repeated. “And you know why? Because there isn’t anything else to make it out of.”

I lighted a fresh cigarette from the butt of the last one and asked myself the following question: “For what reason, barring Original Sin, is a man most likely to step over the line?”

I answered: “Ambition, love, fear, money.”

“He’s Guilty,” Hugh Miller said.

“My God, you talk like Byram was human! He’s a thing! You don’t prosecute an adding machine if a spring goes bust and makes a mistake. You fix it. Well, I fixed Byram. I fixed him so his unborn great-grandchildren will wet their pants on this anniversary and not know why. Boy, it will be the shock in the genes. Hell, Byram is just something you use, and he’ll sure be useful from now on.”

“What we need is a balanced tax program. Right now the ratio between income tax and total income for the state gives an index that-“

“Yeah,” I said, “I heard the speech. But they don’t give a damn about that. Hell, make ‘em cry, make ‘em laugh, make ‘em think you’re their weak erring pal, or make ‘em think you’re God-Almighty. Or make ‘em mad. Even mad at you. Just stir ‘em up, it doesn’t matter how or why, and they’ll love you and come back for more. Pinch ‘em in the soft place. They aren’t alive, most of ‘em, and haven’t been alive in twenty years. Hell, their wives have lost their teeth and their shape, and likker won’t set on their stomachs, and they don’t believe in god, so it’s up to you to give ‘em something to stir ‘em up and make ‘em feel alive again. Just for half an hour. That’s what they come for. Tell ‘em anything. But for Sweet Jesus’ sake don’t try to improve their minds.”

About twelve years later, at a time when the problem of Willie’s personality more imperiously occupied my rare hours of speculation, I asked him, “Boss, do you remember the time we first got acquainted in the back room of Slade’s joint?”

He said he did, which wasn’t remarkable, for he was like the circus elephant, he never forgot anything, the fellow who gave him the peanut or the fellow who put snuff in his trunk.

…

“Boss, did you wink at me that time back at Slade’s?”

“Boy,” he said, “if I was to tell you, then you wouldn’t have anything to think about.”

“I have endorsed Callahan,” the Judge said. He didn’t flicker.

“I maybe could give you the dirt,” the Boss said speculatively. “Callahan’s been playing round for a long time, and he who touches pitch shall be defiled, and little boys just will walk barefoot in the cow pasture.” He looked up at Judge Irwin’s face, squinting, studying it, cocking his own head to one side.”

The grandfather’s clock in the corner of the room, I suddenly realised, wasn’t getting any younger. It would drop out a rick, and the tick would land inside my head like a rock dropped in a well, and he ripples would circle out and stop, and the tick would sink down the dark. For a piece of time which was not long or short, and might not even ben time, there wouldn’t be anything. Then the tock would drop down the well, and the ripples would circle out and finish.

The Boss quit studying Judge Irwin’s face, which didn’t show anything. He let himself sink back in the chair, shrugged his shoulders, and lifted the glass up for a drink. Then he said, “Suit yourself, Judge. But you know, there’s another way to play it. Maybe somebody might give Callahan a little shovelful on somebody else and Callahan might grow a conscience all of a sudden and repudiate his endorser. You know, when this conscience business starts, ain’t no telling where it’ll stop, and when you start digging-“

“I’ll thank you, sir-“ Judge Irwin took a step toward the big chair, and his face wasn’t the color of calf’s liver now – it was long past that and streaked white back from the base of the jutting nose – “I’ll thank you, sir, to get out of that chair and get out of this house!”

“Here, Buck,” the Boss called.

Tom Stark prodded the dog with his toe for a little encouragement, but he might just as well have been prodding a bolster.

“Buck is gitten on,” Old Man Stark said. “He ain’t right spry anymore.” Then the old man went to the steps and stooped down with a motion which made you expect to hear the sound of old rusty hinges on a barn door.

“Hi, Buck, hi, Buck,” the old man wheedled without optimism. He gave up, and lifted his gaze to the Boss. “If he was hongry now,” he said, and shook his head. “If he was hongry we could guile him. But he ain’t hongry. His teeth gone bad.”

The Boss looked at me, and I knew what I was paid to do.

“Jack,” the boss said, “get the hairy bastard up here and make him look like he was glad to see me.”

Like all prime ministers, Chifley had a private phone on his desk—the number known only to his wife, senior colleagues and advisers. It was, of course, a silent number, but apparently was only one digit removed from the number for the butcher shop in the nearby suburb of Manuka. Occasionally, the phone would ring and when the Prime Minister of Australia answered, he would find a housewife calling, wanting to leave her meat order for the weekend. And what would Chifley do? Of course, he would simply take the order for the chops, the leg of lamb, or whatever, saying nothing to the caller except, ‘Yes, madam’, then when she had rung off, he would phone the butcher himself and say ‘It’s happened again’ and repeat the order. These days, it is impossible to imagine anyone getting through, by accident or not, to the Prime Minister unless first vetted.

David Day records that Ben Chifley, even as Prime Minister, drove himself between his home in Bathurst, NSW, and Canberra in his own Buick—his pride and joy. It was not even considered necessary that a bodyguard should accompany him on this journey. Jim Snow, former Labor MP for the southern NSW federal seat of Eden-Monaro, told the author that on Chifley’s drives between Canberra and Bathurst he sometimes changed his route and went through the small town of Crookwell, lunching at a café. On one occasion, he asked for steak and onions, but the waitress told him, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Chifley, we have no onions’. ‘Well’, said Chifley, thrusting his hand into his coat pocket, ‘here’s one’, and he produced an onion.

With 27 ministers in the Cabinet, inevitably much time was wasted on repetitious debates and Whitlam’s exasperation was palpable. Moss Cass, a short, dark, intense man from the Victorian Left faction, was a medical practitioner before he entered Parliament. As Minister for Environment, Cass publicly advocated the decriminalisation of marijuana smoking.

About the same time, Cass’s wife (in the Melbourne Age) bemoaned the loss of conjugal rights the wives of federal parliamentarians endured. Soon after, at the weekly Cabinet meeting, Cass argued with Whitlam about some issue, telling the Prime Minister, ‘The trouble with you, Gough, is that you know nothing about the grassroots of the Labor Party’. Whitlam retorted: ‘Moss, you know a lot about grass and your wife apparently knows something about roots, but you know fuck-all about the grassroots of the Labor Party.’ Whitlam could be bitchy. Cass passed by Whitlam and Bill Hayden walking down the government lobby, and, nodding to Whitlam, Cass said: ‘Morning, Leader.’ Out of earshot, Whitlam said to Hayden: ‘I’m glad he spoke. Now we know his face from his arse.’

Yet many people would believe no prayer is needed, from whatever faith. When the Federal Parliament first met after Federation, no prayer was offered. This led to a storm of protest from various Christian evangelical organisations, the Parliament gave way to the pressure and the prayer became part of proceedings. Gregor McGregor, leader of the Labor Party in the first Senate, protested that the prayer was a breach of the Constitution.

..

Devout Catholic Brian Harradine, the former independent senator, objected in the Senate to other senators reciting the prayer when it was being read by the President of the Senate. ‘We are not in church,’ he noted. Harradine protested that the Senate’s Standing Orders stated the President and nobody else would say the prayer. When the President began reading the prayer, in a clear protest, Senator Peter Baume would don his yarmulke (a skullcap) and recite a Jewish prayer.

One of the more spectacular drunken performances of the 1960s was in the Senate chamber, when Labor Senator from Western Australia Harry Cant found himself seriously drunk and trapped by a division. The doors were locked and the division required Labor senators to cross to the other side of the chamber, sitting in the places of the government senators for the count, while the government senator moved to the opposition benches. Cant was overcome by an urgent need to vomit. Looking around desperately, he came to a decision. Opening the desk drawer of the government senator’s desk where he was seated, he was violently and noisily sick into it. When the division was over and the senators resumed their normal places, the government senator in whose place Harry had sat was understandably disgusted. The stench created by this extraordinary happening filled the chamber. He did not draw the President of the Senate’s attention to the outrage or make a fuss. Urgent action was required. All this had taken place in the full view of the journalists in the Senate press gallery and those in the public gallery.

News of the outrage was soon all over Parliament House and journalists rushed to get the story. Medical practitioner Dr Felix Dittmer, a Queensland Labor Senator, had the answer. He denied Cant was drunk and ordered that an ambulance be urgently called to take Cant to the Royal Canberra Hospital, just across Commonwealth Avenue Bridge in Acton. Dittmer stated that Cant was suffering from an acute case of ‘renal colic’. The ambulance arrived and a Labor colleague suggested to Dittmer that it would be discreet for Harry, now prone on a stretcher, to be taken through the back exit of Parliament via the kitchen. Labor Deputy Senate Leader, Pat Kennelly, rejected this. So the little procession of the two ambulance officers carrying the stretcher with Cant prone, and Dittmer leading, made its way through the Senate opposition lobby, across King’s Hall where visitors gaped, and down the front steps to the waiting ambulance.

In hospital, Cant made a speedy recovery and was discharged the next day. From then on, if an MP entered either the house or the Senate looking a little confused, the interjection would go out: ‘Renal colic.’

I don’t usually use this Tumblr as a forum for commentary, but I can see from the reaction to the release of the trailer of this movie that I need somewhere to put my views on this on the public record.

The below was originally posted at a now virtually extinct social media site when this project was first announced. The trailer confirms my views…

As a massive fan of both Gatsby and Luhrmann (mostly) I think this is an ideal match. 

Fundamentally, “The Great Gatsby” is melodrama. It’s all over the top emotion, extreme actions and highly contrived plot development. Frankly, the prose is often so descriptively florid that it would border on the comical outside an ‘American classic’. 

This is what Luhrmann does best. His best movies (R&J, Moulin Rouge and Strictly Ballroom) are all over the top, visually intense cavalcades of emotion and melodrama. He’s less good at story telling/script writing, but working from Gatsby as subject matter, he’s got a pretty solid base to start from in this respect. 

To illustrate my point, take a passage like the below from the book, in the lead up to Gatsby and Daisy’s first kiss: 

“His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.”

Then consider the climactic romantic scenes of R&J and Moulin Rouge – the aesthetic is hand in glove. (In fact from memory, doesn’t Ewan McGregor actually jump up and touch a star while trying to seduce Nicole Kidman?)

I think a lot of the pre-backlash against Luhrmann directing this project is fans of Gatsby having to face up to the true nature of the book. There are lots of people who claim it as their ‘favourite’ book as a pitch to sophistication. As such, they project ‘sophisticated’ characteristics onto the book ie subtly, deep human insight etc, when they are really not there.

I don’t usually use this Tumblr as a forum for commentary, but I can see from the reaction to the release of the trailer of this movie that I need somewhere to put my views on this on the public record.

The below was originally posted at a now virtually extinct social media site when this project was first announced. The trailer confirms my views…

As a massive fan of both Gatsby and Luhrmann (mostly) I think this is an ideal match. 

Fundamentally, “The Great Gatsby” is melodrama. It’s all over the top emotion, extreme actions and highly contrived plot development. Frankly, the prose is often so descriptively florid that it would border on the comical outside an ‘American classic’. 

This is what Luhrmann does best. His best movies (R&J, Moulin Rouge and Strictly Ballroom) are all over the top, visually intense cavalcades of emotion and melodrama. He’s less good at story telling/script writing, but working from Gatsby as subject matter, he’s got a pretty solid base to start from in this respect. 

To illustrate my point, take a passage like the below from the book, in the lead up to Gatsby and Daisy’s first kiss: 

“His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.”

Then consider the climactic romantic scenes of R&J and Moulin Rouge – the aesthetic is hand in glove. (In fact from memory, doesn’t Ewan McGregor actually jump up and touch a star while trying to seduce Nicole Kidman?)

I think a lot of the pre-backlash against Luhrmann directing this project is fans of Gatsby having to face up to the true nature of the book. There are lots of people who claim it as their ‘favourite’ book as a pitch to sophistication. As such, they project ‘sophisticated’ characteristics onto the book ie subtly, deep human insight etc, when they are really not there.

Foreword by John Faulkner:

“If the Canberra Press Gallery is an institution, Rob Chalmers was an institution of that institution. His career spanned 60 years and 12 prime ministers, 24 federal elections and five changes of government. There is not a member of Parliament today who can remember a Press Gallery before Rob Chalmers joined it in early 1951, moving up from Sydney as a young journalist.”

If This Is a Man

You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find, returning in the evening,
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider if this is a man
Who works in the mud,
Who does not know peace,
Who fights for a scrap of bread,
Who dies because of a yes or a no.
Consider if this is a woman
Without hair and without name,
With no more strength to remember,
Her eyes empty and her womb cold
Like a frog in winter.
Meditate that this came about:
I command these words to you.
Carve them in your hearts
At home, in the street,
Going to bed, rising;
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house fall apart,
May illness impede you,
May your children turn their faces from you.

“My existence, in comparison with yours, is sadly hum-drum, I fear… Nevertheless, there are certain tragi-comic diversions.”

“What sort of diversions?”

“This for example –“ Bernhard went over to his writing-desk picked up a sheet of paper and handed it to me: “It arrived by post this morning.”
I read the typed words: Berhard Landauer, beware. We are going to settle the score with you and your uncle and all other filthy Jews. We give you twenty-four hours to leave Germany. If not, you are a dead man.

Bernhard laughed: “Bloodthirsty, isn’t it?”

“It’s incredible.. Who do you suppose sent it?”

“An employee who has been dismissed, perhaps. Or a practical joker. Or a madman. Or a hot-headed Nazi schoolboy.”

“What shall you do?”

“Nothing”.

“Surely you’ll tell the police?”

“My dear Christopher, the police would very soon get tired with hearing such nonsense. WE receive three or four such letters every week.”
“All the same, this one may quite well be in earnest… The Nazis may write like schoolboys, but they’re capable of anything. That’s just why they’re so dangerous. People laugh at them, right up to the last moment…”

Berhard smiled his tired smile: “I appreciate very much this anxiety of yours on my behalf. Nevertheless, I am quite unworthy of it… My existence is not of such vital importance to myself or to others that the forces of the Law should be called upon to protect me… As for my uncles he is at present in Warsaw…”

‘Do you mind if I lie down on your sofa, darling?’ Sally asked, as soon as we were alone.
‘No, of course not.’

Sally pulled off her cap, swung her little velvet shoes up on to the sofa, opened her bag and began powdering: ‘I’m most terribly tired. I didn’t sleep a wink last night. I’ve got a marvellous new lover.’

I began to put out the tea. Sally gave me a sidelong glance:

‘Do I shock you when I talk like that, Christopher darling?’

‘Not in the least.’

‘But you don’t like it?’

‘It’s no business of mine.’ I handed her a tea-glass.

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ cried Sally, ‘Don’t start being English! Of course it’s your business what you think!’

‘Well then, if you want to know, it rather bores me.’

This annoyed her even more than I had intended. Her tone changed: she said coldly: ‘I thought you’d understand.’ She sighed: ‘But I forgot – you’re a man.’

‘I’m sorry, Sally. I can’t help being a man of course… But please don’t be angry with me. I only mean that when you talk like that it’s really just nervousness. You’re naturally rather shy with strangers, I think: so you’ve got into this trick of trying to bounce them into approving or disapproving of you, violently. I know, because I try it myself, sometimes.. Only I wish you wouldn’t try it on me, because it just doesn’t work and it only makes me feel embarrassed. If you go to bed with every single man in Berlin and come and tell me about it each time, you still won’t convince me that you’re La Dame aux Camelias – because, really and truly, you know, you aren’t.”

The danger of theoretical systems was something that Smith addressed with his own theory in part 6 of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. This section of the book was actually written after The Wealth of Nations. Moral Sentiments had been published in 1759 when Smith was teaching at Glasgow. But Smith revised it in 1789. By then he had met the physiocrats and had been exposed to their system of political economy. In part 6, titled ‘Of the Character of Virtue’, Smith located the evil of political systems in – per the great theme of Moral Sentiments – lack of imagination. Creating a theoretical political system does take imagination, but, Smith argued, there’s an unimaginative side to putting it into practice:

“From a certain spirit of system… we sometimes seem to value the means more than the end, and to be eager to promote the happiness of our fellow-creatures, rather from a view to perfect and improve a certain beautiful and orderly system, than from any immediate sense or feeling of what they either suffer or enjoy.”

Theorisers, Smith wrote, can become ‘intoxicated with the imaginary beauty of this ideal system’ until ‘that public spirit which is founded upon the love of humanity’ is corrupted by a spirit of system that ‘inflames it even to the madness of fanaticism.’

Smith was not a fan of what would come to be called lobbying:

“The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from [merchants or manufacturers] ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined… with the most suspicious attention.”

We must treat other people with respect due equals not because we are inspired by principle or filled with fraternal affection but because we’re pathetic and useless.

Smith wrote that an individual “stands at all times in need of the co-operation and assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scare sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons”.

This nearly left-wing statement was the prologue to Adam Smith’s most quoted passage: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

Economic progress depends upon a trinity of individual prerogatives: pursuit of self-interest, division of labor, and freedom of trade….

Smith’s logical demonstration of how productivity is increased through self-interest, division of labor , and trade disproved the thesis (still dearly held by leftists and everyone’s little brother) that bettering the condition of one person necessarily worsens the condition of another. Wealth is not a pizza. If I have too many slices, you don’t have to eat the dominos box.

But (The Protagonist of Lost Illusions) is subject to what Balzac calls the ‘pitiless laws of society’. Great expression, that. And here are some of those awful laws, expressed by one of Lucien’s Paris acquaintances:

“Do you know how a man makes his way in this world? Either by the splendour of genius, or the adroitness of corruption. He must burst like a cannon-ball into the ranks of his fellow-men, or he must glide in among them like the pestilence.”

(Thomas) Jefferson wanted to rescue all this from what the evangelists had pasted into the pages of the Bible, which seemed to be:

“of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same Being. I separate, therefore, the gold from the dross; restore to Him the former, and leave the latter to the stupidity of some, and the roguery of others of His disciples.”

And so he produced The Jefferson Bible, subtitled The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazerth, in which he stripped out the miracles but retained the moral teachings. Jefferson removes the overlays from the biblical palimpsest.

(Aurelius’ Meditations) does however, suggest two consolations. First, men are not intentional evildoers. And, second, their ‘enmities, suspicions, animosities and conflicts’ will vanish with the dust and ashes:

“That men of a certain type should behave as they do is inevitable. To wish it otherwise were to wish the fig-tree would not yield its juice. In any case, remember that in a very little while both you and he will be dead, and your very names will quickly be forgotten.”

Gustave Flaubert, in a letter to a friend, speculated on the ‘melancholy of the antique world’ being more profound than that of our modern world because there was no hope of life beyond the grave. Flaubert went on to say that for the ancients therefore, that:

“’Black hole’ was infinity itself; their dreams loom and vanish against a background of immutable ebony. No crying out, no convulsions – nothing but the fixity of a pensive gaze. With the gods gone, and Christ not yet come, there was a unique moment, from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone. Nowhere else do I find that particular grandeur.”

Rawson’s Book (Labor in Vain?: A Survey of the ALP, 1966) is sound political science, readable and relevant. Flciking it open, years after I reviewed it for the student paper, I’m struck now by this insight into the ALP:

“The ALP has always been a great source of drama, high and low comedy and even a little tragedy. Even when it is a political failure – or perhaps especially at those times – it is an unending source of human interest. It has provided a good broad canvas packed with a great variety of incident. It abounds in examples of nearly every human type except, of course, those who have no interest in gaining power and influence over their fellow men. It illustrates idealism and cynicism and the path from one to the other; it illustrates poverty and riches and poor men who want to become rich; ignorance and wisdom and ignorant men who seek to become wise. It shows most of the principal divisions of Australian humanity – men and women, working class and middle class, Catholic and Protestant, older and younger – in a magnified though also distorted form as they endeavour within or by means of the party to produce an environment in which they can be content.”

Vidal has Lincoln say:

“When there is so much you cannot say, it’s always a good idea to have a story ready. I do it now from habit… In my predicament, it is a good thing to know all sorts of stories because the truth of the whole matter is now almost unsayable; and so cruel.”

The Civil Rights Act of 1957, not in itself as revolutionary as its supporters hoped or its detractors feared, opened the door to later, more substantial legislative reparation to Blacks. Not until the next decade could Southern Black Children share a classroom with white Americans; not until the next decade could Southern Black adults eat a sandwich at the same lunch counter as whites. But in the context of the times the ‘meagre’ – (Robert) Caro’s word – 1957 Act was the indisputable first step.

Let’s dwell on the rhetoric of that moment – the limited advances that cleared the way for legal and political equality. In a 1957 speech a few hours before the vote, Johnson said, ‘I cannot follow the logic of those who say that because we cannot solve all the problems we should not try to solve any of them.’

Of (Warren Harding’s) oratory, Mencken said:

“It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the lines; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.”

This, however, is my favourite piece of (Orwell’s) wisdom:

“So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.”

(Orwell) could say of a Russian agent encountered in Spain:

‘it was the first time that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies – unless one counts journalists.’

(Isaiah) Berlin takes his analysis a step further. He writes that such a

“search for perfection does seem to me a recipe for bloodshed, no better even if it is demanded by the sincerest of idealists, the purest of heard… To force people into the neat uniforms demanded by dogmatically believed in schemes is almost always the road to inhumanity.”

William Shakespeare was born into a world that was short of people and struggled to keep those it had. In 1564 England had a population of between three and five million – much less than three hundred years earlier, when plague began to take a continuous toll.

So Australia should never use our population as an excuse for lack of ambition…

I had learned about women on a hill in central Vietnam, from a woman in heat, round as a sausage, slick with sweat.

And Hoa? Who had it been for her? I didn’t have the heart to ask her the name of the father of her child.

Never. We Never forget anything, never lose anything, never exchange anything, never undo what has been. There is no way back to the source, to the place where the pure, clear water once gushed forth. The river had cut across the countryside, the towns, dragging refuse and mud in its wake.

The inauguration of Thomas Jefferson was the first held in the new capital city of Washington, D.C. In his inaugural address, Jefferson attempted to move beyond party distinctions and unify the country once again.

“We are all Republicans; We are all Federalists,” he said. “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union, or to change its Republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

The main goals of (the Committee to Re-elect the President), as Segretti and his accomplices later told reporters and investigators, were to torpedo the campaigns of Democrats they thought to be a serious threat to Nixon’s reelection, and to wreak havoc among the Democratic campaigns, creating ill will and sore feelings. “The main purpose was that the Democrats not have the ability to get back together after a knock-down drag-out campaign,” according to Segretti.

Their style of disrupting and harassing rival political campaigns was known to them as “ratfucking”. Their main target in early 1972 was Ed Muskie. According to the political pundits and pollsters, Muskie was the man to beat for the Democratic nomination. As the front-runner for the nomination, expectations for him were high heading into the New Hampshire primary – some estimates had him winning 65% of the vote.

Then came the “Canuck letter”. Segretti and Ken Clawson, a White House communications deputy, had cooked up a letter and sent it to William Loeb, the publisher of the Manchester Union Leader- an influential conservative newspaper in Manchester, New Hampshire. The letter claimed that at a campaign meeting in Ft Lauderdale, a Muskie campaign aid had cracked a joke about French Canadians living in New England. “We don’t have blacks, but we do have Canucks”, the aid supposedly said. To this, Senator Muskie was reported to have agreed and laughingly said, “Come to New England and see”.

Two weeks before the New Hampshire primary and one day before Muskie was to campaign there, the Union Leader published an anti-Muskie editorial on its front page, entitled “Senator Muskie Insults Franco-Americans”. The paper accused Muskie of hypocrisy for supporting blacks while condoning the term “Canucks”. A copy of the Canuck letter accompanied the editorial.
The very next day, Loeb reprinted a two-month-old Newsweek article about Senator Muskie’s wife, entitled “Big Daddy’s Jane.” This piece reported that Mrs Muskie was a chain-smoker, drank too much, and used off-colour language on the campaign plane.

The next morning, the Muskie campaign started to unravel. The Senator appeared in front of the headquarters of the Union Leader in a driving snow storm. Standing on a flatbed truck, he addressed a gathering of supporters, along with the media covering his campaign, and attacked Loeb as a “gutless coward”. As he spoke about the charges against his wife, his voice halted as he choked back tears.

