Going to a business roundtable meeting is boring. Going to New Zealand is boring. Put them together and you’ve got Tom Switzer’s diary in the Oz Spectator, a snooze-fest of Ripping Yarns proportions.
“Previous Australian guests to the annual symposium of 30-odd young local business leaders include Andrew Bolt, Arthur Sinodinos, Janet Albrechtsen and John Roskam, and I am thrilled to be invited to address this two-day event…”
Good God. Bolter, Arfur Daley, Planet, Caspar Roskam, Ghost who walks, and now Heidi Switzer. These people live in New Zealand. haven’t they suffered enough? However, then it starts to get interesting:
“My first real contact with a local is my taxi driver at the airport. A big, bustling Maori who boxed Tony Mundine in the early 1980s…”
Are we about to go in a Tsiolkasesque/Fassbindery direction here?
“He asks whether I have any Kiwi mates. Several, I say, but they all live in Sydney! But New Zealand’s struggle to retain its younger educated workforce is no laughing matter.”
No, it is not. But what sparkling small talk it makes. Those two days must have flown by.
“…widens the trans-Tasman income gap to a dispiriting 38 per cent.”
And on it goes. And on, and on.
Noon, and at the Oz, the Cut and Paste monkeys are still running yesterday’s column online. It’s like they’re ashamed of it or something.
On his blog, wittily-titled AndrewNorton.info, the eponymous commentator has a tribute to Jan Palach, the young Czech who immolated himself forty years ago, in January 1969, in protest at the crushing of Prague Spring but the USSR.
The post is dedicated to the victims of Communism, but in what sense was Palach a victim of it, rather than someone who resorted to a controversial form of resistance? Palach had been “inspired” by the immolation of Buddhist monks in Vietnam — a protest against the immense destructiveness of the war, coming from a tradition that saw the individual life as part of a larger cycle. Palach was fighting a grey and low-level brutal system — does suicide really warrant our respect in this case?
After all, if he’d lived and struggled, he would have been 41 when the wall came down, and just over 60 now. He’d be running an IT firm, jogging round Wenceslas square and living with a hot young Moldovan wife, the Eastern bloc a distant memory. His memory deserves our compassion, but respect is reserved for a different type of courage.
The greatest own goal of recent times: right wing site Investor Business Daily‘s assertion — that if Stephen Hawking had been born in Britain, the UK National Health Service would have killed him — just got a lot better.
After, well, everyone pointed out to IBD that Hawking was a lifelong Brit, Hawking himself got into the act issuing a statement saying: “exterminate exterminate I never get tired of that. OK here’s what I wanted to say, I wouldn’t be alive today if wasn’t for the national health service.”
Which was promptly spun by right wingers into the idea that Hawking someone how survived despite NHS care (a miracle! Take that atheists!). By that time even the whacky ‘Corner’ blog of National Review had editor Iain Murray come out and say that the whole thing was embarrassing and ridiculous, noting that the NHS gave excellent care, but also some crap services as well (true enough) — which was then spun by other right-wingers into a further denunciation of the NHS. And on it goes.
And this weekend is of course the anniversary of … Woodstock II, 15 years ago, the 90s greatest screw up of a hallowed memory. Interestingly, Chip Monck, lighting designer of Woodstock I, and the man who allegedly said ‘the brown acid is bad’, lives in Melbourne now, opposite a lumber yard. Do say ‘peace’ if you see him down Brunswick Street.
Mention of the Woodstock player now resident in Oz, plus Clive Hamilton’s riff today on Woodstock 1 v 2, reminded me of a slightly bizarre somewhat related fact:
Owsley Stanley was a popularizer of LSD brewing up his first batch when a student at UC-Berkeley (LSD was still legal) and ultimately providing 5 million doses as supplier-in-chief and soundman to the Grateful Dead and Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. He was an amazingly inventive character. But this is the freaky part: (from Wikipedia):
“A naturalized Australian citizen since 1996, Stanley and his wife Sheilah live in the bush of Far Northern Tropical Queensland where he creates sculpture, much of it wearable art.[4] ”
Sheesh, the father of LSD is now a Queenslander? Married to a Sheilah……is someone putting us on? Apparently not, here is a 2007 article from the San Franciso Chronicle:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/12/MNGK0QV7HS1.DTL&hw=owsley&sn=001&sc=1000
The original Friday drive-bys item stated that Oscar Humphries had been sacked as the editor of The Spectator.
That statement is untrue and has been removed from the story. Humphries has not been sacked and has no intention of going anywhere in the near future.
Don’t agree re Jan Palach, RIP, though never heard of him.
Defence Secretary Macnamara was quoted late in life referring to the guy who did the same outside his office window, 40 years later. Obviously he never forgot it. Who knows it may have stiffened his backbone against nuclear strikes on Vietnam by druggie President Nixon.
The non sequitur in your choice of courage to respect is this – missing the possibility his extreme protest, harming no one but himself, may well have contributed meaningfully to that wall coming down. I wonder. That’s the real test. His death surely deserves the right question?
Guy – you do yourself a disservice when you trivialise Jan Palach’s action in Prague. Yes, he ‘resorted to a controversial form of resistance’, possibly inspired by the action Buddhist monks in Vietnam took against their own oppression. They chose a shocking and violent action that was intended to benefit others but harm only themselves (contrast with today’s suicide bombers, but entirely in line with Buddhist scriptures). Does that make his action any less heroic?
Yeah, as you say, he could have ‘hung on’ and become an IT millionaire after the cause was won. If we all thought like that, who would do anything to try and right the wrongs of the world?
Guy, I enjoyed your missives from the USA election, but do you think your exposure to that environment has made you a tad cynical?
Whether, to repeat your question, ‘does suicide really warrant our respect in this case?’ the fact is that this man’s name is well-known, forever linked with the events of January 1969 in Czechoslovakia, and among many his name is honoured. The cause he gave his life for was won in the end. He may have contributed to that victory.
Hi Moira
I’m not trivialising Palach’s act, and I’m not cynical. I didn’t say he should have ‘hung on’ – you’ve misquoted me. I said if he’d ‘lived and struggled’, quite a different thing. By the time Palach killed himself the Soviet system was as I say, a greyish and brutal place – but surely the thing to do was, a la sakarovsky, Havel, Walesa and many others, fight positively against it, and live a meaningful life in so doing? In extreme cases – Vietnam was one, and Stalinism at its height would be another – Palach’s act has meaning, as a great refusal. At such points death has to be fought with the withdrawal of even the most basic consent, which is living itself – whether through suicide in that manner, or fighting and dying against it.
Palach – who died in hospital, not at the event itself, and advised others not to do what he did, because the pain was so great – was fighting a system that could be resisted, argued with, confronted, and ultimately undermined. Let’s face it the living dissidents of Solidarity did more to push against it than Palach’s act – and they also affirmed life, not death, made their lives meaningful through resistance, and got to enjoy the fruits of what they’d been fighting for. My point about the IT and the Moldovan wife etc was all the things he could have become had he lived a life no longer defined by communism – that he would have had the opportunity post 40 to define himself by the freer choices he sought, not to be defined by the monolith he broke himself against.
Palach, let’s not forget, was 21, and 21 year old men can do stupid things. Whatever contribution he made, the message was as negative as it was positive – it was both a brave noble act, and a tantrum. Take a look at the tribute songs listed to him in his wikipedia entry, and you’ll see that it’s overwhelmingly moody young men. Suicidal sacrifice is brave and not so, at the same time. Living and resisting is unambiguously heroic, and to be preferred.