Category: Law and Politics

M.C. Surveyor General in the Upper House

People are currently expressing a great deal of surprise that the hip-hop term “diss” (that is to disrespect someone) first appears in the December 10th 1906 edition of Perth’s own Sunday Times.

Those of us familiar with the history of our fair state however know full well that rap was an important and influential part of Western Australian history and politics from the 1880s right up until the first world war.

Take for instance Lord John Forrest’s maiden speech to Parliament in 1890…

I’m Lord John Forrest, G.C.M.G.,
Raised in the hood of Bunbury,
With Dr John Ferguson my Pop did sail,
I learned to rhyme at the feet of Bishop Hale,
First native born son to become a surveyor,
For the Lands and Survey crew of Western Australia,
Searched the deserts for Leichhardt with Tommy Windich,
Then from Esperance to Adelaide showing Eyre he’s my bitch,
Pinned the source of the Murchison down real pretty,
Then cruised the red centre to Adelaide city…

It continues like this for several paragraphs, but they’re mostly just demands for a knighthood and/or railway and poorly worded insults leveled at John Septimus Roe (let’s not even get into the infamous East Coast/West Coast feud with Sir Henry Parkes).

Best. Put-Down. Ever.

One of the best put downs I’ve ever seen was on a message board I stumbled across many years ago…

Someone had taken it upon themselves to start a new thread by posting a lengthy and quite astonishing white supremacist screed. This consisted of some kind of KKK edited version of It’s a Wonderful Life in which a young idiot named Jimmy (or Timmy, or Heinrich or something) goes off to college and comes under the influence of an evil, atheistic, Jewish professor who convinces him that white people are the worst thing to ever happen to the world. On returning home for the holidays he gets into an argument with his white, God fearing, patriotic father and announces “I wish white people never existed!”

Conveniently for all racist didacts an Angel named Clancy appears and takes him on a tour of a world where white people never existed. This mostly consists of barren wastelands devoid of all civilisation because without the influence of white Europeans the rest of humanity are (apparently) unable to even come up with the idea of rubbing two sticks together. Jimmy makes numerous idiotic requests such as “Take me to a Holiday Inn” to which Clancy invariably replies “Without white people there are no Holiday Inns!”, prompting Jimmy to fall into a state of complete despair and request to be whipped off to some other part of the globe, where Clancy is conveniently able to inform him that Archeologists have “recently proved” that the Pyramids or the Great Wall of China or the local KFC were all built by white people. On the rare occasion when Jimmy and his companion manage to locate some semblance of civilisation, the locals are all bloodthirsty savages who try to cook and eat him, which causes him to fall deeper into despair and eventually see how foolish he was to wish away white people, and Clancy undoes the wish, returning him home.

Rather than put this experience down to eating some bad turkey, Jimmy proceeds to gorge himself on a vast meal that name checks every country in Europe, then heads back to his college and shows his classmates THE TRUTH by bawling out the evil, atheistic, Jew Professor who is corrupting the youth of America with his evil, atheistic, Jewish ideas (I don’t recall if the story mentioned it, but it’s highly likely that one of the Ravens of Odin flew into the room and shed a single tear while singing the Horst Wessel Lied).

Following this bizarre rant was a single post from one of the other members of the forum which I can still recall, word for word, all these years later…

So… did you copy that from somewhere, or did you just wake up this morning and think “I think I’ll go batshit insane today!”

Best. Put-down Ever.

Prognostication

If the leadership spill goes ahead and Kevin Rudd becomes PM, Tony Abbott will spend the next week banging on about how the Labor party are an unorganised mess, can’t make up their minds, have a revolving door leadership and cannot be trusted with the future of the nation.

If the leadership spill doesn’t go ahead, or it does go ahead and Julia Gillard remains as PM, Tony Abbott will spend the next week banging on about how the Labor party are an unorganised mess, can’t make up their minds, have a dud for a leader and cannot be trusted with the future of the nation.

Whichever happens, the papers will agree with Tony Abbott, talkback radio will agree with the papers, and the vast unthinking mass of the voting public will agree with the talkback radio. This is what we – for some reason – label ‘the political process’.

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