Argument Wish List

in no particular order.

I am looking for anyone to first state their starting moral, theological, or other axioms, then build some sort of argument that I can engage with justifying any of the following statements:

1. It is 'common sense' that George Bush be tried as a war criminal before an international court.

2. If technology allowed same-sex unions to be spontaneously fruitful, there would still be grounds to forbid them.

3. Sarah Palin is less qualified than Barack Obama to be President of the United States.


Apropos of nothing, this is not, as I feared, an unbearably pretentious blog inaccessible to the common man. Woot!

No one in the world ever gets what they want and that is beautiful

I was thinking some years ago of all the central, vital facts of human biology and psychology that were omitted entirely from most 19th century novels as a matter of course. I thought it would be interesting to write a novel in which something else, some other huge, central, tremendously important fact, was left out, or only alluded to with the most elliptical euphemisms. One idea I was toying with was a novel set in a world that humanity shares with another intelligent species which is taboo to mention, even though they live in the same cities, are vital for the functioning of society, etc. They wouldn’t be mentioned in the novel, so you would have to infer their existence from things in the novel that didn’t quite seem to make sense: from how the human society reported had been distorted around them.

I was vaguely thinking of having a go at this for NaNoWriMo this year, and it was in this spirit I watched Gigantic, a documentary about They Might Be Giants.

Pretty early in the documentary John and John leave their homes in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and take off for New York, where the rest of their story takes place. All the people interviewed seemed to me like New York sort of people. They sounded like New York people. They looked like New York people. Of course, I’ve never been there. The place where they were sitting to be interviewed was sitting in armchairs with water behind them, and a bit of New York skyline behind them.

There were occasional bits of footage from the time the documentary was made, showing TMBG on the Conan O’Brien show, and signing books in Lower Manhattan, and some of these had dates on the bottom ‘September 7th, 2001’; ‘Midnight, September 10th, 2001’. After they finished the book-signing in Lower Manhattan on September 10th, they went back to a bit where they were on stage; they did that song ‘Everyone’s your friend, in New York City', then they did that song ‘She’s an Angel’ with the line ‘If you’re following an angel, does that mean you have to throw your body off a building?’ Then they did some performance-arty stuff on stage talking about ‘negative space’ and taking instruments away from a song, and then notes away from the remaining guitar part, until nothing was left but the audience clicking their fingers along to it. Then, the end.

So, Gigantic is ostensibly about TMBG, but looked at another way it is really about September 11th, 2001. It is really a salute to a place, showing it at its brightest and best, as a place where people can realise their dreams, and create beautiful things, and change the world; and it has ended up being shaped around this huge, central, tremendously important event, which is never ever mentioned, but which colours the atmosphere of the whole film.

You will be assimilated

Marco's re-posting of my comments long-ago contrasting Australian and American democracy omits my conclusion, which was as follows:

From this I draw the conclusion that instead of trying to change our system with stupid constitutional referenda, we should be encouraging the US to adopt our system. We can pick Hawaii off pretty easily as state #7, and once we have taught them to play proper forms of football we can annex the West Coast as states #8,#9, #10, #11. We could get rid of the federation star and put a representation of Coma Berenices in the top right of the flag to represent the New Far Northern states. This will make more sense than building nuclear reactors in Australia, because they already have nuclear reactors in California.

I've pasted on the Ursa Major stars from the state flag of Alaska instead, conceding this is a more immediately recognisable Northern Hemisphere constellation, and can do double duty for the bear of the California Republic flag. The seven stars also replace the Federation star to symbolise the seven* states of Australia, while the five stars of the Southern Cross will also represent the five states of the Borealia part of the Federation.



* I have promoted the Northern Territory. Unfortunately, it will be necessary to relocate the Federal Capital to a more central location, such as Palmyra Atoll, so the current ACT will be resumed by New South Wales.

Shadow Cabinet Reshuffle Tip!

I reckon there would be no better way for Malcolm to shore up his knockabout Aussie larrikin credentials than to make the current opposition environment spokesman the new Shadow Minister for Aging.

Bartlett pears of romance that were honey at the cores

It will give entirely the wrong impression if I *don’t* put up a Palin post of my own. For I am so very pleased, that whatever happens from one moment to the next, I can instantly cheer myself up by reminding myself who the Republican vice-presidential nominee is. I intend, of course, to keep chiming in rationally and analytically on Marco’s blog and Lexifab’s blog. But here, I am afraid I intend to give way to foolish emoting.

Since I heard the news, on one of the great motorways of south-east Queensland, I have had Vachel Lindsay’s poem ‘Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan’ running through my head. I don’t think I am the only one, either.

