The decision by General Motors to retire the Holden brand and withdraw from the Australian car market entirely has disappointed and upset many people. There has long been a perception that Holden was an Australian company, and that Holdens are Australian cars.

I expect that many people, never having reason to reflect on the matter, did not know that GMH was simply the fully owned local operation of the American company General Motors, the largest car company in the world. It was never a publicly listed company on the Australian Stock Exchange, nor privately owned by Australian interests.

It simply was an American company which, like many other car manufacturers the world over, took advantage of government policies intended to foster local manufacturing industries, through subsidies and tariffs.

There is an iconic photograph of Prime Minister Chifley in 1948, standing next to the first locally produced Holden. A milestone moment in local industry and Australian history. And it did so much to make people believe that Holden was as Australian as Vegemite (btw, is Vegemite still foreign owned, or has someone in Australia bought it back from Kraft yet?), whilst Ford, despite being a worthy car, was American.

It’s probably the greatest marketing snowjob in history.

I recall, in the 1990s, that there even was a Holden shop at Highpoint Shopping Centre, where the local bogans could buy their own Holden Racing Team jackets and hats and other merchandise. (Note, I use the term ‘bogan’ affectionately – we all are a little bogan in our own ways, even if most of us drink craft beer these days.)

And who can forget Kingswood Country, the greatest of Australia’s sitcoms, where Holden loving true blue Aussie Ted Bullpit would constantly spar with his Italian son in law in a manner far too non-PC 40 years on, and where he would never let anyone else drive his Kingswood (and not too much later, the Commodore).

If you want to get another snapshot of how loved Holden was in the 1970s, try and buy online a copy of ‘My Love Had A Black Speed Stripe’, a very dark comedy about a Holden factory worker who loved his new car far more than his wife. (My high school actually still had a class set of them in the early 1980s so that it could be studied in English, although not in my year.)

Holden, even on its way out the door, is going to leave like the Cheshire Cat in ‘Alice in Wonderland’, disappearing such that the smile will remain long after everything else has faded. My brother plans to buy himself a 2020 Commodore in around 6 years time (he never buys new cars), and that way, he will be still driving Holdens well into the 2030s. Another Holden devotee, a very distraught colleague of mine, has suggested that I stop putting money into superannuation and start buying up Holdens instead. If I had a large enough shed to store them in, perhaps I might.

1986 was definitely not a great year in my life. Aside from my default from being 17 and facing that semi-adult rite of passage that involves finishing high school (at my local school, where the likelihood of successfully completing high school in six years, from when you started six years earlier, was about 12.5% at best). my father, who was a smoker and a former coal miner (from his late teenage years), got sick at the start of the year and departed this life in mid July.

I would have to say that staying stable and sane and trying to successfully finish high school at first attempt gave me a few challenges, ones that I realised not too many years later had ripple effects on the person that I was that had taken several years to fully manifest themselves.

Staying sane, and trying to get through the stress of exams and the aftermath takes some doing. To this day, Suzanne Vega remains my favourite singer, even though I am not too thrilled with much that she has recorded in the past 20 years. At the time, I played a copy of her self-titled debut album over and over again as I studied for my Math exams and all the rest (is not everything Math if you are doing science?).

But that is not all, from that time, that I feel fondly about, in terms of remembering the barely sane not quite 18 year old I was, who was starting on his first steps into the jungle and inviting stupidity that is adulthood. For example, Paul Simon put out Graceland, an album which was a tad controversial at the time, but which had a great song (and filmclip with Chevy Chase) which resonates with me at the time that I was drawing a deep breath after the ordeal of those final exams.

And there is Huey Lewis and the News, at the height of their success.

Ok… Fore! is not exactly a classic album from any era, and it sure is nowhere near Graceland if we are just looking at music from that year. But it was a popular album, a hit if you will, of honest middleweight rock from the mid eighties.

I doubt that ‘Happy to be stuck with you’ is going to be a bridal dance at many weddings, but perhaps ‘Power of Love’ might be.

But Huey Lewis is a bookmark in time – he and his band represent a point in my life when I was starting to recover from the first major calamity in my life at the same time as I was summoning all that youthful hubris needed to embark on the scary entrance into adulthood. I survived that time. Looking back, I am rather surprised that I have actually thrived as much as I have since then. I have faced and slain several dragons since then, so to speak.

And now, over 33 years later, I discover that they are back, with a new album “Weather”, and a single ‘I’m there for you” with the same mellow tones and middle weight rock that I loved back then, when I was on the northern edge of seventeen.