The next day (Charles) Robb responded with a second ad that called (Ollie) North a liar:

“After lying about President Reagan and even lying to schoolchildren, now Oliver North is lying about Chuck Robb. Chuck Robb has never had anything to do with illegal drugs – period. B what North doesn’t understand is the real issue in this campaign is the candidate’s record of public service. Chuck Robb has a proven record of public service, while North’s public record includes putting himself above the law by selling arms to terrorists and backdating documents to conceal that some of the money went to his personal use. Oliver North – people are starting to wonder if he knows what the truth is.”

To Jesse Helms, politics and ideology were simple, black and white. He saw it as right versus wrong, good versus evil. His slogan for the 1972 Senate campaign was “He’s one of us.” It appeared in television ads and in flyers distributed around the state….

It also implied that the opponent was not “one of us”. It was criticised by many newspaper editorials and by the Democratic Party as an open appeal to racism. His opponent accused Helms of trying to divide North Carolinians. “He’s using an ‘us versus them’ mentality,” one local Democrat said. Who did he mean by “them”? Blacks? Liberals? War Protestors? Probably all of the above.

(In 1990,while running against a black opponent) Helms and his media consultant, Alex Castellanos, created the ad that has come to be known as the “White Hands” spot. The ad- which very likely sewed up the race for Helms- showed the arms and hands of a white male opening, then crumpling up, a rejection letter. An announcer says, “You need that job, and you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota. Is that really fair? Havey Gantt says it is. Gannt supports Ted Kennedy’s racial quota law that make the color of your skin more important than your qualifications. You’ll vote on this issue next Tuesday. For racial quotas, Harvey Gantt. Against racial quotas, Jesse Helms.”

This ad really struck a chord with North Carolina voters, as Helms began moving up in the polls immediataely after it started airing.

The ‘Daisy Girl’ spot was intended to play on the fears and anxieties about Goldwater that he himself had created. The ad opens with a young girl sitting in a field of flowers, picking daisies as she counts them….

At zero, the camera zooms in to the girl’s eyes and we see a nuclear explosion, with a billowing mushroom cloud. Then, Lyndon Johnson’s voice is heard, with a warning: “These are the stakes – to make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.” An announcer then says, “Vote for President Johnson on November 3. The stakes are too high for you to stay home.”

The ad never mentioned Goldwater by name. It did not have to; viewers knew exactly what the ad was trying to communicate. …

The ad only aired once, on the CBS Monday Night at the Movies, on September 7, 1964…. The ad created such a senation that the next day all three networks showed it in its entirety on their evening news programs, enabling many more people to see the ad and so magnifying the effects. The Goldwater campaign reacted with fury, loudly criticising the Johnson campaign and filing a formal complaint with the Fair Campaign Practices Committee. In the end, all the fuss the Republicans raise about the ad only ensured that it would get more attention.

The Johnson campaign struck again a few days later with a different little girl. This ad also aired only once, on Saturday Night at the Movies. The girl is licking an ice cream cone. No nuclear explosions this time, but a female announcer warns us that Strontium 90, present in nuclear fallout, could be poisoning her and she wouldn’t even know it. But the announcer informs us that thanks to the nuclear test ban treaty, which Goldwater oppsed, the child is safe…. When Goldwater rejected the test ban and called for more nuclear testing, it ‘played right into [the Johnson cmapign’s] hands.”

In 1934 (Upton Sinclair) abandoned the Socialist Party and then entered the Democratic Party Primary for governor. He reasoned that a Socialist could not get elected; he had to win an election before he could enact a single policy.

He based his campaign on a utopian novel he had just written, called, I, Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty: A True Story of the Future.

The proportion of political arrests in the Red Army doubled from 1944 to 1945, a year when the Soviet Union was effectively at war for little more than four months. In that year of victory, no fewer than 135,056 Red Army soldiers and officers were condemned by military tribunals for ‘counter-revolutionary crimes’….

Over 1.5 million members of the Red Army captured by the Germans were sent either to the Gulag (339,000 of them), or to labour battalions in Siberia and the far North, which was hardly better. Civilians taken by force to Germany were ‘potential enemies of the state’ to be kept under NKVD watch. They were also forbidden to go within 100 kilometers of Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev, and their families remained suspect. Even as late at 1998, declaration forms for joining a research institute in Russia still contained a section demanding whether any member of the applicant’s family had been in an ‘enemy prison camp’.

Perhaps as a side-effect of this law linking death with sexual maturity, the arrival of the enemy at the edge of the city made young soldiers desperate to lose their virginity. Girls, well aware of the high risk of rape, preferred to give themselves to almost any German boy first than to a drunken and probably violent Soviet soldier.

‘An erotic fever seemed to have taken possession of everybody. Everywhere, even on the dentist’s chair, I saw bodies locked in lascivious embraces. The women had discarded all modesty and were freely exposing their private parts.’

As the Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Steven Weinberg said, ‘Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.’

Blaise Pascal (he of the wager) said something similar: ‘Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.’

Quoting Tennyson’s ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’

‘Forward the Light Brigade!
’ Was there a man dismayed?
Not though the soldiers knew
Some one had blundered:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred.

It was a concept of such stunning simplicity, but it gave rise, naturally, to all of the infinite and baffling complexity of life. The awe it inspired in me made the awe that people talk about in respect of religious experience seem, frankly, silly beside it. I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.

“The God Delusion” – Richard Dawkins

Contrary to their view, the fact that the United States was not founded as a Christian nation was early stated in the terms of a treaty with Tripoli, drafted in 1796 under George Washington and signed by John Adams in 1797:

“As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Musselmen; and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”

…a – perhaps surprising – quotation from Senator Barry Goldwater in 1981, clearly showing how staunchly that presidential candidate and hero of American conservatism upheld the secular tradition of the Republic’s foundation:

“There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God’s name on one’s behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I’m frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in A, B, C, and D. Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And l am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of conservatism.”

“I shall not go out of my way to offend, but nor shall I don kid gloves to handle religion any more gently than I would handle anything else.”

…

“Despite my dislike of gladiatorial contests, I seem somehow to have acquired a reputation for pugnacity towards religion.”

Maybe he tells himself this at night, but in the following pages he describes the religious as “mawkishly nauseating”, “insipid”, “shameless”, “gullible” and goes on to note that:

So name calling and ridicule isn’t offensive?

He then goes on to note somewhat more honestly:

“Thomas Jefferson, as so often, got it right when he said, ‘Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus.’”

Today it is different.

Last month one of the crematoriums at Birkenau had been blown up. None of us knows (and perhaps no one will ever know) exactly how the exploit was carried out: there was talk of the Sonderkommando, the Special Kommando attached to the gas chambers and the ovens, which is itself periodically exterminated, and which is kept scrupulously segregated from the rest of the camp. The fact remains that a few hundred men at Birkenau, helpless and exhausted slaves like ourselves, had found in themselves the strength to act, to mature the fruits of their hatred.

The man who is to die in front of us today in some way took part in the revolt. They said he had contacts with the rebels of Birkenau, that he carried arms into our camp, that he was plotting a simultaneous mutiny among us. He is to die today before our very eyes: and perhaps the Germans do not understand that this solitary death, this man’s death which has been reserved for him, will bring him glory, not infamy. At the end of the German’s speech, which nobody understood, the raucous voice of before again rose up: ‘Habt ihr verstanden?’ Have you understood?

…

Who answered ‘Jawohl’ ?

Everybody and nobody: it was as if our cursed resignation took body by itself, as if it turned into a collective voice above our heads. But everybody heard the cry of the doomed man, it pierced through the old thick barriers of inertia and submissiveness, it struck the living core of man in each of us: ‘Kamaraden, ich bin der Letz!’ (Comrades, I am the last one!) I wish I could say that from the midst of us, an abject flock, a voice rose, a murmur, a sign of assent. But nothing happened. We remained standing, bent and grey, our heads dropped, and we did not uncover our heads until the German ordered us to do so. The trapdoor opened, the body wriggled horribly; the band began playing again and we were once more lined up and filed past the quivering body of the dying man. At the foot of the gallows, the SS watch us pass with indifferent eyes: their work is finished, and well finished. The Russians can come now: there are no longer any strong men among us, the last one is now hanging above our heads, and as for the others, a few halters had been enough.

The Russians can come now: they will only find us, the slaves, the worn-out, worthy of the unarmed death which awaits us. To destroy a man is difficult, almost as difficult as to create one: it has not been easy, nor quick, but you Germans have succeeded. Here we are, docile under your gaze; from our side you have nothing more to fear; no acts of violence, no words of defiance, not even a look of judgement.

We do not believe in the most obvious and facile deduction: that man is fundamentally brutal, egoistic and stupid in his conduct once every civilized institution is taken away, and that the Häftling is consequently nothing but a man without inhibitions. We believe, rather, that the only conclusion to be drawn is that in the face of driving necessity and physical disabilities many social habits and instincts are reduced to silence. But another fact seems to us worthy of attention: there comes to light the existence of two particularly well differentiated categories among men — the saved and the drowned. Other pairs of opposites (the good and the bad, the wise and the foolish, the cowards and the courageous, the unlucky and the fortunate) are considerably less distinct, they seem less essential, and above all they allow for more numerous and complex intermediary gradations.

This division is much less evident in ordinary life; for there it rarely happens that a man loses himself. A man is normally not alone, and in his rise or fall is tied to the destinies of his neighbours; so that it is exceptional for anyone to acquire unlimited power, or to fall by a succession of defeats into utter ruin. Moreover, everyone is normally in possession of such spiritual, physical and even financial resources that the probabilities of a shipwreck, of total inadequacy in the face of life, are relatively small. And one must take into account a definite cushioning effect exercised both by the law, and by the moral sense which constitutes a self-imposed law; for a country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a powerful one too powerful.

But in the Lager things are different: here the struggle to survive is without respite, because everyone is desperately and ferociously alone. If some Null Achtzehn vacillates, he will find no one to extend a helping hand; on the contrary, someone will knock him aside, because it is in no one’s interest that there will be one more ‘musselman’* dragging himself to work every day; and if someone, by a miracle of savage patience and cunning, finds a new method of avoiding the hardest work, a new art which yields him an ounce of bread, he will try to keep his method secret, and he will be esteemed and respected for this, and will derive from it an exclusive, personal benefit; he will become stronger and so will be feared, and who is feared is, ipso facto, a candidate for survival. (*This word ‘Musselman’, I do not know why, was used by the old ones of the camp to describe the weak, the inept, those doomed to selection.)

In history and in life one sometimes seems to glimpse a ferocious law which states: ‘to he that has, will be given; from he that has not, will be taken away’. In the Lager, where man is alone and where the struggle for life is reduced to its primordial mechanism, this unjust law is openly in force, is recognized by all. With the adaptable, the strong and astute individuals, even the leaders willingly keep contact, sometimes even friendly contact, because they hope later to perhaps derive some benefit. But with the musselmans, the men in decay, it is not even worth speaking, because one knows already that they will complain and will speak about what they used to eat at home. Even less worthwhile is it to make friends with them, because they have no distinguished acquaintances in camp, they do not gain any extra rations, they do not work in profitable Kommandos and they know no secret method of organizing. And in any case, one knows that they are only here on a visit, that in a few weeks nothing will remain of them but a handful of ashes in some near-by field and a crossed-out number on a register. Although engulfed and swept along without rest by the innumerable crowd of those similar to them, they suffer and drag themselves along in an opaque intimate solitude, and in solitude they die or disappear, without leaving a trace in anyone’s memory.

The result of this pitiless process of natural selection could be read in the statistics of Lager population movements. At Auschwitz, in 1944, of the old Jewish prisoners (we will not speak of the others here, as their condition was different), ‘kleine Nummer’, low numbers less than 150,000, only a few hundred had survived; not one was an ordinary Häftling, vegetating in the ordinary Kommandos, and subsisting on the normal ration. There remained only the doctors, tailors, shoemakers, musicians, cooks, young attractive homosexuals, friends or compatriots of some authority in the camp; or they were particularly pitiless, vigorous and inhuman individuals, installed (following an investiture by the SS command, which showed itself in such choices to possess satanic knowledge of human beings) in the posts of Kapos, Blockältester, etc.; or finally, those who, without fulfilling particular functions, had always succeeded through their astuteness and energy in successfully organizing, gaining in this way, besides material advantages and reputation, the indulgence and esteem of the powerful people in the camp. Whosoever does not know how to become an ‘Organisator’, ‘Kombinator’, ‘Prominent’ (the savage eloquence of these words!) soon becomes a ‘musselman’.

In life, a third way exists, and is in fact the rule; it does not exist in the concentration camp.

‘Show me your number: you are 174517. This numbering began eighteen months ago and applies to Auschwitz and the dependent camps. There are now ten thousand of us here at Buna-Monowitz; perhaps thirty thousand between Auschwitz and Birkenau.

‘Wo sind die Andere? Where are the others?’

‘Perhaps transferred to other camps?’ I suggest.

And night came, and it was such a night that one knew that human eyes would not witness it and survive. Everyone felt this: not one of the guards, neither Italian nor German, had the courage to come and see what men do when they know they have to die. All took leave from life in the manner which most suited them. Some praying, some deliberately drunk, others lustfully intoxicated for the last time. But the mothers stayed up to prepare the food for the journey with tender care, and washed their children and packed the luggage; and at dawn the barbed wire was full of children’s washing hung out in the wind to dry. Nor did they forget the diapers, the toys, the cushions and the hundred other small things which mothers remember and which children always need.

Would you not do the same? If you and your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you not give him to eat today?

It seems to me unnecessary to add that none of the facts are invented.

An interesting statement to end the preface of this book in the light of subsequent fact based literary controversies.

He quoted a line from “War and Peace”:

‘Yes, the didn’t just waste their time, they wrote.’

(Kovchenko) looked at Viktor. Viktor felt that at any moment Kovchenko might come out with the words that had been hovering between them all along, brushing against his eyes, hands and brain like an invisible mist.

He bowed his head. He was no longer a professor, a doctor of science, a famous scientist who had made a remarkable discovery, a man who could be forthright and independent, arrogant and condescending. He was just a man with curly hair and a hooked nose, with a stooped back and narrow shoulders, screwing up his eyes as though he was expecting a blow on the cheek.

In Auschwitz:

People in camps, people in prisons, people who have escaped from prision, people going to their death, know the extraordinary power of music. No one else can experience music in quite the same way.

What music resurrects in the soul of a man about to die is neither hope nor thought, but simply the blind, heart-breaking miracle of life itself. A sob passed down the column. Everything seemed transformed, everything had come together; everything scattered and fragmented – home, peace, the journey, the umble of wheels, thirst, terror, the city rising out of the mist, the wan red dawn – fused together, not into a memory or a picture but into the blind, fierce ache of life itself. Here in the glow of the gas ovens, people knew that life was more than happiness – it was also grief. And the freedom was both painful and difficult; it was life itself.

Music had the power to express the last turmoil of a soul in whose blind depths every experience, every moment of joy and grief, had fused with this misty morning, this glow hanging over their heads. Or perhaps it wasn’t like that at all. Perhaps music was just the key to a man’s feelings, not what filled him at this terrible moment, but the key that unlocked his innermost core.

There is divine judgement, there is the judgement of a State and the judgement of society, but there is one supreme judgement: the judgement of one sinner over another. A sinner can measure the power of the totalitarian state and find it limitless: through propaganda, hunger, loneliness, infamy, obscurity, labour camps and the threat of death, this terrible power can fetter a man’s will. But every step that a man takes under the threat of poverty, hunger, labour camps and death is at the same time an expression of his own will. Every step Kaltuft had taken – from the village to the trenches, from being a man-in-the-street to being a member of the National Socialist Party – bore the imprint of his will. A man may be led by fate, but he can refuse to follow. He may be a mere tool in the hands of destructive powers, but he knows it is in his interest to assent to this. Fate and the indivudal may have different ends, but they share the same path.

The man who pronounces judgement will be neither a pure and merciful heavenly being, nor a wise justice who watches over the interests of society and the state, neither a saint nor a righteous man – but a miserable, dirty sinner who has been crushed by Fascism, who has himself experienced the terrible power of the State, who has himself bowed down, fallen, shrunk into timidity and submissiveness. And this judge will say:

‘Guilty! Yes, there are men in this terrible world who are guilty.’

A small surprise had been laid on for Eichmann and Liss during their tour of inspection. In the middle of the gas chamber, the engineers had laid a small table with hors-d’oeurves and wine. Reineke invited Eichmann and Liss to sit down.

Eichmann laughed at this charming idea and said: ‘With the greatest of pleasure’.

One might have expected this quarrel to be forgotten as easily as their previous quarrels. But for some reason this particular flare-up was not forgotten. If two men’s lives are in harmony, they can quarrel, be wildly unjust to one another and then forget it. But if there is some hidden discord, then any thoughtlessness, any careless word, can be a blade that severs their friendship.

Such a discord often lies so deep that it never reaches the surface, never becomes conscious. One violent, empty quarrel, one unkind word, appears then to be the fateful blow that destroys years of friendship.

This senseless kindness is condemned in the fable about the pilgrim who warmed a snake in his bosom. It is the kindess that has mercy on a tarantula that has bitten a child. A mad, blind, kindness. People enjoy lookng in stories and fables for examples of the danger of this senseless kindness. But one shouldn’t be afraid of it. One might just as well be afraid of a freshwater fish carried out by chance into the salty ocean.

The harm from time to time occasioned a society, class, race or State by this senseless kindness fades away in the light that emanates from those who are endowed with it.

This kindness, this stupid kindness, is what is most truly human in a human being. It is what sets man apart, the highest achievement of his soul. No, it says, life is not evil!

This kindness is both senseless and wordless. It is instinctive, blind. When Christianity clothed it in the teachings of the Church Fathers, it began to fade; its kernel became a husk. It remains potent only while it is dumb and senseless, hidden in the living darkness of the human heart – before it becomes a tool or commodity in the hands of preachers, before its crude ore is forged into the gilt coins of holiness. It is as simple as life itself. Even the teachings of Jesus deprived it of its strength.

People struggling for their particular good always attempt to dress it up as a universal good. They say: my good coincides with the universal good; my good is essential not only to me but to everyone; in achieving my good, I serve the universal good.

And so the good of a sect, class, nation or State assumes a specious universality in order to justify its struggle against an apparent evil.

Even Herod did not shed blood in the name of evil; he shed blood in the name of his particular good. A new force had come into the world, a force that threatened to destry him and his family, to destroy his friends and his favourites, his kingdom and his armies.

But it was not evil that had been born; it was Christianity. Humanity had never before heard such words: ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged. For what judgement ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again… But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you… Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.

And what did this doctrine of peace and love bring to humanity? Byzantine iconoclasticism; the tortures of the Inquisition; the struggles against heresy in France, Italy, Flanders and Germany; the conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism; the intrigues of the monastic orders; the conflict between Nikon and Avvakum; the crushing yoke that lay for centuries over science and freedom; the Christians who wiped out the heathen population of Tasmania; the scoundrels who burn whol Negro villages in Africa. This doctrine caused more suffering than all the crimes of the people who did evil for its own sake…

(Yershov’s Father) described their fifty-day journey, in winter, in a cattle-wagon with a leaking roof; day after day, the dead had travelled alongside the living. They had continued the journey on foot, the women carrying their children in their arms. Yershov’s mother had been delirious with fever. They had been taken to the middle of the forest where there wasn’t a single hut or dug-out; in the depths of winter they had begun a new life, building camp-fires, making beds out of the spruce branches, melting snow in saucepans, burying their dead…

‘The will of Stalin,’ he said without the least trace of anger or resentment. He spoke as simple people speak about a force of destiny, a force that knows no weakness or hesitation.

An electronic machine can carry out mathematical calculations, remember historical facts, play chess and translate books from one language to another. It is able to solve mathematical problems more quickly than man and its memory is faultless. Is there any limit to progress, to its ability to create machines in the image and likeness of man? It seems that the answer is no.

It is not impossible to imagine the machine of future ages and millennia. It will be able to listen to music and appreciate art; it will even be able to compose melodies, paint pictures and write poems. Is there a limit to its perfection? Can it be compared to man? Will it surpass him?

Childhood memories… tears of happiness.. the bitterness of parting… love of freedom… feelings of pity for a sick puppy… nervousness… a mother’s tenderness… thoughts of death… sadness… friendship… love of the weak… sudden hope… a fortunate guess … melancholy … unreasoning joy …. Sudden embarrassment…

The machine will be able to recreate all of this! But the surface of the whole earth will be too small to accommodate this machine – this machine whose dimensions and weight will continually increase as it attempts to reproduce the peculiarities of mind and soul of an average inconspicuous human being.

Fascism annihilated tens of millions of people.

A conversation between two Bolsheviks in a Siberian gulag:

‘Listen now,’ he said, sitting up in bed. ‘Listen, my friend. This will be the last time I call you like this.’

‘Don’t talk like that,’ said Abarchuk. ‘You’re going to live!’

‘I’d sooner undergo torture, but I have to say this… You listen too,’ he added, turning to the corpse. ‘What I’m going to say has to do with you and your Nastya… This is my last duty as a revolutionary and I must fulfil it… You’re someone very special, comrade Abarchuk. And we met at a very special time – our best time, I think… Let me begin now. First. We made a mistake. And this is what our mistake has led to. Look! You and I must ask this peasant to pardon us… Give me a fag. What am I saying? No repentance can expiate what we’ve done. I have to say this… Secondly. We didn’t understand freedom. We crushed it. Even Marx didn’t value it – it’s the base, the meaning, the foundation that underlies all foundations. Without freedom there can be no proletarian revolution… Thirdly. We go through the camp, we go through the taiga, and yet our faith is stronger than anything. But this faith of ours is a weakness – a means of self-preservation. On the other side of the barbed wire, self-preservation tells people to change – unless they want to die or be sent to a camp. And so Communists have created idols, put on uniforms and epaulettes, begun preaching nationalism and attack in the working class. If necessary, they’ll revive the Black Hundreds… But here in the camp, the same instinct tells people not to change, not to change during all the decades they spend here – unless they want to be buried straight away in a wooden jacket. It’s the other side of the coin.’

The people at the hospital had been struck by her calm and the number of questions that she had asked. They hadn’t appreciated her inability to understand something quite obvious – that Tolya was no longer among the living. Her love was so strong that Tolya’s death was unable to affect it: to her, he was still alive.

She was mad, but no one had noticed. Now, at last, she had found Tolya. Her joy was like that of a mother-cat when she finds her dead kitten and licks it all over.

A soul can live in torment for years and years, even decades, as it slowly, stone by stone, builds a mound over a grave; as it moves towards the apprehension of eternal loss and bows down before reality.

A letter from Anna Semyonovna to her son, Viktor Shtrum from a Ukrainian Ghetto:

Vitya, I’m certain this letter will reach you, even though I’m now behind the German front line, behind the barbed wire of the Jewish ghetto. I won’t receive your answer, though; I won’t be here to receive it. I want you to know about my last days. Like that, it will be easier for me to die.

…

Night is a special time in the ghetto, Vitya. You know, my dearest, how I always taught you to tell the truth – a son must always tell the truth to his mother. But then so must a mother tell the truth to her son. Don’t imagine, Vityenka, that your mother’s a strong woman. I’m weak. I’m afraid of pain and I’m terrified to sit down in the dentist’s chair. As a child I was afraid of darkness and thunder. As an old woman I’ve been afraid of illness and loneliness; I’ve been afraid that if I fall ill, I won’t be able to go back to work again; that I’ll become a burden to you and that you’ll make me feel it. I’ve been afraid of the war. Now, Vitya, I’m seized at night by a horror that makes my heart grow numb. I’m about to die. I want to call out to you for help.

When you were a child, you used to run to me for protection. Now, in moments of weakness, I want to hide my head on your knees’ I want you to be strong and wise; I want you to protect and defend me. I’m not always strong in spirit, Vitya – I can be weak too. I often think about suicide, but something holds me back – some weakness, or strength, or irrational hope.

…

They say that children are our future, but how can one say that of these children? They aren’t going to become musicians, cobblers or tailors. Last night I saw very clearly how this whole noisy world of beared, anxious fathers and querulous grandmothers who bake honey-cakes and goose-necks – this whole world of marriage customs, proverbial sayings and Sabbaths will disappear for ever under the earth. After the war life will begin to stir once again, but we won’t be here, we will have vanished – just as the Aztecs once vanished.

