This weekend marks the resumption of the Australian Football League’s 2020 Premiership season.

The AFL Club I support is the Footscray Football Club, which has, for the past 23 years, played as the Western Bulldogs. This is not exactly surprising, given I am one of those people who, born and raised in Footscray, see themselves as being from Footscray, rather than being from Melbourne.

I do not think Australian rules football is a big part of my life, and I do not really consider myself a footy tragic. I usually go to a match once or twice a year, but that will not be the case this year. But I do usually find it too stressful to watch my team play on TV – I even switched off the AFLW grand final a few years ago as our girls were losing (thankfully they turned it around).

I saw a mad keen Bulldogs supporter I vaguely know at Highpoint this evening, someone who goes to every local game and watches the rest on TV. He said that he asked for and got a refund on his membership ticket this year.

I will not be doing that. The club can keep my money. Supporting my club is about more than winning or watching a game. Being a Footscray supporter means that this is engrained in me.

I am a reasonably fluent Italian speaker. But I did not learn the word tiffoso (plural tiffosi) until 2006, when Italy won the Soccer World Cup. This is a word for a sports fan, probably to be more precise, a soccer fan. My father never used that word, probably because he held soccer in disdain.

My father liked three sports: Boxing, Cycling, and Australian rules football. My brother loves boxing, I loathe cycling, but we both love Australian rules. (FYI, our home town in Italy, Treviso, is a Rugby Union powerhouse, but not so good at soccer.)

My father migrated to Australia in 1959, at the age of 28, after spending 11 years working in such places as Turin, Belgium and Switzerland. After living for a short while in Sunshine North with his sister’s family, he rented a shack in the backyard of someone’s home in Empire Street Footscray. In 1964, around the time he met my mother, he bought a house just around the corner from there, in Gordon Street Footscray, less than 10 minutes’ walk from the Footscray home ground, then called the Western Oval.

The origin story (as he told me once) for his support of the Footscray Football Club was that whilst he went to a few games with his workmates, he only got really interested in it when they came last in 1967 and won only 3 games, one of which being against Richmond, who were premiers that year. He decided that it was an exciting and unpredictable sport which deserved his attention.

After that, until we moved a kilometre north in 1976 to what was then called Maidstone North, he went to every game he could, or caught the last quarter on his way home from overtime (they used to open the gates at three quarter time and anyone could catch the last quarter – which was perfect for workers who had just gotten off the train at West Footscray), or listened to it on the radio. On days we won, he would grab the Saturday evening edition of the Sporting Globe, so that he could read about the thrilling victory.

My mother, who has no interest in sport, was very bemused when the radio commentators were calling the games when my father was listening in at home. It took her a while and the acquisition of a bit more fluency in English to realise that “And Footscray yet to score” meant that perhaps her husband should have chosen a team with greater prospects of winning….

But I do not see Football as about winning. Being from Footscray is an inherent and integral part of who and what I am. It is my home town and supporting the home town team is important to me.

As it turned out, the origin story that my father told me was not entirely true. He did not start supporting the Bulldogs in 1967. He was mad about them in 1964 when he first met my mother. I only found that out in Grand Final Week 2016 when she paid for our Grand Final tickets, saying that if my father was alive, he would have wanted nothing more than to go with his boys to see our team play in the Grand Final at long bloody last.

I am not a tragic for this game, but it seems that I have been to a lot of memorable games (for both good and bad reasons). When they stopped playing games at the Western / Whitten Oval at the end of 1997, there was an article about great games which had been played there – mostly in the previous decade. I had been to most of them.

The last AFL game at the Whitten Oval was a great one. We beat West Coast. “We are the true west!” someone shouted as we kicked another goal.

The Semi Final in 2016 was quite an event. After losing the preliminary final in 1997 by two points (Libba kicked that goal dammit! – I was sitting behind the goals and saw it), I had vowed not to go to a final again until we went one better. But a colleague had a spare ticket, and I went at the last minute. If I had known, I would have brought a scarf, and marched en masse with the other supporters from Federation Square to the game. But at the eleven minute mark of the final quarter, when we had goaled again and the Hawthorn supporters started walking out and we all started singing ‘Good Night Hawthorn, Good Night!’ it occurred to me that this was a historic moment. In my lifetime, we had never won two finals in a row, or two finals in the one year, or a final against Hawthorn. To smash three diamond hard barriers in the one game was cause for optimism.

