Then I could begin constructing narratives about how the bones had been broken, whether they were burnt, how far they had moved, what species were present (two halves of a jaw reassembled being easier to identify than the two separate halves), and so on. A narrative that helped make sense of the lives of the people who had once lived in that place.

I don’t do that work any more, haven’t for a long time. But now I work in social media and similar skills are once again in play. Firstly because of the way I work I suppose. Once I used to hastily jot down ideas while stopped at traffic lights on the car, jot them on any rubbish I could find like supermarket receipts, car park vouchers, paper bags, and then try to put fragments, bulging out of my pockets, together into a narrative when I got home.

One narrative I was trying to construct was my own family history/autobiography one (see under tab marked “Dream”) for publication on this blog. Lives are fragmentary, both as they are lived and more so in recollection. We take a childhood memory here, an object there, a photograph of a friend, and shape it together to form a coherent fragment of a life. Or at least a narrative of a fragment, because memoirs are nothing if not unreliable, to lesser and greater extents. But as an autobiographer you get to construct your own narrative, before your biographer comes along later and reconstructs it with his or her own narrative of your life.

These days fragments of ideas, internet links, quotes, photos, headings, half written posts, are jotted down on computer documents, and bulge out of computer folders cunningly labelled things like “Blog Ideas”. Every so often I go through them, remembering an idea from here, a link from there, a quote from someone, and suddenly realise that a narrative can be constructed.

And the material from which these fragments are derived is itself fragmented. Every day stories come pouring in from all over the world, important, frivolous, happy, sad, serious, trivial, fact, fiction. Long, short, stark, expanded, checked, unchecked, information, disinformation. All grist to the social media mill. Problem is though that it all comes through the filter of the mainstream media and is converted into their narratives before it reaches us. We’d like the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and decide the narrative, having seen patterns, put two and two together, for ourselves.

So we need to deconstruct what we get. If I was looking at a table full of bones that someone else had stuck together, using their own criteria for best fit, and their own filter for narrative construction, I wouldn’t accept it. Instead I would dissolve the glue, separate the bones back to their original state, and start again from scratch. Much the same with the media narratives. We need to see what they are made from, and how and why they have been constructed. Then deconstruct them and make up our own minds.

The environment we all live in is often seen as fragments. Sometimes in a positive way “one might begin to write a book about a hedgerow when a boy and find it incomplete in old age” (from my lovely Ricard Jefferies). A realisation of the enormous complexity of the world we evolved in. Sometimes in a negative way, when politicians, developers, farmers, fishermen, think that destroying one fragment of woodland, driving one species to extinction, polluting one waterway, won’t matter because it is just a small thing.

But just as in our own lives, and in the social and political worlds, the environmental fragments are all inter-connected, and we need to reassemble those fragments to understand all of the narratives.

Have we got the skills?

An essential safeguard for people who were generally hated by the 99% of the population who weren’t benefiting from their rule, and who were unable to see sophisticated poisons arriving at their dinner table in the way that they would observe an assassin equipped with sword, knife or spear. Pretty successful survival technique.

It’s a profession that went out of fashion for some reason, but it could do with a revival. Oh, not for emperors and kings and dictators, but, for, well me. I think I’d like someone who could check out the rubbish food from take-away outlets, see if it was safe for me to eat. Same with supermarket food. I mean I’m guessing there must be items of actual unharmful food in both places, but I’d rather not damage myself trying to find them. Perhaps Morgan Spurlock (of “Super Size Me” fame) would like the job. But it would go well beyond Big Macs or apples sprayed with pesticides.

I’d like my taster (employed from “Tasters ‘R’ Us”) to walk ahead of me in shopping centres, sampling the air before I breathe it, drink from water taps before I slake my thirst, oh and test the decibel level of muzak and store announcements and their IQ (irritation quotient) before I even enter the front door.

Speaking of announcements there’s another service I’d like performed, perhaps by a different branch of “Tasters ‘R’ Us” called “Listeners ‘R’ Us”. This would involve some brave soul checking out any news/current affairs media I was likely to come into contact with – radio shock jocks, News Ltd newspaper columnists, IPA staff seminars on the ABC, blogs by right wing nut jobs, tweets from conservative tweetbots, speeches by neocon politicians, books by former Labor politicians determined to bite the hand that once preselected them, the whole horrible mix of colourless, odourless, and certainly tasteless but audible poisons spewing out into the world every minute of every hour of every day. Poisons not of the body but of the mind, the job of the taster to preserve not my life but my sanity, at the cost of his own. When he rolled over screaming and kicking, throwing bricks at tv, pulling radio out of socket, burning newspapers in the backyard, I would know that his mind had been poisoned beyond endurance and I should stay clear of the responsible media. And call for a new taster. These days it would be a much shorter job occupancy than the taster for a Roman Emperor.

