FROM: Michael T.
SUBJECT: Dear Comrade
(Original spelling and grammar used)

Chuckle, chuckle, Michael, things look promising. But may I remind you that the recommended prescription is a Bex and a lie down, though that's usually prescribed for us lefties who get too worked up over the cheating and lying and general fascistic behaviour of right wing, entry-level prescribers.

Try as I might, no amount of brain-haemorrhaging, hair-pulling, stomach-turning effort on my part could bring me to the conclusion that there was so much as a single valid point that you have to contribute.

My only point is the fair go, Michael. The fair go for everybody, no matter how weirdly they pronounce Australian English. However, I'm not sure the word means anything to you. The reason I say this is because here at Hark Laboratories recent studies of members of the right wing fraternity have produced, among other deficits, the inability to process the meanings of certain words and phrases. For example, when the term "fair go" is spoken, all subjects reported hearing a kind of whooshing of air, or the sound deaf people hear when someone shouts in their ear. Their responses to the word "democracy" produced similar results. Yet, the phrase "single mother" caused such patterns of arousal that they blew the needle off my Scumometer.

As for not making "a single valid point", that's a bit over the top, don't you think? Even the likes of Christopher Pearson, Paddy McGuinness and Andrew bolt make the occasional valid point. But rightist scum never give the other side the slightest validation. As far as you are concerned the solution for us all--and by all, I mean anyone on the left, anyone not white, anyone not Anglo-Saxon or a member of the gene pool that just got here and now wants the door closed on others--is to dig an enormous pit, ring it with us undesirables and rat-a-tat-tat us until it's full. That, Mickey, is why so many lefties draw parallels with Hitler when talking about John Howard. We know he is no Hitler (or maybe one without balls), but we also know that if he were given an endless reign that he, or his successors, would finally arrive at the Fuhrer's final solution to difference.

See, everyone lives in a continuum. Howard's ideology dates back to the first transgressor of human rights, the first man to say "I'm better than you, so give me what you've got, women first." Through the millennia, standard issue right wingers like Genghiz Khan and Attila the Hun, right through to Josef Stalin and Adolph Hitler in our time, have risen to prominence in Howard's continuum. Why would you want to be there, Mick? Or hadn't you thought about the company you keep. But then, thinking, like all creativity, is not well represented by the right. You hear the term "right wing intellectual" bandied about these days. Has us rolling in the aisles, it does.

Despite having barely made the leap to the bottom rung of the other continuum, I can still claim to be part of it. (Though in reality, maybe I've got a foot in both.) I know I'm in good company because the folks in this continuum just naturally reject the claims of half-baked, born-yesterday, used-cars-for-brains shtunks who peddle the lie that it's acceptable to incarcerate children because their parents were brave enough to take a harrowing short cut to a land that used to be free. What asylum seekers in leaky boats have done, Mick, is the stuff of legend, of heroic exploits against almost insurmountable obstacles. How shameful will you feel at the end of your life when you realise that you applauded the mean-spirited, downright evil barriers erected to thwart their courageous dream to provide their children with a decent life? Or will you just regret that you were too feeble to be an Orc.

Suffice to say, Michael, that the continuum to which I hopefully belong, has members such as Buddha, Jesus Christ, Mohammed (peace be upon him), and Phillip Adams. That must hurt, Mickey. To know that Adams is right and you are wrong. Worse, that you most likely grew up believing in a God who would not now have a bar of you, if He, She or It existed.

[SCATT] is--and you'll have to forgive my candor--a piece of cheap, undergrad, polemic, communard perception-management. Oh, I left out trash.

Now stop projecting, Mick. You know, in what was the heart you once had, that you are the trash, and white trash at that. How do I know you're white? Aside from Condoleeza Rice, black people aren't stupid. As William Faulkner wrote in Go Down Moses:

"To the sheriff, Lucas was nothing but a nigger, and they both knew that; to Lucas, the sheriff was nothing but an ignorant redneck with no cause for pride in his ancestors or hope for it in his posterity, but only one of them knew that."