…

Vityenka, I’m finishing this letter and taking it to the ghetto fence to hand to my friend. It’s not easy to break off. It’s my last conversation with you. Once I send it off, I will have left you for ever and you will never know of my last hours. This is our final parting. What can I say to you in farewell, in eternal farewell? That these last days, as during my whole life, you have been my joy. I’ve remembered you at night, the clothes you wore as a boy, your first books….. I’ve closed my eyes and imagined that you were shielding me, my dearest, from the horror that is approached. And then I’ve remembered what is happening here and felt glad that you were apart from me – and that this terrible fate will pass you by!

…

Vityenka… This is the last line of your mother’s last letter to you. Live, live, live forever… Mama.

Somehow the music seemed to have helped him to understand time. Time is a transparent medium. People and cities arise out of it, move through it and disappear back into it. It is time that brings them and time that takes them away….

Such is time: everything passes, it alone remains; everything remains, it alone passes. And how swiftly and noiselessly it passes. Only yesterday you were sure of yourself, strong and cheerful, a son of the time. But now another time has come – and you don’t even know it.

In yesterday’s fighting, time had been torn to shreds; now it emerged again from the plywood fiddle belonging to Rubinchik the barber. This fiddle told some that their time had come and others that their time had passed.

During a German artillery attack on the right bank of the Volga during the Battle of Stalingrad:

Suddenly he realised what had happened: the oil-tanks were on fire. Flaming oil was streaming past towards the Volga.

It seemed impossible to escape from the liquid fire. It leaped up, humming and crackling, from the streams of oil that were filling the hollows and craters and rusing down the communication trenches. Saturated with oil, even the clay and stone were beginning to smoke. The oil itself was gushing out in black glossy streams from the tanks that had been riddled by incendiary bullets; it was as though sheets of flame and smoke had been sealed inside these tanks and were now slowly unrolling.

The life that had reigned hundreds of millions of years before, the terrible life of the primeval monsters, had broken out of its deep tombs; howling and roaring, stamping its huge feet, it was devouring everything round about. The fire rose thousands of feet, carrying with it clouds of vaporised oil that exploded into flame only high in the sky. The mass of flame was so vast that the surrounding whirlwind was unable to bring enough oxygen to the burning molecules of hydro-carbon; a black, swaying vault separated the starry sky of autumn from the burning earth. It was terrible to look up and see a black firmament streaming with oil.

The columns of flame and smoke looked at one moment like living beings seized by horror and fury, at another moment like quivering poplars and aspens. Like women with long, streaming hair, the black clouds and red flames joined together in a wild dance.

The blazing oil formed a thin film over the water, hissing, smoking and twisting as it was caught by the current.

A conversation between and old Bolshevik and a former Tolstoyan in a German concentration camp:

‘Where acts of violence are committed,’ he explained to Mostovskoy, ‘sorrow reigns and blood must flow. I saw the sufferings of the peasantry with my own eyes – and yet collectivisation was carried out in the name of Good. I don’t believe in your “Good”. I believe in human kindness.’

‘So you want us to be horrified when Hitler and Himmler are strung up on the gallows in the name of Good? You can count me out!’

‘You ask Hitler,’ said Ikonnikov, ‘and he’ll tell you that even this camp was set up in the name of Good.’

During these arguments Mostovskoy felt like a man fighting off a jellyfish with a knife. The thrusts of his logic were powerless.

‘The world had progressed no further,’ repeated Ikonnikov, ‘than the truth spoken by a sixth-century Christian’” “Condemn the sin and forgive the sinner.”’.

Linda Grant’s Introduction:

Grossman takes us into the minds of a group of soldiers waiting in the forest: one is full of dire forebodings, one is singing, one is chewing bread and sausage and thinking about the sausage, one is trying to identify a bird, one worries about whether he’d offended his friend, one is composing a farewell poem to autumn, one is remembering a girl’s breasts, one is missing his dog. This passage leads to the substance of Grossman’s central thought, which at the time he was writing could lead to the arrest of a Soviet citizen: ‘The only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for life lies in the individual, in his modest peculiarities, and his right to these peculiarities.’

From Linda Grant’s Introduction:

For Grossman, communism and fascism are ephemera. What matters, what endures, is the individual and the ordinary act of human kindness, indeed the often senseless act of kindness, as when an old Russian woman, about to hoist a brick in the face of a captured German soldier, instead finds to her own incomprehension that she has reached into her pocket and given him a piece of bread. And in the years to come, will still never be able to understand why she did it.

From Linda Grant’s Introduction:

Novels fade, your immersion in their world turns into a faint dream, and then is forgotten. Only great literature grows in the imagination.

The turn of events in Belgium was a product of the German theory of terror. Clausewitz had prescribed terror as the proper method to shorten war, his whole theory of war being based on the necessity of making it short, sharp and decisive. He said the civil population must not be exempted from war’s effects but must be made to feel its pressure and be forced by the severest measures to compel their leaders to make peace. As the object of war was to disarm the enemy, he argued reasonably, ‘we must place him in a situation in which continuing the war is more oppressive than surrender’…

Although 1870s proved the corollary of the theory and practise of terror, that it deepens antagonism, stimulates resistance and ends by lengthening war, the Germans remained wedded to it’. As Shaw said, they were a people with a contempt for common sense.

..

On August 23 placards signed by General von Bulow were posted in Liege, announcing that the people of Andenne, a small town on the Meuse near Namur, having attacked his troops in the most ‘traitorous’ manner, ‘with my permission the General commanding these troops has burnt the town to ashes and has had 110 persons shot.’ The people of Liege were being informed so that they would know what fate to expect if they behaved in the same manner as their neighbours.

..
When Bulow’s army took Namur, a city of 32,000, notices were posted announcing that ten hostages were being taken from every street who would be shot if any civilian fired on a German. The taking and killing of hostages was practised as systematically as the requisitioning of food. The further the Germans advanced, the more hostages were arrested….

Through some peculiar failure of the system, the greater the terror the more terror seemed to be necessary.

“Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans,” Bismark had predicted would ignite the next war. The assassination of the Austrian heir apparent, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, by Serbian nationalists on June 28, 1914, satisfied his condition…

War pressed against every frontier. Suddenly dismayed, governments struggled and twisted to fend it off. It was no use. Agents at frontiers were reporting every cavalry patrol as a development to beat the mobilisation gun. General Staffs, goaded by their relentless timetables, were pounding the table for the signal to move lest their opponents gain an hour’s headstart. Appalled upon the brink, the chiefs of state who would ultimately be responsible for their country’s fate, attempted to back away but the pull of military schedules dragged them forward.

Though a profound student of Clausewitz, Foch did not, like Clausewitz’s German successors, believe in a foolproof schedule of battle worked out in advance. Rather he taught the necessity of perpetual adaptability and improvisation to fit circumstances.

“Regulations,” he would say, “are all very well for drill but in the hour of danger they are no more use … You have to learn to think.”

To think meant to give room for freedom of initiative, for the imponderable to win over the material, for will to demonstrate its power over circumstance.

Though a profound student of Clausewitz, Foch did not, like Clausewitz’s German successors, believe in a foolproof schedule of battle worked out in advance. Rather he taught the necessity of perpetual adaptability and improvisation to fit circumstances.

“Regulations,” he would say, “are all very well for drill but in the hour of danger they are no more use … You have to learn to think.”

To think meant to give room for freedom of initiative, for the imponderable to win over the material, for will to demonstrate its power over circumstance.

“The Guns of August 1914”, Barbara Tuchman

Echoes of the secret meeting of the Committee of Imperial Defence angered the Cabinet members who had been left out and who belonged to the sternly pacifist wing of the party. Henry Wilson learned he was regarded as the Villain of the proceedings and that they are ‘calling for my head’. At this time began the split in the Cabinet which was to be so critical in the ultimate days of decision. The Government maintained the disingenuous position that the military ‘conversations’ were, in Haldande’s words, ‘just the natural and informal outcome of our close friendship with France’. Natural outcome they might be; informal they were not. As Lord Esher with a certain realism said to the Prime Minister, the plans worked out jointly by the General Staffs have ‘certainly committed us to fight, whether the Cabinet likes it or not’.

The Guns of August is an extraordinary example of the role that good history can play in policy making. In an extraordinary historical coincidence, The Guns of August won the Pulitzer Prize in the year before the Cuban Missile Crisis, allowing President Kennedy to learn practical lessons about the relationship between the military and political leaders in the lead up to war that might literally have saved the world. According to Wikipedia:<blockquote>“[President <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy" title="John F. Kennedy">John F. Kennedy</a>] was so impressed by the book, he gave copies to his cabinet and principal military advisers, and commanded them to read it.”<a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guns_of_August#cite_note-3″>[4]</a> In <em>One Minute to Midnight</em> on the Cuban Missile Crisis, Michael Dobbs notes the deep impression <em>Guns</em> had on Kennedy. He often quoted from it and wanted “every officer in the Army” to read it as well. Subsequently, “[t]he secretary of the Army sent copies to every U.S. military base in the world.<a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guns_of_August#cite_note-dallek-4″>[5]</a> Kennedy drew from <em>The Guns of August</em> to help in dealing with the <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis” title=”Cuban Missile Crisis”>Cuban Missile Crisis</a>, including the profound and unpredictable implications a rapid escalation of the situation could have.<a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guns_of_August#cite_note-5″>[6]</a><a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guns_of_August#cite_note-6″>[7]</a></blockquote>

So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration.

<blockquote>That’s some opening line for a history book…</blockquote>

Giresh once drew for me on a piece of paper a diagram of the dance, the choreography of the commuter trains. The Bombay Central contingent stands in the centre of the train from Borivali to Churchgate. The people around them move clockwise around the BC contingent like this: first are the Jogeshwari batch, then Bandra, then Dadar. If you are new to the Bombay trains, when you get on and are planning to get off at, let’s say, Dadar, you must ask, ‘Dadar? Dadar?’ And you will be directed to the precise spot where you must stand to be able to disembark successfully at you station. The platforms are on different sides of the train. There are no doors, just two enormous openings on either side of the compartment. So when the station arrives, you must be in position to spring off, wel before the train has come to a complete stop, because if you wait until it’s stopped, you will be swept back inside by the people rushing in. In the mornings, by the time the train gets to Borivali, the first stop it is always chockfull. ‘To get a seat?’ I ask. Girish looks at me, wondering if I’m stupid. ‘No. To get in.’ This is because the train in from Dadar has started filling up from Malad, two stops ahead, with people willing to loop back.
..

I mention to Girish a statistic I’d read, about the ‘super-dense crush load’ of the trains being ten people per square metre. He stretches out his arm, says, ‘One meter,’ and makes a calculation. ‘More,’ he says. ‘More. In peak time, if I lower my arms like this, I won’t be able to raise it.’ Many movements in the trains are involuntary. You just get carried along; if you’re light, you might not even have to move your legs. In 1990, according to the government, the number of passengers carried in a nine-car train during the rush hour in Bombay was 3,408. By the end of the century, it had gone up to 4,500.

When World War II ended, another catastrophe struck Bombay in the form of the Bombay Rents, Hotel Rates, and lodging House Rates Control Act of 1947 – popularly known as the Rent Act. Bombay is still recovering from the legislative blast. Enacted in 1948, the act froze the rents on all buildings leased at the time at the 1940 levels. In the case of other buildings, the courts were empowered to affix a ‘standard rent’, which, once determined, could never be raised. The act also provided for the transfer of the right to lease the property at the fixed rents to the legal heirs of the tenant. As long as the tenant kepy paying the rent, he could not be evicted; he would not need to renew his lease. This was originally intended as an emergency wartime measure, a five-year provision to protect tenants from inflation and speculation after World War II. Bombay was full of troops early in the war. Accomodations were at a premium; Bombay was bustling. And the newcomers were rich; those who owned property in the city were not blind to this fact. So they hiked rents to whatever the market would bear. Outsiders who came in – Indians – found themselves frozen out of the city. The short-term visitors during the war were in danger of dispossessing the old-timers: thus the Rent Act.

Bu the act, once enacted, proved politically impossible to repeal, since there will always be more tenants than landlords. There are two and a half million tenants in Bombay, the most powerful political lobby in the city. All the political parties are unified in warlike support of the tenants; the Rent Act has been extended more than twenty times…

The Landlords can do nothing but refuse to repair their properties. So there’s no possibility of the housing stock of the island city improving or expanding any times soon, and more of the island city falls down every year. There are 20,000 buildings that are officially classified as dilapidated and need to be renovated by the public agencies; under 1,000 a year are actually improved.
The Greater Bombay region has an annual deficiet of 45,000 houses a year. The amoung to ne construction every year comes up to less than half the number needed. Thus these 45,000 households every year add to the ranks of the slums…

There are also 400,000 empty residences in the city, empty because the owners are afraid of losing them to tenants if they rent them out. Assuming each apartment can house a family of five people, on average, that’s two million people – on-quarter of the homeless – who could immediately find shelter if the laws were to be amended.

The minimum gesture was one that indicated recognition of the discontent the so-called ‘battlers’ felt. If their complaints derived more from unlovely envy than actual hardship, it was all the more urgent to recognise them. The political precondition of the social wage was public acceptance, and the public would only accept what seemed to be just. This was the government’s imperative—to reinvest the social wage with a consensus view of justice. If ‘social justice’ was to be more than a cliché of Labor ideology and government departments, it needed to be vigorously extended to those who worked and earned and had ambition. The answer was not to send everyone in the town or street a cheque, but to assure them all that they were part of the equation and no-one was getting a cheque he did not deserve.

<blockquote>This was absolutely true then, and absolutely true now. Too many on the left fail to appreciate this…</blockquote>

People talk about the ‘political landscape’, but it changes too quickly and unpredictably to be a landscape. It changed before our eyes and often for no apparent reason. Every time you looked it was different. One small cloud would change the colour. An event beyond the horizon, or too deep to comprehend, changed the mood from benign to belligerent in a flash. You would look back on a week or a month and wonder where the change began, but there was no saying. The experts would say they saw it coming, but they had to say it if they were to remain experts. The truth was no-one really knew. It was not a landscape so much as a seascape. That might also help explain why one minute politics seemed huge, like the source of all life itself; and a moment later a sad, puny, unarguable reminder of Nietzsche’s observation that ‘The living are only a species of the dead.’ It might also be why Caligula rode his horse into the waves and commanded Neptune to obey him. Politics was like the sea, though it also looked very like one of those television weather charts that show fronts swirling across the continent at a million times their real speed.

<blockquote>This is interesting, both Michael Oakeshott and Philip Gould have also described the political landscape as an ever changing ocean…</blockquote>

Out of Ireland we have come, Great hatred, little room, Maimed us at the start. I carry from my mother’s womb A fanatic heart.

W. B. YEATS, REMORSE FOR INTEMPERATE SPEECH

The fact is that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesmen-like habits, supplies their demands.

OSCAR WILDE, THE SOUL OF MAN UNDER SOCIALISM

stopitiloveit:

Party likes, Public likes, Winners. Updated to account for feedback.

‘This is a victory for the true believers; the people who in difficult times have kept the faith, and for the Australian people through hard times, it makes their act of faith that much greater.’ He left no doubt that he was claiming it, in fact he might have been still campaigning. ‘It will be a long time before an Opposition tries to divide the country again.’

Keating’s 1993 Election Victory Speech

Politics, as a practice, whatever its pretensions, had always been the systematic organisation of hatreds.

HENRY ADAMS

Very often people would put the very case I had put all week, and I would find myself putting the case to them that had been put to me. All week was spent in first gear going forward, and the weekends engaged reverse. It was tiring and dementing, but it helped me understand why politicians sometimes go strange.

Ah yes, I know this feeling well…

Hewson’s reaction to what Keating believed was a perfectly proper speech to the Queen had touched a nerve. It was a deep insult, and almost certainly intensified by the press reaction to Annita’s missing curtsy. And it probably awoke another half-buried memory, that of his father’s brother who had been captured at the fall of Singapore and murdered on the Sandakan death marches. He berated the Opposition.

“I was told I did not learn respect at school. I learned one thing: I learned about self-respect and self-regard for Australia [this much had been agreed upon—the rest was entirely unexpected]—not about some cultural cringe to a country which decided not to defend the Malayan peninsula, not to worry about Singapore, and not to give us our troops back to keep ourselves free from Japanese domination. This was the country that you people wedded yourselves to, and even as it walked out on you and joined the Common Market, you were still looking for your MBEs and your knighthoods, and all the rest of the regalia that comes with it.”

No-one manipulated symbols better than Menzies, including the Australian flag which he made official by an act of parliament without referendum or public debate. In the half century preceding, three flags had flown in Australia’s name in peace and war—the Union Jack, the Defaced Red Ensign and the Defaced Blue Ensign. The Blue Ensign had flown at Gallipoli and on the Somme, the Red Ensign at the liberation of Changi, the Union Jack here and there throughout. Had they been asked to choose between the three officially approved flags of Australia it is likely the people would have chosen, as Menzies did, the Blue Ensign in preference to the red one or the flag of Great Britain. Even if Menzies had offered alternative designs, including some without the Union Jack, Australians probably would have voted for the one that defined them as Australian Britons. But that was 1954.

If you look at the paintings of the Australian Federation events, the Red Ensign is usually the dominant flag. Many Australian troops in WW1 and WW2 served under the Red Ensign.

It has been proved over and over again that a straight out defensive will always be defeated by a bold offensive and the best and only defence is attack.

H. GORDON BENNETT, WHY SINGAPORE FELL

The Soviet authorities executed around 13,500 of their own soldiers at Stalingrad – equivalent to more than a whole division of troops.

That the Soviet regime was almost as unforgiving towards its own soldiers as towards the enemy is demonstrated by the total figure of 13,500 executions, both summary and judicial, during the battle of Stalingrad.

…
Altogether, over three million Red Army soldiers out of 5.7 million died in German camps from disease, exposure, starvation and ill-treatment.
…

According to some estimates, there had been nearly 600,000 people in Stalingrad, and 40,000 were killed during the first week of bombardment.
…

In the whole Stalingrad campaign, the Red Army had suffered 1.1 million casualties, of which 485,751 had been fatal.

During the huge battles for the northern industrial sector of the city, house-fighting, with local attacks and counter-attacks, had continued in the central districts. One of the most famous episodes fo the Stalingrad battle was the defence of ‘Pavlov’s House’, which lasted for fifty-eight days.

At the end of September, a platoon from the 42nd Guards Regiment had seized a four-story building overlooking a square, some 300 yards in from the top of the river bank. Their commander, Lieutenant Afanasev, was blinded early in the fighting, so Sergeant Jakob Pavlov took over command. They discovered several civilians in the basement who stayed on throughout the fighting. One of them, Mariya Ulyanova, took an active part in the defence. Pavlov’s men smashed through cellar walls, to improve their communications, and cut holes in the walls, to make better firing points for their machine-guns and long-barrelled anti-tank rifles. Whenever panzers approached, Pavlov’s men scattered, either to the cellar or to the top floor, from where they were able to engage them at close range. The panzer crews could not elevate their main armament sufficiently to fire back. Chuikov later liked to make the point that Pavlov’s men killed more enemy soldiers than the Germans lost in the capture of Paris.

One of the better sledges on French Military prowess…

But Lulu saw it differently. “I have no friends. No one likes me,” she announced one day. “Lulu, why do you say that?” I asked anxiously. “Everyone likes you.You’re so funny and pretty.”

“I’m ugly,” Lulu retorted. “And you don’t know anything. How can I have any friends? You won’t let me do anything. I can’t go anywhere. It’s all your fault. You’re a freak.”

As promised, here’s the ending of Sophia’s essay on “Conquering Juliet”:

I didn’t quite understand what was happening until I found myself backstage, petrified, quaking. My hands were cold. I couldn’t remember how my piece started. An old mirror betrayed the contrast between my chalk-white face and my dark gown, and I wondered how many other musicians had stared into that same glass. Carnegie Hall. It didn’t seem right. This was supposed to be the unattainable goal, the carrot of false hope that would keep me practicing for an entire lifetime. And yet here I was, an eighth-grader, about to play “Juliet as a Young Girl” for the expectant crowd. I had worked so hard for this. Romeo and Juliet weren’t the only characters I had learned. The sweet, repetitive murmuring that accompanied Juliet was her nurse; the boisterous chords were Romeo’s teasing friends. So much of me was manifested in this piece, in one way or another. At that moment, I realized how much I loved this music. Performing isn’t easy—in fact, it’s heartbreaking. You spend months, maybe years, mastering a piece; you become a part of it, and it becomes a part of you. Playing for an audience is like giving blood; it leaves you feeling empty and a bit light-headed. And when it’s all over, your piece just isn’t yours anymore. It was time. I walked out to the piano and bowed. Only the stage was lit, and I couldn’t see the faces of the audience. I said good-bye to Romeo and Juliet, then released them into the darkness.

This was an essay that the teenage daughter wrote about learning and performing a piece of music at Carnegie Hall. I think it’s brilliant.

It didn’t upset me that I had revised my dreams for Coco—I just wanted her to be happy. I had finally come to see that Coco was an animal, with intrinsically far less potential than Sophia and Lulu. Although it is true that some dogs are on bomb squads or drug-sniffing teams, it is perfectly fine for most dogs not to have a profession or even any special skills.

Yes, she is talking about whether the family dog should serve a productive purpose in the household (after a lengthy period during which she tried to train the dog)

Personally, I think Debussy was just going through a phase, fetishizing the exotic. The same thing happened to Debussy’s fellow Frenchmen Henri Rousseau and Paul Gauguin, who started painting Polynesian natives all the time. A particularly disgusting variation of this phenomenon can be found in modern-day California: men with Yellow Fever, who date only Asian women—sometimes dozens in a row—no matter how ugly or which kind of Asian. For the record, Jed did not date any Asian women before me.

Given that my wife is Asian, this was…. awkward to read. I can’t even say that I’d never dated an Asian woman before her!

Like every Asian American woman in her late twenties, I had the idea of writing an epic novel about mother-daughter relationships spanning several generations, based loosely on my own family’s story.

As my wife will tell you, I have something of a prejudice against ‘oppressed Chinese woman Lit’…

According to Sophia, here are three things I actually said to her at the piano as I supervised her practicing:

1. Oh my God, you’re just getting worse and worse.
2. I’m going to count to three, then I want musicality!
3. If the next time’s not PERFECT, I’m going to TAKE ALL YOUR STUFFED ANIMALS AND BURN THEM!

In retrospect, these coaching suggestions seem a bit extreme. On the other hand, they were highly effective. Sophia and I were a great mother-daughter fit. I had the conviction and the tunnel-vision drive. Sophia had the maturity, patience, and empathy I should have had, but didn’t.

There’s an old Chinese saying that “prosperity can never last for three generations.

I think I actually agree with this one. At least understand it.

When I was little, my parents had no sympathy for disabled people. In much of Asia, disabilities are seen as shameful, so when my youngest sister Cynthia was born with Down syndrome, my mother initially cried all the time, and some of my relatives encouraged us to send Cindy away to an institution in the Philippines. But my mother was put in touch with special education teachers and other parents of children with disabilities, and soon she was spending hours patiently doing puzzles with Cindy and teaching her to draw. When Cindy started grade school, my mother taught her to read and drilled multiplication tables with her. Today, Cindy holds two International Special Olympics gold medals in swimming.

Everyone is expected to excel in this family…

Unlike your typical Western overscheduling soccer mom, the Chinese mother believes that

(1) schoolwork always comes first;
(2) an A-minus is a bad grade;
(3) your children must be two years ahead of their classmates in math;
(4) you must never compliment your children in public;
(5) if your child ever disagrees with a teacher or coach, you must always take the side of the teacher or coach;
(6) the only activities your children should be permitted to do are those in which they can eventually win a medal; and
(7) that medal must be gold.

Paul Keating on Modesty in 1987:

Keating: This is the great coming of age of Australia. This is the golden age of economic change.

Interviewer: How much credit do you take?

Keating: Oh, a very large part.

“After art deco there’s only fag packets and bottle tops.”

“Other people play the neddies – I perv on buildings.”

“The Labor Party is the only repository of taste in Australian politics. Most of these Tories, like Fraser, have a knowledge of architecture and design that goes no further than wedding-cake Victoriana and grandfather chairs.”

