Barbarians lurking in the mirror
So it’s come to this: at the crack of dawn a team of heavies (Border Force/police/Serco guards) descend on a peaceful family of four in a small Queensland town, take them into custody and fly them to a detention centre in Melbourne. To get to the airport the family — mother and father and two very young daughters — have to travel in different vehicles; the girls become distressed.
So it’s come to this: at the crack dawn we take the family from the Melbourne detention centre and put them on a plane headed for the parents’ homeland, Sri Lanka. A last-ditch court order stops the plane from leaving Australia.
So it’s come to this: thwarted by the legal manoeuvre, we whisk them away to Christmas Island detention centre. They are effectively in a prison. We are telling the world: this is what we do to boat people trying to reach our shores.
It’s come to this: we ignore the pleas of the little country town of Biloela, which has taken the Tamil family to its collective heart, worked with them, played with them, embraced them as good people.
Yes, that’s what it’s come to — holding them in isolation in the huge but almost empty refugee establishment on Christmas Island, all in the name of the law, in the name of setting an example, in the name of acting tough, in the name of complete and utter bastardry.
We have reached the point when we must look at ourselves in the mirror and ask: are we barbarians? I’m using the plural “we” because we are all involved in this. The Border Force officers carrying out these shameful tasks are our officers; we sanctioned their creation and tolerate the way they operate. If that mirror is a truth-teller, it will tell us we are a callous, contemptible, uncompassionate, greedy, inhumane, xenophobic people.
As a nation we will stand aside and let this likeable, vulnerable family to be thrown to the wolves when they have proved themselves just the type of migrants we need — hard-working, community-minded, willing to live in
a country town where now, after years of residence, they are admired and valued by the townsfolk.
The parents, Priya and Nadesalingam (usually known as Nades), came to Australia separately by boat in 2012 and 2013. Their daughters Kopika and Tharunicaa were born in Australia and are now aged four and two.
The courts have told us that the Morrison government has the legal right to deport them — just as it had the right to toss out two au pairs seeking to stay
in Australia last year. On that occasion, Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton stepped in, exercised his discretionary powers and let them stay. The
au pairs had no particular claim for special treatment. Dutton was responding to a request.
This blog has no problem with au pairs being allowed some latitude. But we question Dutton’s judgment when the Biloela Tamils — two of them Australian-born — are treated with such contempt. The Prime Minister has refused to intervene. This is a PM who makes much of his Christian faith.
It is also the PM who, in a monstrous display of hypocrisy, has accused the Opposition of playing the race card with its perfectly legitimate probe into
the activities of a Chinese-born Liberal backbencher. It’s you playing the race card, ScoMo, you are a fraud.
Throwing the truth overboard
Before we close the gate on this disgraceful episode in Australia’s sordid history of immigration and race relations, let’s step back a few years and recall an event known as the children overboard affair. Only weeks out from the 2001 federal election, then prime minister John Howard told Australians that boat people on a sinking vessel had thrown their children into the ocean to curry public sympathy.
In a moralistic tone, Howard said these were not the type of people we want in Australia. “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come,” he intoned. Howard was stirring the racial pot. And, sadly, his tactic worked. No children had been thrown overboard. Howard knew it was a lie. The Coalition won the election using the politics of fear.
And to think that John Howard now is revered by many Australians as our greatest prime minister.
The bother of having brothers
Brothers! They can surface in your life at the most inconvenient time, as Britain’s latest Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, has discovered.
There was Boris, fighting tooth and nail for his political life when his younger brother Jo gets on the blower and tells him: I’m out of here. I’m quitting Cabinet and your government. Never mind that you gave me the job in the first place. Or words to that effect.
It was Jo’s second walkout from Cabinet this year. He believes strongly that Britain should have a second referendum on Brexit. Jo Johnson had returned to government as a business minister only recently after quitting Theresa May’s Cabinet earlier this year in order to back a second referendum.
“In recent weeks I’ve been torn between family loyalty and the national interest,” he tweeted. “It’s an unresolvable tension, and it’s time for others
to take on my roles as MP & minister.”
PM Boris said: “Look, people disagree about the EU. The way to unite the country, I’m afraid, is to get this thing done. That is the reality.”
Another reality is that brothers all over the world have a long history of love and hate. Jane Austen, the novelist put it neatly with: “What strange creatures brothers are!”
In Genesis, the schism between brothers goes back to the third and fourth humans on earth, Cain and Abel. Cain lures his brother into the forest and slays him, thus becoming humanity’s first murderer and the epitome of evil. Many, many years later another pair of brothers, George and Ira Gershwin, cast serious doubts on the biblical story in their opera Porgy and Bess: “The things that you’re liable to read in the Bible, ain’t necessarily so.”
While Boris and Jo ponder their current contretemps, they would do well to remember that brothers litter the pages of history. Whether they do so gracefully or disgracefully is up to them.
Curmudgeon, who had two brothers, applauds the attitude of American writer Garrison Keillor to his sibling: “The highlight of my childhood was making my brother laugh so hard that food came out his nose.” Curmudgeon takes a similar cavalier approach to his younger brother, born 10 years after him. When they argue the toss (which they do on a remarkably wide range of subjects) Curmudgeon apologises to the young fella once again for dropping him on his head when he was a baby. Works every time.
