About 56 years ago, four students at Kent State University were shot dead by the Ohio National guard.
I remember it well, as I was at the time a rifleman in 7 RAR and we were patrolling on operation Concrete. The news filtered through to us when we got back to Nui Dat at the end of the operation. The students were protesting the invasion of Cambodia, an event that was happening only 100 Kms to the North West of our location.
Neil Young released "Ohio" shortly after the massacre, and despite the fact that Nixon was re-elected in 1972, the impact of this song, together with publicity about the My Lai Massacre (which was in news at about the same time) began to have a profound effect on public opinion against the war.
Bruce Springsteen has released Streets of Minneapolis which is already having an impact given the extent of its shares on social media.
There has been, and always will be, a visceral reaction across the Pacific to US citizens being shot by uniformed people in their own country.
This incident may represent a turning point in US public opinion.
The poet is Henry Lawson, and as a consequence of studying a surfeit of his works at primary school, I have never been an admirer of Lawson. Perhaps it's all my Dad's fault. He was, after all my teacher from grades five to eight, and was very fond of Lawson.
Sixty two thousand Australians were killed in the First World War, and the narrative of the poem no doubt held true for many.
We forget the deep wounds left by this conflict until we understand that with a population of 4.9 million, as it was then, the casualty figure set proportionally in today's Australia would have generated three hundred thousand deaths.
Scots of the Riverina
Henry Lawson 1917
The boy cleared out to the city from his home at harvest time — They were Scots of the Riverina, and to run from home was a crime. The old man burned his letters, the first and last he burned, And he scratched his name from the Bible when the old wife's back was turned.
A year went past and another. There were calls from the firing-line; They heard the boy had enlisted, but the old man made no sign. His name must never be mentioned on the farm by Gundagai — They were Scots of the Riverina with ever the kirk hard by.
The boy came home on his "final", and the township's bonfire burned. His mother's arms were about him; but the old man's back was turned. The daughters begged for pardon till the old man raised his hand — A Scot of the Riverina who was hard to understand.
The boy was killed in Flanders, where the best and bravest die. There were tears at the Grahame homestead and grief in Gundagai; But the old man ploughed at daybreak and the old man ploughed till the mirk — There were furrows of pain in the orchard while his housefolk went to the kirk.
The hurricane lamp in the rafters dimly and dimly burned; And the old man died at the table when the old wife's back was turned. Face down on his bare arms folded he sank with his wild grey hair Outspread o'er the open Bible and a name re-written there.
John Schumann put the poem to music on the Vagabond Crew's Behind the Lines album.
It's worth a listen - one of Lawson's better works and Schumann does a good job of it.
We met as soul mates On Parris Island We left as inmates From an asylum And we were sharp As sharp as knives And we were so gung ho To lay down our lives
We came in spastic Like tameless horses We left in plastic As numbered corpses And we learned fast To travel light Our arms were heavy But our bellies were tight
We had no home front We had no soft soap They sent us Playboy They gave us Bob Hope We dug in deep And shot on sight And prayed to Jesus Christ With all of our might
We had no cameras To shoot the landscape We passed the hash pipe And played our Doors tapes And it was dark So dark at night And we held on to each other Like brother to brother We promised our mothers we'd write And we would all go down together We said we'd all go down together Yes we would all go down together
Remember Charlie Remember Baker They left their childhood On every acre And who was wrong? And who was right? It didn't matter in the thick of the fight
We held the day In the palm Of our hand They ruled the night And the night Seemed to last as long as six weeks On Parris Island
We held the coastline They held the highlands And they were sharp As sharp as knives They heard the hum of our motors They counted the rotors And waited for us to arrive And we would all go down together We said we'd all go down together Yes we would all go down together
Joel described the song in this way -
Time has a way of healing wounds or making them easier to look at to see if they've scabbed up. The guys came home from Vietnam and that's it? It doesn't end until these guys are absorbed into the mainstream and we deal with our feelings about it.
(Parris Island is a marine recruit training depot).
I've always believed that watching what is going on across the Pacific is a pretty reliable way of predicting the future of this country.
This rule of thumb has held historically for a wide range of cultural phenomena, including media trends, music and changes in lifestyle. Note I wrote "changes", not "improvements".
Recently in the USA, we've seen the election in 2016 of a populist one-term POTUS, who effectively destroyed whatever remained of his country's unity in his term, and then refused to accept that he was defeated at the election of November 2020. His break with the democratic tradition has plunged his country further into the pit of division that he exploited to get elected in the first place.
As part of the exploitation of this division, the Republicans (or at least some of them) instituted an audit of the presidential vote in Maricopa county in Arizona, the state which, when called by Fox News for Biden, broke the news that Trump was a one-term president.
