July 2024 - The Best Mouse Tap

Modest Expectations – All States of Being Are Without a Self

“Less than 10 percent of the 280,000 species of flowering plants produce blue flowers”

I love blue flowers. I remember there were masses of hydrangeas growing in Victorian Gardens. They were blue, pink, white and variegated. First cultivated in Japan, they are found worldwide in the wild, without there being a single source from which they first grew. There are even Australian hydrangeas with small cream flowers vaguely resembling jasmine and found along streams in NSW and Queensland.

They are a garden flower; brought indoors they are somewhat “crowded house”. They need a big canvas upon which to show off. Living in a maisonette, small rooms just tended not to be the best place to display these flowers. I was told that if you put copper filings in the soil, there would be hydrangeas blue; and if an iron nail is put in the soil, hydrangeas pink.

This formula was not true, truly mythical. In acidic soil with aluminium sulphate as the key component, in a temperate climate, then the blue hydrangea blooms. Quite the opposite of the litmus test, which always records acidic soil as pink.

The scientist’s quote above says it all. Flowers are uncomfortable with blue pigments. Yes, the Japanese have created a blue chrysanthemum by genetic manipulation. Of the few true-blue flowers, if you discard the intrusion of the various shades of red and indigo, all are a delight – well at least for me. If you treasure these flowers then one of the times to be in England is in early spring when bluebells come out in a riot of colour for a few weeks and then retreat, leaving the lush greenery of a well-watered landscape bereft.

Cornflowers are the spiky kid on the block. They have their day at the Spring Racing Carnival in Melbourne when they are the flower of Derby Day. With their small confident upright stance, they make an excellent lapel adornment.

A symbol of hope, the cornflower is the national flower of Germany – and the basis for Prussian blue. Its name was derived because it grew in the wheat, barley and rye fields. There is an Australian native cornflower, but the flower is different in configuration, but given the cornflower has the feel of the Australian everlasting, our version is found in arid regions.

But my favourite is the delphinium, with its tower of blooms. There are various shades of blue but given there are apparently 300 different species and apparently they can be either merged with larkspurs or they remain close relatives, this flower from the high mountains of Africa and Europe is my favourite blue, because there is more than one shade of blue.

They tend to have a brief expression of glory. As one writer put it: Sadly, the flowers were short-lived. And being tall with a heavy abundance at the top of each stalk, all it took was one heavy rain to knock it over and send the flowers sprawling all over the grass. I enjoyed it while I could, and after my first summer, I sunk a tall rose climber into the ground to support the top-heavy stalks and protect them from heavy rain.

When I see the delphinium begin to drop its flowers, it should be realised that they are toxic. In fact, all parts of the plant are toxic – the active ingredient being the neurotoxic effects in the flower’s diterpenoid alkaloids.

So be wary if your herbalist friend offers you delphinium tea.

In explanation of my blue reverie, I’m very visual – how could I ignore the blue hydrangea!

The War of Jenkin’s Ear

Well, we know what happened to Robert Jenkin’s ear. It was sliced off in a confrontation between Jenkins, who was the captain of the British brig Rebecca, and the Spanish coastguards who boarded his ship off Cuba in 1731. Eight years later it was the casus belli for the British Government to declare war on the Spanish. Jenkins had appeared before a Parliamentary Committee to tell his story and allegedly show the Committee his severed ear. Shock, Horror – and the British declared war on Spain in 1739.

It was a desultory affair confined to the Caribbean, except in British eyes the capture of the Portobelo fortress by Admiral Edward Vernon (the man incidentally who gave us the word “grog”). Portobelo was a Spanish possession on the Caribbean coast of what is now Panama. It led to much rejoicing and inspired the writing of “Rule Britannia” and the name has been immortalised in the name “Portobello Road” in both London and Edinburgh. This war ended up merging into the European dust-up, the War of Austrian Succession. In fact, the name was coined in 1858 by the historian Thomas Carlyle; but the name has persisted.

Now the dilemma of Trump’s Ear. The world has moved on. Trump has had a pillow completely obscuring his right ear at the Republican convention. Now Trump said he was shot. The media have taken that as gospel; and even the sceptics say the bullet grazed his ear. The gunman had a high-powered rifle sufficient to kill one of the spectators and injure two others. The gun was not a pop gun.

I have looked at the right ear in the multiple photos available. He has a bloodied right upper helix of the ear and what appears to be clotted blood in the triangular fossa. A medical opinion later said it was a two cm cut.

What surprised me was there seemed to be no indication of the aural cartilage having been damaged, but then maybe the angle was distorted. However as one who has seen and sewn up a cut ear, it is not a trivial exercise. There just did not seem to be any damage in Trump’s ear. A bullet striking the ear, however you measure “grazing”, would have left its mark on the ear cartilage.

Turning to the Trump face just after he emerged from beneath the lectern, there was a smudge over his right mandible, but what intrigued me were the two thin lines of blood which seem to arise without relation to the bloody ear. They are thin straight lines which converge on his lips. The lower line seems to defy gravity by starting at the base of his mandible with no discernible source and moving upwards. Somebody might explain it, but then it was all too trivial. Trump said he was shot and that man with his history of fable telling must be believed.

And hallelujah, if you removed the ear dressing, the ear would appear normal – just a God given miracle.

Later, his controversial doctor, Ronny Jackson, stated that Trump sustained a two cm wide wound from the track of a bullet “that extended down the cartilaginous surface of the ear.” No sutures were required for Trump’s wound, Jackson said, but “there is still intermittent bleeding requiring a dressing to be in place”.

What an amazing bullet! It initiated a two cm cut without damaging the cartilage? I liked the last bit about the intermittent bleeding. Is Trump on anticoagulants?

We await the water stroll, or before that intercession by His Buddy, will Trump’s failed assassination just merge into the War of the Trump Succession?

Paper, Paper Everywhere and not a Thing to Show for It

We’ve been clearing out boxes and boxes of papers – a concentrated episode of nostalgia. Some files are just thrown out, because the link with that subject matter was tenuous and I wonder why I kept them. Yet there are the others, which attract both my amateur archivist interest and nostalgia at the same time. They are files which showed something in which I was involved.

Nevertheless, more than a passing comment, those committees or matters on which you have the minimal involvement of the passing observer are far too common. It is one of the pitfalls of trying to involve every person or organisation that those in authority think are relevant or politically important. Then they either do not turn up with or without an apology or the representative attends, contributes nothing, is basically unprepared and then at the next meeting a different representative attends without any real interest, and at what cost. So much “shuffling the sand” and getting nowhere.

I was asked to undertake a Rural Stocktake to ascertain what should be done to encourage doctors to go to the country. The then Minister of Health, Michael Wooldridge, had as one of his priorities, improvement of rural health. One of the tangible expressions of this was the improvement in the rural medical workforce, which in turn would flow onto improvement in the health professional workforce, including the Aboriginal health workers. Whether this could be construed as a “trickle-down” phenomenon, or a coincidence, was a question which I believe after all these years relies on a successful multi-professional approach. This is difficult to achieve because each profession, because of regulation and tradition, will be ever-present, especially where conflict between the various entities is provoked.

