Category: Op-ed essay

Bleaders, today’s lesson concerns those krimis that I cannot finish. There are several varieties filed under the heading UNFINISHED, and I have commented on some specimens earlier, like those in which everything is written in the present tense, flashbacks, flashbacks within flashbacks, back stories, etc.

That has become a deal-breaker with this reader. One weekend I read a newspaper review of book that interested me, and I was about to order it, when in the last paragraph the reviewer said that this historical study was written entirely in the present tense which the reviewer found confusing and distracting. Amen! I decided I could not read a 400-page book on an historical subject in the present tense, too hard on my teeth. (Tooth gnashing, grinding, and gritting while reading is not recommended by dentists.)
Books described as Thrillers almost always suffer from One-tense-itis, or Present tense-itis, not sure which of these neo-logisms I prefer. (I do know I prefer the hyphen [-] in neo-logism though WORD’s autocorrect does not.) Tangent completed, now back to today’s subject.
There then are IKEA krimis.

Many, many krimis read like catalogues where every article of furniture and clothing is described in detail, from pencil stubs to curtin material as the protagonists move around and meet people. Page after page is spent on fabrics and furnishings in some combination of Martha Stewart with Land’s End and IKEA catalogues, and as always at first I read it thinking that it either sets the scene or relates to, in a manner yet to be revealed, the plot, but no, all too often it is just what it appears to be, padding.
Pain in the Back-story. In the same krimi is often to be found back-story-itis, another virus of the genre, in which each character from taxi drivers, to receptionists, to passers-by are introduced in such detail that an innocent reader like me thinks the character must be important and I should pay attention because later that seemingly incidental character will figure in the plot, but…alas, no.

As in many other art forms, the primary audience seems to be other writers (perhaps, on professional awards panels), and not readers, and so the author displays the creative ability to generate backstories for everyone. Ugh! Padding by another name.
Of course, in this, as in so much else, I am in a minority, because the very books I have in mind are described as best-sellers, as great works, lionised by authoritative sources like the ‘New York Times.’ I struggle to forebear from naming titles but they have been many over the years, and I recently struck another one.
This latest example catalogues fittings, furnishings, and clothing without end, and to no end. In parallel the historical settings, which is what captured my initial interest, was treated as a one-dimensional.
The action, such as it is, takes place in Washington D.C. at Christmas 1941, and yet to all the participants in the story the war is all but won because the Germans are stuck in Russia. Huh? Yes, Germany invaded Russia in June 1941 and by December it was no longer advancing, but the crucible of Stalingrad was fought between August 1942 and February 1943 and that was the first major defeat.
Likewise the book also makes the German V-Rocket program at Peenemünde much more developed in 1941 than it was, and also has the Germans desperate for these secret weapons in December 1941!
To top that there is also a reference to kamikaze Japanese pilots in December 1941 but these attacks began in October 1944 when the Japanese were desperate. See what I mean. I stopped reading after about sixty pages.
The result was overwritten with a cast of historical characters, and undercooked with the historical context half-baked.
Though I was much interested by the period and the historical characters I just could not wade through more and more description, while gritting my teeth at the useless catalogue combined with historical mistakes. This book is a ‘New York Times’ bestseller published by one of great New York City publishers and part of series. Conclusion? Different jokes for different folks. Different facts for different….

Eat the rich!
How amusing. I saw this exhortation in a feed on Facebook. Everything old is new again.
When people say I have no sense of humour, they are right. I never had a sense of humour about the racist and sexist jokes either. When the racists and sexists tried the fig leaf of humour as a cover I did not relent. That was when I learned I had no sense of humour.
Adolf Hitler had the same idea about the rich. He had every last member of the Rothschild family that could be found, one branch of which owned a bank of that name, hunted down, imprisoned, humiliated, tortured, and murdered. They were rich. Very.
However, being a vegetarian, he did not eat them.
Some of the Rothschilds were incredibly rich and they all were Jewish after all. Hard to say which was the greater crime. They got rich, in part, because they took risks other bankers were unwilling to take, e.g., like lending money for the building of the Suez Canal. But more generally to lend money to other Jews because Christian-owned banks would not.

For what it is worth, the surviving Rothschilds stem from other branches of the family, some living in England who survived in that liberal-democratic society so despised by the people who exhort others as above.
No doubt, I will shortly be unfriended.
By the way, the Rothschilds remain a whipping boy for all manner of nutters on the internet. Adolf’s spawn.

