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Green thought, in a green shade,

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The Watermelon Blog Green on the outside, social justice inside


"We can do better" (Kennedy)

Richest fluency

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body." Walt Whitman





The Goodies


good television

good movies

good books

good poetry

more good books

good songs

good children

good boys

good people

good leaders




Try a lucky dip:


"Well it looks to me as if the whole heaven of the world is on fire now."

"landscape that had been farmed for 2000 years or more but had retained some biodiversity and variety."

"So now there are calls for children in schools to be only taught that nuclear power is good for you."

"One of those human-animal hybrids reared its head again the other day and said "Moooo"."

"If you want people to be always under control then simply abolish the concept of "private", and it will get rid of those silly philosophical arguments between teenagers on the meaning of life and the concept of identity."

"if you had to choose one person who is most responsible for the failure of governments, particularly the American and Australian governments, to act over the last critical ten years, Rupert Murdoch is your man."

"Now, for the first time we have a literally Earth-changing event, the effects of CO2 increase on the climate of the whole planet."

"The falseness of this argument is easy to spot because it is proposed by people who have never ever conceded that anything else Aborigines did was of any value."

"Lesser humans may look on aghast, as elections are fixed, opposition parties destroyed one way or another, lies told, courts and the boards of public bodies stacked with zealots, the media starved of information, laws broken, constitutions ignored, democracy trashed."

"In protests everywhere young people literally hug trees, believing, it seems, that there is some quality to a tree which allows a mystical connection with humans."

"Wow, I thought, Peter Costello has looked up from his "tax breaks for the rich spreadsheet" for a moment and smelled the carbon dioxide."

"the inability to do a Google search and instantly find an answer to a question you are pretending doesn't have an answer sure makes even a simple country boy put one flagellum with another flagellum to make three flagellae."

"these religious fundamentalists who spread the enormously damaging creationist propaganda, inflicting a kind of mental terrorism on schools, should also be on "no fly lists"."

"While most of us saw the dangers ahead for the only planet we can live on, representatives of the nuclear power industry, and their tame scientists, saw only a marketing opportunity."

"The ones who could express that love of country through creating art were lucky, but the others who came along to see it were part of that same community spirit."

"I wonder if John Howard has phoned any of his old high school teachers to say thank you for an Australian education?"

"The problem does not lie with the Iraqi people but with the fact that they have been invaded and occupied."

"before you can say "red sky at night, shepherd's delight", there will be the usual nonsensical calls for more and more dams to be built, or for rivers to be turned inland."

"I was again struck with the reality of how badly served are farmers by the leaders of the farmers' organisations."

"They are people who saw Orwells "1984" not as a warning but as a manual."

"Such approaches would certainly be much more productive, and much less damaging than a mistaken belief in the value and benign nature of "prescribed burning"."

"The strong element of belief is dangerous in science as in religion because it prevents people seeing things."

"Will the minister be happy when only 15 percent of Australians accept that humans evolved on this planet, or does he have a still lower figure in mind?"

"well, someone is going to make money out of the destruction of the planet and it might as well be me."

"The combination of course let Pauline Hanson and her shadowy backers and wacky supporters off the leash and the rest is history."

"It would be hard to see any politician arguing against the need for big business to be more accountable to the community that supports it."

"Add into the mix the shockjocks on radio and television shamelessly promoting prejudice and whipping up emotions."

"brown snake bodies wrapped around them."

"Grasslands grow where they do because of combinations such as poor soils, flat lands, high temperatures and low rainfall, they are not areas where Aboriginal burning removed forests."

"It is also often claimed that Australian ecosystems are adapted to fire. This is a bit like saying that lawns are adapted to lawnmowers."

"The business community, with the governments help, is about to send us back to those horse and buggy days of employers ruling the world."

"All care will be taken, they promise, qualified pharmacists running them."

"How could you let them subsume the economy and international interests of Australia into the interests of the Republican Party of the USA"

"but where are my slippers"

"then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies."

"I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators."

"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey"

"a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party."

"the evening star is coming."

"You might at least try to avoid the proposition that if there is a perceived conflict between business and "the environment" that there is no question but that the thing which goes is the environment."

"There may well be people who have a spiritual dimension to their feelings about forests, just as there are people who have a spiritual dimension to feelings about V8 cars or Collingwood football."

" the only thing the market is good at, the only thing it is really for, is taking care of business, and it does that very well."

" let us not go rushing into this religious stuff until we see if there is anything science can't explain."

" Remember Iraq. Remember the flowers that weren't strewn on the streets for the invading armies."
" we have to work with the effects of the "progress" that has been made since Ned Ludd and his merry band were smashing the new fangled weaving machines. Go Ned, I want to say."

" Hard to tell how long the eruptions of the religion plague will last, and what damage they will do."

" Greenhouse temperature rise is a massive refutation of the proposition that the world should be run by businessmen for businessmen."

" We are pulling up the drawbridge against the peasants."

" People in areas prone to bushfires are usually advised to develop an escape plan or action plan which includes having, in easily transportable form, the core possessions you want to survive."

" most of our members were probably Methodists, it being as hard to imagine teetotal Catholics and Anglicans as it was to imagine a drunken Methodist."

" he is playing , like the grasshopper, in the warm sun of high resource prices and plenty of tourists, what happens when the prices collapse and winter comes and the tourists do not?"

" as after walking all that way I think I am capable of looking after myself."

" They can be brought out onto the streets to have some rather odd laws three thousand years old put into their courthouses."