Thank you Huey, thank you!

Sometime in the 18th Century, Bishop George Berkeley wrote his thoughts on empiricism. He could be credited, perhaps, with the ideas which underpin the question ‘If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is there to hear it, does the tree make a noise?’

I suppose the good bishop would, given his writings, be sympathetic to the dilemma as to ‘If you commit vandalism in a place where vandalism is legal, have you committed a crime?’

Hosiery Lane is apparently some sort of Melbourne tourist attraction, where people currently known as ‘street artists’ (but whom I am more inclined to consider vandals) are encouraged to express their talent with spray cans without fear of recrimination from the authorities. [And there I was, thinking that all our railway lines are similarly galleries for our ‘street artists’ to decorate without fear of reprisals from the law.]

Supposedly, people from all over the world like to visit this alley off Flinders Street and admire the graffiti art painted there.

Message to the World: WE DO HAVE REAL ART GALLERIES IN MELBOURNE!

Anywho, I was out for a walk at lunchtime as part of my current health kick, and decided to detour down Hosiery Lane for a look and to inspect the recent vandalism.

By that, I mean that a few days ago, some masked lads with fire extinguishers filled with paint went and covered up all the ‘street art’. The police have found a technicality (painting over the ‘street art’ is actually legal there, but dripping paint on the pavement is not) to try to hunt them down and prosecute them for this heinous outrage.

You know, I could not find any but one trace of this supposed outrage by those vandals. No blue paint covering up the work of other more respected ‘street artists’. No traces of paint on the pavement except those left from other artists making their masterpieces. All the various murals which have been painted and painted over in perpetuity appear to be as intact as they ever have been, until the next artist decides to paint over their work with their own masterpieces. The only exception is the picture I have posted above, a hopefully more permanent record of this amusing incident of vandalism in the one place where vandalism is not illegal.

I was thinking just now about former musical enfant terrible Ben Lee, who in his early album Breathing Tornadoes (back when he was quoted, whether in jest or hubristic earnestness I know not, as saying he was the best Australian singer-songwriter ever, or something like that) included a song titled ‘Cigarettes can kill you’. [Is that sort of cheeriness why Claire Danes dumped him?]

And of course, they can. 100 million people are estimated from dying from tobacco smoking during the 20th century, and perhaps a billion may die from it this century (assuming asteroid strikes, nuclear war, global warning or the Rapture do not end our history first). But it does not stop people from smoking. In China, for example, the annual pro capita consumption (an apt word perhaps) of cigarettes is 2043, whereas in Australia it is 917.

Of course, whilst I am a non-smoker, I cannot exactly preach. Red wine, red meat, and sugary snacks are my poisons of choice, and I am finding it pretty hard to lose weight.

As I have expressed in this blog previously, I am rather skeptical about the coming apocalypse, whether it is coronavirus or something else. But I do keep an eye on the coronavirus epidemic, and I note that three hours ago, the number of people infected was up to 60,328, with 1368 dead, compared to 28,262 infected and 565 dead a week ago. If it keeps doubling at this rate, you do not need to have passed high school maths (I actually have) to know what the numbers are going to look like by Easter.

It is possibly the most serious new illness we have seen in a while, and it’s human cost in the short term looks like being appalling. But putting it in some sort of twisted context, there is still little for most people to worry about.

If you are relatively healthy, rested, and well nourished, and fortunate enough to live somewhere with high quality health care and low air pollution, coronavirus is unlikely to be a problem, even if you do catch it.

China is a rather different place. With the exception of during our recent bushfires, air pollution in China is significantly higher than that we experience in Australia. We also do not have the same working hours. My working week is 37.5 hours (up from the 36.75 hours I had when I first entered the full time work force three decades ago), which allows me much time to contemplate exercising, eat out, garden, read, listen to music, or to blog. In the workers’ paradise that is Communist China, the mandated working week is 44 hours, and the average week is 46.3 hours. The poor bastards working in a smart phone factory work 72 hour weeks.

Put yourself in the position of some unfortunate overworked, weary smart phone factory worker. Not only do they work miserable long hours, but they do so in an environment with much more air and water pollution, and where they are going to smoke 2.2 cigarettes for each ciggie Australians do. And whilst I have the first world problem of too much sugar and red meat in my diet, I doubt they are going to be over-nourished.