Every Australian of a certain age has heard this term, ‘Pig-Iron Bob,’ and knows what it means. I did, too, until I read Geoffrey Blainey’s ‘The Steel Master (1973),’ reviewed elsewhere on this blog.
[No comment.]
As with so much common coin, the Vox Populi is exactly wrong.
First to the common interpretation. While Robert Menzies was Prime Minister, Australia sold pig-iron to Japan in the later 1930s which pig iron the Japanese turned into weapons to attack Australia. That is the claim, and there are many chest-thumping assertions about it on trade union web sites.
It is another myth, like the Brisbane Line. Never existed but became reality by repetition.
Let’s start with the basics. Pig iron cannot be shaped into weapons-grade steel. It is a by-product of steel production not the basis of it. Cause-and-effect can be tricky like that.
BHP did indeed sell that pig iron to Japan, that is true. It did so to prepare for war with Japan. Huh?
Essington Lewis, that remarkable man, who was CEO of BHP, foresaw a Pacific conflict with Japan as early as 1936, while so many of the Lefter-than-Thou persuasion were still toe-ing the Moscow line of friendship with the Axis powers. Lewis bore this message to all and sundry on his return to the wide brown land, but no one wanted to hear it for fear of provoking the Japanese. Softly, softly was the bipartisan foreign policy at the time.

Disappointed with the political response, on his own initiative he began converting BHP steel works to weapons production. While the board of directors chaffed at this unprofitable exercise, the chairman of the board backed Essington Lewis, and conversion went ahead full-steam, that being the only way Lewis ever did anything.
Lewis used the money from the pig iron sales to Japan to pay for this re-tooling of BHP factories to produced airplanes, ammunition, rifles, the Owen gun, Beaufighers, anti-tank guns, and ships.
In this way, the truth is that Japan paid for Australia to arm itself against its threat.
That phrase, like some other colossal lies in Australian politics, traces back to that tireless motormouth Red Eddie Ward. His admirers, a few of whom I have met, might also pause to consider that Ward also violently (but then he did everything that way) opposed home ownership, especially for the working class because it would sap their revolutionary fervour and delay the advent of Soviet Socialist Australia.
Fred Ward, Donald Trump is using his playbook.
Pedant’s note. Grammar Girl advises that when a noun phrase is used as an adjective, it is best to put in a hyphen. Pig iron, the noun, becomes pig-iron the adjective. She is not alone. The redoubtable ‘New Yorker’ does the same. We village hicks but follow our leaders on this point.

Here is some food for thought, were that possible for the Donald Trumps (and Peter Duttons) of this world.
Who is the most famous American illegal immigrant?
There are many candidates, but have a look in the wallet, bleaders in the U.S.A. Got a ten spot? Look at Alexander Hamilton. He is one of the finalists.

First, why is he on the ten, and then how did he get there.
He is on the ten because he created the United States currency. He devised the reserve bank system, coinage, paper money and a lot more. A founder indeed. (He was also an artillery officer in the Revolutionary War, more military service that Trump has seen.)
Until he was murdered, it was widely supposed Hamilton would succeed George Washington as leader of the Federalist Party. It was Hamilton who first bruited the Washington Monument.
Hamilton was also an undocumented, illegal immigrant born out of wedlock to a French mother on a Danish island in the Caribbean Sea who entered America at age eighteen. What a trifecta. Moreover his maternal language was French. He learned English as a teenager at a Jewish school and from the Dutch businessman for whom he worked.
What would Trump or his local imitator Dutton make of that?
A voodoo frog on a bicycle and a bastard to boot. Literal in the case of Hamilton and figurative in the other cases.

The closer Donald Trump gets to the Republican nomination the more the media, other Republicans, and some Democrats will discover his virtues. It is always the same, every four years the cycle is repeated as though for the first time.
Earlier in the campaign qualities deprecated and ridiculed in a candidate, will come to be accepted and then celebrated as positive.
For example, inattention to facts will transform to strategic thinking, untrammelled by petty details.
For example, flippant and destructive remarks, will be transformed into suggestions, and trial balloons.
For example, hostility to Hispanics, refugees, Muslims, women, left handers, homosexuals, will become — thanks to the alchemy of opportunism — unifying remarks.
For example, vague and diffuse threats to other nations will become, presto, disguised diplomacy.
The media always leads the way in this prostitution. When it seems a candidate is going to win, the realisation follows that an accommodation will have to be made with the candidate to keep manufacturing the news.
Even a big target like Trump will get the benefit of this self-censorship. Indeed, the more he threatens the media, the sooner some of its representatives will fall into line in the hope of securing favours before others comply. When it comes to self-serving opportunism, no one can beat Murdoch’s organs.
Soon there will be a rapprochement between Foxy News and The Donald. ‘You read it here first!’
Other Republicans will accept their own candidate, no matter what. All the posturing and playing hard to get will evaporate when success looms. The office seekers ever so subtlety seek office with more finesse than Chris Christie.
Then there will be Democrats who see Trump’s pull in their electorate, and have no wish to rile voters. These are the ‘If I keep quiet maybe their will not notice my party label is Democrat’ leaders. Some of them will couch their campaign publicity to omit the very word ‘Democrat.’ such leaders as they are.
Jimmie Carter went from ‘Jimmie Who?’ to a sage in this kind of transformation. Ronald Reagan’s habit of falling asleep in meetings, became a cool detachment. John McCain’s long past use-by-date became maturity. Mitt Romney’s narrow sectarianism became a virtue.

