Silly news reports here.

In the lovely township of Dubbo in rural NSW, Australia, a seemingly intoxicated man (colloquially and actually known as Bruce) wandered, alleged grog in hand, along a rail overpass.

As family and officialdom gathered below he (allegedly) threatened to “jump.”

With impeccable timing a fire truck - whose urgent intent was to provide a ladder of salvation - roared into position beneath the now dangling Bruce … but arrived milliseconds AFTER his grip failed.

Bruce fell into its path. More precisely, into the front of the racing truck.

Though too-soon an arrival was the preferred schedule, it was, however, otherwise excellent timing.

He struck the truck’s flexible windscreen - which absorbed, then restored, Bruce’s potential energy -  whereupon he fell another 10 metres ..  horizontally!

This bizarre circumstance probably (and allegedly) saved Bruce from severe injury by impact with an uncompromising rock-hard surface (previously) below.

After suffering what was probably the biggest heart stopper of his life - presumably (and, no doubt, allegedly) chastising himself for arriving too late -  the fire truck driver must have allegedly then realised that due to his lead foot he avoided an even worse outcome: arriving a half-second later.

In which case the hapless Bruce would be a speed hump for the huge red and white emergency truck.

Go ferret for the video here, at NineMSN video site.  Video loads automatically after 25 minutes of commercials.

It takes the most outrageous comedy ’stunt’ of the year to litmus if our society has lost the plot.

Chaser’s APEC motorcade set out to highlight the nonsense of Sydney’s security lockdown - which can only be described as barbarous.

This so-called friendly city’s international visitors - unlucky enough to land in town during APEC - were treated to a fearful paramilitary presence, intimidation ranging from a Berlin-type wall between them and what they travelled across the world to see - and  harassment should they merely photograph the bloody thing.

Enter the Chaser with a “Canadian” motorcade escorting VIP one Osama Bin Laden, only to be waved through by police into security heartland.

NSW Director of Public Prosecutions, Nicholas Cowdery QC, announcing the case would not proceed, said police had offered tacit permission for the team to enter the secure zone by waving their motorcade through the checkpoints.

For police it was lose-lose from the moment the ridiculous runner-escorted motley convoy appeared. For Chaser it was win-win. They not only had their case thrown out, they scored Favourite Television Moment on MTV Australia 2008! Oh, and in case this suffers link rot - like, it costs sooo much to leave a web page up - here’s an eternal snapshot of the MTV Moment.

And let’s not forget that famous video:

And once more with feeling

Nicolas continued:

“Morrow was directing the progress of all who were employed for the purposes of the stunt and they either followed or were swept along by the directions that he gave,” Mr Cowdery said.

“I am also satisfied that, if the prosecution proceeded against Morrow only on the basis that his situation could be distinguished from the rest, the court would be bound to find that the motorcade entered the restricted area in error and, if the offence were otherwise proved … it would be probable that a magistrate would dismiss the charge without conviction … considering also Morrow’s otherwise good character,” he said.

Fine chappie, that Nicolas Cowdery fellow.

Bloody gummint.

They give every school kid a free car - then hold back on rego, petrol, maintenance, carport, concreting the driveway and bloody hot wax!

Stingy bastards!

What good is a free car if the taxpayer doesn’t stump up for in-car goodies too?

Oi Kev! What about DVD, GPS, Recaro seats, low-profile tyres, roof-rack, HID kit .. one schoolie was heard complaining “what good is a free car if it don’t glow the road while goin’ boom boom boom.”

Kev ought be flamin-well ashamed.

The Australian Federal Opposition, school principals, and the education union, stuck it right up Labor’s billion-dollar FREE “computers in schools” for every student initiative.

Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson said:

Mr Rudd has short-changed the children of Australia, he’s conned parents.

Now it looks as if we’re all going to be taxed to deliver on a promise that Mr Rudd made last year.

My head hurts, Brendan. How did it look then, if it “now looks”? How else is an election promise funded?

As Jesus said as they strung him up on the cross: “there’s no pleasing some people.”

Back to their tiresome grubby little habits.

Doesn’t take the esteemed Australian press long to resume mainstream business.

Demean public figures, destroy  respect for our governments, leaders, and thereby ourselves’

Sabotage yet again a new beginning, a chance to work together as a nation.

It’s the same old game.

Snide PR feeds cheap shots to undiscerning press.

