Ambrose Ambles

Twelve Caesars.

Book four..

Part one.;

Discourses on the 12 “Stations” of Christopher Corridini.

 

First Station; Jesus is condemned to death.

On bullying and how to resolve such things.

Pissed in the tea pot.

The best payback I know of personally was confessed to me by a woman tradie..a house painter who was bullied by this misogynist speculator builder who didn’t believe building sites were a place for “girlies” as he called her..He would bump the step-ladder when she was on it, kick her long-handled roller as he walked past and generally be a real bastard.

On her last day, just before she left the job, she took his tea-pot from the smoko bench (he liked his tea made in a pot and poured into a mug)…and went and urinated in it…swirled it around a few times, emptied it out and replaced it…just as she was getting into her van, she told the apprentice of what she had done( knowing full well the mischievous personality of the lad).

At smoko, the builder prepared his usual pot of tea, poured himself his mug and proceeded to drink it down…the apprentice, being an apprentice, let him get a few good gulps down and then with an air of innocence blurted out:

“Oh..I meant to tell you..that painter woman..she pissed in your tea pot..”

At this point we can, as Mark Twain wrote..; “Draw the curtain of charity down over the following proceedings.”

I know I’m not going to fool anybody by trying to pass this chapter off as the accepted modus operandi of creative writing, so I won’t bother..so I will say this instead..:

I fucking hate the middle-classes…from the lowest to the uppest!

And I would suggest that if you do not think likewise, just bugger off and go count your stocks and shares, because you’re going to hate what I am going to say..and that saying is that one of the best things Chairman Mao did was to instigate The Cultural Revolution against the bourgeoise .. because that class both harbours and encourages the most destructive and insidious vices of humankind! And I don’t give a rat’s arse whether he or his following leaders succeed or not in a grander ambition, just as long as he shafted those middle-class bastards to sheol!..just once..just one fuckin’ time!

Look what you have done to us! See where you have taken us! Even my own family were not immune to your manipulations..from my grandfather and grandmother fighting to survive in a great depression of YOUR making, to my father..a migrant trying to escape a war of YOUR making…a dictator..Mussolini..the very epitome of fascist tyranny..a megalomaniac trying to become a twentieth century Caesar..my father trying to escape a fascist nation comes unknowingly..innocently to what was THE original Fascist State…the original Corporate State..manufactured by The South Australia Company as a corporate entity..he comes here in all innocence to be immediately interned upon arrival as an “enemy alien” to be sent to Darwin to work on the hospital there and then to most ironically get bombed out by the Japanese!...oh..the irony that turned into the family joke..; to escape from Mussolini to get bombed out by Tojo..a complete circle..also my mother escaping from a life of drudge in the Murray Mallee hoping to develop her skills as a writer to end up in a life of domestic cleaner drudgefor middle-class women in the city…But what hope had any of them really, when all they were…all we are now or will ever be under the yoke of middle-class economics is a wage-slave to the social tyranny of the bourgeoisie..the mean-spirited scrimpers and scrapers and arse-lickers of the petty to the manipulative corrupted politics of the upper middle-classes.

But it is not necessarily the individuals in that class that we rail against, even though the worst of the worst of humanity can be found there, it is the encouraging philosophy of greed, envy and control that is humanity’s greatest enemy..and the Earth’s too I might add..for the industrialisation and mass-production of everything has brought wrack and ruin upon The Earth, reducing a once paradise to an industrial waste block…

It was The Enclosure Laws that spelt the beginning of the end for those guilds and cottage-craft industries and the small plot farmers of England and Europe that drove millions into the mass-production factories and killed off a whole era of skilled tradespeople and crafts-people...a situation we have not yet awoken from and just as we might, we are hit once again with the fraud of the so-called "Gig Economy" of slave labour or the begging-bowl of zero-hour contracts. 