Bexit? Sure, why not? It is bound to be the solution to all problems, since none are homemade in Britain. rright?

Here is one prophecy.
The United Kingdom leaves the European Union.
Thereafter Scotland achieves sovereignty and leaves the United Kingdom to join the European Union.
Not to be left behind, Wales does the same.
Northern Ireland? Surely it would be next.

The result will be Little England.
But not for long, because the rustbelt in the north will consider seceding, so as to join the European Union.

It will then be Littler England. And a new flag will have to be designed.

What do socialism and the Republican Party have in common? Read on.
In ‘Murdoch’s Organ’ (aka ‘The Australian’ newspaper) of 5 April one KImberly Strassel mentioned Ripon Wisconsin as the birthplace of the Republican Party in the context of the forthcoming Republican primary election there pitting Donald Trump against all comers.
The little white school house in Ripon Wisconsin is the symbolic birthplace of the Republican Party because in about 1852 the Free Soil Party was first organised there, and it morphed into the Republican Party in 1860 when Abraham Lincoln was its nominee for president, and the eventual winner.

The Whig Party was slowing imploding in parallel with the rise of the Republicans. The Whigs had elected presidents, but had not succeeded in electing its foremost figure and greatest statesman, Henry Clay, whose frequently quoted remark ‘I’d rather be right than president’ proved all too prescient. Clay was the great compromiser whose compromises for a generation staved off civil war and with his death one of the legs of the table of compromise was lost and the war followed.
These days to call someone a compromiser is a dire insult. One must be consistent and uncompromising to win the adulation of the addled minds of the media.
The Whigs had never supposed slavery was a major issue and the Democratic Party, that genetic issue of Thomas Jefferson, himself a slave holder and more importantly a worshipper of states’ rights above all else, had scrupulously avoided the subject. The one church Jefferson honoured was the state house. Andrew Jackson that other founder of the Democractic Party did not mince words about states rights, he simply declared the slaves inhuman.
The Free Soil movement opposed the extension of slavery in the new western states, starting in the north west with Wisconsin because it feared slave labor would undermine…free labor. The short lived Free Soil Party was born in the little White School house and there is more.
Three of the five signatures on the minutes of the first meeting in the Little White School House came from individuals who had been socialists!
Gasp! Shock! Horror!
Yes, an Associationist Fourier community inspired by French utopian socialist Charles Fourier had flourished in what is now Fond du Lac county at Ceresco just east of Ripon for a few years and as it was winding down some of its members aligned themselves with the rising tide of Free Soil. Associationism was a version of Fourier’s phalanx scripted for American ears by Albert Brisbane and promoted, by among others, Horace Greeley. It was Karl Marx who labeled Fourier a utopian socialist, well Frederick Engels, in fact, but few acolytes notice the distinction.

Ergo the seed of the Republican Party bears the original sin of S O C I A L I S M. Not a fact to be found on the Republican National Committee’s website. Not even a fact to be found in Ripon where it is reported that the early records were destroyed in a fire. But a fact that can be confirmed in the Library of Congress where other records survive.
I wondered how anyone knows of the Party’s history since the Republican National Committee has been stripping history from its web site to comply with the worldview of its Tea Party rump these last few years. To be sure the Ripon Society still exists but it is a shadow of its former self. The list of Ripon Republicans (= by definition liberal, some avant le mot) is impressive for their achievements and noteworthy for their near eradication from the GOP’s official history: Herbert Hoover, George Norris, Thomas Dewey, Arthur Vandenberg, John Lindsay, Wendell Wilkie, Earl Warren, Margaret Chase Smith, Henry Cabot Lodge, Nelson Rockefeller, Jacob Javits, Olympia Snowe, Arlen Spector, Nancy Johnson, Christine Whitman, and Harold Stassen. Few, if any, of these giants would be acceptable to a party that nominates Donald Trump for high office. These days the Ripon Society celebrates the likes of Dennis Hastert, mudslinger extraordinaire and one-time wrestling coach.
A liberal Republican (1) was an internationalist who worked with international organisations like the United Nations and preferred multilateral action to unilateral, (2) who worked with trade unions to strength the society, and (3) and advanced civil rights for all. See how many Republicans would say that today.
By the way GOP stands for Grand Old Party, which was a moniker the Republicans embraced as a nickname after the American Civil War in parallel with Union Army veterans who styled themselves the Grand Army of the Republic or GAR in post war celebrations and reunions. The segue was from GAR to GOP.

