Greg Sheridan, and a smell of pigs sniffing militarist truffles in the Shire

(Above: here at loon pond, it's serious stuff dealing on a daily basis with the commentariat. So we took inspiration from the 11 funniest unintentionally sexual books of all time, and then we found someone who had actually read the book, and prepared a book report here. And another gourmet who offered up an excerpt here. Is there no end to the riches of the full to overflowing intertubes).

So here's our reading for the day:

“Dicky Ruthven was terribly impatient. He had taken his own find home with him, ‘to have tea with it, comb its hair, and fondle it,’ as Donald had said, joking in spite of his hollow feeling of depression…Maybe Dicky slept with the jagged lump of masonry under his pillow, for he was as proud as a peacock of his ‘find.’ And if he woke up during the night with the most pointed corner of it sticking in his ear, no doubt he only smiled in a seraphic manner and contentedly sighed his way to sleep again, with the comforting jab of the thing in the back of his neck. Or perhaps he had it clasped in his arms. Who knows but Dicky himself?”

Oh yes. Boys and jagged lumps of masonry.

Now, with a sigh, we turn to the musings of the day, but not, as you might expect, Miranda the Devine's Greatest moral challenge turns out to be Rudd's dearest folly, which turns out to be a disappointingly standard rant about Chairman Rudd. It reads as if it's been cut and pasted from Akker Dakker's (Piers Akerman to the great unwashed) greatest hits and verbal assaults, and was possibly assembled by the Devine in an automaton dream involving automatic writing.

No, here on the pond, we eschew predictability and banality and obviousness, and search for the finest truffles, which of course require a pig's nose to discern amongst the mud. And lordy did we come up with a beauty.

Come on down hysterical git Greg Sheridan with the rant of the month, if not the year, Gibbering fantasists set sights on Anzac Day. The opener, I must confess, reduced me to a mirthless tearfulness at the sheer poetry and savage insight on offer:

Once again, Anzac Day and all that it represents are under attack. The dark servants of Sauron are gathering in Mordor, orcs and goblins, elves gone over to the dark side, the wraith-like nazgul and the dark riders of historical mayhem, once more to shatter the traditions and peace of the good hobbits of Middle-earth.

I refer, of course, to the ideological Left girding its loins for a fresh assault on the alleged militarisation of Australian history.

Ah dear, long gone Alan Seymour's The One Day of the Year and his immortal line "A man's not too bad who'll stand up in the street and remember when he was licked". Nope, now we're somewhere off in middle earth with J. R. R. Tolkien re-enacting the Lord of the Rings.

Does Sheridan have even the remotest idea how loonish such rhetoric sounds? It's so rich, so fertile, so febrile, that it's tempting to quote the whole thing box and dice and be done with it. Here's the third par:

A slew of dismal academic books, unspeakable in their mediocrity and tendentiousness, presage a full-blooded campaign to destroy the most popular, the most unifying and the most historically sound celebration in our national life.

Historically sound? What on earth does that mean? Waiter, bring me some of what that man's just sniffed, it seems better than the mushrooms to hand down the rabbit hole. Perhaps then I can produce a mediocre tendentious column for Chairman Rupert slaying the leftist dragons that surround us all, the gatling jammed, the square red with blood, and a hush in the close as it's last man in and we must play up and play the game.

First of course it's necessary to identify the enemy - Sauron's servants gathering in Mordor - before embarking on a restrained and insightful debate, and luckily for Sheridan, a restrained and modest argument is part of his inherent rhetorical strength:

For left-wing Australian historians, gorged on grants, tenure, fellowships, faux academic prizes, subsidised centres and all the paraphernalia of the academic gravy train, beyond the wildest imaginings of any David Williamson satire, to complain about someone else getting government money for their view of history demonstrates a kind of unconscious chutzpah available only to those who have had their irony genes removed at birth.

Sheridan of course has no need of irony genes, for any fool can see that a debate about Australia and its military history can find exactly the right ironical tone by referencing Sauron gathering his servants for a final stupendous attempt to defeat the forces of light. Led by Chairman Rupert's empire.

On and on Sheridan goes in a way that's moderate and under-stated:

... the idea that Australian history has been militarised is almost insane.When I was at school we didn't study a single war. We studied the causes of many different wars but never the war itself. My sons had the same experience 30 years later. It is perhaps the absolute absence of war in the classroom that has facilitated the magnificent popularity of Australian military history.

Similarly it is just nuts to claim that either migrant history, or Aboriginal history, both of which I honour and celebrate, don't figure on school or university curriculums. And where is the militarism in the national curriculum?

Uh huh. You see, if the gibbering fantasist Sauronites are insane, or nuts, to use a noble term for mental instability, it's hard to have a sensible discussion. You see, these wretches will stop at nothing:

It was the fashion during the Vietnam War and shortly after to demonise and harass soldiers, to spit at them, call them baby killers, abuse their families. That particular time of barbarous madness has passed.

Except of course for those dissident current Sauronites who still abuse the military and the noble Anzac tradition. Why questioning Anzac is surely an insidious and hurtful and spiteful way of calling diggers baby killers, dressed up in the garb of seditious academic papers. Next thing you know they'll be arguing against two up, getting blotto in the pub, and watching football to celebrate the fallen (and a nice little earner it is too and where's the harm in that, pissed and in a punch up at the footy).

But enough of the window dressing, let's get down to some serious history, even if it was never taught in schools and we are all now compelled and fascinated by the magnificent popularity of Australian military history, a fetish often shared by those who love to sit in armchairs but strangely never quite managed to make it to the front line anywhere.

