Month: August 2018

Tanks for the memory – how Brezhnev changed my life

Paul Hemphill 9 Comments

Fifty years ago this month, on August 20, 1968, troops from the Warsaw Pact, a military alliance formed in 1955 between the Soviet Union and seven Eastern European nations in its thrall invaded Czechoslovakia to crush liberal reforms enacted by communist leader Alexander Dubçek in the brief era known as the Prague Spring. In ex post factum justification, the following month, Leonid  Brezhnev, General Secretary if the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, expounded what became known as The Brezhnev Doctrine: “When forces that are hostile to socialism try to turn the development of some socialist country towards capitalism, it becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries”.

The Brezhnev Doctrine was meant to counter liberalization efforts and uprisings that had that challenged Soviet hegemony inside the Eastern Bloc, considered by Moscow as an essential defensive and strategic buffer in the event hostilities were to break out with NATO, the western alliance. In practice, it meant that  bloc members enjoyed but limited independence. Any challenge to the cohesiveness of the Eastern Bloc, whether, by either threatening the communist parties’ grip on power, or Lenin forbid, actually attempt to secede, the Soviet Union assumed  the authority and the power to define “socialism” and “capitalism“, and to act militarily to defend the status quo.

With Dubçek detained and Prague occupied, the country was subsequently taken over by a hard-line Communist regime subservient to Moscow. In 1968 alone, 137 people were killed by Warsaw Pact soldiers, and a total of more than 400 died during an ccupation of that ended only after the 1989 Velvet Revolution, following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, when veteran dissident poet Vacláv Havel became the first and last democratically elected president of Czechoslovakia – he served from 1989 until the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1992 when he became the first President of the Czech Republic. 

The events in Prague in August 1968 are described and appraised in an recent, informative ‘long read’ in The Independent, republished below.

With friends like these…

But first, as part of a continuing chronicle of the events of 1968 in Into That Howling Infinite (see below), here are some recollections of my own.  

The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was in many ways a seminal event in my own journeying. Until then, I was a political ingenue and a naive communist (yes, a member – the only party I have ever joined!) fellow-traveler, although my evolving perspectives were transforming and expanding as I studied the history and politics of Russia and the Soviet Union, under the tutelage of exiled Hungarian academic Tibor Szamuely.

The summer’s events in what is now-bisected Czechoslovakia occurred against a backdrop of anti-war demonstrations in the US, including the Kent State shootings (“four dead in Ohio”), the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and the tumultuous evenements de Mai ‘68 in Paris. These came as I was writing a dissertation on the Hungarian Rising of 1956 – a tragic precursor to Prague and to Brezhnev’s doctrine – and provided a pertinent background narrative and also, a coda for my story.

The shock-waves of the Prague pogrom rippled through my own world the following August when I was contemplating how to spend my summer vacation once I had earned enough money on the motorway construction site to pay for my travels.

I had a Czech friend – self-exiled Camille –  who encouraged me to visit his country that summer and to  drop in on his folks in Prague. Having completed my dissertation, I was pretty keen to visit such a historical and controversial city. So I booked a one-way ticket to Prague on British Caledonia – my first-ever aeroplane flight! It was my intention to visit the place where “Good King Wenceslas last looked out” and then head home to England via Austria and Germany. 

But, as they say, man proposes, God disposes. Or life is what happens when you are busy making other plans. The date I’d chosen to travel just happened to fall a year to the day of the Soviet invasion. Our turboprop plane headed east into what was still the Soviet Bloc – that had twenty yeqrs to run – and flew OVER Prague! The first we happy travellers – students mostly – knew was that we were circling to land in the Hungarian capital of Budapest.

So there we were, in passport control, without visas and accommodation, our itineraries awry, amidst border officials who were wondering who the hell we were and what the f@$£ we were doing there in their portal to the Iron Curtain. Eventually, things were sorted, visas issued, money exchanged (exorbitantly, as was the way in those days), and a bus provided to take us to a Communist Party Youth hostel, bleak, spartan, and crowded with enthusiastic, gorgeous Young Communist lads and lasses.

So there I was, in my first communist country. And, you know what, “they who know only England, who only England know”. I walked through old Buda and Pest, strolled by the Danube and the Sejm, the famous parliament building, walked the boulevards of my dissertation, and saw the scars of battle still there in the brickwork twelve years after the doomed Intifada of 1956. 

I’d heard and read about how the affluent and decadent west was an altogether different and better world than the drab, depressed and depressing cities of the workers’ paradises to our east. And yet, to my ingenue eyes, the look, life and life-style of Budapest appeared no better or worse than my Birmingham and Berkshire backwaters. 

Maybe it was because of my youth, inexperience, and background – maybe I hadn’t traveled enough to interpret and to judge. Apart from brief Boy Scout and schoolboy excursions into Europe-lite, Brit-friendly Belgium and Luxembourg, this was my first foray into distinctly ‘foreign’ lands with histories, cultures, governance, and world views quite different to the fields that I had known. 

I’d like to think that perhaps it is something intrinsically part of my software – an ability to adapt, accept, empathize, and, as far as it is indeed possible for a stranger, to become one with the scenery and slip into the machinery, and, to put it bluntly, take it all at face value.  As a “stranger in a strange land”, I accepted what I saw, observed, heard and learned, moved on – to quote American beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti – like “a mirror walking down a strange street’. For this is how I traveled in thise roving years, leaving very little by way of words and pictures of my travelling. All I saw, heard, observed, felt and learned was mostly stashed away on my hard-drive to be accessed in latter years – waiting, perhaps, for the advent of social media, blogs and highly portable electronic devices. 

Given the circumstances of our arrival, and the atmosphere prevailing in the Bloc on the anniversary of Prague invasion, the authorities had given me a visa for four days only. I had therefore to depart the country quick-smart. I had effectively two choices of non-Soviet countries –  westwards to Austria, or south to what was then Yugoslavia. In a split second decision, I took the road less traveled – south to Szeged and the Serbian border. Wondering through the rural outskirts of Novi Sad, I was taken home by a pair of Serbian boys. I spent my first evening with their most hospitable family and slept that night on a bed of furs. “Novi Sad, Beograd” the lads had chanted, and so, instead of setting my direction home, I hitch-hiked south to the ancient Danube city of Belgrade.

In the Yugoslav capital, I resolved to keep going southwards. Over the next two weeks, I transited Yugoslavia to Thessaloniki, where decided to continue with my southern odyssey – to Athens and the Greek Islands. At journeys end, I hitchhiked back the way I’d come, only this time, reaching Austria via the Croatian capital of Zagreb. 

That impulsive decision in Budapest led me into new pastures. Back in Britain, an Indian summer gave way to bleak autumn and dark and damp winter, and my compass re-calibrated. I had been focused on Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, on deep history and the Russian ‘soul’ (whatever that might be), on ideologies, betrayals, and Cold War skulduggery. But the clear Hellenic sky and the cobalt blue of the Mediterranean, the parched hills and pine woods of the Peloponnese, the dazzling light and the warm sun on my body, and the ruins and bones of antiquity sang a siren’s song. As Jack Bruce warbled:

You thought the leaden winter would bring you down forever, but you rode upon a steamer to the violence of the sun. And the colours of the sea bind your eyes with trembling mermaids, and you touch the distant beaches with tales of brave Ulysses. 

My thoughts and dreams no longer ranged eastwards. My next journey took me back to the Mediterranean, and thence, following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great – the golden hero of legend, not the “mad, bad and dangerous to know” destroyer – through the Middle East and on to the Hippy Trail to India. There and back again, to quote JRR Tolkien, so fresh in my undergraduate canon. I traveled through lands of which I knew little, picking up fragments of history and heritage, parables and politics as onwards I roamed. 

Through the lands of antiquity and of empire: Greece and Cyprus; Egypt and Israel; the Levant (old French for the lands of the rising sun – Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan; Iraq before Saddam, and Iran under the Shah; Pakistan and India, who went to war with each other whilst I crossed their frontiers (a story for another time); and then back to Britain by way of Turkey and the fabled Pudding Shop.

I stood beside the great rivers of ancient stories – the Nile, the Jordan and the  Orontes, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Indus and the Ganges. I traveled though deserts and mountains, the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush. I climbed through the Kyber Pass, immortalised by imperial  endeavour and hubris, and the valley of Kashmir, a betrayed and battered paradise. I stood atop ancient stones in Memphis and Masada, Baalbek and Babylon, Jalalabad  and Jerusalem. 

On my return, I resolved to learn more about these lands, their peoples, and their histories, and this I did. The Middle East has long-since captivated and colonized much of my intellectual life,  Imbuing it with a passion that has found expression in my persona. my politics, my prose, my poetry, and my songs.

In these troubled times, much of the world I once traveled is closed to the casual and the curious. I mourn for those dear, dead days when the map of the world was a signpost and not a warning. But today, I go wherever and whenever I can go, and I feel a wonderful sense of homecoming when I touch down in the bright sunlight. I get the thrill of fresh adventure when I arrive in new places with their sights, sounds and aromas. I reclaim and revel in the curiosity and wonder, knowledge and understanding, awareness and wisdom that was born back there in Budapest. 

And that is how Leonid Brezhnev changed my life!

These are the lands of testament and prophecy, of sacrifice and sacrament, of seers and sages, of vision and vicissitude, of warriors and holy men. The spiritual and the temporal have melded here since time immemorial. We still see the remnants of ancient empires and the echoes of their faiths. We can chart their decline and fall in the fortunes of their monuments and their mausoleums, in the “tumbled towers and fallen stones, broken statues, empty tombs” where “ghosts of commoners and kings walk the walls and catacombs of the castles and the shrines”. Histories carved in stone,  mysteries locked in stone, as “canyons and castles pass ageless and ageing and captive in time”.  Forward to East – An Arab Anthology. 

See also, A Middle East Miscellany

Here are other posts in In That Howling Infinite with regard to 1968:  Things fall apart – the centre cannot hold;  Springtime in Paris – remembering May 1968; and Phil Och’s Chicago Blues 

And the ‘sixties: Encounters with Enoch; Recalling the Mersey Poets; The Strange Death of Sam Cooke; Looking for Lehrer; Shock of the Old – the glory days of prog rock; Window on a Gone World; Back in the day; and, The Incorrigible Optimists Club

Tanks for the memory

The Prague Spring: 50 years on what can we learn from Czechoslovakia’s failed attempt to reform communism?

Mick O’Hare, The Independent, 19 August 2018

Soviet tanks arrive to crush the ‘Prague Spring’ ( AFP/Getty )

Fifty years ago this week, on 21 August 1968, the citizens of Prague awoke to find tanks on their streets. For some it came as no surprise. Student activist Pavel Kamenicky was sleeping. “At first I thought it was the university bus trying to find the right gear,” he says. “But I realised it was way too loud. I jumped up thinking, ‘they’ve come’.”

Czechoslovakia had dominated news bulletins throughout the summer after its premier, First Secretary Alexander Dubcek, had begun reforming his communist government’s structures earlier that year. But now, what had become known as the Prague Spring, or Dubcek’s “socialism with a human face”, was lying crushed beneath the tank tracks in Wenceslas Square.

The Soviet Union feared its grip on the satellite states of eastern Europe was loosening and its patience had finally run out. Czechoslovakia and Dubcek had fallen foul of USSR leader Leonid Brezhnev’s eponymous doctrine, espoused retroactively in justification the month after Warsaw Pact troops took to Prague’s streets: “When forces that are hostile to socialism try to turn the development of some socialist country towards capitalism, it becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries,” Brezhnev said.

Soviet forces, alongside those of Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria, crossed the Czechoslovakian border at 11pm on the evening of 20 August. East Germany withdrew at the last minute when it was realised that, just over two decades after the end of the Second World War, the presence of German troops on Czech and Slovak soil could lead to unintended repercussions. The following morning, the foreign soldiers were in the capital, offering fraternal support to loyal comrades in Czechoslovakia.

Soviet tanks had intervened in post-war eastern Europe before. Towards the end of October in 1956, Hungarians revolted against their Marxist-Leninist government and declared a new administration, withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact and disbanding the communist-run state security apparatus. But barely two and half weeks later the western world watched aghast, but impotent, as Soviet forces entered Budapest to restore one-party rule.

Yet there had been real hope that Czechoslovakia could be different. 1968 was, of course, a year of revolution and political protest across the planet. But the Czechoslovak version was in many ways a rather gentler form of dissent. Dubcek had never set out to overthrow communism, merely to reform it.

The nation’s planned economy had been in decline throughout the 1960s. Dubcek had replaced previous first secretary, Antonín Novotný, in January 1968 and had attempted to liberalise communist party rule by tolerating political institutions and organisations not directly controlled by the party. Even multi-party government was mooted. More repressive laws were loosened, travel was made easier and freedom of expression, especially in media, accepted.