Inevitably, therefore, Nelson again savaged Rudd with a knee-jerk snarl about a non-event no-news greeting from our PM to their President.

In one cynical, small-minded selfish little media grab the entire purpose and significance of the event is lost forever in the public mind - no small feat considering how small a space that is.

The ‘incident’? That Prime Minister Kevin Rudd chose to boyishly salute the American president.

Firstly, who gives a shit?

Second, the PM is out there seriously regaining the world’s respect after the Lying Rodent’s Decade of Dismay that turned us to international pariahs and legends in our own lunchtime (or is that question time?).

And all Her Majesty’s Provincial Opposition can do, from their position of historic defeat, is busily erode everything that matters in the public mind.

“Well I think it’s conduct unbecoming of an Australian Prime Minister and Mr Rudd appears to conduct himself in one manner when he thinks the television is upon him and another when it is not,” he said.

So the predictably pathetic sound-off began:

• Nelson slams Rudd’s Bush salute ~ ABC News
• Rudd raises eyebrows with salute to Bush ~ The Australian
• Rudd raises eyebrows with salute to Bush ~ The Mercury [tells you something]
• Nelson attacks Rudd for saluting Bush ~ TheWest.com.au [honest headline, at least]
• Rudd salute raises ire ~ Sky News Online [whose ire? “critics have said ..”]
• Nelson attacks Rudd for saluting Bush ~ Sydney Morning Herald [honest headline, also]
• Rudd’s salute to George Bush ~ The Age [honest]
• PM Kevin Rudd salutes George W Bush as a ‘joke’ ~ Courier Mail
• Nelson attacks Rudd for saluting Bush ~ Yahoo 7 News
• Theatrical Salute Screams ‘Deputy Sheriff’ ~ Seven News
• ?????? ~ Channel Ten aka Seriously Ten. [Well, you go find the frikkin  headline on their website: seriously ten  - in fact, try and find any news]

And on, and on.

Australian PM Kevin Rudd ‘Salutes’ President George Bush

I’ve great respect for Senator Bob Brown, yet even he couldn’t resist a lunge at the limelight, at least delivering measured admonishment:

There is a streak of John Howard’s deputy sheriff in Kevin Rudd’s slip-up,” he said. “It takes seasoned maturity to ensure Australia is never second-rated in the international arena and Mr Rudd is not there yet.

We are not the 51st state of the USA and Mr Rudd’s salute carried a subservient connotation many Australians won’t like.”

In case you’re wondering (I doubt it) the text of Nelson’s pious prattle:

I think it’s conduct unbecoming of an Australian prime minister,” Dr Nelson said. “Mr Rudd appears to conduct himself in one manner when he thinks the television is on him and in another when it is not.

Australia is a confident, outward-looking country after more than 10 years of strong foreign policy development and we need a strong prime minister to represent our very best interests throughout the world.”

Serious treatment of the new government is over, and it’s back to the circus ring we pretend is not gutter press, not the great Australian newstainment.

No wonder the public are such intellectual jerks with such banal dialogue from public figures and media journalism (I use the term loosely).

Just WHO is doing the demeaning?

Oh, and where was Rudd, and, err, what was he doing .. where?

I seem to have missed that. Wonder why?

You know you live in an anal-retentive society when:

Dutch health minister says marijuana to be exempt from July 1 smoking ban

 

No, I’m not into blunt blazin’ - not even the occasional social Philip Morris.

Just imagining a free progressive society.

Sigh

On February 13, 2008, at 8.55am Australia’s Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, apologised to “indigenous peoples of this land, the oldest continuing cultures in human history.”

We reflect on their past mistreatment.

We reflect in particular on the mistreatment of those who were stolen generations - this blemished chapter in our nation’s history.

The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia’s history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future.

We apologise for the laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians.

We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country.

For the pain, suffering and hurt of these stolen generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry.

To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry.

And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry.

We the parliament of Australia respectfully request that this apology be received in the spirit in which it is offered as part of the healing of the nation.

For the future we take heart; resolving that this new page in the history of our great continent can now be written.

At the same time in thousands of towns across our 3 million square miles, some parched in scorched dust, others lush and prosperous, a non-indigenous majority bristled in ugly denial they were sorry.

In hundreds of thousands of workplaces the working lucky - overwhelmingly non-indigenous - shrugged in nonchalance, sarcastically hinting at an implied tsunami of compensation claims, as though they would be personally obliged to sign the card and drop coins in the envelope [about their sum total social effort last century].