But, like the Emperor, it would give me peace of mind. Anyone else want to give “Listeners ‘R’ Us” a call? I might buy shares in their company. Oh and “Tasters ‘R’ Us” of course, bet you’d like them to walk in front of you too.

If you are a blog subscriber (ie receiving this by email or RSS) you will probably find it easier to go direct to vote here – on page 5 under “T” for THE Watermelon Blog.

Much appreciated.

Will add a new chapter to the autobiography this weekend, take the story up to date over the last year. Hope you enjoy (now done, see “Topic of Cancer” last chapter in “Dream”, tab above)
Cheers.

So there we are. The two extra serves of nastier chemical rations have done their thing. Physical examination confirms my last PET scan – nothing going on in my lymph system as far as it is humanly possible to tell (always remembering that you are never cured, just in remission). My blood and body however do reflect the ravages of chemotherapy, and it’s going to take some time to feel relatively normal again.

But good news, no doubt, been lucky when so many are not. Means I can stop thinking of myself as a cancer patient, and go back to thinking of myself as someone who happens to have cancer.

As you were – stand at ease.

I’m not a circus fan, don’t think I’ve ever been to one (odd how memory plays tricks, just a faint thought that maybe I have once, but I can’t distinguish that from all of the circus images of film and literature), but a circus arrival in a town is still a big event I guess.

A big Big Top, and occupying the area behind it dozens of vehicles. But contrary to the popular image (“like a circus” said of some disorganised, chaotic event) this is a carefully organised army-style camp of new trucks and fancy caravan trailers, all shiny clean and modern, parked carefully in an ordered square. Has to be of course to move all the people and equipment around Australia, but still a little surprising given memories of childhood reading about circuses.

Also pleasantly surprising, in a grass area neatly fenced with portable fencing, was the small group of Shetland ponies, quietly grazing but no doubt looking forward to their next exciting stint in the ring. Exotic animals long ago banned from circuses here thankfully, and seeing the ponies reminded me pleasantly that there were no lions and tigers in tiny cages, no elephants tethered by the leg with chains. Just ponies, and, no doubt, preparing in their caravans, clowns, acrobats, jugglers, trapeze artists and all the rest.

So, pretty good stuff, Moscow Circus, I hope you succeed, and from the lines of people buying tickets it looked like you might be. But look, just a tip, the sign on the side road entrance saying “Disabled Drop-Off”? You might want to consider rewording that!

Anyway. Parked, went to supermarket, got bread and stuff. And there, as I came out, was another sign, hand-written in biro on a torn out piece of paper, taped to the wall next to the panel of supermarket light switches:

I read it once. I read it again. I looked around. No clown. I read it again, peeped around corner in case I had missed something. No clown.

No, I don’t know the answer. Perhaps visiting clowns from the Circus had caused a ruckus the previous night. Perhaps I had missed seeing a giant mechanical clown somewhere in the refrigerated section juggling eggs.

Perhaps it was something I only imagined. Or perhaps I misread it, and it was really an instruction to blog readers:

“Please remember to turn clown off after reading the blog”

Click.

Not easy to get hold of, but I suddenly spotted it the other day on one of those cheap remainders tables in the DVD store and so here we are.

And indeed it has stood up well. But I don’t really want to discuss the craft that makes it, or should make it, somewhere up among the all time film classics. When I saw it 60 years ago I would have watched it as I did any other cowboy movie. Thought it a bit slow-moving perhaps, long time to get to the gunfight showdown which was the set piece of any cowboy movie. But then, bang, bang, bang, and bang, and it was the baddies who would be, of course, occupying the newly made coffins.

But now, a sadder man and wiser, with a lot more miles in the saddle, the gunfight is incidental, a necessary chore to get through, while the rest of the film is, astonishingly for a cowboy movie made in 1952, an extended metaphor worthy of, say, Bergman.

And a metaphor, what’s more, about life and death, something that I as a child knew nothing about, but now, with an almost near death experience or two under my gunbelt, can identify with instinctively.