Possibly the most successful brothers as a team were William and Orville Wright, who lifted us humans from being essentially land-based animals into the domain of the birds. The Wrights got a heavier-than-air machine into the air at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903. It remained aloft a bare 12 seconds, but that was enough to convince them they should toss in their bicycle business and become full-time plane makers. Good work, W & O, you changed the way we live dramatically and forever.
C’est la vie in gangland …
Brothers pop up in all walks of life and fields of endeavour all over the world. It would be fruitless to try to chronicle them, but a brief comparison of the outlaw activities of the James gang in the American Wild West and the Kelly gang in Australia’s wild colonial bushranging days can fill patriotic Australians with a quiet pride that we had the better of the deal.
Both gangs were murderous hold-up men and thieves. A reasonable case can be made that Ned and Dan Kelly were driven to a life of bushranging by unrelenting police persecution of them, their family and friends, that they had wide popular support among the settlers in rural Victoria, that they only killed policemen who were hunting them down and that, in Ned’s case at least, there was a political element to their campaign.
In his “Jerilderie letter”, an 8,000-word justification of his gang’s fight for survival, Ned assumes an “us or them” stance, the leader of the people in
a fight against a corrupt and brutal colonial authority.
Ned, in his armour and helmet home-made from ploughshares, cuts
a romantic picture in his last stand shoot-out with police at Glenrowan,
an image perpetuated when he went bravely to the gallows, muttering:
“Such is life.”
By comparison, Jesse James’s murderous life ended in low farce. Jesse was standing on a chair, unarmed, to dust a picture on the wall when gang member Bob Ford shot him in the back of the head. When Ford and his brother Charlie failed to collect a $10,000 bounty for James’s murder, they toured the Mid-West re-creating the event as a stage show. How cynical can you get?
Has Mister Loopy topped the Loonies?
Here’s some hot news … America’s loony National Rifle Association might finally have been beaten in the BAMEC (Boofheaded and Mindless Excuse Championship).
After every mass shooting in the US, one or another NRA spokesman comes forth to proffer their mantra: “It’s not a firearms issue, it’s a mental health issue.” Putting aside the calculated, callous cruelty of such a response after
a massacre of the innocents, we thought it never would be topped as a piece
of exceptional illogic.
We were wrong. A certain Republican congressman, Steve King has volunteered the thought that rape and incest have helped maintain the world’s population.
“What if we went back through all the family trees and just pulled out anyone who was a product of rape or incest?” he asked. “Would there be any population of the world left if we did that?”
He also opined: “Considering all the wars and all the rapes and pillages that happened throughout all these different nations, I know I can’t say that I was not a part or product of that.”
Mr King was contributing in Congress to the feisty debate on abortion laws — although not contributing much, in the opinion of his fellow politicians. They passed a motion to rebuke him 424 votes to one.
Mr King failed to explain how “the pillages” had any bearing of his argument.
In any case, his answer might be futile if a consortium named Virternity has its way. Virternity envisages an eternal digital life for everyone in which there would be no guns, no massacres, no incest, no rapes or “pillages”: with just
a few exceptions we’d all be living in a virtual world, therefore having no physical bodies to shoot or be shot at, and thus no wars.
Virternity was launch last year mysteriously by faceless people then, just as mysteriously, disappeared. Curmudgeon’s only source for information comes via the digital world from someone who signs off as David Evans Bailey, a PhD researcher in virtual reality, at Auckland University of Technology.
Mr Evans Bailey may be real or he may be virtual, we don’t know. Whatevs, he goes into detail about the philosophical argument — whether there is a higher consciousness above the physical persona or body, or whether we are all just physical and that’s the end of the matter. If the mind and body are not the same it would seem impossible to digitise a human. (It’s the old mind or brain argument, made more complicated.)
Even if we were to settle the philosophical argument and get into digitising, there are certain stumbling blocks. One way to go about it would be to make thousands of micro-thin slices of the brain and copy the neural network in cyber space.
Problem: First invent your slicing machine.
Then find a volunteer.
Problem: The volunteer has to be alive when they slice up his/her brain.
But let’s not be curmudgeonly, let’s look at the big picture. Let’s set the scene: a whole lot of people have been digitised, we’re alive, we’re living in the computer.
Then the someone who is still living on Earth to keep an eye on the digitised things is having a bad day, starting with a stand-up shouting match with his partner and has only gone downhill since then. Derek, his name is Derek.
Derek is munching on his lunchtime sandwiches, which she made for him after their row. Aw, no, not again: how many times have I told her, I hate cheese and jam sandwiches, cheese and jam don’t belong together …
He looks up. There’s the big, big computer, there’s the switch for the big, big computer that gives shelter to billions upon billions of human minds. Derek is prey to a nasty spasm of envy; those minds might be in cyberspace but they are also on clover, no one is reduced to slanging matches with their partner in the digitised world.
Derek resists … but not for long. He springs to his feet, pulls the computer switch. The lives of billions of digitised humans are snuffed out. Here today, gone today.
Derek is arrested. He is the biggest mass murderer in history. He makes Hitler, Stalin, Genghis Khan look like wimps. Derek fronts the court, he is charged with an untold number of murders. He points out there are no bodies, no corpus delicti.
He walks free and is mobbed by reporters. Derek tells them: “It’s not a clicking problem, it’s a mental health problem.”
