Club Troppo

From the  1891 Taranaki Herald

Thomas Paine was a remarkable fellow who lived at a time of, and helped bring about two great revolutions of the modern age – the American and French ones. His time discovered political pamphleteering in a way that’s quite similar to blogging today. People wrote pamphlets and then others responded – with subsequent editions of the original pamphlet going out with responses to later pamphlets.

Letters, the tongue of the world, have in some measure brought all mankind acquainted, and, by an extension of their uses, are every day promoting some new friendship. Through them distant nations became capable of conversation, and losing by degrees the awkwardness of strangers, and the moroseness of suspicion, they learn to know and understand each other. Science, the partizan of no country, but the beneficent patroness of all, has liberally opened a temple where all may meet. Her influence on the mind, like the sun on the chilled earth, has long been preparing it for higher cultivation and further improvement. The philosopher of one country sees not an enemy in the philosopher of another: he takes his seat in the temple of science, and asks not who sits beside him.

Yet even at the height of his fame and after the American revolutionaries’ success in breaking away from the mother country, he was already  disillusioned by how little his own public achievements and spiritedness had served his own interests. He was a man of great generosity – and some impetuousness. He had given away what wealth and security he might have had in support of the revolution and felt unacknowledged by his adopted United States while others had profited mightily from the revolution, either financially or in acquiring high office. Against the extension of civilization being worked by letters and the spirit of science there was a counterforce:

The principal and almost only remaining enemy it now has to encounter, is prejudice. . . . [P]rejudice, like the spider, makes every where its home. It has neither taste nor choice of place, and all that it requires is room. There is scarcely a situation, except fire or water, in which a spider will not live. So, let the mind be as naked as the walls of an empty and forsaken tenement, gloomy as a dungeon, or ornamented with the richest abilities of thinking; let it be hot, cold, dark, or light, lonely or inhabited, still prejudice, if undisturbed, will fill it with cobwebs, and live, like the spider, where there seems nothing to live on. If the one prepares her food by poisoning it to her palate and her use, the other does the same; and as several of our passions are strongly charactered by the animal world, prejudice may be denominated the spider of the mind.

Paine would come to despair of both revolutions he had helped set in place. Paine was elected to the French National Assembly (I think that’s what it was called at the time, it kept changing and changing its name). He defended the King with energy, decency, courage and ultimately naiveté - arguing in a debate after the sentence of death had been passed that it carried the stain of revenge rather than justice. “My language has always been that of liberty and humanity, and I know by experience that nothing so exalts a nation as the union of these two principles, under all circumstances. . . . My anxiety for the cause of France has become for the moment concern for its honour.”

As France descended into chaos and horror his naturally sunny and disposition turned to another cause – that of deism.  He wrote The Age of Reason to promote deist views. As he began the book “I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.” Deism was very common amongst enlightenment intellectuals and men in high places. But they had always understood that it was polite not to be too trenchant about them publicly or to promote deism in competition with Christianity further down the social order. It was typical of Paine that his deism was democratic and generous of spirit.

I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow-creatures happy.

And it was also typical that his deism was simple and combative.

But, lest it should be supposed that I believe many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare the things I do not believe, and my reasons for not believing them.

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine.

But it is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.

This ruined his reputation in polite society for the rest of his life.

Meanwhile in Paris he stuck around as things went from bad to worse, helping others to leave but not leaving himself – perhaps out of vanity and/or naiveté believing that he would be OK. Paine’s heart and health were broken awaiting execution in a Paris jail though he survived long enough to outlive Robespierre’s and so the terror. He lived many more years, but he nevertheless emerged a changed man.

Memory, like a beauty that is always present to hear itself flattered, is flattered by everyone. But the absent and silent goddess, Forgetfulness, has no votaries, and is never thought of; yet we owe her much. She is the goddess of ease, though not of pleasure.

When the mind is like a room hung with black, and every corner of it crowded with the most horrid images imagination can create, this kind, speechless goddess of a maid, Forgetfulness, is following us night and day with her opium wand, and gently touching first one and then another, benumbs them into rest, and at last glides them away with the silence of a departing shadow. It is thus the tortured mind is restored to the calm condition of ease, and fitted for happiness.

Well blow me down. If it isn’t Jevons in the Powerhouse Museum coming here as the son of a bankrupt family and making good as Assayer to the Sydney mint, becoming the first photojournalist in Australia, discovering the El-Nino effect, writing an ethnography of the uncouth of Sydney Town before hightailing it back to the UK where he reinvented economics, built a computer out of wood and promptly drowned while on a recreational dip, it’s Malthus.

In this very interesting edition of Hindsight historian Alison Bashford was thumbing through Chapter 3 of the second 1803 (hugely enlarged) edition of Malthus’s ‘Essay on the Principle of Population’ she found references to the Hawkesbury which she initially took to be references to something British. It turned out that a lot of Malthus’s second edition was preoccupied with the population practices of Sydney’s aboriginal population. AS the blurb says

Alison Bashford began to realise that there was a great deal more in Malthus’s thesis than had been assumed-his study of the New World raised questions about colonialism, occupation, land, and how we share it- deeply moral and enduring concerns, which the contemporary world continues to grapple with.