What was wrong with cottage industries, the weavers, the hat makers, the potters who earned a living turning out local handcraft and cloth that were used in the homes and lives of the working people?…What was wrong with the Trade Guilds that served so many people and gave an edge of quality to work-practices that served humanity down through time?..Nothing that the greed for control of that market could usurp..the killing off of both cottage craft and trade skills so that the merchants and factory owners could herd the millions into cramped cities and suburbs to fill their factories and then oppress and suppress the working people..crush them beneath their rents and low wages…and did we REALLY NEED to industrialise our agriculture except that with the “enclosure laws” herding the millions into cities, so many no longer had the means to grow or barter for their own food..so setting off an avalanche of snowballing “essential industries” that really only served the promotion of more industrialisation…

Two of the most prestigious private colleges in Adelaide were originally initated, set up and managed on the board of directors by one of the most egregious scoundrel land speculators of the early province. This man’s cunning and outright audacity in coercing and manipulating the price of broad-acre real estate essential to the farming settler’s survival across some of the most valuable regions of the State are notoriously legendary.

Legendary, not in an honourable way, but rather in a collusion with, but also in competition with those most grasping and greedy speculators of the day…: The South Australian Company, board of directors.

Charles Flaxman was employed and sent to the early settlement as George Fife Angas’s “Confidential Clerk”…a position where he was to quietly obtain favourable and opportune parcels of prime broad-acre land for his master at a cut-price rate to secure a handsome profit for his master. THAT was the initial understanding of his employment. The old adage of ; “Honour among thieves” was the friable cement that held the “confederacy” together…a situation that was destined to fail once Charles Flaxman saw the golden opportunity to secure his own percentage of parcels of that rich land for his own profit.

In those early days of settlement, South Australia was a property speculator’s dream, a paradise originally conceived as a property management ponzi scheme where the sale of grabbed land with or without the indigenous owners permission was to be sold to the first migrants to the new province and the money used to bring out more prospective land purchasers to buy more grabbed land…this went on until someone worked out that food was needed in a hurry or the new colony would starve to death!…So the hardy farmers from the East German valleys were brought out to till the soils and provide stability for the money hungry speculators.

Even then it was a close call as the province went into receivership only six years after the first founding, owing creditors in England over 300,000 pounds and the entire kit and caboodle was seized by the British Government in lieu of debts and the British taxpayer bailed out the entire failed enterprise..an early example of “Private profit – Public Liability”….Except the original instigators of the schamozzle were left “in-situ” to continue their speculation..except now,  they had to form a lobby-group to push their enterprises through a real parliament…arise the : “National Defence League”…the incubus of the Liberal Party of Australia and “safe-harbour” for all the white-collar crooks and spielers in the nation.

And of them all, George Fife Angas and his “confidential clerk” were the brightest, “bravest”, and most devious of them all.

An example of Flaxman’s sharp intellect and swiftness of action can be demonstrated in his becoming aware of some prime land north of Adelaide in what is now The Barossa Valley. The German surveyor; Johann Menge made note of the water and soil quality of this wide valley so that it attracted the attention of Flaxman, always on the lookout for land parcels for his master. So taking the surveyor;  Col’ William Light with him for company, he went on horse-back to surreptitiously inspect the country…once there, he found another couple of land speculators in company with Johann Menge..; a Mr. Torrens and companion who foolishly confessed to Flaxman an intention to claim the land once back in Adelaide, within the twisted rights of a perverted piece of legislation of what was called ; “Special Surveys”, where a parcel of 4,000 acres of land could be claimed with a deposit of 4,000 pounds, which then allowed the “purchaser” right of purchase for the surrounding “surveyed land” of 12,000 acres for each block of 4,000 acres…once the price of land was then dropped from one pound per acre to 12/6 pence per acre…it became a speculator’s wet-dream!

On hearing of this intention from Mr. Torrens, Charles Flaxman excused himself from their company, pleading to set up camp away from them for the night, when in fact he left Col’ Light there and rode helter skelter back to the Adelaide lands office to reach it just before closing time to submit his own claim to that very valley that Mr. Torrens thought he was entitled to…A legendary ride by a desperate entrepreneur…BUT..there was a sting in the tail to his action..Because while he did claim that initial four parcels of land of 4,000 acres each, a total of 16,000 acres with right of purchase for another surrounding 48 thousands of acres, he claimed three of them in George Angas’s name and ONE PARCEL of 4,000 acres in HIS OWN name..thereby securing a quarter of the total for his own profit…and not only did he double-cross his master by this covert action, he then had the audacity of forcing Angas, on threat of dropping the entire claim (Angas was in England at this time) unless Angas paid also for HIS : Flaxman’s quarter share!!…The audacity of the man to play Angas at his own game was seen as the ultimate insult and though Angas did wincingly fork out the money, it broke the employment contract and started a vitriolic litigation that lasted for many years.