(If you can’t think offhand who Vachel Lindsay was, he wrote ‘The Congo’, some of the less politically-incorrect bits of which you will have heard chanted by the lads in ‘Dead Poets’ Society’ as they galumph through the forest beating a drum in the dead of night.)

I know I just posted a quote- with which I entirely agree- about the folly and evil of submerging oneself in the collective, but what I am going to do now amounts to giving voice to my tribal identity. One of my tribal identities, anyway. This is no identity as philosophically coherent as a Catholic identity or a small-government identity, but almost entirely a 'young-Western-state-of-wide-open-spaces' identity. What I am going to do is put up big slabs of the first, cheerful, triumphalist, part of Vachel Lindsay’s poem, and it will be obvious which words need to be replaced to bring it up to date. Here goes!

‘In a nation of one hundred fine, mob-hearted, relenting, repenting millions,
There are plenty of sweeping, swinging, stinging, gorgeous things to shout about,
And knock your old blue devils out.’

[Three may scan as well as one…]

‘There were truths eternal in the gab and tittle-tattle.
There were real heads broken in the fustian and the rattle.
There were real lines drawn,
Not the silver and the gold,
But Nebraska’s cry went eastward against the dour and old,
The mean and cold.’

[Huzzah!]

‘Against the towns of Tubal Cain,
Ah,- sharp was their song.
Against the ways of Tubal Cain, too cunning for the young, the longhorn calf, the buffalo and wampus gave tongue.

These creatures were defending things Mark Hanna never dreamed:
The moods of airy childhood that in desert dews gleamed,
The gossamers and whimsies,
The monkeyshines and didoes
Rank and strange
Of the canyons and the range,
The ultimate fantastics
Of the far western slope,
And of prairie schooner children
Born beneath the stars,
Beneath falling snows,
Of the babies born at midnight
In the sod huts of lost hope,
With no physician there,
Except a Kansas prayer,
With the Indian raid a howling through the air.

And all these in their helpless days
By the dour East oppressed
Mean paternalism
Making their mistakes for them,
Crucifying half the West,
Till the whole Atlantic coast
Seemed a giant spiders’ nest.’

[Easy enough to replace Mark with Joe!]

‘And these children with their sons
At last rode through the cactus,
A cliff of mighty cowboys
On the lope,
With gun and rope.
And all the way to frightened Maine the old East heard them call,
And saw our Bryan by a mile lead the wall
Of men and whirling flowers and beasts,
The bard and the prophet of them all.
Prairie avenger, mountain lion,
Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan,
Gigantic troubadour, speaking like a siege gun,
Smashing Plymouth Rock with his boulders from the West,
And just a hundred miles behind, tornadoes piled across the sky,
Blotting out sun and moon,
A sign on high.

Headlong, dazed and blinking in the weird green light,
The scalawags made moan,
Afraid to fight.’

[Loud, loud is the moaning of the scalawags! I can’t think of anything for ‘mountain lion’ that scans at all well, alas, alack.]

‘Defying aristocracy,
With every bridle gone,
Ridding the world of the low down mean,
Bidding the eagles of the West fly on,
Bidding the eagles of the West fly on,’

[Bidding the eagles of the West fly on! Bidding the eagles of the West fly on!

Of course, it may still all end in tears:]

‘Defeat of the aspen groves of Colorado valleys,
The blue bells of the Rockies,
And blue bonnets of old Texas,
By the Pittsburg alleys.
Defeat of alfalfa and the Mariposa lily.
Defeat of the Pacific and the long Mississippi.
Defeat of the young by the old and silly.
Defeat of tornadoes by the poison vats supreme.
Defeat of my boyhood, defeat of my dream.’

Emoting over. Normal service resumes.

This will do for a manifesto

From 'Human Personality', by Simone Weil, translated from the French by Richard Rees:

What is sacred in science is truth.
What is sacred in art is beauty.
Truth and beauty are impersonal.
All this is too obvious.
If a child is doing a sum and is doing it wrong, the mistake bears the mistake of his personality. If he does the sum exactly right, his personality does not enter into it at all.
Perfection is impersonal.
Our personality is the part of us that belongs to error and sin. The whole effort of the mystic has always been to become such that there is no part left in his soul to say 'I'.
But the part of the soul which says 'We' is infinitely more dangerous still.
...
Relations between the collectivity and the person should be arranged with the sole purpose of removing whatever is detrimental to the growth and mysterious germination of the impersonal element in the soul.
This means, on the one hand, that there should be enough room, enough freedom to plan the use of one's time, the opportunity to reach ever higher levels of attention, some solitudes, some silence. At the same time the person needs warmth, lest it be driven by distress to submerge itself in the collective.
If this is the good, then modern societies, even democratic ones, seem to go about as far as it is possible to go in the direction of evil.

