It means, “shut the f*ck up!”

It means, make no noise!

It means let me think for a minute. Let me reflect.

It does not mean blow bugles and beat drums. It does not mean raise flags and banners, sing songs of victory and glory and righteous pride.

Noise is the enemy of silence.

Pomp and ceremony are the enemy of reflection, of thinking, of genuine not confected emotions.

Nauseating pomp and excruciating ceremony and all the commercialism that these are cocooned in, do nothing more than mock the genuine sentiment that brought about this, the most eloquent form of expression, the moment of silence.

There is no more powerful, no more phosphorescent sign of hypocrisy than the three-word-slogan -because that’s what sentences too often uttered become – than the catchcry, “lest we forget!” It is an insult to those who have died and an insult to those who have survived; those who see the bombs – our bombs! – scorching the planet to its core, who hear the groans of pain and agony, of despair, of despondency, of the savage loss of their loved ones, of their homes, their farms, everything they hold dear and are wondering what is the point of this three-word-slogan?

Lest we forget what? What exactly?

And who is this “we?”

“We” that is the common man and woman has never caused a single war. Never!

The common man and woman looks at their children and grandchildren, their siblings, their ageing mums and dads, uncles, aunts, cousins, neighbours, tomatoes and zucchini growing in their vegie patch and rejoice. They need nothing more. That is their ultimate, their heaven. War is the very last thing they want. They do not start it and they do not impose it. No common man or woman wants to lose a jot of it and if the politicians were just common men and women, they’d make sure that this heaven is nurtured and nourished.

All politicians. In all countries.

But politicians are not are they? They are not common men and women, I mean. They are certainly not there to nurture and nourish an earthly Heaven, one that is populated by men and women, with hearts and minds and bodies that age and ache as they do. Men and women who are unequivocally mortal and with very short lives.

Politicians despite what they tell us are there to serve those who have no respect for all those things that make up a common man and woman’s Heaven.

Lest we forget?

“We” have forgotten, “we” forget and “we” do not learn because nothing, in effect, ever changes.

From the days of the 300 Spartans to this very moment, nothing has changed, nothing has been learnt, nothing shall be remembered.

Nothing promotes war than parades of phalanxes of current and past soldiers, of soldiers’ children and grandchildren, with glistening steel raised high, of shining medals, of over-starched uniforms and over-polished, boisterous boots. Nothing speaks more clearly of the powerlessness of the ordinary man and woman and the absolute and indomitable power of the elite, the war mongers.

Nothing extinguishes humility as effectively as pride. Monuments, the budgets of which can lift a nation out of poverty, give shelter to the homeless, treatment to the sick, untold wisdom to the students are monuments of pride.

And Pride is a path to ruin.

Nothing will change other than the faces of the sanctimonious politicians who stand straight as an insouciant post with their right arm rising to a salute.

The last post, bugled and sung and acted out over and over again for all eternity. Speech after sententious speech, rhetoric trying to rival Pericles’ Funeral Oration, flows out of their mouth with emotions so hollow, so vacuous, so insincere that hardly a single syllable of those speeches will be heard, or heeded or remembered a minute after they’ve been uttered. Not the words, not the dramaturgy, not the histrionics.

Dissembling and dissimulating at their most monstrous, at their most grotesque.

If “we” are to remember anything, it is that politicians lie, politicians are oily, unctuous beasts; that politicians send us to wars, wars that we have not caused and wars that we do not want, wars that are anything but silent, anything but harbingers of peace or nurturers of our earthly Heaven.

If “we” are to remember anything it is that we shouldn’t fictionalise wars. That we shouldn’t mythologise it, that we shouldn’t romanticise it, that we shouldn’t clog History with wars and heroes and victims of wars. There are no moral lessons in wars, only immoral ones.

Thucydides, a soldier himself, tells us that he wrote the History of the Peloponnesian War so as to see what war does to morality. What he could learn about man’s character and how it’s affected by war. What he saw displeased him enormously. War destroyed morality, morality being the most crucial part of man’s character.

“We” do not want Trump’s parade, or that of North Korea, among many, many others.