The goal of the audit was to prove fraud in order to get Biden elected. It was not an objective exercise.The results of that audit have finally been released, but without the blaze of publicity that was associated with the announcement of the audit in the first place. The report can be found here.
An extract -
What has been found is both encouraging and revealing. On the positive side there were no substantial differences
between the hand count of the ballots provided and the official election canvass results for Maricopa County.
Remember, that is a summary of the major findings of the Trump-inspired exercise carried out by his supporters - exactly the opposite of what it was intended to find. So the official results stand. In fact, the audit found that Biden actually won by 360 more votes than the official results, winning the state by a margin of 45,469 ballots. You get the best reporting by reading the local non-aligned media.
So in the washup, the audit was an exercise in maintaining the rage and frustration felt by Trump supporters with the goal of keeping his run in 2024 in the news, and maintaining a fund-raising base. It had absolutely nothing to do with election integrity.
In other words, it's now OK across the Pacific, that if you lose an election, to simply deny the fact, put it down to fraud, and throughly weaken your country's confidence in the democratic process as you go along. That is obviously extremely dangerous, and throughly immoral, and reminds me of Abe Lincoln's speech in which he quoted Matthew 12:22-28 -
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
So we should look across the Pacific, note the mess the USA is in, and use it as a reminder not to follow down that road. There are so many examples of this in terms of firearms legislation, a largely non-existent health system and the USA's dysfunctional electoral process itself.
The Americans could do with our independent Electoral Commissions, both state and federal, and our system of compulsory voting. They could also do with our NFA, our public health system, and our largely non-partisan judiciary.
A very long time ago, when I was a young teacher working with students with intellectual impairments, I came across a situation which, to put it mildly, made my blood boil.
There was a corner shop not to far from the school in which I worked, which had the habit of failing to give these kids change, when they bought low value items with large denomination notes.
It happened too often to be accidental, and after a number of complaints from parents, I took it on myself to have a chat with the shopkeeper. Initially, he denied ripping off these students, but when I recounted a couple of complaints, he became angry, called me a "bleeding heart", and threatened physical violence.
The message went out (discretely) and none of the students from the school darkened his door again.
That was back in the early eighties.
At the banking royal commission today, the father of a lad with Down Syndrome revealed how his son had been ripped off by a bank selling life insurance.
Vulnerable people are still being exploited in 2018.
Only these days, it not a spiv who runs a corner store in the frame, but a previously respected institution.
I don't believe things have improved much in the intervening thirty years.
The first ten years of my life, gentle reader, were spent in cane country.
Hearing the Go-Betweens performing Cattle and Cane takes me back.
On the rare occasions these days when I return north during the crushing, the smell of the cane fires, bagasse and rotting mangoes instantly transports me back to my boyhood.. (It’s well known that the olfactory sense is most closely associated with memory).
Sugar prices are low, so the 2018 Crushing isn’t getting off to a stellar start.
Whatever - growing up west of Mackay* in a sugar town was an amazing experience.
The crushing was the drum-beat of the rhythm of life back then. The mill, with its noise, smoke and steam was at the end of the road that went past our place. Cane grew on two sides of our house, and cane was carted up and down the road daily during the crushing.
We would chase the blackened cinders from the spectacular fires - not always a good idea. I ran backwards into the tankstand doing this once. Only once. By the time the gash in the back of my head healed, I'd understood that my eyes were at the front of my head for a reason.
My best mate came off a very large cane farm, and every now and again I would be allowed to spend a few days with him. We gave the farm machinery a pretty fair workout - but survived.
His dad owned a an Essex Super Six. It wasn't road registered, so we drove it all over the farm. I learned to drive that thing at age 10. My parents had no idea.....
The vivid colours, the energetic growth created by the rainfall and heat, and the Maltese, Italian and Kanaka kids that I went to school with conspired to create an environment unique in this country.
The lyrics of the song put it better than I can -
I recall a schoolboy coming home
through fields of cane
to a house of tin and timber
and in the sky
a rain of falling cinders
from time to time
the waste memory-wastes
I recall a boy in bigger pants
like everyone
just waiting for a chance
his father's watch
he left it in the showers
from time to time
the waste memory-wastes
I recall a bigger brighter world
a world of books
and silent times in thought
and then the railroad
the railroad takes him home
through fields of cattle
through fields of cane
from time to time
the waste memory-wastes
the waste memory-wastes
further, longer, higher, older
The railroad didn't take me home.
Instead it took me 1000kms south to boarding school in 1961.
My parents moved south, and I never returned to live in cane country.