“If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s mock Chippendale.”

Keating on Inflation in 1986, more prescient than he would have intended:

“I could burn inflation out of the economy with a recession, but I would burn the economy with it.”

“It’s the great vista of politics that is so appealing. You know, a finger in every pie. You’re always certain of your own motivation even if you’re never quite sure of anybody else’s. So if it’s a case of backing in somebody to do a job you might as well back in yourself.”

“You know me luv, downhill, one ski, no poles.”

“We’re all stressed. The game I’m in is lubricated by stress. Politics is the clearing house of pressures.”

“If you want to wear the belt, you’ve got to have the fights. And if you won’t have the fights, you’ll have the belt taken off you.”

“We are all given the field-marshall’s baton in the knapsack when we get our pre-selection. I got mine then and it is still tucked away” [1988]

“You were heard in silence, so some of you scumbags on the front bench should just wait a minute until you hear the responses from me…

You were in office from 1949 to 1983 bar three years…. And you left everything the way you found it. The place got old and tired and worn out, just like you are… For 30 years all we had was Black Jack McEwen trowelling on the tariff protection while he was kidding farmers he was representing them. And Liberal Party Treasurers, handed speeches by Treasury officials… they couldn’t even read the speeches, let alone comprehend the stuff. That’s how you ran the Commonwealth. The mandarins ran things… you wouldn’t worry about the detail. Because you NEVER ran the policy. You never RAN the place. We run the departments, we run the policy. We comprehend. We know.”

“If we were providing these policy settings and outcomes in Western Europe, they’d be lighting candles to us in the cathedrals.”

“I guarantee if you walk into any pet shop in Australia what the resident galah will be talking about is micro-economic policy.”

“Stick your head out of the building in any capital city in Australia and it’s a sea of cranes. The economy is so robust that it’s taken a pickaxe to stop it. We’re laying into it with a lump of four-by-two to try and slow it down. In the past, if you hit it with a lump of four-by-two, it would fall to bits. And stay in bits.”

“All these ex-Treasury drop-outs around the place advising me how we ought to best do things – the fact is, look, all these people would be better off in the Australian Treasury. We’ve lost years of experience. They have dropped out to write a bloody newsletter for some merchant bank. It’s pointless and useless.”

“What it boils down to is wider nature strips, more trees and we’ll all make wicker baskets in Balmain. Then we’ll all live in renovated terraces in Balmain and we’ll have the arts and crafts shops and everything else is bad and evil.”

“These people are trying to make my party into something other than it is… They’re appendages. That’s why I’ll never abandon ship, and never let those people capture it.”

Mostar is famous above all for its Ottoman architecture symbolised by the old footbridge which arches high over the Neretva River…

Hercegovina is divided by the river Neretva, whose moth is in Croatian territotyr but which soon enters Hercegovina. The Serbs consider the Neretva the dividing line between Serb and Coat territory. The Croats however claim that many of the communities on the eastern side of the bank are Croatian and so must come under their jurisdiction…

This war between the Serbs and Coats is but one of three wards which broke out in BiH. The straightforward struggle between Serbs and Croats intersects with the second war in Mostar. This is a war of territorial acquisition initiated by Bosnian Serbs and the JNA at the expense of the Moslems. The Croats claim all of Mostar for themselves while the Serbs say that the town on the right side of the Neretva is theirs. Nobody asks the Moslems, however, who are the largest national group in the city…

During the Second World War, the Serb, Croat and Moslem population of Mostar was famous for resisting the temptation of mutual loathing which gripped the rest of western and eastern Hercegovina and the Neretva Valley. Mostar Croats saved Serbs, Serbs protected Moslems and communal life revived in Mostar faster than almost anywhere else in BiH after the war. However, Mostar’s military airport and its strategic position doomed the town in 1992….

The struggle was symbolised by the fate of Mostar, a city that was both homely and majestic. Over a period of months, eastern Mostar, with a predominantly Moslem population, was bombarded daily with between 100 and 600 shells. On 9 November 1993, a group of Bosnian Croat soldiers pummelled the famous sixteenth centry Ottoman bridge spanning the Neretva river in Mostar. It is difficult to describe to those who do not know the region well just how deep a psychological wound this inflicted on the vast majority of citizens in the former Yugoslavia. This single act seemed to represent the utter senselessness and misery of the entire conflict.

Mostar is one of the saddest places I’ve visited. While the bridge has been rebuilt and is utterly gorgeous, the city itself still feels just… broken.

“But I really had better go bathe so that the women may not have the trouble of washing my body when I am dead.” One of those present, suddenly recalled from the charm of his talk to the stark facts, cried: “How shall we bury you?”

“Any way you like,” was the amused answer. “Only be sure you get hold of me and see that I do not run away.”

And turning to the rest of the company: “I cannot make this fellow believe that the dead body will not be me. Don’t let him talk about burying Socrates, for false words infect the soul. Dear Crito, say only that you are burying my body.”

Socrates believed that goodness and truth were the fundamental realities, and that they were attainable. Every man would strive to attain them if he could be shown them. No one would pursue evil except through ignorance. Once let him see what evil was and he would fly from it. His own mission, Socrates believed, was to open men’s eyes to their ignorance and to lead them on to where they could catch a glimpse of the eternal truth and goodness beneath life’s confusions and futilities, when they would inevitably, irresistibly, seek for a fuller and fuller vision of it.

He may have been somewhat optimistic in this regard…

The truth to reconcile these truths (Aeschylus) found in the experience of men, which the men of his generation must have realized far beyond others, that pain and error have their purpose and their use: they are steps of the ladder of knowledge:

God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

Pindar prays: “With God’s help may I still love what is beautiful and strive for what is attainable.”

One for the political idealists to take on board.

The tyrants departed from Greece unlamented, and never to be revived again even in wishful thinking, except for Plato’s rulers who were to be given absolute power only upon the condition that they did not want it, a curious parallel to the attitude prescribed by the early Church. A man appointed to the episcopacy was required to say—perhaps still must say, forms live so long after the spirit once in them is dead—“I do not want to be a bishop. Nolo episcopari.” To the Fathers of the Church as to Plato, no one who desired power was fit to wield it.

One for those Ministers who rule out leadership challenges…

Æschylus too had his conception of the price of wisdom:

“God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”

This passage is as characteristically Greek as the quotation from Job is Hebrew. There is little repetition, little enhancement, in the statement. The thought that wisdom’s price is suffering and that it is always paid unwillingly although sent in truth as a gift from God, is stated almost as briefly and almost as plainly as is possible to language.

When St. Paul in his great definition says that the things that are seen are temporal and the things that are not seen are eternal, he is defining the realm of the mind, the reason that works from the visible world, and the realm of the spirit that lives by the invisible.

Would ‘things that are not seen’ include faceless men

Of all that the Greeks did only a very small part has come down to us and we have no means of knowing if we have their best. It would be strange if we had. In the convulsions of that world of long ago there was no law that guaranteed to art the survival of the fittest. But this little remnant preserved by the haphazard of chance shows the high-water mark reached in every region of thought and beauty the Greeks entered.

An intriguing thought…

“How do you know if you’re in love? What does it feel like?”

“Well first of all, you completely forget the world around you. Your friends and family just become invisible. All you can do is think about him day and night. When you see him, it’s as if he’s filled your eyes with light; and when you don’t see him, the thought of him eats away at your heart. You wonder where he is and what he’s doing every minute of the day. You invent his whole life, you live it for him: your eyes see for him, your ears hear for him… ”

Moon Pearl takes a sip of tea before going on, “In this first stage you don’t know what the other is thinking or feeling. It’s the most poignant part. Then you open your hearts to each other and you have a brief moment of incredible happiness… “

“I’d love to tell you but I can’t. Just look at me. Don’t you worry about that until tomorrow, goodness me.”

“I’m not talking to you on what you want to talk… Well I’m not interested in anything you say. You’re always so wide of the mark and generally so critical so I won’t even bother answering what you’ve got to say. Anybody else?”

“Don’t you worry about it, we are looking after it”

On being asked a question on condoms by a reporter: “Let’s come clean, Elizabeth. I thought you looked a decent sort of girl. You don’t mean to tell me that you are in that category also? What’s your lifestyle Elizabeth? What do you really think? Do you really think this is the way for the nation to go? We are being asked to say ‘you go ahead and play around, the Government will help you’?!

“I’m not interested in that, or in anything anyone else says”

“The greatest thing that could happen to the State and the nation is when we can get rid of the media. Then we can live in peace and tranquillity and no one would know anything.”

“You don’t tell the frogs anything before you drain the swamp.”

“The Great Barrier Reef is really big. The people who say it’s being ruined don’t know how big it is.”

“We won’t be able to sit on uranium. Firstly because it would not be right and secondly because it would be wrong.”

“I oppose tobacco tax on principle. It is a new tax and Queensland does not have new taxes.”

“If I had been building the dam and they had ordered me to stop the dam, do you think I would have stopped it, just because some guy in Canberra or somewhere else said it was unconstitutional?”

“We are a federation and I support a federation but we would operate much more effectively and efficiently and really surge ahead if we were on our own.”

“We will work with [Bob Hawke] provided he is working in Queensland’s interests. If he attempts to interfere in any shape or form, then it’s on his head. And if he’s so unsure of himself and so far committed to the communists around his shoulders and breathing down his neck, then God help Australia.”

“What is good for Queensland is good for Australia.”

“I don’t mind being called the Flying Peanut. I think this is unique: in each of the three Government aircraft, we’ve gone more than the distance from here to the moon.”

“I really worry about Queensland. I lose a lot of sleep because I don’t know what will happen when I go.”

“Queensland will not be dragged into the condom culture”

“There is no animal, no beast on this earth that resorts to the sort of tactics that these characters [homosexuals] do. And I think that it is disgusting that they offer to give their blood and cause the death of so many people.”

“The day care concept, boiled down, means leaving you child with someone else to bring up while you do what you like – go to work, learn pottery etc.”

“No Goannas, No Gays”

“Land rights is a communist plot to set up land bases that could be used for subversive activities by other countries as well as for guerrilla training centres for other countries.”

“Aborigines are as wealthy as Arab oil sheiks…. They wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for the United States of America, together with our people, who fought the Coral Sea battle.”

“Is sex the only thing that matters ? Is there nothing else ?” Father threw the pile of manuscripts to one side, shaking his head furiously.

“Let me ask you a question: how come you only pick up on the sex in what I write, and nothing else?”

“A writer ought to offer people something positive, something to look up to, ideals, aspirations, democracy, freedom, stuff like that.”

“Dad, I’m telling you, all that stuff, it’s all there in sex.”

Our gross national product … if we should judge America by that – counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

The time is important for us to rise in defence of politics. There is no greater need than for educated men and women to point their careers toward public service as the finest and most rewarding type of life.

As Pericles said:

“We differ from other states in that we regard the individual who holds himself aloof from public affairs as being useless. Yet we yield to no one in our independence of spirit and complete self-reliance.”

The root problem (of unemployment) is in the fact of dependency and uselessness itself.

Unemployment means having nothing to do – which means nothing to do with the rest of us. To be without work, to be without use to one’s fellow citizens, is to be in truth the Invisible Man of whom Ralph Ellison wrote.

The answer to the welfare crisis is work, jobs, self-sufficiency, and family integrity; not a massive new extension of welfare; not a great new outpouring of guidance counsellors to give the poor more advice.

We need jobs… that lets a man say to his community, to his family, to his country, and most important, to himself, “I helped to build this country. I am a participant in its great public ventures. I am a man.”

RFK’s prose means that he’s frequently remembered as the most ideological of the 1960s liberals, but this is historical revisionism. Ideologically speaking, Bobby would have been a member of the ‘Labor Right’. He was vilified by his contemporaries on the left for his principled opposition to communism and the welfare state. His economics and his values were very much of the progressive centre. He would have been a strong advocate of mutual responsibility had the term been used at the time.

President Kennedy then went on to point out that “Law is the strongest link between man and freedom”.

I wonder in how many countries of the world people think of law as the “link between man and freedom.”

We know that in many, law is the instrument of tyranny, and people think of law as little more than the will of the state, or the party – not of the people.

In a democratic society law is the form which free men give to justice. The glory of justice and the majesty of law are created not just by the Constitution – not by the Courts – nor by the officers of the law – nor by the lawyers – but by the men and women who constitute our society – who are the protectors of the law as they are themselves protected by the law.

During One of RFK’s speeches at a university medical school, a student in the crowd at a speech at a University asked “Where are you going to get all the money for these federally subsidized programs you’re talking about?”

“From You. Let me say something about the tenor of that question and some of the other questions. There are people in this country who suffer. I look around this room and I don’t see many black faces who are going to be doctors. You talk about where the money will come from… Part of civilised society is to let people go to medical school who come from ghettos. You don’t see many people coming out of the ghettos or off the Indian reservations to medical school. You are the privileged ones here. It’s easy to sit back and say it’s the fault of the federal government, but it’s our responsibility too. It’s our society, not just our government, that spends twice as much on pets as on the poverty program. It’s the poor who carry the major burden of the struggle in Vietnam. You sit here as white medical students while black people carry the burden of the fighting in Vietnam.”

John Adams once said that he considered the founding of America part of “A divine plan for the liberation of the slavish part of mankind all over the globe.”

This faith did not spring from grandiose schemes of empires abroad. It grew instead from confidence that the example set by our nation – the example of individual liberty fused with common effort – would spark the spirit of liberty around the planet; and that once unleashed, no despot could suppress it, no prison could restrain it, no army could withstand it.

In Africa, I tried to answer those who asked, “If the United States is fighting for self-determination in Vietnam, then how can it not support the independence struggle of Angola and Mozambique?”

I answered unsatisfactorily, for there is no real answer. Yet to the questioners, it is less our intention than our pretension that is objectionable. Thus does false principle destroy the credibility of our wisdom and purpose that is the true foundation of influence as a world power.

I think the knowledge came to him at last — only at the very last. But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude — and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating.

Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of somber pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror — of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, — he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath — ‘The horror! The horror!’

The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there — there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were, — No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it — this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled, and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity — like yours — the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar.

Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you — you so remote from the night of first ages — could comprehend.

And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything — because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage — who can tell? — but truth — truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudder — the man knows, and can look on without a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet that truth with his own true stuff — with his own inborn strength. Principles? Principles won’t do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags — rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief.

“Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no family. They don’t belong no place….With us it ain’t like that. We got a future. We got somebody to talk to that gives a damn about us.”

…”An’ why? Because…because I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that’s why.”

“I also have tickets to a… a Mills Vanilla concert, if you’d like to go,” I tell her casually.

Confused, she asks, “Really? Who?”

“Milla… Vanilla,” I repeat slowly.

“Milla… Vanilla?” she asks uncomfortably.

“Milla… Vanilla,” I say. “I think that’s what their name is.”

She says, “I’m not sure.”

“About going?”

“No… of the name.” She concentrates, then says, “I think they’re called… Milli Vanilli.”

I pause for a long time before saying, “Oh.” She stands there, nods once.

“What do you think I do?” And frisky too.

“A model?” She shrugs. “An actor?”

“No,” I say. “Flattering, but no.”

“Well?”

“I’m into, oh, murders and executions mostly. It depends.” I shrug.

“Do you like it?” she asks, unfazed.

I’ve been a big Genesis fan ever since the release of their 1980 album, Duke. Before that I didn’t really understand any of their work, though on their last album of the 1970s, the concept-laden And Then There Were Three (a reference to band member Peter Gabriel, who left the group to start a lame solo career), I did enjoy the lovely “Follow You, Follow Me.

Phil Collins’ solo efforts seem to be more commercial and therefore more satisfying in a narrower way, especially No Jacket Required and songs like “In the Air Tonight” and “Against All Odds” (though that song was overshadowed by the masterful movie from which it came) and “Take Me Home” and “Sussudio” (great, great song; a personal favorite) and his remake of “You Can’t Hurry Love,” which I’m not alone in thinking is better than the Supremes’ original.

I have many issues with this book, but using an extended monologue about the protagonist’s obsession with Genesis and Phil Collins as an illustration of his pathology was quite brilliant…

Have you ever heard this: “Don’t maul, don’t suffer, don’t groan – till the first draft is finished”?’

‘Who said that?’ ‘Tennessee Williams.’

If one can demonstrate that there was such a plan (to remove the President of Cypress), and that Kissinger knew about it in advance, then it follows logically and naturally that he was not ostensibly looking for a crisis – as he self-pityingly asks us to believe – but for a solution. The fact that he got a crisis, which was also a hideous calamity for Cyprus and the region, does not change the equation or under the syllogism. It is attributable to the other observable fact that the scheme to remove Makarios, on which the ‘solution’ depended, was in practice a failure. But those who willed the means and wished the ends are not absolved from guilt by the refusal of reality to match their schemes.

I found this to be an interesting quote, given that the last sentence in particular could be equally used to condemn Hitchen’s position on the Iraq War…

Many if not most of Kissinger’s partners in crime are now in jail, or are awaiting trial, or have been otherwise punished or discredited. His own lonely impunity is rank; it smells to heaven. If it is allowed to persist then we shall shamefully vindicate the ancient philosopher Anarchasis, who maintained that laws were like cobwebs: strong enough to detain only the weak, and too weak to hold the strong.

I can’t see how this isn’t the perfect description of ‘International law’…

The Luftwaffe bombed (Fromelles) on 27 May 1940, destroying some buildings when British ammunition trucks parked there were hit and exploded. The following day the Germans occupied the town once again. Then things went along uneventfully until 25 June, when France surrendered to the Germans. That very day, Chancellor Adolf Hitler, the former humble lance-corporal who had served with the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment at Fromelles, swept back into the village in triumph. With his entourage, including former comrades from 1916, Hitler spent the evening near Fromelles quietly celebrating victory over France at the second attempt. Hitler and his comrades-in-arms then toured the battlefield and were photographed outside the blockhouse where he took refuge during the battle from the advancing Australians, about 800 meteres along Rue de la Biette, down the hill from the Fromelles church and behind Rouges Bancs. Hitler then moved off to visit his old billet and his regiment’s cemetery in Fournes, never to be seen again in Fromelles.

So theoretically, an enterprising Aussie at Fromelles in WW1 could have shot Hitler and prevented the Holocaust!

Bean highlights the work of one of the rescuers, 40 year old Victorian farmer, Sergeant Simon Fraser of the 57th Battalion, and quotes from a letter Fraser later wrote him:

“It was no light work getting in with a heavy weight on you back, especially if he had a broken leg or arm and no stretcher bearer was handy. You had to lie down and get him on your back; then rise and duck for your life with the chance of getting a bullet in you before you were safe.

Fraser recalled finding a group of wounded near the German line and, after bringing them in safely, hearing another call for help. He went again and eventually found this man too. He was a big strapping man wounded in the thigh – too heavy for Fraser to carry on his back – so he helped him into a sheltering shell hole and promised to return with a stretcher. As he moved off, he heard another wounded Digger near by call: ‘Don’t forget me, cobber!’. Fraser was able to return with stretchers and bring them both in safely.

The cry, ‘Don’t forget me, cobber!’ has come to symbolise the selfless devotion of those who risked, and often lost, their lives to bring in their wounded mates…. And it prompted the wonderful sculpture by Peter Corlett that today stands in the Australian Memorial Park at Fromelles. This statue immortalises Simon Fraser’s heroism and stands as a superb symbol of the sacrifice and devotion that characterised the battle and its aftermath. Fraser survived Fromelles and was promoted to Lieutenant in April 1917. Sadly, he fell at the battle of Bullecourt and, ironically, his body was never found.

The reality was that, from midnight on the day of the battle, the flow of casualties had swamped the capacity of the medical staff and the stretcher-bearers and the front-line trenches were chock full of the wounded and dying… While the front lines were a confusion of wounded and dying, many more still lay exposed in no-man’s land. … Bean, who had rushed to Fromelles from the Somme when he heard about the battle, was greatly moved:

“Especially in front of the 15th Brigade, around the Laies, the wounded could be seen raising their limbs in pain or turning hopelessly, hour after hour, from one side to the other …

There followed a stillness never again experienced by the 5th Division in the front trenches. The sight of the wounded lying tortured and helpless in no-man’s land, within a stone’s throw of safety but apparently without hope of it, made so strong an appeal that more than one Australian, taking his life in his hands, went out to tend them.”

The Diggers organised rescue parties, and once darkness fell they crept out on their hands and knees and scoured no-man’s land to try to find and bring back those who were still alive. The sheer numbers of the wounded mean that they quickly ran out of stretchers and were forced to carry the rescued on their backs. Hugh Knyvett was one of them:

“One lad, who looked about fifteen, called to me: ‘Don’t leave me sir’. I said: ‘I will come back for you sonny’, as I had a man on my back at the time. In that waste of dead one wounded man was like a gem in sawdust – just as hard to find.

Four trips I made before I found him, then it was as if I had found my young brother. Both of his legs had been broken, and he was only a schoolboy, one of those overgrown lads who had added a couple of years in declaring his age to get into the army. But the circumstances brought out his youth, and he clung to me as though I were his father. Nothing I have ever done has given me the joy that the rescuing of that lad did, and I do not even know his name.”

At one stage Knyvett heard a groan. Unbelievably, he claimed this was a rarity. For, despite their terrible injuries, the wounded tried everything they could not to cry out:

“Why. Some had gritted teeth on bayonets, others had stuffed their tunics in their mouths, lest they should groan. Someone had written of the Australian soldier, in the early part of thw war, that, ‘they never groan’ and these men who had read that would rather die than not live up to the reputation that some newspaper correspondent had given them.”

In one remarkable attempt to reach safety, a group of eleven men of the 8th Brigade, under the leadership of Captain Frank Krinks, decided to make a run for it as a group, vowing to stay and help any of their number who found trouble. Having decided to leave their weapons and rely on a surprise dash to safety, they struck trouble in the second German trench when two of them were captured. But, as they had promised, the others turned on the captors and frightened the stunned Germans into releasing them. They then bolted into no-man’s land. Krinks and three companions eventually reached safety in the front of the British trenches. But, as Bean noted, there was a tragic sequel:

‘The 30th Battalion was immediately after the fight sent to reserve, but Krinks and his three companions returned to the trenches as soon as it was dusk, and, taking a stretcher, went out into no-man’s land bringing in Wells on a stretcher when a sentry of their own brigade catching sight of the figures, fired, killing Wishart and Watts with a single shot.’

When they realised they were being shelled by their own guns, the Diggers reacted sharply, as Hugh Knyvett recalled:

‘Our first message… was very polite ‘ we preferred to be killed by the Germans, thank you’… two of our officers being killed, our next message was worded very differently, and we told them that ‘if he fired again we would turn our machine guns on them’. I was sent back to make sure that he got the message… this battery did not belong to our division.”

This is a reminder that the most dangerous threat to the long-term survival of the human species is the human race itself. Of course, this has been obvious for some time. My generation and the one before us grew up with the fear of a nuclear holocaust. Even though the number of nuclear missiles has been reduced, the list of countries possessing this technology has grown, and with it the probability that one day somebody will push the button. My children’s generation has grown up with the threat of global warming, a process whose consequences could be as destructive, albeit much slower. The human race is not very quick to understand novel threats. Just a few years ago, the president of the United States refused to ratify the Kyoto protocol on the basis that the ‘American way of life is not negotiable’, as if the core of American civilisation and values were the four-wheel drive vehicles produced by three large corporations that barely survived the end of this president’s term in office.

In this context, the one new message that the HIV epidemic, as chronicled in this book, should bring home is that well-intentioned human interventions can have unpredictable and disastrous microbiologic consequences. Mankind has emerged through a process of natural selection over billions of years. Apart from ourselves, there is probably no other living organism on earth that could destroy us completely, because if such organisms had existed, we would not have managed to reach our current status in the first place. But as I write these lines, there is renewed interest in sending humans on a wonderful voyage to Mars and back. The kids who watched Neil Armstrong’s small steps on the moon are now engineers, pilots, administrators and politicians. They think that their own generation also needs to push back a new frontier, that this is part of the human experience, and perhaps something that will provide an answer to perennial questions about the meaning of life. For a long time I have thought that space adventures were very unwise. What is the point of setting up a small human colony somewhere in orbit around the earth or even further away, when we are systematically destroying, day in and day out, the only planet which can sustain human life? Would it not be smarter to spend our resources and ingenuity on scientific adventures whose purpose would be to protect our earth rather than taking the risk of importing into our cherished planet a completely different form of microscopic life, perhaps not even based on DNA, and whose innocuous nature has not been proven by billions of years of natural selection and co-evolution with us?

