Hark
v the
Tower
of Terror

The beat thuds on
Harold Hark
16 August 2002

Hark did his best to block out the sub-reality of national and world madness during his first holiday in years. In the end, multiple rides on the Tower of Terror and Lethal Weapon along with the triumphant downing of two dozen oysters at one sitting were no match for Mophead Meg as she exerted her grey revenge on Natasha Stott Despoja.

As if in a trance, he found himself taking the lift down to the foyer every morning for the newspapers. "Don't do it!" begged wife and daughter as they sat on the sun-drenched 22nd floor balcony overlooking the pristine beach and ever-changing, never-changing ocean.

"I...I...I'll be right back," he blurted, a political junkie to the core, with no hope of rehabilitation.

And there on the front page was Andrew Murray's sour face. Raising disloyalty to a virtue in these Orwellian times (it seems like only yesterday that loyalty was a prerequisite in politics), Murray seemed clearly bent on destroying the Democrats solely because they dumped his GST collaborator Fright-wig Meg for Nath, the young woman who has leant youth and vitality to politics and who embodies the greatest of all contrasts to the muddy brown auras emanating from the subs 'n' duds infesting parliament.

The press, with perhaps the sole exception of Glenn Milne, were after her like Pit Bulls on the scent of an asylum seeker. "Flibbertigibbet," "Barbie Doll," and "Tinkerbell," were some of the names used in dismissing her as if she were at best a dilettante in politics, or at worst the worst politician ever to grace that dishonourable profession. Body Snatched to a man and woman, they howled for her corpse, sick of feeding year after year on the grey jelly of the faceless incumbents.

Milne was right to call the clamour ageist and sexist. Meg the Mop is operating out of pure hatred for being dumped from her illusion of power by someone with Nath's good looks and youth. The jealousy is that blatant several psychology majors are no doubt already writing their PhD theses on the subject.

And Murray's obsession with Meg's so-called treatment by the party is no doubt the topic for several more.

These two collaborators are suffering from a disease currently in plague proportions in Australia. A disease which has turned minds and hearts into one-dimensional reflections of bureaucratic blindness.

Heil Ruddock, who is in the terminal stage of this disease, is no longer able to look up from the figures in his reports to match them with three-dimensional human beings. Not since the henchmen who carried out Hitler's Final Solution have we seen such cold-blooded efficiency in exacting outcomes of misery.

And then there is Australia's real tower of terror, John Howard. Only in his case, the tower is so small it could fit under a sagging lounge room couch. Transferred to an American International science fiction movie, the nugget-cum-tower is then seen to be infused with a core of such concentrated misanthropy that it exerts power far and wide. (Or to paraphrase the blurb for "Space Platoon," a low budget sci-fi flick recently showing on Optus Television: "A power-hungry leprechaun holds an entire nation hostage.")

Dropping the base qualities of cunning and opportunism to new lows, the garden gnome has puffed up his little chest and volunteered Australia for war on Iraq. Never mind that an attack on Iraq is merely a cover for Dubbya's escalating reputation of corruption and deceit among slow-learning Americans. Oh, and the oil.

Meanwhile, Little Lord Downer, so up himself he's almost inside out, rose to his tippy toes with excitement over Magoosolini's call to arms. It's out of the question to hope for a hand held depiction of Downer mincing off to war, but totally within reason to expect him to oversee a future of funeral orations, when the boys he sends to protect Big Dubbya's oil interests and L'il Dubbya's poll ratings are returned in body bags containing bits and pieces. (See Matt Price: Things that flatter Alexander the great.)

And did you hear the git coming over all coy and shy about eventually being number two on Peter Costello's ticket? After letting his desire be known to all and sundry, he then got downright snippety when asked to elaborate. That's our answer to the heyday of Versailles, for you.

Tony Abbott, the Illiberal Party's Catholic version of an Islamic mullah, was back to lecture us on what a great guy Theodore Dalrymple is. Dalrymple is the British Hun (and Satanic descendent of Charles Dicken's most hateful characters) whose idea of individual responsibility was recently espoused in relation to asylum seekers. Portraying 99 per cent of them as liars, he was nevertheless magnanimous enough to concede that those who manage to successfully bullshit the British Immigration Department's obviously leftie sob sisters (for letting anyone through) should be allowed to stay...without so much as one bob in help from the government, that is. If they survive, they'll be a boon to society owing to their resourcefulness. If they don't, tough titty. (See Ray Cassin: The trouble with Tony's text for today, Tony Abbott: Permissive society: the policy maker's enemy, and Theodore Dalrymple: Migrants can be a great help to us, provided we don't help them.)

Ross Cameron, winging it with all two neurons firing at once, decided that the 19th century was too upbeat for his tastes, so he hit the time travel button for Trecento Central to come up with a divorce tax. (That's the problem with these Illiberals, even then they lived on the outskirts of life.) Ross wants to make us pay if we divorce, even if our spouse is such a nasty piece of work that staying with him or her is tantamount to begging for a cancer injection. Never mind the beatings, the incest, the gambling, the philandering, just stick with it. God wants it that way!

