<< WHEN MOONBATS DREAM ~ MAIN ~ ALL SUNLIGHT EATEN >>
MALAISE GOING ON
The ABC’s Kerry O’Brien interviews fearless leftoid novelist Richard Flanagan:
KERRY O’BRIEN: [Your novel describes] two thugs beating up an old vagrant in Sydney’s King’s Cross, “They kept on for a few minutes more, kicking him as if he were to blame for everything in that dirty, dead decade their were all condemned to live through. A sack of shit that had once been a man in a place that had once been a community in a country that had once been a society.” Is that what Australia has become for you?
RICHARD FLANAGAN: I think it’s become that for many people. We are more frightened, we are more frightening, we are less free, we are more unjust, we are more callous, there’s a greater divide of wealth and power and the truth gets ever harder to get out. So, that was very much how I felt and that story sort of captured it in a few sentences.
It also captured, in a few sentences, several reasons not to buy Flanagan’s book. Richard doesn’t hate Australia, by the way; he’s merely sickened by our spiritual malaise, which only Richard and his people wish repaired:
RICHARD FLANAGAN: There is something else that’s going on in Australia, a sort of spiritual malaise that I find sickening, in a word. At the end of the day it is our Australia, too, and a lot of people want it back. They want a gentler, more generous, kinder Australia, not the kind of Australia they are getting presented with every day at the moment.
Every day this happens. Every single, terrible day. Along with, as Flanagan reports, the destruction of our government’s opponents:
RICHARD FLANAGAN: We have an ever more cowed media and we see daily anybody who rightly questions or simply interrogates the process of government or government policy being destroyed.
This is happening daily? Perhaps Richard should supply a list of those destroyed. Or perhaps Richard, like the rest of his family, is genetically pre-disposed to making stuff up:
KERRY O’BRIEN: When your brother, Martin Flanagan, was asked recently what quality he most associates with you, he said, “Sheer, naked courage”. Do you recognise that in yourself and what particularly has taken courage in your life?
RICHARD FLANAGAN: I think the family is given to exaggeration, Kerry. I wouldn’t believe that for a moment.
We don’t.
(via Cuckoo)
Good God, we used to get this same sort of crap over here during the Reagan administration. Same in the UK when Thatcher was in power.
I remember reading a few years back about Vaclav Havel dressing down some chattering class idiot who’d moaned to him about the ‘darkness’ they’d all had to endure during the Thatcher years.
The capacity of these people for navel-gazing self-pity and hyperbole is bottomless.
Good lord! This guy’s borrowing from everybody. The kicking scene sounds like it must have been “inspired” by A Clockwork Orange. And that business about a “kinder, gentler” Australia is straight out of Bush the First’s playbook, via Peggy Noonan. And the cornball finish, equivalent to, “Aw, shucks, ma’am, ‘tweren’t nothing any red-blooded hero wouldn’t've done”, sounds like a take-off on Gary Cooper. And “malaise”?!? Did he make sure to send Jimmy Carter a royalty check?
What did Flanagan do anything to help the guy getting kicked?
Or, is the lefty record of “do no good” still clean?
The guy should be happy that Flanagan didn’t join in to get material for his writing.
Posted by Andy Freeman on 2006 11 02 at 11:41 AM • permalinkA media “so cowed” we get regular televised interviews with social critics like Flanagan who love democracy, only as long as people who agree with him are in charge, and love elections, only as long as his candidates win.
The politics of petulance.
So, I guess he’ll now be ‘destroyed.’ Now THAT would be worth tuning in.
I have been begging people for months to tell me of one single case of they or any other American citizen they know having his rights curtailed. I will fight for them fiercely. But no one has had that experience, unless it’s those of us constantly hemmed in by the economic pestering of liberal governments. (Between the endless government regs and the constant threat of lawsuits, you must be mad to want to start your own business these days.) But that’s not the kind of rights-squishing that the lefties mean—they prefer the kind that they aren’t causing, the right-wing fascist imaginary kind.
