The Various Shades of Shame

Though painful to endure, shame and embarrassment are nevertheless extremely useful. They helpfully inform us that certain activities should not be repeated, and that particular attitudes and ideas should at the very least be reconsidered.

It would have been quite shame-inducing, for example, for a man to disguise himself with woman’s clothing in order to secure a seat on a life-raft leaving the Titanic. Sure, such a strategy may have ensured survival, but only at a profound and possibly unbearable social cost.

(Note: the above scenario is obviously era-dependent. A male attempting to pass himself off as female would have been condemned in 1912, when the Titanic sank in the North Atlantic, but a male attempting the same ruse in 2023 would be praised for bravely celebrating her/their true inner life. Just a helpful tip there for any blokes planning long voyages aboard dodgy ocean liners. Pack a frock.)

Or perhaps you’re a fellow who thinks it a good idea to advertise your wealth and accomplishments by driving around in a Maserati. Wealthy and accomplished such a person may be, of course, but Maserati ownership doesn’t do anything to enhance that image.

Quite the opposite, in fact. Maserati ownership amounts to clinical-level evidence of a serious personality flaw. It’s basically an extremely expensive way to tell the world you know absolutely nothing about cars.

Within a Maserati’s tasteless confines, shame and embarrassment are your permanent passengers. Or should be. Some people, of course, are incapable of registering humiliation even when they’re surrounded by an interior that looks like Elvis’s 3 a.m. shot at decorating a Dubai hotel lobby.

And some people—our leftist friends, for example—may be capable of experiencing shame and embarrassment, but process them in ways that are not exactly healthy or productive. They convert what should be an instructive and humbling psychological trial into an indulgence. They turn an ordeal into an emotional orgy.

Just look at how staffers at the Guardian have responded to revelations that their far-left publication was founded in 1821 on the back of profits from slavery. This came to light three years ago, precisely when the Guardian—and every other leftist collective on earth—was applauding 2020’s Black Lives Matter riots.

On June 9, 2020, the Guardian editorialised in favour of pulling down a Bristol statue of Edward Colston, said to have been “a leading figure in the slave-trading Royal African Company”, and throwing it in that English city’s harbour. “Bristol made a fortune out of the slavery business,” the Guardian railed.

Destruction of all that followed from slavery’s wicked bounty was, by the Guardian’s leftist logic, therefore wholly justified. Just one week later, however, London’s Sun had unfortunate news for the Guardian’s moral scolds. “Originally called the Manchester Guardian,” the Sun reported, “the paper was founded in 1821 by John Edward Taylor using profits from a cotton plantation that used slaves.”

As the ABC’s vocabulary-restricted Paul Barry says in just about every episode of Media Watch: “Whoops.” Not only was the Guardian established by slavery wealth, as the paper’s own investigations confirmed, but a check of the Guardian’s archives revealed what would now be described as “hate speech” aimed at anti-slavery icon Abraham Lincoln.

“It was an evil day both for America and the world,” a Guardian editorial declared in 1862, “when he was chosen president of the United States.”

If any other organisation had both profited from slavery and slammed one of history’s greatest forces for liberation, the Guardian would have been front and centre demanding its demolition. But leftists apply different rules to themselves than they do to the likes of Bristol’s poor old Ed Colston. Instead of throwing themselves into a reeking British waterway, Guardian staff commenced a journey of self-regarding grievance.

“I remember the moment,” current Guardian boss Katherine Viner wrote in March about learning three years earlier of her paper’s disgraceful founding. “We were meeting the historians who had been commissioned by the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian, to look into our past …

“Dr Cassandra Gooptar, an irrepressible expert on the history of enslaved peoples, had done some early work, and the evidence was inescapable: there was no doubt that the Guardian was founded with money partly derived from slavery, and the links were extensive.”

