Monthly Archives: May 2015

As Abe Hoffman used to say

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joanie phonie

We went to see an entertaining show last night on the ’60s, the last decade from which I know any popular songs whatsoever. My political conversion also turned out to mean that I never listened to popular music again, something I didn’t even notice until one day when I read about some song that everyone knew – “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” – which I had never heard a bar of. But the music of the ’60s I absorbed along with the politics. This is from the notice.

This story is about the rise of Joan Baez from folk singer, to performing the songs of Bob Dylan and Peter Seager [sic], all culminating in her brilliant performance at Woodstock in 1969. Joan became the voice of the peace movement with songs like ‘Joe Hill’, ‘We Shall Overcome’, ‘With God On Our Side’ and many more. All will be sung in this show. The Road To Woodstock is the story of one woman’s commitment to the peace movement and the music that accompanied it.

That they could not spell Pete Seeger’s name, and called him Peter [!!!!!], only shows how the times have been a changin’. But what made me laugh out loud was when “Joan Baez” said, “as Abe Hoffman used to say, if you remember the ’60s you weren’t there”. The actress being about 20-odd wasn’t there but I was. Reluctantly (my wife made me) I mentioned to her after the show that it had been Abbie Hoffman and not Abe. This was news to her, and obviously to all the others who had gone along in the many nights before.

I never did meet Abbie but I met Jerry Rubin at the University of Toronto back around 1969-ish. He had come to visit and I was sort of in the outer ring of the inner circle of the campus left so we met up. And we had a conversation in which I said to him that, you know, all this, all this radical revolutionary stuff will end, and he said to me, which I remember as clear as any memory I have, “No, it will never end!” And you know what? He was right. The long hair may be gone, and the folk songs, the communes and the rest, all gone, vanished. But those are mere ephemera. What really counts remains. All that was once radical and revolutionary is mainstream. Our culture is a disaster zone. You may think watching ISIS knock over 5000 year old statues is a unique form of vandalism, but I watch Obama and the political elites of my own civilisation knocking over many of our cultural icons and find much the same being done to the traditions of the Judeo-Christian West. But I am used to the idea that 2115 will be as different from today as today is from 1915. I may not like it, but I can’t stop it either.

As for Joan Baez, a product of her time as we are all. Al Capp’s Joanie Phoanie she may be, but a great singer as well.

The lesson of history is that you often have to understand the lesson already before you can learn from it

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As one of the veterans of the Viet Nam war/street-protestor division, I note that April 30th was the fortieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon. For me, the most memorable part of hearing the news was how despondent it made me. Deeper currents were stirring within me and I was on the turn towards who I am today. There is an interesting article today in The Australian on Five Myths about the Vietnam War. It had been a turning point, all right, and the residual remaining of newspaper anti-Western crusades and student ignorance matched against an arrogance rising to preposterous levels. In the spirit of what will get you is what you know that ain’t so, it is an article I recommend. It finishes with a genuinely important message:

It is regrettable that the Vietnam War has spawned so many myths that still adhere 40 years after the war’s end. Until we get the history of the Vietnam War correct, politicians and the educated public are likely to make bad decisions about the wisdom of intervention, and ­possible methods of involvement, in future military conflicts.

I might also mention that I have come across this quite interesting and valuable list of 10 books to celebrate the socialist holiday of May Day. I was speaking to someone of a different generation the other day about how influential Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had been on my thinking and he said, Russian background notwithstanding, that he had never heard of him. With things being as they are, I can well believe it.

Of the ten-plus-one books listed, I have read nine. The Gulag Archipelago made the difference for me, and the others came after. History being of no interest in a post-modern world, these things are seemingly less important. Know thine enemy is, however, a useful notion. These books help, and the descendants of those these books were written to warn us against are everywhere.

Crossing to the supply side

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You know, the Government may actually have gotten the point. Early days, and we haven’t seen the budget yet, but these are positive straws in the wind. This is good: Budget 2015: rewards for seniors to stay at work. I don’t know whether keeping me around will be like getting an ARC grant, but nonetheless:

Older Australians will get new ­rewards for finding work and strong incentives to put off their retirement as the federal government recasts its controversial pension savings in a wider budget reform aimed at boosting the workforce at the same time it helps to cut the deficit.

Federal cabinet has agreed to make faster payments of up to $10,000 to employers who hire older Australians as part of an overhaul of job programs to help tens of thousands of people back into the workforce.

A separate budget measure will give people approaching ­retirement a new incentive to stay at work for a few more years in the knowledge they could collect a bonus when they choose to claim the Age Pension.

The budget will also spare about two million retirees from an unpopular change to pension ­indexation, making the savings instead from fewer than 400,000 people with substantial private ­assets.

Yesterday, or maybe the day before, it was childcare payments that were redirected towards supporting women at work, not to support those on maternity leave which was the original plan last election. Instead, the need to make employment grow and people in jobs secure seems to be the underlying theme. Supply-side economics comes in many forms.

Jobs growth in a market economy just happens. The question, where will the jobs come from, an ever-present idiocy of those who have no feel for market outcomes, is answered by the fact that jobs just seem to come, almost from nothing. The more public spending that could be pared back the better, but with the active promotion of the private sector merely to get on with it, the funny thing is that it will do just that.

We are the least racist country on the planet but the left are doing what they can to change it

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chan and sukumara

The left have no solutions to any of our problems, but are themselves the biggest problem we have. We are the least racist country on the planet, with the Canadians an equal first to us, which is what makes this such a peaceable kingdom. But until we have our own Baltimore-like rioting in the streets, these people will not rest content.

The above pic was picked up at Andrew Bolt, where you can find more of the same. Racial tensions are not reduced by insisting we classify everyone by race but by exactly the opposite. These two, drug runners though they be, are Australian. Whatever their racial origins, it made no difference either to us or to the Indonesians. We did what we could and they did what they did. But to try to find in any of this some kind of racism is despicable, sickening and vile. These typically anti-American fools import all of their politics from America, which should now become the perfect example of what to avoid at all costs. They lead empty lives whose only enjoyment seems to be to stir up trouble to fill the place where genuine emotion ought to be, but where is found instead a dead cold heartless void.