(no subject)
Good to have the Eunos back, I took it out for a run along Mundaring Weir Road. Feel I kinda owe it that before it gets sold. It handled it pretty well, though I wasn't pressing hard, brakes stood up relatively well and the handling was faultless. The suspension doesn't really like 'round town stuff but once you start to open the taps out on a back road, it seems to cheer up. Nearly ran out of fuel, then found a really good North-South, hill cutting road that gave a few good corners as well as awesome views on the night Skyline. Can't wait to go there in the Skyline.
Reading the Latham Diaries on break at work and it's so good to be doing something semi-intellectual again. After nearly two years of intellectual atrophy and stagnation, it's good to be thinking again. This excerpt is one I found particularly amusing and poignant and suitably enough, the entry was my birthday; 2nd of September, but in 1999.
Thursday, 2 September
The things you do in Parliament House. At midday I went to a meeting of the ALP Status of Women Committee, our frontline femocrat cadres. Now I know how Martin Luther felt, pinning his thesis to the church door. A heretic in their ranks, I advocated an overhaul of the Committee to take account of men's issues. We should call it the Status of Gender Committee, taking into account both genders, a genuinely inclusive approach. After all, the main social indicators now show that men are more disadvantaged than women in life expectancy, school retention rates, university entry to professional careers, youth suicide rates and so forth. We need to address the problem of downwards envy, of angry white men turning against the ALP. Male and female issues should be treated on their merits.
Needless to say, I didn't get very far. If looks could kill. Some of them had technical and historical reasons why my idea was inappropriate. Then Senator Brenda Gibbs, one of the intellectual powerhouses of the Queensland ALP, said what they all thought: 'I knew it would be a mistake to let men onto this Committee. Why did we ever do it?' That would be right, a segregationist approach to the Committee's membership as well as its policies. Ah, Labor, the party of social equity.
But they are not all bad. Give me Senator Rosemary Crowley any day of the week. What a trooper. She told me a story about the American writer Dorothy Parker, who was asked to use the word 'horticulture' in a sentence and replied, 'You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think'. Years ago, Joel's dad and predecessor in Hunter, Eric Fitzgibbon, told me the story of Rose visiting a colleague's electorate and getting into a discussion with some locals about their cars. She floored them by pointing out, 'Listen you blokes, I have had more rubber up my cunt than you've got on those tyres'. Rose for PM.
In the evening, I went to a dinner in the Great Hall to listen to John Anderson open proceedings at Ross Cameron's youth leadership forum (roped in again). It was one of the wackiest speeches I have ever heard. He attacked humanism, the power of reason and rationality, on the basis that he once spoke to a humanist who didn't know whether he believed in positive or negative humanism. He said that 'nineteenth-century European man' experienced a loss of Christian faith and this led to World War I. He's got to be kidding: what he's saying, that religion has never caused any wars? Anderson found his own faith as a young man when he accidentally killed his sister with a misdirected cricket shot to the head. What about those of us that haven't had this experience? He expects us to share his faith, but with none of the background and his obvious, desperate attempt to find meaning in his life after a shocking tragedy. When I hear stories like this, it just convinces me more about the myths of religion and the spurious grounds on which Bible-bashers promote their faith.
Poor old Ando, he should have just played a straight bat and ignored all this pagan idolatry masquerading as religion, all these kiddie-fiddles masquerading as priests. Latham's first law of the church: the greater the degree of fanatacism in so-called faith, the greater degree of escapism, either from addiction (Gambling, drugs or sex) or form personal tragedy. My evidence? I was at a function listening to John Anderson, organised by Ross Cameron. The prosecution rests.
Anderson went on to talk about our 'shared humanity' and how our morality must come from a higher existence, almighty God. If we share our humanity then, surely, our morality must also come from these shared social experiences. That's the problem with these high-horse Christians, they have no language or dialogue about the real-life relations between people. For them, it is entirely functional. The Council of Nicaea sorted it out nearly 1700 years ago and we shoud simply follow its orders. Organised religion: just another form of conservative command and control in our society.
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Reading it is so good; there's been some genuinely hard to swallow bits about it and my views on certain political figures, the media and politics in general, have been entirely up-ended. After finishing this, I know I'm going to have to chase down more information upon Keating, the Third Way, Hawke, Whitlam and Blair. Excited to have that feeling of wanting to study again. I just want to make sure that I'm not swaying to a personal, biased viewpoint.