Leonid Brezhnev shares a joke with US president Richard Nixon in 1973 (AP)

Unwittingly though, Dubcek had created either a vicious or a virtuous circle, depending on one’s political viewpoint. Reform emboldened progressives and led to demand for further liberalisation. Dissidents, especially students, but also the wider population in numerous Soviet satellite nations, began to push for similar freedoms.

He was wrong: 2,000 tanks and a 250,000-strong Soviet-led force of men invaded on Brezhnev’s orders; 137 Czechoslovak civilians were killed resisting; and, pleading with his citizens not to fight back, Dubcek was flown to Moscow.

Some citizens used the power of argument to voice their opposition, engaging troops in discussion to make their point – until photographs were used in Soviet propaganda to suggest the locals were making friends with the invaders. Dubcek returned as little more than a puppet of the Soviet regime and was replaced early in 1969. Half a million of his supporters were expelled from the Communist Party.

Leaders of communist countries meeting in Poland in 1955 to sign the mutual defence treaty commonly known as the Warsaw Pact (AFP/Getty)

The members of Nato, especially the United States – already involved in conflict in Vietnam and aiming to broker a disarmament agreement with the Soviet Union – condemned the invasion but had no intention of intervening. In the aftermath, 300,000 Czechoslovaks, many highly qualified, emigrated to the west, although the authorities soon clamped down on their ability to leave.

The period between 1969 and 1971 is known in Czechoslovak history as the era of “normalisation”. The country returned to the Soviet fold; opposition both within and without the country faded; and the Communist Party returned to the hardline position it had held before the onset of the Prague Spring.

So, 50 years later, what does the anniversary offer today’s Europeans still struggling with political upheaval and, certainly in the east of the continent, getting to grips with increasingly nationalistic, repressive governments? Apart from the sense of betrayal felt by Czechs and Slovaks, both towards their own government and their supposed allies, and the reminder that totalitarianism brooks no dissent, are there lessons to be learned from the Prague Spring; and what became of Dubcek, its architect? Unsurprisingly the legacy is complex – as legacies are wont to be.

Perhaps the key to understanding Czechoslovakia in 1968 is that, unlike similar uprisings against the establishment, both in communist Europe but also elsewhere around the world – witness the Arab Spring of 2010 and 2011 – the Prague Spring was not a movement of only liberals, students (among other young people) and political intellectuals fighting a conservative establishment. It had wider cross-generational support drawing on the strong traditions of democracy that had developed in Czechoslovakia between the two world wars, after its formation in 1918.

Czech-born writer Milan Kundera, author of the Unbearable Lightness of Being, who lived in exile in France from 1975, argued that it was a movement falling back on the “best traditions” of Czechoslovakia’s brief history: a “higher quality of democracy not based on the ills associated with capitalism”. By contrast, the later revolutions that would finally overthrow communism in Europe at the end of the 1980s were driven as much by the “victory” of Reaganism, free-market economics and monetarism as they were by the right to vote freely and express opinions openly.

It has become fashionable, with hindsight, to blame the suppression of the Prague Spring on “communism”. But let it not be forgotten that it was fervent communists who were carrying out Czechoslovakia’s reforms. Whether the Prague Spring was a “purer” revolution than those that followed is probably an argument for political ideologues alone, but a glance across the border towards Viktor Orban’s Hungary shows that the spoils of the “freedom” won in 1989 might not always manifest themselves with good intent.

Two decades after Dubcek’s attempt to reform communism from within, the then premier of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, issued an apology on behalf of all Warsaw Pact nations, stating that the invasion of Czechoslovakia was a mistake, and that the USSR should never have interfered in the internal affairs of another sovereign state. (It should be noted that both Romania and Albania had refused to participate in the 1968 intervention; and Albania ultimately withdrew from the Warsaw Pact in the aftermath.)

It was the culmination of a number of apologies from Warsaw Pact nations throughout 1989 and it seems reasonable to argue that there was a direct link between these acknowledgements and the overthrow of communist governments in East Germany, Poland, Romania and, most poignantly, Czechoslovakia, that same year. Protesters realised that their actions would no longer lead to Red Army interference, and the Soviet bloc of eastern European nations had replaced their communist rulers within months of one another.

                          Vaclav Havel,was elected first president of Czechoslovakia  (Getty)

Perhaps 1968 showed us, if 1956 had not already, that the post-war façade of communist interdependence, internationalism and fraternal allegiance was broken, if indeed it had ever been more than a charade at all. The alliance was built on flimsy foundations and maintained by suppression. Czech historical novelist and writer Ivan Klíma has said that – for good or ill – the most important legacy of the Prague Spring was the delayed but ultimate destruction of the international communist movement.

But warnings must still be heeded. In a world where a nationalistically invigorated Russia under Vladimir Putin increasingly looks beyond its borders for a bulwark against Nato and the EU, the demise of communism and the Warsaw Pact does not mean a concurrent diminishing of militarism: the annexation of Crimea by Russia has shown us that very clearly. And – even putting aside the Brexit debate – illiberal governments in Slovakia, Poland and Hungary threaten to overturn the European Union’s free-market liberal consensus. The threat, while changed in ideology, still lurks.

And what of Dubcek? After he was ousted as  first secretary he worked for the forestry service near Bratislava, in his native Slovakia. And after the final overthrow of communist rule in Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution of 1989 he briefly returned to political prominence as chairman of the Czechoslovak Federal Assembly, and later as leader of the Slovak Social Democrats.

Pavel Kamenicky, now 70, says: “We were idealistic. But Dubcek should have realised what was going to happen. Did he really think Brezhnev would shrug and say ‘carry on’?” On the other hand, Dubcek’s son Pavol has defended his father’s position, once saying: “I don’t know if people really understand what it meant to have your fate in Brezhnev’s hands.”

For right or wrong, however, Dubcek had in truth become more or less a political irrelevance by the time of the Velvet Revolution. Václav Havel, the poet and statesman who played a prominent role in the events of 1989 and became Czechoslovakia’s first post-Soviet era president, said: “Dubcek is a symbol of our nice memories, but nobody thinks he can influence the situation now.” Dubcek himself rarely spoke of 1968.

Although a Slovak, Dubcek was opposed to the 1993 split between the Czech Republic and Slovakia and maintained his belief in the idea of a single, united nation. He was killed in a car crash in 1992, declared in an official investigation to be an accident. Conspiracy theories abound and even today 50 per cent of those Slovaks who know of him believe his death was almost certainly not an accident.

The crushing of the Prague Spring continues to echo down the ages, its eventual legacy yet to be determined.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/prague-spring-anniversary-czechoslovakia-soviet-union-wwii-czech-republic-slovakia-a8485326.html

Phil Och’s Chicago Blues

Paul Hemphill 3 Comments

We’ve got too much money we’re looking for toys.
And guns will be guns and boys will be boys.
But we’ll gladly pay for all we destroy.
Cause we’re the Cops of the World, boys,
We’re the Cops of the World
Phil Ochs

In our continuing series of the events of 1968, here is the enthralling story of folk singer Phil Ochs and the Democratic National Convention in Chicago fifty years ago this month. Hubert Humphrey was selected as candidate to run unsuccessfully against Richard Nixon that fall, and Chicago’s Mayor Daley set the city’s finest upon the thousands who had gathered to protest the Vietnam War, racial injustice, and other social and political ills in what contemporary reports described as a “police riot”.

The serpentine storylines of American author Nathan Hill’s astonishing debut novel The Nix converge on the chaos and carnage of this convention. He sets the scene so lyrically, merits quoting in full:

“The day before the riots the weather turned. The grip of the Chicago summer loosened and the air was spring-like and agreeable…In the very early dawn there appeared on the ground a thin, slick dew. The world was alive and lubricated. It felt hopeful, optimistic, and therefore disallowable as the city prepared for battle, as National Guard troops arrived by the thousands on green flatbed trucks, as police cleaned their gas masks and guns, as demonstrators practiced evasion and self-defense techniques and assembled various projectiles to lob at the cops. There was a feeling among them all that so great a conflict deserved an nastier day. Their hatred should ignite the air, they thought. Who could feel revolutionary when the sun shined pleasantly on one’s face. The city instead was full of desire. The day before the greatest, most spectacular, most violent protest of 1968, the city was saturated with want”.

A reader’s comment in response to this essay declares: “1968! What a year! Everything was so groovy then. What happened in the following decades? Phil Ochs hung himself, Abbie Hoffman was arrested for drug dealing and later died of an overdose, Jerry Rubin turned into a corporate consultant and died in LA trying to cross Wilshire Boulevard while drunk and was hit by a car. Chicago is now a killing field and more segregated than ever thanks to the Yippies who morphed into the continuous white corporate America”.

But in reality, apart from the great music, 1968 was a sad year for the USA. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. Four students were shot dead by the National Guard in Ohio. The war in Vietnam continued to bleed out and divide the nation.

For more on 1968, see: Things fall apart – the centre cannot hold 

And here are other posts in In That Howling Infinite with regard to the ‘sixties: Springtime in Paris – remembering May 1968; Encounters with Enoch; Recalling the Mersey Poets; The Strange Death of Sam Cooke; Looking for Lehrer; Shock of the Old – the glory days of prog rock; Window on a Gone World; Back in the day; and, The Incorrigible Optimists Club.

How the 1968 DNC protests in Chicago ‘killed’ protest folk singer Phil Ochs

Ryan Smith, Chicago Reader, 25th August 2018,

Phil Ochs during a 1967 Vietnam protest outside the UN building in New York. - MICHAEL OCHS

Phil Ochs during a 1967 Vietnam protest outside the UN building in New York.

It probably seemed like a gloomy joke when Phil Ochs put an image of his own tombstone on the cover of his 1969 album Rehearsal for Retirementwith an inscription that read: “Born El Paso, Texas; Died Chicago, IL, 1968.”

The grave, which also featured a black-and-white photo of Ochs—rifle slung over shoulder—standing in front of an American flag, was an obvious reference to the radical leftist folk singer’s role in the bloody protests outside the Democratic National Convention 50 years ago this week. Specifically, Ochs was in Chicago to help plan and participate in the Youth International Party’s (also known as Yippie) “Festival of Life” protest in Lincoln Park. He was among a core group of organizers arrested as they tried to publicize their own candidate for president, a pig.

Ochs witnessed all of the violence and chaos in Chicago while the Democratic establishment, guarded by a small army of Mayor Richard J. Daley’s troops, chose pro-Vietnam war candidate Hubert Humphrey. The singer saw it as the “final death of democracy in America.”

“It was the total, final takeover of the fascist military state—in one city, at least,” Ochs said in an interview in New York shortly after the DNC. “Chicago was just a total, absolute police state. A police state from top to bottom. I mean it was totally controlled and vicious.”

Certainly, Ochs didn’t perish. Nor was he one of the hundreds of anti-war protesters hurt in the ensuing melees with police and the National Guard that week. What he and many of his peers in the New Left instead suffered was a kind of spiritual death.

“I’ve always tried to hang onto the idea of saving the country, but at this point, I could be persuaded to destroy it,” Ochs said. “For the first time, I feel this way.”

The cover of Phil Ochs's 1969 album Rehearsals for Retirement

The cover of Phil Ochs’s 1969 album Rehearsals for Retirement

If the music of Phil Ochs doesn’t ring a bell, you’re not alone. History has a way of sanitizing, obscuring, or just plain forgetting much of the protest music of the past. Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land,” for instance, was never intended to be a paean to our republic but a defiant Marxist response to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” And the radical pro-labor and anti-war tunes contained in the Industrial Workers of the World’s Little Red Songbook (detailed in a recent Reader feature) are all but unknown today.

The same goes for Ochs. He wrote eight albums of fierce and fiery folk songs before he died by his own hand in 1976, but his legacy has been papered over when we think of the protest music of the tumultuous 60s. When Lady Gaga asked, “Anybody know who Phil Ochs is?” before covering his 1967 ballad “The War is Over” at a free concert during the 2016 Democratic National Convention, it got a lackluster response.

It’s no wonder: Ochs’s radical politics pulled no punches. When the Ohio State student newspaper refused to publish some of his pieces, he started his own underground magazine called the Word. During his early musical career—as part of a duo called the Singing Socialists and then as a solo artist—his songs often sounded like left-wing columns on current events set to music. Bob Dylan once famously once kicked him out of his car during an argument saying, “You’re not a folk singer, you’re a journalist.” Ochs didn’t totally deny it—his first album for Elektra in 1964 was even titled All the News That’s Fit to Sing, a play on the New York Times‘s tagline, and the songs were written about topics allegedly pulled from the pages of Newsweek magazine.

Many of his songs, as one might expect, take direct aim at reactionary conservatives and the architects of the Vietnam war: “We’ve got too much money we’re looking for toys. And guns will be guns and boys will be boys. But we’ll gladly pay for all we destroy. ‘Cause we’re the Cops of the World, boys,” he sang on “Cops of the World.”