The average white Australian is not sorry. But then, they never are.

Greedily stuffing their pockets with iPods, houses with home theatres, and driveways with stupendously extravagant vehicles, “Sorry” is never further from their minds.

And if this silent selfish majority cannot even empathise with a discarded and abused people whose kingdom we so recently stole, they reduce Australia to a mean-spirited caricature of the so-called lucky country.

Political leaders become statesmen, it seems, only after losing power.

Pontificating from retirement they say exactly what we wanted to hear when they were in office in office, but never did.

Some become real people again, spreading compassionate humanitarian truth.

Sure, they’re always suspected of self-aggrandizement, but vanity pieces are easy to spot and vainglorious twaddle thankfully rare.

Former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser speaks out with often delightful candour.

He gained power by a controversial stunt, denying finance to an elected government in 1975, after two gentlemen’s agreements were dishonoured by State politicians, giving him a senate numbers advantage and bypassing the electorate. One might say Australian politics lost its integrity on that day, sliding thereafter to an unprincipled morass of personality and spite.

Westminster political chess, grandmaster level.

While I never forgave Fraser for the national disruption and bitterness he caused - by what was ultimately no more than a ruthless lunge at power - he certainly redeems himself of late with each critique of his political descendents’ policies and legislation.

Either Fraser has changed his spots, or he’s a bellwether of how far Australian “conservative” political forces have drifted from liberalism - and dignity.

And as much as I enjoyed slagging him, I now relish his slagging of the unsavouries who have lowered the tone of public life in recent decades, and especially have trashed Australia’s reputation as a progressive and independent force in international affairs.

Release of 30 year-old “cabinet papers,” a record of Oz-gummint goings-on in 1977 Australia, backlights a recent PM who, for the past decade, placed his political skin and ideological satiation well ahead of the nation’s needs.

Despite pious posturing and wide-spread acclaim as one of Australia’s greatest prime ministers, his evasive performance at times of deep national crisis finds his critics despairing the term “lying little rodent” an epithet too anaemic.

Even in career twilight he yet denies [via a spokesman] what more believable sources attribute to him.

Steve Cannane [ABC Radio National]: You mention [in The Australian newspaper] that John Howard (former Prime Minister) then a minister in your government objected - not in a cabinet meeting but in a corridor conversation - saying “We don’t want too many of these people. We are just doing this for a show, aren’t we?”

Is that correct?

Malcolm Fraser: The Australian [newspaper] report is largely correct. Yes.

ABC: Largely correct, because John Howard through a spokesman denied he said that.

Fraser: Well, the report as I understand it is largely correct.

The full audio of this interview is available for a few months at the ABC Radio National Breakfast website.

A transcript is provided here for when the audio disappears. The Australian Newspaper report referred to can be found, link rot pending, here.

A Dream Dashed

The Christian church was kind to a younger me.

The season of Christmas and the handiwork of religion evoke fond memories and deep meaning.   [ Image, below: Wall art, Newcastle, Aust.]

Imagery of angels, clouds, sunrays, and halos filled the voluminous spaces this child’s vivid mind had pegged, fenced, and subdivided, as the intangible but heartfelt estate of Heaven.

Sunny churchyards of old stonework, green grass and flowers, tombs and stained glass - such magically safe, loving places warmed the soul of this timid little fellow.

The Church of England delivered a warmly logical message: all was in order, a world explained,  hereafter policies fully paid up.

Puberty found me still creating nativity scenes of painted papier-maché appropriately wired and lit. Balmy summers blended with this creative absorption, effecting moods now yearned for and sadly missed in these souring days of senility.

Dreamwork dashed by a city priest whose predatory quest for funds and sarcastic hatred of children dispelled further need for church doings, off I went to spend remaining teens disproving and disparaging God or, more easily, his minions.

Time mellows nowadays these priestly precincts.

Massaged by Mass

[ Image, below: Celebrating Mass in our humble local working-class makeshift chapel. If that’s not a stage show, what is?]

My better half drags me, bottom lip a-dragging, to the local Catholic affair, 4th Sunday in Advent.

Father Amiable smiles pleasantly his duties.

Parishioners contribute readings and music respectfully, with spiritual gusto and gusty spirit respectively.

An old chap in front wobbles his hymn book in Parkinsonian poise.

