Monarchy.  by Tarquin O’Flaherty

(Happy birthday Sam)
Today Ira Maine has searched out a challenging piece.  Bear with it.

Cargo Cults  Even in this this Dispatch of 30 June 2012 we find reference to Cults!  

Nós nos encontramos novamente amigos
(Google Translate: “We meet again friends”)

On the periphery of a jungle clearing, a group of New Guinea Highlanders gaze longingly skywards. In the clearing there is an aeroplane made from palm fronds. It is a decoy which the Highlanders hope will persuade a plane to land and disgorge its munificent cargo. The Highlanders are Cargo Cultists. They are participating in one of the most poignant scenes I have ever seen on film.
That is how I remembered the scene in the film Mondo Cane.

“Elke herinering werd een diamant, en zij sleep er nog telkens niewe kanten aan”
Every memory became a diamond, and forever more she polished new facets onto them.

If you missed it in 1962 or you didn’t exist back then: through the magic of Youtube you can now see it for yourself, unaltered by the vagaries of memory….

http://youtu.be/dlnxPOeyTbk

 At the time Mondo Cane was released, Minister for Territories Paul Hasluck was to visit Yuendumu. Unlike at present, when visitors and politicians often arrive at our airstrip to be met by no one and have to summon a ride ‘into town’ by mobile phone, back then the far fewer visitors were met with anticipation and some pomp and ceremony. A group of respected old men had been issued with new shirts, trousers and shiny black shoes. The importance of the visitor had been impressed upon them. A favourable impression would be the key to future federal funding for Yuendumu. A key to Stronger Futures.
There they were at the dusty airstrip all standing in line, Hasluck’s plane taxied in, a door opened, an equerry installed some footsteps and raised a small Australian flag, the Minister stepped off the plane, at which point an excited Jungarrayi broke ranks stepping forward with an extended welcoming hand and exclaimed “ Money! Money!”

http://youtu.be/PX_qAtwMDFk

Publishers note:  Would you believe it!  Again Quentin Cockburn (of all people) has mistaken Colt for Cult.  I am at my wit’s end.  Have pity.

Colts:  the Gun Kind  by Quentin Cockburn

There was ‘the Colt from old regret who got away’, and then there’s my favourite the gunslingers’ Colt.  The Colt that was worn by Wyatt Earp, Captain Thunderbolt, Mad Jack Morgan and the Kellys’.  And lastly the Colt that’s immortalised by Clint Eastwood in those magnificent Sergio Leonie films, later enshrined as ‘The Outlaw Josie Wales’, and ‘the Unforgiven’.  The inspiration is in the swagger, the loneliness of the individual, outlined, stencilled in shadow, to a ‘High Noon finale’ of stirrups jangling in unison to each (maybe their) last step.

The Colt Revolver:  A Brief description

I don’t really know much about side arms, I believe, (having checked the internet) that Mr Colt developed the revolver and Messrs Smith and Wesson perfected the metal cartridge and bullet.  Colt achieved universal fame through the perfection of the first mass produced, multiple shot pistol with easily interchangeable parts, hence, you could fire more than one bullet, without having to then reload, re prime and all the rest.  There’s no pause in the action, the camera can keep whirring without the pause, as the laborious process of reloading would have required, and the action, is in sync with the sequence.

To my thinking the change established the Western movie genre, because the hero, or villain, for the very first time could have multiple shots, and multiple chances.  It celebrated the drama, and intensified the action.  Options on the field, (and for film directors), the eternal option of the draw, the volley, and the hand action, and between it all the sequence of time changes with the revolver, the act of killing, is sped up.  I suppose it’s the precursor to the machine gun, and with it Time, as depicted in the Western, is accelerated or slowed down and compressed.

I am not an expert on Westerns, having grown up on a diet of Sunday afternoon movies.  I became tired of the staged routines, the slaughter of injuns and the banality of scripts deemed to be too B grade to arouse anything beyond apathy.  Besides it was up against stiff competition from the surrealist gymnastics of Samurai and the Ninjas.  But later, much later I became aware that the real (the genuine) Westerns were masterpieces of construction and understatement.

Now I must confess there are really only two Westerns I like, High Noon, and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.  No John Wayne, no Hopalong Cassidy, no Gunsmoke, no Rawhide and an absence of petticoats, and bonnets.