Grand Final Week 2016 was an extremely memorable time. Two days before the Grand Final, I walked through Footscray for the first time since I had returned from my trip to Italy. I walked down Leeds Street, then Barkly Street til the Whitten Oval, and then up Gordon Street til my mother’s home. Parking poles were wrapped in red, white and blue, and shops were decorated in streamers, balloons, and ‘WOOF WOOF’ signs. The home town was coming alive, showing that under the usual studied indifference to the footy results, there was a beating heart that loved its own football club dearly. There had occasionally been hints of this, when we made finals before, but this was the first time we had made the big one in 55 years.

I wore my member’s scarf all that week. Everyone gave me thumbs up or other encouraging signs. After all, due to its underdog status and its general good sportsmanship, the Bulldogs are everyone’s second favourite team, especially if representing Victoria against an interstate club.

At our work grand final afternoon tea, myself and the other Bulldogs stood together proudly wearing our scarves. Someone who was originally from Sydney and who did not know me (or my team) well asked if I was a bandwagon supporter. Bandwagon? Bulldogs are for life, it is where we are from and what we are (not like those a-holes in school who were Hawthorn supporters – from Footscray WTF???).

The Grand Final itself was hard to watch. It is very stressful to watch your team play at the best of times, let alone when so much is at stake. Even before the siren went, when the outcome was beyond doubt, my phone started to be flooded with congratulatory texts from friends and colleagues.

After the game, my brother and I went back to Footscray and celebrated at Hart’s Hotel, one of the pubs closest to the Whitten Oval. When we entered, there were two Sudanese blokes wearing Bulldogs jumpers standing on a table singing ‘Who Let The Dogs Out’ over and over again. A hipster dude kept standing on his chair and singing ‘Sons of the West’.

And the pub almost ran out of beer. (Along the way, my brother and I got on Channel 7 news – a screen shot of that is at the front of this post.)

As I was walking to the tram stop much later on, four young blokes in Bulldogs fan gear stopped me and asked me directions to pubs. They were not from the home town per se, but they knew they needed to come to the home town on this one night in history to celebrate with their fellow supporters.

I could go on and on. About the disappointments during the premiership hangover, and the sudden surge of optimism as we stormed into the finals last year with the press saying that we were back and no-one knew quite how far we could go, given what had happened in 2016.

I am not a tragic for Australian rules football, or for my particular team. But it is still more than a game to me, much more than a game. It is an important part of my identity, that has been there since my earliest memories, and whilst I do not go to as many games as I might, or enjoy watching my team on the TV, I care what happens.

So I will not be asking for a refund for my 2020 membership. My home town team is welcome to the money I have paid them, and I will be willing to pay much more to ensure that radio commentators might say, for many more years to come ‘yet to score’ when we have a bad start to a game.

I liked Return of the Jedi when it came out. I suppose I still do, although I have not bothered seeing it again for many years. But I suppose it was when George Lucas jumped the shark as far as balancing the cutesy merchandising and kiddie gimmickry. R2D2 and his sidekick C3P0 work well together, Jar Jar Binks does not. And Episode VI is where it all really started to tip over towards the eventual birth of Jar Jar.

Because that is where we first meet those loveable little Ewoks, little teddy bear like creatures who worship C3P0 as a god and want to cook his companions in a feast in his honour.

The scene where the Ewoks suddenly spring out and ambush the storm troopers, fighting and winning a savage battle so that Han Solo and Princess Leia can sabotage the shield generators is pure science fiction. Did any well drilled and armed modern colonial army encounter such resistance to the point where they were defeated by bows and arrows? (Well, the Zulus did it once, but they were well armed and well drilled and in huge numbers, and did it at huge cost.). But I digress.

We all know lots of bears. In our safe urban lives where we have long been at top of the food chain, bears are reduced to loveable critters like Paddington, or my childhood favourite Humphrey B Bear (I had a huge crush as a four year old on his sidekick Patsy Biscoe, who then crossed over to Fat Cat on another channel – and eventually shacked up in real life with the bloke in the Fat Cat suit). And most of us have at least one soft toy teddy bear to play with as a baby.

And we Australians love to joke about a carnivorous mutant species of Koala, the Drop Bear, who likes to drink the blood of American tourists. Who would think that a cuddly little Koala is a scary monster?

But in even in our soft safe urban lives, where our bears are only toys or cartoons or zoo exhibits, there is still one bear who can strike fear into the hearts of the boldest amongst us.