The original terms were that it be a three-month consultancy, that there would be a committee to help me and I would have the Department providing me with administrative assistance and at times one of the bureaucrats travelling with me. I was given an Optus phone, which in those days did not have enough rural coverage to be of any use. The Department would write the Report.

What happened? The consultancy was extended for six months; the committee might have met once at the very start. The makeup conformed to what I have said about Committees. After I had completed the Australia-wide consultations which absorbed the whole six months, I wrote the Report, which took three months for which I did not get paid. But it didn’t stop the politicians questioning the amount of money my company was paid. Some of them were taken aback when I called them directly and asked the basis for their concern. Not much came of that except mumbled responses.

The problem was that at that time, I was close to the Minister, which attracted the normal set of “maggots” who seem to think everything is rotten in such a relationship, only to find out that there was nothing there. Our affinity rested on the desire to get things done.

In addition, the Secretary of the Department, Andrew Podger, whom I did not know previously, was extremely progressive and fitted into the Wooldridge agenda. When Wooldridge retired prematurely, my view was that it was bad for his unfinished agenda and not particularly good for himself personally. But that is life.

The Stocktake involved me travelling around Australia, but I had the advantage of already having been involved in rural health issues really since the first week after medical registration, even before I started my first year internship. Then with my then wife, who had also just graduated, we undertook a locum in Birregurra in Western Victoria. That was January 1964.

These days doing such a locum just after graduation is debarred. For God’s sake, one has gone through five or six years of a medical degree, and the graduate doctor cannot practise unencumbered. It is one of those expensive unproven exercises that are imposed by authoritarian administrators without any real evidence. However, there is a more insidious reason and that is in the pursuit of private practice, teaching recent graduates is relegated down the list of priorities. Has anybody calculated the cost of this? No, because it is easy to bluff politicians with words like “safety” and “malpractice”, although the doctors do not retain the omniscience they once had.

Wooldridge agreed with the major recommendation of the Stocktake to establish a series of rural clinical schools linked to universities which already had a medical school. I reported in March 2000. Twelve months later, in anticipation of the 2001 Federal Budget, Wooldridge announced in Bairnsdale the creation of rural clinical schools, the Bairnsdale site being part of the Monash rural clinical school. Funding was provided for another seven sites. It was an extremely quick adoption of the Stocktake recommendation.

At the time the Universities with medical schools were enthusiastic. With most of them I had extensive consultations, which were also facilitated through other links. Wooldridge was able to fund the rural clinical schools directly through his Health budget rather than through Education where the central administration of most Universities generally skimmed off a percentage of this funding for “God-knows-what”.

The aim was to train a cohort of medical students in their clinical years in a rural setting. For instance, the University of NSW Rural Clinical School would have nodes at Albury, Wagga Wagga and Griffith. One of the ways the Stocktake was crafted was get the country areas and the universities positive. As those who are familiar with rural Australia know, there are intense rivalries (e.g. Albury vs Wagga Wagga). It is one of the problems of rural living and, as a rule of thumb, the closer the townships often the fiercer the rivalry, which makes collaboration a tricky business.

Then within each of the townships, there is conflict between professions, and this needs some degree of massaging. Nevertheless, there was a need to involve general practices as teaching sites. There was already a registrar training program where the Government funded the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP). The problem was while there were good teaching practices, many used their registrars as “mules” just doing unsupervised consultation on government funds – in effect “double-dipping”. The entry of the Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine (ACRRM) with their initiative of the “rural medical generalist” coincided with the approval of the medical School at James Cook University in Townsville, with subsidiary campuses at Cairns and MacKay. Ian Wronski, who was a leading academic with long experience working in Northern Australia, particularly the Kimberley, was the driving force behind the initiative; I prepared the submission and Wooldridge approved it. The process was open, the arguments persuasive.

Townsville, home of the medical school in the tropics

Wronski, in pursuing this agenda, not only created a rural medical school in the tropics but also saved the University which had built up a reputation in marine biology but very little else. Wronski then developed schools of dentistry, allied health professionals, including nursing and veterinary science.

The other part of this approach to rural health had been the creation of University Departments of Rural Health (UDRH). The first two sites – Broken Hill and Mount Isa – were chosen because of remoteness, because the aim was to have a multicultural training centre in population health. The concept was new, but I was able to obtain locally-based allies in both cities.

The UDRH program has been successful in the number which have been created (12) but they have strayed from the original intention of the program to integrate population health into clinical practice. However, the progression of the program has been hampered by the failure of the Rural Health Commissioners to progress the agenda and so the program still has limitations in its ability to satisfy its original aim.

The Hanging Participle

John Funder AC is a sage and probably would be happy to hear himself described as a polymath. He is the father of the best-selling author, Anna Funder.

Jesuit-schooled, Funder is one of the few who took the traditional Classics whilst at school, Latin and Ancient Greek. An excellent orator, Funder usually was able to navigate the shoals of academic research and university politics with ease. We knew one another from shared university and post-university experience, never close but generally experiencing entertaining interactions when we did.

But I was surprised one day to receive a note, commencing as always charmingly:

Dear Beastie,

You’ve done it again. Not only is “The Best of Best” terrific as it routinely is, but the underlined sentence is now the benchmark for the floating (a.k.a. hanging) participle.

The underlined sentence occurred in an article where I was mentioning being at a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art honouring the Finnish architect, Alvar Aalto. The year was 1998, the centenary of Aalto’s birth, and for those unfamiliar, he was inter alia the original architect for the modern hospital, producing those characteristic airy flowing designs, so different from the forbidding Victorian hospital design,

And the sentence over which Funder waxed lyrical: Wandering around the pictorial display of Aalto’s genius, interspersed with scale models of his various buildings, there is certain familiarity.

Well, at least I could sit down on my benchmark to recover from such a gust of praise.

Mouse Whisper

This would appear somewhat relevant to what is going on with the current Construction, Forestry, Maritime, and Energy Union (CFMEU) conflict with all the associated heavy-handedness.

This observation appeared in the Column 8 of the SMH some years ago. A reader wrote that he had seen a truck with what the writer described as a flamboyant sign: Rough as Guts Constructions. The number plate on the truck, YAH-HOO.

Modest expectations 278 – The year 2058

Anthony Albanese was born in 1963. At that time, Australia had to deal with a “faith-based” political force, which had its birth in the Labor Party. Let me say, I had to deal with operatives of the Democratic Labor Party (DLP), basically a Falangist right wing Roman Catholic party which tried to take over the Labor Party. It was labelled the Movement, and was the brainchild of an Italian immigrant’s son, Bob Santamaria, who made common cause with the violently anti-British Archbishop of Melbourne, Daniel Mannix.

While its activities were concentrated in Victoria, there was also plenty of activity in Queensland. It never gained much traction in NSW, because of the opposition of the Sydney Archbishop Gilroy. He disliked Santamaria intensely and was a much more open character than the saturnine Mannix. Eventually the DLP was destroyed, effectively in the 1974 election, but for 20 years it was godsend to Menzies and his successors; and a huge headache for the Labor Party.

I do not buy the argument that the DLP was not “faith-based” because it did not incorporate any religious name into its title. I knew I was navigating certain Roman Catholic doctrines, when having to implement policies while working for a Government riddled with DLP supporters, with whom which I disagreed. Mostly I was able to ignore them.

