Category Archive: POLITICS
The Strange Death of Liberal England
Painting by Walter Paget
(by George Dangerfield) (1935) The 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising reminds us of the eternal marriage of hope and disappointment. Ah, the Edwardian period, and its hopeful ripples beyond, a Golden Age, when the British Empire enjoyed a seemingy endless decade of tea and scones, village cricket, sensible novels and the White Man’s Burden. By the time the Liberals had been shredded by militant unions, suffragettes, Irish nationalists, the rise of militants, the Great War and the nation state, it became clear that the fruits of Queen Victoria had been maggotted by the worms of extremism, never to ripen cleanly…
Continue Reading →The Flight of the Intellectuals
There ain't no Muslim Sisterhood...Tariq Ramadan at Oxford, 2009 (photo by Kaihsu Tai)
(by Paul Berman) This hasty, readable, tendentious book bills itself as an attack on liberal intellectuals, and in particular, their inability to confront the paradox of a modern Islamism that hearkens back to its glory days of stony fundamentalism. But really, it is an assault on one man. Via that attack, the book ends up saying important things about the impulse of humans (even and perhaps especially those of ‘superior intellect’) to choose sides, deny opposing points of view, and draw near to attractive extremes. Berman, from the outset, leaps straight at his target, Swiss-born Tariq Ramadan, the controversial Islamic philosopher, alleged here to be an apologist for Islamic…
Continue Reading →Rampage at Port Arthur
28 April 1996 TVC has friends who were honeymooning in Tasmania on the above date. That morning, they had a lovers’ tiff: she wanted to go to Port Arthur, the pretty but desolate and spine-tingling remnants of early convict settlement, vividly recounted in Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish (although that is set elsewhere in Tasmania). Her beau, however, thought they should take advantage of the mild weather to climb picturesque Cradle Mountain, and his argument prevailed. It’s the kind of argument where you can never say ‘I told you so.’ For that day, a young (28 year old), well-to-do,…
Continue Reading →The Lyin’, the Pitch, and the Allodoxaphobe
Tim Robbins listens to an uncomfortably realistic pitch in Robert Altman's "The Player"
I watched the 2016 Academy Award ceremony recently, that horde of virtue signallers, with their silly names, silly hair, silly clothes and sanctimony, barely able to read the teleprompters, and it occurred to me that here I am, beavering away in obscurity, when I could be writing award-winning scripts. I mean, I’ve not seen enough films to know what the people want, but I have sat through enough to know what they deserve. Since they’ve done Batman vs Superman, what about James Bond vs Obi-Wan Kenobi? So I’m sitting in one of those Potemkin cabins on the lot (of my mind), facing three illiterate…
Continue Reading →Damned Whores and God’s Police
Black-eyed Sue and Sweet Poll say goodbye (by Robert Sayers)
(by Anne Summers) (1975) (updated 1994, to 2000s and beyond) The title is a bit of a howler, for it derives from a statement attributed to someone in partial error. But it is still a great title, and it synthesizes the point of the book, which is to reveal and detail how the bifurcation, by colonial authority, of early Australian females into saints and tramps, has formed the nation’s bedrock and permeated the social fabric ever since. This is a difficult case to make. For instance, such ‘types’ are considered somewhat one-dimensionally cartoonish now. And wouldn’t the outlook change with the development of a free…
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