When something like coronavirus arrives in such an environment, which affects the respiratory system, it is going to hit a large population which is, due to the underlying living conditions, going to be less resistant to it.

This is all going to have great potential for awfulness in coming weeks for people in poor developing countries, where we have exported our pollution, and where first world economic hegemony results in some modern form of third world helotry. It is the unpinning living conditions in those places which are going to make them more vulnerable to coronavirus.

I am reminded, even more than usual, that most of my problems are first world problems, and that living in the first world: with clean air, clean water, decent health care and nutrition, the Rule of Law, comfortable work-life balance, and with all the trappings of lower middle class material affluence that I enjoy, is a blessing that I should never take for granted.

Anyone, man, woman, boy, or girl, who loves their father and idolises him as a hero, cannot help but be moved to tears by the narrative of Scout Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird.

It is a narrative of a ten year old girl, frustrated by having a father who is somewhat elderly compared to the other fathers, and therefore slower and less able to play with his children.

She narrates the story, mostly, from the start onward, naive and oblivious to the high regard her father, Atticus, is held in by their fellow townspeople, who insist in him representing him (unpaid of course) in the state legislature, amongst other things. To her, he is just older and slower. She does not see any greatness in him.

Yet through her oblivious narrative, the greatness of Atticus Finch as a true hero gradually emerges as layer after layer is pealed away. For me, it starts at the point where she observes that the townspeople ask Atticus, as the man regarded as the surest shot in town, to shoot a rabid dog dead. I remember that vividly from when I saw the film at age nine, let alone from when I read the novel, many years later.

At that point, Atticus is just showing a hint of his heroism, the tip of an iceberg, prowess without the principle. But this is just the first hint, seen through the eyes of a ten year old girl, that her father is more than just a useless boring old man.

Not long after that, when the victim of the story, an innocent black man, is falsely accused of rape, where the entire town clamours for southern ‘justice’, is when the heroism that is inherent to Atticus Finch emerges. He gathers his children and he tells them that despite the town being against it, it is is his duty to represent someone in a criminal trial. He makes it very clear that this might be the most important thing that he does in his career, and that he is doing it for their sakes.

This is the moment where, whether Scout realises it or not, her father steps out from being a respected village elder and becomes greater than anyone in the entire county (or perhaps the country). He becomes the embodiment of the Rule of Law, the representative champion of due process.

Ultimately, Atticus is defeated in court, and his client is destroyed in the prison system. But that Atticus, the elder of the village, is prepared to stand up and speak for the falsely accused is important. He knows that he will probably lose when he does so, but he knows that something more important will be lost if he remains silent: the Rule of Law. For a father, as Atticus is, that is more important than the potential hostility his children may feel from fellow townspeople expressing resentment to them for his defence of a black man.

Whilst Scout does not, as a ten year old, understand this, she is an honest and truthful witness to the deeds and decency of her father.

It is all fiction, but fiction does set us examples to live up to. I have been told that Atticus Finch has been cited in some Victorian law schools as an example of the standard of ethics to which lawyers should aspire.

Today, we learn in the news that Nicola Gobbo, the Lawyer Formerly Known As X, got a first class honours in legal ethics at the University of Melbourne and even wanted to do a Masters degree on legal ethics.

What do we take away from this? That legal ethics is something that you can rout learn and recite parrot like in an exam, rather than live and feel and be moved about?

Everyone, thanks to Magna Carta, is entitled to Due Process of the Law under Anglophonic legal systems. This is one of the major things that makes Anglophonic societies more successful than other societies in Western Civilisation or anywhere else. People have rights, including to a fair trial and to independent representation.

That Nicola Gobbo, expert in legal ethics, was prepared to betray her oath to the court and her commitments to her clients and become a police informer is particularly heinous. It represents a conspiracy between herself and senior members of the Victoria Police to pervert the course of justice and undermine the Rule of Law in this state.

It does not matter that her clients were people generally regarded as heinous, such as Carl Williams and Tony Mokbel. Those people deserve a fair trial, and competent representation. That they were denied this through a conspiracy involving senior police officers and their own barrister means that the Rule of Law has been eroded. This needs to be further investigated, and addressed, and the people involved sanctioned.

The most serious crime is not whether people have been unfairly or unjustly convicted. The most serious crime is that the Rule of Law in the State of Victoria has been seriously compromised by those who are meant to protect it. They deserve to now face the full force of the Law, including gaol time, if it is so found to be deserved.

