Books

Rambling River Run Repeat #2

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Before we leave Bucharest we need to acknowledge something as culturally precious to the Romanians as a ute is to an Australian tradie and a Ferrari is to an Arabian prince, a hockey puck is to a Canadian, a casino is to a Chinese granny and a spiked dog collar is to a German swinger and that’s beer. On our first night in Bucharest, the Child Bride and I found a pub a couple of staggering minutes from our hotel. The choice of beers was as extensive as a Kardashian arse with the minimum alcohol content at a heady 5% and most in the 6-6.5% range. The highest was 16%. Light beer is for communists. After four rather substantial glasses, I was ready for a lie down.

We’re now out and about, or if we were Canadian (there they are again), oot and aboot. We know Romania is famous (infamous?) for gypsies and I thought they lived in brightly coloured wooden caravans pulled by horses or hillbilly trucks. It seems that when they are not on the road they actually live in what were once considered to be houses. House pride is not something that would get them into the culture list above. You can tell a gypsy’s home because there’s a bloke who looks like Borat sitting on the remnants of a couch in the front yard surrounded by life’s debris. There’s more shit outside the house than in it. I know this because you can’t fit that much shit into the Palace of the Parliament, let alone a windowless hovel.

We knew it would be cold here in the Transylvanian Carpathian Mountains but it snowed yesterday and will likely do so again today. This was not in the fine print from what I remember and I didn’t bring my beanie and big coat. I have a Korean winter golf hat which has a fold-down flap to cover your ears, but only half of them so it I bump my head it’s likely my ear lobes will fall off.

We visited two castles in the last two days. The first, Peles Castle is more of a palace, like an ornate wooden version of the Hermitage in St Petersburg, on the inside. The outside is rather more extravagant than the box like Hermitage. It was also built relatively recently, like after the Ottomans had been vanquished although it’s doing nothing to stop the Ottoman invasion of Europe currently underway. Bran Castle or Vlad the Impaler’s castle or Dracula’s castle, depending on your preference, is more your neo-barbarian style. It has the swirling turrets and was built up rather than out to protect a pass at the border between Wallachia and Transylvania by the Teutonic Knights in the 12th century. This was long before it supposedly housed blood sucking ghouls which didn’t occur until Bram Stoker (who never visited the place) wrote his book. Vlad did make a significant contribution to the bloodthirstyness of the areas reputation by inserting sharp logs into people he didn’t like or even didn’t know, such was his apparent indifference. And it was actually built to collect taxes, not the blood of wild eyed, bare necked totty.

We spent two nights in Brasov (preferred pronunciation – “bras off”) after Bucharest and it was from here that we visited said castles. If you ignore the communist influence and focus on the pre – Stalin/Ceausescu architecture it’s a very attractive city, if rather cold. But the CB and I did find a a place in the middle of the town square, serving beers, wine and pizzas with a generous helping of gas heater which made a significant contribution to my “would I like to live here” survey which is conducted everywhere I go, if only subconsciously. The answer was…..

RIP PJ – We’ll Miss You Mate

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I didn’t know Patrick Jake O’Rourke but I have been known to steal his middle name for various anonymous activities and correspondence (taps side of nose with index finger) like sending “secret admirer” valentines to the child bride. I haven’t done that yet but planned to a couple of days ago. Procrastination got the better of me. And this is the second time I’ve mentioned him recently as he figured in my most recent Christmas message

Like I said, I didn’t know him personally but after reading and still owning 18 of his books (I think he wrote 19), if we’d had an opportunity to have a drink which is something we have in common, we’d have had plenty to talk about….between drinks. Those books are now dog-eared and torn and the type has been read so many times it’s starting to fade. Unlike novels where once you know the ending there’s no point backtracking, his books overflow with one-liners and tragi-comedic but somehow appropriate expositions on politics and economics and life in general that you just wish you could remember so you could steal them and appear witty and politically erudite all at the same time. Of course there are very few “comedians” or like PJ, literary humourists, capable of this as most of them these days are from the Robert DeNiro “fuck Trump” school of applied hilarity.

He was born in Toledo, Ohio whose other famous resident was Max Klinger. The mashing together of their relative portrayals of the absurd somehow makes sense. PJ died today of lung cancer complications. I suspect cigars and whisky were all that remained of a youth that majored in practical chemistry while studying English Literature. He said this about suicide : “Guns are always the best method for a suicide. They are more stylish looking than single-edged razor blades and natural gas has gotten so expensive. Drugs are too chancy. You might mis-calculate the dosage and just have a good time.”

PJ has many claims to fame. He was editor-in-chief of National Lampoon magazine before the movies began to appear. Later and around the time when Hunter S Thompson was creating mayhem at the same publication, PJ was foreign correspondent for Rolling Stone magazine which mainly involved him reporting back from war zones. That makes about as much sense as being the tobacco correspondent for Men’s Health. He has contributed mirth and scorn to the lexicon ever since those heady days.