There is a statue of a charging bull set up on Wall Street. In our recent politically correct times, there was some contention when a statue of a fearless girl was placed in front of this fierce auroch. Standing in front of any charging bull is a foolish thing to do, rather than fearless. The only creature who can face the sharemarket’s Bull is the sharemarket’s Bear, and he is not exactly the cuddly variety.

They do not set up statues to him. He is not someone investors worship, like a minotaur, or sacrifice their fearless daughters to, in emulation of Iphigenia, to raise winds for their becalmed equities. Investors like to believe that he is at worst caged, and hopefully extinct.

Last night, as I have firmly expected, the recent insane exuberance on the share markets came to a halt. The Dow Jones plunged 6.9%. The ASX had a 3% drop in sympathy this morning.

The Bear has burst his cage open, and is out amongst our financial markets.

Are any of you surprised? Look at the world.

We have over seven million people suffering from the Wuhan sourced pandemic, 400,000 dead, and it is running rampant through most of the world, doubling currently at a rate of every 36 days. The recriminations against the tyranny that is Communist China have finally caused most political and business leaders to start realising that this tyranny is not our friend, but a robber who comes in the day, as well as a thief in the night. The economic damage caused by the three months (so far) of economic closure and money printing is starting to show in the economic indicators. And America is burning.

To expect the Bull to continue his unimpeded charge down Wall Street in these times is not naive, it is insane.

The Bear is out, and he is very hungry. He wants to eat beef. That and your investments.

Be afraid, be very afraid.

I was born in 1969, which makes me part of the elder third of Generation X, which demographers assert as starting in 1965. That makes Bret Easton Ellis and his most famous character, the anti-heroic Patrick Bateman, Baby Boomers. Somehow I am glad about that.

I have been listening to Huey Lewis and the News a lot lately, partly because they have released a new studio album for the first time in a decade, and partly because I am in the sort of mood where I want to connect a bit more with the foolish youngster on the south side of twenty I used to be, compared to the grey bearded fellow on the north side of fifty I am now.

One of my friends, who is a musician and has much more developed tastes in music, has ridiculed my insistence on the merits of Huey Lewis, and sent me a you-tube clip of Christian Bale, as the protagonist (anti-hero) Patrick Bateman, in the film American Psycho, where he extolls the merits of Huey Lewis to a coworker whilst Hip to be Square plays in the background. Then he butchers him with an axe. It is very blackly funny, the way that film can sometimes make brutal murder to be, rather than the tragic and sad reality.

This has not changed my opinion of Huey Lewis and the News, but it did cause me to have another look at American Psycho. I don’t mean the movie, which I saw whenever it was out (2000? 2010?) and promptly mostly forgot. I mean the novel by Bret Easton Ellis, which came out in 1990, and which was the subject of great outrage.

A highly conservative (and rather personally hypocritical) academic I knew, the thesis supervisor for a close friend, smugly suggested in his influence peddling way (a lot of people were listening to him around then, although to my credit, I quickly decided that outside of his lectures, he had nothing of value to say) that conservatives and radical feminists should form an alliance to have the book banned.

I am pretty conservative, but banning books is something I find pretty abhorrent, and I promptly bought and read a copy of the offending novel. It was sold in shrink wrap (a bit the way Battlefield Earth was in the mid 1980s, although for a different reason) and had a warning label on the front indicating that the book was rated R.

Absurdly, if you are going to buy a copy in Australia today (it is still in print), you still can only buy it in shrink wrap with the R rating sticker, the only mainstream book sold like that. Such was the level of outrage levelled at that book.

I have not read any of his other books, although I have seen the movie versions of his debut novel Less Than Zero and the later Laws of Attraction. There is a savage nihilism running throughout both movies, although the plot summary I recently read about Less Than Zero makes the movie adaption sound a bit like Mary Poppins in comparison, which really gave me something to think about.

I have no plans to reread American Psycho, but the reminder about Huey Lewis in the film caused me to dig out my copy and to flip through it, looking for the bits that are particularly relevant. There, on pages 352 to 360 is the chapter which reads like a very favourable music review. Earlier on in the book, there are similar chapters about Genesis and Whitney Houston.

On page 71, in case you are interested, Tom Cruise (ironic that I mentioned Battlefield Earth a few paragraphs back), the supposed occupant of the penthouse in Bateman’s apartment building, makes an appearance, sharing a lift with Bateman. There is a very awkward (but to the reader hilarious) exchange between the two, which I still find memorable, but which is even more revealing about the mindset of Patrick Bateman:

“I thought you were very fine in Bartender. I thought it was quite a good movie, and Top Gun too. I really thought that was good.”