That was then, but it demonstrates that the sweeping statement that Australia has not indulged in “faith-based” party shenanigans is wrong.

Albanese is a gang leader. His actions show that. He seems not to particularly like woman, especially a young Muslim woman, who fled Afghanistan as a small child and came to Australia.

Infuriatingly for Albanese, Fatima Payman looks like an ordinary, smartly-dressed woman – and moreover she looks like a white woman – an “Australian”. In fact, in looks and demeanour, she reminds me of my favourite cousin, who went to a Presbyterian school in Ballarat.

The activity in Gaza has created a situation where Muslims are reduced to a feeling of powerlessness as the Australian government temporises. Despite the weasel words, the Australian Government actually supports Israel. Jews have what I would describe as a “philanthropy lock” on Australia, especially in the area loosely labelled “The Arts”, fertile ground for supporters of the Labor Party. The appointment of an extreme Jewish woman as Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism in Australia, with additional form in the banking scandals of a decade before, does nothing to assuage the damage being done by the Israeli retribution sheltering behind cries of “anti-semitism”.

Fatima Payman was given a slot on the Western Australian Labor Senate ticket, which was thought to be an unelectable position. However, the swing to the Labor Party was so strong in that State that she was elected. Given she was not expected to be elected, what does she owe the Labor Party?

Don’t do what Albanese does – directly or through his henchwomen, who operate under the rubric of “reaching out”, alternatively patronising and vilifying her. In the end, Fatima Payman will be paid out. Her chances of re-election in Western Australia are minimal, given that Labor has probably passed its highwater electoral mark. However, she will be around for a long enough time. I would suggest the Labor Party stops bullying her forcing her out of the Party – and that applies to some of the media with their insulting unsavoury questions.

She is a strong woman. Let’s not waste that talent.

My Experience

Now Senator Payman, let me relate my experience in rural Victoria in the early 2000’s when there was an influx of Muslims, both male and female. There was also a group of Iraqi Marsh Arabs, who were settled in Cobram. It was drawn to my attention that one of the doctors was worried by his Muslim colleagues not eating nor drinking. He enquired whether his colleague was unwell. The Muslim colleague replied that it was Ramadan.

This display of unintentional ignorance prompted me to ask one of the Muslim doctors whether she could prepare a presentation on the significance of Ramadan and in so doing, provide a sketch of what it meant to be a Muslim. Her presentation proved very popular with the staff of the various health services. She repeated it around Ramadan each year, at least while I was there. It demonstrated to me how little we non-Muslims know about Islam, but the number of hospital staff in various health services who wanted to learn more about Islam surprised me – in a positive manner.

One issue which confronted me clearly illustrated an area of religious sensitivity. This is male circumcision. Paediatricians in Melbourne were recommending severe restrictions be placed on the procedure which, when I was a baby, was de rigeur. Most male infants then were circumcised. However, without consultation, the restrictions were introduced. When I heard one Iraqi Muslim had taken his child back to Iraq to be circumcised, I recognised something had to be done.

One Syrian-qualified paediatrician also raised the problem with me; and I convened a meeting in Yarrawonga to seek a solution. I included members of the paediatric establishment and local doctors who were willing to undertake infant circumcision. The compromise agreed was that khitan should not be proscribed but must be undertaken by medical practitioners. The Department did not offer any objection, once it was realised how important circumcision was to Muslims. After all, Jews were not banned from undertaking male circumcision, which is undertaken in a highly regulated manner with the Mohel undertaking circumcision on the eight day old child.

My aim was to engender further understanding in a community where, historically, there had already been a Muslim presence from before WWII. This was the Albanian community, based in the Goulburn Valley. This community had been well-integrated socially and the migrants were allowed in during the operation of the White Australia policy. They were seen as European and, importantly for the Government of the time, looked “white” enough. The strength of Payman, which people are afraid to say, is she looks “white”. She has clipped accentless English; and apart from the hijab, in the street she would be indistinguishable from the traditional white face that dominates the female Labor parliamentary ranks – the operative word is “dominates”.

I found male Muslim doctors often very difficult in working in a team. Most of them were competent, however their relationships with female patients often left much to be desired. I remember one doctor who was the subject of a complaint by an elderly woman when he was undertaking a home visit. To me it was a question of misunderstanding not helped by the clumsy way the doctor handled the visit. However, there was no evidence of sexual assault, but when a doctor with poor English and a soft voice asked an elderly rather deaf woman about her symptoms, then there may be fertile grounds for such misunderstanding. I counselled him and tried to assist him in modifying his clinical mien, while also ensuring he could pray at the required times while at work. He undoubtedly was devout and kept asking me for advice. I found dealing with the complaint difficult, but he did heed my advice, the problem arose from a misunderstanding, and the matter died down.

The fact is that Muslim communities seem very self-contained, but the prospect of further division exists, aggravated by inflammatory remarks from Dutton and his ilk, with talk of Islamophobia, as though the Muslim community is the “enemy within”.

The mantra about our being a multi-cultural community may be theoretically correct, but our ostensibly secular country is a country divided around a collection of religious totems.

Of course, there was talk about Payman joining a Muslim party at the time she left the Labor Party, however the last thing we need is a Muslim Party organised along the lines of the late Democratic Labor Party. The Party would act as a spoiler, but the governing parties are liable to yield to its demands which inevitably encourages a Muslim Party to consolidate any such division.

The place where division would be most obvious is in the school system. I went to a private school founded in 1858. I was regaled by tales of my great uncle taking on the St Pat’s boys on the banks of the Yarra River “with one arm tied behind his back”. The Irish religious divisions were transported to the Australian colonies. After all, in one of our early crews, we had both a Sweeney and a Todd – yet we of the Church of Ireland had such boys with such names.

The funding of religious schools is the best way to ensure continuing division in the community.

So, Fatima Payman is in a privileged position of harnessing the creative elements of Islam. After all, she fled from the Taliban. Islam in the eyes of the young generation is rooted in the horrors of ISIS, the extremist fringe of Islam. She can be a cohesive force, encouraging the elements of Islam which introduced the world to its positivity, for instance the concept of zero, who had given us an understanding of a world of precision – and yet produced a world of beauty such as the Persian garden.

As someone who has wandered through the architecture of Islam I have seen the soaring legacy of a force which has brought such creativity. Yet this is also a religion reviled because of a time when Islam is constantly at war, with so many of its young people socialised in a world where death is ever present. Where a child cries and is drowned out by gunfire, lying across the body of a dead parent, is it any wonder that Muslims in the Australian community do not greet us effusively, particularly when the messages from Government are mixed.

I always look to that time in mediaeval Granada when Christians, Jews and Muslims lived in harmony under Moorish rule. To me, the Alhambra Palace in Granada is the apogee of Islamic architecture – the way the gardens are designed to use water as a coolant in the harsh Andalusian summers in a remarkably airy structure. I loved the gardens, interspersed – in particular, the rectilinear water features with fountains and their parabolic streams, these pools lined with orange trees in designs that acknowledge the four sacred elements of water, wind, fire and soil. We relax. The stresses of the outside world evaporate – at least for this moment.