Very-Christian woman manages alone four boys, infant, toddler, plus pre and post pubescents, and makes the cross on baby, then young’un who scampers off to meet & greet every other kid in church.

Attractive dark-skinned girl does second reading, eloquently mesmerising the assembly .. but trips on “apostolic” delivering instead “apocalyptic” to her apoplexy and our secret delight.

Aging Down syndrome woman might seek the Love of Christ in ceremony, but it’s our nomadic toddler lighting her face with joy and delight (kindling, may I venture, dormant maternity?), twinkling his eyes at her in persistent pew patrols.

Chubby-faced young thurible-wielder might have loaded it too generously, as profusely pluming pollutants permeate to plenum. Waking from surreptitious snoozing, what pop concert is this, fog machine in full flight? He swings in our direction a bit, providing priest respiratory respite.

Father Amiable, blessing wine and wafers, pauses patiently as attendant Server’s cell phone raucously - and too far from the altar to ceremoniously silence - announces incoming communiqué. And almost certainly it ain’t God on that not-so-Royal Telephone. But hey, who can tell? Maybe they should pick up. (Thinks headline: “Comet Crushes Cathedral. God’s Forewarning Foregone.”)

As resurrection follows crucifixion, text follows call .. several, in fact, each accompanied by Glare of Damnation from the good and ever so patient priest.

Four piece ensemble - acoustic guitar, electric organ, windy flute, and hmm, he doesn’t seem to do anything - adds reverberance to our hymn-umming. Guitarist lass is one talented chorist and could replace our combined congregational cacophony, and then some, with her sweetly powerful, rapturously echoing sonance [did I overdo that?].

Slides matron adjusts too often the vertical on our projected prompts, inducing a touch of vertigo .. or maybe our faith moves the church, or God adjusts Earth? A bit of a trick, you know. Those words suddenly burned larger than life on stone walls elicits a little Moses déjà vu.

Candle-lighting time. First flame for .. (did he say Wicked Witch of the West?). However, like best man at a wedding our robed and having-a-baaad-day Server was unable to produce that elusive waxed taper (with his lighter no doubt, in keeping with modern times, on the back steps with his smokes).

Frantic hunting thinly disguised as rites should have ceased when Father Amiable relented with “Brian, over here” yet Brian oblivious persisted.

Further increasingly less subtle announcements followed from Father A’s wirelessly amplified microphone, resonating gently around the gothic arches, through the ambulatory, thence crypts (were there any), and back up the nave to Brian’s imperceptive ears.

We bemused brethren presumed poor Brian did not recognise the Amiable Father’s voice, divining instead intonations direct from The Holy Father, if not incantations from the bowels of that holy stony structure itself, delivering some archaic Da Vinci code, not the mere location of a simple taper.

Into the second round of collection plates we flouted, then dropped, cunningly-withheld-from-first-plate generosity.

Flock dismissed.

Religious symbolism travels clean over my ignorant lay head and I see and hear nothing but words, rites, and paraphernalia. The faith-worthy child did not emerge, again, on this day.

Another year finds Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Jew, Sikh, Confucianist, Taoist, Shintoist, and Calathumpian reigning over a world tearing itself apart with stupidity, selfishness, and violence.

World religion is so consumed by organisation, its laity so beset by word and symbol, all miss the simple truth that Christ has already returned, time and again, in the sweet innocence of their new born.

Servile to the grind of life’s machinery, they impatiently snuff their children’s gifts of joy, promise and hope, and another barbarian treads the Earth.

At least I would tell them that, were I a believer. Were they listeners.

So, in delightful irony the world’s oldest, most temperate civilization and perennial superpower stirs from slumber, its 1.3 billion inscrutable people living quite happily, thank you, without a personal god.

Will Smith is a hot box-office draw card.

His remake of the atrocious Omega Man (I Am Legend) raked it in, as did the 2006 film The Pursuit of Happyness, to which a friend and I offered shelter from the street last night.

It had to work for lodging, whirling deftly within our wide-screen DVD surround for 2 hours before lapsing to snooze mode in a warm corner of the TV den.

And what a miserable small-hearted little film!

Smith played Chris Gardner, a struggling salesman trying to sell a technological lemon to doctors, who realizes that to accomplish the great American dream of bettering oneself at the expense of others, one commits to the dark side, selling intangibles to the financial elite.

The movie failed to deliver at the human level.

