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To devote the same day to reflection on both Down syndrome and on poetry, though probably unintended, was a very human thing to do. Precisely because one is so commonly regarded as a defect and the other as an idle activity, we need to be reminded that both are a gift.
The Five Quintets is a long, conversational poem of almost 350 pages. In an age that focuses on detail, its topic is vast: the nature of Western modernity and its future. In a secular age its perspective is unobtrusively but deeply religious. It is therefore unlikely to make the best-sellers list. But it is an important and rewarding work.
What is so urgent here is not a sense of being morbid. Nor, in the main, was there even a vengeful note. This was unalloyed grief, unimpaired by manipulation and political exploitation.
If we say the man's lost his mind, we must, in fairness, acknowledge that he possessed a mind to lose. Bizarre as the notion now sounds, Latham brought consider intellectual firepower to the Labor leadership. His deep commitment to free market policies meant his hostility to Hanson always came as much from the right as the left.
Consider the sheer volume of Hanson's emotive denouncements over decades. The anti-intellectualism that undergirds her populism. The shifts in tack, to capture the wind of whichever tragic event puffs up her sails. We're breathing in Hanson's views without conscious recognition of their invalidity. That's why this book matters.
These events cannot be scrutinised in a vacuum. Fairfax and Nine might still merge. Sky News has made a deal with WIN to broadcast across its regional networks. We will need a robust national and public broadcaster if we are to have an alternative to entertainment posing as news, propaganda as analysis, and advertising as fact.
It is important that Bachelet's appointment is discussed away from the framework promoted by the UN. Primarily, it should raise questions as to how a torture victim can become complicit in impunity as president. That such complicity is ignored at an international level should contribute to the growing mistrust in the UN as human rights 'guardian'.
The same sense of grievance and outrage that drove Jack and his rebels 500 years ago has sent Trump to the White House, propelled the United Kingdom out of the European Union, resurrected the poisonous 'Irish question' and legitimised Senator Pauline Hanson. She, with Cade-like empty bravado, claims to be for the 'battlers'.
A few years ago, I travelled back to the war zones where I had worked providing humanitarian assistance to see what happened to the people and projects. I realised then that some things need to change. One of them is that we need to give communities who have borne the brunt of wars more time to recover.
The imposition of 'managerialism' or 'marketisation' on universities is disastrous. So why are academics so passive when their working lives are being immiserated by the imposition of ideas, mostly derived from business or economics, that are either patently false or poor?
As someone who has a language background which will in all likelihood not make it past one more generation in my family here in Australia, I've long understood the way language loss can occur as a result of migration, to say nothing of acts like colonisation. These are great forces that are difficult but, as I've found, not impossible to resist.