Tolerance is relative, but at that time Muslim, Jewish and Christians intermingled, some years being better than others. It was a time when the Islamic world was revising the Ptolemaic conception of the Universe, advancing mathematical theory (the concept of zero and algebra), promulgating advances in medical knowledge, practice and medicines themselves – introducing the pharmacy (gauze from Gaza), bringing forth advances in weaving and dyeing (muslin from Mosul, damask from Damascus). Then there was the legacy of poetry intertwined by philosophical discussion among intellectuals drawn from the three religions.

But Granada, or for that matter the whole of Andalusia, was not necessarily an attar of roses and the Reconquista in 1492 by the Christian King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile unleashed the intolerance of a Church still bound by dogma and violent evangelism – an environment which produced the Inquisition. Something which is not far from the attitudes of those who would rend the fabric of Australian society apart, because all they know is retribution, paranoia, suppression and violence.

Thus, coming back to Senator Payman, you should think carefully, and not be seduced by the sirens that blare “Go, get ‘em”. Conciliation is a difficult path, but if you believe in religious and racial harmony and not be seduced by the hellish forces of violent extremism, then this nation may have a chance – with role models like you.

A Letter of Complaint Goes a Long Way

On August 4, 1996, the SoHo Grand Hotel was opened in Lower Manhattan, where once there were grand houses, which then were left to decay as the area was transformed into an industrial centre initially for small enterprises and then large-scale textile manufacturers. The area (SoHo means South of Houston Street) at one stage was a red-light district and then when the textile industries left, it became a wasteland – hell’s hundred acres.

But it retained the largest number of cast iron buildings in any American metropolis, a legacy of its “grand old days” in the mid nineteenth century. It was only after the bohemian set recognised the potential of these old buildings with their high ceilings and faded ornateness, that the area began to be revived from the early 60’s of the last century.

The Soho Grand Hotel epitomised this gentrification. It was a slick minimalist hotel, where the rooms were not large but had a tasteful spareness in the fittings, exuding that quiet luxury which can be felt whenever one steps into an upmarket Danish display centre in Copenhagen. No frills, just elegance. No waste space.

We knew we were in good company when we saw k.d. lang and her partner, she in a sharp black suit with black and white patent leather shoes, and her companion more conventionally dressed, stepping out of a limo. They were going to the same address as we were on West Broadway.

Anyway, I must have sent a letter complaining about something or another. I don’t have a copy of letter, but the reply turned up today in papers we are throwing out.

Let me say the reply was a little unexpected. I’ve added it below verbatim.

Dear Dr. Best

Thank you for your patronage in 1998!

As a Grand Guest you enjoyed the benefits of membership in New York City’s only corporate rate program designed exclusively for Loyal Guests. In 1999 we are pleased, once again, to extend the benefits of the Grand Guest program to you, including a Guaranteed Rate of $284 and Last Room Availability.

We are also pleased to tell you that, because of your comments, we have made many positive changes to our Services, Guest Rooms and Public Areas. We have added additional Concierge, Front Office, Reservations and Telephone staff to better serve you. We have upgraded our Guest Rooms with CD players and VCR’s, additional bathroom shelving, polar fleece throws and residential sized Kiehl’s toiletries and Caswell Massey soaps. The hotel’s interior designer, William Sofield, has reinterpreted the design in the Grand Bar, Salon, Canal House and other public areas, introducing new furnishing, fabrics and details.

Again, we thank you for your loyalty and look forward to your return in 1999. Enclosed are the details of the 1999 Grand Guest program.

Sincerely

Tony Fant

Executive Vice President
General Manager

But it was not such a big complaint that the management had to renovate the hotel. We did stay there the next year, and I dared not make another complaint lest they’d demolish the whole hotel and rebuild it.

As a footnote, Tony Fant is now the president of GrandLife Hotels and a pioneer of the hospitality landscape in lower Manhattan. According to his blurb, he is also a longtime patron of downtown culture, drawing from the days of the rock poets to the emergence of East Coast hip hop and beyond. Judging by what I saw nearly 30 years ago, he has style, a quality so typical of New York.

Rear Window

Rear Window is one of my favourite Hitchcock movies. Recently, I have tried to fathom out why the film is called Rear Window. My wife has a simple explanation – James Stewart, as the voyeuristic bored photographer laid up with his leg in plaster, can watch all the other residents in the apartments facing him. This is his rear window looking across the courtyard to the rear windows of the apartments opposite. To me it raises the question of front windows in such a Greenwich apartment complex. After all, in so much writing, authors describe their characters pondering the world through front windows.

As is well-known about this film is the setting: The (Greenwich Village) apartment complex that Hitchcock chose to reference was ultimately completely reconstructed on the Paramount Studios lot, reportedly costing an “unprecedented” $9,000 to design and $72,000 to build. (c. $920,000 today) The structure included seven apartment buildings and three other buildings on the other side of the street. It boasted a total of 31 apartments, although only a handful were fully furnished.

Much is made of the symbolism, with the extremely dysfunctional character played by Jimmy Stewart with all the massive sexual undertones in his relationship with his girlfriend, played by Grace Kelly. She is the typical Hitchcock heroine, where passion is a frozen commodity in a fair-haired beautiful body, enclosed in generally perfectly groomed outfits.

As with nearly all Hitchcock films, there is crime, murder being a favourite, and this Hitchcock ability to engender an atmosphere of suspense, without having to resort to props is one of the reasons he is considered such a great film director.

I still puzzle over the film name. The film was made in 1953 near the end of the McCarthy era when his crusade against Communism was leading to a high level of distrust with many people unfairly treated and American society torn apart by Senator McCarthy, President Eisenhower either unwilling or unable to rein him in.

You can say that Americans are always looking at the rear window, seeing what has gone by but unwilling to project themselves into the future consequences of their actions. Rear windows can distort one’s views, and assessing other people through the rear windows is based on a distillation of assumptions about a certain person, if you believe there are no absolute facts. Hitchcock concentrates our mind on the man who has murdered his wife in the apartment being recognised by the Stewart character through his camera lens.

Rear Window is a symbol of the past- what has happened. That is the problem with those supporting Biden. Their gaze is fixed on the rear vision window of past accomplishments. Just as the hero in the Hitchcock film, he is focussed on the past; and has not the ability to take his gaze away from the rear window. But he still had his girl friend loyal to him, no matter what. Grace Kelly’s character is that person in the film.

But unlike the film, Biden will have a disastrous fall, because if one’s gaze is fixed on the past, one will inevitably stumble badly because the path one assumes to be the same as in the past is no longer there or vastly changed. Or was it you who have changed? After all, at the end of the film, Jimmy Stewart’s character has two legs encased in plaster. This was the result of fighting off the murderer who has come across to exact retribution. A future he did not anticipate?

QED!

This comes from the Boston Globe. In the wake of the Trump near-miss, a minor case but illustrates something about American society, in this case in Rhode Island. The back story is that Joseph Francis had long term mental health issues, which he showed in bizarre, anti-social behaviour. And as shown in the piece below, his lawyer was a bit of a pistachio also. You know, a nutter!

After looking at the scope of Joseph Francis’ past contacts with other law enforcement agencies, Hopkinton Police Chief Mark Carrier told the Globe, “We saw a pattern with his character flaws, temper, and mental health issues.”