Coldly juxtaposing heedless greed and beleaguered need, it focused too narrowly on Gardner’s brief struggle to reach escape velocity. It did, however, capture the essence of capitalism (how could it not?): everyone for themselves and screw thy neighbour.

Granted it was a tribute to hard work, but as a piece of entertainment it was cold-selling a morally flawed product. The only joy, if not hope and redemption, lay in Jaden Smith’s pensive, resilient, and loveable little kid on the lam with his pushy single-minded dad.

Dear acquaintance and I were less than entertained by The Pursuit of Happyness, paying far more than a $2 DVD rental fee in emotional toll: stressing, distressing, agonizing, empathizing, hand-wringing, and general all around ing-ing at his endless chasing of buses, leaping thoughtlessly in front of cars, lugging and losing those frikkin’ portable osteo-sewing machines all over Frisco, abusing poor folk, defrauding small business folk, and bootlicking rich folk.

Then deprived, we were, of celebrating the spoils of his selfish quest, as the film obsessed with his brief struggle and failed to capitalize on the happy ever after, alluding by some dumb text graphic that, oh, btw, the dude got rich .. later, after you finish watching (sucker).

Lauding the film “inspirational,” optimistic reviewers chose to forgive its mean spirit and quite deliberate shows of spite and anger in the Gardener portrayal, which one can only assume (no, I’m not gonna read the book) had basis. You decide, from this bio of the real Chris Gardener.

Miserable

Whatever, HE lived happily ever after. WE were left bloody miserable.

Like the queue of street bums he trampled over for a night in the Methodist flop joint, we neither shared his enjoyment, nor had any glimmering, of the obscene wealth and lifestyle he was later to enjoy.

The Pursuit of Happyness was no story at all.

A “so what” odyssey of a struggling Joe whose frantic tribulations as a bottom feeder struck only chords that the American working poor - let alone non-working devastated - would rather not be reminded of, as it’s still their daily lot.

Gardener’s “down and out” the true losers in American society wish for in their wildest dreams.

The soothsayer seeks to predict the future in order to … assure its rulers that their profits are safe and the system will endure. These days, he is generally an economist or a business executive.

The prophet, by contrast, has no interest in foretelling the future, other than to warn that unless people change their ways there’s unlikely to be one. His concern is to rebuke the injustice of the present, not dream of some future perfection .. “   Terry Eagleton  Socialism still relevant

Prophet as Critic

Lightweight intellects like myself, though probably incapable of original thinking, nevertheless ruminate, from experiential grazing, a wealth of original inspiration.

Though even if, with an inordinate amount of slavish study, I should produce some valuable thesis from original research, a brain as tardy as this sees innumerable quicker ones leap through gaps in its thinking to higher paradigms leaving me behind in the intellectual dust.

So doomed, I am, to be a critic.

Those who cannot do, teach. Those who cannot teach, criticize. But a fine critic, who takes Vidal’s self-deprecation to even lesser excellence: “I have very little to say but a great deal to add” .. to the work of others.

And great at spotting the great work of others, too: “Of course he’s the messiah, I ought to know, I’ve followed a few.”

Though the Cigar complies with Eagleton’s stance that criticism be used to promote a more equitable society, it admits shortcomings in technical critiquing, yet attempts to accurately quote, to understand the opponent’s (or victim’s) argument, to link to sources for you to investigate first hand.  That’s blogging for you.

My lot, ’spose, to be dullard who rants. But with good heart. Cultivating gut impressions of what’s wrong with the world. Roasting them in common sense, basting all ideologies with the same brush, then lambasting them with equal heat.

Humanity Test

The Cigar is not a mouthpiece for cliques, coalitions or consortiums, left, centre, or right.

Our agenda is our own. We align with original thinkers of any persuasion or ideology whose heart is with humanity and the oppressed - not with investor ROI.

The Cigar abhors a world led down the path of stupidity by greed’s creed.

The 19th century saw science join religion in a quest to understand the world. The 20th century saw great ideologies clash attempting to apply this knowledge.

The 21st century begins with an overcrowded world in blind laissez-faire flight, plotting civilization’s course by observing its backwash.

The world’s “haves” bath in a sea of consumerism; the “have-not’s” wish either to join the splashing, or destroy it.

Only the bathers can read these words, which now ask that they judge themselves by the Humanity Test:

Can you act against your own self-interest to benefit someone of lesser wealth?

Would you rather be a human in rags - or a well-dressed animal?