HIV transmission among paid plasma donors were reported in Valencia, Spain and Pune, India. In the latter city, among commercial plasma donors, HIV prevalence was 0% in November 1987 but 78% seven months later, illustrating the exponential transmission of HIV through unhygienic plasma collection practices.6–11 These outbreaks, although tragic in their own right, were dwarfed by what happened in China in the early 1990s, several years after the risk of HIV transmission via plasmapheresis was understood, and a decade after the transmission of HCV had been documented in the same Chinese centres. In rural areas, poor farmers were recruited by ‘plasma pimps’, to sell plasma to increase their meagre income. They received $6 per donation, which could be repeated twice a month in theory, more often if donors attended more than one collection centre. There were several hundred plasma collection stations set up by blood product companies. In the most-heavily affected provinces of Henan, Anhui, Shanxi, Hubei, Hebei, Shandong and Jilin, approximately 250,000 paid donors (a quarter of a million!) acquired HIV.12–14

…

What do all these stories have in common? Poor people looking for a quick source of income and willing to sell their blood repeatedly. Profit-driven blood collection centres where a small number of entrepreneurs try to make as much money as possible by cutting costs, re-using needles, syringes and tubings, while being unaware of or not caring about the risk of transmitting blood-borne viruses. A lucrative market for these blood products, either locally or internationally. Finally, a ‘patient zero’ who introduces the pathogen.

Over the next two years, Voronoff performed twelve testicular transplants, from chimpanzee to man. It was not possible at the time to perform microvascular surgery, and Voronoff thought he could avoid the necrosis of the transplanted organ by actually grafting thin slices, with the assumption that small new blood vessels would form to re-vascularise the organ. That was very optimistic. Furthermore, nobody at the time had any understanding of the immunological rejection of a transplanted organ, presumably very severe when that organ was not of human origin.
…
Even if Voronoff might have had sincere scientific aims initially, he quickly realised the immense commercial potential of the procedure. Here was a renowned surgeon, holding a chair at the Collège de France, who had invented a procedure that could act not only as a surgical Viagra but prolong life and enhance quality of life for decades. Many rich and old men were willing to pay a fortune for a shot at eternal youth. Voronoff even travelled to India in 1929 to perform a testicular transplant on a maharajah. Although some of his fortune may have been inherited from his second wife, Voronoff certainly made a lot of money out of this surgical adventure, allowing him to spend the last three decades of his life in a fancy villa on the Italian Riviera, where he had set up a chimpanzee breeding colony, probably as a public relations ploy.
..
Such a lucrative business interested colleagues in France and overseas, and Voronoff‘s biographer estimated that about 2,000 testicular transplants were performed in Paris, Bordeaux, Nice, Lille, Alger, London, Rome, Turin, Milan, Genoa, Vienna, Madrid, Lisbon, Porto, Berlin, Alexandria, Constantinople, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Buenos Aires, Valparaiso, Rio and even in Hanoi. Voronoff himself claimed to have performed 475 transplants. Eventually, the procedure was completely discredited for a number of reasons, including the fact that Voronoff had started performing ovarian transplants (inserting a chimpanzee ovary into a woman and vice versa), which raised extremely serious ethical concerns (could one of these females become pregnant with a half-chimp, half-human baby?). Voronoff became the butt of popular humour in France and abroad. He died in 1951, aged eighty-five.

OK, I’m willing to concede that the history of science may well be even stranger than the history of politics…

Cuba stands out as the country with not only the lowest HIV prevalence in the Americas but also the highest diversity: about half of Cuban isolates are either non-B subtypes or recombinants. This reflects the acquisition of multiple subtypes of HIV-1 (or recombinants) by some of the internationalistas, the soldiers that Castro sent to fight alongside the leftist Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola during the civil war in Angola, and very limited opportunities for transmission upon their return to the island. The whole Cuban population was screened for HIV in 1986–9; seropositives were quarantined for years in AIDS sanatoria and brainwashed with preventive messages (Cuba was indeed the only country that tried to control HIV like an infectious disease, rather than making it a human rights issue). At the peak of their intervention in 1986, 35,000 Cuban troops were stationed in Angola, which became one of the most corrupt and capitalist regimes in Africa, while smaller numbers of Cuban soldiers were stationed in sixteen other African countries. Recent studies documented a high diversity in HIV-1 isolates in Angola, where all non-B subtypes found in Cuba are present. This illustrates how political and military events, even ideologies, had a measurable impact on the transmission of HIV.

It’s interesting when reading a scientific account of the transmission of disease how much politics and sociological factors influence the process…

The politics of grievance can be harsh and it is never easy moderating a group where the sole focus is immigration. But immigration, like crime, like welfare abuse, is not an issue we can avoid; we must deal with it head on. Not just because of the sense of unfairness that people hold but also because it is for many an issue of democratic involvement. Immigration has changed Britain, culturally and ethnically, and in my view for the better, but this was not a process over which the electorate felt they had sufficient control or influence. It has left many who had little power in the first place feeling yet more disempowered. So much of this is about control, insecurity and fear.

I think this holds for Australia too…

Perhaps most important, the politics of grievance is about control and empowerment and voice. If people are heard, if they have genuine influence over their communities and their lives, then they will feel less resentment. Paradoxically, the more people are empowered to act, the less extreme their opinions may be. The politics of identity and of empowerment must go hand in hand. We must hear the people on these issues, we must be tough where necessary and above all competent, but we must be confident that in the end progressive solutions will work, and conservative solutions will not. The answer to unfairness is not more unfairness; the left must win fairness back in all its various forms.

Despite the small numbers sampled, and the obvious lack of empirical rigour they entail, focus groups are the form of polling that I prefer. Although their scientific validity is less than that of an opinion poll, they are in a sense truer because you can talk to people as they really are, not as abstractions captured in a single moment. You gain access to real people with ideas and opinions that connect both to the past and to the future, who do not care much or at all about politics, and who think at one and the same time at many different levels. The complexity of public opinion reflects the complexity of politics; people have paradoxical views and opinions that cannot be reduced to easy choices or one-dimensional solutions. At its best a focus group is a place where you can dig beneath the surface and feel the forces gathering below.

Gould’s (positive) view of Focus Groups is far more nuanced than the hostile views of many who oppose them…

David Marquand calls this the progressive dilemma:

‘How to transcend Labourism without betraying the labour interest; how to bridge the gap between the old Labour fortresses and the potentially anti-Conservative but non-Labour hinterland; how to construct a broad-based and enduring social coalition capable of not just giving it a temporary majority in the House of Commons, but of sustaining a reforming government thereafter.’

This is the test by which the New Labour government should be judged. When critics attack New Labour for caution, for failing to be radical enough, early enough, for making tough economic decisions, for trying to impose order and discipline, they are trapped in the conservative mind-set that kept Labour in opposition for so long. If a progressive coalition can govern Britain for a majority of the time then more poverty will be removed and more real change implemented than could ever be achieved by short, sharp, occasional spasms of radicalism. Lasting change can only happen over time, as part of a progressive project for government. The alternatives have failed Britain and its people. We lack schools that are good enough, hospitals that are modern enough, streets that are safe enough. The British people lack skills, opportunity and ambition. Our public infrastructure has been allowed to crumble, our national identity is uncertain. We have let people who do not use our schools run our education system, and people who do not use our health service run the NHS. This is the price Labour has paid for losing the last century. We need a new long-term radicalism, to ensure that progressive instincts become rooted in the institutions of the nation, just as conservative instincts were in the past. New Labour may have won an election, but now it has to win a century.

This is a fine articulation of why electoralism must underpin the progressive project.

Greenberg says of the use of modern polling techniques in political campaigning:

“It doesn’t need defending. It is part of the democratisation of modern elections. Just as governments have changed, just as parties have changed, campaigns have changed. Democracy has changed. The institutions that used to be effective in mediating popular sentiment have atrophied, and have lost their ability to articulate. So the trade unions, for example, just don’t have the kind of base that they used to have. If you want to know what working people think, you can’t turn to these organisations which can effectively represent their members and so there is no choice but to go to people directly through these means. Politicians have always used various instruments to try to judge where the public stood. And now polls and focus groups are the best available means.”

Central to the War Book and one of my core beliefs is that you must be absolutely honest about your opponent’s strengths, and your own weaknesses, and that you should put them in writing. It is a risk putting sensitive information down on paper, but in my view unless you document hard campaigning truths they will never be fully taken into account and will run the risk of being dodged or discounted.

In this I took my lead from Joe Napolitan, who told me:

‘If a strategy is not in writing, it does not exist.’

Unless strategy and the inputs into strategy are written down and agreed, they will not be there. They will be just an impression of a strategy: you will think you have it, but under the pressure of campaigning it will melt.

I really believe this. If nothing else, the process of writing something down clarifies your thinking and forces you to consider your position in its totality…

Campaigning is about message. People think message just means a few words, often repeated, but message is much more: it is the rationale that underpins your campaign. It is your central argument, the reason you believe that the electorate should vote for you and not your opponents. This rationale is the most important thing to get right in a campaign. You must be clear about why you are seeking to form a government, or why you wish to be Prime Minister. A message can be formed in part by opinion polling and the attitudes and values of the electorate, but it must also come from the substance of what you represent: what is true about you, as a party or a politician.

This is a point that is often forgotten by young hacks….

For as long as I can remember I have believed that there is a continuing battle between progressive and conservative forces. For most of this century conservative forces have won in Britain, and for much of the 1980s they were winning across the world – winning (in part) because the right could campaign well, and the left could not. I felt humiliated by these defeats, but it wasn’t me that was hurt: it was the millions of ordinary working people who deserved a better life, but who were repeatedly let down by progressive parties which campaigned poorly and did not seem to think that it mattered.

A point that is too little recognised. Thatcherism was just as much a product of the failures of successive Labour Oppositions as it was the preceding Labour Government.

The Conservatives reacted immediately with the most famous advertisement of the campaign. It appeared on the same Sunday in the News of the World, the Mail on Sunday and Sunday Times, and portrayed Tony Blair with red, demonic eyes, alongside the caption: ‘One of Labour’s leaders, Clare Short, says dark forces behind Tony Blair manipulate party policy in a sinister way.’

…

(Mandelson’s) immediate instinct, which was the right one, was to react and not to ignore it. His strategy was to twist the advertisement from being a depiction of the dark and sinister forces behind Tony Blair, into portraying Tony Blair as satanic, which was incredible and would rebound on the Conservatives. For this he needed a bishop to condemn it. Peter Hyman discovered that the Bishop of Oxford was outraged by the advert and had put out a strong quote condemning the Tories for accusing Blair of being the devil. Hyman faxed it to Campbell, who said it was the one thing to make him smile that holiday. The advertisement was immediately rebranded on our terms. Not sinister forces manipulating Blair, but the desperate Tories labelling Blair as the devil.

And also important, still, was what (Stanley) Greenberg called ‘the basics’: ‘One of the pre-occupations of Old Labour was a preoccupation with what the public often saw as “bizarre” issues: homosexuals, immigrants, feminists, lesbians, boroughs putting their money into peculiar things. Voters think that a serious party that represents the ordinary person focuses on things that matter to people in their lives, “addresses things that concern us”.’ After ten years of reform and modernisation, and despite the great strides taken by Blair, Labour was still a prisoner of its past.

A good point. It’s not that voters are particularly hostile to these issues, they just can’t be the defining issues of a progressive political party. Your core policy platform has to be relevant to the primary concerns of the bulk of voters…

In December 1989 BMP had developed the concept of the ‘aspirational classes’. They argued that the key determinants of the next election would be ‘financial well-being: spending power, taxation, interest rates’. Qualitative research conducted at the time showed that despite the recession, Labour was seen as more likely to accentuate economic difficulties than the Conservatives. The key target group was the aspirational classes – working-class achievers and the middle class under pressure. This is the group I came to call the new middle class. I define them as those people who call themselves middle- and upper-working-class, estimated by the British Social Attitudes survey to comprise 50 per cent of the population. I came from this class and believe I understand it. It is the pivot around which progressive politics must revolve.

It’s bold to define the aspirational class as the ‘pivot’ of progressive politics, but I think it’s both justified and pragmatic. What is the progressive movement about if not lifting people up? And given the demographic shrinkage of the ‘working class’ as traditionally understood, new groups needed to be embraced to form a governing coalition for progressive politics…

Joyce Gould, the Labour Party’s director of organisation, and Patricia Hewitt had asked MORI’s Bob Worcester to conduct some focus group research for the ‘Jobs and Industry’ campaign. ‘We decided we needed some focus groups on language to see if the voters were understanding a word of what we were saying,’ Hewitt said. And Bob took out some prompt cards and stuff, and this came back with the wonderful finding that when you said ‘public ownership’ to the British people, they said, ‘That’s wonderful.’ They were really in favour of public ownership. But when we asked what they thought public ownership meant, they said, ‘It means privatisation – selling the shares to us, the public.’ We asked what they thought about nationalisation, and they said, ‘No, that’s a bad idea. That’s ownership by the government.’ There was a wicked suggestion in one of the campaign strategy meetings that we should brief all our people to talk about public ownership rather than nationalisation.

A really good example of why it’s so dangerous to rely on poll results without trying to dig beneath the surface of public opinion.

Following on from Monday’s post, here’s the second half of my reading for 2011:

1. “Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa”, Jason Stearns – A history of the Congo Wars; a twenty year conflict that involved a dozen countries and cost six million lives that most people have never heard about. Virtuoso journalism to tackle a conflict this complex and little known in the west and make it digestible to the average reader. Even better, Stearns doesn’t over-reach. His only conclusion is that there are no simple solutions to stabilising this region.  Buy – Borrow – Toss
2. “Revolutionary Road”, Richard Yates – A story of suburban ennui in 1950s America. I know a lot of people loved this book, but I was a bit underwhelmed. I guess I’m just unsympathetic to people complaining about the stultification of middle class life. Honestly, there are more important things to be angst ridden about. Buy – Borrow – Toss
3. “The Jungle Book”, Rudyard Kipling – A collection of short stories of life in Raj era India told through the eyes of animals and children. Reading Kipling, it’s easy to see how the English both achieved and destroyed so much around the world. Buy – Borrow – Toss
4. #“Recollections of a Bleeding Heart 10th Anniversary Edition”, Don Watson – A personal history of life inside the PMO during the Keating Prime Ministership. Elegiac. Naïve. Inspirational. Buy – Borrow – Toss
5. “Psmith Journalist”, P.G.Wodehouse – Psmith moves to the United States and takes up journalism. I’ve largely forgotten this already. It’s Wodehouse, It’s Psmith. For better and for worse. What more do you need to know. Buy – Borrow – Toss
6. “Fifty Orwell Essays”, George Orwell – A collection of Orwell’s best non-fiction. From Colonial Burma to Revolutionary Spain, from the coal mines of Northern England to the literary circles of London, Orwell’s searing insight cuts to the nub of the great political and moral questions of the 20^th Century. The best 99c you’ll ever spend on Amazon. You could teach an ethics course from this collection. Buy – Borrow – Toss
7. “Cannery Row”, John Steinbeck – A novella about the inhabitants of the small Californian coastal community of Monterey. Brilliant. Every time I finish a Steinbeck I feel invigorated and enriched. A New Year Resolution to properly work through his catalogue. Buy – Borrow – Toss
8. “Columbine”, Dave Cullen – A detailed examination of the events leading up to and following the Columbine school massacre informed by the diaries and videos of the killers and thousands of interviews with members of the community. A great piece of journalism. A necessary one too to debunking the many myths that were perpetuated by the media in the aftermath of the shooting. Fascinating. I was surprised to learn that the shooting had nothing to do with bullying or teen alienation, or even for that matter shooting (it was really a failed bombing inspired by Timothy McVeigh).  Buy – Borrow – Toss
9. “A Visit From The Goon Squad”, Jennifer Egan – The stories of a loosely linked set of characters in and around the music business interacting across time. I found the meta-debate around this book difficult to overcome. Jennifer Egan keeps getting thrown up as an example of a major female US literary fiction writer that doesn’t get the same credit as the Franzens’, Eugenidies’, Dellilo’s etc because US literature is a boys club. AVFTGS is cited as a book that doesn’t get the critical acclaim it deserves because female writers are overlooked (which is weird given all the prizes it won!). So I can’t help but compare the book to those guys – and I honestly don’t think it’s anywhere near being in their league. Maybe I am an unconscious misogynist, but I think Franzen’s work is significantly better than hers. My overall feeling is that it’s not substantial enough to be enduring. I can’t imagine as many people reading this book in ten years as are currently reading The Corrections for example.  The thing that worries me the most about the book in retrospect is how little of it I can actually remember just a few months on. I think by jumping between characters and time so frequently, she sacrificed the ability to focus on the substance to a greater extent. I thought most of the characters were only really sketched out rather than really developed in detail. Maybe that was the intention, but at the end of the book I found myself wishing that it was a whole book about Sasha, or maybe only three characters (maybe the guy in the last chapter and Benny as well?). But as it was I found it too fleeting. I don’t know. My feelings on this book are unstable, but I was ultimately unsatisfied. I did love the chapter written in powerpoint though.  Buy – Borrow – Toss
10. “The Spy Who Came in From The Cold”, John LeCarre – Cross, double cross or triple cross? A cold war spy thriller of the first order. Not just a pot boiler either, but a literary work of real substance. Explores an interesting thread about the means and ends of politics and international relations and the consequences for individuals. When I was a teenager I loved Tom Clancy books, I wish I’d found LeCarre earlier instead.  Buy – Borrow – Toss
11. “Hiroshima”, John Hersey – The seminal account of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima, told through the experiences of half a dozen survivors. Originally commissioned by the New Yorker and published shortly after the bombing, it’s brilliantly written with a tone pitched perfectly for the subject matter. Buy – Borrow – Toss
12. “Power Without Glory”, Frank Hardy – Roman à clef of the life of the corrupt Labor power broker, John Wren. Surprisingly good. Genuinely readable, even if it flagged a bit at the end. Insights into the nature of power and its exercise abound. Buy – Borrow – Toss
13. “300”, Frank Miller and Lynn Varley – Graphic novel portrayal of the battle of Thermopylae. After reading The Watchmen, V for Vendetta and 300, it’s pretty clear to me that there’s a crypto-fascist aspect to his world view. It’s a bit creepy.  Buy – Borrow – Toss
14. “Marvels”, Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross – A graphic novel linking the stories of Marvel’s main superheros and filling new comers in on the universe. Supposedly one of the best of the superhero genre, but failed in a narrative sense for mine. Without emotional valence. One for the true fans only. Buy – Borrow – Toss
15. “The Defender”, Jordan Conn – The story of 7’7’ Sudanese basketball oddity Manute Bol. No, he didn’t really kill a lion. Yes, he lived a bizarre, comical and tragic life regardless. A very interesting read. Incidentally, I really love the Kindle Single format (cheap, easily consumable in short bites), but I can’t seem to find much of interest in the Kindle store. I think they need to find a better way of helping people find content. Buy – Borrow – Toss
16. “The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better”, Tyler Cowen – Academic economist and Internet polymath Tyler Cowen posits a theory for the stagnation of economic growth in the United States. No more free land to be productively utilised and under-educated people to have their human capital enriched means that the US (and the west more broadly) needs to work harder at the things that drive growth (science, R&D etc). Buy – Borrow – Toss
17. “The Unfinished Revolution: How New Labour Changed British Politics Forever”, Philip Gould – A key Labour strategist from 1987-2010 writes about the modernisation of the UK Labour party and the six UK election campaigns that he advised on. Along with “It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear” by Frank Luntz, this is the book that I would most recommend for anyone interested in a practical handbook on political campaigning. Gould gets the big picture of campaign strategy, but also sets out in detail how to go about operationalising strategy during an election. First class. Buy – Borrow – Toss
18. “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea”, Barbara Demick – A US journalist pieces together the details of ordinary life in one city in North Korea through the stories of a exiles living in South Korea. If you have even the slightest curiosity about North Korea (particularly in light of the death of Kim Il Jung, you ought to grab this book. It’s fascinating and insightful. Close to the best book I read this year. Buy – Borrow – Toss
19. “Disgrace”, JM Coetzee – A South African Professors’ liaison with a student leads him to flee Cape Town in disgrace to live with his daughter in rural South Africa. A well told reflection on masculinity, fatherhood, power, repression, hatred and suffering.  Buy – Borrow – Toss
20. “Reluctant Fundamentalist”, Mohsin Hamid – Overachieving Pakistani working in the finance sector in New York has his relationship with the United States turned upside down by the September 11 attacks. I’m not sure that I fully bought the format of this book (it is told in form of a discussion between the protagonist and an unidentified American in a Pakistani city), but I did like the multiple layers of allegory that Hamid played with in this book. Layers upon layers of meaning everywhere you look. Buy – Borrow – Toss
21. “The Light on the Hill: the Australian Labor Party, 1891-1991”, Ross McMullin – The authoritative history of the ALP commissioned for the Party’s 100^th anniversary. A long, but rollicking account of the drama filled history of the Australian Labor Party. Buy – Borrow – Toss
22. “Goodbye Jerusalem: Night Thoughts of a Labor Outsider”, Bob Ellis – Ellis recounts the lead up to the 1998 Federal Election and his surreal independent candidacy in Bronwyn Bishop’s electorate when she was spruiked as a future Liberal leader. Yes, I know he’s an arsehole with some really unpleasant views, but so was Hemmingway etc etc. Fact is, the guy can write and his melancholy but earnest tone is ideally suited to discussions of the Labor party. My copy is pre-defamation pulping J  Buy – Borrow – Toss
23. “Farewell Babylon: Further Journeys in Time and Politics”, Bob Ellis – The same gimmick as Goodbye Jerusalem, but for the 2001 election campaign. Like most sequels, not quite as good despite arguably better material. Buy – Borrow – Toss
24.  “The Naked and the Dead”, Norman Mailer – A company of US soldiers is assigned to a mission on a Pacific Island in World War 2. Over long and overblown in parts, but somehow compelling despite it. I can see why it was a literary sensation when it was published. Holds up well today, 50 years after it was first published.  Buy – Borrow – Toss
25. “The Hunger Games Trilogy”, Susanne Collins – Teen girl forced to fight for survival against other teens on a reality tv show in a fantasy dystopia. I can see why it’s become such a big seller. Entertaining, but ultimately insubstantial. A significant drop off in quality in the second and third books. Buy – Borrow – Toss
26. “Learning to be a Minister: Heroic Expectations, Practical Realities”, Anne Tiernan and Patrick Weller – An academic account of the experience of being a Minister in the incoming Rudd Government informed by anonymous interviews with ministers, staffers and public servants. I picked this up at the Parliament House book store on a business trip when I had run out of reading material. An interesting flashback to what it was like in the early months of the Rudd Government. Fun to play “Guess Who” with the blind quotes. Buy – Borrow – Toss
27. “Barefoot Gen (Barefoot Gen)”, Nakazawa Keiji -  A manga cartoonist who was a ten year old boy in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb hit tells the story of the lead up to and the aftermath of the bombing. I found this book via a recommendation from Maus’ Art Spiegelman. It’s excellent, though not in Maus’ league. Barefoot Gen is more directly aimed at children and has a more explicit didactic purpose. Which means you get a lot of the more extreme manga conventions (over the top fights, children biting off people’s fingers etc) and expository detours explaining events (using Gen’s anti-war father and Kamikaze volunteer brother as foils). Which is fine and important, but just pitched at a different level to Maus. (Graphic Novel) Buy – Borrow – Toss
28. #“The Trial of Henry Kissinger”, Christopher Hitchens – Hitchens reviews the evidence for the trial of Henry Kissinger for crimes against humanity in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Bangladesh, Argentina etc, etc. This really is a shocking read. I’m not adverse to real politik in service of a greater cause, but Hitchens makes a pretty compelling case that Kissinger knowingly and repeatedly commissioned horrific crimes solely to advance his personal power within the US establishment. This was a quickie Hitchens’ read prompted by his sad early death. I read this book some time ago and remembered it as an archetype takedown. It held up on re-reading – authoritative, brutal and erudite. I’m really going to have to get around to reading Hitch 22 next year. Buy - Borrow – Toss

A few reading goals for next year:

• Poetry – I’ve never read poetry at length (other than Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon who I feel don’t really count for some reason). So next year I want to get through at least “Leaves of Grass”, some Frost and some Ruthven Todd. Is Philip Larkin any good? I’ve heard people I respect speak favourably about him. I really have no background in poetry so it’s tough to know where to start.
• Getting back into Asian literature – You wouldn’t know it from the list above, but I’ve probably read more Chinese and Japanese literary fiction than any other genre. They are distinct oeuvre’s to be clear, but they share an obtuseness and non-linearity that I really like. The core of the story is always submerged and you have to really work to get what’s really going on. I love it. Anyway, it’s tough to get most of what I like for the Kindle which has led me to deprioritise it. I do however I have a bit of a hard cover queue accumulating. I have the new Ha Jin and a few Ma Jian’s backed up in my reading queue. I also want to get around to finishing the Sea of Fertility Tetraology. I loved Spring Snow and Temple of the Golden Pavilion, but ran out of energy for the other two books.