The police denied Francis’ applications to buy guns in 2020 and 2021, Carrier said. But Francis fought back, and hired a lawyer: Frank Saccoccio, the president and lobbyist of the Rhode Island Second Amendment Coalition.

Saccoccio got the cyber-harassment charge expunged, clearing the way for Francis to buy firearms. Without that charge, there was no legal standing for denying his applications as long as the questions on it were answered truthfully. His mental health could not prevent him from owning a gun unless he had been involuntarily committed or a court had determined that he was a danger to himself or others.

“Town Solicitor Kevin McAllister advised that nothing on his record would prohibit it, so we had to proceed with approval,” Carrier said.

Francis started buying firearms. And last weekend, he used one of them to kill his estranged wife, Stephanie Francis, and then himself.

Mouse Whisper

Mouse in French is souris; in Italian topo; in Spanish ratón; in Portuguese rato; in Romanian soarace; in Romansch mieur.

There you are – fluent in all the Romantic languages.

Modest Expectations – Dome of Wisdom

Taos has a certain style.

Above are some of the pictures which were drawn, painted, scrawled by D.H. Lawrence in the 1920’s. They hang in a private “Gallery” in Taos, a town in New Mexico. When I first came upon them in 1982, they were hidden behind a curtain. Too pornographic to be shown in Great Britain, these paintings were “exiled”, otherwise if they had not been removed from British shores, they would have been destroyed.

In the 1920’s Lawrence, with his wife Frieda, decamped to Taos aiming to start an artist’s colony, and where Lawrence could indulge himself in painting instead of writing. That was not completely true because Lawrence wrote The Plumed Serpent while they were there. They stayed for only two years. The experiment thus never worked, compounded by discord among the members of the putative artists’ colony

Lawrence died in 1930 of tuberculosis in Venice (although Provence is mentioned). They still had the ranch. Lawrence’s ashes were bought back to Taos five years later, and mixed by his widow with cement for the altar built as his memorial overlooking the Rio Grande Valley. Remember, Taos is at an elevation of 2,121m.

Frieda bequeathed the ranch to the University of New Mexico in 1956. The property was left largely as Lawrence would have remembered it. Lawrence’s Tree, a giant ponderosa pine immortalised in a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe, still towers over the simple former homesteader’s cottage.

I first went to Taos in 1982. I had been in Albuquerque visiting a hospital on the Friday. A friend of mine flew over from San Francisco and suggested we go to Taos for the weekend. The drive was over two hours, going via the State Capital, Santa Fe, and along the Rio Grande River. We stayed in an adobe motel, one of the buildings lining the central square. Taos retained a certain pueblo shtick.

We heard about the banned Lawrence paintings and how they were kept behind a curtain, in the office of the owner of the Hotel La Fonda. Saki Karavas was an affable, thickset Greek who welcomed our enquiry about the paintings. We were the only the two people there at the time; he charged us a nominal amount of money and then elaborately pulled back the curtain. Voilà.

He said he had purchased nine of them in 1956 but didn’t tell us how much they cost.

Although we didn’t know it at the time, this is the largest collection of Lawrence paintings in the world. Karavas singled out the two paintings, which were among those confiscated in London – Fight with an Amazon and Dance-Sketch. I said to my companion, why?

I reckon then these paintings were considered too pornographic to put on display because Lawrence’s novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, provided the necessary background notoriety. The book had been banned for so long, it became a surrogate for censorship, even though the ban was lifted in Australia in 1965.

When I went back 30 years later, Karavas had long since died, but the paintings were still there (for an increased viewing charge). Photography was allowed, but my companion on this occasion, even though a keen photographer, said why would she bother photographing them. So, she didn’t. She found them boring and not well painted.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous blog, we were more concerned to buy a melonhead Kachina doll. Having seen a good example, we told the shop owner we would return the next morning when the owner was to come to open his shop. He never did.

We still loved Taos, especially in the early morning when the air was crisp and all the russet and terracotta and burnt sienna colours were on show in what still had that Indian pueblo effect.

Lawrence too was not oblivious to his surrounds. He wrote a poem “Autumn in Taos” – in part:

And then to look back to the rounded sides of the squatting Rockies.
Tigress brindled with aspen,
Jaguar-splashed, puma-yellow, leopard-livid slopes of America.

Yes, we looked back; and saw Taos retreating as we drove down to catch our plane. Not sure we saw the animal colours.

Requiem for a Light Welterweight

White House spokesperson Andrew Bates confirmed that Biden had seen the White House physician to check on the cold. But on Friday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the opposite, telling reporters that Biden had not had any kind of medical checkup since February. Boston Globe.

Since President Biden does not have Parkinson’s Disease doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have a Parkinsonian variant such as Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP). Good days and bad days. Falls. Getting more frequent episodes over time. What we saw at the debate doesn’t look like simply an episode explainable as just a bad cold and jet lag. Some national and international colleagues say he is having more frequent problems with his speech. His gait abnormality. His stare. His abnormal face of “surprise”. Tangential speaking which is soft and garbled – Washington Post reader

When I read these comments about Biden, it was a perfect definition of denial on one hand and clinical acumen on the other. When Biden ultimately collapses, as he will unless he quits the race, the retribution will be long and hard. These stupid Biden advisers who have facilitated the resurrection of Trump will be the scapegoats deservedly when Biden fails if not persuaded to step down.

The problem with the Democratic Party, there are too many just like Biden. This is the tribe who should have stopped their cosmetic surgery and Botox years ago in order to try and fool the ageing process – and the leader of this mob is Nancy Pelosi, who I hope is not following in the steps of Senator Feinstein, also from California, who was a tragic demented remnant for years, refusing to resign, dying in office last year at 90 years, a wasted seat in the Senate. The problem is not new. Both the Congress and Senate are a ruling gerontocracy.

The infection has spread to the Presidency.

Thomas Parr, reputed to have married at 80 and died at 152 (although it was suggested there was confusion with his grandfather) – didn’t run for office

If Biden says that he will not stand again it will be a circuit breaker. The reason? It will leave Trump exposed. Trump then can no longer deflect the age question onto his opponent. He’ll become the target, and then there will be clear air to determine the level of Trump’s cerebral decay.

The problem: Biden is so separated from reality that he is incapable. Picture a drooling, incoherent shell in November, every State lost. Trump is a pathological liar, a plaintive cry echoing around halls where the blue bunting lies limp. Why, because America is a place where the ruling class believe that ageing can be halted if you wish hard enough. No, untrue!

Yet the Democratic party paradoxically, apart from the geriatric layer at the top, has much talent. Not Kamala Harris, who has had her chance. Not Newsom, the Governor of California, too slick and too vulpine.

Apart from the disastrous Obama, whose judgement never matched his rhetoric – as example, his support for the wooden unelectable Hilary over Biden as his successor – both Clinton and Carter came from Southern States, once Democratic territory but now tomato red (Arkansas) and plum-coloured (Georgia). It remains a useful pointer.

Any of Andy Beshear, Governor of Kentucky, Amy Klobuchar, long serving Senator from Minnesota, or Gretchen Widmer, Governor of Michigan, would wipe any floor upon which Old Man Trump would attempt to stand, his wonderful imitation of Toad of Toad Hall wreathing his vermillion visage slowly dissolving into a black iguana snarl.