Definitely a good listen. Malthus hated slavery too. Like Smith before him and Mill after him. I’m not too sure Ricardo cared too much, but perhaps someone can set me straight on that.

Perhaps it’s the Christian roots of our civilisation. Perhaps it’s innate in many  of us, but I’ve never understood the business about to forgive is divine. It’s natural. Even if people have done really bad things, if you think they are genuinely sorry, your heart goes out to them. I think of people like LBJ saying (IIRC) “I guess the kids were right all along”, or what I fondly imagine was Alan McAlister’s mortification at his own racism. Anyway, here’s John Skully on how wrong he was.

Scully: Looking back, it was a big mistake that I was ever hired as CEO. I was not the first choice that Steve wanted to be the CEO. He was the first choice, but the board wasn’t prepared to make him CEO when he was 25, 26 years old.

They exhausted all of the obvious high-tech candidates to be CEO… Ultimately, David Rockefeller, who was a shareholder in Apple, said let’s try a different industry and let’s go to the top head hunter in the United States who isn’t in high tech: Gerry Roche.

They went and recruited me. I came in not knowing anything about computers. The idea was that Steve and I were going to work as partners. He would be the technical person and I would be the marketing person.

The reason why I said it was a mistake to have hired me as CEO was Steve always wanted to be CEO. It would have been much more honest if the board had said, “Let’s figure out a way for him to be CEO. You could focus on the stuff that you bring and he focuses on the stuff he brings.”

Remember, he was the chairman of the board, the largest shareholder and he ran the Macintosh division, so he was above me and below me. It was a little bit of a façade and my guess is that we never would have had the breakup if the board had done a better job of thinking through not just how do we get a CEO to come and join the company that Steve will approve of, but how do we make sure that we create a situation where this thing is going to be successful over time?

My sense is that when Steve left (in 1986, after the board rejected his bid to replace Sculley as CEO) I still didn’t know very much about computers.

My decision was first to fix the company, but I didn’t know how to fix companies and to get it back to be successful again.

All the stuff we did then were all his ideas. I understood his methodology. We never changed it. So we didn’t license the products. We focused on industrial design. We actually built up our own in-house design organization, which they have to this day. We developed the PowerBook… We developed QuickTime. All these things were built around Steve’s philosophy… It was all about sales and marketing and the evolution of the products.

All the design ideas were clearly Steve’s. The one who should really be given credit for all that stuff while I was there is really Steve.

I made two really dumb mistakes that I really regret because I think they would have made a difference to Apple. One was when we are at the end of the life of the Motorola processor… we took two of our best technologists and put them on a team to go look and recommend what we ought to do. (Continued)

The two finals for the oval ball codes do not just share a weekend this year. Two of the finalists – Collingwood in the AFL and Manly in the NRL – have the undisputed status of being “the team everyone likes to hate” in their respective leagues. Yet they are far from similar clubs and the root of this hate is a striking contrast.

The source of hatred for Manly is easy to understand. Manly are “silvertails”, a moniker popularised by Roy Masters whilst coaching Western Suburbs in the late 1970s. Wests were then based in Lidcombe and Masters developed a mythology of class resentment for his under resourced team of “fibros”. It managed to inspire a brutal theatre for audiences, but ultimately failed on two counts – they didn’t win a premiership and rather than inspiring a siege mentality against all of Wests’ opponents, it instead inspired a league wide hatred of the prosperous, well resourced, player stealing team ensconced on the insular peninsular. The ultimate beneficiary was Newcastle in 1997. This folklore still inspires documentaries today.

Collingwood - Stereotyped

The hatred of Collingwood is less easily encapsulated. Occasionally someone will suggest it is due to resentment of the team’s early 20th century success, which seems unlikely. Was dislike transmitted by geriatric fans that could actually remember Collingwood success? And why did the same resentment fall on teams like St George or South Sydney whom had similar periods of dominance in league? Over the years I’ve asked people, and searched internet forums and when one got past vague generalisations that could apply to any team, certain imagery made a habit of reappearing . Of “rats”, of “tatts”, of “flanno” and “missing teeth” [fn1] and of “Winnie Reds up sleeves”. Or I could just browse the facebook page devoted to asking “Why are Collingwood supporters roaming the streets? Shouldn’t they be in jail?”, or this one, or this one…. Hmm….

When the Western Suburbs Magpies consciously adopted proletarian semiotics, their Emmanuel Goldstein drew everyone else’s hate. When these semiotics are applied to the Collingwood Magpies, they became Goldstein.