“We” want the war mongers, the greedy and the gluttonous powerful, those deluded enough to think that money and power will give them physical immortality, those who think that making funeral orations in front of cameras give them a moral advantage over their political adversaries, to stop.

Just stop!

“We” want them to be silent and to reflect and to let us reflect.

That’s what “we” want!

By George Theodoridis

It’s Thucydides all over again, isn’t it? I mean, it’s so bloody obvious! Here, in this war we have the classic “Thucydides Trap” a phrase coined by Graham Tillett Allison Jr a professor and a national security officer in the US administration.

A phenomenon that has become a game the sort that John Varoufakis the Greek economist and erstwhile Minister of Finance in the Geek Gov’t, plays very well.

Indubitably so! A small State declares war on a larger State. It happens all the time, if indeed, not all the time.

In this game, Turnbull was a big State – so to speak and Dutton was a small but emerging State – so to speak.

Here are the Historiographer’s own words said in his History of the Peloponnesian War: “What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.”

Beware of rising powers if you’re too powerful. You frighten them and they get angry and declare wars against you.

OK, the end result re the Turnbull v Dutton war had a kink in its proceedings and neither Turnbull nor Dutton won, unlike the war (thirty blood shedding years of it!) between Athens and Sparta in which Sparta won unequivocally.

And that war too, like the one that’s been going one within the LNP for Zeus only knows how long, was an internecine war: Greeks against Greeks, Libs against Libs. The Greeks lost back in 5thC BC as will the Libs, whatever the result in Wentworth tomorrow.

I love a good war where no blood is shed. Brain cell to-brain cell, moral stand to-moral stand. Two bands of warriors throwing mud pies at each other, the one with the least number of mud pies covering their faces wins. It will be the Libs.

Thucydides said that he wanted to write about the war (one in which he participated by the way) because he wanted to see what happens to men’s morals during a war.

He didn’t like what he saw.

All men shed their morals during the battle. That’s the first victim of war. Morals are left back by the home’s hearth, next to the baby and the young wife, next to the elderly mother and father, next to the statue of the god you favour.

And it’s the case with all wars. I mean wars, not little tiffs and scraps and exchanges of insults.

Wars.

Like the one between the mild-mannered Libs (I am told as I write, that there is such a species, examples of John Hewson and even Fraser are proffered) and the wild-mannered Libs (not the slightest doubt about their existence) of which one lot will lose and one will win.

In maths, when we multiply two minuses (and in my “leftie” mind, all right-wingers are minuses, albeit one lot, in this game is less so than the other) we end up with a positive. I must admit though I just don’t know what a positive in this multiplication of minuses will look like.

The Greeks v Greeks scenario brought about a dictatorship in Athens – Athens, the heart, head and womb of Democracy and the cradle of civilization, a rule by thirty tyrants, the word meaning extreme conservatives, far right, in today’s parlance.

In a place like Athens, it wouldn’t last long and it didn’t survive beyond eight months; and that was the positive. Athens lost the war, was ruled conservatively for eight moths but this tyranny gave them the incentive to collect their wits their courage and what manpower they had left, fought the tyrants, killed them and regained their Democracy. (It’s a bugger when one thinks of the fact that this Democracy is what, in the end, condemned their most prominent and most wise man, Socrates to death but that’s another story of another war).

Whatever the result then of today’s by-election, one thing is certain: the Libs will lose; which will ineluctably bring about another “loss,” the one in their mates’ ranks, that of the Nationals, where Mr Barnaby Joyce will most probably accomplish his obsessed fantasy, that of regaining the leadership of that party, having toppled its current leader, Michael McCormack after which, Joyce ought to change his name to either Lazarus or Barrabas!

Which Libs will have the least number of mud pies on their face? To a leftie like me, it matters not. A win-win situation because we lefties see this result as a sure precursor of the Libs losing the Federal election next May. But we often count our chickens prematurely.

One can hope that the least “minus” lot does have the fewer mud pies spread across their faces but this isn’t a battle of two sides; it is one where there are at least four opponents and these may or may not bring an unexpected result but they could bring about a different political make up and a moral chemistry `a whole different vibe – in the subsequent Parliament.