Gary Cooper is everyman. Fate is coming for him down that ominous rail line stretching into the future. Something wicked that way comes, inexorably. Is it on time, yes it’s on time, is it on time, yes it’s on time. Oh, yes, it’s a cowboy movie, so the wicked thing is a gunslinger in real life, but imagine that it is cancer, say, or a diseased heart. The clock is ticking, this is the deadline, no escape.

Should everyman run from his fate? Well, he could, but he can’t hide, it will catch up with him (like an appointment in Samarra), all he can do is face it and either survive or not. Bravely facing your worst fear may be suicidal, but the alternative is worse. But wait, not to worry, he won’t be alone, he can face this with his own strength of character, all the character resources he has built up, his reserves of mental health and strength..

But then everything is stripped away from him, bit by bit, one by one. He is on his own, or, as Mrs Soprano said, “in the end we all die in our own arms alone”. And all the time the clock is ticking, the deadline fixed. Death is in the air and the coffins are being made, the hammering of coffin nails matching the ticking clock.

Finally the clock will strike twelve (though oddly it doesn’t audibly), and everyman is out on the street, alone. That long dusty street, the final stage of life’s journey heading towards the wickedness which has now arrived by rail and is covering the last little distance, potentially the last moment of life.

Finally the battle is on for his life. Face your demons, fight hard, bravely, win through against the odds, survive. Live to fight another day.

Or maybe that interpretation is biased by my own recent demons. What do you think? But if you haven’t seen it, or not since you were a child, take another look, this lean, pared down gem of a movie is a real classic. My friend was right.

She said, perhaps bemused by the stupid question, that because most if not all Canberra students were already receiving support above what was being proposed, there actually wasn’t anything “in it” for the ACT.

In hunter-gatherer societies all children are educated equally – it would be suicidal for the society to do anything else. Same with the early agricultural societies. In both cases gifted individuals may specialise in particular areas of expertise later, but all will be educated.

We lost this equality of opportunity as the accumulation of wealth by a few created a situation where better education could be purchased, and that has remained the case, and been strengthened, ever since.

Indeed in Australia the Right, themselves, one and all, the products of the best education money could buy, decided they could do better as old boys (or girls) than merely denoting a few tax deductible dollars to the alma mater. They could, they realised, get their name up on the honour roll by getting the people of Australia to pay big bucks to schools already overflowing with swimming pools and polo ponies and acres of rolling playing fields. And they could lock in such payments permanently with a clever mathematical formula which achieved bias while appearing objective. A simple formula, always applied by conservatives, and always effective = The Rich get Richer. Genius eh?

So, it’s time for a reversal of fortunes. A simple formula = To each according to his needs. Identify the poorest public schools, give them more money to build up their resources to the level of the richer public schools. And then, whisper who dare, onwards to the levels of the private schools. Oh, sorry, getting a bit carried away there. Never mind, let’s get all students onto as level a playing field, playing fields, as possible. Cry havoc and let loose the dogs of class war.

But wait, there’s more. The other conservative legacy also affects equality of educational opportunity – religion. Separation of church and state? Yeah, whatever, but separation of church and school just as important. Yet John Howard unleashed the dogs of sectarianism. Loony tunes religious schools proliferated. Students taught curriculums in which garbage like creationism can be included, because religious freedom. “The more religion, the lower the quality of education” – write that on the blackboard 100 times Mr Howard

But worse is that schooling, meant to broaden horizons, introduce new ideas, allow children to mix widely, teach the ability to think and evaluate, to see a world beyond the walls of their home, has been narrowed. Religious fanatics have been allowed to carry out home-schooling in bulk. Allowed to make sure that no child raised in the closed little worlds of religious fundamentalism is allowed to discover that there is another real world outside.

So, equality of opportunity for all students? Absolutely, stuff of dreams. But understand that it involves more than just money. I have a dream of getting all students onto the playing field of secular education.

What’s in it for Australia? Only the next generation.

Well, sadly Maggie did, but Ruby didn’t. People don’t of course, even though it is such a common reaction to approaching political storms (“if John Howard wins”, “if George Bush wins”). People like my Aunt don’t anyway, too emotionally rooted in family and community. Too costly to physically and economically uproot. Too loyal, I guess, right down to their bootstraps, to the country of their birth. So they stay, as the political storm clouds gather once more, and batten down what hatches they can.