Stumbling in their way is the rigid figure shorn of his electability, Biden, a stubborn old man exhibiting the fact that he has always been a selfish mediocrity – a junior welterweight not acknowledging the towel falling in his political ring.

As Biden said on Tuesday: “I’m not going anywhere”. Only too true.

Peripheral Neuritis

In the perpetual cycle of medical misinformation swirling around Biden, his condition is stated to be partially attributable to mild peripheral neuritis with “subtle changes in response to heat/cold” as though one gets a tincture of peripheral neuritis and it is some trivial disease.

Maybe, his doctor speaks verities, this comment also seems to be set up for the doctor to dismiss Biden having a diabetic neuropathy, judging by the tenor of his Report on Biden’s health – or else to distract from a more worrying central lesion of his nervous system. But then am I just another “Conspiratory theorist”?

Let me just say, peripheral neuritis is crippling. I ought to know. I have it as a complication of my underlying disease which lay undiagnosed for the best part of a decade. This missed diagnosis provided plenty of scope for the complication of peripheral neuritis to supervene. It did not particularly help when I realised how serious it seemed to be and there was the three-month delay in getting an appointment with a neurologist. Once I saw her, she was very good, and referred me onwards where I have been diagnosed and treated.

Nevertheless, the changes are irreversible, and I have lost sensation in the classic “glove and stocking” manner. In other words, I have impaired neuro-conduction defects in my lower legs and feet as well as my hands and lower forearms.

In fact, in the sural nerve which innervates the area around the Achille’s tendon, a purely sensory nerve, I have nil response to stimulation in both left and right legs.

I walk with difficulty, because peripheral neuritis affects the motor neurones also, so walking becomes increasingly difficult and climbing stairs is a step too far.

But apparently not for Biden, the Man with the Mild Maladies.

The Modest Member

In the 70’s I convened a conservative think tank called GRAPPL – Group for the Rational Advancement of Progressive Liberalism. It met monthly in the Vaucluse Hotel in Richmond, when Graeme Richmond was the publican.

The genesis of the Group was discussions among a number of young people who were interested in producing policy documents which could be circulated among politicians, public servants and others who were relevant for a particular policy. Most of the participants were then in their thirties, and some had already had substantial achievements; so there was a ripple of influence already through this Victoria-based group. For the group it was useful that the Coalition parties were in power during its active years, so there was fertile ground to lodge the papers.

Surprisingly for a Victorian group, arising in a traditionally protectionist State, the Group was adamant in support of free trade. It was still a time when Australia was in the grip of McEwenism, named after the former National Party leader, John McEwen. He was the member for Murray in Northern Victoria from 1934 to 1971, and ultimately a malignant force in the growth of Australia. Talk about the Tariff Iron Curtain!

Bert Kelly was a farmer, who represented the Liberal Party in the South Australian rural seat of Wakefield from 1958 until 1977, when he was rolled at the preselection. After he left Parliament, he continued to write his Modest Member column in the AFR. By this time he had attracted a number of like-minded Liberal Party politicians to his quest of inducing change in Liberal Party policy, even though the then Prime Minister Fraser was an intuitive protectionist. I remember being in the USA in November 1982, and the Australian dollar was grossly over-valued. I then was changing one Australian dollar for US$1.20. This was a side product of the persistence of the McEwenism, which required a Labor Government under Hawke to remedy the situation.

I did not have much to do with Bert Kelly. As far as I can remember he never came around to Snedden’s office. I reckon he saw Bill Snedden as a lightweight, and since he had been Treasurer under McMahon and was from Victoria, he would be a protectionist anyway – which, Bert, was not quite right. Snedden was brought up in Western Australia.

On one day in 1979 following release of some GRAPPL papers supporting free trade, I was surprised to receive a letter from Bert Kelly, who by that time was no longer a Member of Parliament and living in Burnside, a foliage-rich Adelaide suburb nestling in the foothills of Mount Lofty:

Dear Dr. Best

I have been very busy lately so have not been able to read the two Grapple papers with the thoroughness that they no doubt deserve. However, I gave them to my economic mentor to study and Eccles was most impressed. Indeed, his comment on Dr Walls’ paper (Jamie Walls was later the convenor of GRAPPL) to the effect that he could not have done as well himself. And such a comment from a self-opinionated blighter like Eccles is high praise indeed.

I don’t know anything about your organisation, but if these two are fair samples of what you are about then I wish you well indeed because Australia desperately needs this kind of horse sense as never before.

Good luck

Bert Kelly (signed)”

Professor Eccles was one the characters Bert Kelly made up to ensure that he had his own coterie of believers, when all around were not. But in the end Bert did win out. This succinct letter is one of my most valued possessions.

Bert Kelly was a great Australian; and you know the Liberal Party never kicked him out. He just lost pre-selection when the redistribution reduced the number of South Australian seats in the House of Representatives. The genial nonentity who had been the member for the abolished seat moved over and was pre-selected. That’s how we do it in Australia. Tall Poppies lie strewn on the Political Road.

The Razor’s Edge

While many books have had an impact on me over the years, only one can truly be said to have changed the way I look at the world, and thus changed my life. It was a bestseller when it was released in 1944 but has since fallen off many people’s radar because it is not considered a “classic.” In the case of the great English novelist and playwright W. Somerset Maugham, this “classic” label has long been applied to his book Of Human Bondage, yet not the one that changed my life: The Razor’s Edge. The Razor’s Edge is not simply Maugham’s finest novel, however; it is easily one of the best novels of all time. – Paul Combs

I finished reading Razor’s Edge, a first edition of Somerset Maugham’s book ostensibly about a war-traumatised American called Larry Darrell, but really about Somerset Maugham, the observer of a group of people moving with varying degrees of grace across a mainly post WWI landscape. It was an intense book; and the interchange between the author and Larry near the end of the book about the spiritual experience which Indian Hinduism cast upon Larry was the element which emotionally exhausted me. The ending was just where Maugham stopped writing. Life is a loose end; and I just put the book down, emotionally wrung out. I have never experienced that sense of emotional exhaustion in any book that I had read previously.

This edition was printed in 1944 on the inferior paper of wartime, which only intensified the intimacy of a book. Maugham had distilled his experiences of this group of people, and the book starts slowly. As the players emerge, it gathers pace from its languid start, where Elliott Templeton, the elegant snobbish well-to-do flâneur, serves as the medium through which the plot gathers speed with the introduction of Larry’s fiancé, Isabel and the Matunin family into which she ultimately marries Gray, the scion.

She prefers luxury to Larry; but if I go further this is to summarise the book; rather to stimulate one’s interest. I have not forgotten the tragic Sophie MacDonald, and here I felt the razor’s edge, which comes from a passage in the Upanishads: “The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard.”

Finally, on the flyleaf was a brief annotation from Nita dated Christmas 1944 “A very happy Xmas to my Darling.” So tender; so anonymous; never expecting an intrusive reader eighty years later. What prompted my intrusion were the lightly pencilled underlining, which commenced on page 152 with: Passion is destructive…and if it doesn’t destroy it dies. On to page 167, you know women are very unfortunate, so often when they fall in love, they cease to be lovable. Then to 253, I know by personal experience that in nothing are the wise men of India more dead right than in their contention that chastity enhances the power of the spirit…but that happiness rests not in them, but in spiritual things. And they think the way we have chosen leads to destruction.

