Category Archive: POLITICS
Write, Don’t Talk
(Random thoughts regarding Adelaide Writers’ Week, 2023 – a verse dialogue) (With apologies to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Stearns Eliot) READER A lovely form there sate beside my bed, And such a feeding calm its presence shed, A tone so pure, far from earthly leaven, A message reassuring, newly down from heaven. ‘Twas some comfort – A fact drawn from bone; “We read to know that we are not alone.” AUTHOR And yet here it shrinks back, as if mistook! That weary, wandering, disavowing look! ‘Twas all another feature, look and frame, And still, methought, I knew, it was…
Continue Reading →The Old Stoic’s Lethargy
POEM FOR THE YEAR (with apologies to W. H. Auden) This earth in 2023 Is not the planet fit for me, A world, I need, to give me hope Opposed to the end of a rope. *** My Eden landscapes and their climes Are great constructs from rational times, When reason meant, at least, induction, Not dogma posed as deduction. *** The plastic bags we gather to be Transformed as if by alchemy: I chose to send them whence they came, The ground, from fossil fuels by name. *** I’m now required to approve Blighted wind farms that rarely move:…
Continue Reading →Breaking History
By Jared Kushner (2022) Kushner is no prose stylist. But this tome is a valuable guide to the tour-of-duty of an outsider in a White House full of outsiders. It shows how a transactional background with amateur oversight, ego, and the Art of the Deal, can actually accomplish something in the Deep Swamp that is American federal executive governance. Take, for example, the Abraham Accords. The conventional wisdom, espoused by the likes of the never-right-but-never-in-doubt John Kerry, was that a Palestinian solution was a necessary pre-cursor to improvement of general Arab-Israeli relations. Yet the Trump administration, at Kushner’s suggestion, flipped…
Continue Reading →Exodus to Labor
And the jealous body politic that had cast upon the Chosen the power, the glory, and the light, did remind itself of those commandments it had required the Chosen to keep…and St. Albo did gather up those fragments and shore them against our ruins, taking a vow of poverty and darkness for ‘Astraya.‘ THOU SHALT HAVE NO OTHER GODS BEFORE ME THOU SHALT NOT MAKE UNTO THEE ANY GRAVEN IMAGE THOU SHALT NOT TAKE OUR NAME IN VAIN REMEMBER THE HOLY DAY HONOUR THY FATHER AND THY MOTHER THOU SHALT NOT KILL THOU SHALT NOT COMMIT ADULTERY THOU SHALT NOT…
Continue Reading →The Descent of Comedy
Oh dear. Shaun Micallef was once a genius of the Theatre of Embarrassment. But if you’re going to “go political” in comedy, you need to visit a plague on all houses. Not merely pander to the cognitive elites, smug in their infallible bubbles. Alas, he’s now the Australian Stephen Colbert.
Continue Reading →