Bit different when the Gucci Shoe is on the other foot. The mere whiff of what laughingly passes for a Blairite/Keatingesque/Obamacrat/Hollandaise “only-a-few-miles-right-of-centre-social-democrat-party” in the offing, and the Rich are, well, offing. Depardieuing to some less taxing place. And not just individuals – whole companies, corporations, faced with, say, a mining tax increase, threaten to dig up all the Australian iron ore, bury it again in, say, Myanmar, and dig it up again to sell to China, from a new head office in a tax haven.

But the poor stay behind, and watch as swine like Thatcher graduate from stealing milk from children to stealing mines from miners, factories from communities, houses and services from families, and set free the dogs of banks and financiers to ravage the economy. Oh, they try to fight back, some ding dong battles, but the power of the state, riot police on flying monkeys, is never so starkly on display as when it is being used by the rich, for the rich, against the poor.

Nor is the power of the media more starkly displayed than in these circumstances, when Rupert’s Unlimited News Bugles consolidate the gains made by the corporate and public order shock troops (while using some themselves to smash print unions), and convince the suddenly out of work and homeless that they will never have it so good again unless they vote the “bosses’ party” in again, or a “worker’s party” that has absolutely indistinguishable policies, because “socialism” is so nineteenth century. Like laissez-faire capitalism, I guess.

And then, when the Great Leader has trashed her (or his) own country, spread the disease to others, cosied up to even more obnoxious foreign dictators who stop at nothing until the jackboots are stamping on faces, and helicopters are flying out to sea, and, retired or been, finally too extreme even for his (or her) colleagues, shunted out, the Trumpets of the Free Press move in to start rewriting history even as the removalist vans are passing each other at the entrance to 10 Downing St.

And, when the Angel Gabriel’s trumpets sound to summon the old, cold, warrior to Valhalla, the Press write effusive, white-washed eulogies as if preparing for sainthood application, and any suggestion that history, real history, should be referred to, is shouted down with that old saviour of horrid right wing leaders (though not, apparently, those of the left), “Don’t speak ill of the dead”. And even the public broadcaster, in the face of widespread demand from people trying to fight back, refuse to play a very appropriate song from Wizard of Oz. Well, bugger that for a game of soldiers, a game of battleships – there’s a Class War going on all over the word, and it’s the Class of ’79 that’s winning it. Time to join the battle.

I wish my Aunt had come to Australia, unexpectedly turned up on my doorstep, rung my bell, ” Ding Dong”. Escaped from the stealer of milk, winner of battles, Boadicea risen again to fly in a Harrier Jump Jet. Mind you, with the advent of John Howard I think Ruby would have been packing her bags again in 1996 for Blighty, sure, and rightly, that Oz was also in for rule by a potential milk stealer and armchair warrior.

And with Tony Abbott now looming in Australia like a Wicked Wizard from the East, I think it might be time to pack my bags and join her. Well, except for David Cameron already at the other end stealing hospital services from old ladies, and old gentlemen, and taxing their homes, completing Thatcher’s work.

Where has that Yellow Brick Road gone?

No, mustn’t tempt the fates, waiting with their deadly scissors to punish both optimism and hubris. This is hopefully the last chemo treatment (astonishingly number 19) for quite a while after two years and 4 days since my first one, an age ago.

Side effects a bit rough last time, hope better this time.

This whole process is a bit like burning the forest to get rid of weeds and then seeing the good green shoots appearing again through the blackened landscape. Chemotherapy burns up all the white blood cells, including the bad lymphoma particles, and then the blood ecology comes back.

But just as the forest is damaged by each fire, and the more you burn, the less well the ecology recovers, so the more you “burn” the good cells in the body the more you damage them, and the less your body returns to normal. Moderation in both are needed.

There, managed to combine my fire research with my cancer treatment, not a bad metaphor eh?

So don’t forget to vote for me as Best Blog at http://www.writerscentre.com.au/bloggingcomp/peopleschoice.html – page 5 under THE Watermelon Blog.

Unaccountably the rest of the planet seemed blissfully unaware that I was, at least in my head if not out loud, singing “Watch out World, here I come”. They seemed preoccupied with other stuff in that year of my awakening awareness of news that was to continue for a lifetime.

Plenty of other stuff had happened since I was born (the years known as AD for After David), small matters like the end of world wars, atomic bombs, Berlin Wall, Long March, Korean War, Indian independence, a new Queen of England, death of Stalin, the voting out and voting in of Churchill, and so on, but I had been too young to take much notice of (or understand had I done so) those interesting times I was living in.