I first encountered PJ in 1977. The CB and I were on our way to Tasmania and I needed something to read on the ferry from Melbourne to Devonport. I spied a magazine I had never heard of called National Lampoon and that edition’s theme was Sex. A no-brainer really in an innocent age of no internet and therefore no internet porn. But thanks to the internet you can pull National Lampoon out of archive and see the humungously famous magazine cover – Buy This Magazine or We’ll Kill This Dog. I’ve even provided the link for you.

https://ia800706.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/8/items/NationalLampoon_201812/National-Lampoon.iso

 Most recently he wrote A Cry From the Far Middle which contained the usual quota of quotables, one of which was the rules he taught his kids to live by – keep your hands to your self and mind your own business – or as he calls them, the Clinton rules. Bill, keep your hands to yourself and Hillary, mind your own business.

Even though you’re no longer with us PJ, you’ll be making me laugh for as long as I am still capable of doing it.

Atlas Shrugged

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I have just finished reading Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged” and have to admit that I am exhausted. The book was published in 1957 and I feel like I have been reading it since then. It is by far the longest and most taxing book I’ve ever read. It has to be up there with the Bible but I haven’t read the Bible so the comparison is moot and I understand the English in Atlas Shrugged is a little easier to understand. Atlas Shrugged is over a thousand pages of tiny writing, tiny to the extent I couldn’t read it at night. I like to read in bed but either my eyes, my glasses or the bulb in the bedside lamp or combinations of all three were not up to the task.

If you know anything at all about Ayn Rand you will know she was a philosopher/novelist who also wrote many works of non-fiction. Her novels were vehicles for the promotion of her philosophy of objectivism. And didn’t she make sure the philosophy shone through. At regular intervals her main characters in this book are given the opportunity to expound on the virtues of the various facets of objectivism culminating in the main character’s 56 page speech to the people of America. Let’s see Leonardo Dicaprio or Matt Damon memorize that. I read the first few pages then the first line of each paragraph for the final 50 pages. That was hard enough. As she explains it:

“My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”

Fair enough. None of this compulsory altruism crap – conservatism with Adam Smith’s invisible hand wearing an iron glove.

The base line of objectivism relates to three axioms – existence, consciousness and identity. So all of those hippies who went off to find themselves were actually onto something although I’m sure they would be heading for Comrade Andrews’ Democratic Socialist Republic of Victoria and their soon to be legislated euthanasia laws if they knew what they were aligning with. When you think about it, why do you think about it and what’s the point. Who am I and why am I here even though I know I’m here and I know who I am, I think, and why is 42 the answer to the ultimate question of life the universe and everything. In my view, philosophy can be described in one word; one letter actually – “I”. So enough of that.

The most interesting thing about the book in my view, is the thematic parallel with what’s happening in Australia and other western democracies at the moment. Large numbers of millennials, bless them, (and their cold war warrior fellow travellers ) due to a glitch in the education system, have never heard of Venezuela, think Che Guevara was a heroic freedom fighter and somehow or other have common cause with clapped out leftists like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn and socialist wannabe’s (in the best Animal Farm tradition) like Bill (Mr Thompson) Shorten. I bet some of them even feel sorry for Kim Jong Un because he’s being abused by that sexual predator, warmongering, scumbag of an American president. No, not Bill Clinton, Donald Trump.

If you read the comments after opinion pieces in the Australian newspaper you may have noticed someone called “Chris” refer to Shorten as Mr Thompson plus a few other cryptic (and direct) references to this book. Ayn’s Mr Thompson is in charge of America and wants everyone to be brought down to the lowest common denominator where equality rules. Take a bow Bill, you’ve starred retrospectively in a book which figures in numerous lists of the top 100 books of all time but not the BBC’s list funnily enough. Perhaps because they recognise themselves in the book, along with most state run and indeed, main stream media and it’s not a complimentary comparison.

Shorten, sorry, Thompson and his crew spend the duration of the book either wreaking havoc on society and industry by implementing things like the Equalization of Opportunity Act which belies its name because of its restrictions on opportunity or disavowing any responsibility for the ensuing chaos. They all at one time or another, some multiple times, channel Bart Simpson with their “you can’t blame me, it wasn’t my fault, you can’t prove anything ”entreaties”. Meanwhile as the country and the world go to shit as the socialism experiment moves inexorably down the path of nationalisation, plummeting productivity and riots, the good guys start to disappear, go on strike actually, which of course, exacerbates the problem.

Any pimply faced millennial socialists who can read and have got well and truly into the book will eventually realise that socialism is really communism with fewer guns. But the Berlin Wall fell last century so we’re going to get it right this time, aren’t we comrades. That old saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is for squares, man.

I wonder sometimes what it would be like if the productive people ever did strike. I firmly believe that if the world was populated by empathetic wealth redistributors – you know, the earnest, green, humourless, virtue signalling, safe space seeking student types, redistributing an ever decreasing quantity of wealth, the human race would be extinct in a generation. Everybody would be hugging and nobody would be building anything.

There are a lot of people like this. They know who they are but they know not what they do. Didn’t someone rather famous say something similar once?