Many issues that solicit moral circumspection, such as climate change, taxation, Adani, the shift of the Oz embassy to Jerusalem, religious freedom, will be given – I suggest – the requisite amount of cogitation and have those previously exercised excesses curbed considerably if either Kerryn Phelps or Tim Murray win.

And then there is also the other mud-slinger, the one who, like the god Apollo, slings from afar, the one who has lost the original war, the leadership of the Liberal Party and of the country, Mr Malcolm Bligh Turnbull.

His sling is a tweet and he’s enjoining the honourable denizens of Wentworth to beware about the lot that run the party now, after his assassination.

And then there is also his son, Alex Turnbull, who leaves no mud pie unslung. “Teach them a lesson!” He exhorts the very same denizens.

Finally, I’d like to remind the gamers what had happened to the conspirators of Caesar’s assassination on that fatal Ides of March, in 44BC and what followed that bloody event: A mountain of blood and gore rose up from it and it swallowed up the Roman Republic and all its benign and orderly legislature from which new event followed the emergence of a most malevolent savagery, trying desperately and brutally to manage an uncontrollable empire.

And so, I’m off to the war ground.

I’m taking my own pies – meat ones – and sauce and my own beer.

Whoever loses, for a leftie like me, it’ll be a fun show!

By George Theodoridis

It seems to me that we have a pronounced, a phosphorescently obvious reluctance to employ women; and by “we” I don’t just mean we, the men, though I must admit we, the men, are by far the greater culprits of this reluctance but women also, some of whom surprise me with the vehemence of their reluctance; and it isn’t simply a reluctance, it is, when one looks a little closer, an utter refusal, actually. These women, I notice, are not mere agnostics to the view that women are just as capable, just as likely to be as excellent at their work as are their male counterparts, or even just as ordinary,  just as harsh and hard-hearted and just as banal and indistinguished as men; or to the view that women should be represented in at least equal numbers and – Oh, Zeus forfend! – with equal recognition and equal pay! Nor are they merely agnostic as to the view that women have the inalienable right to be given equal opportunity during the selection process. No, these women are in fact, anti-gender equality and anti-gender balance.

And if you don’t hear their assertion that “men can do it better!” in these very words, you will certainly hear it and feel it in the tone and sentiment behind their own phraseology: “I’m not interested in gender, I’m not interested in quotas, I am only interested in merit!” What they do not utter but you can hear the words bouncing off the walls of your brain is, “but men have balls!”

They insist that when they go about selecting the people who will sit at their board or at the various offices in their organisation, they look not at the gender of the applicants but at their merit as it relates to that position. That’s what they’re adamant about. Nor do they look at – these women will assert – anything else, like race, colour, religion, and other distinguishing marks about the body of the applicant.

And then, when one has a quick look at the phalanx of the men who surround them – all looking like they’ve been pushed out of the same factory and from the same mould and sees that this “merit” thing which their selectors said they so lovingly hunted for is glaringly absent, one is very tempted to ask them what wooing tactic or tactics they employed that has caused this ear-smashing bellowing consequence of “men, not merit?” and the screeching refrain, “we want balls, not vaginas and certainly not brains nor hearts!”

What method did they use?

That of the peacock, perhaps, spreading his colourful feathers across and doing a mating dance. In other words, was this selection process a case of hormonal needs.

Perhaps they’ve used Orwell’s anti-dictionary where ‘merit’ is defined as ‘wickedness’.

Or perhaps it was the old IQ compatibility test: S/he is smarter than me so I won’t choose him/her.

Or, were they inspired by the wooing tactic of some crass, barbarous, bullying, shock jock.

Or by Trump’s “angry clown method” of “I had one beer!”

Merit!

The whole of Plato’s Republic is a search on an accurate definition of merit, of justice, of wisdom. The oracle of Delphi had pronounced him the wisest, the most meritorious man in the whole of Athens and, at his trial, his accusers turned that word to mean smartarse. “You’re a smartarse,” they shouted at him. “A conceited smartarse, going about our streets addling the minds of our youth!”