Other tracks hold up a mirror to moderate liberals and implicate them in the excesses of American empire and systems of inequality and institutional racism. His scathing 1966 song “Love Me, I’m a Liberal” mocks hypocritical Democrats he described as “ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally.” Sung from the perspective of a liberal, Ochs croons the lyrics: “I love Puerto Ricans and Negros, as long as they don’t move next door. So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal.”

Mass-market success eluded Ochs his entire career. His most popular album, a 1966 live album, peaked at 150 on the Billboard charts. But he was an influential presence at folk festivals and at political rallies at college campuses all over the country. It was while visiting UC Berkeley to perform at a teach-in against Vietnam during the Free Speech Movement protests in 1965 that Ochs met and befriended Jerry Rubin, one of the founders of the Yippies.

It was Rubin who convinced Ochs to play music at the Festival of Life, the Yippies’ theatrical spoof of the DNC in Chicago. “[The Festival] was to show the public, the media, that the convention was not to be taken seriously because it wasn’t fair, and wasn’t going to be honest, and wasn’t going to be a democratic convention,” Ochs later testified in court.

To show their contempt for the American political system, they vowed to nominate their own Democratic candidate—one of the swine kind. Abe Peck of the underground paper Chicago Seed told the New York Timesthat after the nomination, they were “going to roast him and eat him. For years, the Democrats have been nominating a pig and then letting the pig devour them. We plan to reverse the process.”

Phil Ochs paid an Illinois farmer for Pigasis, the pig the Yippies tried to nominate as president.

Phil Ochs paid an Illinois farmer for Pigasis, the pig the Yippies tried to nominate as president.

Ochs and several other Yippies traveled to various farms in the Chicago area before the convention to pick out what Yippie Judy Gumbo, in her 2008 recollection of 1968, called “the largest, smelliest, most repulsive hog we could find.” The 145-pound black-and-white pig, dubbed Pigasus, was taken to the Chicago Civil Center for a press conference on August 23. Five Yippies were taken to jail at the press conference as they were taking Pigasis out of the truck—including Rubin and Ochs, while the presidential hog hopeful was taken to the Chicago Humane Society. All humans were released after posting a $25 bond.

The crowds at the five-day Festival of Life in Lincoln Park averaged between 8,000 and 10,000, nowhere near the 15,000 that organizers expected. Many were scared off by Daley’s saber rattling. A week before the convention, the city of Chicago turned downtown into a combat zone, with a special 300-strong CPD task force armed with riot gear. “No one is going to take over the streets,” said Daley. After the Yippies were denied a permit by the city, the Chicago Seed advised activists to avoid coming. “Don’t come to Chicago if you expect a five-day festival of life, music, and love. The word is out. Chicago may host a festival of blood,” the paper wrote.

“Daley’s preconvention terror tactics were a success in keeping out large numbers of people. For instance, his threats to set up large-scale concentration camps,” Ochs said. “Daley issued many statements like that, very threatening statements, and these and come succeeded in keeping a lot of people away. But the people who did show up were the toughest, really, and the most dedicated.”

Few countercultural artists and musicians came as well. Ochs invited Pete Seeger, Judy Collins, Paul Simon, and others to perform but he was the only folk singer to show. As he sang “I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore”, hundreds of protesters burned their draft cards.

The only rock band to appear were the MC5, a radical leftist group managed by John Sinclair, a Yippie who’d formed the White Panthers—an organization of white allies to the Black Panthers. MC5 played at the Festival of Life.

Ochs believed his peers didn’t see the DNC protests as a “worthwhile project.”

“There really hasn’t been that much involvement of folk people and rock people in the movement since the Civil Rights period except that one period where the anti-war action became in vogue and safe, you know, large numbers of people and all that publicity, and then they showed up,” Ochs said, while also acknowledging their fear. “I’m sure everybody was afraid. I was afraid.”

As it turns out, there was plenty to fear. Especially on Wednesday, August 28, the day that most people think about when they think about that convention in Chicago. That early morning, protesters agitated along the east side of Michigan Avenue across from the Conrad Hilton Hotel where the Democratic delegates were staying. That included Ochs, who wore a flag pin on his suit jacket.

“Phil was born in El Paso, Texas, and really loves America,” Gumbo later said. “Even when he’s being gassed along with the rest of us.”

He also tried to engage with the young National Guardsmen pointing their bayoneted rifles toward the sky, Gumbo recalled:

As we walk, Phil introduces himself to the impressed guardsmen and asks if they’ve ever heard his songs. Like “I Ain’t Marching Anymore.” Many nod.
“I once spent $10 to go to one of your concerts” one complains. “I’ll never do that again.”

In 1968, $10 was a lot of money. Phil stops and talks directly to the guy, explaining why he is opposed to the war. The Guardsman starts to smile, and even lowers his rifle a little bit, very appreciative that a celebrity like Phil is speaking to him like a real person.

But the smiles soon disappeared as about 3,000 protesters tried to march and the police didn’t let them and some of them started throwing rocks, sticks, sometimes feces. What ensued was a 17-minute melee in front of the hotel between the marchers and a force that included some of the 12,000 Chicago police in addition to 6,000 army troops and 5,000 National Guardsmen that had been called to protect Chicago on the orders of Mayor Daley. Officers beat activists bloody in the streets of Chicago with nightsticks—live on national TV. It was called the Battle of Michigan Avenue, a nickname used to describe a one-sided affair that a government commission later declared to be a “police riot.” In all, 100 protesters and 119 cops were treated for injuries and about 600 protesters were arrested.

A public poll taken two months later found that more people thought the police had used too little force rather than too much, 25 to 19 percent. Many Chicagoans were also on Daley’s side, a fact that disturbed Ochs.

“The Chicagoans were unable to recognize that this was a national convention. They literally, psychologically couldn’t. They kept thinking, ‘This is our city, our convention.’ When it’s a national election they’re talking about,” he said. “I’m really beginning to question the basic sanity of the American public . . . I think more and more politicians are really becoming pathological liars, and I think many members of the public are. I think the Daily News, Tribune poisoning that comes out is literally creating—and television—all the media are creating a really mentally ill, unbalanced public.”

But Ochs also left Chicago feeling unbalanced and disillusioned with the idea that the system could be repaired or reformed.

“Maybe America is the final end of the Biblical prophecy: We’re all going to end up in fire this time. America represents the absolute rule of money, just absolute money controlling everything to the total detriment of humanity and morals. It’s not so much the rule of America as it is the rule of money. And the money happens to be in America. And that combination is eating away at everybody. It destroys the souls of everybody that it touches, beginning with the people in power,” he said.

This sense of despondency was reflected in his music. Many of his politically charged anthems had been critical of American society but were nonetheless anchored in a kind of can-do optimism. But in mid-1969, the man who once sang “Can’t add my name into the fight while I’m gone / So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here” released Rehearsal for Retirement,” an entire album of what he called “despair music.”

In the funereal track “William Butler Yeats Visits Lincoln Park,” Ochs sang about the bleak scene in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention: “They spread their sheets upon the ground just like a wandering tribe. And the wise men walked in their Robespierre robes. When the fog rolled in and the gas rolled out. In Lincoln Park the dark was burning.”

Ochs wouldn’t return to Chicago until almost a year after the Festival of Life to testify in the trial of the so-called Chicago Eight. They were the main organizers of the protests—including Rubin and Yippies cofounder Abbie Hoffman, and members of the Students for a Democratic Society, the National Mobilization Committee, and Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers—charged with conspiracy to cross state lines with intent to incite a riot.

The trial was a circuslike spectacle, and Ochs’s testimony was no different. The defense lawyer William Kunstler asked him discursive questions about Pigasus (“Mr. Ochs, can you describe the pig which was finally bought?”), had Ochs deny that he’d made plans for public sex acts in Lincoln Park, and tried to get him to play his song “I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore” in front of the judge and jury until the defense objected. The trial dragged on for months, and Ochs returned to Chicago in December 1969 to play the so-called Conspiracy Stomp, a benefit for the Chicago Eight, at the Aragon.

R. Crumb drew the poster for the Conspiracy Stomp, a benefit for the Chicago Eight held at the Aragon in 1969.

R. Crumb drew the poster for the Conspiracy Stomp

The criminal and contempt charges against the Chicago Eight were eventually overturned or dropped, but the FBI escalated its attempt to build a case against them and Ochs. “I’m a folk singer for the FBI,” he told an audience during one show. Special agents monitored his travels in person and received updates from foreign authorities when, for example, he flew to Chile to meet with supporters of Salvador Allende, a socialist elected in 1970. (After his death in 1976, the FBI declassified the 420-plus-page file they kept on him, with information including the claim that a lyric about assassinating the president from Rehearsal for Retirement‘s “Pretty Smart on My Part” was a threat against President Nixon.)

Ironically, the FBI had increasingly less justification to do so. Ochs considered leaving the country at the end of 1968, but instead moved to Los Angeles and drastically changed his act. The tactics of the Yippies, he came to believe, were ineffective at enacting change. He turned, believe it or not, to Elvis Presley.

In Gunfight at Carnegie Hall, a concert album recorded at Carnegie Hall in New York on March 27, 1970, Ochs dressed in a Elvis-style flashy gold- lamé suits and sang medleys of covers of the King and Buddy Holly. He laid out his new philosophy bare in a monologue to the audience:

“As you know, I died in Chicago. I lost my life and I went to heaven because I was very good and sang very lyrical songs. And I got to talk to God and he said, ‘Well, what do you want to do? You can go back and be anyone you want.’ So I thought who do I want to be? And I thought, I wanted to be the guy who was the King of Pop, the king of show business, Elvis Presley.

Phil Ochs in his Elvis suit. - YOUTUBE

Phil Ochs in his Elvis suit.

“If there’s any hope for America, it lies in a revolution. If there’s any hope for a revolution in America, it lies in getting Elvis Presley into becoming Che Guevera. If you don’t do that, you’re just beating your head against the wall, or the cop down the street will beat your head against the wall. We have to discover where he is, he’s the ultimate American artist.”

But Ochs’s Elvis-impersonator act bombed even as the singer begged the crowd to be more open-minded, pleading, “Don’t be narrow-minded like Spiro Agnew.”

Over the course of the 70s, the singer fell into mental illness, depression, and alcoholism. His death came at his own hands on April 9, 1976, at the age of 35. His real passing came almost exactly seven years after he announced his death on vinyl in early May 1969.

The tombstone wasn’t meant as a prophecy, it was a lament of the past

How the 1968 DNC protests in Chicago ‘killed’ protest folk singer Phil Ochs

Islam’s house of many mansions

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

Islam, the faith of some two hundred million souls, has a long and well-documented history of pluralism and tolerance, and indeed, learning. But in recent decades, the faith has been hijacked by the punitive and literalist proclivities of the Salafis, condoned, coopted and championed by the conservative, corrupt, brutal, patriarchal and misogynistic autocracies of Saudi Arab and other Gulf States and ostensibly Islamic states like Iran. If ever there were exemplars for the “religion of peace”, and followers of a “merciful and compassionate” God, these are certainly not. To borrow another faith’s noun, theirs’ is in so many ways a gospel of bondage. [read Alastair Crooke’s excellent article on the history of Wahhabism]

[This, by the way, is a book review and not a theological critique. I neither profess nor profane, although my personal opinions might occasionally intrude. I admit to a sound but not specialist familiarity with and knowledge of Islam and Muslims, and a wide but not expert knowledge of the Middle East]

In The House of Islam – a global history  offers the potential for a softer, kinder, spiritual  Islam.  Author Ed Husain, British-born of Indian heritage, wears his Sufi heart on his sleeve.  “Preoccupied with spiritual awareness and depth, Sufi Islam transcends the performative trappings of superficial appearances such as beards and head-coverings, fixation with the simplistic binaries of haram and halal (what is forbidden and not forbidden in Islam) and the state’s imposition of sharia law.”

Little wonder that in many rooms in the House of Islam, Sufis are suspect, sanctioned and silenced – often brutally. As are many “heterogeneous” offshoots of this one true faith, including for many,  more than two hundred million Shiah.

It is the authoritarian, mediaeval Salafi-Wahhabi Arabian Peninsula theology and culture that has become commonly adopted as a marker of Muslim authenticity and has assumed the status of the ideal religious identity – notwithstanding the historical preeminence of Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad as centres of Muslim learning – and even though Arabs constitute a numerical minority in the Muslim world.

This “Arabization” and indeed, “Saudification” of Islam has colonized, distorted and, indeed, contorted and corrupted the spiritual message of Islam, and with the concurrent attractions and challenges of westernization, has, in Husain’s words, “disoriented the traditional Muslim equilibrium”, and brought forth jihadi abominations like al-Qaeda and Da’ish.

