We’re on the Proper Track

The heading on this column in June 2007 was “Rudd is a Dud”. Kevin Rudd certainly surprised me with his electoral victory some months later, but he has used the prime ministership chiefly as a shop window to display all the deficiencies I had noted, plus a whole catalogue of unsuspected others. His government already ranks way below Whitlam’s.

Now, as in 2007, these words are being written soon after Anzac Day, against a background feeling of reassurance that (notwithstanding its many serious problems and perplexities) Australia is OK. There is something sound at the heart of a people who, in numbers which increase each year, are prepared to set their collective alarm clock for three in the morning, to be ready to stand shoulder to shoulder with their fellow citizens, silently in the chill before the Dawn Service.

Later in the morning, the march is distinguished always for its spontaneous decency and good order, and for its sense of unaffected tribute just below the surface. For example, in 2007, not a veteran marching was unmoved by two little Asian boys whose uplifted placards, self-made from white cardboard and black crayon, read simply: “Thank you!”

While the recent Anzac Day waxed in strength and acceptance, as annually it does, the academic Left tried hard to make it rain on the parade. A slab of constipated prose from historians Henry Reynolds and Marilyn Lake deplored the “militarisation” of Australian history, as though there were some sinister plot to turn us all into goose-stepping Prussians of the South Seas. This trend, I must confess, I hadn’t noticed for myself.

I was, however, a little surprised at the appearance of Reynolds’s head above the parapet at all. His Aboriginal “history” has lately been so completely sliced and diced and served on toast by the detailed researches of Keith Windschuttle that a short silence from Reynolds, clad in sackcloth and ashes, might have been seemly and appropriate.

Instead, he and Lake demonstrated the sulky isolation of the academic Left, the ring-fence they have built around themselves to keep ordinary Australians out. As the Left progressively discloses how little of interest they have nowadays to offer, they find more and more words to do it in. The triviality of their concerns becomes yearly more apparent, but their infestation of the universities does not diminish. Thorstein Veblen described the process a hundred years ago from California: “It is something of a homiletical commonplace to say that the outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where one grew before.” So, whacko! for taxpayer-funded research “grants” to keep the wheel turning for ever and for ever.

Anzac Day clearly ain’t broke, and is therefore precisely the sort of thing that the frenzied fingers of Rudd itch to fix. Almost before the crowd barriers had been dismantled and the band instruments put away, he set up an inquiry to report on how Anzac Day should look ten years from now. Two of our better-known has-beens—Bob Hawke and Malcolm Fraser—would head the investigation. I must say that I would have preferred people with stronger chances of being still alive to see the results of their own handiwork.

But not to worry unduly. If you simply add “Anzac Day” to the bottom of that list which began some time ago with “Petrol Watch” and “Grocery Watch”, and which moves ever-downward through “Pink Batts” towards “Carbon Emissions Tax”, I think we ordinary mug-patriot Australians can feel pretty relaxed.

The leisure-bonus of the long Anzac weekend I employed partly to read Going Rogue, the autobiography of recent US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. An odd choice, perhaps, and an odd book. Her 400 pages can hardly have been written all by herself in the time slot allowed—only Peter Craven might have managed that. Yet it is seamlessly personal and “authentic”, right down to a running catalogue of every diaper (“nappy”, to you) which she applied to the bottoms of her brood. The volume could be the longest and most profusely illustrated political manifesto ever written, yet I did not feel that I was wasting my time. The woman is no airhead, despite what some of her opponents have suggested. Alaska, after all, is the USA’s largest state, and she has governed it. She has dealt shrewdly with “Big Oil”. She knows the unspeakable underground ramifications of the scandalous Exxon Valdez oil spill disaster. Her candour is refreshing as—for example—about provincial government, where corruption “runs through the ventilation system as a substitute for air”.

If I were an American citizen, I would probably vote for her next time around. (Make no error, she is determined there will be a next time around!) But my ballot would have nothing to do with politics. The attraction would be poetry. You see, Palin’s father brought her up on the poems of Ogden Nash, and no one who knows Ogden Nash can be all bad.

Now dead some forty years, Nash was a prolific contributor of verse to the New Yorker and other papers, and published many books of his poems. During the 1940s and 1950s, his “terse verse” sprang more swiftly to the public lip than Shakespeare’s and T.S. Eliot’s combined. How well-remembered—or forgotten—is he today?

He ridiculed the rule book of formal English to indulge the eccentricities of his own outrageous rhymes: (“Parsley is gharsley”). He presented shrewd and funny fragments of life packed into startling four-liners:

Candy

Is dandy

But liquor

Is quicker.

After Harvard, he tried many jobs unsuccessfully, including—note this—selling shares to investors. He wrote:

I would live all my life in nonchalance and insouciance

Were it not for making a living, which is rather a nousiance.

Beneath all the brittle clowning which eventually made him famous and well-off, the man was truly a poet. There are no verbal tricks whatever in his three verses “For a Good Dog”, which makes as simple and as moving an acceptance of old age as I have ever read.

As so often happens to people who like to pretend they own a library, I simply cannot locate the text of an old Nash poem which still applies horribly well to the governmental sleaze and muddle in Canberra today, and to the moral sewer created by the banking and investment industry of much of the world. I must therefore seek your indulgence of my decades-old memory of Ogden Nash’s “The Four Bastards”. *

The poet figuratively divides his polity into bastards of four different kinds. Three of them are successful, conspicuous, rich and rotten:

Your banker, your broker, your Washington joker:

Three jolly old bastards are we, are we;

Three jolly old bastards are we.

The fourth and overwhelmingly numerous category looks remarkably like you and me. (The small print concedes that our parents were actually married.) We are “ordinary figures in these democratic states / A pathetic demonstration of hereditary traits”.

We invested, we deposited, we voted every Fall;

If we ever saved a penny, those bastards took it all.

But now we’ve learned our lesson, and we’re on the proper track:

We’re self-appointed bastards, and we’re out to get it back!

Well, an election approaches. If the Rudd government survives, whose fault will that be? And Ogden Nash, from underground, will sadly shake his head.

* If any Quadrant reader could let me have a copy of Nash’s text, I would take it as a great kindness. P.R.