Socrates objected: “I was wondering why the oracle declared me the wisest man in Athens so I went around asking all those whom we call wise and discovered that though they, themselves said they were wise, they were, in fact, dumb. Then I thought about it,” he continued in his apology, “and discovered that the reason the oracle said I’m the wisest man in this city is because I was wise enough to know that I know nothing; wise enough to know that I am not wise!”

He was sentenced to death for being such a smartarse.

Merit, true merit, is often mistaken for smartarsedness.

This reluctance to employ the female of our species stands of course in stark contrast to the gusto and the alacrity with which we – we, men, in particular – abandon the splendid benefits of peace – serenity, laughter, love, the cooing and gargling of babies, the sound of birds, the armfuls of our harvest, the warm bed in winter, the cool gentle waters of a creek and rush off to the brutal killing fields of war.

Oddly enough we are loathe to create a board room in a corporation or a cabinet of a political party, or in the Presbytery of a religious body based on equal numbers of sex but that reluctance turns into untamed gusto and alacrity when it comes to deciding on our marching off to war; or to incarcerating children and their parents under the most brutal, inhumane conditions, or to removing those children from their parents, stealing whole generations of them and having them live lives of orphanage for the entirety of their existence. The same disposition of reluctance rules us when it comes to our treatment of the most vulnerable in our society, people who are often put into that state of vulnerability because of this disposition of reluctance on our part.

Merit?

The first known and quite arguably the best ever satirist, Aristophanes, saw all this “reluctance v alacrity” game being played out in his 5th century BC society of Athens – Athens, the womb of civilization and the beating (though, at times a little too tentatively) heart of Democracy – and he, Aristophanes, didn’t like it. So he wrote a couple of plays to express this quite profound disgust of his. The one is called “Women of Parliament” and the other “Lysistrata,” both hilarious, both scathingly poignant, both are excoriating accounts of the character of the men who made the stupid laws of his country and who loved sending the youth off to endless and mindless war. Their reluctance of having any women interfere with matters of importance relating to the running of the city and the alacrity with which they placed the city on a war footing.

It was a melancholy sight for anyone with a heart, which like that of Aristophanes, was endowed with the sentiment to feel melancholy.

Reluctance and its antonym, alacrity fought each other ruthlessly before the satirist’s very eyes so he put it up on his stage for all to see. This was a contest which was as glaringly obvious and as shamefully destructive then as it is now, some two and a half thousand years later because it seems that we did not heed Aristophanes’ warnings and the warnings of many others around him, before him and after him – and here we are now, still shouting the catch-cry, “men do it better!”

Lysistrata came first. In 411BC, at the most gruesome peak of what was called The Peloponnesian War, a war that was indubitably a “man’s war” because it was the men who declared it and the women who hated it he wrote a play that has women take over the treasury (then held in the Parthenon) and keeping the males away from it until they signed a peace treaty of their own words.

It is a play by which Aristophanes shows his men where he thinks they keep their brains. They are kept, he suggested, in their testicles and consequently, they think by them and consequently that is why they go to war with such gusto and alacrity. Men think with their balls!

Not so the women, Aristophanes says. The women think with their brains. I admit that am certainly and shamelessly oversimplifying the play and the author’s intent but that is its essence: Men are mindless, and women are mindful. One lot thinks with their balls, the other with their brains.

Lysistrata, a middle-class intelligent woman gathers all the women she can get together from all over Greece, including Sparta with whom Athens is at war and convinces them all to deprive the men of sex until the men from all sides of the war sign a peace treaty. Peace came in no time.

Thirteen years later, in 391, when the war was well and truly over with the devastation of Athens and the final exit of the Spartan dictators from the Athenian parliament, the Athenian men began to behave in the same “balls-brains” way.

This time Aristophanes writes his Women in Parliament in which he has the women dressing up as men and flooding the Parliament – a place sanctified by and for men – and there legislate laws that make living fair for all. “Men wanting to visit whores must, henceforth, first visit the ugly ones and then the pretty ones,” is one of the new laws enacted by these women. Fair enough!

It’s a stern warning to men by the satirist of the day: If you love sex so much, don’t go to war!

A glorious line is uttered by Judith Dench, playing M, in Tomorrow Never Dies, some two and a half thousand years later:

Admiral Roebuck: “With all due respect, M, sometimes I don’t think you have the balls for this job.”