He looks away from the numbers and then straight at me. “It was called Cocktail,” he says softly.

This does go to show what Bateman, 26 year old yuppie stockbroker, obsessed with his hedonistic lifestyle and luxury material possessions, is all about. In his insulated cocoon of wealth and privilege, he can only see the world as objects, and strangers only in their context of possible service to him. Such as nameless bartenders.

There are many great passages of prose, and of wit, in American Psycho. Unlike the movie, which presents Bateman as being on an uncontrollable serial killer rampage through New York, the novel gives us sufficient clues as the first person present tense narrative progresses, that the rampage is all simply going on in Bateman’s head, a grim fantasy world, or rather, a psychotic delusion being revealed to us as if it is reality. He is falling apart at the seams, increasingly unable to relate to the world around him.

Which leads us to wonder what sort of commentary Ellis is offering us in this, his greatest, and still unsurpassed, work?

The crisp opening paragraph gives us a clue:

ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Miserables on its side blocking its view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn’t seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, ‘Be My Baby’ on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so.

I have long thought, even before I read Dante, that this novel was an attempt at a journey into an American Hell, with the grotesque torments and the hubris and the obsession with worldly plenty.

But perhaps there is another take. Plato gave us the metaphor of the cave, an epistemology based on reason rather than on one’s senses, rationalism rather than empiricism. Reality is not what you see, that is just an illusion. Reality is really what you are able to establish through the use of your powers of reason.

What does that tell us when the narrator is someone who has clearly lost his powers of reason?

I am not sure, and I am not a postgrad student undertaking a thesis on American literature, so I will not be too rigorous in my speculations. What I do wonder is what was the purpose of Ellis’ literary project in this novel. Is his commentary a celebration (unlikely but not out of the question) of late 1980s material hedonistic excess? Is he merely describing and documenting it? Or is he deploring it? Or, perhaps, it could be that he is ridiculing it, and his social contemporaries who lived those lives and dreamed those nightmares.

And by extension perhaps, he is ridiculing those people, like that smug hypocritical academic and all the others, who feigned or felt such great outrage at his words. I do like to think so, but then, I am inherently an optimist.

I first was introduced to George Orwell at age 13. There was that favourite older cousin the English teacher who kept recommending things (although I think that Orwell is on a different level to John Wyndham really…) who encouraged me to read 1984 and Animal Farm.

I fear 13 year olds are still too young to see the nuance and irony of such works. It did (sorry Sandra) scare me off reading any more Orwell until my early 30s.

When I did, it was his journalism and his esoteric intellect that drew me back in. Firstly his semi-fictional autobiographical work Down and Out in Paris and London, and then The Road to Wigan Pier, and then Homage to Catalonia. The latter, I must admit, has so many Marxist and Anarchist factions in it that you need, at this removed point in time, PhDs in both history and Marxist philosophy to properly comprehend.

And then I read an anthology of his essays, Shooting An Elephant, in which we get to see not the evangelical Marxist wannabe rebel from the colonist gentry, but rather, the real Orwell, the clever, decent and relatively well educated man, trying to make his way out of a social class where he did not feel at home with what he felt was his obligation to join in oppression.

Instead, a bit like the protagonists in Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Coming Up For Air (and even perhaps, when you come to think about it, Winston Smith in 1984), he is a bourgeois with a voluntarily tenuous hold on that place, seeking to use his intellect to find a way to make a living through that intellect, rather than through unskilled manual labour, not possessing a trade (having just paid an electrician AND a plumber to sort out minor problems in my home today, I can understand that very well).

In his essays and book reviews, well before we get to his two last, great, world shaking, novels, we see Orwell at his most clever. The sharpness, and broad curiosity, of his intellect, is plain to see, and is jaw droppingly awesome. We can read the thoughts of a decent and principled man who happens to be both very well read and very clever.

My introduction to Christopher Hitchens gave me that very same impression. A colleague who was a recent acquaintance who had not yet become a friend (now a few years later a very close friend) showed me, for some reason or other, the contents page to Hitchens’ essay anthology Arguably. It was a seminal moment, as I immediately saw something in the way Hitchens’ mind worked and his pen moved to what Orwell did, half a century later.

Since then I have read many of Hitchens’ essays, and he is a great essayist, just as Orwell was. Sadly, he is only an essayist, although I do think that you could forget the first four of Orwell’s six novels and not miss a thing.