Let’s hope Dr Gooptar, a historian of colour, was paid for her work. The Guardian, or at least its originator, has some unfortunate form in that regard. The paper’s obvious next task should have been closing down or rebranding the entire tainted enterprise. After all, that was the rule—applied by the Guardian, among many others—for everyone else throughout BLM’s 2020 terror reign.

But the Guardian turned a negative into a positive. They threw themselves an introspective apology party over events that occurred more than 200 years earlier. Of course they did. Leftists adore nothing more than apologising for matters to which they have no direct connection. It’s all pose and no pain.

Recall then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s formal apology to Australia’s indigenous folk and the allegedly stolen generations in 2008. Recall, too, Peter Dutton’s apology this year for walking out on parliament during Rudd’s apology. Remarkably, the current Liberal leader apologised for something he did do after refusing to participate in an apology for something he didn’t do.

Apologies to anyone who is struggling to keep up.

“It is absolutely right that we apologise for our past,” Viner continued in her March piece, adding that the slavery saga had left her feeling “sick to my stomach”. Plans are afoot to ease such suffering. “The Guardian is home to many fantastic Black journalists, editors and columnists, and we can and will be more diverse,” Viner announced. “I believe diversity is a practical as well as a moral imperative.”

Blue-eyed white gal Viner will presumably be stepping aside, then. But to do so would only perpetuate, as former UK Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption wrote in April, “a new and pernicious form of racism—the peddling of a notion of hereditary white responsibility for slavery, which requires one to recognise an entirely artificial class of modern victims defined by race”.

The Guardian’s founder got it wrong on race 200 years ago. The Guardian now aims to get it wrong again. Best load that Maserati with some powerful shame-concealer and hit the highway.

AT CONSIDERABLE length and in possibly excessive detail, readers were last month subject to recollections of my summertime heart attack adventure and recovery. As of this moment, everything continues to be fine—although with one or two surprises.

I signed a bunch of documents while in intensive care. They were mostly standard administrative fare: insurance forms, medication acknowledgments, something about “do not resuscitate” and so on. One unremembered signature, however, resulted in a dramatic post-recovery lifestyle change I’m still dealing with.

Somehow I joined a gym. Specifically, a hospital gym specialising in cardiac rehabilitation.

Now, I’ve seen gyms before and even been inside a couple—for professional purposes, when covering sports—but I’ve never actually used gym equipment, beyond maybe some simple weights. Gym machinery can be intimidating. Happily, the instructors assigned to our small survival pod were caring, helpful and often even funny.

They were also very insistent about exercise, and not just under their watch during gym attendance. They asked every week about exercise undertaken voluntarily, at home or outside. This was all very new to me. Which, come to think of it, may partially explain why I ended up needing cardiac surgery and rehab in the first place.

Walking was strongly recommended, being “low impact”. (That’s fancy gym talk for “so easy even Tim can manage it”.) The trouble is, walking for the sake of walking is incredibly dull. Yet I desperately needed some walking stories—believable ones, otherwise the instructors would see right through me.

Solution: I drove to country Victorian towns close to my home, abandoned the car at the end of main streets and walked their length. One side of the street one way, the other side on the way back. Depending on the town, this could deliver thirty minutes or even an hour or more of instructor-approved exertion.

This also provided additional surprises—or, more accurately, reminders. Australian country towns are fascinating. The trick is to get in close and carefully clock all the features. Don’t walk past any shopfront words, especially, even at stores that have clearly been closed for decades.

Otherwise you might miss the outstanding ice-cream recipe (“From Jean Parkinson’s Cook Book”) I found posted outside a former milk bar in Warracknabeal, or this powerful Wimmera warning to any would-be conquerors of slides and swing sets: “In 1970 the Lions Club of Minyip established a children’s playground on the site and in 1974 a World War II Bofors anti-aircraft gun was moved in.”

For now, though, let’s keep secret my visit to Nhill. It has a brilliant pinball museum. Very little walking was accomplished. Also, I’m down about $50.