Gary Cooper is old, he looks haggard, and his young wife Grace Kelly a portrait of stoicism.  The bad guys are all bad, and the landscape, in this black and white film sets the frame, each sequence.  A railway track that leads into the horizon, the waiting for the train, and the nervousness of the citizens, brooding for the inevitable showdown.  When the showdown does come, it is handled with an evocative restraint.  The culmination of Gary Cooper’s mortality is the loading sequence, his fingers shaking as he loads the Colt revolver.  The showdown is inevitable from the start, and when it happens survival is instinct, luck and practice.

The central character is a normal person.

So much of the film is carried by Gary Cooper, and this older Cooper, conscious of his mortality, and the promise of marriage and a new life, as against the certainty of death and waiting, like the two converging rail lines meeting in the distance.

The bad guys are louts, and they’re led by the evil eyed Lee Van Cleef, who reappears some decade and a half later as “Angel Eyes” in “The Good The Bad and The Ugly”.

A younger Clint Eastwood is the vehicle for good guys that aren’t all good, and bad guys that are nuanced, real bad and borderline bad.  The heart of the film is about perseverance and the unlikely companionship between the opportunist and the strategist.

The final sequence, whilst no less satisfying than the showdown in High Noon, leaves the almost likable baddy hanging by his neck, as Clint rides off, with his share of the loot.  He turns, aims his rifle and shoots the rope, salvation of a life, and an act of chivalry amidst a graveyard.  The cross that Tuco fidgets upon is a graveyard of Civil War soldiers, nobly died.  The film’s baddies prosper through their capacity to neither belong, nor live by a code of patriotism.  They shackle themselves to the inevitable death as pawns in the system.

In both films the music scores are simple, repetitive and emphatic, “do not forsake me”, with the coconut percussion rhythm, and a single guitar, and The Good The Bad and The Ugly, the signature tune half crazed vocalisations, something between a hyena, and a Lunatic Asylum to reinforce the outsider as a passing shadow, unseen by the mainstream.

The message, Italian directors, and Jewish American directors, outside the mainstream, make the best commentary and allow us to see things as they really are.  They employ Shakespearean comic opera with a deft touch, and a comic book simplicity to eternal truths.  But I can’t actually remember any of them.

Publishers Note:  Hallelujah, we are saved, Tarquin O’Flaherty, at least, can read.  Here, as promised, is an article on “Cults” 

Cults. by Tarquin O’Flaherty

I have to take my dictionary to task;
• Cult;  Latin, cultus, from colere, to till, to worship.The rites and ceremonies of any system of belief. Worship; homage; a system of religious belief.

Can this possibly be right? If it is right, (and it can’t be, surely?) then we are all in a lot of trouble.  If we belong to a religious group, then we belong to a cult.

Of course, my Cassell’s English Dictionary is of 1969 vintage and is probably beset by dotage and doesn’t know about Jim Jones and has never heard of the Branch Davidians and how they became so powerful, so threatening that every single one of them, without exception, men, women and children, had to be put to death and their House of Worship  reduced to ashes in a ritualised and cleansing fire.  You can’t imagine it, can you?  How frightening can it get when even the babies, the tiny children of these people, are so inculcated with heretical thinking that they represent a massive threat to National Security, Freedom and Liberty.  A threat so great that we cannot suffer these children to live…

On the other hand, and thirty odd years later, my 2001 Penguin English Dictionary has something else to say, something seemingly innocuous, something you wouldn’t give a second glance to, and of which there’s not the slightest hint in the positively naïve old ’69 Cassell’s.  This, in part,is what the Penguin adds to the ’69 Cassell’s definition ;
• Cult; [(as Cassell’s) then;] Religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious.

Well now, there’s a thing.  Easily understood, nothing mysterious, self explanatory really, but markedly different,and perhaps, a tad pejorative?  What changes have been wrought in thirty odd years to add ‘unorthodox’ and ‘spurious’ to what was then, almost fifty years ago, a fairly even-handed dictionary definition?  Even my  shorter OED of 1978 is silent, casting not a single ‘spurious’ aspersion, whereas, if the ultra-modern, up-to-date ‘Information Super Highway’ is explored, ill-informed arriviste gibbering predominates, and ‘cult’ is seen as being on a par with Communism or the Yellow Peril.