Which leads me to current English (or is it Jamacian-English) novelist and essayist Zadie Smith. I first heard of her about 15 years ago, but contemporary novels rarely make a stir in my attention. Last year, on what might be my last trip to Italy for several years, I had finished all the books I had brought along for my trip (I do spend much time resting in my hotel room or on trains during my overseas trips, rather than out raging after dark) and jettisoned them, and found I was a few days short. I bought two books in English at the bookshop at Treviso Railway Station a couple of days before I flew home, but found I did not have the energy to read them.

One of those was Feel Free, a book of published essays by Zadie Smith. She is several years younger than me, and somewhat better read (which is hard to admit given that I am extremely well read by most standards), and I can see that from reading the essays, and feeling the inevitable jealousy that comes of being middle aged and mundane and mediocre and settling for a risk free life with a few rooms full of books rather than a life writing books where the world is one’s room.

Ms Smith, like Orwell and Hitchens, is of the Left. Unlike them, she has not had grounds to rebel against the left and its status quo and be subject to criticism from it. However, she is of a different generation. Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War and then was in the Home Guard during the big one, and Hitchens had reason to choose to support the much vilified second Bush in his decision to remove the tyrant Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Ms Smith just has Boris and Donald to criticise, and none of the pocket tyrants like Kim present a real threat to the world.

But that is not to say that she is not a decent person, nor well read, nor an amazingly good writer, as she tries to make her way in the world on the basis of her own cleverness and education, the way that people like Orwell or Hitchens did before her. Nor, like those predecessors, can I say that she is not trying to persuade people to agree with her about views which she definitely believes are better for the world (and which, as I get older, I am less likely to dismiss entirely out of hand).

But I am not going to go into great details on her writings. I urge you to read just one essay of hers, Meet Justin Bieber!, a very caustic and ironic piece of great wit and cleverness, in which she compares the behaviour of Justin Bieber to the writings of his near namesake Martin Buber, a long dead philosopher. It is a very clever and funny piece, where the tweets of Bieber on his breakup with Selena Gomez (‘Can’t hear you over my cash, babe!) are compared with Buber’s writings, and where the infamous and ultra-narcissistic ‘Hopefully she would have been a Beliber’ comment in the guest book at the Anne Frank museum is taken into wicked account.

If there is any loss, it is that Zadie Smith lives in what, compared to generations before her (she shares a place in my generation, Gen X), is a safe and mundane generation, more so than the last (and hopefully less so than the next), where we have grown up to “find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken…” Let’s hope that these are smugger times, where she can preserve her moderate faith in English welfare state social democracy more than Orwell could his in robust 1930s Socialism or Hitchens in the rebellious leftism of the 1970s and 1980s.

I just saw an ad for Big Brother – a very nasty and narcissistic reality TV show which makes its way around the networks like a virus.

First Ten, then Nine, now Seven. The people are not shy physically, and they are not exactly shy emotionally.

People want to be on that show, fine. People want to be on that show, equally fine.

I always have the problem with it being titled Big Brother. On his dead bed 75 years ago, Eric Blair, the artist otherwise known as George Orwell, wrote a novel which originally was called The Last Man in Europe, but which was eventually released as 1984. In it, the technological surveillance of the population was seen as sinister and pervasive, but still very limited to what we have available now.

Big Brother was the name of the totalitarian patriarch always placing the thoughts and behaviour of the members of the society under control and surveillance.

Now, for the past two decades, we have had that subject to mockery through a highly banal TV show, where people who are tested by the appropriate measurements for being the best TV fodder end up on such shows. This is totally wrong.

However, I note that Channel 7, the new owners of Big Brother, is owned by Kerrie Stokes, the billionaire who has otherwise recently used his ownership of the media to advise the Australian public that communist China is not a threat to our security. To me, this is just dialling up the water on the boiling frog one more degree. Kerrie Stokes – you need to choose what nation you should be loyal to – a free country like Australia or a vicious dictatorship like communist China.

“Not for the love of women toil we, we of the craft,

Not for the people’s praise.

Only because our Goddess made us her own, and laughed,

Claiming us all our days.”

Thus starts Song of the Pen, a short but beautiful autobiographical poem written by one of Australia’s greatest poets, Banjo Patterson.

It is a poem which ends with the words “Work is its own reward.”

It is about writers, and how writers are not interested in money or acclamation or other rewards. Writing, and being read, is what drives writers. They need an audience, not any other reward.