I encourage all Aussies to also work as modern-day Diogeneses, seeking out a single victim of the John Howard reign of terror.
The interview was made more disgusting by Red Kezza’s embarrassingly childlike fawning and grooming of the “author”.
He LEANED all over him,suctioned up every pearl of wisdom that dropped from his lips, -guffawing at his “witticisms”,
Flattering and posturing submissively,
radiating bonhomie and goodwill..
Could this be the sour,witholding,misery
stricken,virulently HoWARd hating,elitist,misogynist Red Kezza we all know and love.The one who acts like a mother in law who can NEVER be propitiated or satisfied,never be pleased and delights in the sabotaging of his own people and country.cosmo’s got it. If there’s one thing that unites all modern leftists and leftoids, it’s the belief that their opinions are being suppressed even while they get to air these opinions in umpteen media appearances. (For the Kos-style foot soldiers, it usually takes the form of “the media is in the tank for Dubya/Howard/right-wing boogeyman of the day”, of course.)
Their utter inability to recognize the inherent contradiction is really quite amazing.
My company is always on the lookout for motivational speakers. I’m hoping that Mr. Flanagan hasn’t been booked on the David Williamson cruise.
Posted by chinesearithmetic on 2006 11 02 at 12:23 PM • permalinkThe quote from the novel was all it took. If he writes that badly, no way I’d buy it.
Posted by Sonetka's Mom on 2006 11 02 at 01:01 PM • permalinkThe left in the US and Australia are mirror images of one another. I’ve never seen a group of people so sensitive to criticism.
criticism = McCarthyism
criticism = censorship
criticism = suppression
criticism = denial of Constitutional rightsI know what “gentler, more generous, kinder” means to the American left (unfettered immigration of the wretched refuse except white Europeans, massive wealth redistribution, cradle to grave nanny state, group/collective over individual, national/individual disarmament, stringent secularism with exceptions for Islam, multiculturalism/moral relativism, pro-internationalism—law, courts, UN, climate treaties—but anti-economic globalization, massive transfers of wealth from first to third worlds, scaled down military to be used only when US has no direct stake in conflict outcome, Gaia rights ascendant/homo sapiens rights descendant—did I miss any?). What does it mean to the Australian left?
Posted by Kyda Sylvester on 2006 11 02 at 02:13 PM • permalinkKyda: Well said.
It also means every sin they forever accuse the right of doing—
Intolerance—of politically unfashionable views and people
Stifling of dissent—through speech codes and thuggery
Bigotry—through preferential treatment of protected groups
Destruction of the Constitution—by turning more and more of our lives over to an imperial judiciary
Amerikkka the police state—funny, but there haven’t been any Wacos or Ruby Ridge’s during Dubya’s reign.
I could go on, but we can already see the impact of the Left’s war against the individual and the Balkanizing of society into grievance-nurturing, axe-grinding tribes.
This bitch also dedicated his book to David Hicks and referred to Jesus as the world’s first suicide bomber because he gave his life for a higher cause.
Posted by Oafish and Infantile on 2006 11 02 at 04:04 PM • permalinkThat “malaise” word is troubling. As others have noted, we got plenty of that from Jemmah Cahtah, and it took two terms of Ronald Reagan to get over it.
Which was good, except for the part about it being preceeded by Peanut Boy.
Posted by Steve Skubinna on 2006 11 02 at 04:58 PM • permalink#15 Tim Blair -
Note: my post as first written led some—with justification, considering I didn’t make it clear—to believe Flanagan had personally witnessed the beating described.
Not so; it was a product of Flanagan’s delightful imagination, for his novel.
Yes, true may it be, it might as well be fact for a liberal like Flanagan. Whether it’s a Baltimore newspaper journalist who wins a Pulitzer Prize for a completely made up series on a child junkee, or a longstanding news anchor who places his reputation on the line for a completely unauthenticated memo, these people know that crimes have been committed. Somewhere. They know it. They just can’t find them. Which is no indication that they didn’t occur but instead further evidence that the dark side is a cunnning foe to have hidden it from them so well.