(Hugh) Gaitskell began in modernising terms: society and the economy were changing, and Labour had to change too. Labour, he said, had to adapt itself,

“to be in touch always with ordinary people to avoid becoming small cliques of isolated, doctrine-ridden fanatics, out of touch with the main stream of social life in our time”.

For many, Michael Foot was not a leader who tried but failed woefully, but a martyr, a champion to ‘the cause’. Too many saw him as Gwyn Williams did:

“There he stands, Member for Ebbw Vale, bone of our old bone, blood of our very blood, in his white hair and his cheekbones, his humanity, his generosity, his literacy and his stick, the only legitimate heir in the apostolic succession.”

About three years ago I resolved to make enough time in my life to read one book a week. I’ve always read quite a bit, but reading being a domestic activity, it had always been the subject of the vicissitudes of domestic life. Busy periods at work, social commitments or just lack of overall motivation meant that it was easy to come home after a long day and veg out on the couch. Reading requires just that little bit more effort and commitment than other readily available entertainment substitutes and suffers as a result. As The Onion rightly points out – it’s easier to watch a Two Hour Biggest Loser Special than read the collected short stories of Vladimir Nabokov  (metaphorically speaking).

Which meant that while reading was the cultural and intellectual activity that I found most rewarding, I didn’t do as much of it as I wanted. So I decided that I’d approach reading like you would an exercise regime; slogging through the periods of fatigue and lack of motivation with the aim of building enough momentum and a strong enough habit to keep me going in perpetuity. I wouldn’t sacrifice enjoyment or comprehension in the name of achieving this goal, but I’d prioritise my time throughout the week accordingly.

It’s not almost three years later and I’m still going strong. I’m a bit surprised I’ve lasted this long, but very pleased too. It feels great to get through a real volume of (non-work) reading – like getting mentally fit. I bet this is what Buddhists feel like J

Anyway, while I’ve blogged quick book reviews and extracts that I’ve liked for some time (at my tumblr Blogging the Bookshelf), I thought it might be fun to blog my impressions of my year in reading. So here’s part one of what I read this year in a broadly chronological order (my Kindle’s My Clippings file allows me to retrace most of my reading history, but with hard copy books the exact timing is uncertain).

1. “A Single Man”, Christopher Isherwood – A closeted gay man in 1950s America loses his partner in a car crash. Achingly sad and closely observed. Very effectively conveys the smothering nature of grief. I read it to be much more pessimistic than the recent movie adaptation, but a good friend with a better perspective on the issues came to the opposite conclusion so I may be wrong. Buy – Borrow – Toss
2. “The Berlin Stories”, Christopher Isherwood – Writers, artist and bohemians in Weimar Berlin push the boundaries of social norms in the shadow of the rise of Nazism. Tells the story of a homosexual English writer in Berlin without ever conceding the existence of homosexuality. Layered with subtext and obtuseness, so exactly to my taste. Buy – Borrow – Toss
3. “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, Oscar Wilde – English dandy and aristocrat enters into faustian bargain to preserve his youthful good looks. Reading Wilde is like running around a playground of the English language. Witticisms and homilies abound. Buy – Borrow – Toss
4. “Tender is the Night”, F Scott Fitzgerald – A wealthy American couple deal with a wife’s mental illness and a husband’s insecurities while jet setting through 1930s Europe. Ah, Dick Diver – The most unfortunately named protagonist in literature. An interesting on though. The relationship between the two protagonists is beautifully and painfully realistic. Buy – Borrow – Toss
5. “Casino Royale”, Ian Fleming. – You all know what it’s about – spies and poker or something.  Trash. Unreconstructed misogyny and homophobia. Not as mendacious as others in the James Bond series (eg Goldfinger), but still probably a net negative contribution to society. That aside, I still can’t help myself from reading them. A guilty pleasure I guess. The books are darker than the films. Buy – Borrow – Toss
6. “The God Delusion”, Richard Dawkins – God doesn’t exist and if you continue to believe otherwise in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary you are either stupid or mentally ill.  You can’t disagree with the logic or the verdict, but the way the case is put makes you wonder what is the point. It’s not the kind of book that’s going to persuade many with religious faith. Overall more irritating than enlightening. Buy – Borrow – Toss
7. “Lust, Caution”, Eileen Chang – A novella of short stories set in WW2 Shanghai. This book makes you feel like you’re listening to middle aged Chinese women gossiping to each other in a tea room. A gossipy and melodramatic feel, but well constructed and ultimately effective. The circumstances of Chang’s personal life adds a layer of intrigue to reading the title story. Buy – Borrow – Toss
8. “The Maltese Falcon”, Dashiell Hammett – Hard bitten private eye juggles competing gangsters and a femme fatale in search of a fabulous antique. Not quite as good as The Thin Man, but still one of the best private eye mysteries. Sam Spade is one of the great characters of American literature. Buy – Borrow – Toss
9. “The Big Sleep”, Raymond Chandler – Private Eye gets caught up in the nefarious affairs of a wealthy patriarch and his amoral daughters. This book comes highly rated in the genre and was certainly enjoyable, but thinking back now, there’s very little of it that I can recall. There witty dialogue, I remember that much. Buy – Borrow – Toss
10. “The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War”, David Lebedoff –A dual biography of George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh, with the premise that these contemporaries lives shared more parallels than their very different personas would suggest. An enjoyable read, but ultimately the premise was stretched too far to be entirely satisfying. I found some of the themes enlightening (eg Orwell’s life as an Etonian trying to hide the fact and Waugh’s as a non-Etonian trying to pretend otherwise. Sadly, my strongest memory of this book was the factoid that Evelyn Waugh’s first wife was also named Evelyn! Buy – Borrow – Toss
11. “Why Orwell Matters”, Christopher Hitchens – One of the best essayists of our time riffs off the work of the best essayist of all time providing historical context and modern interpretation. A first class introduction to Orwell’s body of work and its significance for modern politics. All young progressives would do themselves a favour by picking up this book – it will take the blinkers off and dramatically accelerate the evolution of your political thinking. Buy – Borrow – Toss
12. “After the Quake: Stories”, Haruki Murakami – A collection of surrealist short stories loosely linked by the Kobe earthquake. This is the collection with the story about the giant frog. I am a fan of Murakami’s oeuvre, but I find myself feeling a sense of dread every time I come across one of his increasingly lengthy stand alone novels. In my view, his short story collections are invariably much more enjoyable. You get the same feeling of whimsy and disorientation, but in short bursts that don’t feel like a slog into the unknown. This isn’t quite up there with Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman for my mind, but is excellent nonetheless. Buy – Borrow – Toss
13. “Darkly Dreaming Dexter”, Jeff Lindsay – Origin story of serial killer who works as a police forensics analyst by day and kills serial killers by night. I hadn’t seen the Dexter TV series so I picked this up to see what it was all about. It’s trash, but harmlessly so. Buy – Borrow – Toss
14. “Up in the Air”, Walter Kirn – Shallow road warrior businessmen who specialises in facilitating redundancies confronts the emptiness of his existence. Cleverly written, but pretty insubstantial and emotionally unfulfilling. I liked the movie (and George Clooney) better. Buy – Borrow – Toss
15. “An Education”, Lynn Barber – UK journalist recounts her free loving youth and career as a journalist. I’m a bit embarrassed that I read this book for some reason. It’s a bit of a chick’s book right? The opening chapters dealing with her high school romance were engaging, but I lost interest as the book progressed. Buy – Borrow – Toss
16.  “The Right Stuff”, Tom Wolfe – A non-fiction account of the lives and culture of the military test pilots who comprised NASA’s first manned space program (the Mercury missions). A tad gung ho and rah rah, but justifiably so. A genuinely awe inspiring story of real life human courage and endeavour. Great fun too. The Chuck Yeager stories in particular are mind blowing. Buy – Borrow – Toss
17. “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother”, Amy Chua – Intense first generation immigrant mother outlines her parenting philosophy in the form of a memoir of her experiences raising two over-achieving daughters. Far and away the funniest book I read all year. Chua’s complete lack of perspective or self-awareness produces a series of laugh out loud statements of parenting myopia. It’s amazing to think that just a year after this book was released, the phrase ‘Tiger Mother’ now requires no explanation. A phenomenon. Buy – Borrow – Toss
18. “Parentonomics: An Economist Dad Looks at Parenting”, Joshua Gans – An economics professor tries to apply economic principles to the task of parenting with his own children as guinea pigs. Sadly for Josh, this book didn’t take off in quite the same way as Tiger Mother! But as a new dad with an economics background, I enjoyed it and picked up a few useful tips (Make sure your baby sleeps as far away from mum and dad as possible!). Buy – Borrow – Toss
19. #“Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics”, Joe Klein – Charismatic Southern Governor seeks the Democratic Presidential nomination in the face of scandal and ethical quandaries. Originally published anonymously and hewing very closely to the real life circumstances of Bill Clinton’s 1992 Presidential campaign, this is probably the second best fictional account of US politics (It will take a lot to knock off Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men” from the number one spot in this regard). Gets at the core of why people become involved in politics and the trade offs they face once they are players. It’s telling that Joe Klein came to sympathise more with politicians than journalists after his experience with the media after he was outed as the book’s author. Buy – Borrow – Toss
20. “Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays”, David Foster Wallace – DFW in his purest form; high quality, high brow, humanist essay writing. If you find him insufferably affected – you’ll hate it. Includes the majority of his most iconic essays eg The Las Vegas Porn Convention, The Maine Lobster Festival and Peta, Robert Federer and Authority and American Usage (AKA his grammar pedantry spray. Buy – Borrow – Toss
21.  “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine”, Michael Lewis – An account of the causes of the 2008 global financial crisis told through the stories of the investors who saw it coming, and bet against the world financial system. Lewis is a seriously talented communicator and story teller. A cogent and comprehensible explanation of the causes of the GFC with real narrative structure. Really quite impressive when you think about it.   Buy – Borrow – Toss
22. “Democracy, an American novel”, Henry Adams – An 1870s New York society woman moves to Washington in search of a political education.  The dialogue was amusing at times and some of the political philosophy was interesting and insightful but I found this book to be a bit of a drag to get through. The novelistic form has evolved for the better since this book was first published in 1880. Buy – Borrow – Toss
23. “In Cold Blood”, Truman Capote – Two drifters murder an upstanding rural American family. The birth of the ‘true crime’ genre. I know the reputation of this book and I don’t necessarily disagree with it, but I wasn’t personally taken by this book. Can’t put my finger on exactly why. Maybe I was just in a funk myself at the time. Buy – Borrow – Toss
24.  “Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts”, Clive James – An extraordinarily wide ranging collection of essays about the figures James considers to be most important to the cultural life of the 20^th century. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant writing. Fascinating, meaty subject matter engaged by a luminescent intellect. At times, reading this felt overpoweringly rich; like eating pigs trotters stuffed with sweetbreads and truffles. I had to give my mind breaks from this book with less enriching fare in order to get through it all. Buy – Borrow – Toss
25. “Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. I. My Father Bleeds History. & II. And Here My Troubles Began”, Art Spiegelman – A cartoonist tells the story of his parent’s experiences in the holocaust and his own experiences in drawing out the tale. You probably know this book’s shtick: the Nazis are drawn as cats, the Jews as mice and a complex and intense multi-generational family story is told in a way that is accessible to all readers. This book isn’t just excellent in it’s genre, it’s excellent for any genre. It deserves to be more widely read. There are a number of books that I’ve bought with the conscious intention of having them sitting invitingly on bookshelves for my children to sneak away to read for themselves. I really hope they grab Maus one day. Buy – Borrow – Toss
26.  “Persepolis”, Marjane Satrapi – An Iranian woman tells the story of her childhood in revolutionary Iran and her return to the country as a young woman. Maus put me onto a bit of a graphic novel bender. I was excited to explore a new genre that I’d barely touched before. Persepolis was a bit of a let-down in this context. It’s not bad, but Maus meant my expectations were set too high for me to really love this book.  Buy – Borrow – Toss
27.  “Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth”, Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos H. Papadimitriou, Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna – A graphic novel about Bertrand Russell’s ambition to ‘prove’ the logical foundations of mathematics. I’ve long loved Bertrand Russell’s pop-philosophy and essays, but I’ve never found a way into his own philosophy. It’s really mind bending stuff. How can you ‘prove’ that 1 +1 = 2 from first principles? Russell never worked it out, but this cartoon makes it reasonably straightforward to understand the questions he was posing.  Buy – Borrow – Toss
28. “The Walking Dead: 1 – 85”, Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, Cliff Rathburn and Tony Moore –  (Graphic Novel), The Zombie apocalypse in cartoon form. Harmless fun if you like that sort of thing. Buy – Borrow – Toss
29. #“Anthills of the Savannah”, Chinua Achebe – An allegory of post-colonial politics in a fictional African nation told through the relationship between three childhood friends, a soldier, a journalist and a public servant. One of Achebe’s more underrated books. Lyrically written and very insightful on the nature of power, jealousy, hatred and repression. Buy – Borrow – Toss

# Re-reads.

Part 2 tomorrow (or later in the week if I get distracted).

A few observations on general patterns looking back on this list:

• 28 Fiction v 30 Non-Fiction books. A pretty good balance. I found myself wanting to read more fiction through the year than I did, but I kept getting way laid by high quality non-fiction. I blame Tyler Cowen. 
• When you’re ripping through a book a week, the really big tomes (eg The Naked and The Dead, Cultural Amnesia), feel even longer than they are. I’ve also found myself deferring some very long books I’ve wanted to read because of this feeling (IQ84 & Freedom). I might have to be more disciplined about this. Maybe require one 1000+ pager every six months?
• I finished three essay collections this year (Orwell, Clive James and David Foster Wallace). This isn’t a genre I’d spent much time with before, but I very much enjoyed it.
• A weirdly morbid year in non-fiction; the Holocaust, Hiroshima times two, African Wars, North Korea, AIDS, the Columbine shooting. Very dark and not consciously selected. I may have to contemplate the significance of that.

From Tony Blair’s Foreword:

As The Unfinished Revolution shows, Labour spent the 1980s desperate to escape the true reasons for defeat, taking refuge first in the madness that the country voted for Margaret Thatcher in 1979 because Labour was insufficiently left-wing; and then making a series of tactical steps toward change that were almost always one election cycle behind necessity, and never added up to the strategic shift required.

Tony Blair’s Foreword from:

There is a slight tendency on the left to believe that the people are misguided when they reject us; a bit like the Gnostics of the early Christian Church, who thought the path to salvation was the attainment of a superior knowledge only to be grasped by a select few. We can be exasperated with those who don’t share our view, rather than trying to understand, self-critically, why they don’t.

…Calling this a ‘slight tendency’ is a ‘slight understatement’!

Tony Blair’s Foreword:

One area where I completely agree with Philip, and which is a reproach to my leadership, is that in government I did not pay sufficient attention to continuing to build the party. There are a multitude of reasons for this – not least the enormous pressure of governing – but it was a fault.

The truth is that building a modern party base is even more important in government. … the way in which modern political parties need to function has to take account of the very different way people lead their lives today.

Halfway home, Lucy, to his surprise, speaks. ‘It was so personal,’ she says. ‘It was done with such personal hatred. That was what stunned me more than anything. The rest was … expected. But why did they hate me so? I had never set eyes on them.’

He waits for more, but there is no more, for the moment. ‘It was history speaking through them,’ he offers at last. ‘A history of wrong. Think of it that way, if it helps. It may have seemed personal, but it wasn’t. It came down from the ancestors.’

But he is a father, that is his fate, and as a father grows older he turns more and more – it cannot be helped – toward his daughter. She becomes his second salvation, the bride of his youth reborn. No wonder, in fairy-stories, queens try to hound their daughters to their death!

He sighs, Poor Lucy! Poor Daughters! What a destiny, what a burden to bear!

“Have you heard of the janissaries?”

“No,” I said.

“They were Christian boys,” he explained, “captured by the Ottomans and trained to be soldiers in a Muslim army, at that time the greatest army in the world. They were ferocious and utterly loyal: they had fought to erase their own civilisations, so they had nothing else to turn to.”

Salaries have not risen in line with inflation, the rupee has declined steadily against the dollar, and those of us who once had substantial family estates have seen them divided and subdivided by each – larger- subsequent generation. So my grandfather could not afford what his father could, and my father could not afford what his father could, and when the time came to send me to college, the money simply was not there.

But status, as in any traditional, class-conscious society, declines more slowly than wealth…

To Father Kleinsorge, an Occidental, the silence in the grove by the river, where hundreds of gruesomely wounded suffered together, was one of the most dreadful and awesome phenomena of his whole experience. The hurt ones were quiet; no one wept, much less screamed in pain; no one complained; none of the many who died did so noisily; not even the children cried; very few people even spoke. And when Father Kleinsorge gave water to some whose faces had been almost blotted out by flash burns, they took their share and then raised themselves a little and bowed to him, in thanks.

I do wonder how much of this is Western projection. The Japanese accounts of Hiroshima recount plenty of noise and screaming. It’s all relative I guess, but while first-hand, the account above strains belief a little.

The lot of Drs. Fujii, Kanda, and Machii right after the explosion—and, as these three were typical, that of the majority of the physicians and surgeons of Hiroshima—with their offices and hospitals destroyed, their equipment scattered, their own bodies incapacitated in varying degrees, explained why so many citizens who were hurt went untended and why so many who might have lived died. Of a hundred and fifty doctors in the city, sixty-five were already dead and most of the rest were wounded. Of 1,780 nurses, 1,654 were dead or too badly hurt to work. In the biggest hospital, that of the Red Cross, only six doctors out of thirty were able to function, and only ten nurses out of more than two hundred.

This is what happens when you attack civilian populations.

The children were silent, except for the five-year-old, Myeko, who kept asking questions: “Why is it night already? Why did our house fall down? What happened?”

Mrs. Nakamura, who did not know what had happened (had not the all-clear sounded?), looked around and saw through the darkness that all the houses in her neighbourhood had collapsed.

The following note appeared in the NEW YORKER of 31 August, 1946. as an introduction to John Hersey’s article:

The NEW YORKER this week devotes its entire editorial space to an article on the almost complete obliteration of a city by one atomic bomb, and what happened to the people of that city. It does so in the conviction that few of us have yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon, and that everyone might well take time to consider the terrible implications of its use.

It created a first-order sensation in American journalistic history: a few hours after publication the issue was sold out. Applications poured in for permission to serialise the story in other American journals, among them the New York Herald Tribune, Washington Post, Chicago Sun, and Boston Globe. A condensed version—the cuts personally approved by Hersey—was broadcast in four instalments by the American Broadcasting Company. Sonic fifty newspapers in the U.S. eventually obtained permission to use the story in serial form, the copyright fees, after tax deduction, at Hersey’s direction going to the American Red Cross. Albert Einstein ordered a thousand copies of the New Yorker containing the story.

Wow. Albert Einstein ordered 1000 copies of what you’ve written? That’s something to tell the kids

From the Foreword: On August 31st, 1946, Hersey’s story was made public. For the first time in The New Yorker’s career an issue appeared which, within the familiar covers, bearing—for such covers are prepared long in advance—a picnic scene, carried no satire, no cartoons, no fiction, no verse or smart quips or shopping notes: nothing but its advertisement matter and Hersey’s 30,000-word story.

I had always wondered why there was a picnic scene of the cover of this piece. I had just assumed that it was a piece of high brow New Yorker cartoon irony that went over my head!

“It makes you the same,” Liz continued; “the same as Mundt and all the rest… . I should know, I was the one who was kicked about, wasn’t I? By them, by you because you don’t care. Only Fiedler didn’t. But the rest of you… you all treated me as if I was… nothing… just currency to pay with…. You’re all the same, Alec.”

“Oh Liz,” he said desperately, “for God’s sake believe me. I hate it, I hate it all, Fm tired. But it’s the world, it’s mankind that’s gone mad. We’re a tiny price to pay … but everywhere’s the same, people cheated and misled, whole lives thrown away, people shot and in prison, whole groups and classes of men written off for nothing. And you, your Party—God knows it was built on the bodies of ordinary people. You’ve never seen men die as I have, Liz… .”

“You’re wrong,” Liz declared hopelessly; “they’re more wicked than all of us.”

“Because I made love to you when you thought I was a tramp?” Leamas asked savagely.

“Because of their contempt,” Liz replied; “contempt for what is real and good; contempt for love, contempt for…”

“Yes,” Leamas agreed, suddenly weary. “That is the price they pay; to despise God and Karl Marx in the same sentence. If that is what you mean.”

Tall, with rather curly brown hair; orange tie and pale green shirt; a little bit petulant, a little bit of a pansy, thought Leamas. Could be a schoolmaster, ex London School of Economics and runs a suburban drama club. Weak-eyed.

Hey! I’m ex- LSE – I didn’t realise it used to be a by-word for homophobic slurs!

“I mean, you’ve got to compare method with method, and ideal with ideal. I would say that since the war, our methods—ours and those of the opposition—have become much the same. I mean you can’t be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government’s policy is benevolent, can you now?”

He laughed quietly to himself. “That would never do,” he said.

A pair of government how-to guides helped. The FBI and the Secret Service each published reports in the first three years, guiding faculty to identify serious threats. The central recommendations contradicted prevailing post-Columbine behavior. They said identifying outcasts as threats is not healthy. It demonizes innocent kids who are already struggling. It is also unproductive. Oddballs are not the problem. They do not fit the profile. There is no profile. All the recent school shooters shared exactly one trait: 100 percent male. (Since the study a few have been female.) Aside from personal experience, no other characteristic hit 50 percent, not even close.

“There is no accurate or useful ‘profile’ of attackers,” the Secret Service said. Attackers came from all ethnic, economic, and social classes. The bulk came from solid two-parent homes. Most had no criminal record or history of violence. The two biggest myths were that shooters were loners and that they “snapped.” A staggering 93 percent planned their attack in advance. “The path toward violence is an evolutionary one, with signposts along the way,” the FBI report said.

Cultural influences also appeared weak. Only a quarter were interested in violent movies, half that number in video games—probably below average for teen boys. Most perps shared a crucial experience: 98 percent had suffered a loss or failure they perceived as serious—anything from getting fired to blowing a test or getting dumped. Of course, everyone suffers loss and failure, but for these kids, the trauma seemed to set anger in motion. This was certainly true in Columbine: Dylan viewed his entire life as failure, and Eric’s arrest accelerated his anger.

For investigators, the big bombs changed everything: the scale, the method, and the motive of the attack. Above all, it had been indiscriminate. Everyone was supposed to die. Columbine was fundamentally different from the other school shootings. It had not really been intended as a shooting at all. Primarily, it had been a bombing that failed.
…

That same day, officials announced the discovery of the big bombs, and their destructive power. It instigated a new media shock wave. But, curiously, journalists failed to grasp the implications. Detectives let go of the targeting theory immediately. It had been sketchy to begin with, and now it was completely disproved. The media never shook it off. They saw what happened at Columbine as a shooting and the killers as outcasts targeting jocks. They filtered every new development through that lens.

