Kenneth Davidson

Gertrude Stein warned the young and egotistical Ernest Hemingway that "if you keep on doing newspaper work you will never see things, you will only see words". I think this is a brilliant summary of journalists in general, but not so Kenneth Davidson who steps down as a senior columnist with The Age this week. Here's my letter they didn't publish in his honour –

Kenneth Davidson will be truly missed. Over his career he has painfully witnessed and brilliantly critiqued Mussolini's definition of fascism – the merger of state and corporate power – coming into full effect in Victoria under the Kennett, Bracks and Brumby governments. Very few journalists have so doggedly reported on the wasting away of public assets to benefit private interests at the expense of the environment, and therefore our future communities. With pop culture – endless festivals, grand prixs, touring spectacles – our attention is easily drawn away from years of democratic erosion. Thanks Kenneth for helping us remain informed and clear-eyed.

Davidson's last column on water is a cracker. He'll continue to submit articles to The Age and co-edit D!SSENT magazine.

We at the Garden of Self Defence salute you KD!

Religion, there is no reason to argue

I used to think, naively, that religion is arbitrary; that people are entitled to their opinions and beliefs so long as they don't abuse others. But, of course, religion is anything but arbitrary. Over the past week I have had three very different encounters with religious extremism. One from each of the main monotheisms.

The first was virtual and Islamic. I watched a documentary on SBS detailing how the Taliban are operating in Pakistani villages that they've captured. It revealed that first they use terror to frighten people into submission by beheading dissenters (an oldie but a goodie). Then they take over schools, kick out the girls and teach the boys with only one book, one way of life – Sharia law. The journalist asked a Taliban official why young boys were fighting this war and the response was, "they love to carry the guns for us" (as boys do), "we teach them to use the guns and when they're older to fight the infidels". 

"Get them early!" It's the same slogan for all monotheistic religions and, of course, advertising. 

The second was a little more personal and Jewish. I read newmatilda this week and made a positive comment on a Jewish writer's intelligent argument about both anti-Semite's and certain Jewish lobbyists' bigotry. I thought it was very good and clear-eyed. Whenever I make a comment online people can click on my blog name and it will direct them back here. Last night I received an abusive Anonymous comment attempting to upset my goyishness, especially by virtue of the fact he (or she) knew part of my family was raised Jewish. Right-wing Zionists can be so vulgar for chosen people, enlightened by God.

The third was my most direct experience and Christian. Today, in hospital (more knee troubles), an 83 year old Catholic man lay next to me and between life-challenging coughing fits proceeded to tell me that no one can live without God. I reminded him that the Djadjawurrung had lived in this area for 40,000 years before the missions and the state destroyed them. "Children today need to be caned by a priest or teacher", he ranted, "otherwise they will never know discipline". He later said, sensing he hadn't convinced me, "if you have no religion, you're no good; you're a communist". He had grown up in a country whose people were only given these two monological options – oppressive religion or oppressive secularism. In the end it's the same thing. We shared the air and we shared numbers. I am 38.

All three men are products of childhood propaganda. They've never grown out of it. They have suffered a similar thing to what obese kids suffer today – a life-sentence of being fed the fruits of industrialised agriculture, a new era of oppressive secularism I call pop-fascism. All of this is against nature, disembodied from wild nature, hateful of wild nature. The Taliban official was partially veiled to screen his face on camera, the Jewish Anon was fully and cowardly veiled behind his cum-stained digital screen, and the Catholic man, dying beside me, was fully transparent in his resoluteness that his God will soon offer him just rewards. None of them think of the soil when they fear death, the richness of microbial life. The possibilities for wild new life to rise from it.

Men require the silencing of others to make their mutable truths concrete. Today is the Twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre and the sole dance of the beautiful Tank Man (Tank Man Tango).