Around Shakespeare’s time, the presiding power, (the Cult of the Christians) thought that the Earth, being God’s creation, must be at the absolute centre of the Universe.  Giordano Bruno, by empirical means, begged to differ and was burned to death for his presumption.  Luckily Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and Galileo were in the wings and gradually, through the cult of empiricism, replaced astrology with astronomy.  Empiricism, which threatened faith-based belief systems, was viewed as a dangerous ungodly cult, and was fought against every step of the way, particularly as it threatened the whole of Christianity with the ‘spurious’ tag!  The Christians at the time didn’t use the word ‘cult’.  They had however, their own word, the very mention of which caused people to panic.  The word, of course, was heresy.

Here we go again;
• Heresy, From the Greek hairesis, to choose.
• From Old French (heresie) or Latin (haeris), to choose.

There is no suggestion in the above definition that by choosing between, say tea or coffee, by making a choice, you’ll be crucified or burnt alive.  Yet that’s what’s happened.  A group, in this case the Church, takes on a word or common phrase and makes it their own.  ‘Heresy’, through the centuries, and to modern ears, has had only one meaning; a system of belief which runs counter to those of the established church and, therefore must be eliminated.  This means that an individual, simply by making the ‘wrong’ choice, is an instant heretic, an enemy of the Church and, recant or not, will be put to death.

This is why the word ‘cult’ has changed it’s meaning.  It has changed because we cannot reasonably use the word ‘heresy’ any more.  This is, after all, a democratic world we live in and ‘heresy’ is associated with an uncivilised time when they put pigs on trial and people were burnt at the stake.  ‘Cult’ is much more acceptable, and gives respectability to a level of  modern political intolerance which was once the exclusive preserve of the Church.

Words may change their meaning from time to time; people sadly, just keep on coming up with the same old tedious Fascism.

Publishers Note:  Not again!  I am sure I said ‘Cults’.  

Colts  The political kind

There was the Colt from Kooyong, Andrew Peacock, who made his mark and then made his mark, and then, like all good pretenders vanished without a trace, to Washington, (and Shirley MacLaine) to reflect upon what could have been.  As Paul Keating immortalised, “a soufflé cannot rise twice”.  If there’s a Colt in the contemporary scene, he’s actually a gelding.

Peacock was famous for so may other reasons, his three points in the 1990 federal election, emphasis to the first two, and then the third point, the abyss of ‘What was the third point?’  As far as Colts go he was one in a long line of great Australian politicians who had the looks, the intensity, the bravura of the film star, yet was well and truly shackled to the reality of political life; in all it’s dullness.  All the major politicians had their moments, either spectacularly pant-less outside an American motel foyer, or cultivating comfort zones between Canberra, Sorrento and Toorak as other indiscreet non-moments.  The best of all, the man who challenged Gough but never took the guernsey, the one and only Billy Snedden, the man who ‘died on the job’ for Australia.

Andrew, the Colt from Kooyong, had his compensations.  There was his wife, his ex wife and then another and another and another mans wife, Susan-Lassiter-Peacock-Sangster-Renouf.  What was her real name?  Was she gauche, NO!! Just enterprising, opportunistically advertising ‘Sheridan Bed Sheets’, while her husband was a minister.

Prior to Andrew stood a real man, and another woman who would endure as the star of the Maxwell House commercials.  In Australia there’s no such thing as the hallowed sanctity of office, here it’s the hollowed inevitability of falling short of the mark.  And what better footnote to history’s page than wee Willie McMahon, and that celestial White House staircase.  More Baz than Luhrman and  for a moment, the world stood still as legs, longer than the piers of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, more slender than the arch, and more langerous than the eddying backwash of the ferries, the legs of Sonya McMahon, displayed through a slit in her dress that seemd to go all the way up to her armpit. (Pictured here with their heads cut off)  How we laughed at Willie, deducing he lacked one, yet he managed, by the wiliest of political stratagems to score such a stunning sheila.

Of all the PM’s I like Harold Holt the most.  Celebrated pork-swords man, as noble a figure as his namesake at Hastings (who took the arrow in his eye), and whilst not flailing the femmes with his sword, cut a swathe through the lumbering ranks of a rusted on, DLP depleted Labour Party.  His end came in the tradition of Mary Shelley and the pre-raphaelites.  A spectacular and mysterious demise scripted from Le Carre with a little bit of  “ Blue Hills” thrown in.  (He drowned in the surf of Bass Strait)

As a colt, John Gorton comes a close second to Harold Holt.  Gorton’s secretary was described by a disgruntled minister in regards to policy, “It wiggles, It’s shapely, and it’s name is Ainsley Gotto”.