I give up

Back at the beginning of the year, nobody wanted to talk about my observations on Mark Twain’s observations in Rome.

What my observations were really about is this: The concept of a person being both ‘True God and True Man’ has become more and more forbidding and incomprehensible to me the more I think about what I mean by God.

This is one half of a trap.

The other half of the trap is my well-intentioned but insidious universalism, as detailed in Part Eight of my ‘Spero’ document. This does not necessarily deny a ‘special’ role for Jesus in whatever mysterious mechanism allows contact between God and Man, but it makes that special role seem more and more arbitrary and irrelevant.

What this trap means is that, while I have never found it easy to believe that Jesus is God, it has gotten harder and harder. And I can’t do it anymore.

On Christmas Eve, 2007, I was watching ‘Carols by Candlelight’ on the television, and suddenly felt the monstrous incompatibility between the enormity of the thing we were asserting and the half-hearted, puerile, unworthy way we were asserting it, and I just felt an enormous tide of revulsion against the whole thing. I didn’t want to celebrate Christmas anymore. And I didn’t want to keep straining to try to believe that Jesus is God anymore. So I gave up. I could still probably affirm that Jesus is God, but it would be hard to do. It would be an emotive, rather than a reasonable affirmation. It would also make no difference to my behaviour in any way.

So I have given up. I have fallen over into pure Monotheism, and won’t call myself any kind of Christian in the census anymore, because the custom of the past 1700 years is that you have to believe that Jesus is God to do that.

I affirm and glory in the message that Jesus brought, that we can call God our Father: that He is not only transcendent, but immanent, and can relate with us as a person: and not as a Master, but as a Father. This seems to me now, as it always has, the essence of what Jesus was trying to do. And I have built and will continue to build my life on the words of Jesus as recorded in the synoptic gospels.

W is for Wyndham

It is fitting, I guess, as the ‘Holiday from History’ (August 21^st, 1991 – August 8^th, 2008) draws to an end, to say a few words about the work of John Wyndham, which more than most other bodies of work breathes the sense of Apocalypse that overshadowed my youth.

I had a pretty good idea of what I was going to write about Wyndham back around B or C, but I am afraid it has pretty much evaporated. My mind is like one of those thingies, you know, that is full of holes, and I don’t seem to remember much unless I write it down. And as I never wrote down what I was going to write back then, I haven’t remembered it. So I will have to start again.

‘She was quite abruptly aware that the world was almost noiseless.

There was an alarming feeling of unreality. She held her breath to listen for some reassuring sound. Supposing it had all stopped, now? – As it might do one day.

Perhaps, even at this moment, there were in some parts of the world great columns of smoke writhing upwards in Medusan coils, swelling out at the top into cerebral convolutions that pulsed with a kind of sub-life, marking the beginning of the silence that meant the end of everything.

For years now, when she was off her guard, those pillars of smoke had been likely to start up in her mind. She hated and feared them.’ (Wild Flower, 1956)

In another way, it is inappropriate for me to construct this around Wyndham, since I didn’t start reading him until I left the Old Country and no longer lived in fear. It was The Martian Chronicles that best embodied the feeling of Apocalypse when I was young. There was something I never understood. Why did all those people leave Mars and go back to Earth? Isn’t away the direction you ought to run, when everything goes pear-shaped? There was such a deep, deep, vein of melancholy in those two doomed civilisations, Mars and Earth, following each other into the void in the twinkling of an eye.

The short stories of John Wyndham are not always about the end of the world as we know it, but the novels almost always seem to be, in one way or another. I guess it is hard to keep writing for so long without doing something drastic. In The Outward Urge, which I am fond of for no particularly good reason, the nuclear war happens offstage and isn’t really so bad given the action takes place over centuries and in Brazil and Australian when its on Earth. In The Kraken Wakes and The Trouble with Lichen, civilisation isn’t quite destroyed, but it is clearly going to be replaced by something very different.