The recently departed Dr Hal Colebatch, an author whom I knew relatively well, truly would have been an adherent of the values of Banjo Paterson. He was a chap who could have been financially successful as a lawyer, a journalist, or as an academic, but did not want that. He chose to be a writer, a successful published writer, and writers do not make very much money, nor praise.

The writer Clementine Ford, who is currently the subject of much criticism, would also have been claimed by the same Goddess, and be subject to the same laws as my late friend Dr Colebatch.

Hence I am going to be very gentle in any criticism of Ms Ford.

She very recently was the subject of great outrage because she tweeted something about the coronavirus not killing men fast enough.

I am a man, and I value my life. My mother is not a man, and she values my life, as she does that of my brother. My other female relatives value my life, as do my female friends and colleagues, and presumably the other women who meet me and get to know me.

But Ms Ford, who does not know me, or the other four billion men on the planet, is preemptively celebrating my possible death and that of any or all of those other men.

She has, on the results of a casual google search today, been making jokes about killing men for quite some while.

Yet she is the mother of a young son. Where does her apparent wish for the death of half the human population of this planet end?

I assume that Ms Ford is the sort of person who is best described as a ‘radical feminist’. My sociology studies 32 years ago gave me a reasonable working understanding of feminism, in its three streams:

. liberal feminism – men are not bad, they just need to see what their behaviour means and they will change it

. Marxist feminism – men are not inherently bad – it is capitalism that make them bad

. radical feminism – men are inherently bad, regardless of what the social or economic system are.

When Ms Ford (according to her own stated views) wishes death on all these people (men) whom she does not know, and whom she only is aggrieved against because of their holding a penis (as opposed to their skin colour or the shape of their eyes or their religion), she is exhibiting the classic signs of being a radical feminist.

Why does she want me dead? Can she say that this is not personal? Like those classic mass murderers Hitler, or Mao, or Stalin, or Pol Pot? Is it being ‘not personal’ better than anything ‘personal’?

I am pretty sure that she is ‘radical’ rather than ‘Marxist’. Her wikipedia biography does suggest that she is rebelling from a family of what some would call ‘white middle class privilege ‘, where her own background in terms of education and class origin suggests that she is blind to the disadvantages that both males and females that are not of an Anglo-Saxon and middle class origin would have in comparison to her own Anglo-Saxon middle class (and probably protestant in origin) privilege.

Marxists, much as I disagree with them, have the decency to see that there is a lot of disadvantage to being a poor boy, as compared to a rich girl.

To be a published author is frequently a matter of not what you know, but who you know. If you are an angry white anglo middle class woman, there are people who will be more likely to print your stuff than the barriers that some others will have to overcome.

Ms Ford did say, in reply to some of the outrage about her comments (which are not really a new theme in her writings):

“Christ alfkn mighty, men love to screech about snowflakes and triggered feminists and women not being able to take a joke and they crumble at the first sign of a hyperbolic tweet that does not place them as gods at the centre of the universe. Ding dongs, all of them.”

You will see in my blog that I do not talk about snowflakes or make excuses for my various beliefs – although I do express reservations about many of them. I am too old for that sort of excuse. What Ms Ford is doing is trying to hide behind the bad behaviour or excuses of other people, when she herself is expressing the sort of extreme hatefulness which is no longer acceptable in a mature and tolerant world. She is using ‘snowflake’ (a term she holds in contempt) as an excuse for her own appalling statements.

We need to have more love and more acceptance and tolerance and inclusion in this world. We need less hatred. Especially from the hate-filled and over indulged products of white anglo middle class privilege.

But should anyone sanction Ms Ford? Apparently the grant the City of Melbourne was going to give her towards her next book was only $3200. Writers do not (as I indicated at the start of this post) have real interest in money. Double her grant, print her book in quadruple the quantities that anyone might actually buy. She wants attention. Perhaps seeing her book unsold on the discount tables of QBD Highpoint at $2 each is the punishment she really needs.

As a child, I used to watch a lot of old Warner Brothers cartoons on the TV. Looney Tunes, Merrie Melodies etc. Mostly they were organised into either The Bugs Bunny Show or The Porky Pig Show. And some were The Road Runner Show.

Wile E Coyote, the hapless protagonist of the Road Runner Show, is a very American character: endlessly ingenious, inventive, resourceful, optimistic, persistent. And totally incapable of realising when to cut his losses or to learn lessons from history. [I am not sure that the creators of this character intended viewers to read so much into him as that, or what it says about their mid 20th century take on American society.]