... there is also something wondrously ahistorical and ignorant about the standard line against the Australian efforts in World War I, whether at Gallipoli or on the Western Front or elsewhere. The proposition that Australia mindlessly, needlessly and foolishly followed Britain into World War I is completely wrong.

You see. Dare I add completely and utterly and comprehensively and totally wrong. You there in the back row, clearly yet another Irish dissident or perhaps a Catholic of the Mannix school. I dare say you're one of those wretches who voted not just once, but twice against conscription. Or perhaps you're one of those unionists who now erupt into tenured academic posts. Whatever, your white feather is in the post, along with Greg Sheridan's wonderful history An Imperialist's guide to the imperatives of Imperialism.

We are trapped in a terrible tyranny of ignorance about our leaders in the early days of federation. Alfred Deakin, Edmund Barton, Billy Hughes and the others were sophisticated politicians with an astute sense of all the strategic realities their new, young country faced.

Sheridan then proceeds to prove his point by showing a terrible tyranny of ignorance about the very real debates about the war that consumed the populace back in those dark days.

His idea of scribbling the truth? Evoking monstrous slanders of Deakin, and babbling on about German militarism, as if German militarism was the only game in town in those colonial days:

Australia joined Britain in World War I for four reasons: just cause, empire solidarity, regional security interests, and long-term maintenance of Australian security. It was a just cause to defeat German militarism. You'd need a very strange moral compass to support German militarism.

What on earth are we to make then of those treacherous, treasonous, traitorous types who twice in plebescites voted to limit the power of the federal government to conscript men to become machine gun fodder in the mud of Europe?

Well at least let us make it clear that Sheridan is no Irish Catholic lover of the likes of Mannix:

... most importantly there was the question of Australia's long-term strategic self-interests. Australian leaders, and the population, understood, correctly, that the British empire (and I write this as an Irish Australian who could not possibly have less sentimental attachment to the British crown) provided for Australian security, provided for Australian prosperity and to a large extent embodied Australian values.

Oh yes, I did but see her passing by, and yet I love her till I die. Oh damn you Vietnamese people with your control of the dry cleaning and bakery games in Sydney, look to Britain for your values.

There's more, plenty more, as Sheridan jumps the shark, ascends the faraway tree to faraway land, and berates the Sauronites one sided notion of history ... by producing a one sided version of history ... and his wrap-up finds him sounding off as solidly as when he started his rant.

When we compare a modern act of courage or self-sacrifice to the Anzac tradition, we are not by any means "militarising" our modern life. We are instead measuring courage by a yardstick which came out of an episode of unique intensity in our history, when tens of thousands of ordinary young men lived and died for something greater than themselves.

In that, Anzac Day is neither modern nor anachronistic, but timeless, profound and beautiful. These words are seldom used about academics.

Oh indeed, just as I like to think of the carnage of the first world war as timeless, profound and beautiful. Something greater than themselves? The first world war as a kind of Tolkein epic? Move over Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. But I guess the assigning of brave and heroic death from an armchair provides moments of unique intensity and helps make any carnal house of slaughter profoundly moving.

My grandfather used to gather us around the flame in Tamworth and explain just how his time in the mud of the Somme was a timeless, profound and beautiful moment for him. Seeing as how the machine gunners were the first to be targeted by the artillery and ground forces, and he happened to be sitting behind a machine gun scared shitless.

But then shitty pants never get much of a mention in timeless profound and beautiful celebrations of war.

Now you might think someone who argues with such passion shows all the signs of being a one sided passionate fool, but I think it's wonderful stuff, at a stroke elevating Sheridan to the valhalla of loons, lurking for ever more somewhere in the Shire in the sky.

For a different view, expressed in temperate language, and therefore clearly the work of a Sauron-ite, see Martin Flanagan's One-sided thinking on Gallipoli an injustice, paying particular attention to John Simpson (Kirkpatrick), who was a deserter, ship jumper, fiercely Labor knockabout who joined up thinking he'd be getting a ticket home to England, and who instead, courtesy of Churchill's folly, ended up working with a donkey on the Gallipoli hills. Immediately he was dead the myth makers - the Chairman Rupert publicity machines of their day, sadly including historian C. E. W. Bean - began their work and he came out scrubbed clean, a gormless brave heroic lad with a donkey fighting for king and country.

Reality's a tad more complex and interesting than Sheridan and his rhetoric might allow, but hey I think it's a singular vision for Sheridan to rabbit on endless about the nobility of world war one, and not once mention the singular folly that was Gallipoli, or Churchill's folly, or the stupidities of the generals running the show, or even begin to discern a characteristic ambivalence in Australia's celebration of the campaign, in which it played a relatively minor role in what turned out to be a major military defeat.

Irony in the genes? When Sheridan begins to understand the line "A man's not too bad who'll stand up in the street and remember when he was licked" he'll have got his head out of the clouds, and understand that there were many causes of world war one, and that German militarism was only one of them, and that if Anzac day serves a purpose in reminding us that the first world war was a particularly stupendous and ugly example of militarism gone mad, then that's when it might be a timeless and beautiful thing.

And in the usual way, I feel a poem coming on, one by Wilfred Owen, and a favourite of my grandfather's:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! -- An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime. --
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, --
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

But then Wilfred Owen went to the first world war, was killed in action at the battle of Sambre a week before the war ended, and knew whereof he wrote. An ecstasy of fumbling. If only Sheridan knew the ecstasy of fumbling ...