It’s the fake but accurate way of thinking which is the hallmark of every liberal thinker.
Posted by wronwright on 2006 11 02 at 05:13 PM • permalinkI thought it was Robert Dessaix who talked about Flanagan’s “sheer naked courage”, in an SMH suck up. Perhaps brother Martin has also said it, perhaps all of Flanagan’s mates have agreed to say it.
What struck me was the sheer naked unoriginality of Flanagan’s views.
Posted by Consuela Potez on 2006 11 02 at 05:14 PM • permalink“Sheer, naked courage” Flanagan?
“questions or simply interrogates the process of government or government policy being destroyed”
This means, for him, over-long interviews on prime-time government-funded TV.
This is for a guy most of us have never heard of, who NEEDS just such free publicity for a living.He came across as an ignorant extremist - as much in touch and sympathetic to normal Australians as Sheik al-Hilali.
#12 crash: The interview was made more disgusting by Red Kezza’s embarrassingly childlike fawning and grooming of the “author”.
He LEANED all over him, suctioned up every pearl of wisdom that dropped from his lips, -guffawing at his “witticisms”, Flattering and posturing submissively, radiating bonhomie and goodwill..crash, here’s the PROOF of Total Media Control - Kezza had no alternative but to follow the Approved ABC Line with Artists.
The novel,in pursuit of political correctness no doubt, offers no description of the two thugs.Would it be safe to presume that they were probably “men of no appearance”? While I know that thugs of “no appearance”(aka MOMEA) normally hunt in packs of at least six or more perhaps on this occasion could they have made an exception given that their target was an “old vagrant”.
My wife’s old boss grew up with Flanagan (neighbour or relative, I can’t quite remember the exact relationship). About the time that ‘The sound of one hand clapping’ came out, she would regale us at dinner parties with tales of Flanagan’s shortcomings. She also said that in her opinion (and bear in mind that this woman was your classic product of a late sixties-early seventies private melbourne catholic school education, with all that implies)that he was not very bright, and she doubted he operated in the real world. From a lefty about a fellow lefty, that said it all.
Caought the interview, too. It had quite a few laugh out loud moments, but red kezza seemed to take him very seriously.In a similar vein, I was thumbing through one of those men’s lifestyle magazines—the kind that feature annual lists of the most influential men, which are populated almost exclusively by actors, musicians and sports figures. This issue had advice on being a man from Julian Schnabel. You get the idea.
Anyhooo, I come across an inteview of tedious Timmy Robbins, who says “American people accept that their country is run by gangsters.”
Yeah, sure, Tim. Just like American people accept that their creative and entertainment industries are populated by poseurs.
This was the same Tim Robbins that gave an address on the ‘stifling of dissent’—nationally broadcast from the Press Club.
This guy’s lived for so long in the land of make believe he doesn’t understand that real gangsters—especially the kind that run entire countries—have ways of keeping their critics quiet.
#26-wronwright:
“Which is no indication that they didn’t occur but instead further evidence that the dark side is a cunnning foe to have hidden it from them so well.”
Usually followed up by a challenge made to the cunning foe to prove their dark allegation didn’t happen. See:
1. Conspiracy to assasinate JFK.
2. Apollo moon landing was faked.
3. Election in 2000 was stolen by Republicans.
4. September 11 was perpetrated by the government.
5. Levees in New Orleans were dynamited in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.Now prove those events didn’t happen that way!
I was at Uni with Flanagan when he was student union president. I’ve never seen anyone so in love with themself, not since my time in Launceston when his older brother Martin “Flaps” Flanagan, a local footy reporter, started to cultivate this air of gravitas which all his old Uni friends considered ridiculous (no surprise when he ended up at The Age).