For someone like Nicola Gobbo, who has claimed to be on the side of the Law whilst having a long standing history of using it to be self serving from her earliest days of being a law graduate, I just wonder whether she was simply able to rout learn and tick off multiple choice quiz answers to pass legal ethics. It is just as well that Atticus Finch is a fictional creation – he seems too good to be true.

I think I was about 15 when I first started reading The Chronicles of Pern by Anne McCaffrey. Teenagers have a very limited budget, so I mostly borrowed the books from either the local public library or the school library. I only ever bought one of them, the second book, Dragon Quest, which I was unable to find in either library.

Dragon Flight, the first of the books, is a classic in fantasy, and got me pretty much hooked on the series. It is set in a fictional world where people live in mostly medieval style, protected from a sky borne threat called ‘thread’ by dragon riders. I enjoyed it because it is an excellent example of escapist fantasy literature, involving a totally fictional world with dragons, albeit swords without sorcery.

For the most part, the rest of the first trilogy and the companion trilogy about harpers are much like that. Enjoyable because they require a suspension of disbelief.

Where the books started to pall for me was when Anne McCaffrey started to introduce elements of science fiction. Of course, you cannot have a world with both humans and dragons without some sort of explanation, and her rational nature meant that she could not help herself, but had to introduce an explanation. We discover that Pern is a distant world colonised by humans, who have forgotten the technology that brought them there, or their original home Earth, and who genetically engineered the dragons from a local alien species.

And when the heroes of the first novel, the leaders of Benden Weyr, F’lar and Lessa, start driving the gradual discovery of this forgotten technology and history, the series descends from Fantasy into a hybrid science fiction.

I enjoy both Science Fiction and Fantasy. But I do not like it when both genres are combined. The only place where I believe that has successfully worked is in Star Wars, with the Force. In every other instance where an author has started a fantasy story, and then combined it with science fiction, it spoils it for me. You can either have sword and sorcery, or you can have space opera. You cannot and should not have both.

What prompted me to start writing these reflections was my finding a copy of All the Weyrs of Pern at the book exchange at the Highpoint Shopping Centre this afternoon, when I was changing buses on the way home (the book exchange is at the bus stop). This Pern novel is the eleventh, and involves the discovery of an artificial intelligence which has lain dormant for the 2000 years since Pern was colonised.

I sighed, shook my head, and put the book down rather than taking it home. I gave up on Pern when I read the colonisation origin novel Dragonsdawn, many years ago. I do not want my fond memories of reading Dragonflight further spoilt.

Anne McCaffrey is not the only author to spoil her perfectly good fantasy novel series with the introduction of reason and science. L.E. Modesitt Jr, a rather prolific writer from about 15-20 years ago, would sometimes write straight science fiction. But frequently, he would write Fantasy. His Recluce series is now at 22 novels, and I quite enjoyed the first five of those novels. I stopped at number six, Fall of Angels, when he introduced a science fiction element (one which did not seem particularly believable in any event) to explain the origins of many of the people in that fantasy world. I simply stopped reading the book partway through, and have never returned to that series.

Sadly, I did not realise until most of the way through one of the series by Mark Lawrence and one by Joe Abercrombie that their fantasy worlds were actually set in a post-apocalyptic future. That discovery, and the inclusion of such elements of rational explanation, diminished my enjoyment of their fantasies. (I also find use of a post-apocalyptic world as the vehicle for a fantasy story to be rather misanthropic, as if the author is hoping for humanity to get nearly wiped out.)

What is wrong with just suspending disbelief entirely and indulging in some fantasy, preferably sword and sorcery, without finding rational explanations for things? Imagine if Tolkien had introduced nuclear bombs and laser guns into Middle Earth? Ugh! Or, alternatively, if you had machine guns and jet fighters instead of swords and dragons in Game of Thrones (btw, I did not enjoy the prose style in Game of Thrones so I stopped reading the first book 100 pages in).

Perhaps I am just a hopeless romantic – I like the idea of seeing some mystery and magic in my reading, without the constant need for rational explanation. I wish more so-called fantasy authors would realise the necessity of this and not season their work with misplaced traces of reality.

For someone who has never bothered learning to drive (this is actually a very good thing for the safety of the world), I do have quite a thing for the aesthetics of muscle cars.

Indeed, if I were to win a very large amount on the lottery, I would buy the old Stan Cash furniture tin shed in Maidstone and turn it into Zanatta’s Museum of Bogan Cars: 1970s Valiants, Holden Monaros, Toranas and Kingswoods, Ford Falcons, and lots of Kingswood panel vans. Lots of panel vans. All painstaking restored and artfully painted in gaudy colours – lime green, bright orange, purple.