When I look at what is happening in the stock market at the moment, where there is a a significant upward bounce from the lows we experienced in March, with the pandemic still raging out of control across most of the world, ravaging communities and the global economy, governments and reserve banks printing money at an unprecedented rate, geopolitical turmoil, all of that, things do not really seem to make much sense. Markets should be much much lower than they are. Things are much worse than they were in March.

What helps me to make sense of it are the Road Runner cartoons, and what frequently happens to Wile E Coyote. Oft times, we see him speeding off in pursuit of the Road Runner. He is so intent on his prey that he fails to see that he has run all the way off a cliff, and keeps on running. Eventually, he realises that he no longer has any ground under him, and looks down. Only then do the laws of gravity take effect, and he falls into the canyon, hard.

Share markets are like our friend the Coyote right now. They have run off the cliff, but have not realised this yet. When they do, Boom!, we get the second wave of the bear market.

Since the age of seventeen, when Suzanne Vega was on the charts with her debut single Marlene on the wall and then the Pretty In Pink soundtrack song Left of Centre, I have been a fan of her music. When I acquired her debut album and played it constantly during swot-vac before my HSC exams, she became my favourite singer, and she still is.

I remember, when her first greatest hits collection, Tried and True, came out in 1999, that it was a sign that I was getting old when one of my long time favourite singers was putting out a greatest hits album.

But at that time, when she included, aside from her soundtrack contributions Left of Centre and Woman on a Tier, two songs which had not previously appeared on any of her studio albums (Rosemary and Book and a Cover), feeling a little bit disappointed, as I knew that there was at least one early song which had not made it onto any studio album.

I knew that because at some point, either in 1986 or 1987, I was browsing Brashs Highpoint (Brashs is a long defunct record chain), and saw an early live album of her music, which had some song whose name I did not quite recall, but which had the word ‘station’ in it.

So for years, I wondered about where I could find that song. Close Up, the four volume re-recording of her back catalogue, did not include it.

Last night, I rediscovered it. When browsing Apple Music, I found recently digitally reissued two early live albums by Suzanne Vega, both of which featured Black Widow Station. That must be it. That niggling question buried deep in the back of my mind since my teenage years is finally answered.

As an added bonus, there is another long forgotten early song, The Rent Song, on one of those live albums. I can see why, perhaps, these songs never made the cut on her early studio albums – there were a lot of great songs to choose from. And later on, I suppose her song writing gradually changed so that they would not be a great fit on her five later albums (particularly not the Carson McCullers inspired concept album she put out as album number 9 in 2016).

Playing those songs now, along with the other classics that appear on those live albums, reminds me a bit of the good times of being in one’s late teens. [Not that I would ever want to be seventeen again.]

“Marxism consists of thousands of truths, but they all boil down to one sentence, ‘it is right to rebel!’ For thousands of years, it has been said that it was right to oppress, it was right to exploit, and it was wrong to rebel. This old verdict was only reversed with the appearance of Marxism…. And from this truth there follows resistance, struggle, the fight for socialism.”

This quote is from self-styled Marxist and successful warlord and dictator Mao Tse Tung. I am taking it from page one of my copy of the 1972 book, It Is Right To Rebel, which was a contemporaneous account of the student radical protests at Monash University of that era of the late 1960s and 1970s.

It was a very different time. I was a toddler, we still had military conscription and were committed to a questionable war in Vietnam, and the McMahon government was in the last months of a 23 year Coalition reign over Australia.

And at my future university, Monash, there were regular student protests.

There were still occupations of the admin building when I was an undergrad, by anti-fees demonstrators. Much as I am a very conservative person, I am also a romantic, and I do like the idea of students questioning the status quo and protesting. It is one of the things which is very healthy about our democracy and civil society, even if I do not always (or often) agree with the protestors.

By the mid 1990s, the last sad echo of the dissent of the early 1970s on campus was when Dr Jim Cairns, former Deputy Labor Leader and acting Prime Minister, would set up a card table outside the union building on an occasional afternoon and try to sell some of his old books. Passing by en route to a meeting with some fellow postgrads (in the one semester I took my part time MA seriously enough in comparison to full time work to actually still visit the campus), I would stop and engage in polite small talk with Dr Cairns. After all, just over two decades earlier, he would have spoken not too many steps from where he sat chatting with me, enthralling the better part of ten thousand students with his words.

That time would so quickly sweep away the memory of his place in the history of that era was something I found profoundly tragic.