I won't dispute your accusation of being sort of "undergrad". I'm not a journo and no one is paying me to do this, so I get to rant and rave and be a pontificating, uppity smart-arse as much as I please. (Until Heil Ruddock calls in his goons.) Polemics, obviously, is what this site are all about. I only wish there were more like it.

I'll pass on "perception-management" because that is what your side devotes all its time doing. I don't operate from the manual of management-speak. But I like to think of myself as being in the fine tradition of the "communards," those valiant Parisians who died fighting to preserve Paris from both the conquering Prussians and the French Army, who by then were trying to placate the Prussian occupiers. During their short existence as the defenders of Paris, the Paris Commune separated the church from the state and made all church property state property, excluded religion from schools, postponed debt obligations, and abolished interest on debts. Hey, Michael, reason enough to exterminate them, non? Which is just what happened. The last defenders of a free Paris were mowed down against a wall at Pere Lachaise cemetery.

Of course I'm assuming that's what you meant by "communard". But maybe you weren't being "intellectual" at all. Maybe you were just using a high-falutin' word to call me a commo. How ordinary of you, Mikhail.

It is, however, valuable in one sense. It allows me a window, through which I might be able to see into the clouded, disturbed, self-loathing perceptions of a die-hard Leninist.

Sorry, old chump, I'm no Leninist. Or a Marxist either. Perhaps what unconsciously freaks you out is that I don't believe any of the mind-numbing rubbish that fills dumpsters from either side. Once "the quick" gets categorised and bureaucratised, it becomes "the dead".

See, we've got lots of birds where I live and every morning it's impossible not to be struck by what a whee of a time they're all having. (When not being struck by the infernal racket.) Once in a blue while, it occurs to me that humans should be having a whee of a time too. Unless we the human race are paying off karmic debts as spiritual criminals, then I can't for the life of me understand why there is so much needless suffering. Is that undergrad? You bet!

There is no reason why every man woman and child on this planet should not have access to a reasonable life, as much education as they want, and health care as a matter of course.

Well, there is a reason. Most of us won't make the effort. And I'm not talking about Mark Latham's ladder of material success. I'm talking about the simple effort of paying attention to what is in the best interests of not only themselves but of others. In potentially life altering research on the failure of people to make correct predictions of the emotional consequences of their actions, Daniel Gilbert and George Loewenstein have noted:

"...boosting the living standards of those already comfortable, such as through lower taxes, does little to improve their levels of wellbeing, whereas raising the living standards of the impoverished makes an enormous difference."

I guess there is no profit in that. But even better than profit for the side of power and greed, is the chance to straiten and punish the impoverished. It's that meanness of spirit that the human race needs to be attentive to and when found, neutered. Alas, we can't seem to remember. And so the conservatives, the reactionaries, the totalitarians just step into the vacuum. Shit, maybe we are paying off karmic debts and earth is a prison planet. I mean, if we had paid attention in those higher realms, we wouldn't be subject to lifetime after lifetime of the whims of scum at the top. Makes sense to me. Make sense to you? No?

Your page is so completely, painfully biased that it falls beneath the previous levels of blinkered tripe, as it had been set by the "The Guardian". (The Oz Communist Paper, not the watered-down British socialist rag)

Who, me biased? Willikers, Mickey, can't us lefties have at least one anti-right wing rag? Not allowed, eh? Well, don't worry, ASIO will be shutting us down sooner or later.

Incidentally, the subheader originally read: Australia's Journal of Right Wing Political Character Assassination, but it was too long to fit. And don't forget that I'm kind of biased against Labor too.

Your Don Quixote-like optimism is refreshing though. You just keep on waiting for that revolution. I'm sure it'll be along anytime now.

Cheers,
Michael T.
Sydney Australia.

I wish you were right, Mick. But while things are looking good for reactionaries, the same can't be said for the human race. Never fear, though, when sanity and wisdom prevail once again, you will be forgiven. Like naughty children who haven't yet got a grasp of life's complexities, us lefties understand that you righties simply know not what you do.