Sunday musings

The current excitement over the sub-prime debacle tangled with a book I have been reading. The book is nothing special, being a 50 cent offering from the local thrift shop, but this 1953 thriller was an oddly timely read.

My normally boring Sunday, my turn to cook and smoked cod pie the request, was seasoned with a bit of blogging excitement. A winger attack over at praguetwin and a continuing sub-prime coverage from reality-based educator set my blood running and mind racing.

The winger attack was interesting in that it petered out on a charge that a fellow Australian (of mine) was a whacko. Well this is a country where we can freely assert that our leaders and neighbours are brain-dead dickheads. No great issue there.

But back to the book and to wider issues of US policy on economic and diplomatic practices (Australia seems to be subservient to those policies for the foreseeable future).

The novel was set between Britain and Poland in a post war setting (1953?) and one of the Polish characters expounded the contemporary little gem:

“…a hard ideology is worth a lot more than hard currency – as your American allies are beginning to learn at their cost...”

I doubt the American leaders learned any such thing, but there you go. Another leitmotif was that extreme (dictatorial) regimes tend to rely on the moral argument to shore up their dubious positions.

Hitler had a whole department to regulate the length of women’s skirts and of course homosexuals were classed with Gypsies and Jews. Stalin, Mao and others including radical Muslims have used oppressive moral codes to control the people.

Ain’t it bloody strange that George W should have homed in on that same controlling factor to cement his corrupt regime? I am no apologist for Australia’s part in all this, except to say it doesn’t really sell here. John Howard’s Christian Right is generally told to stick it in their ear!

But history keeps repeating because we let it repeat; accept these moronic moral strictures in place of logical fact. I guess fear drives people to accept the simplistic – I guess, but don’t really understand. A bully brings out the worst in me but then maybe I’m just not keyed into the realities of this life.