With the spread of ultra-conservative Salafi theology in many parts of the Arab and non-Arab Muslim world, Muslims are expected to dress in accordance with “modest” traditional Arabic attire and women are under pressure to wear the headscarf and other more extreme coverings – the latter never sanctioned by either Qur’an or Hadith writ. The writ runs deeper than outward appearance, as exemplified by the subordinate status of women in most Muslim societies. Moreover,  Arab and non-Arab Muslims are also expected to abandon their pre-Islamic history and culture – derided as remnants from pre-Islamic ignorance. In its most extreme manifestation, this saw the destruction of humanity’s priceless heritage at Palmyra and Nineveh. Some salafis call for the razing of Egypt’s pyramids.

Muslims in their glory days would refer to what went before as al Jahiliyya, the age of ignorance. But in so many ways, multitudes have returned there, helped in no small part by their more atavistic coreligionists who see salvation, wisdom and benefit to all in reverting to a medieval ethos and lifestyle of some golden age of faith which most scholars maintain never existed.

Islamists are intolerant of anything resembling a free exchange of ideas and information – the very concept of democracy is haram as the Prophet and his successors never thought of it – and possess a cultural antipathy, and iconoclastic rage for all things western, including, in some places,  western education (the derivation of the name ’Boko Haram’  for Nigeria’s ISIS franchise). The fundamentalist mindset in all its patriarchal intolerance, prejudice and misogyny is itself often embraced by the ignorant and the uneducated, the downcast and dispossessed, the bitter and the bigoted.

Husain points out that “not every Salafi is a jihadi, but every jihadi is a Salafi. Today’s jihadism, violating all the ethics of Islam, is nothing more than the continuation of the puritanism of the Salafi-Wahhabis“, which originated from the Saudi kingdom – guardian of Mecca and Medina, Islam’s most revered cities. There is no space for plurality and doubt in Salafi theology, rooted as it is in the discourse of yaqeen (certainty) and the propagation of an authoritarian one-dimensional piety.

This said, there are many more Muslim-majority states such as Turkey, Indonesia, Malaysia and Tunisia – countries that were conceived as secular states, and have largely remained secular or quasi-secular) , and indeed, have and made considerable democratic breakthroughs via the ballot box. Indonesia (the most populous Muslim-majority country) and Malaysia (one of the most industrialised Muslim-majority countries) are not located in the Arab Middle East. And yet, as events in Turkey and Indonesia have shown, the lure of radical Islam and its cultural and moral strictures is an attractive one to would-be authoritarians and to governments fearful of rising populist and nationalist tides.

And herein lies another portend. Just as the Muslim world has its share of religious and political extremists, so do an alarming number of Western democracies that are dominated by populists and ethno-nationalists who often do not hesitate to use religion as a blunt instrument of groupthink. I am thinking here of Russia and its Othodox Church, and of Polish Catholicism, but even ostensibly democratic USA and Israel are subject to the overweening influence of powerful evangelical and Haredim interest groups that endeavour to stamp their moral code on the more temporal majority. As radical British playwright Dennis Potter once remarked, “religion is the wound, not the bandage”.

Academic Lily Rahim notes in he review, published below, that this calls for a systematic analysis of the economic, socio-political, structural and institutional factors that have fueled the ascendancy of all forms of extremism, intolerance and exclusion, often rooted in authoritarian beliefs and systems. And that is a huge, multifaceted project, taking in the economic and social inequality that persists in countries rich and poor, the gap between the few ‘haves’ and the many ‘have-nots’, the power imbalances between the ‘North’ and the ‘South’, the pernicious rise of sectarianism and ethnocentrism, the mirage of ‘manifest destiny’, and the historical habit of the strong to bomb the weak and the poor to blazes.

Civil war and economic desperation have propelled millions of refugees across the Mediterranean and the Aegean Sea into Europe, threatening the unity and stability of the European Union. Islamic fundamentalism has filled the vacuum created by crumbling dictatorships and vanishing borders, unleashing atavistic, uncompromising and vicious Jihadis against their own people and co-religionists, and onto the streets of cities as far apart as Paris and Brussels, Istanbul and Baghdad, Jakarta and Mogadishu. In Syria particularly, but also in Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Afghanistan, the longest war in the 21st Century, outsiders have intervened to further complicate the chaos, rendering an early end to what Rudyard Kipling called these “savage wars of peace” a forlorn hope.

“In many respects, the House of Islam is a microcosm of The House of Human History”.

Two other reviews of Ed Husain’s informative and illuminating boo follow.

For other posts regarding the Middle East in Into That Howling Infinite, see A Middle East Miscellany.  And, for a long view, read: A Brief History of the Rise and Fall of the West.

The House of Islam by Ed Husain.

The House of Islam by Ed Husain review – a powerful corrective

Boys prepare food for devout Muslims to break their day-long fast on the last Friday of the holy month of Ramadan in Mumbai, India.
         Boys prepare food for devout Muslims to break their day-long fast on the last Friday of  Ramadan in Mumbai, India ( Rajanish Kakade/AP)

Of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims a very large number – perhaps a majority – observed the Ramadan fast last month. This doesn’t simply mean abstaining from food and water during the hours of daylight (as well as sex and cigarettes), but in many cases involves a deliberate reappraisal of one’s relation to God and the world, with more prayers and philanthropy and less shopping.

Of all the obligations that define Islam, Ramadan arouses perhaps the most irritation among some outsiders. A practice that places such a strain on the body is surely an affront to reason. Nor does it seem to make economic sense for workers to be tired and unproductive while declining to perform their allotted roles as consumers with credit ratings. And yet the west has absorbed Ramadan, if uneasily, with supermarket promotions for dates (the Prophet’s favoured breakfast), school assemblies on the subject and “What is Ramadan?” features even in the Sun.

Knowledge about Islam may have improved, but the speed with which relations are changing between Muslims and non-Muslims, and between Muslims, necessitates a constant reassessment of different worldviews and the way they interrelate. Isis’s defeat in Mesopotamia has not led to any meaningful dialogue between cultures. On the contrary, with Gaza aflame, the Iran nuclear accord uprooted and Sunni-Shia tensions at an all-time high, the prospects for detente have rarely been bleaker.

An airstrike on Islamic State militants in Sirte, Libya in 2016.
                      Airstrike on Islamic State militants in Sirte, Libya in 2016 )Manu Brabo/AP)

It’s an illustration of the insincerity of many world leaders that more than 250 French public figures, including former president Nicolas Sarkozy and three former prime ministers, recently demanded that Qur’anic verses endorsing the killing of non-Muslims be “struck down” – just as the Second Vatican Council expurgated elements of Catholic doctrine in the early 1960s. This meretricious proposal affects to assume that Islam is a centralised religion like Catholicism (it isn’t), that the Qur’an can be snipped and remain the Qur’an (it can’t), and that because they recognise the same holy book the Islam of the jihadi is the same as that of the Sufi or the Europeanised Muslim with his Qur’an on the top shelf and his bottle of burgundy on the bottom. When will someone put these contradictions of text, practice and culture into terms accessible to the layperson? Who will speak across the divides?

Enter Ed Husain. A Briton of Indian parentage, a Muslim whose bestselling book, The Islamist described his temporary embrace of the values of global jihad in the 90s, Husain retained his religious faith even after he became a government adviser on deradicalisation. Since then he has lived off the fat of the neoliberal establishment that ran the world before the age of Trump, working for Tony Blair’s Faith Foundation as well as several other well‑heeled thinktanks on both sides of the Atlantic. The anti-extremism organisation he co-founded in 2007, Quilliam, is considered by many to be hopelessly compromised by its support for government efforts to squeeze Muslims into the corset of “British” values.

Ed Husain in Brick Lane, London, May 2018.
                            Husain in Brick Lane, London, May 2018 (Andy Hall, The Observer)

Husain’s politics and the company he keeps may be questioned, but they evidently haven’t stopped him from thinking productively about Islam as a force for good in the world. An account of the compassion, reason and wonderment that Islam has exhibited for much of its history, this book is a powerful corrective to the widespread perception, fostered by jihadis and Islamophobes alike, that it’s a belief system for misanthropes.

Ever since its inception Islam’s ethos had been contested, but a disastrous turn came with rejection of the printing press and the triumph of scholasticism over independent reasoning, exacerbated by a morale-sapping struggle against European expansionism in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Husain rightly says that the root of much Muslim confusion is a sense that a glorious past has soured into defeat and humiliation, but fallen prestige is hardly the monopoly of Muslims. The West has also lost ground, particularly its white males; dealing with changes in status is a part of being human. In general, Husain is too apt to view Muslims and their dignity as qualitatively different from those of other people. His modern politics can also be sketchy. With justification he criticises Saudi Arabia for its promotion of bigotry – less understandable is his soft spot for the  Turkey of Recep Tayyip Erdogan –  less a paragon of generous Islam than thuggish majoritarianism. His insistence that Muslim nations accommodate the tiny Jewish state in their midst is common sense but a suggestion of a Middle Eastern union including Israel reads somewhat grotesquely in the light of the recent carnage in Gaza.

For all that, Husain has written a valuable book, full of suggestions for Islam’s implementation from a position of magnanimity and love. Then the confidence will return.

• The House of Islam: A Global History is published by Bloomsbury. To order a copy for £21.25 (RRP £25) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

The House of Islam :  the history of a welcoming religion

Muslim pilgrims pray on the Mountain of Mercy during The Haj. Mount Arafat, marked by a white pillar, is where Prophet Muhammad is believed to have delivered his last sermon to tens of thousands of followers some 1400 years ago, calling on Muslims to unite.
Muslim pilgrims pray on the Mountain of Mercy during The Haj. Mount Arafat, marked by a white pillar, is where Prophet Muhammad is believed to have delivered his last sermon to tens of thousands of followers some 1400 years ago, calling on Muslims to unite ( Nariman El-Mofty/AP)

In The House of Islam, Ed Husain affirms the centrality of the pluralist foundations and principles of Islam. Pluralism has also been rooted in Husain’s “lived reality”. His book opens powerfully, with Husain affirming his plural identity: “I am a Westerner and an observant Muslim. Caught between two worlds, I have learnt to dovetail the two facets of my identity. This book is a reflection of that inner bridge between Islam and the West”.

Yet, as the inflections of this superbly written book suggest, Husain’s “inner bridge” extends beyond “Islam and the West” and incorporates “the West” (Britain where he was born and raised), Islam (his faith) and India, his ancestral homeland.

A Turkish Muslim woman prays inside Hiraa cave, where Prophet Muhammad received his first revelation from God to preach Islam, on Noor Mountain, on the outskirts of Mecca, Saudi Arabia.
A Turkish Muslim woman prays inside Hiraa cave, where Prophet Muhammad received his first revelation from God to preach Islam, on Noor Mountain, on the outskirts of Mecca, Saudi Arabia.Photo: AP

Husain’s Indian heritage comes across in his whimsical ruminations of Mughal Sufi history, in particular the riveting narrative of Jahanara Begum – the complex and colourful Sufi-inspired daughter of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (1592–1666), who built the Taj Mahal in memory of his beloved wife.

Hussain’s Sufi proclivities are apparent in the chapter “Who is a Sufi”, arguably one of the most engaging chapters. Husain describes the Sufi as one who “seeks only to please God, and does so in secret as often as possible”, grapples with “the heart and soul of Islam” and strives towards “maintaining equilibrium while swimming in deep oceans of spiritual awareness, and the ways in which the human ego could be crushed”.

Preoccupied with spiritual awareness and depth, Sufi Islam transcends the performative trappings of superficial appearances such as beards and head-coverings, fixation with the simplistic binaries of haram and halal (what is forbidden and not forbidden in Islam) and the state’s imposition of sharia law.

In contrast to the rigid, punitive and literalist tendencies of Salafi Islam, as promoted by the conservative monarchies in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states and supposed Islamic states such as Iran, Sufi Islam’s leanings are inclusive, compassionate and speak to the complex yearnings of the human soul.

These leanings are evident in Rumi’s message of learning, hope and redemption, as the renowned Sufi poet ruminated: “Come. Come, whoever you are./ Wanderer, worshipper, lover of learning./ It doesn’t matter./ Ours is not a caravan of despair./ Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times./ Come, yet again, come, come.”

Husain’s considerable insights on the house of Islam, made up of more than 1.5 billion Muslims, have been shaped by his lived incarnations as an Islamist, Salafist and current abode in mystical Sufi Islam. His destiny within Sufi Islam culminated after many years of study under the guidance of Islamic scholars and living in the Middle East.

Enriched by these experiences, Husain notes that he has the “rare privilege of being an insider both in the West and in the Muslim World”. Yet, it could also be deduced that his acute insights have been cultivated by his status as an “outsider” in both the West and the Arab Middle East – stemming from his minority Indian ethnicity in both domains.

The House of Islam is understandably concerned with authoritarian and Salafi-Wahhabi Gulf Arab theology and culture that has become commonly adopted as a marker of Muslim authenticity. This peculiarity has assumed the status of the ideal religious identity – even though Arabs constitute a numerical minority in the Muslim world.

Husain insightfully asserts that Arabisation as well as Westernisation has “disoriented the traditional Muslim equilibrium”, as manifested by the rise of Salafi jihadi groups such as Isis and al-Qaeda.