But, given I am more likely to get struck by lightning than to win the lottery, my dream of a bogan car museum will remain unfulfilled. Instead, I can just appreciate the cars I see around town.

Now that Holden have abandoned the Commodore in favour of more anaemic models, and Ford no longer offer the Falcon, most newish cars I see around the place are some sort of hybrid between a hatchback, an SUV, and a station wagon. They seem to have the side profile of Sonic the Hedgehog. Maybe they are very practical, but they are not very pleasing on the eye.

But what I have noticed is that there are quite a lot of Ford Mustangs out there on the road these days. A couple of years ago, they would not have been seen at all, but now, I see at least one per day, usually jet black or fire engine red (side note – I once was going to paint my toilet fire engine red – that would have been quite the cure for constipation!), or milky white (why oh why?). Mostly new models, although I have seen the occasional classic model from the heyday of the muscle car 50 years ago.

Why is this so? I suppose there is a microeconomic explanation. Part of it has to do with the demise of Holden Commodores and Ford Falcons, the type of car that most men will want to drive (my brother is a Holden man through and through, and has been reduced to getting a Calais now, after decades of Kingswoods and Commodores). With no more powerful Commodores and Falcons rolling out, the Mustang looks more and more like a mainstream choice, rather than a luxury self-indulgence.

The other part has to do with the affordability of other big ticket items. A new Mustang starts at $50,000 and can range as far up as $75,000. Median house prices currently are around $750,000 in Melbourne, about 10 times the average full time wage. That means that what once would have been a house deposit is now only half a house deposit. People are giving up on the idea of buying a home any time soon and deciding to enjoy themselves. High end restaurants, overseas holidays, and luxury cars (I see a lot more Mercedes, BMWs and Audis on the road these days too, and I drool when I see a Maserati or a Jaguar, even though I know that the people who drive these latter two cars tend to be utter tossers).

Hence the resurgence of the Mustang.

[Sadly not for me, the non-driver. And when they do introduce driverless cars, I will get myself an electric powered ute or SUV, and get it to drive me around rural wineries. That is me living the dream.]

On my hallway wall, I have a framed canvas map of Melbourne in 1956, the year we hosted the Olympics, and the year before my mother arrived in Australia.

It’s a fascinating map. It is colour coded by municipality, according to the cities and shires which existed prior to the Kennett government’s council amalgamations of the mid 1990s, giving the viewer an idea of the ancient council areas of Greater Melbourne which are now long gone.

A close look at Footscray shows that the tram network in my home town was slightly more extensive back then, with offshoots down Barkly Street all the way to the West Footscray village and down Ballarat Road til Rosamond Road, and the main line zigzaging from its present day terminus in Leeds Street through Seddon until Williamstown Road.

My high school, from which I matriculated (yes, I like using a quaint term more accurate than ‘graduated’ in the context of high school education) over 33 years ago, is not on the map. There is a quarry marked on most of the land that was, the following year, to become that school.

The street where I currently live, in Avondale Heights, is not on this map. The subdivision did not occur until 1963, and most of Avondale Heights was still market gardens then (I remember there still being a market garden off Canning Street near the bridge in the late 1980s). Avondale Heights then was part of what was still known as the Shire of Keilor (it was not proclaimed as a City til 1961), so technically I suppose you could argue that where I am now sitting was still out in the countryside then, just past the outskirts of Melbourne.

Parishes and Counties, which have no meaning in modern Australia, but which were created in the original colonial division of the land in the 1840s, are also marked on the map. I already knew that most of Melbourne is situated in the County of Bourke (I think it is mentioned on my land title), but I had only a vague idea that my parish is Doutta Galla, and that Sunshine is in the parish of Derrimut. And there you were, thinking only that Derrimut was that bogan pub near Sunshine Railway station and that Doutta Galla was that other pub on Racecourse Road in Flemington….

The population of Melbourne in 1956 was a shade over 1,500,000 people, quite a lot under the 2,300,000 or so who lived here in the 70s and 80s, and far less than the 5,100,000 estimated to live here now, in early 2020.