There is only one domestic issue in the United States: race.
That President Black Obama got elected was a shock. It certainly surprised me. And a great many people have never accepted that result.
Here are the haters at work. Bibles clutched, voices raised, faces red, necks distended. What the haters feared has happened. These are the Trump and Cruz voters.
Of course, the sophisticates have learned to code their reactions for the media, but the heart of the matter is that a black man is president!
How can that be? Those unreliable voters, again!
In the years since his election many means have been tried to rein in voters to prevent the recurrence of such an aberration. They take many forms but commonly raise the barrier to voting while easing the capacity of voter-buyers to do so.
The more direct methods of insuring the outcome as practiced by these Trump voters.
Racing car drivers wear suits labeled with the logos of their sponsors. So should politicians, as has been said by others. Every Representative and Senator should appear thus besuited. Ditto candidates.
The haters prefer someone like Senator Mitch McConnell.
President Clinton once said something like that title about race, and he was right. Responses to a host of specific issues comes down to race. Unemployment, mortgages, education, health care, even veterans’ care…. The list goes on.

Administrator logic? The moral of the story is that we lie in the bed we made.
When yet another convoluted directive did the rounds of the University, one Ph.D. with enough time on hand to comment wrote, acidly, ‘Administrator logic’ and very kindly hit ‘Reply All’ so that we all could savour the wit and insight.
It is the sort of snide remark that can only be made by the naive. ‘Why so,’ asks Mr Spock?

The rules and regulations of the University inevitably trace back to a committee of professors, lecturers, and other academics. That we make our own rules is the ultimate explanation for the way they are.
With a committee of smart people, there is usually a competition to show just how smart each person is by thinking of things to include, cases to anticipate, including layers and layers of protection for students, especially those who manipulate the system the most.
I observed, and at times as a committee chair had to deal with, this competition to complicate, and the zealous desire to defend poor defenceless students against the mean University (embodied in yet another committee of academics).
To take one pivotal example, the unit of study syllabus has grown to a multi-volume work through this process. When instructors prepared their own, most were three to six pages for a semester, citing reading assignment and explaining written assignments, assuming the context of university study. Each syllabus would be amplified and explained further in the classroom over the semester.
Then came the pressure to move to a minimum standard for the syllabus. I chaired the first committee that did that, and I was happy to do so because I had seen some ludicrous specimens of syllabi first hand, e.g.,
the instructor did not know the name of the unit of study,
the syllabi did not state assignments,
the reading list was a joke,
and ….then there were the bad examples. (Including at least one that boasted of the number of failures there would be.)
From that bad seed grew today’s Godzilla the Syllabus. Its growth was cultivated solely by committees of academics who each year added more and more to the minimum standard. We could not longer assume anything. Each syllabus had to be a complete and stand-alone document. In it every contingency had to be anticipated and provided for, so that no student could later say ‘I didn’t know…’ The last one I did slavishly in accordance with the template was eighteen pages, of which six were mine, and the remaining twelve were generic information about the University.
Now a student who gets four of these tomes each semester, eight in a year, will find repeated in each of them rafts of material that virtually none of them will ever need. The labor and energy that goes into the lists of campus resources, methods of appeal, location of the front door of the library, definitions of plagiarism (revised annually by yet another committee of scholars), and more is never calculated.
We have then a syllabus template that comes loaded with pages of ancillary information, which is all readily available elsewhere. Repetition, repetition, repetition, there is no evidence that repetition reaches anyone but it is something to do. That much of this is now electronic both makes it even more easily available and even less likely to be read.
Each year the relevant committee tweaks the template. It is a standing item on the agenda these days. It does this at a time of its choosing, and what it does depends very much on which Ph.D.s are present with a bonnet full of bees.
The timing is always bad because there are four semester, summer, first, winter, and second. (Though at one time members of a committee objected to the labels ‘first’ and ‘second’ because it would hurt the feelings of someone who started in the second semester to call it ‘second.’ I make no joke here but report the fact with a straight keyboard. What saved the numbers first and second was the inability of the members of the committee to agree on names to put on the semesters. No, we cannot use the seasons since our seasons do not correspond to those of the Northern Hemisphere from whence arrive most of our golden fee-paying students descend, and it would confuse them. And so.)
Inevitably the new template for the calendar year appears a fortnight before the start of the first semester in March. Too late for those who organise themselves in advance of the stampede. Timed perfectly to create traffic jams on unit of study servers and at photocopiers.
Moreover, the tweaking can be minor or major. It is seldom identified, explained, or justified. The instructor is then enjoined to use it.
Because it repeats reams of information from other University offices, there is a great deal of room for discrepancies, because just as the committee is revising the syllabus template, these other offices of the University are also editing their own material. Discrepancies are the inevitable result. A well intentioned student can then find two different directions, one in the syllabus and another on the homepage of the relevant service. Yes, I personally tried using URL links but found even these changed.
It then falls to the administrative staff to distribute, to cajole use, and to record compliance with the template. And then to be the butt of such criticism. Since the administrative staff are professionals they do not reply in kind.
More than once in handing these things out on paper, hoping that it would be read before filing, I saw students, wiser in the ways of the world than the committee that designed the template, rip the last dozen pages off and drop them in the recycling bin on exit.
Is it any wonder that students grow cynical.

