Attack Of The Towering Trot

THE next poor fellow to divorce the former Mrs Bunyip will learn rather quickly that harsh words come in two varieties. The first sort hurt but their effect is muted, as hearing grim truths about one’s poor habits and regrettable activities tends to encourage silence rather than anger, silence with sometimes a dash of shame. The other kind, they’re the barbs that can escalate the simplest spat into what attending police will log as “a serious domestic”.  It is one thing to hear genuine vices proclaimed – screamed, actually – but quite another to be heaped with convictions for offences no more than contemplated, a category that includes all those misconceptions about what went on that night on the mooring with Joan (who was drunk, going through a difficult time and just needed a little help with her self-esteem).  The thing about legal papers and lawyer bills is that, eventually, they turn those bitter moments into memories. Slowly the temper cools, blood pressure medications can be chucked and it becomes possible as anger subsides to fall asleep without balled fists and grinding teeth.

Such has been the happy state at the Billabong for the past few years, but not last night. When the light was dimmed and imagination re-ran the day in its sepia stutter of mise-en-scenes, it was the spectre of a snarling Martin Hirst that rose from the drowsy subconscious. And once again, as he did through most of yesterday afternoon, he was flinging terrible, unjust slurs and charges. Wearing one of Mrs Bunyip’s less-fetching aprons, wielding an ice pick in one hand and a fashionable martini in the other, the phantasm's words were honed by cruelty and cut with a rapier’s slash.

The Billabong  is “a low-rent rightwing blog” and the Professor “a troll” cum “dribblejaw” who feeds faux “facts” to Andrew Bolt. This death-beast percolation fires up the jackboot media, yesterday inspiring a garden-variety reporter to call Deakin University’s Associate Professor of Media Studies (just as he was settling down, no doubt with a chic martini) and grill him in that evil, Murdoch way.

ethicalmartini ethicalmartini 

#mediainquiry I just had a call from #thedAilytelegraph on a witch hunt for reds under the bed. Weds #newslimited papers doing a hatchet job

3 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply

Vile, foul remarks, but there were more and worse memories to haunt last night’s dark hours. When a tweeting admirer urged Associate Professor Hirst to spurn a “fascist” Bunyip and pay no heed at all to posts about the academic’s proud Trot pedigree, he rejected with a revolutionary’s zeal the very notion of staying schtum. He is out for blood, he explained in his response, replying that “baiting them is fun. They are nasty and don't have a sense of humour or social justice.”

In the case of a mild and inoffensive Bunyip, Hirst might be right about the social justice bit. But nasty? No sense of humour? What a hurtful man he is to say such things, so hateful it requires a real effort to extend good fellowship’s hand and remind him, gently and calmly, why empty vessels will always make the most noise. It is no more than logic, really. If a sense of humour is lacking at the Billabong then something else must be responsible for the chuckles at his expense that he sense, and a process of elimination nominates him as the source of all that mirth.

If Hirst would but spike tweets like this one, that would be a big step toward his goal of being taken seriously – quite a challenge for a fellow who works at Deakin, of which a modest commenter notes: “ATAR entrance cutoff in 2011 to the Deakin faculty of Media and Communications at the Geelong Campus was a stunning 59.05”.

ethicalmartini ethicalmartini 

#mediainquiry #newslimited asks are you now or have you ever been a #Trotskyist nothing about my opinion. As a #socialist I am not allowed

4 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply

Associate Professor Hirst, it is not that you are a socialist. There are still quite a few of those about, especially in the common rooms of universities until recently devoted to the useful disciplines of wool classing and crutching. The real problem is that you are a Trot, which in this day and age suggests, you know, a self-absorbed preciousness.

Advocating the hopeless cause has always been a fine way to stand out from the pack, to wrap  ego in the pure and burnished glow of inspirational otherworldliness. Mainstream Left and dominant Right? Why, don’t you know that each is wrong, and ’tis only from the throne of theory and Trot abstractions that the shortcomings of all others’ agendas can be divined and, with a contemptuous wave, dismissed. It is the playground of your noxious, know-it-all teenager -- an expanding demographic which has come to include university-supported Peter Pans of the middle-aged variety. And best of all, the Trot creed cannot fail because it will never be put to the test, meaning Associate Professor Hirst can remain the smartest and most interesting guest at any inner city barbecue. He will think so, anyway, which really is the most important thing.

Still, it remains something of a mystery why the Press Inquiry made Associate Professor Hirst its lead witness. Trotsky was, after all, an advocate of doing away with censorship, as he explained in 1938:

“Any workers ‘leader’ who arms the bourgeois state with special means to control public opinion in general, and the press in particular, is a traitor.”

Since the inquiry’s other witnesses have been rather keen to fit free speech with overseers, hobbles and reviewers, not to mention generous, grant-bestowing “parents”, Hirst would seem once again to have been cast as the loneliest voice in the room.

But then, when you recall what else Long Winded Leon had to say about free speech, the genius of kicking off a show trial with a thinker of Associate Professor’s stature becomes crystal clear:

Once victorious, the proletariat may find itself forced, for a period of time, to take special measures against the bourgeoisie, if the bourgeoisie adopts an attitude of open revolt against the workers’ state. In this case, restrictions to the freedom of the press go hand in hand with all other measures used in preparation for a civil war. When forced to use artillery and aviation against the enemy we will obviously not tolerate this same enemy maintaining his own centers of information and propaganda inside the camp of the armed proletariat.

The revolution, Associate Professor Hirst’s revolution, is not yet upon us or ever likely to be, so those restrictions are needed now and, to all intents purposes, forever after.

It all makes perfect sense to the superior mind, especially after a few martinis.