In the past few years I have many times dreamt of being tortured by men who hate that which is not in their own image. It's as though I'm preparing myself for my final hours. I'm hung up in a dark cell, I've been there for several days. (I have been in a hospital for nearly a week). I'm thinking that this will all end soon. I get lanced by a hot poker. I swallow. I choke. I like to think that none of this will hurt me, that I have my humanity. I'm punched in the groin with a metal glove. I will not hate these men, they are frightened, I have no fear today, they will not have my liberty today. I am free-dying. Then acid burns into my skin. I scream. Silence. 4 minutes and thirty three seconds. More screams, then –

relating

to the care of souls,

it says)

He had smiled at us,

each time we were in town, inquired

how the baby was, had two cents

for the weather, wore

(beside his automobile)

good clothes.

                        And a pink face.

It was yesterday

it all came out. The gambit

(as he crossed the street,

after us): "I don't believe

I know your name." Given.

How do you do,

how do you do. And then:

"Pardon me, but 

what church

do you belong to,

may I ask?"

And the whole street, the town, the cities, the nation

blinked, in the afternoon sun, at the gun

was held at them. And I wavered

in the thought.

I sd, you may, sir.

He said, what, sir.

I sd, none,

sir.

And the light was back.

For I am no merchant.

Nor so young I need to take a stance

to a loaded

smile.

I have known the face 

of God.

And turned away,

turned,

as He did,

his backside

Charles Olson, from The Maximus Poems, 1960

(With thanks to Ianian, Pete O, Meg and Z for their added love this week).

Making meaning (or, Alan Watts lives)

I've put together a few words, terms and their (in-progress) meanings here, which I've been developing over the past few years. But first a reminder:

Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything. Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951)

Social warming – A social by-product of global warming, where good things come from horror and tragedy.
Permaplay – Non-delusional play invented by both children and adults within a permaculture.
Pop-fascism – Self-enslavement through debt as a result of aggregate desire and participation in capitalism’s slavery/destruction model. A Pop-fascist state is the private control of trade and industry in collusion with the state to the detriment of the environment and society at large.
Free-dragging – Street art. A mutant form of parkour or free-running (often practiced in drag). Physical graffiti tagged on the retina of the passer-by.
Permapoesis – Permanent meaning-making through active participation with one’s ecology and hence the localising of one's resources.

The Australian

To the Letters Editor:

I bought your paper today for the first time in years. Reading it was like sneaking into a black tie dinner at a men's only club. Wow! I thought, people still think like this, but of course I was joking, you're just representing what we all think, right?

What I found since my last read (back in your glorious Howard years) was an even greater ramping up of heroic capitalist rhetoric, finer crafted greenwashing, and a border-line sociopathic hyper-mediated psyche, with the subtext embedded dispassionately: 'power invents a mask for powerlessness to wear' (TS). All this, despite the writing on the wall signaling the end, thank fuck, of capitalism.

Knowing a little of the territory marked by your bullish jock journos who champion pop-fascists like Rupert Murdoch – why wouldn't you, he's your boss right? – I should hardly have been surprised, but to witness again the dogmatic clutching on to an economics based upon profit growth and the refusal to advocate for a commerce that mimics ecological systems illustrates your bloody-minded stupidity and out-moded ideology.

Even after the nature crunch (which will make the sinking global-pool-of-money seem like just another family holiday spent at home), your paper (in the unlikely event that it survives) will no doubt once again twist the story of capitalism's failure to one of triumph. But capitalism's real triumph will be our extinction.

Your newspaper, to borrow McKenzie Wark's words, is a shopping guide where news breaks up the commercial page and filters the right stock advice throughout it. Your newspaper preaches the reliance upon the importation of resources when we know this to be our species' death wish. Therefore, your paper is illogical.

Luckily for me, my money is not totally wasted in buying today's, nor the material you print your capitalist propaganda on as it will go nicely in my compost, and feed the worms who enrich the soil to grow the food that is in walking distance to my home.

Calvanism

The great social and ecological perversion that became Christian-capitalism.

Excerpt (Garden as Collective Offensive)

In less than a generation we have used half the world’s oil supply and are rapidly depleting other fossil fuels. Cheap food and cheap energy are becoming things of the past. The machinations of growth-obsessed industrial civilisation result in the continual transfer of carbon from the ground, where it is good, to the atmosphere, in ever-increasing quantities that make it toxic. Despite all the evidence demonstrating this, the governing corporations remain committed to the growth model - acting as though the environment has an infinite capacity to absorb the relentless production of toxicological wastes.