What is going on at the University of Queensland at the moment is far more tragic. They are seeking to expel a student radical, who has done nothing more than express dissent with the University of Queensland’s Finlandizing policies towards Communist China.

I only became aware of the case of Drew Pavlou in the past week, and I think that the below article from the Guardian serves as a good narrative of what is going on:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/may/24/how-a-20-year-old-student-put-the-spotlight-on-australian-universities-cosy-relationship-with-china

Protests on university campuses are part of what makes them interesting places, and particularly what make them a healthy contributor to our democracy. Student occupations of admin buildings, which happened, in my time, on many campus around Australia, were a healthy, albeit rather Quixotic, sign of dissent.

University administrations tolerated them. And perhaps they saw them the way that I do, as a healthy thing. But that is a different time again, when universities were less interested in the bottom line, and more interested in intellectual freedom and academic enquiry.

Nowadays, the mutterings about the decay in the academic standards and moral position of universities in Australia has started to go from a whisper to a scream. A blind eye is frequently turned to plagiarism, and every attempt is made to pass the paying customers, including through group rather than individual assessments.

Is it any wonder that a university which is firmly committed to encouraging as many customers from Communist China to attend would wish to ingratiate itself to its paymasters by seeking to suppress dissent where it can.

Last year, during his participation in a Hong Kong pro-democracy protest on campus, Mr Pavlou was assaulted. The Chinese Consul General in Queensland, Xu Jie, who is an adjunct professor of the University of Queensland, praised the spontaneous patriotic behaviour of the people who participated in this violent counter protest. Having read Silent Invasion, I strongly suspect that Professor Xu may have ordered the counter protest.

Of course, Professor Xu and the violent anti-democracy protesters are not subject to sanction from the University of Queensland. A 20 year old undergraduate and assault victim is the one accused of bringing the University into disrepute.

I think that the University of Queensland’s administration has brought itself into disrepute. And their heavy handed attack on one of their students will have ongoing consequences for their reputation. The Free World is watching.

Every few years my CD player stops working properly and I need to go buy another one. After all, I have a library of about 300 CDs that I have paid good money for and should listen to more often.

However, this is 2020, not 1990. I bought myself this iMac almost 18 months ago and it is mostly all I now need, supposedly – a replacement for my TV and CD player combined, and all the world’s music is at my finger tips.

And when I go looking at JB HiFi, just about the only place where I can find a CD player to buy these days, the range is, well, a little more limited than I remember. I am not into stereos etc – I just want something which will play the music I like, in a modestly enjoyable way.

Hence, I have not bothered yet to replace my CD player and the CD case in the lounge will just continue to gather dust.

Because, of course, I have a music streaming service, and that means that I should be able to get everything that I owned on CD.

Not only that, but I have two now. I resubscribed to Apple Music at some point last year, and recently I added Amazon Prime (not for the music or the home delivery, but for the video).

Today, it occurred to me that as I am working from home, perhaps I should listen to some music. So I felt that I might, in between my frequent Skype meetings, play as much of the Suzanne Vega back catalogue as I can fit into a day filled with constant interruptions.

I wanted to play it in publication order, from the self-titled debut album in 1985 which I have been listening to since 1986, right up til time to log out from the laptop and start thinking about dinner.

I got through the first three albums – Suzanne Vega, Solitude Standing, and Days Of Open Hand. Then, as the day prepared to draw to a close and I had a few minutes before my next Skype with two of my staff members, I thought it was time for album number 4 – 99.9 Fahrenheit Degrees (which, by the way, is the last of her albums which I really like – after 1993, she seemed to lose her way a bit and aside from a couple of songs on her greatest hits album, there’s nothing more recent that matches her early glories).

Except… 99.9 Fahrenheit Degrees is the one album of hers not listed on Apple Music. Rather than go onto her fifth album, Nine Objects Of Desire, it occurred to me that I am an Amazon Prime member now, and perhaps the $20 I pay per month might get me access to the album there.

What I found was rather displeasing. Amazon Prime’s music section is not just very user unfriendly, and mostly directed at trying to channel you into signing up for yet another more premium subscription to give you more music for a further fee (talk about bait and switch), but it does not seem to allow you to even play an album (not that one, but another one which was represented to me as available via Prime) continuously.

I have had a gradually building resentment towards and distrust of Amazon for several years. So today that ratcheted up several notches in the one go.

Two paid music streaming services, and neither has what I wanted to listen to – and one was making it impossible for me to just set it to the singer I wanted to hear and leave it alone.

That, my friends, is a first world problem. Let’s be grateful for that.