Mull This

THERE ARE a few, just a few, positives to the dull business of running down life’s clock. Plenty of time for weekday golf, that is one of them, as is the barber’s unsolicited offer of a senior’s discount. And the right to review memories of an earlier life without guilt or shudders of remorse -- that certainly needs to be mentioned because it is by far the brightest candle on an otherwise grey and unpalatable cake.

At a distance of years and decades, memory has the decency to present the missteps of long ago in the merciful third person. Yes, it really was a young Professor who went over the back fence as the Drug Squad came in the front door, but those two hours spent cowering in a neighbour’s outhouse bring a smile these days, not the cold shivers of terror which made that summer afternoon so memorable. The winces of later life spring not from the knowledge of a career and reputation jeopardized, nor even the sound of a co-cultivator getting a good and vigorous slapping from one of Detective Inspector Kyte-Powell’s prohibition agents . If there is sadness, it is prompted only by thoughts of a primo crop being uprooted just as it was heading. What a lovely ketch those profits would have bought! What a crew of bare-breasted hippy nymphs might have decorated the cockpit on that planned voyage to Tahiti and beyond.

And guilt? Well, there was none then and less now. Had it been a meth lab in the back yard, that would today be a source of shame. But a quarter hundredweight-or-so of finest Fitzroy buds, there was no harm in that, other than that which the herb’s purchasers would have shouldered knowingly and entirely of their own accord. It was apparent then, and moreso now, that there is a fundamental injustice in denying individuals the right to make of their lives what they will, even if it be nothing more than wreckage. And illegal drugs, they do have their benefits. There is a definite streak of truth, for example, in the old saw that many libertarian conservatives began their journeys to enlightenment not with Hayek in hand but with a bong.

Older gentlemen, even those who shoot under 100, are entitled to their reveries, but this post is no mere trip down memory lane. Rather, it is a word of encouragement for a young fellow who has had a dreadful start in life and whose fortunes, he must surely be telling himself, last year took a disastrous turn. His name is Rory O’Gorman, who dropped from Lee Rhiannon’s loins some 32 years ago and was last year incarcerated after being lumbered in his Bondi home with 7 kilograms of dope and $120,000 in cash.

Let us not be too hard on the lad, who may well be his family’s redeemer. Three generations of his antecedents have looked to Marx and central planning for a better world, but not Rhiannon’s little lad. Somehow, in that multi-generational tangle of bright Red bloodlines, a little wisp of entrepreneurial DNA survived all those renditions of the Internationale, eventually to blossom. Rory’s mad mum raves about government as the source of good, and she dreams of the day when even greater levels of legislated coercion will be available to keep the proles in a state of officially approved happiness. Rory -- and may the Great Bunyip bless him for this – saw a market opportunity and took it.

Hope springs eternal because, where profit and personal betterment are concerned, it really is eternal.

(*Do click the link and scan to page 30, where you will find a quaint summation of drug abuse in Victoria, circa 1970. Four decades later, and with countless billions of dollars having been squandered on the unwinnable war on drugs, drug abuse is endemic, organized crime has prospered and prohibition has been proven, yet again, to be an expensive folly. It is no endorsement of drug use to observe that marijuana, at the very least, needs to be legalised. Rather, it is a vote for the blindingly obvious.)

Red and Green and Dishonest All Over

GOOD Lord, but those facts are difficult, troublesome things. Suppose, for example, you are Greens publicity agent Melissa Fyfe, whose salary is paid by the Sunday Phage, and you really, really need to need to write an upbeat profile of Lee Rhiannon, who will shortly take her seat in the Senate. Well, there is your problem right there. How do you say nice things about a creature whose support for Islamic nut jobs, amongst other fruit loop causes, has divided the Greens and embarrassed Saint Bob?

Answer: Choose your words carefully, skate lightly over the bad stuff and, when all else fails, stretch euphemism to breaking point. The key is to sustain that flow of happy publicity without alienating Rhianon or your other pals in the party, the ones who think she is a loose cannon and will be a magnet for grief come the next election.

In today’s Phage, Fyfe demonstrates how a true Fairfax professional navigates such dilemmas. On the matter of personal politics, devote just one sentence to Rhiannon’s slavish adoration of Moscow, which she supported even after the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, when she bolted with fellow lickers of jackboots to the Socialist Party of Australia.

Next, try to calm down Mr and Mrs Stringbag – you know, the sort who will be paying a lot more for everything when the Greens’ carbon tax becomes law. Do this by insisting Rhiannon “is no longer a socialist.”  Not at all! She just wants “more government regulation and a bigger role for public services such as education, health and transport, but not the overthrow of capitalism.”  Well that is OK, then. She is not a socialist, she just wants government to run everything

And when it comes to Rhiannon’s red-nappy upbringing, Fyfe demonstrates a skill that is the journalistic equivalent of a shonky home renovator’s eagerness to slap nice, clean wallpaper over some very toxic mould.

The consensus is that Rhiannon is quick to be combative, as The Sunday Age learnt while asking about her mother's frequent travels overseas for work.

For work!

When her mum, vile harridan Freda Brown, died in 2009, the Silly published an obituary that listed some of those “work” trips:

The Silly: She was elected president of the 1975 Women's International Democratic Federation congress in Berlin.

Backround: The WIDF was a Soviet front and the Congress was not held “in Berlin” unless you were using a pre-WWII map. It was held in East Berlin, where the one measure of equality was the Stasi’s habit of spying on everyone, oppressed housewives included. Typical chatter in the ladies room at at WIDF congresses: “Our children cannot be safe until American war-mongers are silenced.” The CIA’s appraisal of the WIDF and other front groups is to be found here. Yes, it is the CIA doing the appraising, but the file’s observations about the clash between gals of the Peking-line and Soviet-line stands up very nicely to history's scrutiny.

The Silly: While the women's union's sympathies were left-wing and some members were communists, most were not members of any political party and rejected the doctrinaire narrowness of communist leaders … Members dug wells for women in many low-income countries and campaigned for breastfeeding of babies.

Background: See the CIA report (linked above), which supports a vigorous scepticism about the clam that the WIDF concerned itself primarily with water tables and lactation.

Then there are Brown’s other travels, as the Silly also explained:

Coming home with US cluster bombs, she was attacked for working with the enemy. In Cuba, she ran workshops for women from across Latin America. In Moscow in 1977, she was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize.

And her voyaging continued:

“She was one of the first westerners to enter the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps after the slaughter of 1982. She visited Cambodia shortly after Vietnam overthrew the Pol Pot regime, travelled through the Western Sahara with the Polisario Front, and worked with the African National Congress Women's League.”

To Melissa Fyfe, all of the above is just “work”, not tireless crusading for bloody tyranny. And while her astute choice of words probably means Rhiannon will continue to return Fyfe’s calls, such a flippant disregard for accuracy ill-serves Phage readers.

Freda Brown was a devoted warrior in the Soviet cause -- much, much more than one of the “useful idiots” in whom Lenin invested such hopes and joy. As for Fyfe, she fits that description very nicely indeed.