With the spread of ultra-conservative Salafi theology in many parts of the Arab and non-Arab Muslim world, Muslims are expected to dress in accordance with “modest” traditional Arabic attire and women are under pressure to wear the headscarf and other coverings. Arab and non-Arab Muslims are also expected to jettison their pre-Islamic history and culture – derided as remnants from pre-Islamic ignorance or jahiliyya.

Husain reminds us of the paradox of the current Salafi dominance by noting that in the 1790s, Salafis were not even considered Muslims by the chief qadi (cleric) of Mecca; indeed, for several years Salafis were kept away from the holy cities and The Haj.

He highlights the theological ties between Salafi Islam and jihadi Islamists, such as Isis and al-Qaeda, by pointing out that “not every Salafi is a jihadi, but every jihadi is a Salafi…. Today’s jihadism, violating all the ethics of Islam, is nothing more than the continuation of the puritanism of the Salafi-Wahhabis”, which originated from the Saudi kingdom – guardian of Mecca and Medina, Islam’s most revered cities.

There is no space for plurality and doubt in Salafi theology, rooted as it is in the discourse of yaqeen (certainty) and the propagation of an authoritarian one-dimensional piety.

The House of Islam is a valuable read, particularly for those with some understanding of Islam and the Muslim world. Husain is a gifted writer and perceptive observer particularly of the Arab Middle East.

That said, the book makes minimal references to the more dynamic and democratising Muslim-majority states such as Indonesia, Malaysia and Tunisia – countries that were conceived as secular states (have largely remained secular or quasi-secular) and made considerable democratic breakthroughs via the ballot box. Instructively, Indonesia (the most populous Muslim-majority country) and Malaysia (one of the most industrialised Muslim-majority countries) are not located in the Arab Middle East.

Instead of pointing to Israel as a source of emulation for the Muslim world, Husain could well have highlighted these consolidating democracies. All three countries boast a vibrant civil society, coalition governments based on power-sharing and political systems based on secular constitutionalism.

Despite the penetrating insights in The House of Islam, Husain’s narrative of the myriad hurdles confronting the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, and Israel’s role in this struggle, is somewhat disappointing.

Just as the Muslim world has its share of religious and political extremists, so does Israel and an alarming number of Western democracies that are dominated by populists and ethno-nationalists. This calls for a systematic analysis of the economic, socio-political, structural and institutional factors that have fuelled the ascendency of all forms of extremism, intolerance and exclusion, often rooted in authoritarian beliefs and systems. In many respects, the House of Islam is a microcosm of The House of Human History.

https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/the-house-of-islam-review-ed-husain-on-the-history-of-a-welcoming-religion-20180809-h13r0w.htm

Lily Rahim is an Associate Professor at the University of Sydney, where she teaches Political Islam and Southeast Asian Politics. Her more recent books include Muslim Secular Democracy and The Politics of Islamism. Ed Husain is a guest at the Melbourne Writers Festival (mwf.com.au).

Still tangled up in Bob

Paul Hemphill 2 Comments

Bob Dylan is currently criss-crossing Australia on yet another circuit of his globe-trotting, decades-long Never Ending Tour. He played Sydney’s gorgeous art deco State Theatre the other night, at oure one-time local venu, the small but venerable Enmore Theatre in Newtown, to acclaim from fans young and old.

Veteran Australian folk music critic Bruce Elder wrote somewhat underwhelmingly: “… given the inevitable limitations (his voice is an ageing, husky, adenoidal instrument; he doesn’t talk to the audience; he always offers new interpretations of his old material; every song was delivered from behind his piano; he never tries to establish a rapport with his audience) this was a fascinating stroll through the “great American songbook” via an eclectic reinterpretation of twenty of his songs”. But friends of mine were much more enthusiastic. Stephane wrote me: “I thought of you last night. The show was great, it was fantastic to see him (he is still in good shape at 77!!).  We even saw him smiling and dancing a bit at some stage on a fantastic version of “Gotta serve somebody”. Charles messaged: “It was really, really good. He was in top form. His voice sounded better than it has for quite a while. He played only piano but that with gusto and energy – and sometimes tenderness – throughout. The band cooked and arrangements were brilliantly re-imagined bringing new focus to the lyrics “. And this from Llew: “Started with It Aint Me Babe and Ballad of a Thin Man, so I was happy no matter what else happened. He did an encore of Blowin’ in the Wind and Don’t Think Twice. Not the old versions of course. He never said a word to the crowd”.

At a Bob Dylan concert – and I’ve been to many – we hear what we wish to hear, filtered through the memory of how we heard him all those years ago when we were young and idealistic and our world was new. To this day, I can never get enough of Bob – in all of his many guises. I listen to at least one or two of his songs every week and always discover something I hadn’t heard before. He has been a constant soundtrack to my ever-evolving, often revolving sense and sensibility. I wish that I’d been there in Newtown on Sunday night.

Bob in Newtown

Meanwhile, I have recently read classics professor Richard F Thomas’ scholarly frolic Why Dylan Matters. It is an entertaining and informative if ponderous and overwrought exegesis of the Bobster’s interaction with and intertextualizing (there’s a nice, fresh word for us all) of the old Greek and Roman poets and playwrights, and also poems, plays and folk songs of later vintage, including Rimbaud, of course, and Robbie Burns, and the hunter-collectors Cecil Sharp, Alan Lomax and the eccentric Harry Smith’s encyclopedic Anthology of American Folk Music so well analyzed in Greil Marcus’ insightfull Invisible Republic – Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes.

And then, last night, by chance I watched the Todd Hayes’s 2007 film I’m Not There, an imaginative and at times surreal biopic inspired by Bob Dylan’s life and music, in which six actors depict different facets of Dylan’s public persona. I first saw the film when it was release and recall being a tad disappointed at the time and unsatisfied – although I did  think that Cate Blanchett was fabulous as electric Bob.

Second time around, however, thought it a marvelous film full of allusions and illusions, facts and fictions, follies and fantasies. The selection of songs was superb, particularly Memphis Blues Again during the many railroad sequences, Ballad of a Thin Man in a smokey Blonde on Blonde cabaret, and The Man in the Dark Black Coat as the leitmotif for the Billy the Kid parable. The mix of extracts from interviews, chronicles, and other stuff was fascinating, and with the lyrics of the songs, demonstrate just what a gifted poet and songwriter Dylan was and is – which is the message Thomas gives in his professorial take on the man.

Cate was, as before, peerless. A great choice if a daring one on the producer’s part.  She has the voice, the gestures, the body language down to a tee. She got a global globe award for that, and an Oscar nomination. Ben Whishaw as French poet Arthur Rimbaud is also very good, as is gorgeous Frenchie Charlotte Gainsbourg as Susie/Sara. And, much to my surprise, Richard Gere was good as the aging Billy the Kid (he got away after Pat Garrett done him in).

The weirdest thing is that just that morning, I was reading the lyrics to Tombstone Blues. And the second song up in I’m Not There was Tombstone Blues, sung by the late Richie Havens and a  little Marcus Carl Franklin who goes by the name of Woody. They didn’t sing the best verses, but there is a cut, later on, to a  Vietnam era President Johnson saying “the sun is not yellow, it’s chicken”. How about that?

With Bob Dylan once more on our fair shores, critic and author Peter Craven explains how Dylan’s “way with words helped change our times”.

It is reproduced below to surmount News Corp’s paywall.

Bob Dylan: rock poet’s way with words helped to change our times

Peter Craven, The Australian, 11th August 2018

For a lot of people who were young in the 1960s and starting to think of themselves as adults, Bob Dylan was a kind of god. And the funny thing is that this image of him as a sort of dynamised genius, a cross between Shakespeare and Marlon Brando, has never really gone away. We thought of him as a great songwriter who was also a great performer and, in a thrilling way, a great poet. And somehow this atmosphere of awe remains.

Dylan released what is probably his greatest album, Blonde on Blonde, in mid-1966 — 52 years ago — yet on his present Australian tour (his first was, you guessed it, in 1966) a lot of bright young kids, millennials aged 22 or so, who are a bit bored with Shakespeare and a bit vague about Brando, will be there along with contingents of their parents or grandparents.

Rock music is partly a domain of classic fashion and no one is going to shift Dylan’s status because, in its contemporary aspect, Dylan created it. As he said to Keith Richards, that old villain of the Rolling Stones, “I could’ve written Satisfaction but you couldn’t have written Desolation Row.” Is that why they gave him the Nobel Prize in Literature two years ago? The fact he could write a 12-minute rock song that could include lines such as:

And Ezra Pound and TS Eliot
Fighting in the captain’s tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers
Between the windows of the sea
Where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much
About Desolation Row

Is it that with Dylan, and especially the Dylan of those great records when the singer went electric (though Desolation Row is plucked out on an acoustic guitar with only the lamentation of the harmonica by way of accompaniment), rock music had thrown up a figure with the courage to trail the greatest artistic pretensions like a cloak?

Think of those mermaids in this long, deliberate monstrosity of a song, so lame with the limitations of musical talent and so grand and sepulchral in the way it overcomes them. Do the mermaids deliberately invoke TS Eliot’s Prufrock (“I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me.”)?

Who knows? You could almost say who cares, as the logic of Desolation Row is annihilating because — whether by design or accident — it’s a pop-art replica of Eliot’s The Waste Land. It’s as if Dylan has revised and rewritten Eliot’s poem and turned it into his own.

All of which is weird beyond belief. Dylan is the singer-songwriter with the highest reputation in the history of rock music, if not the whole of popular music, yet this reputation depends pretty absolutely on a few hours of music that he wrote in the 60s — between his second LP, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, in 1963 and John Wesley Harding in 1967, where he is already tending towards lean meditations on the bare bones of country music.

The only other album for which the very highest claims continue to be made is Blood on the Tracks,which dates from 1975 and is venerated by many enthusiasts, but which to the diehards sounds a bit like Dylan imitating himself, whatever claims you make for songs such as Tangled Up in Blue and Idiot Wind, and however endearing it is to hear Dylan throw off lines like “Relationships have all been bad / Mine’ve been like Verlaine’s and Rimbaud”.

You can make a case that Dylan is very like Rimbaud — the French teenager who wrote some of the greatest poetry of the later 19th century — not in his relationships but in his relation to language. Like the French adolescent prodigy he took the poetic diction of our tradition — in its further reach, Western civilisation — and remade it in his own image.

So, in one way he’s like Rimbaud because he blazed so young, so briefly and so brilliantly, and lived to outlive his genius. Though it’s odd in a way to think that with Dylan, as with the casualties of rock 50 years ago (such as Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix), the reputation depends on the early work.

Then again, that’s some kind of norm, isn’t it? Think of how much the Rolling Stones trade on the vigour of what they wrote 50 or more years ago.

The 60s were when popular music upped its ante. Philosopher Raimond Gaita said to me once that before Dylan, anyone at a university was expected to educate themselves in classical music, according to their limits, but afterwards not. It helped of course that Dylan burst on the world in the early 60s with songs such as Blowin’ in the Wind, so that he’s still sometimes thought of as a folk singer and a protest singer.

Poet Robert Lowell, who thought Dylan wrote some great lines though not sustained poems, said he had “a Caruso voice”, and it’s true that he had a voice — and in some sense still does — of such overpowering individuality that it haunts or harrows the soul.

He created his early music by sounding the depths of what he could learn from Woody Guthrie and the blues, but he gave it a grave monumentality that was at the same time radically individual — it sounded like nothing on earth, it didn’t sound like anything that was ordinarily called singing — yet it seemed, too, to speak for the folk, so that when he says in With God on Our Side “The country I come from / Is called the Midwest”, you believe him.

In fact, as “the unwashed phenomenon, the original vagabond” — as Joan Baez, his one-time lover and very beautiful vocal interpreter once called him — Dylan crisscrosses the US. But in his work from the mid-60s — in particular in the great songs on Blonde on Blonde such as Visions of Johanna (“Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re tryin’ to be so quiet? / We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it”) — he sings in a New York accent.

It’s the voice of the greatest of urban metropolises that enunciates that great line from Just Like a Woman — “I was hungry and it was your world”.

How could he dare to write with that kind of plainness and that kind of grandeur? And how could he create such an opalescent, allusive and elusive thing as the side-long, 11-minute Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands? Perhaps it’s an image of the eternally mourning woman, widowed by life: “And your magazine-husband who one day just had to go” — as much a transcendence of the popular culture it plays on as the very greatest of Warhol.

And that’s the trick with Dylan: he inhabits the form of an idiom he is re-creating. He sounds grounded in the deepest folk tradition yet the inimitable voice is the voice of something that a lifetime ago was a form of rock ’n’ roll. Think of the stately ravaged opening of Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues:“When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez / And it’s Easter time, too / And your gravity fails / And negativity don’t pull you through …” It sounds pretentious to say this sounds like Baudelaire, but it does.

