Cyrus Brooks, and a portmanteau of redneck artist dreamings ...

(Above: redneck outsider art).

Hmm, so many loons on the pond, so little time.

Where to start? How about Cyrus Brooks, with Church of Scientology: We're being vilified?

What is occurring here is vilification on a grand scale — falling into a pattern of denigration and dehumanisation of religion, and particularly of religious minorities, which is well known to the world because of its long, tragic history.

Umpire! Technical point! Is falling on the floor, rolling about laughing hysterically, tears streaming out of eyes, mockery, ridicule and abundant chortling a form of vilification? Can cults be vilified? Is calling a cult a form of vilification even if it's a cult?

Scientology is a practical religious philosophy that answers questions about life and about living. Its tenets can be used to improve one's own life and to help others.

But ultimately Scientology helps people regain spiritual self-knowledge. These spiritual truths are not unique to our church — all religions have them or seek them.

We believe that Scientology is a workable way to attain spiritual truth. We believe in good works, spiritual fulfillment, and truth telling.

We understand the difference between allegation and fact.

Fact? You mean the fact of L Ron Hubbard getting around the ban on teaching medicine without a license in New Jersey by devising the concept of thetans? Fact? You mean the story of Xenu, alien ruler of the Galactic confederacy who 75 million years ago brought billions of people to earth in spacecraft, and stacked them in volcanoes and then exploded hydrogen bombs ... so that these thetans would end up in the bodies of humans, and now we have to spend all our time isolating body thetans and defeating their badness?

Oh put me on the floor again, and spin me around like a bottle. I know I've recommended the wiki many times before, here, but you can never get enough fun from the doings of cult gherkins ... unless of course it turns into Jonestown and something more solemn.

Next there's David Southwell, who purports to be a journalist and trots out the header Rednecks! The new racist term for ordinary Australians.

Redneck? New? Lordy, there's nothing new under the sun, and David Southwell proves that with thinking as agile as a rock stuck in mud.

I suppose redneck might be a term of abuse for ordinary Australians, but is it racist? Are whites the only folks who get sunburn on the back of the neck from toiling long hours in the field? Can a black be a redneck? And are redneck attitudes only real if you're Caucasian, or can you be a redneck irrespective of color, and if so is it these days an ethnic slur? And is its use as a racist slur cheap easy way to fill in a header for a column full of cheap easy thoughts?

So many questions, so few answers, but you might find reading about the etymology of 'redneck' here is way more interesting than reading Southwell. We provide the fair and balanced links, and you decide.

Do we have time for a redneck joke? Oh what the heck it's Friday:

A farmer walked into an attorney's office wanting to file for a divorce. The attorney asked, "May I help you?" The farmer said, "Yea, I want to get one of those dayvorces."

The attorney said, "Well do you have any grounds?" The farmer said, "Yea, I got about 140 acres." The attorney said, "No, you don't understand, do you have a case?" The farmer said, "No, I don't have a Case, but I have a John Deere."

The attorney said, "No you don't understand, I mean do you have a grudge?" The farmer said, "Yea I got a grudge, that's where I park my John Deere."

The attorney said, "No sir, I mean do you have a suit?" The farmer said, "Yes sir, I got a suit. I wear it to church on Sundays." The exasperated attorney said, "Well sir, does your wife beat you up or anything?"

The farmer said, "No sir, we both get up about 4:30." Finally, the attorney says, "Okay, let me put it this way. Why do you want a divorce?"

And the farmer says, "Well, I can never have a meaningful conversation with her."

Oh and as for Southwell, reading him's a bit like talking to the farmer, and just as bad a joke.

You know it's racist to talk about xenophobia and irrational fear of others, but presumably not xenophobic or racist to caricature proponents of moderate humanitarian policies in relation to boat people because they've magically transformed into racist redneck baiters.

Yep, it's just more of the usual half-assed half-baked Murdoch nonsense about the inner west chardonnay sipping latte lapping elites slagging off the noble average Australian from the barricades of their generous life style, safe from unskilled jobs or living in a potentially high crime suburb. Dressed up with reverse redneck racism as the hook into the story.

You want crime baby? Have we got crime for you ...

Well who else have we got? Since I'm off to the Prokofiev tonight for the final in the series at the Opera House, why not Andrew Frost? And Everyone a winner with an arts lottery.

Casting an envious eye over the British National Lottery for Good Causes, and dissing the Federal government's present royalty model, Frost wants to revert to the good old days of the Opera House Lottery which helped fund the noble beast I'll shortly be inside the bowels of:

Set up in the early 1990s, the National Lottery has raised more than £23 billion for projects such as the arts, heritage, sport and public works.

