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
Did you see the ABC 'Four Corners" show about how the Liberals in the lead up to the last election were trying to dump Mr Howard? I liked the bit best about how none of the ministers knew that workers could be worse off under "work choices" - oh my goodness gracious me no. Nothing in the program we didn't know at the time of course, if you were paying attention and following the well known rule that if a senior Liberal in the Howard government said something was definitely not true you should believe the opposite.
An interesting comment by Costello though, that he had never believed Howard would retire. At least he was a realist then, because all of us knew Howard was never ever going to retire, no matter what he said, what Ian McLachlan wrote, what Peter Costello thought, you couldn't have got him to retire from the job he had craved all his life. Never ever. Not even for a day as captain of the Australian cricket team playing an Ashes Test at Lords.
And it occurred to me that during all this he was not just a climate change denier, but the ultimate climate change denier, the one all others model themselves on (rather in the way that all teenage party givers must now strive to emulate Corey). I have from time to time thought that that the climate change deniers, even the silliest of them, would eventually be so overwhelmed not just by the scientific evidence, but by their own observations of the deteriorating world around them, that they would be converted. Not true. They will never ever believe anything that is demonstrated to them. Never ever. Nothing will do the trick - not the disappearance of the Arctic ice cap, or the loss of the Barrier Reef, or the complete drying up of the Murray River. They will still keep spouting the same old rubbish, like a player piano roll; ice caps on Mars, 1970s ice age, crops in Greenland, 1998 a hot year, can't predict weather even next week, etc etc. The points can be, and have been, answered a thousand times, but into the piano goes the roll, and the same old tune is played again and again. They won't go away, just like John Howard, but let's ignore them anyway.
One group of deniers we can't ignore though. They have gone quiet, gritted teeth, lips zipped shut. No more "it's a cold day in Melbourne bring on global warming" for them. They are the Neo-deniers. How do we pick them? They are the ones talking about nuclear power, and "clean coal" and getting oil from shale, and bio-fuels. Oh, and also the ones denying that any renewable energy source, anywhere, can ever be made to work. They are not going away either, big money to be made from pushing through disastrously dirty industries that would never be approved otherwise. Enough money to keep your lip buttoned and pretend to believe in a changing climate.
Keep your eyes and ears open for neo-deniers in action. If they get their way the poor old planet is going to have two disasters on its hands. Maybe they would like to captain Australia at Lords instead. Can't do any harm there.
Note for American readers - think leading the New York Yankees in a World Series game.
"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)
"nothing startles me beyond the moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights - or if a sparrow come before my window I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel." (Keats)