Why this difference? It’s unlikely to be a root difference in the culture of the cities that form the core of each competition given Sydney and Melbourne are as alike as any two large cities in the world (the narcissism of small differences notwithstanding). Topography does make class differences more apparent in Sydney, but how would this explain this observed difference? (Continued)

Manning and and Dymphna on the veranda of their house at Wapengo on the NSW South Coast

Inside Story has just published an essay by me in which I try to figure out Manning Clark. I was working on this within the bowels of what is not so politely called the ‘back end’ of Troppo when Ken Parish sent me an email saying that he liked the essay as it was coming along.  But it was still fairly repetitive, so I smartened it up and sent it off to Inside Story for a more salubrious publication than we amateurs can hope for here on Troppo.  I’m not too sure what the point of publishing an earlyish draft of the essay is, but Inside Story don’t like us reproducing their copy in its entirety, but I wanted to put a marker here to the final essay and it’s here in Troppo’s back end so I’m going to press ‘publish’ and be done with it.  But I’ll assume unless otherwise stated that comments below relate to the final version up on Inside Story. And even if you do read the material below, you should read the final version linked to above – or otherwise miss out on the story of the contraband frozen salmon marked “printed matter” that Dymphna smuggled through US customs.  (Please don’t pass the story onto Chris Mitchell or there’ll be hell to pay).

ooooOOOOoooo

I’ve written once or twice about Manning Clark on Troppo and have managed to rack up over 3,000 words in this post. Given it’s got a nice spot for an ‘intermission’ I’m going to publish it in two parts.

I lived in a converted garage out the back of his house in 1990 – in between two close friends living there for several years each on either side of me – and got to know him and his wife Dymphna quite well. Manning Clark both as he appeared on the public stage and as I knew him and his expansive circle of family members, friends, followers and acolytes and hangers on of various hues (like me) remains a subject of fascination. One reason for that is that, to use one of his own high blown expressions, he dreamed a great dream. To use Woody Allen’s expression, he wanted to eat at the grown ups table and had the temerity to imagine that he could somehow fashion literature out of his very vivid and melodramatic view of his own experience.

A second reason is that the dream he dreamed was about us, about our history.

A third reason is that, in contrast to other great national cultural figures of his generation, it’s painfully unclear what he achieved. His monumental history is a very strange beast, full of inaccuracies ( not of great moment by themselves, but for what they may portend).

McKenna’s biography helped me clarify my own thoughts about what I think of his history.  I’m sorry to say that I think it’s pretty much a disaster. It is an attempt at an anachronistic genre – an attempt to write history as myth as Thomas Carlyle wrote (I can only really take about one paragraph of Thomas Carlyle at a time – separated by at least a few hours though usually it’s a few years – he was also a big defender of slavery against the likes of those cold blooded practitioners of a new and ‘dismal science’ – his expression – called economics – which brings one up a little short, but I digress). The anachronism of the genre ramps up the degree of difficulty – the chance of pulling off what he’s attempting by a great deal, but perhaps leaves it as a possibility. It would be possible to write something great writing additional books of the Bible – ie not as contemporary literary interpretations but additional books to add to the series – but it would be pretty damn hard. Like imagining a painter who could create really great art as an imitation of some past style. I know of none who’ve done it.

(Continued)

HT: Skeptic Lawyer

I knew Rob Chalmers who worked in the press gallery for over 60 years and has just died after what they call in the media “a battle with cancer”. Cancer won as it so often does.  Peter Martin does the honours here including reproducing a fine letter to Rob from PM Julia Gillard, which, on account of its ease, I reproduce from his site over the fold. It ‘s one of the finest uses of high office to send letters like that – read some of Abraham Lincoln’s letters to widows and mothers of soldiers who died on the battlefields of the civil war.

In any event, it led me to think, there was something different about Rob – though it wasn’t nearly as different when I knew him around 1983-4 when I worked for John Button and 1991-3 when I worked for John Dawkins than it is different to today.  Journalism was more of a craft in those days. There was still a strong distinction between news and commentary, and between the story and the teller of the story.

Journalists were not celebrities and weren’t as full of themselves to the same degree – Richard Carleton excepted. Certainly in 1983-4 and less so in the 1990s, the ABC was a utility, not a ‘brand’. Things were different in the media then – and mostly better.

Anyway, Rob was a nice guy, happy to talk with all comers – not one of those types whose eyes dart around the room looking for someone more important than you. May he rest in peace (though on thinking about it, I’m not too sure what that means.) (Continued)

If it had happened in the US it is inconceivable that a great deal of the emphasis would not have been on Justice for the Killer.  ”We’ll hunt him down . . . ” Well no hunting down required in this case but you get my drift. I can’t recall what we said about it in Bali, but we’re not as preoccupied with ‘justice for the killer’ as the Americans are.

In Norway they will deal with the killer no doubt, but are ignoring him – as we have come to largely ignore our own monster of Port Arthur – and  focusing on more important things, which is healthier methinks. Here’s the Norwegian PM’s speech.

Which isn’t to complain.  He gives a great speech.