The skyline of Melbourne has drastically changed in recent years. When I walk down Canning Street, I can see two tall apartment towers in West Maribyrnong, two kilometres away, as well as an abundance of skyscrapers further away, both in the Hoddle Grid which is the CBD and just outside it in Docklands. I do not know the names of most of those new buildings, which have sprouted like mushrooms in recent years. When it was completed in 1976, Nauru House was the tallest building in Melbourne (now it ranks 24th). Now, without fanfare, there is a slightly taller building nearing completion right next to it, where I doubted there was enough room for any further construction.

The Hoddle Grid and its surrounds have changed a lot. Approximately 200,000 people work there, and approximately 40,000 currently live there, mostly in recently constructed apartments. This is a far cry from 1984, when only 500 people lived in the CBD, mostly in loft apartments in older commercial buildings in the smaller streets and laneways.

Whilst predicting the future is an awfully difficult task (as my attempts to win the lottery ruefully attest), it is likely that Melbourne will overtake Sydney as Australia’s largest city in coming years – possibly as early as 2026.

What does all this mean? I am old enough now to realise that bigger is not always better. The median house in Melbourne costs something like nine or ten times the median salary, and more and more people are living in apartments and units, rather than in houses. People are increasingly becoming slaves to the mortgage beast for longer and longer.

Suburban backyards are disappearing, as housing blocks get demolished and subdivided into two or three townhouses, depending on the size of the block. This is not a great social development in terms of raising families – kids need space to play.

Nor it is great environmentally. Having land with trees around one’s house is good for keeping a suburb cool in the summer heat, and provides habitat for possums, fruit bats, reptiles, birds, and other creatures. A megacity with high population density housed in apartment towers is going to be more artificial and less healthy than a city where most denizens reside as I do, in a house with a front yard and a back yard. I enjoy complaining about possums and getting the creeps when fruit bats haunt my fig tree in late summer. Take out the suburban backyard and you lose a lot of the trees which absorb pollution and which make city life more bearable.

Melbourne has been considered, until very recently, the most liveable city in the world. Now, with the population and population density starting to rise rapidly, housing affordability continuing to diminish, and our transport and road infrastructure struggling to keep up, there is a lot to worry about.

And if that is not enough, remember that the last time Melbourne added a water reservoir was the Hume in 1982, when the population was less than half what it is now. True, it was a massive reservoir, as big as all the others put together, but more thought needs to be given to what happens when our population outpaces the water capacity we currently have.

I would much rather live in Melbourne than elsewhere, and I am particularly grateful for living in an intermediate suburb surrounded on three sides by the Maribyrnong River, especially as there are development limitations in my area which prevent high-rise from eventuating here (yet).

But if our town planners are not careful (and I am not optimistic about either planning ministers or local councillors making the best decisions) we are going to see a downward spiral in the quality of our lives in Melbourne. It could happen very quickly, given the rapidity of our population growth, the constant construction of taller apartment blocks in the suburbs, and the smaller size of housing blocks in housing developments in the new outer suburbs.

Where should I start when writing about the end of the world? Perhaps Kurt Vonnegut is a good place to begin.

You see, in the last decade of the Cold War, the 1980s, I was a teenager. One of my favourite cousins was an English teacher then, and hence influenced a lot of my reading. In the summer limbo at the end of 1986 and early in 1987 after my HSC exams, whilst I was anxiously waiting to find out whether I had passed my HSC and then whether I was accepted into university (the odds at my school tended to be rather long on either outcome), I borrowed an omnibus collection of Kurt Vonnegut novels from my cousin and voraciously consumed them. Mother Night. Slaughterhouse 5. Player Piano. Breakfast of Champions. The Sirens of Titan. And finally, Cat’s Cradle.

My relationship with the writings of Vonnegut is an ambivalent one. I am both compelled and repelled by his stated ideas. He seems to be both more pessimistic and misanthropic than I am, but then, I could be misunderstanding him. He had a very dark and ironic sense of humour.

Cat’s Cradle is the first of his novels (I was eventually to read most of his works, although it took a few years) which has overt eschatological themes to it. [His later work Galapagos arguably is a post-apocalyptic novel narrated by a ghost, so the eschatological themes are past tense.]

The doomsday device, inadvertently developed by an absent minded but equally selfish and amoral scientist, in Cat’s Cradle is Ice Nine. This is a reverse entropy water molecule that freezes all liquid water it comes into contact with, converting them into Ice Nine, which then freezes further liquid water into Ice Nine, and so on exponentially until the entire world’s liquid water is frozen and life can no longer continue.