Richard got even worse when he came back from his Rhodes scholarship mewling to the papers about how nasty Oxford was. Not surprisingly, no-one had much sympathy for him at that point.
Ever since then he’s played out this tedious psycho-drama in public of how he can’t really handle living away from Tassie, basically because he’s just a home-town boy and his inflated ego is too embarrassed to just admit this.
(What’s sad is that the success of his novels meant that many Tassie people who used to laugh at him behind his back now boast of knowing the great author).
But which would you flush down the toilet first, Big Jim? Talk about a serious dilemma.
Posted by SwinishCapitalist on 2006 11 02 at 08:25 PM • permalinkSheer, naked courage? I thought that was the Palestinian guy performing genital acrobatics while fleeing the IDF?
Posted by Infidel Tiger on 2006 11 02 at 08:55 PM • permalink...there’s a greater divide of wealth and power and the truth gets ever harder to get out.
In my experience, wealth and power in Australia lie with a well-educated liberal elite, who despise the conservative proles for their lack of socio-political enlightenment.
It’s abhorent that people like Flanagan still think they represent the oppressed, not the oppressors.
Posted by blandwagon on 2006 11 02 at 09:41 PM • permalink#45, and Latham was self-destruction pure and simple. The VRWC didn’t have to do anything.
Posted by Art Vandelay on 2006 11 02 at 11:02 PM • permalink#9
No, Flanagan would never imagine jumping into a fight to help someone out. Just as the media stood around and watched a photographer get the crap kicked out of him in front of the Magistrates’ court in Melbourne. It was their “professionalism” that meant about 30 cameramen and photographers took pictures of one bloke getting bashed. Not one of them helped out. How many blokes does it take to record the moment. Cowards.As for dedicating the book to David Hicks! I agree everyone is entitled to, and subject to, the law. (Even the Nazis were charged, tried and punished where it was appropriate.) But for crying out loud, that doesn’t make Hicks a hero. He hasn’t earned anything, except our utter disgust by defending the Taliban. He came from a civilised and lawful society to take up the cause of misanthropic religioius maniacs. Can Flanagan be blind to this? How can he rationalise idolising such a worthless human being?
Posted by SingleMalt on 2006 11 03 at 12:16 AM • permalink#49 - Admittedly, this was Kerry doing a Barbara Walters piece, rather than the hard-hitting studio grilling. He was wearing an open-neck shirt, after all. I agree that he wasn’t utterly fawning, but not to pull Flanagan up on that ridiculous claim about people being ‘destroyed’ for daring to question the government! There seems to be a distinct pattern in ABC interviewing of on-message moonbats:
1. Moonbat makes outrageous claim
2. Interviewer queries claim
3. Moonbat offers specious, absurd, ludicrous justification of claim
4. Interviewer accepts this without a murmur and moves to next questionBonmot, seeing Kezza’s sour, disappointed face at the end of the last Federal election night coverage almost made my ten cents a day worthwhile.
Posted by Art Vandelay on 2006 11 03 at 05:37 AM • permalinkWhy doesn’t Flanagan just try saying “hello” to people if he wants “kinder and gentler”?
Most of them do return the greeting!!Posted by carpefraise on 2006 11 03 at 08:23 AM • permalinkIf you pour yourself into a book, it’s a bit like getting your gear off and running down the main street of your town.
Don;t tell me he was in the shower with the “acrobatic” Palestinian ...
Posted by carpefraise on 2006 11 03 at 09:42 AM • permalinkI wonder if Dick F. has signed the Ass Houses petition yet?
Posted by andycanuck on 2006 11 03 at 09:52 AM • permalink
Page 1 of 1 pages
Members:
Login | Register
| Member List
They kept on…kicking him as if he were to blame for everything in that dirty, dead decade that we’re all condemned to live through. A sack of shit that had once been a man in a place that had once been a community in a country that had once been a society.
The “two thugs” must have been following the form of Chris Masters and David Marr.