Obviously, and thankfully, the large bombs that the instigators had set failed on the day.I was really surprised to read that Columbine was intended primarily as a bombing inspired by Timothy McViegh, not as a school shooting motivated by the bullying, revenge etc as assumed by nearly everyone.

The narrative unfolding on television looked nothing like the killers’ plan. It looked only moderately like what was actually occurring. It would take months for investigators to piece together what had gone on inside. Motive would take longer to unravel. It would be years before the detective team would explain why. The public couldn’t wait that long. The media was not about to. They speculated.

…

Reporters quickly keyed on the darker force behind the attack: this spooky Trench Coat Mafia. It grew more bizarre by the minute. In the first two hours, witnesses on CNN described the TCM as Goths, gays, outcasts, and a street gang. “A lot of the time they’ll, like, wear makeup and paint their nails and stuff,” a Columbine senior said. “They’re kind of—I don’t know, like Goth, sort of, like, and they’re, like, associated with death and violence a lot.” None of that would prove to be true. That student did not, in fact, know the people he was describing. But the story grew.

The boy described more commotion. “There’s a little bunch of people crying outside. I can hear them downstairs.” Something crashed. “Whoa!” The anchor gasped. “What was that?!” “I don’t know.” The anchors had enough. Her partner told him to hang up, keep quiet, and try to reach 911. “Keep trying to call them, OK?”

The cops pleaded with the TV stations to stop. Please ask the hostages to quit calling the media, they said. Tell them to turn off the televisions. The stations aired the requests and continued broadcasting the calls. “If you’re watching, kids, turn the TV off,” one anchor implored. “Or down, at least.”

Reporters had no idea hundreds of kids were trapped inside and no concept of the echo chamber in full bloom. The cops knew. The detective force was assembling teams to interview every survivor, and they knew hundreds of their best witnesses were still inside, getting compromised by the minute. But the cops had no means to stop it. This was the first major hostage standoff of the cell phone age, and they had never seen anything like it. At the moment, they were more concerned with information passing to the shooters.

Sometimes the kids’ revelations scared reporters. On live TV, a boy described sounds he took to be the gunmen: “I hear stuff being thrown around,” he said. “I am staying underneath this desk. I don’t know if they know I’m up here. I am just staying upstairs for right now, and I just hope they don’t know—” The anchorwoman interrupted: “Don’t tell us where you are!”

Not everyone bought the lion story. When Bol played for the Philadelphia 76ers in the early ’90s, his teammate Charles Barkley walked into the locker room one day saying that he’d just read about the lion feat in a newspaper. Barkley looked across the room at Bol. “Man, you didn’t kill no lion,” he said. “That lion was old and dead when you showed up.”

Teammates laughed and waited for Bol’s response, but he neither confirmed nor denied the accusation. In the locker room, he wasn’t a cattle tender; he wasn’t an African; he was a basketball player. “Fuck you, Charles Barkley,” he said.

Doc said, “Look at them. There are your true philosophers. I think,” he went on, “that Mack and the boys know everything that has ever happened in the world and possibly everything that will happen. I think they survive in this particular world better than other people. In a time when people tear themselves to pieces with ambition and nervousness and covetousness, they are relaxed. All of our so-called successful men are sick men, with bad stomachs, and bad souls, but Mack and the boys are healthy and curiously clean. They can do what they want. They can satisfy their appetites without calling them something else.”

This speech so dried out Doc’s throat that he drained his beer glass. He waved two fingers in the air and smiled. “There’s nothing like that first taste of beer,” he said.

Richard Frost said, “I think they’re just like anyone else. They just haven’t any money.”

“They could get it,” Doc said. “They could ruin their lives and get money. Mack has qualities of genius. They’re all very clever if they want something. They just know the nature of things too well to be caught in that wanting.”

If Doc had known of the sadness of Mack and the boys he would not have made the next statement, but no one had told him about the social pressure that was exerted against the inmates of the Palace.

At the same time there is reason to think that Gandhi, who after all was born in 1869, did not understand the nature of totalitarianism and saw everything in terms of his own struggle against the British government. The important point here is not so much that the British treated him forbearingly as that he was always able to command publicity. As can be seen from the phrase quoted above, he believed in “arousing the world”, which is only possible if the world gets a chance to hear what you are doing.

It is difficult to see how Gandhi’s methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary. Is there a Gandhi in Russia at this moment? And if there is, what is he accomplishing? The Russian masses could only practise civil disobedience if the same idea happened to occur to all of them simultaneously, and even then, to judge by the history of the Ukraine famine, it would make no difference. But let it be granted that non-violent resistance can be effective against one’s own government, or against an occupying power: even so, how does one put it into practise internationally? Gandhi’s various conflicting statements on the late war seem to show that he felt the difficulty of this. Applied to foreign politics, pacifism either stops being pacifist or becomes appeasement.

A depressingly prescient point…

Gandhi was asked a somewhat similar question in 1938 and that his answer is on record in Mr. Louis Fischer’s GANDHI AND STALIN. According to Mr. Fischer, Gandhi’s view was that the German Jews ought to commit collective suicide, which “would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler’s violence.” After the war he justified himself: the Jews had been killed anyway, and might as well have died significantly. One has the impression that this attitude staggered even so warm an admirer as Mr. Fischer, but Gandhi was merely being honest. If you are not prepared to take life, you must often be prepared for lives to be lost in some other way. When, in 1942, he urged non-violent resistance against a Japanese invasion, he was ready to admit that it might cost several million deaths.

It’s horrific conclusions like this that leave me in terror of all absolutists and extremists….

I remember reading its opening chapters in the ill-printed pages of some Indian newspaper. They made a good impression on me, which Gandhi himself at that time did not. The things that one associated with him—home-spun cloth, “soul forces” and vegetarianism—were unappealing, and his medievalist program was obviously not viable in a backward, starving, over-populated country.

While most people remember Gandhi’s campaigns of peaceful non-violence in support of the independence of India, few remember that his economic program of anti-industrial autarky was a recipe for mass-deprivation and suffering. Admire his means, but not his message.

We feel this dilemma to be a painful one, because we see the need of engaging in politics while also seeing what a dirty, degrading business it is. And most of us still have a lingering belief that every choice, even every political choice, is between good and evil, and that if a thing is necessary it is also right. We should, I think, get rid of this belief, which belongs to the nursery. In politics one can never do more than decide which of two evils is the lesser, and there are some situations from which one can only escape by acting like a devil or a lunatic.

+1000

The whole left-wing ideology, scientific and Utopian, was evolved by people who had no immediate prospect of attaining power. It was, therefore, an extremist ideology, utterly contemptuous of kings, governments, laws, prisons, police forces, armies, flags, frontiers, patriotism, religion, conventional morality, and, in fact, the whole existing scheme of things. Until well within living memory the forces of the Left in all countries were fighting against a tyranny which appeared to be invincible, and it was easy to assume that if only THAT particular tyranny—capitalism—could be overthrown, Socialism would follow. Moreover, the Left had inherited from Liberalism certain distinctly questionable beliefs, such as the belief that the truth will prevail and persecution defeats itself, or that man is naturally good and is only corrupted by his environment. This perfectionist ideology has persisted in nearly all of us, and it is in the name of it that we protest when (for instance) a Labour government votes huge incomes to the King’s daughters or shows hesitation about nationalising steel. But we have also accumulated in our minds a whole series of unadmitted contradictions, as a result of successive bumps against reality.

Yeah, ‘successive bumps against reality’ is a good way of describing the evolution of progressive policy between 1940 and 1989…

I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their own sound. And in fact my first completed novel, BURMESE DAYS, which I wrote when I was thirty but projected much earlier, is rather that kind of book.

It’s funny to think of Orwell, one of the great masters of a stripped back utilitarian style, wanting to write in florid prose.

“there is the professor at the School of Political Projectors who “shewed me a large Paper of Instructions for discovering Plots and Conspiracies”, and who claimed that one can find people’s secret thoughts by examining their excrement: Because Men are never so serious, thoughtful, and intent, as when they are at Stool, which he found by frequent Experiment: for in such Conjunctures, when he used meerly as a trial to consider what was the best Way of murdering the King, his Ordure would have a tincture of Green; but quite different when he thought only of raising an Insurrection, or burning the Metropolis.”

A method of deducing political plotting from the excrement of politicians? If you see any members of the Press Gallery hanging around the toilet stalls of Parliament House, you’ll know that they’ve reached a new low

Adding the other batch of books that I have elsewhere, it seems that I possess altogether nearly 900 books, at a cost of 165 15s. This is the accumulation of about fifteen years—actually more, since some of these books date from my childhood: but call it fifteen years.
….

It is difficult to establish any relationship between the price of books and the value one gets out of them. “Books” includes novels, poetry, text books, works of reference, sociological treatises and much else, and length and price do not correspond to one another, especially if one habitually buys books second-hand. You may spend ten shillings on a poem of 500 lines, and you may spend sixpence on a dictionary which you consult at odd moments over a period of twenty years. There are books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one’s mind and alter one’s whole attitude to life, books that one dips into but never reads through, books that one reads at a single sitting and forgets a week later: and the cost, in terms of money, may be the same in each case.

Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.

In enlightened minds maybe…

Perhaps, however, whether desirable or not, it isn’t possible. Perhaps some degree of suffering is ineradicable from human life, perhaps the choice before man is always a choice of evils, perhaps even the aim of Socialism is not to make the world perfect but to make it better.

Orwell was a consistent advocate of incrementalism…

This does not matter, because, on the whole, Yeats gets away with it, and if his straining after effect is often irritating, it can also produce phrases (“the chill, footless years”, “the mackerel-crowded seas”) which suddenly overwhelm one like a girl’s face seen across a room.

Ooh – I like this similie

He identified himself with the ruling power and not with the opposition. In a gifted writer this seems to us strange and even disgusting, but it did have the advantage of giving Kipling a certain grip on reality. The ruling power is always faced with the question, ‘In such and such circumstances, what would you DO?’, whereas the opposition is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions. Where it is a permanent and pensioned opposition, as in England, the quality of its thought deteriorates accordingly.

…he gained a corresponding advantage from having at least tried to imagine what action and responsibility are like.

This is a really fundamental insight I think.

(Kipling) sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.

Again, it’s Orwell’s ruthless realism that sets him apart from other progressive writers. Particularly progressive writers of his time.

…officials with their prehensile bottoms, will obstruct for all they are worth.

Orwell really had a way with figurative speech…

Outside the Labour Party there existed several extremist parties, of whom the Communists were the strongest. The Communists had considerable influence in the Labour Party in the years 1920-6 and 1935-9. Their chief importance, and that of the whole left wing of the Labour movement, was the part they played in alienating the middle classes from Socialism.

You could make this observation about a number of extremist parties who have existed outside the ALP too…

What this war has demonstrated is that private capitalism that is, an economic system in which land, factories, mines and transport are owned privately and operated solely for profit—DOES NOT WORK. It cannot deliver the goods. This fact had been known to millions of people for years past, but nothing ever came of it, because there was no real urge from below to alter the system, and those at the top had trained themselves to be impenetrably stupid on just this point. Argument and propaganda got one nowhere. The lords of property simply sat on their bottoms and proclaimed that all was for the best. Hitler’s conquest of Europe, however, was a PHYSICAL debunking of capitalism. War, for all its evil, is at any rate an unanswerable test of strength, like a try-your-grip machine. Great strength returns the penny, and there is no way of faking the result.

One of the few things that Orwell got well and truly wrong.

The mentality of the English left-wing intelligentsia can be studied in half a dozen weekly and monthly papers. The immediately striking thing about all these papers is their generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion. There is little in them except the irresponsible carping of people who have never been and never expect to be in a position of power.

Another marked characteristic is the emotional shallowness of people who live in a world of ideas and have little contact with physical reality. Many intellectuals of the Left were flabbily pacifist up to 1935, shrieked for war against Germany in the years 1935-9, and then promptly cooled off when the war started. It is broadly though not precisely true that the people who were most ‘anti-Fascist’ during the Spanish Civil War are most defeatist now.

Probably my favourite Orwell quote.

The (British) Empire was peaceful as no area of comparable size has ever been. Throughout its vast extent, nearly a quarter of the earth, there were fewer armed men than would be found necessary by a minor Balkan state.

Very droll and typically Orwellian. For a strident socialist, he was always very realistic about the state of the world.

Communists and near-Communists had a disproportionately large influence in the literary reviews. It was a time of labels, slogans, and evasions. At the worst moments you were expected to lock yourself up in a constipating little cage of lies; at the best a sort of voluntary censorship (‘Ought I to say this? Is it pro-Fascist?’) was at work in nearly everyone’s mind. It is almost inconceivable that good novels should be written in such an atmosphere. ‘Good novels are not written by by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscienee-stricken about their own unorthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are NOT FRIGHTENED.

I wonder whether Orwell would think that there was a similar climate of stultifying ‘orthodoxy-sniffing’/political correctness within our arts community today?

To people of that kind such things as purges, secret police, summary executions, imprisonment without trial etc., etc., are too remote to be terrifying. They can swallow totalitarianism BECAUSE they have no experience of anything except liberalism.

Look, for instance, at this extract from Mr Auden’s poem ‘Spain’ (incidentally this poem is one of the few decent things that have been written about the Spanish war):

“To-morrow for the young, the poets exploding like bombs,
The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;
To-morrow the bicycle races Through the suburbs on summer evenings.
But to-day the struggle.
To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
To-day the expending of powers
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.”

The second stanza is intended as a sort of thumb-nail sketch of a day in the life of a ‘good party man’. In the-morning a couple of political murders, a ten-minutes’ interlude to stifle ‘bourgeois’ remorse, and then a hurried luncheon and a busy afternoon and evening chalking walls and distributing leaflets. All very edifying.

But notice the phrase ‘necessary murder’. It could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a WORD. Personally I would not speak so lightly of murder. It so happens that I have seen the bodies of numbers of murdered men—I don’t mean killed in battle, I mean murdered. Therefore I have some conception of what murder means—the terror, the hatred, the howling relatives, the post-mortems, the blood, the smells. To me, murder is something to be avoided. So it is to any ordinary person. The Hitlers and Stalins find murder necessary, but they don’t advertise their callousness, and they don’t speak of it as murder; it is ‘liquidation’, ‘elimination’, or some other soothing phrase. Mr Auden’s brand of amoralism is only possible, if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled. So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.

IMHO this is Orwell’s most scathing section of prose. Absolutely brutal. Notably, Auden basically recanted on this position after considering this critique.

In 1930 the English Communist Party was a tiny, barely legal organization whose main activity was libelling the Labour Party. But by 1935 the face of Europe had changed, and left-wing politics changed with it.

Hitler had risen to power and begun to rearm, the Russian five-year plans had succeeded, Russia had reappeared as a great military power. As Hitler’s three targets of attack were, to all appearances, Great Britain, France, and the U.S.S.R., the three countries were forced into a sort of uneasy RAPPROCHEMENT.

This meant that the English or French Communist was obliged to become a good patriot and imperialist—that is, to defend the very things he had been attacking for the past fifteen years. The Comintern slogans suddenly faded from red to pink. ‘World revolution’ and ‘Social-Fascism’ gave way to ‘Defence of democracy’ and ‘Stop Hitler’. The years 1935-9 were the period of anti-Fascism and the Popular Front, the heyday of the Left Book Club, when red Duchesses and ‘broadminded’ deans toured the battlefields of the Spanish war and Winston Churchill was the blue-eyed boy of the DAILY WORKER. Since then, of course, there has been yet another change of ‘line’.

Link: Port Nouveau: A distraction, or something else?

portnouveau:

Fiona Simpson is the shadow minister for communities. If the LNP is elected to government, she will have responsibility for LGBT support services.

From ABC News today:

Opposition MP Fiona Simpson says the Mr Fraser’s push for same-sex civil unions is nothing more than a well-planned diversion….

I have seen just enough of the working class to avoid idealizing them, but I do know that you can learn a great deal in a working-class home, if only you can get there. The essential point is that your middle-class ideals and prejudices are tested by contact with others which are not necessarily better but are certainly different.

This is something that a lot of  a lot of modern progressives could learn from…

There exists in England a curious cult of Northerness, sort of Northern snobbishness. A Yorkshireman in the South will always take care to let you know that he regards you as an inferior. If you ask him why, he will explain that it is only in the North that life is ‘real’ life, that the industrial work done in the North is the only ‘real’ work, that the North is inhabited by ‘real’ people, the South merely by rentiers and their parasites. The Northerner has ‘grit’, he is grim, ‘dour’, plucky, warm-hearted, and democratic; the Southerner is snobbish, effeminate, and lazy—that at any rate is the theory. Hence the Southerner goes north, at any rate for the first time, with the vague inferiority-complex of a civilized man venturing among savages, while the Yorkshireman, like the Scotchman, comes to London in the spirit of a barbarian out for loot.

Speaking as a Queenslander, I couldn’t agree more!

The others had all disappeared; we two seemed to be the only tramps on the road. Then I heard a hurried step behind me, and felt a tap on my arm. It was little Scotty, who had run panting after us. He pulled a rusty tin box from his pocket. He wore a friendly smile, like a man who is repaying an obligation.

‘Here y’are, mate,’ he said cordially. ‘I owe you some fag ends. You stood me a smoke yesterday. The Tramp Major give me back my box of fag ends when we come out this morning. One good turn deserves another—here y’are.’ And he put four sodden, debauched, loathly cigarette ends into my hand.

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history COULD be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone.

If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, you will find that a respectable amount of the material is drawn from German sources. A British and a German historian would disagree deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be that body of, as it were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other. It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as ‘Science’. There is only ‘German Science’, ‘Jewish Science’, etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but THE PAST. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’—well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five—well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs—and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement.

And now we’re practically into a first draft of 1984…

This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history. How will the history of the Spanish war be written? If Franco remains in power his nominees will write the history books, and (to stick to my chosen point) that Russian army which never existed will become historical fact, and schoolchildren will learn about it generations hence.

Again, he’s hoeing the ground from which 1984 will spring here…

I remember saying once to Arthur Koestler, ‘History stopped in 1936’, at which he nodded in immediate understanding. We were both thinking of totalitarianism in general, but more particularly of the Spanish civil war. Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie.

You can clearly see the genesis of 1984 in this essay.

A teacher or mentor whom one admires greatly in early adulthood will leave his mark, and indeed, long after one has come to re-evaluate, perhaps even reject, the bulk of that man’s teachings, certain traits will tend to survive, like some shadow of that influence, to remain with one throughout one’s life…

..the way I poise my hand when I am explaining something, certain inflexions in my voice when I am trying to convey irony or impatience, even whole phrases I am fond of using that people have come to think of as my own – I am aware these are all traits I originally acquired from Mori-san, my former teacher. And perhaps I will not be flattering myself unduly were I to suppose many of my own pupils will in turn have gained such small inheritances from me.

But those of us unfettered by being either professional philosophers or patriotic Frenchmen can surely suggest that even Sartre’s first and most famous treatise shows all the signs not just of his later mummery, but of the mummery of other pundits who came to later fame. Foucault, Derrida and the like shouldn’t have needed scientific debunking to prove them fraudulent: the pseudo-scientific vacuity of their argufying was sufficiently evident from the wilful obfuscation of their stylistic hoopla: and the same could have been said of their progenitor.

This is something that I have unconsciously known to be true for quite sometime, but was only freed to explicitly recognise it when I read this passage.Sartre is little more than a pompous, self-indulgent fool.

Revel was the first to spot that those ideologists who did give up parts of their position became very angry if it was suggested that they had done so in response to criticism. “Those who hold the monopoly of error reserve to themselves the monopoly of rectification.

Oh yes, I can think of more than a few prominent Australian commentators who would fall into this category.

Critics are always remembered best for how they sound when on the attack. Schadenfreude lies deep in the human soul, and to read a tough review seems a harmless way of indulging it. But the only critical attacks that really count are written in defence of a value. It was because of his admiration for competent practitioners that Polgar assaulted the incompetent. He could be hilarious while doing so, but never for the sake of being funny. Lesser critics look for opportunities to pour on the scorn. Polgar would rather have avoided them. When forced to the issue, however, he left no man standing.

I tend to think the same applies to negative, political attacks. They only really count when they are pursued ‘in defence of a value’.

Moorehead also recorded an unsettling insight into the intransigence of Gandhi. Challenged about the possible effects of relying on passive resistance to dissuade the Japanese, Gandhi was forced into his fallback position of averring that not even the Japanese could kill every Indian. Moorehead, who already had some idea of what Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union added up to in terms of population control, clearly had his own opinions.

Non-violent principles are great – but Gandhi had some seriously troubling policy positions that were generally a function of unwaveriong ideological purity. His economic views were utterly ruinous for similar reasons. He started with a position that Indians should be responsible from themselves and pushed that to the extremes of autarky and self-sufficiency – a recipe for impoverishing his nation.

Apart from gumption, courage and determination, what the illegal immigrants have that the legal applicants haven’t is money. No doubt the illegals have made great efforts to save it. Nevertheless, they’ve got it. If you reinforce the principle that illegal immigrants can pay a people smuggler to put them in a position where the Australian government will have to either admit them or leave them to die—many dreams have been brought to your doorstep—you also reinforce the principle that the queue is merely a mechanism for reducing hope to despair, one more mockery for people who have been mocked already.

When the Australian intelligentsia had this explained to them, they were ready with their answer: there ought not to be a queue. Everybody should be allowed in. Think of the misery of all the world’s injured and deprived. Think of the power of the story. There is something to it, but only just. For those Australian commentators with an historical perspective—it has lately become fashionable to rent one of these by the hour—the Tampa sailed in the troubled wake of the St. Louis, the liner full of Jewish refugees that left Europe in 1939, was never allowed to land anywhere else, and ended up back where it started, delivering many of its desperate passengers to their untimely deaths at the hands of the Nazis.

Most of the Tampa people, however, were simply in search of a better life. It was hard to blame them for that: so were my grandfathers. When you heard the journalists talk about racist Australia, however, it was just as hard to see why anyone should be thought unlucky not to be allowed in. The power of that story—the story about racist Australia—kept on growing until the Bali nightclub bomb took some of the puff out of it. Even then, some commentators managed to convince themselves that the bombers were students of history who were registering their dissatisfaction with the nearness of Australia’s foreign policy to that of the Bush administration.

But what never weakened the story, strangely enough, was that most of the people who were initially turned away eventually got in. They were diverted to Nauru, they spent time in detention camps in Australia, but eventually they got in. Yet the story persisted. If it did so, it was partly because there is nothing pretty about the detention camps. But here again, the intelligentsia shows invidious haste in holding the Australian population responsible. When adult refugees sewed their lips together in silent protest, it was indeed a daunting sight. Why, however, should their children do the same, unless encouraged to by the parents?

The Australian population was asking a question about culture. The intelligentsia, ever on the lookout for signs of intolerance, regards all questions about culture as racist at the root. That the common voters should ask such questions is taken as evidence of Australia’s role as a source of the world’s problems, and not as a refuge from them. Luckily the refugees themselves do not agree. They are in flight from a different story. They might not fully understand it as yet, but they have certainly felt its power.

Gauguin did the same for me before I could pronounce his name. (I called him Gorgon.) Degas I gave an acute accent over the “e,” not realizing that the “De” was an honorific prefix: “duh” would have been closer to the right sound, and certainly would have conformed to my general reaction when faced with his genius. Adding tear sheets from magazines to a small stack of thin books, I built up an archive of reproductions, calling him Day-ga until a kind woman from Vienna at last corrected me. (She ran a little coffee house in the Strand Arcade. How young and foolish of me not to quiz her on the story of her life.) From then on, I never laughed at anyone who mispronounced an artist’s name, because it usually only meant that what he had read had run far ahead of what he had heard, and I knew too well how that can happen. When you are learning a new language, there is a blissful moment when, from not knowing how to, you pass to not knowing how not to. The second phase is the dangerous one, because it leads to sophistication, and one of the marks of sophistication is a tendency to forget what it was like to be naïve.

Urgh – I never knew this. Duh-ga is close to my favourite artist and I’ve been mispronouncing his name for years! I love his conclusion about someone who mispronounced a cultural phrase though…

The mass murderer is ever fond of theories that explain everything, and all the fonder if they can be acquired without study. There is no reasoning someone out of a position he has not reasoned himself into. People are drawn into these enthusiasms by no mechanism that has anything much to do with rational thought.