I hasten to add that the competitors in committees are always a minority, perhaps a quarter of the membership. The other three-quarters, if they attend meetings at all, are present only in body and curriculum vitae (CV). The only eye contact, the only time I heard the voices of members of this silent majority was when I introduced myself to them. Yet I am sure when came the time to apply for promotion this committee service would have been cited in bold under Service on the CV.

The increasing polarisation of politics in the United States has many consequences that are less visible than the entertainers vying for presidential nominations.
One long term consequence that has infected both Republican and Democratic administrations has been the selection of appointees. More than once able candidates have demurred or declined, while still others have been blocked in the Senate, or raked over the coals there so comprehensively that it becomes impossible subsequently for them to do the job. The Cold War custom of appointing as Secretary of Defense someone the other party, i.e., a Democratic President appoints a Republican as Defense Secretary has become nearly impossible. For a Republican to accept an appointment in a Democratic administration is now Tosca’s kiss. Secretaries of the Treasury were often appointed in the same way. But no more. As were ambassadors to particularly important posts. There was in short a bipartisan approach to some matters regarded as above politics.
It is routine for the fourth or fifth choice to be selected, because choices one through four feared the nominating process.

The endless media scrutiny starts long before the name is finally said, ignited by rumours and trial balloons. That however is nothing compared to securing the advice and consent of the Senate. Whereas for several generation the norm was that the President choses, and the Senate advises what it thinks, and then consents.
Not so any more. The threat that the Senate will not consent is palpable. Each side will say the other started it. The Senate playground.
Every Republican Senator knows that to vote for one of President Obama’s nominees will stimulate an attack from the Tea Party, and may lead to a challenge from within the Republican Party. Senator Richard Lugar cooperated with the Obama administration to speed the disarmament of Soviet missiles left in Eastern Europe, to keep them out of the wrong hands. Seemed like a top priority at the time. Still does. But Lugar was a Republican and when he came up for renomination his Republican rival painted him as Satan incarnate for supping with the black devil in White House, and he won. So ended Lugar’s career. By the way the same was true for Democrats during the Bush Administration, but it was less conspicuous.
The unspoken fact is that one president after another has chosen to avoid such a confrontation by selecting a certain kind of candidate. Since all this has come up, again, about the Supreme Court, let us take that example.
Whereas Supreme Court nominees were once leaders in the judiciary with widely quoted opinions, long and closely argued articles in premier law journals, keynote speakers at the most important legal conferences, reputations for analysis….and more. Not so any more.
The paper trail of such outstanding candidates is rich pickings for someone willing to misconstrue, misinterpret, and de-contextualize everything to settle old scores and to embarrass the nominator.

The result is the routine selection of candidates with a small paper trail because they are a smaller targets, not because they are better jurists.
This preference for ever smaller targets is now commonplace. The more obscure the candidate the better. While the Supreme Court is the big ticket in this game, it is not unique.
Cabinet appointments can also be vexed, as plenty of recent examples have shown. That the Senate consented to Hillary Clinton or John Kerry is due to their service as Senator. Like the media, the Senate does not (yet) eat its own.