So THIS was the sort of person that later desired to start a “Propriety School” for the education of the children of his peers in the province…for all the like-minded, like attitude, like cunning members of his own class…a private school that would inculcate the intentions of gaining, securing and protecting their ill-gotten wealth . The fore-runner of those public-funded, private screened, profiteering poltroons of a future white-collar criminal class, that now holds by far majority major influence in our institutions of law-making, judiciary, corporate boards, government political appointments, politicians themselves and higher echelon authorities in the land….a corruption complete of every institution of governance by a coterie of like-minded philosophied religious/capitalist indoctrinated “consciousness of kind” pusillanimous buffoons that have steered this nation and a few others in the West to the situation we find ourselves in now…teetering on the verge of economic, physical, social and environmental breakdown…AND STILL having no desire or perhaps no idea of which way to go from here except to encourage feral bogan elements in our midst to clamour and cry for a new Fascist order to protect and secure those ill-gotten gains.

The entire private school system has to be blocked from any future funding by THE State Government and left to fund themselves..We ; the people can no longer afford to pay for their private fantasies. They have to be left to grow up or get out!

 

The Ant.

The ant, in silence, goes about

It’s ordered business,

It builds nests,

And it knows.

The worm, in depths of dark, damp Earth,

Tunnels and turns,

In silence,

And it knows.

Humanity, goes about its intent,

With all the noise and rancour

Of accrued wisdom,

But it knows not.

 

You know the time-line and the story-line…you bastards..you bastards!...I despise you, humanity despises you and if your own mothers could have known the egregious intent in your souls, then I suspect many (not all, for some of them trained you) of those also would have despised you!..Time for us to pay you back.

So I will start with this..:

Second Station; Jesus carries his cross.

On our Culture and why we need a way to redefine it..

RISORGIMENTO!

“The Culture is dead, long live the Culture!”…

When I was quite young, and I heard for the first time the cry of ; “The King is dead, long live the King!”..I was confused…how can the king live long if he is already dead?…But of course, ..well..you know the logic of that old saying with out me saying it.

And just as the new King replaced that deceased King, so too must we replace the old dead Australian culture with a new one…just as a language will absorb sounds and words from another tongue and “convert” them into common words of the dominant language, so too must we allow our culture to do the same..to innovate..to change.

It is why the English language has become so flexible and widely spoken..this absorption and adoption cannot and should not be stopped..just as the death and birth of cultures ought not be stalled..to do so can see a language die..as Ancient Greek has died and so too has Latin as a spoken language. In truth, those ancient languages never were the true language of the people..most speaking a mixture of Mediterranean / Middle-East / Asiatic dialects..the pure, grammatical Greek and Latin was restricted to the elite ruling classes and academics.

“ Nevertheless the Greek nation with all that it had possessed–with its nationality, its language, its art–belonged to the past.It was only in a comparatively narrow circle not of men of culture–for such, strictly speaking, no longer existed–but of men of erudition that the Greek literature was still cherished even when dead; that the rich inheritance which it had left was inventoried with melancholy pleasure or arid refinement of research; and that, possibly, the living sense of sympathy or the dead erudition was elevated into a semblance of productiveness.” (Mommsen; “History of Rome”).

The tragedy of any society is for it to lock itself into a stagnant situation of cultural growth. This happens with the creation of an “industry” around a favoured era of the nation’s history..a false reality, a twisted jingoism is created with a romantic view of what existed and of what happened in that epoch. We saw this with the Menzies era after the second world war, when conservative governments went all out promoting the “Anzac Spirit”, with special day celebrations and marches..Returned service people leagues and institutions holding a falsely elevated and powerful social position in the community and even their heads of office like Bruce Ruxton drawing up political policy for the government…When all the time the last of the old culture of the “Bronze Anzac” had died on the brutal battlefields or prisoner of war camps in Burma, Thailand or Singapore…there is no illusion any more of the stolid, manly returned soldier…ALL were wounded, ALL were hurt..just that everything was done to hide away from the public eyes those whose wounds were so obvious or whose pain was most visible.