But then came 1956, and my mind sprang to attention as the world seemed to erupt in serious, newsworthy events, most with long-term implications. Suez! Hungary! Olympics in Melbourne! TV in Australia! Elvis Presley! First commercial nuclear power plant! Black protests (Rosa Parks having done her courageous thing in December 1955) increasing in America!

From then on of course, year after year, newsworthy events kept happening until you felt like screaming “stop the world I want to get off”. There was Sputnik in 1957 (the whole world, it seemed, including me, stood outside their houses at night, getting cricks in their necks as they stared upwards at a tiny manmade star moving, it seemed unbelievable, through space. Or, almost as incredibly, it was possible to listen, on a radio, to the high-pitched beeping sound that was the star communicating with Earth. Advanced technology, completely indistinguishable from magic, and destined, though few of us knew at the time, to revolutionise communications among other things).

There was the election and killing of JFK, the build-up in Vietnam, the Beatles, Castro, riots in Paris, the Prague Spring, Woodstock, the assassination of Allende, the end of the Vietnam War, man on the Moon, and on and on as Sixties became Seventies and beyond.

All through these decades, as the world settled back into a new order after the end of World War Two (like a city rebuilding after an earthquake), serious news was related to us in serious ways. Morning newspapers gave sober facts, thoughtful editorials, expert analysis, on the significant events of the previous day at home and abroad. Television and radio had major evening news bulletins to do likewise. Oh, of course there was also frivolous stuff all through the media, but there seemed to be a recognition (especially from the ABC, but other media outlets as well), that there needed to be a core of seriousness for serious times. That there were things that an educated public needed to know.

But then, somewhere along the way to the 21st Century (and this won’t be news to any observant human being), everything changed. Oh, there was no shortage of significant world events, but the way they were, or weren’t communicated to the public changed.

On the pretext that there was more news to report, the “24 hour News Cycle” became a self-fulfilling description, and 24 hour news channels came into being. Instead of single major news bulletins in an evening, short news grabs were pumped out all through the day, and lasted no longer than a ay. And because when you got down to it there weren’t any more significant events than there had been, “news” had to be padded out with a white noise of trivia.

But by happy coincidence this padding served another function. Because so much “news” was being pumped out by the media it was hard to make people (whose parents and grandparents had once clustered eagerly around a radio to hear the 7pm Bulletin) take any interest in news bulletins. So they had to be turned into entertainment. Short snappy tabloid style reports replaced longer factual ones. Nothing could be reported that didn’t have video footage to accompany it. Analysis from experts was replaced by opinions from small numbers of regular ideologues (some employed, some on contracts). Sport dominated bulletins that had once kept it to a minimum, including at times running sporting stories as the lead.

Bulletins had to end on a happy note, so funny animals, whacky people, strange events, of a kind once restricted to tabloid newspapers or sideshow alleys, appeared, often taking more time than a report of, say, World War Three breaking out. And then began to be dotted through the bulletin to lighten it up. Conversely, to add suspense and interest, in the way of a lurid crime novel, the networks began including scare campaigns in which anything and everything in your kitchen could kill you, strangers could slaughter you, children be abducted, yellow hordes invade, aircraft crash, and so on. Every day some new thing to fear – keep reading/watching, we will keep you alert and alarmed, keep you warned about what to be fearful of.

So news bulletins, once so fundamental to a well-informed democracy, turned into glossy gossip magazines with moving pictures. And the “24 Hour News Channels” going the same way except at greater length with much repetition, and slabs of talking heads from right-wing think tanks or shock jock radio or Retired-Conservative-Politician-Land.

Then to compound (if ’twere needed) the problem, politicians, seeing the way the electronic wind was blowing, and realising that the days of thoughtful, longer, discussions of policy or events was long gone, began speaking in sound bites themselves to fit into the new news style. And, to be helpful, associating political stunts, as colourful and entertaining as possible, to go with the three word slogans and three sentence propaganda. There you are, a small package beautifully tailored for insertion straight into “news” bulletins 2013-style.

So a torrent of news noise washes across this land. Little or no information, in fact often deliberately misleading information through the stunts and slogans, just a scrap-book of sound and fury signifying nothing. And, as an unforeseen consequence, a view of the world promoted in which everything is of equal significance, or that nothing is of any significance. Wars and rumours of war of no more interest than skate-boarding dogs or surf-skiing hamsters. No ability of the public to distinguish what if anything is of concern and importance among all the fake fear campaigns and funny animals.

No way now that a child born in 2002 could see 2013 as a memorable year of great world events, or understand what they mean.

Nor could anyone else.