Thank the long absent lord that the reptiles let the Caterists join the world … the pond knew it would be tremendously important because the reptiles had put the Caterists at the top of the digital edition, and had devised two great Cookian illustrations to go with the text …
The pond used to love humbugs and all day suckers in its childhood, and that explains why it's such an easy mark for the reptiles … because in reality the Caterist piece was just Caterism as usual …a sociology student from a minor university discovering that he's a stranger in a strange land …
Speaking of humbugs and clarifying remarks, of course the real Caterist game, one that's intrigued a number of the pond's correspondents, is the matter which features the parrot …
With due regard and appreciation for the offer of an unpaywalled copy of the copy, available at news.com.au here, the text is sadly lacking for Caterist lovers … and so the pond must revert to the lizard Oz text …
Uh huh. Well the pond will refrain from commenting on a court case in progress, but does feel obliged to ask where the Caterists are ...
There we go … though the pond does think that's a bit of mischief-making on the part of the reptiles, calling the Caterist a journalist, when in fact these days he runs the Menzies Research Centre, which has mastered the art of scoring taxpayer cash in the paw … with nary a sign of a sense of irony or hypocrisy …
Sadly the news.com.au report had 'disappeared' the Caterist in its closing pars …
Honest opinion? Now there's high 'cash for comment' comedy of a silly kind ...
Never mind, somewhere along the way, the pond almost forgot the Caterist piece it began with, and so it must now revert for a final dreary gobbet of the usual …
Reading this godforsaken Pom propaganda, you'd almost forget that the Poms first step in this grand allegedly classically liberal enlightened experiment was to send a bunch of convicts out from the overcrowded prison hulks …with 17 dying on the trip out …
With the Caterist in full rhetorical flow, he could probably redeem the slave trade ... as a way of bringing western civilisation to Africans in urgent need of an introduction to the classical liberal enlightened values of a southern plantation owner … (though perhaps one not played by Leonardo DiCaprio, now given his true calling as the right sort of name for a new beetle species).
What a putz the Caterist is, what a useless futtock, what a waste of time, how it grieves the pond to see this wretched student of sociology reduce history to a series of mindless war games …as if everything must be reduced to a simple-minded binary of winners and losers.
Didn't the Enlightenment suggest there might be a little more complexity in the world, past, present and future, than allowed for by fundamentalists and fanatics?
And speaking of classical enlightened values, please allow the pond to join in the celebration of Jefferson, and his fucking of the slaves …literally and figuratively.
Yes the pond has been to Monticello, and seen the grand building, and also noted that where the slaves lived, there's bugger all left of the shanty shacks and forgotten lives pressed into service so that Jefferson might live in a grand style, and incidentally get his rocks off …
And in that spirit of classical enlightenment and self-awareness, why not a few celebratory cartoons from the current self-evident United States …
Cater: "...sees Australia as a laboratory for moral and scientific progress, formed by the British Enlightenment?"
ReplyDeleteJust yesterday I was looking up the count of Indians who were starved to death by the "Enlightened" British Raj: what I've found ranges from 35 million to 60 million ! As the Indian author Shashi Tharoor wrote:
"... a reminder of what was done to India by the British, who conquered one of the richest countries in the world (27 per cent of global gross domestic product in 1700) and reduced it to, after over two centuries of looting and exploitation, one of the poorest, most diseased and most illiterate countries on Earth by the time they left in 1947”
Eat your heart out, Mao. See: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/india-35-million-deaths-britain-shashi-tharoor-british-empire-a7627041.html
Yep, that's an outstanding example of "British Enlightenment" and a fine exemplar for the "settlement" of Australia.
"Didn't the Enlightenment suggest there might be a little more complexity in the world, past, present and future, than allowed for by fundamentalists and fanatics?"
Oh pish tush DP you know the answer to that: "All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds."
And as evidence for this, just look to Sally Hemings and the six children she bore Thomas Jefferson.
PS thanks for finding the Cater-Jones trial reference.
What conservatives see as "revisionism" is actually the reading of history. Cater obviously hasn't read much. Putting aside blackbirding, abduction and sale of aboriginal women to sealers, adoption of children as free domestic labour, underpayment and misappropriation of wages, restriction of movement etc etc etc - - what the hell is convict labour? It is a fine point of law if it is not slavery.
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