And so too, we see the latest plague which threatens humanity, Coronavirus, something which it is feared will breach quarantine barriers through the difficulty of detection and spread exponentially, until everyone is infected and dies. Five years ago, Ebola was our big fear, and ten or fifteen years ago, it was SARS and bird flu. Seven hundred years ago, with a lot more grounds for concern (it did wipe out a third of Europe’s population after all), it was the Black Death.

Whilst this new plague is looming, we are beset by bushfires and an angry sixteen year old Scandinavian girl as emissary of climate doom, North Korea continuing to build bombs, Putin apparently building high megaton yield cobalt bombs and the Doomsday clock has been set closer to midnight than at any other time in its history (one hundred seconds to midnight).

I am not going to cry Fake News or Fake Science. The Cold War was a reality to me from when I was ten in late 1979 when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan at the same time as China skirmished with Vietnam whilst Iran held US diplomats hostage, right up til the Berlin wall came down in 1989 and I went the following year to a German reunification party (long before I developed my fondness for copious amounts of fine red wine). The 1980s was a far scarier time than now.

What I do want to observe is that we, in Western Civilisation, are long hard wired to expect Doomsday, and have been ever since the Emperor Theodosius imposed Christianity as the mandatory state religion on our pagan ancestors some 1640 or so years ago. Eschatology, the reasoning behind the coming end times, entered our collective consciousness and our thinking alongside the Book of Revelation.

How our ancestors felt about history before then was different. Pagan religion (unless you were Norse, and I doubt that many of my ancestors were that) did not have an end time, or eschatology. The Gods would frolic along in their hedonistic, rapacious and adulterous ways with nary a worry in the world. Ancient historians were interested in recording the past, as a way of keeping the memory of the great deeds of the mighty dead alive (think Herodotus), and perhaps of glorifying the living (Livy, whose patron was Augustus, springs to mind).

History gained its sense of progress from Christianity. In Christian doctrine, there is a sense of continuous progress from the time of creation and the fall from grace through to the first coming of the Messiah and then the end times, when, thanks to the nightmarish visions of St John, the Anti-Christ arises and then the final battle is fought, and then the Day of Judgement comes.

This sense of progress, or eschatological hard wiring, affects us both intellectually and psychologically in inescapable ways.

Intellectually, ideas expressed first by Hegel and then in modified form by Marx, present theories of human development and progress as iron laws of history, independent of God and religion, as if history is a force which is sweeping mankind along to an inevitable final state of being. The ideas of Marxist dialectical progress were countered in the 1960s with the End of Ideology argument advanced by Julien Benda and other intellectuals. Then, in 1989, those ideas were dusted off and represented by neo-Hegelian Frances Fukuyama as the End of History – that liberal-democracy was finally triumphant over all lesser political systems, and that now we had reached the end state of human development. (Well, how is that working out for you?)

Psychologically, and perhaps anthropologically, the foreboding of doom has been prevalent amongst the Hoi polloi a very long time, and with good reason. Soon after the imposition of Christianity Western Civilisation experienced the barbarian invasions which marked the fall of Rome, and then the dark ages, where they were constantly preached to about the end times and the Day of Judgement. And they were conditioned to expect it at any moment. With barbarian invasions, plagues, holy wars, and more invaders, the average villager in medieval Europe had much evidence to expect the end of the world at any moment.

We 21st century first worlders are, unsurprisingly, no different. We are more educated and informed (although we use our computing technology mostly to transmit or watch cat videos rather than for any more useful purpose), and far more materially prosperous than any preceding generations. But with over sixteen centuries of cultural indoctrination into believing that Doom is coming, we are going to believe it.

It might not be the Anti-Christ, although many (most?) Americans believe it will be. But it might be climate change, or an asteroid strike, or a cobalt bomb, or a more full scale nuclear war, or the exhaustion of our resources before human ingenuity has found a way to work around that.

I doubt very much that it will be coronavirus.

But in any event, we are conditioned culturally over a period of fifty consecutive generations to believe in Doomsday. And the lifting of our ignorance does not bring enlightenment. It just brings more threats to our existence, more potential sources of fear.

Fear is a crippling way to exist. I prefer to live in hope – I hope that we are able to find a way out of the various messes we have stumbled into as a species over the course of history. Whether that means I believe in human progress is debatable, but I expect it does. Escaping 1600 plus years of cultural hard wiring is as impossible as converting the world to speak Esperanto.