Finally on page 254: I happen to think that the greatest ideal man can set before himself is self-perfection…nothing that happens is without effect. If you throw a stone in a pond the universe isn’t quite the same as before… when a man becomes pure and perfect the influence of his character spreads so that they who seek truth are naturally drawn to him.

A reflection in pencil perhaps in the winter of 1945, of someone perhaps the object of Nita’s affection. Marginalia underlined, by that someone, now a ghost but who discloses his hand, which frankly I find uncomfortable.

As for myself, I prefer another excerpt:

Larry gave a little smile. “Of course, it may be that I’d fallen into a doze and dreamt. It may be that my concentration on that feeble flame had induced a sort of hypnotic condition in me and that those three figures that I saw as distinctly as I see you were recollections of pictures preserved in my subconscious. But it may be that they were myself in past lives. It may be that I was not so very long ago an old lady in New England and before that a Levantine Jew and somewhere back, soon after Sebastian Cabot had sailed from Bristol, a gallant at the Court of Henry Prince of Wales.”

To me, it rings true – what he is describing the sensation brought through his meditation is tapping into focal points along his string of pearls, his DNA, which holds and guards his inheritance. I must try staring into a flame sometime to see if it shakes up by DNA threads to release my ancestors to touch one of my senses.

Mouse Whisper

You know even we mice are amazed by the Robinette Biden, the old codger who says that only the Lord God Almighty will persuade him not to stand again from US President. I believe that constitutionally America has separated Church from State, otherwise would he dare ignore the electoral process if he heard his Lord God Almighty say to him, “No. Stay on, the Polls are just a trivial Temporal process, which I have not ordained.”

Modest Expectations – Abendlied

Only $100,000 a week over summer in Nantucket, so went the headline for this property overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. There is the idyll for those who remembered a summer before climate change, which is currently besieging New England. One doesn’t associate the Brahmins of Boston with being ravaged by hurricanes.

The property seems a bit close to the ocean, and maybe there will be a different perspective in five years’ time when the cliff buffer is gone.

Nantucket is an exclusive island, off the Massachusetts coast. How could God not protect such a property! It is certainly not a place for an Australian without the “moolah” to undertake such a summer rental unless one had access to a Cayman Island account labelled “Australia defence bureaucrat”.

To put it into perspective, the property comprises a six-bedroom main house and a two-bedroom guest cottage, a pool, private beach stairs, and an outdoor kitchen. The lot on which the estate was built had sold for US$3.25m to a limited liability company run by managers based in New Jersey.

When I saw this photograph, it frankly did not seem worth the rent, but it does house at least 16 people, so a week shared round would soften the financial blow of having a beautiful view of an endless Atlantic Ocean, from a place whence myriad American whalers would have set sail to the Southern Ocean nearly two hundred years before.

Some of these whalers would leave their inheritance on the Tasmanian Islands, as they ventured South in search of the great white whale. Such was the value of the harvest (meat, bone (baleen), ambergris and blubber) that men would sail that far for up to four years at a stretch. Whale oil derived primarily from the blubber was used to light lamps, lubricate machinery and make soaps and detergents – and perfumes. Depending on the whale, the oil characteristics varied.

So that is the point of why we came to New England, in search of the whaler boat commemorated on a piece of scrimshaw I had purchased many years before in a village south of Hamilton, the centre of the fertile Waikato region of the New Zealand North Island. With the name of the ship, its destination and the year, we felt there was a good chance of finding out about the voyage that had brought that particular whaler to the South Seas.

This interest in scrimshaw coincided with visiting friends, who had a summer house in Lubeck, Maine on the Canadian border, overlooking the Bay of Fundy. We had discovered an efficient way to travel, after landing from Australia at JFK, was to take a limo, bypass New York and head for Providence, Rhode Island, capital of that tiny State wedged between Connecticut and Massachusetts, but with easy access to the summer recreation New England areas such as Hyannis Port and Cape Cod.

Providence thus was a convenient place to stay for a few days. Walk down the street to hire a car. The city is small enough to be able to move around. Providence is home for multiple high class educational institutions headed by the Ivy League Brown University.

Providence at that time was undergoing a makeover from an essentially industrial city of grime to a modern, clean, technologically “savvy burg” – one of the first so created as the Industrial Revolution gripped America in the 19^th century. Providence also developed as a busy port, as it is situated at the mouth of the Providence River at the head of Narragansett Bay – a jagged gash in the Atlantic Coast.

We stayed in an architectural jumble which had been converted into the Providence Hotel, having laid unfinished since before WWII. It was originally to be a Masonic temple, with all the weird pretentiousness which characterises the arcane symbols of that aproned brigade. The Depression effectively killed the project until the mid-2000s, when the Renaissance Hotel was built from the Temple shell. I believe we were some of the first who stayed there.

But that was not the highlight of our search for information about the whaler pictured on the piece of scrimshaw. Funny how the photograph of the House on Nantucket stimulated my memory of that visit. Nantucket was one home of the American whaler. The place we picked out to find more about the ship, which had been etched on our whale’s tooth, was New Bedford, from where the ship had sailed. Here in this picturesque clapboard township was the whaling museum.

This museum houses the thousands of logbooks carried by the American whalers and on return lodged in New Bedford. Unfortunately, the log held there for our ship was only up to the year before – 1841. However, we did establish that the ship had visited the Pitcairn Islands on 18^th August 1842, noting it had then been out in the Pacific for 9½ months, and was carrying 450 barrels of sperm whale oil. The ship is reported as having sunk off Pago Pago in 1860.

As a young man I was entranced by Moby Dick, the incredibly complex story by Herman Melville. If I had known I could spend an American summer at the New Bedford Whaling Museum on Johnny Cake Hill, with one of those logs, which needed to be read and properly catalogued, I would have jumped at the chance. Perhaps if I had gone to Yale, as I could have in the early 1970s, in retrospect that would have been the time.

Biden – Time’s Up Mate

Will the Democratic Party recognise that Biden has Parkinsonism and will he be persuaded to step down in the next few weeks pledging not to stand again? His voice on the night of the Debate is characteristic of a person with Parkinsonism – the hoarse, stumbling voice.

I was amazed how severe the disease seems to have become and it is a disgrace that his advisers had not called in a specialist neurologist to test his cognitive ability and swing the axe.

Biden the plagiarist, the enabler of Clarence Thomas, the man who has lived on the train between Wilmington and Washington is now the punching bag. A man who has now shown he can’t function without a teleprompter; a man lacking in independent thought which, judging from his charge sheet, indicates a propensity to cheat – or least take the course of less resistance. He will become revigorated – at 81 years – no, definitely not.

What was so sad was his wife who has always seemed to be level-headed and highly educated strident in support of her husband the next day in North Carolina. It was interesting that the cheers from a sympathetic crowd gradually fell away as the level of hysteria increased. Instead of that performance, she should have taken him aside and encouraged him to end his campaign, serve out his term and – hopefully for the Democratic Party – hand over in January to a younger energised President. The only reason Trump, with his outrageous lies, survives is that he has an adversary who is so dangerously impaired.