Sadly, it is difficult to see a contemporary political Colt.  I think we all miss them.
Quentin Cockburn QC

Publisher’s note: Sir Bertram Postule was asked to pen a likeness of Mr and Mrs McMahon.  He suffered an attack of the vapours on seeing the image above.  We trust he will recover quickly

Publishers note: Goddamnit I asked for an article on Cults!

Celts
What is it about the Celts?

Theres something so indefatigable, so romantically inclined that it’s a hairbreadth that separates us from them.  From the lofty heights of the sublime to the devastating reality of the fall.

We all feel for the Celtishness inside.  Who amongst them, the Joyces, the Dylan Thomas’s who taught us how to feel, and then questioned the very feelings themselves.  Wasn’t it Boadicea, who astride her chariot took fury back upon those Romans who dared to ‘veni vidi vici’, and wasn’t it Vercingetorix the gallant Gaul, all clad in woad, (or some other Gaulish substance that may have been a little bit like woad) who stood resolute before the phalanxes, robotic, and perfunctory as they wore his warriors down.

To be Celtic is to place such passion, such warmth, such nurturing of the human soul above the mere practicalities, the orchestrated foregone conclusions of certainty.  And yet it is to court failure, heroic, all encompassing, as a badge of honour, worn through overuse into self fulfilling parody.

Is Clive Palmer a Celt?  If a football team were  to enshrine the Celtic spirit it would naturally be North Melbourne, whose recent losses, five of them between 1 and 5 points, are demonstration enough.  The Celtic spirit lives on in Myki, the East West Tunnel, North South Pipeline, and the desalination plant, all of them imbued with fatalistic inevitable Celtic spirit.  That spirit of endurance, naysayers would suggest, obstinate to the inevitability of certainty.

NEVER let it be forgot, it was Celts who held the line in the Crimea, as the Highlanders stood firm and were squashed beneath the Russian steamroller, Celts who held the defile at Rorke’s Drift, and Celts again, who rallied that last time before the oblivion of Cumberland’s volleys at Culloden.  And amidst the dust and squalor of Coopers Creek, the Burke and Wills expedition fizzled to a withering finale under the “leadership” of another Celt.

They are the engineers, the poets and the future thinkers.  Was it not a Celt clad in armour, who stood alone against the Establishment at Glenrowan?.  And as armour and all came crashing down from the romantic to the modern in the annals of Australia.  So lets celebrate the Celt and Celticism whilst the spirt of all that it entails rises above the determinist diminution of the soul we associate with the measured, the certain, the factual and the inevitable.  Let us celebrate one more time the triumphalism of celtic spirit above the winnowing, demeaning effluvia of Business Managers, Masters of Business Administration, the sycophants, the lock jawed acolytes, and the testicle bound satraps that adorn our political and cultural systems, and celebrate just this once, the Celtishness within us…. lest the others shackle us in a Naplan derived bondage.  The unstoppable, unweanable urge to follow our spiritual path and embrace life in all its incarnate mystery so that we may be freed from the manacles of certainty, the demeaning exigencies of mortality, and the nagging premonition  of a dull and fleeting existence.
We thank the Celts for this.

Phaudrig Macguire, reader Celtic Mythology, Universality College Dublin.

Here at Passive Complicity we have had great pleasure in bringing you a week focussing on Health.  Lets first have a word from Errol
“I am alternately very kind, very cruel.” From My Wicked Wicked Ways, by Errol Flynn 1959.

Racism caused some distraction, but only for those who don’t suffer it.  See here.  Covert Racism is discussed in this weeks Musical Dispatch (which is not actually a Musical dispatch but a piece first published in The Global Mail and then in its parent The Guardian (UK)).  This piece reinforces all that the Musical Dispatch has been reporting over many years. It is (along with our treatment of refugees) Australia’s international shame.   We at Passive Complicity commend this article.  Read it here 

Now to Health.   The health of our car industry, and Ford Australia specifically deserved comment in our first piece.  comment came from our motoring expert Quantum Dumpster and from a PR consultant.  Check it here

Our second post ‘Health Care in the US;  a personal perspective’, gave a small insight into just a few of the downsides of a user pays health system. Read this piece here

Ira Maine introduced us to a very happy client at that well known (or should I say ‘Infamous’?) retirement home Endette Hall.  Her interesting story was carried over inot a second post. Read her story here and here http://www.pcbycp.com/health-3-of-4/ for the second part.