I really think this is one of the great dangers of ideology…

We also have to grasp that art proves its value by still mattering to people who have been deprived of every other freedom: indeed instead of mattering less, it matters more.

Very true – the willingness of people in repressed regimes to risk their lives in the name of artistic expression is telling.

I would never have taken a note in the first place except out of the fear that what I was reading would soon slip away: a fear all too well founded. The Russian symbolist writer Andrei Bely once said that what we keep in our heads is the sum of a writer: a “composite quotation.” But the only reason I still know that Bely once said that is that I wrote it down.

This just about sums up the point of this blog!

It would be a desirable and enviable existence just to earn a decent wage at a worthwhile job and spend all one’s leisure hours improving one’s aesthetic appreciation. There is so much to appreciate, and it is all available for peanuts. One can plausibly aspire to seeing, hearing and reading everything that matters. The times are not long gone when nobody could aspire to that.

I think this is a really important thing to remember. We might look back on previous times as somehow more culturally rich, but I wouldn’t choose to live in any time but now.

‘Good day, Your Excellency, Mr. President,’ intoned Professor Okong executing at the same time a ninety-degree bow. No reply nor any kind of recognition of his presence. His Excellency continued writing on his drafting pad for a full minute more before looking up. Then he spoke abruptly as though to an intruder he wanted to be rid of quickly.

This book isn’t as well known as Achebe’s earlier work, but if you’re interested in modern African politics, it’s really rewarding. Colonialism throws a shadow over all of Achebe’s works, but in works like this it’s really clear that be doesn’t ‘blame’ it for the current state of affairs. It necessarily explains some aspects of the status quo, but Achebe is very clear that Africa’s future is in its own hands.

So why aren’t all children under the age of three required to be on leashes when in public? After all, dogs are.
…

Indeed, the child (on a leash) is happier than most children their age who are forced to walk around with a hand in the air trying to match their parent’s pace. That is hardly a model of dignity. By contrast, the leashed child has both hands free and can wander ahead, to the side, or behind before being reigned in. It is not a lot of freedom, but it is much more than the average unleashed child enjoys.

A hard-nosed rationalist approach that I can fully endorse!

Popularized by Richard Ferber,-’ controlled crying is all about breaking a baby’s association between their crying and your reaction. The idea is to make sure that when they are in bed, they learn to do things that are independent of you. What this ultimately means is that, at some point, you just have to let them cry.

Think of it as an investment in your child’s independence and your sanity…

According to Christopher Green, the phrase “sleeping like a baby” is misleading. When researchers examined video recordings of children as they “slept” at home:

Parents of the children studied believed that their little ones were sleeping soundly right through the night, but the recordings showed otherwise. It appeared that even apparently good sleepers may wake a number of times to sit up, look around, play with their toys, kick off their covers, then perhaps have a quiet grizzle [whimper] before slipping back to steep.’

This means that in order for you to get even a few uninterrupted hours, your child will have to go through one or more of these waking moments alone.

One obvious implication of this is that distance matters. If you have a baby in your bed, when they wake, they may disturb you. If you have a baby in a bassinet in your room, there is a similar risk. With a baby in a separate room, the baby has to put in more effort to make a disturbance. So, if you want to raise your chances of uninterrupted sleep, it will likely involve moving the baby away.”

I could not agree with this more!

I remember looking at you and thinking ‘God, if only he’d stop talking.’ Because everything you said was based on this great premise of ours that we’re somehow very special and superior to the whole thing, and I wanted to say ‘But we’re not! Look at us! We’re just like the people you’re talking about! We are the people you’re talking about!’ I sort of had – I don’t know, contempt for you, because you couldn’t see the terrific fallacy of the thing.

To be honest, I didn’t really get into this book. It came to me highly recommended and I was enthusiastic, but for some reason it just didn’t click. Maybe I’m too far removed, but I just didn’t buy the protagonists as believable characters. Thought they were a bit cartoonish.That being said – this quote definitely rung true with me.

Then I heard an old grizzled, long-haired Central Asian chief, who had come down with the Amir, asking questions of a native officer. “Now,” said he, “in what manner was this wonderful thing done?”

And the officer answered, “An order was given, and they obeyed.” “But are the beasts as wise as the men?” said the chief.

“They obey, as the men do. Mule, horse, elephant, or bullock, he obeys his driver, and the driver his sergeant, and the sergeant his lieutenant, and the lieutenant his captain, and the captain his major, and the major his colonel, and the colonel his brigadier commanding three regiments, and the brigadier the general, who obeys the Viceroy, who is the servant of the Empress. Thus it is done.”

“Would it were so in Afghanistan!” said the chief, “for there we obey only our own wills.”

“And for that reason,” said the native officer, twirling his mustache, “your Amir whom you do not obey must come here and take orders from our Viceroy.”

The British Empire was built on allegories in which domesticated animals stand in for human beings.

Now, Tabaqui knew as well as anyone else that there is nothing so unlucky as to compliment children to their faces. It pleased him to see Mother and Father Wolf look uncomfortable.

“The Jungle Book” is one of those books that is a completely different experience to re-read as an adult. It’s like the CS Lewis books, the magic of the fantasy/imagery that you see as a child is almost completely obscured by the feeling of being constantly beaten over the head by strident ideological preaching of a kind that has not aged well at all…

“Dr. Kim staggered up the riverbank. her legs were numb, encased in frozen trousers. She made her way through the woods until the first light of dawn illuminated the outskirts of a small village.…

Dr. Kim looked down a dirt road that led to farmhouses. Most of them had walls around them with metal gates. She tried one; it turned out to be unlocked. She pushed it open and peered inside. On the ground she saw a small metal bowl with food. She looked closer – it was rice, white rice, mixed with scraps of meat. Dr. Kim couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a bowl of pure white rice. What was a bowl of rice doing there, just sitting out on the ground? She figured it out just before she heard the dog’s bark.

Up until that moment, a part of her had hoped that China would be just as poor as North Korea. She still wanted to believe that her country was the best place in the world. The beliefs she had cherished for a lifetime would be vindicated. But now she couldn’t deny what was staring her plain in the face; dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea.”

Other than the section about the Kindergarden teacher explaining how 4/5s of her class died of starvation in front of her, I thought this was close to the most depressing moment in the book. It’s not tragic in a personal sense, but at the conceptual level it’s deeply depressing.

At the University, behind the librarian’s desk, was a small selection of Western books that had been translated into Korean. They were forbidden to the general public; only top students could have access to them. At some high level of the government, somebody had decided that the nation needed an intellectual elite with some knowledge of Western Literature…

Jung-sang’s favourite was Gone With the Wind. The melodramatic style of the book was not unlike the tone of Korean fiction. He was struck by the parallels between the American Civil War and the Korean War. It was amazing to him how vicious the fighting could be between one people – clearly the Americans were as impassioned as the Koreans. He thought the Americans better off for the fact that they ended up one country, not divided like the Koreans. He admired the heroine, Scarlett O’Hara, for her pluckiness. She reminded him a little of North Korea’s own cinematic heroines who were always in the dirt, fighting for their land, but Scarlett was much more of an individualist – not a quality celebrated in North Korean literature. And North Korean heroines most certainly didn’t have love affairs…

He even read How to Win Friends and Influence People, the 1930s self-help classic by Dale Carnegie. It was his first exposure to Western ideas about business, and it shocked him. He couldn’t believe the advice that Carnegie was giving readers.

“Learn to love, respect, and enjoy other people”.

How could a product of the American Capitalist system write something like this? Jung-sang asked himself. Weren’t all capitalists enemies who lived by the law of the jungle – kill or be killed?

I LOVE this anecdote. A paradigm example of the power of the book to open up another world to someone and to promote understanding.As an end note to this, Jung-sang becomes a devotee of Orwell after he defects to South Korea.

Whether they were studying math, science, reading, music, or art, the children were taught to revere the leadership and hate the enemy. For example, a first-grade math book contained the following questions:

“Eight boys and nine girls are singing anthems in praise of Kim Il-sung. How many children are singing in total?”

“A girl is acting as a messenger to our patriotic troops during the war against the Japanese occupation. She carries messages in a basket containing five apples, but is stopped by a Japanese soldier at a checkpoint. He steals two of her apples. How many are left?”

“Three soldiers from the Korean People’s Army killed thirty American soldiers. How many American soldiers were killed by each of them if they all killed an equal numner of enemy soldiers?”

…

One of the songs taught in music class was “Shoot the Yankee Bastards.”

The Children were never to forget that they owed everything to the national leadership. Like other North Korean children, they didn’t celebrate their own birthdays, but those of Kim Il-sun on April 15 and Kim Jong-il on February 16. These days were national holidays and they were often the only days people would get meat in their ration packages. Later, after the energy crisis began, these were the only days there was electricity. A few days before each birthday, the Workers’ Party would distribute to every child more than two pounds of sweets. It was a truly impressive gift for kids, all kinds of cookies, jellies, chocolates, and chewing gums.

Just like the horses’ Birthday!

The dark has advantages of its own. Especially if you are a teenager dating somebody you can’t be seen with. When adults go to bed, sometimes as early as 7:00pm in winter, it is easy enough to slip out of the house. The darkness confers measures of privacy and freedom as hard to come by in North Korea as electricity. Wrapped in a magic cloak of invisibility, you can do what you like without worrying about the prying eyes of parents, neighbours, or secret police.

It’s extraordinary, but the narrative of this book is driven by a touching, almost Victorian romance between two North Korean teenagers. I certainly didn’t expect this book to feel sentimental!

Where is the Graveyard of Dead Gods? What lingering mourner waters their mounds? There was a time when Jupiter was the king of the gods, and any man who doubted his puissance was ipso facto a barbarian and an ignoramus. But where in all the world is there a man who worships Jupiter today? And who of Huitzilopochtli? In one year – and it is no more than five hundred years ago – 50,000 youths and maidens were slain in sacrifice to him. Today, if he is remembered at all, it is only by some vagrant savage in the depths of the Mexican forest.

Huitzilopochtli, like many other gods, had no human father; his mother was a virtuous widow; he was born of an apparently innocent flirtation that she carried out with the sun. When he frowned, his father, the sun, stood still. When he roared with rage, earthquakes engulfed whole cities. When he thirsted he was watered with 10,000 gallons of human blood. But today Huitzilopochtli is as magnificently forgotten as Allen G. Thurman. Once the peer of Allah, Buddha and Wotan, he is now the peer of Richmond P. Hobson, Alton B. Parker, Adelina Patti, General Weyler and Tom Sharkey.

Speaking of Huitzilopochtli recalls his brother Tezcatilpoca. Tezcatilpoca was almost as powerful; he consumed 25,000 virgins a year. Lead me to his tomb: I would weep, and hang a couronne des perles. But who knows where it is? Or where the grave of Quitzalcoatl is? Or Xiehtecuthli? Or Centeotl, that sweet one? Or Tlazolteotl, the goddess of love? Of Mictlan? Or Xipe? Or all the host of Tzitzimitles? Where are their bones? Where is the willow on which they hung their harps? In what forlorn and unheard-of Hell do they await their resurrection morn? Who enjoys their residuary estates? Or that of Dis, whom Caesar found to be the chief god of the Celts? Of that of Tarves, the bull? Or that of Moccos, the pig? Or that of Epona, the mare? Or that of Mullo, the celestial jackass? There was a time when the Irish revered all these gods, but today even the drunkest Irishman laughs at them.

But they have company in oblivion: the Hell of dead gods is as crowded as the Presbyterian Hell for babies. Damona is there, and Esus, and Drunemeton, and Silvana, and Dervones, and Adsalluta, and Deva, and Belisima, and Uxellimus, and Borvo, and Grannos, and Mogons. All mighty gods in their day, worshipped by millions, full of demands and impositions, able to bind and loose – all gods of the first class. Men labored for generations to build vast temples to them – temples with stones as large as hay-wagons. The business of interpreting their whims occupied thousands of priests, bishops, archbishops. To doubt them was to die, usually at the stake. Armies took to the field to defend them against infidels; villages were burned, women and children butchered, cattle were driven off. Yet in the end they all withered and died, and today there is none so poor to do them reverence.

What has become of Sutekh, once the high god of the whole Nile Valley? What has become of:

Resheph Baal
Anath Astarte
Ashtoreth Hadad
Nebo Dagon
Melek Amon-Re
Ahijah Osiris
Isis Osiris
Ptah Molech

All these were gods of the highest eminence. Many of them are mentioned with fear and trembling in the Old Testament. They ranked, five or six thousand years ago, with Yahweh Himself; the worst of them stood far higher than Thor. Yet they have all gone down the chute, and with them the following:

Arianrod Nuada Argetlam
Morrigu Tagd
Govannon Goibniu
Gunfled Odin
Dagda Ogma
Ogryvan Marzin
Dea Dia Mara
Iuno Lucina Diana of Ephesus
Saturn Robigus
Furrina Pluto
Cronos Vesta
Engurra Zer-panitu
Belus Merodach
Ubilulu Elum
U-dimmer-an-kia Marduk
U-sab-sib Nin
U-Mersi Persephone
Tammuz Istar
Venus Lagas
Beltis Nirig
Nusku En-Mersi
Aa Assur
Sin Beltu
Apsu Kuski-banda
Elali Nin-azu
Mami Qarradu
Zaraqu Ueras
Zagaga

Ben Chifley to Nugget Coombs, 1944:

“I’d rather have had your education than a thousand pound.”

Kim Beazley at the Arts Labor Launch before the 2001 campaign responding to speeches by Geoffrey Rush and Bryan Brown:

“Well, it’s a tough gig I’ve got. There are people here whose wordsmithing beats mine every time. But it’s ok, I feel approved, I feel embraced. The last time, in fact, I felt so embraced was when David Helfgott jumped into my arms and kissed me and said a furious whisper ‘Socialist Prime Minister. Socialist Prime Minister. Socialist Prime Minister.’ And I said, ‘It’s a hard ask, but I’ll do what I can.’”

Jack Curtin lived in Cottesloe and one day he gave his driver a day off. Then he found he needed to go to Perth, so he went out on the road and hitchhiked. And a truck pulled up.

‘Can you give me a lift into Perth?’

‘Sure,’ said the driver, then looked at him startled. ‘Aren’t you the Prime Minister?’ he asked.

‘That’s right,’ Jack said. ‘Do I still get the lift?’

It’s a story, I thought, as I fought my way back down into sleep on that Remembrance night, that should be as well known, as celebrated as George Washington and the cherry tree. But we’re not in Australia, being of secretive convict stock or descended from men on the lam from European scandal or pogrom, as good at celebrating ourselves as, say, Americans are, at saying we are important, at writing 1000 page biographies of people like James Dean who died at 24… we took 30 years to bring out our first biography of Curtin, out Churchill, while the English were already bringing out books on Enoch Powell and Iain McLeod and Bevin and Bevan and Gaitskell and Chuten Ede. We think we’re not good enough, and that’s a fact. Jack Curtin knew he wasn’t good enough, and that’s a pity.

“I see two powerful forces pulling at you,’ said Adams in his gentle, challenging way. ‘One is your public, politics, that whole arena. The other is the arts, beauty, sensuality. Which these days, as you now step off one role into another, which as the stronger pull?”

“Well… I think the latter’s always had the stronger pull for me,’ Keating said, in the same familiar voice that seemed after six months so long gone from us, “and had it not had the stronger pull, I don’t think I could’ve done the former as well.”

“Explain that…”

“Well, you’ve got to fill up the bottle. To have a public life where you’re always giving out, where the system is sucking it out of you, where the ideas and the responsibility, the decisions, it’s suck, suck, suck, and it’s just dragging your personality, it’s withering your personality…”

“And deforming it sometimes. You used to complain about the things you were forced to do, the way you were forced to behave, you felt, in the arena.”

“Well, you’ve got to fill the bottle up in some way, and I used to fill it up though those things, broadly through the arts. Through my interest in whatever it might be, in music or architecture, or I’d read, and still read, quite extensively- histories, biographies, novels occasionally – but you need novels to keep your mind enquiring, keep the words coming.”

“But you also need architecture, you need ceramics, you need beautiful furniture…”

“I don’t say I absolutely need them…”

“Oh come on, of course you do. You’re insatiable. You’re like me.”

“I don’t say I absolutely need them, but I enjoy them”

“I want to play out by playing Jessye Norman. This is called “Going to sleep” in German. Would you explain the significance of this?”

“Well, this was written by Richard Strauss at the end of his life. This was in, I think, about 1949. I think he died in 1950. He wrote that very moving thing called The Metamorphosis in the ruins of Berlin in 1946. You know he had all these anti-Semitic views and what have you…”

“He was not a nice person.”

“But of course he was a great romantic, and the great effusive things he wrote when he was eighteen or nineteen like Don Juan and those tone poems, Zarathustra, Death and Transfiguration, they’re amazing works for someone eighteen or twenty to write. But in the absolute twilight of his life he left behind- when really people were not writing like this – perhaps the most melodic, moving, beautiful things that have been written for the voice, his last four songs, and this one is the third song, “Going to Sleep”, and was in part his coming to terms with the fact that he was moral and that he would soon die, which he did, I think, in Garmisch, down near that Junkgspitzer in Bavaria, a year later. And it’s … just beautiful.”

Citing John Upton from “The Warhorse”:

‘We have an old Labor saying: If you’ve never had holes in your shoes, you dunno what it’s like’

I lunched with the man who shot (Arthur Calwell) a few years back (the way one does) and, intrigued by both his subsequent career as a published poet and novelist released from detention and given a literary grant by addled Balmain allies of his writing (would Lee Harvey Oswald have been given a literary grant, it was rightly asked in Parliament, on similar grounds?) and his stark, murderous appearance, like a crazy-eyed James Joyce with red hair and freckles, I asked him why he did it.

Well, he said, or something like it, his life was going nowhere and to do it was a more elaborate form of suicide. He knew he’d be gunned down as he ran from the scene of the crime and all that was left was to do it and go out in a hail of bullets, the way one does.

He approached the car as Arthur Calwell had just got into the passenger seat.

He pointed both barrels at Arthur’s surprised crustacean countenance, and pulled the trigger.

But the window was up, and the bullets deflected by the glass ricocheted round the inside of the car and one wound up in Arthur’s lapel and the flying glass cut his chin.

Peter Kocan, the assassin, turned and ran.

He kept running, and there was no sound behind him. No scream of sirens. No submachine-gun fire.

But soon he heard the puffing of a single overweight pursuer, Wayne Haylen, Les’s son, who brought him down with a fair to middling Rugby tackle, and held him down.

An old party worker came to the car window.

‘What’s up, Arthur?’

‘I’ve been… shot.’

‘Are you alright?’

“I hope so.’

Kocan looked up and saw above him Pat Kennelly, the stuttering Senator.

‘I h-h-hope You r-r-realise, y-young man, you’re in very s-s-serious t-t-trouble.’

And that was it, the assassination. Calwell wound up with a crossed piece of plaster on his prognathous chin and a lot of national merriment around him as he went on to fight an election on Vietnam with a man who a year later drowned in a frogman suit, and Kocan in various mental institutions with the Kingsgrove slasher and other eminent psychopaths began to write a novel called The Treatment and its sequel The Cure and to undergo what the Americans called Redemption and Labor lost by a landslide and life went on.

‘Did you ever hear from Calwell?’ I asked his would-be assassin.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘he wrote me a letter. The burden of it was I too have been a young man alone and sad in the big city and I think I know how you felt. I suggest we forget the whole incident.

Imagine that.

Neither (Bruce Hawker or Mark Latham) seemed interested in using the fact that (John Fahey) helped secure the acquittal of Ivan Milat for gunpoint rape outside Goulburn in 1971, thus freeing him to rape and kill some more.

Nor, when I met him outside on the street, was Michael Lee. … I suspect it’s the vulgarity of the attack that offends them, as well as the unfairness (a lawyer accepts clients, that’s his job, he tried to get them off, that’s part of his duty); it’s something Labor doesn’t do. If it was Gareth Evans who got Milat off we’d know about it now. Because the Liberals would have told us. If you do everything, Bobby Kennedy said, you will win. If you don’t you mightn’t. And you make that choice.

In conversation with Bob Carr on the lessons of 1996:

‘That there is no leeway,’ I said with emphasis, ‘no leeway for a Labor leader in government. No leeway to sell Qantas or the Commonwealth Bank, to scorn the Press Gallery or enrage Kerry Packer, to increase the woodchip licence or bankrupt tariff-dependent industries or ruin country towns, or,’ I added with riesling-fuelled cheek, ‘to evict the Governor from his palace or suddenly decide not to cancel road tolls.’…

‘You have no leeway,’ I continued, ‘to be anything other than a traditional Labor government, playing a straight bat, hitting the ball in the middle, not slashing out in all directions, a six here, a leg-bye there, because you don’t have the media there on your side, or not enough of it, explaining what you’re up to. All you can be up to is the obvious, social reformist agenda, with safety nets all over the place, of traditional Labor. There is no leeway for anything else.’

“Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.”

Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.

“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

Curtin paid the price, however. The poisonous remarks flung at him during the (single army) controversy by the most vitriolic Federal Parliamentary Labor Party anti-conscriptionists – principally Ward, Calwell and Cameron – distressed the Prime Minister and damaged the Government’s cohesion. Curtin responded to one of Cameron’s outbursts with dignified resignation:

“Rabaul is further from the Australian mainland that Timor. It is not possible for me to be a good Labor man when I conscript men for Rabaul and New Guinea and to become a suspect Labor man for doing the same thing in respect of Timor… The strictures of the Minister for Aircraft Production upon myself make me unhappy, but what is irrelevant can be endured.”

Despite disheartening episodes and eras the ALP has displayed an admirable resilience throughout its history. With the party’s disappointing performance since 1915 very much in mind, one observer concluded (in 1935) that the ALP:

“Has been burdened with careerists, turncoats, hypocrites, outright scoundrels, stuffy functionaries devoid of sense and imagination, bellowing enemies of critical intelligence, irritatingly self-righteous clowns bent on enforcing suburban points of view, pussy-footers, demagogues, stooges for hostile outside groups and interests, aged and decaying hacks and ordinary blatherskites”.

Nevertheless, that same observer noted, Labor had retained its idealism and purposefulness.

Asked for his views by Theodore during the deliberations, Hill replied ‘I can’t really make up my mind… I don’t know’.

‘You bloody old woman,’ Theodore snapped, ‘you haven’t got a mind to make up.’

Chris Watson as opposition leader responded to critics of Labor’s Government interventionism by stating that:

“The very people who objected to socialism were immersed in it. They rode in socialistic railways, sent their children to socialistic schools, received their letters through a socialistic post-office, read them by a socialistic light, rang up their friends on a socialistic telephone, washed in socialistic baths, read in socialistic libraries, and if through studying the advantages of individualism they became insane, they retired to a socialistic lunatic asylum.”

The Dawson Ministry, the first Labor Government in the world, leaving Government House Brisbane after their swearing in.

“They see me rollin’, they hatin’….”

I love this photo for their Reservoir Dogs swagger…

(Scanned from “The Light on the Hill” – Ross McMullin.

(When the nationalisation plank was not included in the 1898 NSW Labor electoral platform) Many socialists resigned from the Political Labor League, including its secretary. According to one of them, the Labor Party had ‘degenerated into a mere vote-catching machine, doing no educational work, and generally following a policy of supineness.

Yep – that’s 1898. People have been harking back to the glory days when Labor stood for real progressive values since Federation. It’s all relative I guess.

The cacophony became so bad that Vice President Kagame had to intervene on several occasions. Once he convened the leadership in Kigali and told them an anecdote about a king. “The monarch had a wonderful advisor who saved him many times,” he told his audience. “As a reward, one day he told his advisor that he could make one wish that he would grant him without condition. The advisor told him:‘I have but one simple request. When I want to tell you something, can I whisper it in your ear?’ The king, baffled by the request, granted it immediately. From then on, whenever there was an important decision to take, the advisor would go up to the king and whisper banalities in his ear—he talked about the weather or what the cook would make for dinner—and the king would nod. The advisor would then go and tell the court that the king had agreed with his recommendations regarding national policy.”

Kagame then thundered, wagging his finger. “Some of you fools come and see me here in Kigali, just to say hello and ask about my family! Then you go and tell the rest that Kagame agrees with your decision on this or that matter.” He banged his fist on the table. “ I will have none of this!”