The sadness was compounded the next day when Biden, with his stiffened features and staring eyes, was described as being “energised”, as he started to bray – not talk in the measured tone of a President. The genial smile, which was once his trademark, has now descended into a risus sardonicus. There seems to be a belief that the irreversible is reversible; that somehow the remnants of his personality will remain in aspic. No. The hinges are coming off the man’s personality.

You cannot have a man who is clearly declining with absolutely no hope of lasting another four years being allowed to stand for the President. Talk about a bunch of politicians in denial.

By November this year, it may be predicted that he’ll have deteriorated to such an extent, that he will be incapable. The problem is that his handlers are blinkered; look at the man and realise that this guy is over 80 – and after 80 years on this planet, there is no way back!

As for Trump, he is beyond the pale. His salvation is the continued presence of Joe Biden. It does not matter, even if he himself is grossly impaired, the spotlight is on Biden. Once Biden quits for a younger person, one not so cold as his Vice-President, but with the charisma Biden may have once had, then it will be Trump who will be the old man and the jibes from the gutters, which he has used will come back to haunt him, old Orange man!

Yet crucial decisions made tend to resonate down the ages if one is conscious of these vibrations. In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson had a stroke, which left him incapacitated although functioning cerebrally well, as was said, but who knows? He was 63. Nevertheless his aides, led by his second wife, attempted a cover-up in a brief attempt to enable him to stand for President in 1920, for a third term. The Vice-President at the time, Thomas Marshall, a former Governor of Indiana (cf Mike Pence) was actively kept from taking over by Wilson’s second wife and her cronies.

Woodrow Wilson neither stood aside nor stood again for that third term. The Democrats were soundly defeated. The incoming Republican President, Warren Harding, had many of Trump’s personal flaws without the outright buffoonish unpleasantness. He died in office of a heart attack aged 57, but there was no Democratic President until 1933 when Roosevelt assumed office. Ironically, Roosevelt had been the Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate in 1920. Such was old age a century ago.

Thomas Alito Gorsuch – Present, Sir!

The Supreme Court has ruled that the White House can combat misinformation on social media platforms — a stick in the eye to Trump and his Russian troll supporters, so reports the NYT.

And it gets even better…

The court’s decision means that the White House and federal agencies like the FBI can urge online platforms to remove disinformation.

More immediately, it means that the Department of Homeland Security can flag posts on Facebook, X, and similar platforms if they’re believed to be the work of foreign agents seeking to undermine the election.

The court ruled that the Republican state officials and social media users who first challenged the Biden administration on the issue simply did not have the standing to sue.

“To establish standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will suffer an injury that is traceable to a government defendant and redressable by the injunction they seek,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote. “Because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing to seek a preliminary injunction.”

Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas joined with Justice Neil Gorsuch (left) in dissent, whining that the case is “one of the most important free speech cases to reach this Court in years.”

If Alito and Thomas (pictured below) oppose something, it’s almost always a good outcome if the Supreme Court rules the opposite.

Molly Ticehurst – Has Forbes done anything?

Following Molly Ticehurst’s murder, I took out a month’s subscription to The Forbes Advocate to see what would be actually done following the outpouring of “good intentions” culminating in the community walk in early May to commemorate her life.

Not much if judged by the reportage in The Advocate– if anything. Her alleged murderer has been committed to trial after a hearing in Parkes. This did not mention anything about what Forbes had put in place to ensure that there was a suitable sensitivity to domestic violence in that town – in other words a “quick response team.”

The Advocate on May 24 ran a general article about domestic abuse in rural NSW. It identified Walgett, Broken Hill, Moree, Coonamble, Condobolin, Muswellbrook, Dubbo, Narromine, Kempsey and Inverell as the ten worst areas for domestic violence. There was no mention of Forbes in the article.

As for the determination to do anything. Not a word in The Advocate. That is the problem. The immediate crisis is over – the media has lost interest; media bites expressing determination to do something have disappeared. Where to now?

So much for vapid promises from the community leaders.

The latest Advocate headlines: Forbes’ Frost and Fire music festival delivered on Saturday night, with the highlight of the night the hometown crowd welcoming Vera Blue to the stage. In what was a special homecoming for the Forbes-born Celia Pavey, the artist drew the crowds in close to the stage with pure, soaring vocals and an incredible performance.

Well, I now know about Vera Blue, the alias for Ms Pavey. She sings, plays the guitar and violin. Quite a modest success story.

But what is the community doing to prevent another Molly Ticehurst catastrophe?

The spotlight meanwhile has moved to Casino where another tragic death has occurred with an inexplicable delay in the police response. Why am I not surprised?

I might add that I’m not taking a month’s subscription to the local Casino paper, The Northern River Times.

I think I’ve made my point.

Was I forgetful or just lazy?

It was about 65 years ago when I took a copy of Cary’s A History of Rome from the Trinity College Library. I did not know why I did so, because I already had a copy, it having been a very important text for the Roman History subject which I had taken in my Matriculation year. It happened to be my only First Class Honour; I remember very clearly reading my result in The Age I bought at the Wynyard Railway Station kiosk and whooping for joy when I saw my number, apparently so over the top that that the elderly lady asked whether I was feeling well.

In 1999, I got round to returning the book together with $200 as a self-imposed fine.

As a result, I received this delightful response from the then College Librarian:

“I am writing to thank you very much for returning Cary’s History of the Roman Empire, which you borrowed from the Trinity library during your student days in the 1950’s.

It is most impressive to have a book returned by a reader after such a long time, and a wonderful example to all readers everywhere. I feel we could cite your experience anonymously as a shining example of a late return to encourage some of our more wayward borrowers.

You may be interested to know that there were actually two copies of Cary in the collection, so readers have not been denied access to the text during the past 40 years.

Thank you again for your scrupulous return, and the accompanying generous donation which has been handed to the Development Office.

Rarely has a more elegant piece of irony been written.

Mouse Whisper

I’m indebted to this memory of the late Richard Smallwood as recounted by the Boss.

Richard acquired the nickname “faggots” whilst at school. “Faggot” is of course a synonym for “small sticks of wood”.

This was long before the word became part of the “queerage”. After all, those posh kids who went to English public-schools used to “fag” for the older boys, in other words work as a servant, making the tea and being at the beck and call of the older student. At the same time, they tolerated the situation because it would be only a couple of years before they would be a senior and have their own “fag”. I suppose it introduced these gents to the world of untrammelled privilege. Of course, “fag” was also a word for a cigarette.

Yes, there is a verb “to faggot”, a task which was undertaken by a faggoter, which seemed to be a distinct worker, whose job was to bind sticks together, which served as fire-starter kindling for the hearths of the estate, and of course not to forget that faggoting is also a form of embroidery produced by pulling out horizontal threads from a fabric and tying the remaining cross threads into groups of an hourglass shape.

Anyway, as the story goes: One of Richard’s medical mates was getting off the train at New York’s Grand Central Station when he espied Richard and called out loudly, “Hey, Faggots”. As a result, it is alleged that half the people on the station platform ran towards Richard; and the other half ran away. That is called an allegory!