With permanent funding, the arts would be free of the changing attitudes of governments to the sector and therefore the importance placed on investment. The Australia Council and other organisations would have more freedom to experiment with funding models and to promote Australian culture internationally.

The best part of a lottery would be that it would play directly into the betting and prize culture that we seem to value so much. The irony for artists such as Polo is that every one would be a winner, baby, and that's no lie.

Tremendous, excellent idea. Actually they already do it in Western Australia, for film and the arts, but really it's no more than a form if idle rhetoric and drivel about returning the funds to the community from whence they came ... and as for the films that get funded ... (here's where government can spout the same drivel as licensed clubs),

Never mind. For my first commission I'd propose a series of documentaries on the evils of gambling, with particular attention to the impact of poker machines and lottery tickets, leeching the life blood out of the redneck poor who can least afford it as a way of keeping in luxury the blood sucking, comfortable, well off crime free leeches at the top of the food chain (how's that David Southwell?)

Perhaps this could also be dramatised in mini-series and feature film form, in a neo modernist realist portrait of suburban Australia where women sell their bicycles so they can continue to gamble. Bicycle Thieves re-dux, that's the pitch. And at the very end, the woman wins the arts lottery and buys a bicycle and can happily cycle off to the club to gamble on the poker machines. Upbeat, strong, classy, and win win, emotionally. The stuff of dreams.

Of course I'd expect the plastic arts to get into the caper as well. How about an exhibition on the theme of homelessness and the evils of gambling? I'd see this backed by a multi-media platform which would allow for streaming on the intertubes as well as streaming in the gallery, perhaps in the form of participation, where visitors are invited to gamble, then shown losing.

You can see the perfect circle, the virtuous circle, already forming. How better to celebrate Australia as a nation of gamblers than through arts based on gambling?

How better to organise things so that the arts establishment and bureaucrats aren't answerable to government, bureaucrats or the public. How better to absolutely establish that the paradigm for art is the almighty dollar. Perhaps we could dress up a lottery dollar in the way Jasper Johns did the American flag.

You know, as a way of understanding the world, and not for easy cheap, absent-minded, mindless consumption, which all artists rightly abhor. You know, like those helpless hapless sods trapped in their suburban ghettoes indulging in the mindless business of gambling in the hope that a one in a million chance might somehow get them out of their misery.

No more existential angst of the van Gogh kind! What good did it do him? Just a tidy gravy train, a handsome trough with room for lots of untrammeled snouts. Pie in the sky by and by.

And what a celebration of the betting and prize culture we value so much. So that in a post-modernist post-ironic world, we could celebrate the way there are no losers, just winners, except for the 999,999 mugs who missed out on the chance to be the one in a million no longer needing to buy lottery tickets.

Well I for one am pleased with this grand conception. The old idea that art should produce relevant social commentary is shamefully Marxist and old hat, and the old idea that artists should connect with an audience, which gasp, might even want to buy their works, is really just faddish capitalism, while the idea that artists might head off to an ivory castle on the basis of hard won lottery earnings is a splendid dream ... not answerable to anyone, just pursuing their dream in a visionary way, while freed up to experiment with new modalities, tonalities, and spatial realities ...

Ah well, so much for my feeble idea of a luxury tax on alcohol and tobacco, so that forlorn punters might die comforted by knowing that their money went to an inspired series of works on the theme of the evils of drinking and smoking, happily done by indigent artists eager to come to a spiritual understanding of the unhappy demise of the splendidly benefactoring punters. Such vision I lack ...

I think William Blake put it best:

"Art seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives it ease,
And builds a heaven in hell's despair."

So sang a little clod of clay,
Trodden with the cattle's feet,
But a pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:

"Art seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a hell in heaven's despite."

I think Blake might have been talking about love, but it's all the same isn't it, art and love, and care for the common herd of humanity trodden by the cattle's feet. Now who's going to be first in the race to the trough ...

The conclusion from this portmanteau package of inspired thinking on this forlorn Friday as we sample the diverse gastronomic feast open to all who enjoy the squawking of the loons?

Surely the way forward is redneck artists with a vision ... a dream of the way thetan-inspired gambling can be destroyed, and the suburbs made safe for artists with a post-apocalyptic, post poker machine view of nirvana, which are of course free of troublesome immigrants and the redneck baiters who might impair their clear eyed understanding of life and all that matters ...

42, or something like that ...