M: “Perhaps. The advantage is that I don’t have to think with them all the time.”

Wooing is a tactic used for mating. How we woo, how we try to convince people – men or women – to join us in our firm, or in our political party, or in our church, our boardroom or our bedroom determines what sort of person we end up with.

Men or women, when they are in too great a majority, they can and often do constitute a power which they can use against the minority. Lord Acton put it well: “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely,” words that have become a well-worn aphorism, one which Orwell dramatised so brilliantly with his Napoleon in Animal Farm.

… Or did they woo the way the three witches in McBeth did? So as to hand a “hollow crown” to someone, a sinecure?

By George Theodoridis

It is a case -as it bloody nearly always is- of relevance deprivation and diminution, thanks mainly to the prodigious proliferation and ever burgeoning of social platforms and the largely bored hoi polloi, bored by celebrities who have nothing to offer but the empty, irrelevant minutiae of their lives. The celebrities, like the emperor in the famous tale by Hans C. Anderson, have shown the full nakedness of their existence.

So, they’re out and about -celebrities of all sorts- and they are using anything and everything they can, including cartoons, as platforms (already well lit up by their adoring hoi polloi,) to stand upon it and yell at us, “hey, look here! Here I am! This way! I am a celebrity, listen to my rants, watch my outrages! I can still perform! I’m still a celebrity. Someone give me another contract!”

This includes the cartoonists themselves, of course, the tennis players, the hollow-headed authors like Rawlings whose credentials as moral and art arbiters are questionable if, quite arguably, non-existent.

This is a cartoon by a satirist and all satirical messages, from those by the very first ever and arguably the very best ever, Aristophanes, (c. 446 – c. 386 BC) whose world was no better nor worse than ours, if political chicanery is the measure, to Knight (born c. 1960s) all satirical messages are about exaggeration, exaggeration about everything from the shape of one’s nose to the shape of one’s words, to the colour of their budgie smugglers and the pitch of their Hanson-like squealing. Cartoonists are satirists and the identifying first sign of a satirist is exaggeration. No exaggeration, no satirist. It’s that simple! The other sign is that they condemn or criticise, or ridicule someone in a powerful position, be it in the political sphere or in the social one. From fathers of children to fathers of the Church or the State. Aristophanes depicted most brutally politicians Cleon among many, a Military man, Lamachus among many and philosophers, Socrates, among many. Most brutally!

We can like that sort of thing or we can hate it and we can express that love or hate by any means we can. Cartoonists do it by drawing cartoons.

Knight is a satirist and he did his satirical work, not only on Serena but on many other people, and did it in his own inimitable style which we all know and -as I said- either love or hate, laugh at or spat the dummy at. I can’t remember any such similar bellowing noise and social media turbulence generated by any of his other drawings, all of them satirical, all of them critical of someone or other.

Serena mucked up badly. Knight portrayed that.

Here we have a glowing emblem of an athlete, an icon of the best of them, rightly adored and admired by millions, acting like a spoilt child, “spitting her dummy,” as Knight put it. Something that does not fit that icon. Not at all! She happens to be black. Her opponent was an American-Japanese. Both were women, both non-anglos. The umpire was a non-anglo too and would most definitely have felt the excruciating pains of racism -as have I and anyone with even the slightest difference in the spelling of their name or the shape or colour of the skin on their face. No doubt, Carlos Ramos, the umpire would have heard the word “dago” as I have heard the word “wog” (among many other equally vile epithets) countless of times and felt its mind-numbing, stomach-churning jab often. He would know the excruciating hurt that racism can cause and he -as do I- would try his utmost to avoid delivering racism to anyone.

It also so happens that he is a male.

Would this ridiculously outraged, bigoted crowd, feel better or as bad if the incident were reversed and it was Osaka on the receiving end of the umpire’s penalties?

What the fuck are they on about?

Knight did the same thing many times before and is unlike to stop now -probably especially now and probably especially because he is now a celebrity. He sees the bullshit and he calls it for what it is and he draws a cartoon about it, satirising it. The bullshit, that is.