Dylan’s idiom — a language that was at once streetwise and capable of literary reference — also had extraordinary emotional range. Think of the blistering invective of Positively 4th Street and then place it against the lyricism of Love Minus Zero/No Limit (“My love she speaks like silence / Without ideals or violence / She doesn’t have to say she’s faithful / Yet she’s true, like ice, like fire …”) There’s a dazzling simplicity in that but the juxtaposition of “ideals” and “violence” is completely new in the world of popular music.

The times were a-changing and there’s a symbolic sense in which Dylan changed them. Quite early on he could write a song such as The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll that had as its refrain “But you who philosophise disgrace and criticise all fears” where “philosophise” is used in the sense of rationalise but the upshot has a Shakespearean effect; it’s as if Dylan bypasses ordinary literary language to create a kind of sung poetry shorn of artifice.

And it’s there in the most lushly romantic and dreamy of Dylan’s songs, Mr Tambourine Man, perhaps the clearest example of why he is such a great songwriter, why he was once such a dazzling singer and why he is a poet.

In Ballad of a Thin Man Dylan derides someone who has been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books and is described as having discussed lepers and crooks with great lawyers.

I once discussed Dylan with one of the world’s great literary critics, Christopher Ricks — the man who did the knockout edition of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and who wrote the knockdown defence of Milton against his modernist critics. Ricks is one of Dylan’s most formidable admirers. He believes that when you put Dylan’s words together with music, he is an extraordinary maker of worlds out of words.

Dylan created for the rock music of the baby boomer generation a poetic language equal to its hubris in thinking it could discover a new heaven and a new earth, that it could encompass a radical new politics and some kind of derangement of the senses that might open up a new spirituality.

It may be that all these things were delusions or potential traps, but the language he used to shape and shade them has outlasted its occasion. That’s why it speaks to the millennials. That’s why they’ll be there in droves to see the grand old man of rock who is also so much more.

Dylan changed the language in which we think and feel.

Decades ago I gave up rock music and tried my way with classical music. But Dylan’s words and music have never left my mind.

When we shore up the ruins of what we have made Western civilisation, how could he not have a high and mighty place? Who do we think could compare with him?

I’ve read a lot about Dylan, and Peter Craven’s article is excellent, but the thing is, no words seem aver to come anywhere near accurately describing what seems to be a very personal and unique relationship / interpretation each fan of Dylan has with his work.

Here are some of the comments posted in respnse to Craven’s piece:

You make sweeping statements of Dylan’s relevance and output in the context of “decades ago I gave up rock music”. Making your critique of the greatest singer/songwriter’s career output rather shallow. “Tried my way with classical music” – good for you! In my experience, and in my own case, Dylan goes deep and has produced extraordinary work over decades, because of his singing and phrasing. The emotion, uniqueness and genius of his singing. Unfortunately his live voice has been off badly, imo, for about a decade now. The man is genius but it isn’t because of the songwriting. He should never have received a Nobel for Lit, that’s says more about the self important (why do we give it so much attention?) Nobel Academy than anything else. Dylan is rock n rolls greatest and most influential singer songwriter by a million miles. He is steep in rock, country, blues, folk and Americana. How predictable we get another tired article in a broadsheet newspaper misunderstandings & representing Dylan and from someone who “gave up Rock decades ago”. Why give up rock? And gave it up for classical, how worthy!!

He also wrote two of the most vicious put- down songs ever: “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Positively Fourth Street”.

Have seen him three times – each time was different. Would see him again. Love the fact that he constantly reinvents his classics and always has a sensational group of musicians with him. This concert is no exception – his piano playing is standout.

Dylan, in centuries to come, will not be so much seen as a singer song writer, but a written history of humans of the western world of the 20th century. Sent from the future to document and capture a deep understanding of the soul of humanity.

You get the impression of Dylan as an almost unsurpassed songwriter but reluctant performer, due to the brilliant cover versions of his songs. Think of Hendrix with All Along the Watchtower, Peter Paul and Mary with Too Much of Nothing (and Blowin’ in the Wind), Manfred Mann with Just Like a Woman and You Angel You, Bryan Ferry with A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall, and UB40 with I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight.

l And you might add Simon and Garfunkel’s repertoire…The Sounds of Silence, Bridge Over Troubled Waters, and more thought-generating songs.

@Peter “reluctant performer”!!. No one in the history of rock n roll anywhere near is level of fame and influence has performed as many times. He is engaged in the “Never Ending Tour” that has been going essentially non-stop for two decades! Performance is the absolute essence of who and what Dylan is.

At 76 years of age I loved the good music of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Occasionally I would hear the radio commentator, mention the name Bob Dylan but that was it. Never knew his songs or was ever interested in them.

He’s my favourite songwriter of all time and undoubtedly a genius, but I gave up on his concerts years ago. There seemed little point when he’d be half way into a song before I could actually (sort of) recognise it. I’ll stick to my record collection – and there are quite a few stinkers in there too – and memories of the great concerts.

I don’t agree with much that Peter Fitzsimmons says, but he called Dylan an impressionist and I think that is the best description of him.

No mention of “Lay lady Lay”. my favourite love song. ” whatever colours you have in your mind, I’ll show them to you, you’ll see them shine” Of course ” lay across my big brass bed” is not too shabby either.

His concerts have been unattendable for 30 years. Still a genius.

He may well be a good poet and songwriter. I agree with Bob Rogers, he should leave performing to others.

f only van Gogh painted like da Vinci, imagine how much better his paintings would be!

A Parting Glass – farewell to an old friend

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
TS. Elliot, Little Gidding

“One of those days in England, with a sword in every pond”, sang Roy Harper, the high priest of anglo-angst. And so it was when we looked out on England and imagined a wider world. Our journey took us to this farthest shore on the brink of the mighty Pacific.

This month saw the passing of a fine old friend whom I’d first met fifty years ago this September when we arrived as young freshmen at the provincial red-brick university in Reading, Berkshire, a provincial southern town on the banks of the River Thames, less salubrious than its famous riverine neighbours Oxford and Windsor, and noted mainly for biscuits and beer. Fate determined that a bunch of disparate ingenues from all parts of the island boarded at the same ‘hall of residence’.

It was there that John and I bonded through folk music. I had a battered Spanish guitar that I’d strung  with steel strings, and had started writing songs and playing them to our friends. One day,  I left my guitar with John and headed to Hull to visit an old school chum and do my first trip (“those were days, yes they were, those were the days”). When I’d landed and hitch-hiked home, John had not only mastered the instrument, but was able to play me a couple of his favourite songs – Ralph McTell’s Streets of  London and Michael Chapman’s One Time Thing (see below). Very soon, he could play them note-perfect from just listening to the vinyl. Instead of me showing him chords and finger picking, he was teaching me. And whilst emulating his guitar idols, over time he assembled a fine repertoire of his own songs.

With a bunch of university friends, we later flatted in London whilst they earned enough money to get themselves overland to Australia. There, two of the fellowship settled down, built families and careers, and raised a mob of clever, creative and beautiful children. I was never born to follow; but life seeks out its own highways and byways, and in time these led me also DownUnder.

Those London days inspired my Harperesque, navel-gazing epic London John (see below).

Though his later life rendered him victim to a treasonous DNA, he fostered and followed through a passion for the wide, dry flatlands west of the Great Divide. He would undertake long-distance solo driving tours “beyond the Black Stump” (which is to say “the back of beyond”, or more prosaically,  “to buggery”); and would send us dispatches of his journeying, with beautiful photographs and stories of shooting the breeze with the locals and playing his guitar in pubs and by camp fires. When driving was physically no longer an option, he’d catch the train to outback Broken Hill.

Like Banjo Paterson, one of our national bards, and his poetic alter-ego Clancy of the Overflow, he treasured “the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended, and at night, the wond’rous glory of the everlasting stars.

Listen to John’s songs on SoundCloud.

Farewell to North Finchley 1992

Back in the Day …

All those years ago …
Northern lads in a southern town.
Working-class in a middle-class world.
To Reading we’d come and then to London Town.
We are all compadres still.

Lent you my old guitar when I was roved out.
I came home and you’d played like a pro.
Streets of London and One Time Thing.
Note perfect played by ear.
And you were teaching me.

In London we busked on the Undergound
Got busted when playing Pavan.
Bow Street Magistrates Court.
“Soliciting reward without license”.
The only record we’d make together.

You took the hippie trail to Asia and beyond.
Bound for Bondi Beach.
Sang of mushrooms and a dog on the shore.
Four amigos washed ashore DownUnder.
Where you found your true home.

I came hither by another road.
Our paths forever criss-crossed.
Like ships passing in the night.
You headed always to the bush
But got to see our forest home.

Once you lent me your Martin guitar.
And I  went and lost it.
You probably never forgave me for that.
But maybe you’ll find it again in the valley beyond.
Because old friends always meet again.

There’s a song we’d all sung
When we were all young.
Of when we were no longer so.
Written by an ancient Greek
Over two thousand years ago.

I’d rolled it into a song of my own
As bold songwriters do.
And as years run us down and transfigure us
It echoes through the foggy ruins of time.
I hear it now as clear as the days we sang:

In those days when were men,
Ah, you should’ve seen us then.
We were noted our for our courage and agility.
We carried all before us
In battle and in chorus,
And no one could’ve doubted our virility.
But those days are past and gone
And the feathers of the swan
Are no whiter than our heads
For now we’re old.
And yet, as you can see,
Thinning relics we may be,
In spirit, we’re still
Manly, young and bold.

Farewell, old friend,
And flights of angels sing you to your rest.

Vale John Rugg 1949 -2018

Valances

                  (early in the morning at break of day)

Valance: The capacity of something to unite, react, or interact with something; connections; relationships.

In the afternoon they came upon a land in which it seemed always afternoon.
Lord Alfred Tennyson, The Lotus Eaters

Out of the cradle so restlessly rocking,
Ringing the changes that resonate still,
The rolling momentum of memory sailing
Like some graceful galleon, onwards until

We came in due course to harmonious havens,
Seeking the warmth of another land’s sun –
Such was the feeling, and such was the motion
Of onwards, and upwards, and endlessly on,

Out of those valances, casual, knowing,
Seeking out payments for debts never due,
The curious cadence of melodies flowing,
Gathering vagrants in pastures anew,

Forgotten weekends of such transient yearnings,
The edginess felt as we near a strange land,
Vanishing echoes of strange dreams returning,
Just out of reach of the memory’s hand,

They’re falling like mist through my arms,
Flowing like mist through my arms,
Broken memories, fractured songs
Are flowing like mist,

Flowing like mist through my arms,
Flowing like mist through my arms,
Broken memories, fractured songs
Are flowing like mist, like mist through my arms.

Out of the days of such recklessly wandering,
Seeking sensation and stretching the mind,
Journeying aimlessly, canyons and castles
Pass ageless and ageing and captive in time,

What lies before us and what lies behind us
Are little compared to the treasures we find,
Are nothing compared to what’s lying within us
As secrets unfold and the stories unwind,

And down through the ages, the prophets and sages
Set beacons to guide us both forward and aft,
We rise on the billow, descend to the hollow,’
Climb to the top-mast, or we cling to the raft,

And when all is unravelled, the road that’s less travelled
Winds back to the start, and we know it again
For the first time, and we know that there’s no more to say,
So early in the morning, at breaking of day.

Falling like mist through my arms,
Flowing like mist through my arms,
Broken memories, fractured songs
Are flowing like mist,

Flowing like mist through my arms,
Flowing like mist through my arms,
Broken memories, fractured songs
Are flowing like mist, like mist through my arms.

© Paul Hemphill 2012

Other memories of the ‘Sixties in Into That Howling Infinite: Back in the day: and A Window On A Gone World

  The Old Man’s Tale

Part One

In those days when men were men,
Ah, you should have seen us then
We were noted for our courage and agility.
How we carried all before us,
Both in battle and in chorus,
And no-one one could have questioned our virility.

But those days are past and gone,
And the feathers of the swan
Are no whiter than our heads, for we are old;
And yet as you may see,
Thinning relics we may be,
In spirit we’re still manly young and bold.

Though we may be phased out crocks,
The whiteness of our locks,
Does the country better credit, I should say,
Than the ringlets and the fashions
And the wild immoral passions
Of the namby-pamby youngsters of today.

But for all our sacrifice for to make a better life,
For those who followed to be proud and free.
Oh, we had to watch you grow
Into some horticultural show.
“Was it thus worth all our toil?” The dead ask me.

We lived like men, we looked the part;
We held our country to our heart;
We always did our best and better still;
But you who came too late to fight,
You’re living off the state alright,
And from our hard exertions, take your fill.

But those days, alas, are gone,
And the feathers of the swan
Are no whiter than our heads for now we’re old.
But if we could have seen
What the fruits of toil would’ve been,
Would we still have been so manly, young and bold?

Part Two

The image of my life is laid out before me:
It shows how well I fate, how hard I fall;
How people curse and jibe, how friends ignore me;
And I scream in a soundless voice, “I don’t care at all”.

