Summer school for herpetology students: unit in portentous pretentious referencing

 

The aim of this unit is to leave herpetology students better prepared for the arduous task of portentously and pretentiously referencing philosophers and historians and poets - the more ancient the better.

Required reading: no actual reading is required, but it is required that students be armed either with a google-like tool (go the ducks if you must), or an old-fashioned source of quotations, the more ancient and irrelevant to the modern world the better.

This site doesn't like to boast, but thanks to a recent street library find, it became the proud owner of A Dictionary of Quotations, by Colonel Philip Hugh Dalbiac. It should be sufficient to note that the dictionary was compiled by a Colonel for students to be reassured that this is exactly the sort of reference they should somehow acquire.

While there is no date on this volume by Thomas Nelson and Sons, Ltd, of sundry parts of the world, including London, Edinburgh, Toronto, New York, Paris and Melbourne, the Paris of the south, it carries an elegant ink stamp of ancient public service pedigree, though in this case for Trinity College of Music London, 310 George Street Sydney.

Herpetology students might be unaware that Trinity has maintained a local presence for many years, and still has a website boasting of its presence. Those doubting the longevity of colonial presence may look to Trove for a July 1925 report on the practical examinations of May 1925 in The Sydney Morning Herald.

At this point, some stray reader might indulge in some foot-stamping and moan to the sky, "what in the long absent lord's name does this have to do with anything, you bloody ning nong",  at which point a skilled herpetology student could embark on a discussion of the source of ning nong, and whether it should in fact be in need of a hyphen ...

As this is a summer school unit, there will be few visual distractions. Students are required to focus on the words, and must imagine the visuals ... though clues are provided.

Students will be marked up if they can take a quotation and try to make sense of it by offering another quotation.

For example, if a student encounters "climate change activism that reached new heights after Greta Thunberg’s rise to stardom", they might like to point to recent stories, such as Climate change: Seasonal shifts causing 'chaos' for UK nature, or 2023's costliest climate disasters show poor lose out in 'global postcode lottery'.

While such references will establish the bleeding heart credentials of the student, better students will immediately enlist Thucydides, saying "for it has always been law that the weaker should be subject to the stronger", History of the Peloponnesian War.

Or:

“For the love of gain would reconcile the weaker to the dominion of the stronger, and the possession of capital enabled the more powerful to reduce the smaller towns to subjection.” The History of the Peloponnesian War

Now that the ground rules for the unit have been established, it should be noted that there is no time limit on this unit. Students may spend as much time as they like digging out arcane and irrelevant quotations, the more arcane and irrelevant the better ...

Goodbye, 2023: The year of living angrily

The first test for the diligent student might have come a tad early for even the most diligent because they must imagine a photo of a scene designed to produce shock, horror, terror, fear and loathing in the reptile readership, and all from a descriptive line ...

Environmental activists march through Treasury Garden in Melbourne. *

It's difficult to imagine the sheer terror induced by mention of "environmental activists" but students must quell their rising alarm - it can in severe cases lead to heart failure or at a minimum angry letters to the lizard Oz. It is of course part of the year of living angrily, because there's always a deep and abiding anger lurking in the pompous pretentious referencing ...

By henry ergas
5:00AM December 29, 2023

2023 will be remembered as the year of living angrily. As storm followed storm, the debate, if one can call it that, was almost always vituperative, rarely civil and never friendly.
But the year’s tone merely reflects the legitimation, over the past decade, of outrage as the dominant style of political expression.
Of course, politics is inherently antagonistic: it involves a clash between alternatives. Henry Adams had a point when he wrote, way back in 1907, that political competition is “the systematic organisation of hatreds”. The promise of democracy, however, is that it moderates that competition’s excesses, funnelling its passions into well-defined channels that prevent controversy degenerating into limitless conflict.
Quite when that promise slipped our grasp is inevitably hard to determine. But a crucial step was the persecution and near judicial execution of Cardinal George Pell.
More clearly than in any previous case, that maelstrom involved the convergence of virtual lynch mobs on Twitter, unabashedly one-sided reporting by the ABC and SBS, and a political chorus led by the Greens but which included substantial parts of the ALP.

Some students might have been bemused to see a scene from 2019 featured in the story.

Cardinal George Pell arrives at Melbourne County Court in February 2019.

What, they might wonder, has the suffering of the frock-loving Pellists in 2019, got to do with 2023?

Any student wondering this way has fallen into a basic trap, a lack of imagination, a failure to understand.

That reference to Henry Adams way back in 1907 is surely a clue. Anyone in the business of portentous pretentious referencing, with bonus pomposity, would know that all the world's a stage or an oyster, and anything can be shucked to fine purpose.

Please allow the pond to demonstrate the methodology. Right in the middle of the moaning of the suffering of frock wearers, the pond will now drop in a reference to Hamilton, as found in the founders' archives:

The truth unquestionably is, that the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion. Tired at length of anarchy, or want of government, they may take shelter in the arms of monarchy for repose and security.

Those then, who resist a confirmation of public order, are the true Artificers of monarchy—not that this is the intention of the generality of them. Yet it would not be difficult to lay the finger upon some of their party who may justly be suspected. When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits—despotic in his ordinary demeanour—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may “ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.”

It has aptly been observed that Cato was the Tory-Cæsar the whig of his day. The former frequently resisted—the latter always flattered the follies of the people. Yet the former perished with the Republic the latter destroyed it.

No popular Government was ever without its Catalines & its Cæsars. These are its true enemies.

Cue references to the mango Mussolini's love of dictators and his own desire to be a dictator and seek revenge on all and sundry.

Or not, because there are many other chances for portentous pretentious referencing, with deep pomposity ...

Pell was, no doubt, a scapegoat. Indeed, it was hard, observing that process, not to be reminded of an early definition of that term which, in 1711, said “in most of the Nations of the World, where publick Divisions have prevail’d, they always had People among them (who were forced) to bear Scandal without Guilt, to be Condemn’d without Crime, sent, like the Scape Goat, into the Wilderness with other Men’s Faults upon their Backs, without any regard to their own”.
But the choice of target was no accident. As well as paying for the sins of the church, Pell stood for everything his assailants detested: attachment to tradition; a scholar’s love of the Western canon; and an adamant rejection of the belief that personal identity and sexual preference are mere consumer items, to be adopted and discarded as readily as a snake sheds its skin. Expressed by a Muslim cleric in Lakemba or Broadmeadows, conservative Islamic values would have been entirely acceptable. Expressed by a Christian prelate from Ballarat, conservative Western values were not.
Viewed in the longer term, that episode’s legacy to our political culture was three-fold: the cult of the victim, whose allegations had to be taken at face value; the entrenchment of self-loathing, in which Western values were necessarily despicable; and a vision of the world dichotomised into saints and devils, along with a scarcely concealed command to extirpate the latter.

Now some students might be distracted by talk of the "cult of the victim", while at the same time presenting the frock devotee as a victim, but no one asks for logic when indulging in portentous pretentious referencing.

An ability to move quickly on is much more important ...

Media-link
Jacinta Price accuses Albanese of ‘ignoring Indigenous issues’ after Voice failure

That Manichean vision – along with the rapidly crystallising coalition of online lynch mobs, public broadcasters and the “progressive” wing of politics – was then seamlessly transferred into the climate change activism that reached new heights after Greta Thunberg’s rise to stardom.
Led by “Extinction Rebellion”, those movements’ striking feature was their utter contempt for the law. Endorsed, or at least tolerated, by education authorities, schoolchildren were almost everywhere allowed to skip classes and engage in mass protests. At the same time, the movement’s militants acted – often with official connivance – as if public inconvenience could never outweigh what they (fallaciously) considered their rights.
They were, in other words, fanatics; once again in the original meaning of the term, which Philip Melanchthon, the great German Lutheran reformer, coined to describe those possessed by the phantasm of “enacting on Earth the kingdom of heaven through the elimination of the devils who stand in their way”.
All that provided immensely fertile ground for #MeToo. As the Gadarene swine became the epitome of the age, the presumption of innocence – already trashed by the Pell case – was trampled underfoot in the rush to condemn. Any word of caution, any hint that tantrums needed to be distinguished from traumas and grudges from genuine grievances, was denounced as sure evidence of misogyny.
With #MeToo deployed to devastating effect against the Morrison government, the sordid Brittany Higgins saga then gave Labor and a herd of “progressive” media personalities a formidable weapon in the election campaign.

Naturally at this point there was a media link ...

Media-link
Greta Thunberg pleads not guilty for blocking venue entrance while protesting

As the pond has never indulged in reptile media-links, some students might weaken at this point and desire a visual ...

Such students will not be marked down ... they might even be encouraged ... because it's a natural way to respond to drivel ...

What that proved, were further proof needed, was the strategy’s extraordinary effectiveness. As rage and spite marched hand in hand, shaping the public mood, the massed battalions of social media activists, left-wing broadcasters and “progressive” politicians seemed invincible – all the more so as the Hayne royal commission, which had fanned anti-business hysteria, convinced large corporates that opposing the zeitgeist was suicidal.
It is consequently unsurprising that the newly elected government went into the referendum brimming with hubris. It may have been madness; but in the shrewd formulation of Roy Porter’s A Social History of Madness, “even the mad are men of their time” – and this was a time that seemed to be going their way.
The referendum campaign therefore relied on the standard playbook, including casting the issue as a struggle between unquestioned good and unredeemed evil. There are very few instances, if any, of the No campaign’s leading figures denigrating their opponents’ intelligence or good faith; there are at least 65 instances of prominent Yes campaigners, including government ministers, describing the No case’s supporters as bigots, liars or just plain stupid. Nor did defeat quell their rage: it simply converted it into a potentially deadly cocktail of abject denial, aggrieved silence and simmering resentment.
There are, in this chain of events, stark echoes of an ancient lesson. The Greeks, who thought deeply about rage, believed it differed fundamentally from ordinary anger: anger had a defined focus; rage, a sign of fury at the world, was labile, readily shifting from one object to another. Characteristic of personal immaturity, it was by its nature opportunistic, rushing to the target of the moment, like a child rushing to a new toy.
Centuries later, Anna Freud, in a well-known article on aggression, reprised that conclusion. A good or true lover, she noted, is faithful; “in contrast, a ‘good hater’ is promiscuous: he has free aggression at his disposal and is ready to cathect with it on a non-permanent basis any object”. Love sticks; the perpetually restless, never satiated, aggression of haters moves and spreads. And as it does so, it readily resuscitates, albeit in ever varying form, the hideous archetypes of the past.

A final visual featured ...

Juergen Habermas

But having broken the rule about visuals, perhaps another would be allowed at this point?

At this point students will note a final flourish of most excellent portentous pompous pretentious referencing ... the art of humbug, and it doesn't just involve lollies ...

That is why the founders of Critical Theory, including Theodor Adorno, Jurgen Habermas and Ernst Fraenkel, who had lived through Nazism, saw the students who stormed their lectures in 1968 as “red fascists”, primed to veer, as many did, into anti-Semitism. And that is also why the keffiyeh-clad storm troopers of the movements that transformed this country into a persecuting society now defile our venues with the exterminationist cry of “from the river to the sea”.
None of that has come out of the blue; it is the fruit of a decade of “progressive” activism, which has elevated rage into its modus operandi. Labor purports to be uncomfortable with its results; it would be better if it had the moral clarity to acknowledge how we got here and reflect on its lessons.
As 2024 dawns, we will remember our Tennyson: “Ring out a slowly dying cause, / And ancient forms of party strife; / Ring in the nobler modes of life, / With sweeter manners, purer laws”.
But we will also remember Thucydides’ grim yet lucid warning. It is, he wrote, in the nature of human affairs, with their weaknesses and crippling imperfections, that the abysses loom far greater than the peaks. And when mayhem is on the march, pushing us towards the abyss, all of humanity’s reserves of culture, courage and resolve are needed to stop it in its tracks.

Indeed, indeed ... as the poet cogently put it ...

Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough

Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades

For ever and for ever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To read a dullard Henry, heaven forfend,

To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!

As though to breathe were life!

While inhaling undiluted Henry 

can only cause strife...

Meanwhile, the collective displacement, the collective punishment, the ethnic cleansing, and the slaughter continues apace, with the pompous portentous referencer leading the exterminationist cry ... but the skilled herpetology student will quickly pivot, speaking as we are of of grim yet lucid warnings that don't involve drongoes of the Tennyson kind ...

The top 20 climate disasters in 2023 by cost per capita

1 Hawaii, US, wildfire – $4,161

2 Guam, storm – $1,455

3 Vanuatu, storm – $947

4 New Zealand, storm – $468

5 New Zealand, flood – $371

6 Italy, flood – $164

7 Libya, flood – $105

8 Peru, flood – $66

9 Spain, drought – $50

10 Myanmar, storm – $41

11 Chile, flood – $39

12 Haiti, flood – $36

13 Mexico, storm – $35

14 Chile, wildfire – $30

15 US, storm – $25

16 China, flood – $23

17 Peru, storm – $20

18 Malawi, storm – $17

19 US, storm – $16

20 Peru, flood – $9

At this point, slack students will revert to traditional forms and Xmas messaging, because it's only a few days, a few weeks, a few months to the next one ...

Meanwhile, students with a keen eye for history will appreciate that there can only be one answer to certain questions of history, and this is one of them ...

* For students who lacked the visual imagination, this was the terrifying sight, harridans, and possibly cross-dressers, disturbing the peace of the Paris of the south and sending reptile survivalists scurrying to their bunkers ...

Of course students will recognise the Xmas-themed visual reference encoded in the display ...