I was doing coffee yesterday with two of my colleagues, and somehow the topic got onto music. One of my colleagues, being a Western Australian by upbringing, once owned a rare busker tape by the dreadlocked John Butler, which he sold for a handsome sum. He also owns two copies of some rare vinyl pressing of John Butler’s music, which had been limited edition and sold out within a day.

Given that I have no love for the cacophony which is the whiny lefty sound which is John Butler and his trio (although I believe that contrary to his dreadlocked hippy demeanour, Mr Butler is actually a very good capitalist and aggressively defends his intellectual property against music piracy, as well as enjoying making millions from those poor misguided souls who like listening to his noise in concert) I suggested that my friend sell his rare records so that they no longer contaminate his music collection. There are many good things that he could do with the money – buy fine wine, a start on deposit on a Ford Mustang, a small chip off the mortgage, or even add to his already large collection of guitars.

I then was accused of agreeing with Andrew Bolt, the conservative columnist and commentator in the Murdoch Press. Apparently he once wrote a piece attacking the music of John Butler for having some sort of anti-civilisation or anti-life or anti-capitalist or pro-Satanic (that bit I am making up, I think…) theme to it.

That does sting me to the quick. Much as I share a lot of views that are not far off those of Mr Bolt, I get the general feeling that he is rather lacking in either authenticity or sincerity. (I promise you, this blog of mine is nothing if not authentic and sincere in my beliefs and my unique view on the world.) I also tend to see Mr Bolt as unnecessarily dogmatic and polemical, and also, occasionally, as a bit of a killjoy, especially where he decides to share his views about music.

So I pointed out to my colleagues that I enjoy the 1990s band Live (I own most of their albums on CD), and I also enjoyed Ultravox (ie Vienna – I once played one of their post-punk and pre-new-Romantic albums and considered it to be an undecipherable mess). That I like both is very material to this conversation as Mr Bolt had gone to the extent of devoting a column once upon a time to each of these bands where he expounded in great detail why he thought they were worse than awful – they had terrible values!

At which point, my other colleague chipped in with: “I bet he likes Bing Crosby!”

That, in itself, is a pretty good put down on which I might end this posting, except that I deliberately misnamed my blog ‘Lost for words’.

The question begs to be asked as to at what point do you criticise music on the basis of political motives?

Plato, whose political philosophy (which was derived from his epistemology) could be described as proto-totalitarian, wanted to either ban or highly regulate music, as all life, within his Republic, was to be regulated. Actual totalitarians of the past century, able to put their ideas into practice rather than leave them on parchment, have done something along those lines, particularly in the time of Stalinism. Such examples are extreme, but do need to be kept in mind.

After all, music (apart from to the artists who make their living or their riches from it, Ed Sheeran probably being the only busker in the world wealthier than John Butler) does not provide economic or material benefit. It does not result in the growth of food, or production of shelter, or clothing. Nor does it cure cancer. Nor does art or sport. And we do have Killjoys out there, particularly joyless people, who spend much of their time pontificating that we spend too much time celebrating our sporting events, or reviling the vulgar excesses of rock stars, whilst we face problems such as starvation and climate change.

But what music does provide us with, as with sport, literature and art, is joy. What is life like without joy, whether it comes from enjoying the music that fits your tastes, or the thrill of your team winning a sporting victory, or the resonance of a great poem, or gaping at an amazing piece of art, or from something else (love for example)? You can have material sufficiency, in a technocratic and mechanistic and over-regulated sense, and have a totally meaningless and miserable life. Such was the world Orwell presented to us in 1984.

Which takes me back to the issue of overly criticising the lyrics or lifestyles or beliefs of musicians. It is OK to disagree with a musician’s beliefs, or to find their music whiny or annoying or cacophony, or dislike their appearance (although I suppose, if dreadlocks are an issue, I still dislike the music of John Butler whilst I enjoy that of Adam Duritz, even if Counting Crows are way too retro these days). But to do a sanctimonious criticism of musicians based on the filter on one’s political perspective, well, that is a bridge too far, a step more than should be taken on the path to censorship and totalitarianism.

The only way we can function as a society (and indeed as individuals) is to respect our differences and disagreements. We do all need to get along.

And as an example of where I probably disagree with the political viewpoint of a music act, but appreciate their wicked humour and humanity and general creativity, how about you go onto You Tube and find the music video for Kisschasy’s song ‘Opinions Won’t Keep You Warm At Night’. (I bet you were expecting me to recommend any of the songs from Bob Roberts.)