You look at the world through different eyes to me:
You see life in a greyer shade of white;
Embrace the past, dictating what is there for me;
Telling me what is wrong and just what is right.

But I tell you I just don’t care.
You can’t change my mind.
And all your stories just won’t wear.
Let se speak my mind.

So i don’t fit your picture of the ideal man,
And if I don’t impress your sight – you say I must.
If I don’t don’t suit your taste like so many others can,
Must I conform to gain your meaningless trust?

I tell you I just don’t care.
You can’t harm my mind.
And all your fictions just won’t wear;
Let me speak my mind.

You say my behaviour’s a disgrace to modern life.
This permissive way of living’s got to stop!
“Why can’t you accept the guidance
Of those who are older and wiser?”

But then I just don’t have a wife to swap,
Or the guns to kill,
Or the power to guide men’s lives,
Or to bend their will,

And I don’t have the blood on my hands,
And I don’t have lies in my mind,
And your explanations won’t wear,
And  you won’t change my nine.

And my ears are not deaf to the tears,
And my eyes are not blind to the plight,
And my senses not numb to a world
That has yet to emerge from its night.

Put me on the road to God;
I know it’s the path to Hell;
Ins if I fall, don’t  heed my call.
Just say it was just as well.

© Paul Hemphill, September 1969

Some of John’s favourite songs:

Michael Chapman: One Time Thing. This was one of John’s early favourites back in the day. He’d borrowed guitar when I’d gone off on a frolic and when I’d got back. he’d not only learned how to play guitar, but he played this note perfect – and sang it much better than Chapman.

 Amazing Blondel : Pavan. We got busted when we played this on the London Underground. John used to play the flute riff on his guitar. It was the only record we made together – in Bow Streets Magistrates Court!

Al Stewart. Ivich. Al was a longtime favourite of John’s, from Reading days, and we used to go to see him in Cousins in Soho when we lived in London.  John admired his excellent guitar-work.  A friend of ours – ex-GF of one of our flatmates, actually – went out with Al for a while. I think John had left for Australia by then, but I got to know him. He even came for supper at my folks’ home in Birmingham when he played there once. And most amusing, that was.

Here’s another Al Stewart song that John liked, In Brooklyn

Roy Harper, the English High Priest of Angst, was another of John’s favourites. Here’s one of his ‘softer’ songs. Very nice. Another Day.

And probably, John’s all time favourite, Ralph McTell’s Streets of London. John played this note perfect too, from the get-go. I hated it, but there’s no accounting for bad taste.

Photo Gallery

Picnic in Whiteknights Park 1969. 
The M1, Summer 1972. Brendan, John, Eric and Paul
Hemphill Family Home, Birmingham, Summer 1972
Bardwell Park, October 1983 Paul, John, Andrew, Damian, Christian and Jean
Federal Hotel, Bellingen, December 2013

https://soundcloud.com/user6120518-1/london-john-freefall

Losing Earth – the decade we almost stopped climate change

Paul Hemphill 2 Comments

“Thirty years ago, we had a chance to save our planet. Almost nothing stood in our way – except ourselves”.

 The New York Times recently devoted its weekly magazine to one article only, a lengthy feature by American novelist and essayist Nathaniel Rich.

Losing Earth is a historical narrative of the years 1979 to 1989, a decade when humankind first came to a broad understanding of the causes and dangers of global warming and climate change. Complementing the text is a series of aerial photographs and videos taken over the past year by George Steinmetz. The article is based on 18 months of reporting and well over a hundred interviews. It tracks the efforts of a small group of American scientists, activists and politicians to raise the alarm and stave off catastrophe.

It will come as a revelation to understand how thoroughly they grasped the problem and how close they came to solving it.

As early as the mid ‘sixties, American scientists and intelligence experts were warning how increasing carbon emissions and what Rich describes as “the unwitting weaponisation of the weather” could alter weather patterns and wreak famine, drought and economic collapse. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee was its published its executive report on carbon dioxide warned of the rapid melting of Antarctica, rising seas, increased acidity of fresh waters — changes that would require no less than a coordinated global effort to forestall. In 1974, during Richard Nixon’s presidency, the C.I.A. issued a classified report on the carbon-dioxide problem. It concluded that climate change had begun around 1960 and had “already caused major economic problems throughout the world.” The future economic and political impacts would be “almost beyond comprehension.”

It was recognised that unless coal production and use was phased out and fossil fuel combustion dramatically reduced, the world was careering toward an existential crisis. And the all important questions were asked: Could the global warming trend be reversed? Was there time to act? How would a global commitment to cease burning fossil fuels come about,? And, crucially, who had the power to make such a thing happen?

The ritual repeated itself every few years. Industry scientists, at the behest of their corporate bosses, reviewed the problem and found good reasons for alarm and better excuses to do nothing. Why should they act when almost nobody within the United States government — nor, for that matter, within the environmental movement — seemed worried?

Why take on an intractable problem that would not be detected until this generation of employees was safely retired? Worse, the solutions seemed more punitive than the problem itself. Historically, energy use had correlated to economic growth — the more fossil fuels we burned, the better our lives became. Why mess with that?

In July 1883, National Academy of Sciences commissioned a 500 page report, ‘Changing Clinate’. Things were dire but there should be caution and not panic. Better to wait and see. Better to bet on American ingenuity to save the day. Yes, the climate would change, mostly for the worst, but future generations would be better equipped to change with it. America had solved every existential problem it had confronted over the previous generation; it would not be daunted by an excess of carbon dioxide.

The Washington Post called this “clarion calls to inaction”, loud-sounding nothing’s which the administration and the fossil-fuel industry willingly bought into.

Whilst acknowledging the phenomenon, scientists, politicians and fossil industry executives argued about the urgency and the means. President Reagan indeed appeared determined to reverse the environmental achievements of Jimmy Carter, before undoing those of Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy and, if he could get away with it, Theodore Roosevelt.

Because of the lag between cause and effect, it was unlikely that humankind would detect hard evidence of warming until it was too late to reverse it. At a congressional hearing in 1982, Melvin Calvin, a Berkeley chemist who won the Nobel Prize for his work on the carbon cycle, said that it was useless to wait for stronger evidence of warming. The time for action was past … “It is already later than you think.”

Three decades ago, the problem was recognized by scientists, industrial leaders and politicians of all parties. But then, it was if a stupid bomb dropped. As Rich writes in his epilogue, “Everyone knew — and we all still know. We know that the transformations of our planet, which will come gradually and suddenly, will reconfigure the political world order. We know that if we don’t act to reduce emissions, we risk the collapse of civilization. We also know that, without a gargantuan intervention, whatever happens will be worse for our children, worse yet for their children and even worse still for their children’s children, whose lives, our actions have demonstrated, mean nothing to us”.

Can we turn things around? The prognosis is not an optimistic one. It would appear that human beings, whether in global organizations, democracies, industries, political parties or as individuals, are incapable of sacrificing present convenience to forestall a penalty imposed on future generations. “ … we have trained ourselves, whether culturally or evolutionarily, to obsess over the present, worry about the medium term and cast the long term out of our minds, as we might spit out a poison”.

Read on…

Milo Down Under

Paul Hemphill 2 Comments

Is it only six months since the cream of Australia’s intelligentsia, including those famous insider outsiders Mark Latham and Ross Cameron, News Corp flunkies Andrew Bolt and Janet Albrechtson, Alan Jones (of course), the entire Whine Nation cabal, including the irritating dwarf Malcolm Roberts (now consigned to that limbo where lame ex-pollies languish), and that gruesome twosome Cory Bernadi and George Christiansen rocked up to salute confused libertarian and Alt-Right poster-boy Milo Yiannopoulos?

[Author’s note: this piece was penned (don’t we miss that anachronism!) in a fit of frolic and nostalgia. I found Milo’s adventures in Australia quite entertaining and informative. May he come back soon! Many of the places and personages mentioned herein may be unknown to readers who are unacquainted with the politics of our great southern land. I beg your indulgence.]

That giant can of ‘Milo’ ?  ‘Milo’ is a chocolate powder, often served in hot milk, and commonly given to kiddies as a dinkum night-cap (thus guaranteed to keep them up all night long). It is one of many Aussie icons – alongside meat pies, lamington cakes, kangaroos, the late Steve Irwin, and the ABC (our national broadcaster, which many on the right would like to see abolished).  And we have many such BIG Things in Australia. Like the Big Merino in Goulburn, the Big Prawn in Ballina, and the Big Banana in my own regional centre, Coffs Harbour]

Did Milo REALLY make such a big impression DownUnder when he was out here last December? At the time, I thought that it was just shock jocks, insider “outsiders” (or is it outsider “insiders”?), a One Nation coven, and a mob of journos who view politics as entertainment, who fawned at the feet of this strange muppet.

I guess we will never really know because the media, forever breathlessly covering our antipodean political blood-sport, generally loses all sense of objectivity and proportion. And in vicariously entertaining and picturesque way, the carnival was quite newsworthy.

There was wide media coverage as demonstrators of all stripes flocked to Milo’s clandestine but well-publicized-Melbourne gig in their tens and proceeded to get stuck into each other, and the police turned out in force to break up the very telegenic brawl. Milo’s myrmidons were sighted sporting Trump flags and red “Make America Great Again” caps (which goes to show what an unoriginal lot we Aussies are). Guy Rundle of e-zine Crikey sent an entertaining dispatch from the Flemington front-line on 4th December 2018 (it is republished below). Damian Costas, the organizer of the event, who also happens to be the publisher of Australian Penthouse, Was billed A$50,000 for the services of the boys in blues, but he has yet to pay up. A case of “free speech, one each”?

 

it was a gift that kept on giving. Soon afterwards, celebrity sex therapist, Milo-fangirl and occasional News Corp mouthpiece Bettina Arndt spent quality time with Milo (our featured image), and joined the opinionistas of the House of Rupert by writing to a News Corp and Institute of Public Affairs template in an opinion piece in The Australian which echoed a Janet Albrechtsonesque angst about left-wing university group-think into a contrived diatribe against the preponderance of young women in said left-wing ranks. Universities, she says, are brainwashing our damsels and transforming them into latter-day Mesdames Defarge.

And yet, Betty, maybe girls were already left-wing before they enrolled in Uni. And one really can understand why they veer to the left given the example set by the conservative right-wing males who dominate our politics, business, churches and media. Sisters are doing it for themselves, and “the powers that be” do not like it.

They do not like very much, it seems. It is becoming quite predictable that “culture war” opinionistas coopt any contrarian who comes along as a crusader for their conservative cause. Late militant atheist Brit Christopher Hitchens; dissenting Danish environmentalist Bjorn Lomberg; Canadian psychologist Jordan Petersen. Even eccentric and useless climate-change denialist Viscount Christopher Walter Monckton. So it was not unusual that Milo got a guernsey from the News Corp chattercrats. As did Milo’s mate, photogenic Canadian Alt Right poster girl Lauren Southern who dropped in on us last month. Laurie canceled her New Zealand speaking tour, however, after the Mayor of Auckland banned her from speaking in his burgh. Yet another example of how the Kiwis are doing things better than its neighbour across the Tasman these days.

Southern Discomfort

The whole Milo mythos is founded upon a world of make-belief, a political world overly determined by rhetoric, fear and loathing, fireworks and fictions. It is driven by false narratives that envelop false hopes and expectations. But, like that big can of chocolate powder, we like big things in Australia, and if they are not as huge as we like them, in the immortal word of Captain Jean-Luc Picard, we make it so …

And so, whenever the likes of Milo and his ilk land on our fatuous shore, they are feted by the right and vilified by the left whilst the affronted at every hand huff and puff in self-righteous indignation, posture and pontificate, vigorously virtue-signaling energetically to their minuscule covens. The chucks cluck, the dogs bark, and the circus leaves town.

As Led Zeppelin once crooned, “Oh, it makes you wonder!”. But, as John Lennon sang: “Strange days indeed! Most peculiar, Mama!”

[I’ve just remembered what Milo’s martial get-up reminds me of – Michael Jackson. As the Donald would say, “Sad”]

Peter Fitzsimmons wrote a highly amusing piece in the SMH recently. Read it here, or in full at the end of this post, he also reveals that Brexit bon-viveur Nigel Farge will grace our shores shortly. be still my beating heart!

For more in In That Howling Infinite on Australia’s politics, see Outside Looking in;  Western Civilization and the long, dark tea-time of The Australian’s Soul; and Conservatism in Crisis

Guy Rundle reminisces in Crikey ,4th December 2018:

Night had fallen on Flemington when your correspondent rocked up to the Milo extravaganza. The houso flats across the road, sheer cliffs of lights, the Citylink overpass glowing green on the other side.

Racecourse Road was blocked off either side of the Milo venue, Melbourne Pavilion, an old art deco hall with a concrete box attached to one end of it. “Weddings Events Functions” reads the sign on the side. All that, and, inevitably, boxing too.

