He did, he did ...
MICHAEL BRISSENDEN: Malcolm Turnbull argues that China's policy of muscling up to its neighbours has in turn forced them to draw ever close to the US, and to illustrate his point, he reached way back to ancient Greeks, and to a uniquely colloquial interpretation of a passage from Thucydides' 'History of the Peloponnesian Wars'.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: And the Athenian ambassadors, led by Alcibiades, said 'cut the crap. You know as well as we do that, in the real world, justice is to be found only as between equals in power. As for the rest, the strong does they will, and the weak suffer as they must.' Now, if that's the message that China is sending to its neighbours, they will say 'we, a: better get closer to the one guy that is as strong, if not stronger, than China. And b: we better make sure we're strong ourselves'. (PM here).
And look how it's catching. Tingle with Tingle as she goes Coen brothers, and this referentialism is surely all big Mal's fault:
As a country that tends to outsource its foreign policy – or at least not let it encroach on our domestic political debate – we now find ourselves, as Ulysses McGill liked to say in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, “in a tight spot".
The Coen brothers film was loosely based on Homer’s Odyssey. The ancient Greeks also featured in Malcolm Turnbull’s musing on regional tensions this week.
Observing that China had been losing friends across the region of late, Turnbull marvelled at the way China’s actions had got Vietnam cosying up to the US which was “quite an achievement when you think of the history".
Which brought Turnbull to Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War, and the bit “where Thucydides in explaining the causes of the Peloponnesian War says the cause of the war was simply that trust had broken down . . . both sides became anxious about the growing strength of the others. “So it wasn’t so much a single incident, it was a fear of the new rival." (AFR, outside the paywall here).
Well for the record, the pond always preferred the fanciful Herodotus, and the tabloid Suetonius - oh what saucy tales he had to tell - wasn't that Tiberius a kinky thing - and none of the fancy words and references can wipe away the sorry sight of big Mal maintaining his status as keeper of gulags and destroyer of fibre ...
But at least the Doggie offered another choice ...
Indeed, indeed, and almost as entertaining as the News Corp infighting is the astonishing sight of the reptiles of Oz caught in a bout of editorial navel-gazing.
Sorry, no bets will be allowed on social media being blamed, the odds are simply too short:
Indeed, indeed, and what the pond loves in the reptiles is their love of history.
You see, in the Edwardian era, Australia had in short order Sir Edmund Barton (1901-03), Alfred Deakin (1903-1904), Chris Watson (1904), George Reid (1904-05), Deakin again (1905-08)), Andrew Fisher (1908-09), Deakin yet again (1909-1910), Fisher again (1910-13), Joseph Cook (1913-14), and Fisher yet again (1914-15) ... (do a Greg Hunt and wiki the dates here).
And just before the second world war, we got Sir Earle Page (1939), Ming the Merciless (1939-41) and Arthur Fadden (1941).
Ah that'd be the modern throwaway mentality that simply ruined the system.
But then stupid people like Kelly and the reptiles are doomed to repeat history because they routinely forget what went before. There's absolutely no point in talking about Thucydides in their presence ...
And then there's the befuddling sight of the reptiles lashing themselves because that eternal doofus Abbott blamed the media for his own ineptness ...
They really don't have a clue, and so it's on with the rest of the cluelessness ...
Ah, there it came: Social media has distorted media tendencies further towards superficiality and cheap populism.
So this ...
... is apparently all the fault of Twitter ...
M'lud, it wasn't that I worked for the chairman, it wuz the Twitter wot made me do it ...
And so apparently it's not the fault of that tedious old fart Paul Kelly doing some kind of Ancient Mariner routine, wringing his hands and pronouncing there are deep problems, and imagining there was some golden age in the past where everything worked out for the best ...
Editorial physician, heal thyself ... because your decision to end your piece with a bit of flip glibness shows that the influence of Twitter runs deeper than you think ...
If you're going to head into the joke territory of ruling things in and out, you could at least have referenced You might say that ... I couldn't possibly say that ...
But okay, the pond is always game, and so we must proceed on to examine a sublime piece of reporting ... wherein the bromancer mourns the excellent Kevin Andrews and denounces an incoming minister before the ink is dry on her appointment ...
Now that's presumably the sort of top notch reporting to which the Oz editorialist aspires ...
Because you know, the stolid, sturdy Kev was as solid as a stick in the mud, or perhaps a bit of four be two ... and what do you know, that ghostly spectre, the dullard Kelly, pontificating away in a desire to put prattling Polonius out of business, haunts the bromancer too ...
Is it possible to imagine a better example of group think as the reptiles bunker down around the kool aid saturated water cooler?
And so, on the strength of quoting the oscillating fan, the judgment is done and dusted.
And the reptiles of Oz have the cheek to blame social media for superficiality, as opposed to the reptiles disappearing up each others fundaments ...
Now the pond isn't in the business of defending Payne, but watching Sheridan tear her down so that the defence department might continue on its pathetic way, aided and abetted by that inept dud Kevin Andrews, is pure comedy gold.
As soon as a department begs that a minister be allowed to continue, you can bet a dollar to a dime that they could see the mug coming from a mile away ...
And so to the wrap up:
Read it and weep: our profoundly broken political system.
Decoder please!
They took my Tony away and I'm still a shattered man. Why didn't they think of the bromancer and defence before they did this ghastly deed?
Oh it's all too much and yet too little, and at the same time, an enormous delight, especially the notion that the doofus Kevin Andrews - lovingly remembered for his relationship vouchers - would have sorted out the submarines mess ...
Of course Andrews' job had been made even messier by that Captain's Call for Japan, but the end result of the bromancer pretending that everything was ship shape and in order in defence thanks to Abbott and Andrews will give the pond a warm absurdist glow for the rest of the day ...
Meanwhile, speaking of monumental stuff-ups, how thoughtful of David Pope to combine two memes in the one cartoon this day, and more Pope here ...
Of course when the reptiles talk about 'reform', they mean economic reform. Reforms like NDIS and Gonski don't count.
ReplyDeleteAnd we must ditch the Internet and all go back to reading newspapers.
DeleteIt's Trump vs Fox in the US, we have to be content with reptile vs reptile.
ReplyDeleteThe "fanciful Herodotus and the tabloid Suetonius" indeed make for entertaining reading, but for mine, Thucydides' command of his subject matter and his mastery of rhetoric place him on the top step of the podium, perhaps only with Gibbon for company, for history-as-literature. And his better grasp of realpolitik nudges him ahead.
ReplyDeleteAs an extra bonus, and despite a reputation for being dry and dense, I found his Greek mostly clear and unambiguous, making translation (what is it with private schools and dead languages?) a relative pleasure, compared to the elliptical poetry of Aeschylus and co.
Whatever ones take on Malware, its slightly refreshing to have someone in the big chair who doesn't hear "Thucydides" and assume he's one of those Syriza leaners...
With apologies to W.H.Auden:
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what reptiles do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave