parismarisamadonna

Shit on the Radio – Robbie Williams 2012

I had had a really long and tiresome day at work. I was walking out after another long week, completely exhausted, ready to let go and seek respite within the welcoming confines of our local bar and a glass of warming red wine.

As we wound our way out of the building, a gaggle of gossiping girls excited about the few hours we were about to spend together, a colleague chased me down. I know this person; we’ve worked together for 4 years, and I’d estimate that I’ve had 3-4 conversations with him about anything other than the Fruit Company.

The fact that he was calling out behind me with such energy and vigour led me to believe that he wanted to speak to me desperately about something only I had the answer to…what was my middle name? Did I want to have dinner with him on Friday?  Where did I buy the bag I was carrying? 

But alas, it was nothing of the sort.

There aren’t many Australians in the Australia. Considering the astronomical cost of air travel from the farthest flung point on the globe, there are even fewer outside of Australia. Add then that one must speak French to live with any degree of ease in France and here we are but a handful. The Embassy has us at 3000 in the whole country, I am guessing that about 1000 of them are somewhere much warmer than Paris, likely surfing in Biarritz or being very rich in Nice. Then another 1000 are working in the giant Rio Tinto tower at La Defense racking their brains as to how we can make the French pay even more for uranium. All that remains are about 1000 of us, integrated into la vie à la française, 1000 of us who all got asked the same question this past week. A question I’ve been asked by every tool from Lille to La Reunion…why do Australians hate the French so much?

Excusez-moi Monsieur le Tool… we don’t hate the French anymore than cats can play piano or babies sneeze at birthday cakes or dogs jump unscathed from oncoming semi-trailers or anything else you saw on YouTube this week. Although if one more of you ask me, I’ll make a special exception and shoot every last one of you from inside of Notre Dame’s belfry and claim diminished responsibility after suffering the repeated question of a bunch of effing ignoramuses.

One moron. One stupid ignorant brute with the intellectual capacity of an ant, a brute resident of the social armpit of Melbourne gets on a bus. Another equally moronic fool with a phone films it, posts it to YouTube and voilà, the whole of Australia are racist pigs that abuse innocent women singing in a foreign language.

To date, I’ve not even watched the offending video*. Idiots are everywhere. That one idiot filmed other idiots doing something idiotic is unfortunate, but it is the even more unfortunate outcome of our obsession with car-crash media and Big Brother’s desire to distract us from what is really going on.

This week France’s economy was dealt another fatal blow; Moodys have downgraded us to AA1. If this keeps up, in a month there may not be enough money left to pay even half of the public servants who keep this country permanently one step behind the rest of the world. But hey, an idiot in Australia is racist, let’s dedicate the week’s news and current affairs to a YouTube video rather than face the fact that someone in this country might have to actually work for a living if we’re to see the other side of 2013.

I’m all for fluff. I love reading about the comings and goings of R–Patz and K-Stew. I am a bit obsessed with red carpet fashion and the ensuing discussion about who was best dressed. I love fairy tale journalism so much I read my horoscope every bloody morning. But I also try to stay abreast of the important stuff. I read the papers that are on the same side of the political divide as myself, but I read the other guys as well. I don’t want be told what to think, what is important and what I should think. I want to figure it out for myself.

Over in the UK, it was the same story. While half the nation was underwater in freezing flash floods and the other half were living in abject poverty, the POMs looked up from their china teacups to remark that Johnny Aussie, the prodigal son that got away, is a racist bigot. This news report came hot on the tail of the groundbreaking truth reported last week from the Melbourne Cup that Australian youths drink too much champagne and piss on each other. The passing of one of Australia’s finest authors, Bryce Courtenay, got a passing mention but on the whole, Australia is like a blackhead on the British subconscious; not very pretty, ever present and no matter how much you try to squeeze it, cover it or ignore it, it keeps on making it’s adolescent presence sorely known.

The irony in this instance is of course that the entire United Kingdom are currently glued to their tellies watching I’m A Celebrity.

The concept of I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here is that a group of C-List Celebrities are sent to live in a jungle somewhere in Queensland. The British then vote to watch them do stupid things like crawl through pipes filled with cockroaches, stand in booths while drowned in larvae and the infamous Bush Tucker challenge. 

I lived in Australia for almost 30 years. I have never, ever, in my life, not once, seen so many cockroaches as I saw in one hour of IACGMOOH. I’ve also never eaten a Kangaroo testicle, a wallaby’s toe or any kind of insect, ever. I’ve never let a spider closer to my person than the length of the vacuum cleaner hose and I’ve never built a house with the manure of a marsupial. I’ve never worn khaki, apart from a short season when it was fashionable. I don’t go outside wearing a wide brimmed hat and while I do love my Docs, I don’t wear hiking boots. I’ve also never ever referred to a crocodile as a “croc”; I’m not so friendly with them as to imagine that we’d been on a diminutive first name basis.  

So why then do these self proclaimed “celebrities’ participate in acts that portray Australia as a giant jungle where the only thing one eats is genitals? Call me crazy, but might you describe that as racist? 

I feel awful for the victim of this particular hate crime. That such a thing can happen in 2012 makes me wonder if the human race will indeed see it past the Mayan D-Day next month. But that the act of one moron, who got himself on telly has so captivated the world makes me even sadder. I thought we’d put paid to the singular influence of one televised dickhead when Dubya retired?

 

  

*I watched it just before I posted this. It is shameful. But it is the act of an isolated group of thugs...just like Abu Ghraib, Clichy-sous-bois, Tottenham and the list goes on

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Live and Let Die – Paul McCartney & Wings 1973

Six and half years ago, I wrote and then read the eulogy at my father’s funeral. It began with the line, “I read the news today oh boy”. Creating a discography that spanned two generations Paul and John, separately and together, have written songs that would become a soundtrack for every conceivable moment in one’s life.

This week’s song, famously the title and soundtrack of a Bond film, and then infamously destroyed twenty years later by a whimpering Axl Rose, came to me when I read the news today (oh boy). There was the crying out about the perceived brevity of the sentence for Anders Breivik, the 1 billion dollar patent dispute between Pineapple and Billsang*, Julian Assange held hostage in an embassy and Prince Harry, the world’s most famous ranger, with his knackers out in Las Vegas. 

Cue piano cords and strings…live and let die…This last month, I’ve been delighted and I’ve been let down.

I am fiercely proud of my British ancestry, an ancestry defined and punctuated by books and music. Watching the Spice Girls dance about (or pout because Posh doesn’t dance) on top of sparkly black cabs in between Eric Idle gadding about with Bollywood dancers, made me proud. I have never lived in Britain for more than a year. All the same, my likes and dislikes were indoctrinated thanks to the influence of my British father. Watching the ‘Lympics in London, watching Baby and Ginger, watching John’s face on a digital screen as he incanted Imagine; I was proud to be a POM’s daughter.

Prince Harry can shag, or not shag, strip and canoodle whomever he bloody likes. I don’t think any the less of him for it. He is a single 28-year-old man, with heaps of cash, on holiday in Vegas. The papers are banging on about him being third in line for the throne and destroying the reputation of his family, because the “I want to be your tampon” line didn’t? Let’s face it; the women of his family live an average 100 years. Harry will be lucky to live long enough to see his father on the throne, let alone have a chance at the golden title before Duchess Kate pushes out a fashionable, honey-coiffed heir.

I think I might become British full time, innit gov, yer know wha’ I mean? You see, these past few months, I’ve never been less proud to be an Australian.

The summer of my discontent has been bubbling away inside for many months. I am ready to admit that it may be from eating too much Australian Vegemite, a notoriously salty, acid reflux inducing breakfast spread. Jokes aside, it started some time ago with the asylum seekers. 

Not really a P&O Cruise of the Whitsundays

I know that refugees could take advantage of the fact that no one thinks about a little country like Australia. A little country perched at the very end of the earth, a little country that welcomes those who can claim refugee status. But are the advantage-takers really the majority?  Would you be willing to sail for three months with two thousand other people, on a dilapidated fishing boat, to a remote island on the off chance they might let you in? Surely these people are not sailing to Australia because they have a deep and dark desire to take advantage of a country that provides for her people, a country blessed with space, with arable land, with a spirit of acceptance and open-mindedness (oh the irony). Surely you can’t be of The Shire-ey belief that these people just come to lay on a beach, and wear rubber thongs all day, rather than to escape persecution, nail bombs, hand grenades, child slavery, the stoning of women in public squares and god knows what else.

Were they not criminals, bread-thieves and pickpockets who chose transportation and founded what is modern Australia? Criminals, bread-thieves and pickpockets who chose life in a remote desert land rather than death by hanging in the village square? Those who found themselves on the wrong side of the law founded our nation, and now we bandy about the ideal that asylum seekers are not acting within the confines of the law. That as such they should not be allowed asylum in a country that was once the world’s biggest prison.

Forget the politics and the philosophy; let’s focus on the maths. Australia spends more money sending navy boats out into the North Pacific, purportedly to protect the oceanic borders, than we do feeding those who can’t feed themselves and housing those with no home. If we brought the navy back to shore, and had them focus on teaching everyone how to fish, would not all man, Australian or otherwise, eat for a lifetime? 

And then there are the gays.

 

...love and marriage, go together like a horse and carriage

I recognise that the few readers who have tolerated my liberal politics and made it this far might not get to the end of this paragraph. But here goes.

If a man and a woman, both as high as an effing kite, who may have known each other only as long as they played blackjack and skulled Martinis at Caesar’s Palace, can walk into the Little White Chapel of love in Las Vegas and walk out with a marriage license#, then why can’t two men or two women, committed to each other for many years, be afforded the same right to join themselves in matrimony, holy or otherwise, as one.

Before you get over-excited, you can forget your religious argument.

Last time I checked, Australia wasn’t governed by a priest, by a mullah, by a rabbi or by a minister. Her citizens who vote, her citizens who pay taxes and her citizens who contribute to her economic growth govern her democracy. Be they black, white, green, purple or Jedi, this does not prevent the government from denoting them as tax residents and thus claiming income tax. So how can the government then proclaim that only boys with girls have the right to share those tax benefits, their superannuation and of course, civil rights? Australia allows Christians to marry Muslims, allows Jews to marry Hindus, all of which is prohibited by any number of ‘gods’. Is it more or less of a crime against God for a Jew to marry a Muslim than it is for a boy to marry a boy?

Even so, the theology of the argument doesn’t matter. Marriage is a civil concern governed by federal laws, not by churches, mosques or synagogues. The second largest economic event in New South Wales after New Year’s Eve is Mardi Gras. So quit reaping the sequinned benefits of Sydney’s colourful Priscilla-y culture and grow up.

Julia^, you have never married and you live with a man. You are hardly a poster girl for the Religious Right, so why the political snail race? Barack Obama has potentially alienated half of his Southern voters by openly supporting gay marriage. Hugh Hefner, the world’s most notorious Playboy has spoken out in favour of gay marriage and he only shags silicone juveniles. Unbelievably, even the Americans are ahead of Australia on this.

To borrow from another of this week’s journalistic oeuvres, I wonder if one gay would get pregnant if another gay man raped him legitimately? I could ask Todd Akin, the reproductive-theo-biologist-congressman. …And that is why religion and politics are the oil and water of intelligent debate.

Finally the most recent episode of my disappointment with my sunburnt mother country. Echoing our epic abandonment of David Hicks, an Australian left to squander 6 years in Guantanamo Bay, enter Julian Assange, Australian citizen, currently squatting in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

 

Looks Ecuadorian to me!

Ecuador, a country not bigger than Victoria, with no political ties to anything British or Australian or even Swedish, has granted asylum to the most infamous Australian since Martin Bryant. We, the Australians, have all but denied knowledge of his existence. We won’t guarantee that if he comes home, we won’t ship him off the Uncle Sam to face questioning, rendition, water-boarding or torture by Kardashian. Our political relationship with the United States is more important to us than an actual human citizen of Australia who should he land on American soil, will be ironically imprisoned for that first amendment held so dear by our American cousins, the right to the Freedom of Speech.

Maybe if Julian had gone to London and won a Gold Medal in the pool we’d be a little more tolerant. Maybe if Sri Lankan Asylum Seekers could demonstrate their ability to bowl leg spin as they walk the gangplank to the shore we’d let them stay? Maybe if gay couples were able to prove that in eight years they would divorce, just like a third of Australia’s heterosexual couples, we’d let them marry?

Maybe, instead of being so concerned with what every other country is doing, to borrow the title of our national anthem, we could focus on Advancing Australia Fairly?   

Maybe we should live and let die?

 

 

Feel free to stay, so long as you don't arrive by boat

 

*Some of you will know why I can’t go into detail, for those of you who don’t, just skip that bit

#I know that it is in America, but the license is still legally valid Down Under

^Julia Gillard, Prime Minister of Australia