The notion of an Empire “on which the sun will never set”, has created a romantic illusion of the Victorian era of English monarchy..A time in reality of brutal management of earlier colonisation. This illusion was formulated and maintained in Australia up to the second world war.. by then, following on from the great depression, any illusion of a Greater British Empire could only be maintained with blind faith and a fiercely selective reporting of worshipping propaganda…the beast was already dead, but because of the political need for conservative dominance, a kind of bizarre “dance” was performed around regular appearances of the Royal Family in the colonies and by all those status class-leeches that depended on them..a weird dance of necromancing the ancient rites of aristocracy and class privilege…and along with this black magic of public adoration and worship, there was the Menzies era of metaphorical necrophilia with a lost cultural soul.

“The literary tendency of this age was varied and could not be otherwise, for the age itself was divided between the old and the new modes. The same tendencies which came into conflict on the field of politics, the national-Italian tendency of the conservatives, the Hellene-Italian or, if the term be preferred, cosmopolitan tendency of the new monarchy, fought their battles also on the field of literature.  The former attached itself to the older Latin literature, which in the theatre, in the school, and in erudite research assumed more and more the character of classical. . .

. . . the poets of the sixth century were never more vividly felt than in this epoch of thoroughly developed epigonism (an artistic or literary imitation of an artist by a later generation), which in literature as decidedly as in politics looked up to the century of the Hannibalic warriors as to the golden age that had now unhappily passed away beyond recall. No doubt there was in this admiration of the old classics no small portion of the same hollowness and hypocrisy which are characteristic of the conservatism of this age in general. . . “(ibid)

This obsession we had with a dead culture, the culture of “ockerism”, of a romantic construct of the “Bronze Aussie”, with an imperial monarchy giving “cultural cred” to a coterie of anachronistic worshippers of all things regal and militaristic. But in effect, this masculine bravado, this Anzac legend had died with the dying days of the second world war..instead, where brave reality was needed to reconstruct the hurt of a generation, a phony pastiche of “masculinity” was erected as a stop-gap until it was hoped a new wave of younger patriotic citizens could be persuaded to keep carrying the flag….but then along came the Vietnam War….and THAT put the kybosh on THAT little plan.

The world of literature of that age giving a certain credence to the myth can perhaps be best represented with the film of the Neville Shute story : “A Town like Alice”…taking us from the heroic to the horrors of war to the sentimental romanticism of a town in the centre of Australia…overlooking with suitable musical accompaniment the real-life horrors of what happened to those returned soldiers, traumatised by the brutalities they had experienced or seen. Such horrors were not allowed to be presented to the general public…instead, this cultural myth of male camaraderie and stoic, silent endurance was manufactured and maintained.

In contrast, we have the Richard Flannigan novel of ; “The Narrow Road to the Deep North”.. A story close to his own knowledge of his father’s experiences on the Thai-Burma railway..He in effect buries the myth of cultural heroism…:

There has been an attempt at resurrecting this myth of “heroic masculinity”, this white supremacy, Western Cultural supremacy over all others..It is false..it is a failure, like the proud, ancient Romans gathered in their exclusive Senate house or their expensive villas in old Pompei and waxing lyrical in those grammatically pure languages of a culture, long dead in the streets outside.

John Howard sidled up with what is left of the monarchists and in his time as Prime Minister, they worked in-step with the Murdoch media to concoct a “new vision” of an old story of the “Anzacs of Gallipoli”, turning the faces of the youth of the nation toward their own private sunset and delivered a gross stage-set of the “heroics of war” with a emulation cringe-worthy of a modern “Biggles” or something like the wide-eyed “Brylcreme philosophy” of a Boy’s own Annual…and in gingering up an old stew, he has created, in his tin-pot middle-class manner, a farcical effigy of “Golden Aussie Youth” with his “battlers” and personal wish for such to “feel relaxed and comfortable in their own skin”…a “skin” now clothed in the Nazi uniform of our once Fascist enemy and with a face over-rouged and whored-up for Hayek’s Capitalism!

No…Just as Ancient Rome had to fall so Modern Europe could arise, so must we let our archaic Anglo-European culture die so a new Australian culture can be born into the environment it exists..into the Pacific/Indian oceans..into the region of Asia…

Into our multi-cultural, honest and honourable image.

RISORGIMENTO NOW!