I remember that Stanislaw Lem was quite dismissive of ‘End of the World’ fiction. Ah, here he is:

‘In the course of its evolution science fiction has renounced the positive omnipotence, and for a long time it has occupied the opposite pole- that of maximum despair. Gradually it has made this pole its playground. Because the end of the world, the atomic Last Judgment, the epidemic provoked by technology, the freezing, drying up, crystallisation, burning, sinking, the automation of the world, and so on no longer have any meaning in science fiction today. They lost their meaning because they underwent the typical inflation that changes eschatological horror into the pleasant creeps. Every self-respecting fan owns a science-fiction library of the agonies of mankind that equals the book collection of a chess amateur, since the end of the world should be as formally elegant as a well-thought-out gambit. … There are specialists who have slaughtered mankind in thirty different ways, but still search diligently and calmly for further methods of murder. Structurally this (end-of-the-world) science fiction has put itself on the same level as the crime novel, and culturally it acts out a nihilism that liquidates horror, according to the law of diminishing returns.⁴’

To me what is written and what is unwritten have always loomed equally large in these sort of novels, and I spend a lot of time thinking about the countless tragic stories that are not the adventures of the hero. My own imagination always interpolates the eschatological terror back into the most pedestrian of the sort of books Lem is talking about.

I have been reading ‘My Apprenticeship’, by Beatrice Webb, off and on for the past month or two. I had only ever heard of the Webbs as people mentioned unfavourably in books by or about Chesterton or Wells- sort of Machiavellian powerbrokers of the Socialist movement, the sort of people who might go out to dinner at Iguana Joes. It has been a pleasant surprise to find Beatrice so engaging, so rational, so- Clammish:

‘What body of scientific men, or even of ordinary shrewd business men, spoken to on the subject that interested them most, whether intellectually or materially, would tolerate that extraordinary mixture of personalities, dogmatic assertions as to fact and principle, metaphysical theories, grand and vague moral sentiments, appeals to personal devotion on the hand, and self-interest on the other, this extraordinary medley of sentiment, passion, and expediency which makes up the argument of the politician?’ (Beatrice Potter Webb, diary, July 1884)

But I wanted to quote something that she wrote when she was much younger, about ten:

‘A novel now and then is a wise recreation to be offered to a growing mind, it cultivates the imagination, but taken as the continual nourishment, it destroys many a young mind … The whole of their thought (for a child of nine or ten spends little or no thought on her lessons) is wasted on making up love scenes, or building castles in the air, where she is always the charming heroine without a fault.’

When I was of that age, a good many of my castles in the air involved the destruction of everything I knew, a desperate struggle to survive, and my death at the age of 21 from radiation-induced cancer after playing a role in the salvage of something from the wreck of civilisation. I thought, a lot, about the exact sort of story that the first chapters of The Day of the Triffids is, with myself as the protagonist. Most times I travelled into town- for we lived on the edge of town- I would think about how far we were likely to be from Ground Zero, and what our chances of survival might be. My calculations were based on false premises; for I later found out the city I lived in was surrounded at a goodly distance by a ring of Titan II missile silos, which no doubt had at least one missile each allotted to them, so wherever I went I would have been comprehensively obliterated by overlapping blast zones in the event of a nuclear exchange.

I still think, uneasily, sometimes. Should I lay in a better store of organic seeds? Do I really have any practical skills that my neighbours in the village might find useful, were civilisation to collapse? Are we far enough away from the highway to avoid the starving hordes from the cities?

Oh well.

It appears to me that the holiday is over. We had for a little while the luxury in the West of casting down tyrants, but now we are well on our way back to being tied-up by Realpolitik and the Balance of Terror from effecting anything good in the world.

We shall see.

4: The quote from ‘Science Fiction: A Hopeless Case - With Exceptions’ was long enough, so you will have to hunt down a copy of ‘Microworlds’ yourself to read the footnote. But it will be worth it, if you have any weakness for curmudgeonly footnotes at all.

Spot the Difference!

A: This head of state is arriving to open the Olympic Games before his regime murdered tens of millions of people.

‘WE should all wish the People's Republic of China success as host of the 2008 Olympics, for which it has made heroic efforts to prepare itself’ ?!?

Did any of you notice this dreadful thing a few weeks ago?

I thought Frank Devine was supposed to be a crusty old conservative Catholic bloke. A real Catholic bloke would have fulminated about the Chinese state’s attempts to impose its will on the Church, all those clergy from the ‘underground’ Church who are still arrested and die mysteriously in prison, and most of all the ‘One Child Policy’ and accompanying horrors, which is just about as un-Catholic as anything I can imagine.

I can only think that Frank Devine must be conditioned to reflexively take the opposite position whenever Bob Brown expresses an opinion on anything. ‘If he’s agin’ it, I’m for it.’

Words ought to mean something, don't you think?

When people kill civilians in a democratic country, the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald is happy to call them militants.

When people kill men belonging to an armed and uniformed force of the world's largest dictatorship, the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald calls them terrorists.

This is not what those words ought to mean.