This will hurt me...

With Ezra's foray into The Sorrows of Young Werther , Henry was feeling a little put out so has started to explore Daddy's extensive library on the works of one G.W.F. Hegel. So Saturday afternoon, when Jen was out knitting, he starts on about Elements of the Philosophy of Right , and was asking me what defines the actualisation of freedom . I said that I doubted that history had an actualisation point and wanted to leave it at that, but then he started on about what it was to lead a ' moral life ', so I asked him what it was to lead an ' ethical life ', and then Ez got started on the unity of being and nothing which Henry confused with the master-slave dialectic and things were just getting out of hand, and I was rapidly getting a headache. We did however, find some common ground regarding the owl of Minerva, that is, its big eyes made it appear quite cute.

Here is Henry zealously approaching the slide down at Bicentennial Park for the umpteenth time. Oh how I long for those blissful, carefree and innocent days of youth. A time when one's greatest concern tended towards whether one would be able to squeeze in one more go of the slide before dusk set in. [Such a memory must have been before the public housing estate really kicked off, and one's concern tended towards "is that a human poo/broken glass/a used condom/syringe on the slide?"] Where was I? Ah,the heady days of youth! A time far away from the realisation of the crushing reality of bills, mortgages and the soul destroying banality of a job you now struggle to remember even getting. Alienated from the ends of my production? Check. Uh oh. Somehow I've been denied my capacity to transform the world and it turns out that Marx was right! In having to work , rather than slide , I've become alienated from my very own nature. It is a spiritual, rather than mate...

Here is Ezra's reaction to the news that eminent political theorist Bernard Crick had died . Although he was a good age, Ez couldn’t help but be saddened by the news. You see, unlike Henry – naturally attracted to the political firebrands like Robespierre or Trotsky – Ezra is a conciliator, thus naturally Crick was his kind of guy. Essentially a moderniser rather than a radical, Crick’s notion of political reform appeals to Ezra’s astute sense of balance and responsibility. Like myself, Ezra was attracted to Crick primary through his masterful In Defence of Politics (1962). At a time of ideological tumult, the book reasserted the importance of politics and the nobility of the political vocation to an age that seemed either apolitical or anti-political in character. For Crick, the ideologically driven leader – think Castro, Mugabe or Chavez – practises a form of anti-politics , in which the goal is the mobilisation of the populace towards a common end – even if it means killing som...

So I’m standing at the lights, and these two guys are in some kind of speed boat. Only I think that they were trafficking cocaine, rather than speed. C’mon, they’re not on motorbikes . So I see these dudes, and I’m like, “it’s my duty as a good citizen to stop them going about their destructive ways”. The thing is though, the little red man/woman/citizen is up, and I’m like, “it’s my duty as a good citizen to obey the little red man/woman/citizen”. Torn by the conflicting drives and obligations, I had a little nervous breakdown. After my recovery – and the flight to freedom from our Columbian friends in the speedboat – the little red man/woman/citizen got me to thinking about my favourite variation on the theme, the world famous Ampelmännchen . You might be familiar with the Ampelmännchen tale, the friendly face of East Berlin. Like me, you may have even been to the Ampelmännchen shop and purchased an Ampelmännchen t-shirt. The theory behind Ampelmännchen (are you starting to see h...

Here is Henry on his first birthday this time last year. As you can see by his t-shirt, we'd been out campaigning hard in the lead up to the Federal election. In fact, I put down Rudd's eventual victory to Henry's endorsement. You see, Henry was a committed social democrat at that point. He's since shifted somewhat. Before I put him to bed last night, Henry, Ezra and I fell into our habit of discussing the work of Søren Kierkegaard. Henry is something of a fan, Ezra less so and I have long exhibited a tendency to distance myself from the Existentialists, as a rule, because they are rubbish at telling humorous stories and are thus real downers when it come to dinner parties. "But father," Henry pleaded, "once you label me you negate me". "Nonsense," I say. He then started crapping on about something to do with fish, or sheep, and believing and unbelieving, and something about a cactus (or maybe it was synthesis?) Whatever. That's the th...

The no bill posters building that I featured yesterday also seems to be a favourite of the anti-New World Order crowd (remember them?) I quite like their stencil work (it’s better than the “dick” written on our fence), even if you get a little tired of being told how horrid Americans are (and, consequently, how horrid anyone is that might take issue with lumping 400 million-odd into one vile basket). You see, there is something inherently offensive about people that are seemingly driven to lecture high-minded principles about the way one should or should not live (and indeed the way that one should or should not think ; yet at the same time exhibit a kind of hypocrisy that is as extreme as their political and cultural viewpoints. Of course, this tendency towards extremism does not limit itself to a particular set of pre-conditions (other than ideological certainty). I have seen it in libertarians and communists; Christians, Muslims and atheists; left and right. On one score, I can’t he...

Today I've found an interesting ad for US Savings Bonds from 1952. Essentially, They have decided that the best way to promote the bonds is by drawing up a map of Communist Party members in each State. One assumes the thinking was that the terror provoked by the knowledge of five fifth columnists in Alaska potentially getting up to no good would be enough to scare the housewives out of a few dollars to stump up for another H-Bomb! This is one of my all time favourite ads, as it reveals a certain mindset (paranoia) at a time when the Cold War (still in its infancy) threatened to turn hot. I'm sure that the Bonds people saw this as a public service announcement of sorts, kind of like mapping of the outbreak of some horrible disease. Maybe the implication implicit here is that Bobby Joe down in Kansas better start rooting out the seditious six! When I look at this map though, there is one thing that I can't help but ponder. I wonder about that lonely Red down there in Mississ...