Strange

Bedfellows


John Howard

Kevin Rudd

Al Gore

George Bush

Malcolm Turnbull

Leon Trotsky

Thomas Huxley

Oliver Goldsmith

Kurt Vonnegut

Tony Blair

Samuel Pepys

Winston Churchill

Peter Costello

Joan of Arc

Fidel Castro

Sarah Williams

Peter Beattie

Ned Ludd

De-Anne Kelly

Barack Obama

Kylie Minogue

Tony Abbott

Alexander Downer

Barbaro

Sam Kekovich

Alan Bennett

Osama bin Laden

Rupert Murdoch

George Lakoff

Bjorn Lomborg

Adolf Hitler

Ayn Rand

George Orwell

Julia Butterfly Hill

Saddam Hussein

James Carville

Charles Darwin

Philip Cooney

Jacky Kelly

Irshad Manji

James Lovelock

Bob Hawke

Brendon Nelson

Barnaby Joyce

Robert Menzies

Robert Tressell

Slim Dusty

Noel Coward

Samuel Johnson

Walt Whitman

Edmund Hillary

Robert Byrd

Phillip Adams

Alisa Camplin

Arnold Schwarzeneger



Blogger's Cut


Best slices from the watermelon



Future to the back

Ox power

Whacko Texas

Ticked off

Inhaling the Sixties

God unwilling

Bakers Oven 5

Game over

All change for

Dog bites man

Whale tears

Flowers for bosses

Curtin spinning

Gotta love it

Dodgy intelligence

A glass darkly

Truth and consequences

Media-ocrity

Cant get me Im part of the society

Growing like woody weeds in the nanny state

People like us

In both Australia and America the last decade has seen the election of neoconservative governments. In both cases the new governments have quickly set about vigorously changing the political and social landscape. So far so unexceptional. Parties of both the left and right when they get into power, especially if the opposition had been in power some time, always have a long agenda of things that need doing, need 'putting right' - think Gough Whitlam, think Maggie Thatcher, think John Kennedy. There are always other common features too. Being in government means that you have spoils to distribute and donations to reward - people to appoint, wishes to grant, business concessions to give, rules to relax or extend, departments to create or amalgamate. Finally these spoils of government are so addictive that every government, when it gets into power, looks for ways in which it can modify the political and social landscape in order to stay in power as long as possible - a little pressure on the media here, strategic appointments to boards there, a new judge or governor-general today, changes to electoral laws or parliamentary practices tomorrow. Some incoming governments are subtle about this, others less so, but all of them intend not to be beaten at the next election, intend that their government will last a long time.

When first the Howard and then the Bush governments came into power I thought initially that they were just going about things as all of their predecessors had done. A little more vigorously perhaps, because both the Liberals and Republicans had become very professional and were hungry from long periods out of power. I didn't like what they were doing, but like all of us on the Left I gritted my teeth. They had won elections, and politics is a matter of cycles - sometimes the Left wins, sometimes the Right, and society and culture is adjusted accordingly, only to adjust back in the next cycle. Winners under one kind of government will be losers under the next and so on. Business as usual, get over it, try to win the next time.

But it very quickly became obvious in both Australia and America that the rules of the game had changed. In both cases we had groups of people who were not merely saying 'we want to ensure that the Howard government lasts for a very long time' or 'we want George to be succeeded by Jeb', but who were saying 'we are going to make it certain that people like us will rule forever' and who were prepared to do whatever it takes to achieve that outcome. They are people who saw Orwell's '1984' not as a warning but as a manual. These are politicians who believe that people like them are meant to always be in government and have control of the spoils of government. They are also, collectively, the most ideologically driven governments that either America or Australia have ever seen, and part of the desire to stay in power forever is the result of the ideologue's belief that there is only one right answer to any social, economic, cultural, environmental or political problem. And they have it.

And in both cases these are governments who have been favoured by context. The increase in refugee movements from the Middle East, terrorism and September 11, and the Iraq war, have all provided an environment of fear and nationalism. In the rise and rise of vicious realty TV shows like Survivor and Fear Factor and Weakest Link and The Bachelor we have a training ground for public attitudes. The media run endless fear campaigns on law and order. The trivialisation of TV news and current affairs (including now the ABC) and the lack of any kind of investigative reporting plays into authoritarian government hands. Corporate support for globalisation and smashing unions and reducing working conditions and wages and reducing taxes helps the conservatives. The rise of fundamentalist religious groups increases support for right wing governments. Shock jocks on radio and in newspapers constantly and loudly shout comments that just a decade ago would have been seen as so extreme as to be never heard. In this environment it is almost (but these are people who pay attention to details) superfluous to stack every board no matter how large or small with neoconservative appointees, corporatise and silence the universities and ban student unions, spend public money on advertising party politics, set up inquiries stacked with people who can be relied upon, shift money from government to private schools and hospitals, make a mockery of parliamentary question time and ministerial accountability, reject scientific research.

This is government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich, and the rise in CEO salaries and grotesque corporate profits are performance indicators of its success. Another indicator is that the Labor Party has been forced well to the right, and is now, arguably, equivalent to the Liberal Party of Fraser or Menzies. In terms of economic and environmental policy it now really doesn't matter much to corporate Australia whether Liberal or Labor is in power. Any other voices, expressing views that would have been familiar to Chifley or Whitlam, say, whether through protests or through the third largest party in Australia, the Greens, are suppressed in the media by either being completely ignored, or by the reporting of a protest totally framed in a way that suits the government (for example concentrating entirely on whether a protest might 'turn violent', or hold up traffic, and not on the content of the message).

If you want people like us in government, and not people like them, you better get your act together and quick. The political future is close to being predetermined for the next 1000 years.
People like us
9 March 2006
Category Politics federal
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"You are a person of some interest,one comes to you and takes strange gain away." (Pound)


"I find that I can have no enjoyment in the world but the continual drinking of knowledge. I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good for the world." (Keats)

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