Wrapping health up for the week was ‘A PITHY OBSERVATION ON BLADDER TUMOURS’  by our first time contributor Tad Pole. This piece, which you can access here was most tastefully illustrated by Sir Bertram Postule.

Award winning Nunga poet, Ali Cobby Eckermann brought gave us a taste of endemic racism in her poem “Table manners”.  Read it here

Look for our dissertations on ‘Cults’, with our first post by the brilliant ‘disserter’ (or should it be ‘dissertationist’?) Cantina Baulk!

Happy reading.
Cecil and Quentin.

Dear Reader, when I say “Cults” are on everyone’s lips, I am not talking cigarettes.  I am talking those mysterious things that many of us wish to explore but don’t for fear of being trapped.  Owing to this lack of courage on my part I have asked a number of eminently qualified commentators to give their take on “Cults” in order for you to be better able to make those life choices you have been assiduously avoiding.  Thus over the next few days we will post those pieces, trusting our security measures are effective.

Pig Skin and Purple Kool Aid

by Cantina Baulk

Sometime in 1972 I overheard my mother whispering– a cousin’s son  was in a cult.  I was intrigued.  How does someone go in never to be retrieved?  Six years later cult leader Jim Jones ordered 900 to suicide by drinking Purple Kool Aid.  And they did.  With superiority in my teenage voice I sighed, “How do they get sucked in?”

Thirty years later, I am caught in the vortex of a country cult.  My husband has been involved for decades; my son will never leave of his own volition.

It’s Victoria.  It’s a cult.  It’s football.

Initially it was state-sponsored Auskick after school.  We innocently took our 8 year- old- old boy to “The Minis” —keen tykes playing at half time during “big boy” football.  The darlings ran about in oversized jumpers.  There were no positions, just a swarm of boys on the ball and a voice calling, “Gran did you see me?”  The scene was like the flower extended by the Harre Krishnas.  We took it.

We began our rostered life of junior football with zeal.  The club song was memorized.  We joined trance-like convoys of parents in order to be to be at places called Pimpinio and Rupanyup by 8:15 in the morning.

All our Saturdays from April to September were sucked away from us, like an orange at half time.

Thursday nights are training night.  As the boys run under the lights, mothers swarm in the canteen with ladles feeding the 200 sons, fathers, as well as the daughters of the associated cult (netball).

22 team jumpers come home in a muddy bag to soak and wash.  They whirl around my Hills Hoist while I imagine life on the outside.  Every home game requires a plate of afternoon tea or a vat of soup.

On Saturdays in the canteen I hawk pies with icy middles and blue Powerade.  The beverage distributor reports our club buys more of this mixture than any other client.  Ah, the days I naively puzzled at Jim Jones’ followers queuing at their vat of purple Kool-Aid.  Now I sell it in red, orange and blue.

I don’t see my husband much.  He’s huddled on the score board 25 feet the in air on an icy July morning.

You could still get out I hear you say. Make a run for it after the Reserves.  But no, our son is rostered on for water boy during the Seniors.  My husband is on the gate. We would be exposed.

People in cults forget their past.  I dimly remember when I discussed literature in the summer sun.  Now I can’t risk it. We discuss number #28’s groin injury instead.

If we relocated outside of league boundaries maybe they’ll let us go.  I dream my son could get a clearance and come too.  I know in my heart it won’t happen; in cults we supress the possibility and the questions.  It’s as foolhardy as asking cult leaders “Does anyone ever win the meat tray?”

Table Manners

Warrior woman walks proudly
Close to where I sit in the street,
I notice her mute smile buried under scars.
Our eyes meet.

I bow my head.
“Sorry sis”, I say quietly “I got nothing”.
My friend looks at me, searches through her bag
“I might have something?”

I respect the warrior woman, ask “What’s your name?”
Her eyes are focused behind me.
Focused on another place
Along Todd Mall.

Suddenly her focus is at my shoulder,
“We told you before” Waitress yells in my ear.
“You have to leave,”
“You can’t ask for money here.”

Warrior woman walks proudly
Away from where I sit today.
Her scarred face turns, smiles with her words –
“She’s just jealous!”
Ali Cobby Eckermann