Big cop trucks at each end of the area, flashing red and blue, cop helicopter thrumming overhead.

Cops and cops and cops around. Cops in yellow hi-viz; cops in blue; black-clad ninja-turtle riot squad. Rings and rings of them. Cops in number absurd.

“No place for fascists no place for fascists” or something, shout coming from the grounds beneath the flats. “We live here, fuck off.” The remnant left protesters, hardy anarchists mostly, had been joined by locals, young mainly, African mainly, from the flats.

The Milo late-show crowd were arriving on the other side of the street. They gleamed white in the fluoro and arc lights. A few Mediterranean types, of martial arts/UFC styling, top-crop hair and T-shirted, hard-body man tits. But mostly Anglo, boiled-potato pale.

“They don’t even know what they’re protesting,” they laughed, at the protesters.

“It was easy to get a park, because protestors don’t own cars.” That got a big laugh.

And:

“How can Milo be a racist? He’s married to a black man!”

“I know! I know!”

Heard that exchange six times if once. A sort of alt-right ring tone.

I’d missed the early session argy-bargy, because I’d been to — what else? — a book launch in Fitzroy. The first show crowd were just coming out, the cops directing them down a corridor between temporary barriers, running down a side street.

“Go go go go this way this way this way” — the cops treated it like they were getting the Kurds out of Iraq. The protesters were half a kilometre away.

“Lot of cops to protect one paedophilia advocate,” I said loudly, and one cop on the end of the line winced, visibly. I made a mental note.

The place was in lockdown, yet I was drifting easily back and forth between the lines, threading through the riot cops, my press card in a lanyard. Admirable respect for free activity of the press I thought.

Then I looked at the stage door, where bouncers and tour officials were gathered. Fat men in dark suits and lanyards, they — ah.

The cops thought I was with the tour.

There were 600 in the early show, took a while to get them out. They clutched copies of Dangerous, Milo’s self-published book, and copies of Australian Penthouse, sponsors of the tour, and my sometime publishers (hello, fellows! You still owe me author’s copies of the September and October issues by the way. Send them to the Crikey office, please).

“The show was great,” Trisha told me, without much prompting. Trump-style red baseball cap, bottle-blonde, fake-leather jacket, two copies of Dangerous, two copies of Penthouse. “I just love him, he’s so funny.”

“What do you like in what he’s saying?”

She thought for a long time.

“Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh … well, I mean immigration. Not that we don’t like Muslims! Just not the wrong ones!”

“There anyone in Australia who inspires you like he does?”

“No one! No one!”

“Andrew Bolt?”

“He’s pretty boring.”

‘What about the pro-paedophilia stuff? ‘Thirteen year old boys can consent meaningfully’ …”

Trisha squirmed.

Ponytail man came up. There were a lot of ponytails in this crowd. Long, short, ’80s adman, postmodern architect, vegan grindcore maleorexic, Milo’s little ponies.

“I’ve seen Milo four times.” Ponytail man was soft-faced, soft-bodied. Milo men are either hard-body keto warriors, living off bullet coffee enemas and T-gel patches, or they appear to be carved from a giant bar of soap. Ponytail man wore a red tie, and a white cotton suit, over hips that wobbled like an offal tray.

“How was he tonight?”

“Top form, top form.” As if speaking of an employee.

“What’s the most important issue facing Australia today?”

“Oh corporate control. Banks, globalisation …”

“Who do you like politically here-“

“Oh the Citizens Electoral Council make … sense.” (A LaRouchite! I’d found a LaRouchite!)

“We need a state-owned bank, public ownership,” he said.

“But that’s exactly what most of the protesters would say!”

“Well, yes, we’ve got to build bridges …”

“And Milo, well, as far as he has any position at all, he’s sort of a gay Thatcherite.”

Ponytail’s eyes peeped out his puffy face, imploringly: don’t spoil this for me.

“What do you do?”

“I’m a music producer.”

“You make a living from that?”

“Well no,” he laughed, like George Martin between Beatles LPs. “I’m living off savings. And,” voice lowered, “getting some payments from the government.” (“Ah, Mr Ponytail,” the voice said on the phone at midnight, “you are too dangerous not to have on our side. Your fee will be dispatched fortnightly disguised as a Centrelink payment.”)

The helicopter thrummed, the protesters got louder. People were coming out of the flats now, it was getting big. Couple of smoke bombs went off near the tram stop, and the riot squad formed up in a phalanx. This was all piss-weak, yet they looked skittish. The more suited up cops are, the more scared they get.

Late-show arrivals, early-show departures commingled. Ross Cameron, the show MC, was walking around, looking at his notes, like anyone gave a damn what he said.

“You’re going to miss the late show Ross,” I said.

He looked up.

“Oh you’re right, yes, thanks very much,” and scurried in through the stage door. He thought I was security, too. Jesus, six Trots in Target suits and lanyards could have taken this place. It was Stupidolooza.

“Do you want to know what I think?” A large blonde swayed towards me, in big blue comedy shades, Jimmy Buffett fan sans margarita, and said, and I will sign an affidavit to this conversation, “they don’t like us cos we support Trump! Yahhhhhh,” she yelled towards the protestors “we’re lefties”.

“Lefties?”

“Oh hang on, no, I get those two mixed up.”

Her equally imposing friend turned up. “Stop talking to him.”

“This is my friend Tziporah,” Lefty said. “She knows a lot of stuff.”

Tziporah! Tziporah Malkah! Kate Fischer as was! Last time I’d seen her, I was writing lines for her for an awards night performance. A torturous joke that included the name “Wittgenstein”. It took a long time.

Tziporah had been casting herself as a Milo fan, or Milo-curious, hours earlier, posting a pic of herself kissing his pic on her “access all areas” pass. Now they wouldn’t let her in. Malkah and Lefty tottered back and forth between the entrances, but they’d been barred.

“You want to talk, call my agent,” Malkah said.

“But I don’t want to talk.”

“Call my agent.”

They tottered off.

The crowd was herded in, the old one herded off, the protesters got louder, plastic bottles started flying across the road.

Suddenly there was loud shouting, and a megaphone “back back, leave them alone …” and the riot squad, having demobbed, formed up again, and started coming across Racecourse Road to the flats.

I walked across with a few others. Malkah and Leftie, passes still dangling, had walked across to talk to the protesters, locals now, nearly all African, and appeared to have asked a question about Muslim extremism, and the organisers were having a bit of trouble restraining some of the more rambunctious.

“Back, back … OK OK look,” the organiser glanced around. No TV still around. “Leave the women alone! Leave the women alone!” Yeah. That would not have looked good on the news.

“Why are they holding this here –” one of the kids asked me, “to insult us?”

“It’s a boxing venue. They-“

The last anarchist charged over, white as the moon. “Don’t talk to the media! Don’t talk to the media.”

Big mistake. The kids, seeing his pale face and black hoodie thought he was a Milo-ister and laid into him. The organisers had to wade in and rescue him. It was all sorted out.

At which point, of course, the riot squad began to move, the Behan principle taking over (“no situation so bad, a policeman cannot make it worse,” Brendan Behan said).

Banging on their shields, they came into the flats gardens in a flank that even I could see was far too long. The kids got behind them. There was pelting with empty mineral-water bottles, the equivalent of a stern letter to The Flemington Leader. The squad narrowed their line and charged deep into the gardens. The kids legged it easily.

Piqued, the squad set up camp, holding a corden inside the gardens for 45 minutes, an empty Fanta can from the windows bouncing off a helmet now and again.

I tried the line again.

“Four hundred cops on night shift to defend a paedophile sympathiser. You must feel really proud of your work.” Tried it about half a dozen times. Pretty sure it got a few wobbles. Tease the cops about being agents of the banks, etc, no response. But, overtime aside, I don’t think anyone signed on to defend a Hitler Youth tribute act.

The gardens quietened.

‘Bout 11.30pm a cop car pulled up. A senior cop got out, took a look at the pointless vigil, and said something sharpish to the field commander. The riot squad moved backward slowly, and in 10 minutes they were gone.

Across the road, somewhere inside, a gay man likely to faint at the sight of a visible panty line was adjudicating on which women were and weren’t fuckable. Today, he’s addressing the right at Parliament House. Australian conservatism in our time.

No need to import right wing nutters – we have enough of our own

Peter  Fitzsimmons, Sydney Morning Herald, 7th August 2018

It remains one of my favourite bits of rugby writing.

In the late 1980s, after a Wallaby of modest repute changed national rugby camps to turn out for the Irish team instead, a writer for the Irish Timescommented: “Why is Ireland importing bad rugby five-eighths? Don’t we have enough bad rugby five-eighths of our own?”

Might I ask a different version of the same question for Australia in 2018?

Why on earth are we importing so many “alt-right” political nutters to Australia on speaking tours? Seriously, don’t we have enough alt-right – whatever that is – nutters of our own?

The most recent visitor to our shores was a 23-year-old Canadian, Lauren Southern, whose schtick seems to be warning about the dangers of Islam, multiculturalism, immigration, political correctness and the left side of politics in general, while also trying to right the many wrongs done to white people just because they are white. I repeat: she is just 23-years-old. From the fine, peaceful, happy country of Canada.

I ask you: how likely is it that this young woman, as fine as she might be, will have some wisdom, some insight into Australian affairs, something she can tell us, warn us about, that our own people of her ilk haven’t been saying around the clock, on the radio, in reams of columns, in parliament, on the street, for years?

Police assemble at Broadmeadows train station to manage people protesting against Lauren Southern who is in Australia on a speaking tour.Photo: Darrian Traynor

Hasn’t Pauline Hanson been doing all of the above for a quarter of a century? Wasn’t our very own Malcolm Roberts a seer on these very issues? And isn’t he planning a comeback? (Where are you, Mr Roberts, by the way? A nation turns its lonely, bemused eyes to you.)

As for paying up to $750 to see Ms Southern, close-up, and speak? Please.

Save your money, my friends. Turn on Sky News After Dark any day of the week. You can watch hours of that kind of stuff, from the comfort of your own home. You can call Bronwyn Bishop “Butter,” ’cos she’s always on a roll, on those very subjects. And don’t forget Ross Cameron. And that other fellow, someone-or-other Hargraves.  On Sunday night, and I am not making this up, they even provided a platform for Blair Cottrell – previously notable for his criminality, and for advocating that every Australian classroom should have a portrait of Hitler on the walls – to give his views on immigration. I am not making that up, I said! And tell us, Blair, given your boast about using “violence and terror”, to get what you want from women, your views on feminism?

Yes, Sky News costs a bit, but if you divide the cost of subscribing by the number of cans of Pissed-Off they serve up, it is, seriously, as cheap as chips.

The Brit, Nigel Farage, will also be here shortly, I gather. He, you’ll recall, rose to fame by running the campaign which saw Britain commit to the economic suicide of Brexit and then turned his back on the whole mess, waltzing away on something of a world speaking tour. What, pray tell, can he see, that our own nutters haven’t spotted? In the first place, we don’t have a Brexit situation and in the second place, he’s never lived here, never shared our experience, never had much to do with us at all. So what would he know that, say, Alan Jones doesn’t?

Alan’s great on that kind of thing generally. When he speaks on the radio, there is never a pause, never a nuance to be examined, never a grey area which he is not sure about – he delivers outraged certainty, for a good 15 hours a week. Everything is either right or wrong, it is mostly wrong, and he is the only man who can right the wrongs. All your prejudices will be fed, all the bleak angels in your nature can gorge themselves and you can hit the day roundly pissed off at about 15 things at once. Yes, Alan is, as Paul Keating once described him, a “middle-of-the-road fascist” but he’s our middle-of-the-road fascist and that has to count for something, dammit.

For the Fascist 1500 metre race, our Alan would lap Farage. Not only that, he has endurance. I first heard Alan ranting like that in the Manly rugby dressing sheds, in 1983, and he is still going strong.

Milo Yiannopoulos? I frankly can’t remember what he was all about when he visited earlier in the year – I think it was most of the above, bar ganging up on gays – and only recall that our own Mark Latham delighted in displaying a photo of himself kissing him on the cheek. That would be a fair indication that Latham believes in his views, so if that is the stuff you want, my fellow Australians, if the Yiannopoulos brand of outrage is your thing, buy home-grown, buy Latham. He is producing so much of that highly refined bile – the really good Aussie stuff, not that imported rot – he is giving it away.

I am serious about this.

A consistent theme of the whole alt-Right thing, is to defend Australia, stop the bastards at our borders, say no to foreigners of all descriptions, make Australia great again by putting Australia first, etc.

Can’t the people who espouse all this then, and who want to consume that kind of stuff, start with our own nutters and set a good example?

Support Alan. Support Mark. Support Bronwyn and Pauline. And bring back Malcolm Roberts, the real star of the whole show.

But Blair Cottrell? Actually, no. Even we, have to draw the line somewhere.

An earlier version of this comment was briefly published online last month .