The Herald reminds us of these cartoons, also by Knight: Tony Abbott depicted as Hannibal Lecter with the caption “Banned: Big ears, cannibal mask,” and a topless Kim Jong-un with the words “Blocked: Belly fat, Asian stereotype.”

I can only conclude that all these “celebrities” from all over the world who have added their penny’s worth, thinking it was worth a pound, commented on this issue because they are desperate to be seen again and to be read again and to be listened to again and to be re-admired and, so as to jog our memory about their vacuous existence. They did so because they saw this incident as a platform, a stage where they can jump on and once again play the prima donna or the primo uomo.

The rest of us, the non-celebrities, we are either rational enough to see that there’s nothing to see here or not rational enough and so we behave like gangs of cowardly thugs who put the boot into some who’s down. A boot, by the way, which I and as I said the umpire, have felt and still feel now, at times, most painfully. Being kicked like that leaves great scars on you, scars that can flay not only your body but also your soul, scares that never leave you.

And, let us not forget that the umpire is a male who sits high up, above a couple of females -in the form of an idea as well as in that of reality- and it is therefore unequivocally and duty bound, in fact, ok for us to put our boot into him!

And that the cartoonist, of course, is a male also and also with a power mightier than a sword, and therefore it is also unequivocally and duty bound in fact, ok for us to put our boot into him as well!

The other reason is that, as a gang, we love to hate. We love to kick, we love to shout and show outrage. It’s an easy thing to do and, to some sick minds, it’s also an entertaining thing and something that gives us the power we have lost in almost all other areas of our lives. We’ve been made lesser in worth and dignity than overloaded donkeys, so we “kick.” We kick at anything and anyone, given half an opportunity. Knight’s cartoon has all the makings of such an opportunity for us to exert some of the power that’s been taken away from us.

Are we saying that the umpire is racially prejudiced against blacks but not against yellows?  What sort of racial prejudice is that?

Are we saying that Knight has similar predilections to those of Carlos Ramos? WTF  ARE we really saying? Whom are we accusing of what exactly and why? Based on what evidence?

Racial history of the world is brought into the court. Questions about the umpire’s integrity are raised or comments are made about Serena’s glowing sportsmanship, or about the umpire’s inconsistency of awarding penalties and Zeus knows what else, are all proffered to the judge as evidence that something is dreadfully wrong here! But none of these questions and comments and exhibits should even be heard or seen by the judge or us the jury.

They are all irrelevant to what had happened in that court on that day. They have nothing to do with the participants playing that particular game of tennis. They are simply hollow drums beating wildly! Loud shouts of wannabe celebrities. Loud shouts of hollow heads. Blistered tongues talking bullshit like our Prime Minister is so keen to do almost non-stop!

None of it should persuade the Goddess Justice, who should be blindfolded and unable to be persuaded by anything outside that single event on that single day in that single court.

Racism, misogynism, prejudice of any sort is disgusting. Utterly unacceptable to a society that wants to call itself civilised. So is bigotry, even if our erstwhile attorney general, George Brandis is otherwise convinced. According to him, we have the right to be bigots… but not be racist!  

Well, Zeus be praised now it’s all made very clear!

Over sixty thousand years of Indigenous history of white torture has always and still is being treated with neglect, scorn and disdain but we’ve spent copious amounts of ink and intolerable decibels of noise arguing about the depiction by a cartoonist of a tantrum thrown by a tennis player. The hypocrisy is exasperating! The outrage is baffling.

Is it racism, sexism or is it cultural supremacism by the supreme supremacists we all know supremely well?

Just asking.

Serena has done wrong. The umpire penalised her.
END OF FUCKING STORY!

Henceforth it has become a boring ochlobabble!

Can we now shine our torch on the new champion, the new real sportsperson, the youth, the serene, the graceful and gracious, the true lover of tennis and not of vacuous notoriety, Naomi Osaka, please?

She beat the other player. She won the match. She did not yell or insult the umpire and -may the gods bless the young woman- she played by the rules, such a rare thing these days of spoilt sports and overpaid celebrities.

Yes, Naomi Osaka had won the match and the day. Three cheers for Naomi!

PLEASE?