Speaking of God and the Illiberal Party, George Pell (who first promoted the divorce tax in our era) has reiterated the mantra of religious leaders from time immemorial: never let real life get in the way of absolute power. Unable to acknowledge his disgrace from recent cover ups of sexual abuse in the church, he is now telling all who will listen that the rampant abuse of children by his brethren is nowhere near as awful as the ghastliness of abortion. Pellsie shares this attitude with American Christian fundamentalist organisations subscribing to the "Unborn or Die" Crusade, all of whom advocate the rights of the unborn and the death penalty for those opposed. Why these apparently alien creatures in human form have decided that a foetus has more rights than someone already born is doubtlessly the subject of, once again, many PhD theses. That they should wield so much power should be a gobsmacker, but then, if you look around at the likes of John Howard and George W Bush, you understand that ignorance in high places is the norm on this planet of, dare it be said, spiritual criminals.

If it isn't, then why are we constantly confronted by these colourless, nowhere men, so inept at coming to grips with the complexities of real life that they keep trying to encoffin the rest of us for whom life is a challenge without borders. (Save for the old admonition to treat others as you would have them treat you.) They are scared to death of life and they want us to be scared little gnomes too.

As one letter writer to The Age recently asked, "Who elected these idiots?" Your neighbours and mine is who elected them. Stand them up against a wall and take a good look at the absence of elan that has turned their beingness into mere shadows. Grey and decadent visages, without morals, without values, without ideals, without vision. These are the puffed up purulent men and women whom a majority of thumb-sucking Australians look up to.

Through it all have been the inquiries. The Labor Party assured us that they were no longer a force to be reckoned with by opting out of any serious subpoenaing over SIEV-X or the rest of the government's lies to get themselves re-elected on the backs of dead asylum seekers or those still alive in its torture camps. (See Margo Kingston: Labor backdown opens black hole of accountability.)

Concurrently, the sons of Murdoch and Packer were dressed in their finest as they sought to get things over with as soon as possible so they could get back to doing what they and their pops do best: make money with scant regard to ethics. The whole RC should be wound up quick smart, because, as Brian Castro said in his novel Pomeroy: "Business is synonymous with crime". Since no one who is able to combine the abilities of thinking and speaking freely could disagree, let's just move on. We're stuck with these crooks and their descendants for all time. The best we can ever hope for is to marginalise them from the machinations of government. Fat chance.

In stark contrast, Monash University sacked its hated, can-do vice-chancellor David Robinson for being a three-time plagiarist. It must be acknowledged that one of the modern curses of being an academic is that there is no time to do the job properly; lots of rushed errors are made. Before the government's pincer movement on tertiary education, academics had an Administration Department that took on time consuming work done by secretaries. But that excuse didn't wash for Robinson. He had a personal secretary. And he's been plagiarising for three decades.

Which brings up the difference between academia and business and why it is a disaster for the latter to have influence in universities. A case in point is the recent "research" conducted at La Trobe University, with psychologist Dr Helen Scouteris accepting $25,000 from Disney's Buena Vista to do research on the influence of TV and videos on young children. Not surprisingly, Scouteris found the influence beneficial. Never mind that there were no control groups and that no children were actually monitored. The research consisted entirely of questionnaires sent to 314 mothers. Let's face it, most mothers and househusbands are happy to get the precious little ankle biters out of their hair for a few hours. Thus, the question of TV and videos and their effect on young children remains a question.

Hannie Rayson (The Age, 20/7/02) says: "In business, it's perfectly acceptable to pass off someone else's idea as your own ­ to find a way around laws of copyright and intellectual property." By contrast, she says, in academia "...scholarship is based on trust. The art of it is that you are actually engaging in a conversation with other scholars, both alive and dead, making sense of their ideas and contributing your own. There is no other unit of currency for scholarship except honesty."

Big difference, eh?

Then we had the asinine Commonwealth Games, signalling both a good time for the brain dead and the bread and circuses typical of failing civilisations. Oh, boy, Victoria gets them next.

In Tasmania, Illiberal leader Bob Cheek got it between both of 'em for, among other things, allowing Eric Abetz to shove Greg Barns aside. Couldn't have happened to a nastier bloke. The Greens happily took up the disgraced party's slack. And Helen Clark retained in New Zealand. Couldn't have happened to a nicer sheila.

Finally, the possible solution to all our ills: the giant asteroid astronomers have discovered heading our way and scheduled to hit us for six come February 2019. With all the trickle-down diarrhea from the arseholes purporting to be our leaders worldwide, its no wonder so many loopy religions yearn for the end of the world. Armageddon might provide the relief Valium just can't touch. Of course their despair is a tad self-centred, but so are the bozo's in power. One thing is sure, if the thing hits, it will be connecting with a world essentially the same as the one we live in now.

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