A mother of a tongue.

With the greatest respect due to one of the funniest and most informative writers I’ve ever read, Bill Bryson, I think that the above would have been a more apt title for his wonderful book about the evolution of the English language, Mother Tongue.

Of course I had no idea of its difficulty back when I picked-up at least the basics of English back in infancy by parroting the speech of my mother and others. Or, indeed, when I learned more of it by rote and later by wrote in primary school.

But now, some seventy years later, after decades more of hearing it spoken in countless accents and dialects, speaking it myself in its Australian version, and also writing it for a living, I realise how mother-lucky I was not to have to learn it as another tongue, as so many of my readers have so brilliantly done.

Because I still find myself stunned (stongued?) by not only its virtually infinite complexities and ever-expanding vocabulary, but also by the wealth of opportunities it affords for the invention of slanguage and other versions of and variations on itself.

But what else would you expect of  a tongue so confused and confusing as to describe the collection of 26 ‘Roman’ letters it comprises by compressing the names of the first two letters of Greek into into the word alphabet; and, having partly originated from the ‘Anglish’ spoken by an invading Germanic tribe, to now call itself ‘Inglish’, which of course is spelt‘English’?

I could go on endlessly citing countless other examples of the alarmingly anarchistic nature of the English language, and the linguistic puzzles it presents to not just learners accustomed to other tongues, but also for a great many for whom it’s their mother tongue.

But rather than focus on the problems of English, I’d prefer to opt here for a discussion of its opportunities. One of which, as any reader of my columns, posts or blogs will be plainly and perhaps even painfully aware, is that it affords virtually endless scope for not only playing fast and loose with the sounds and often multiple meanings of its existing words, but for improvising variations on them and even outright inventing new ones.

And as I’ve said before, as a writer I find this loads of fun, even if at times my version(s) of English gives some of my readers cause for anguish.

As in the case of the one some time ago who wondered why I “write so weird”, as discussed in an earlier post, or the other who more recently accused me of what he called “corrupting the English I once knew.”

But I plead my complete innocence of this charge, on the grounds that, far from corrupting ‘correct’ English with my puns, homophonic neologisms and other versions of words that some eye-witnesses of my work might unwittingly mis-perceive me as doing, I’m actually doing my damndest to defend it against its perversion by every misuser and abuser of this and other languages, from political and commercial so-called spin-doctors to ruthlessly truthless dictators.

A list of formerly ‘correct’ or ‘proper’ English words that have been rendered totally ding-a-linglish by professional practitioners of everything from Spinglish to outright Lyinglish would be virtually endless.

So let me save your time and mine by considering just a few of the victims of especially vicious versions of verbicide. Starting with, as I’ve done before, that apparently innocent little word “people’s”, which has been rendered effectively extinct by  people-enchaining Chinese Communist Party for the purpose of pretending to be democratic.

Similarly misused and abused, of course, is, as I have to admit again that I’ve alluded to many times before, the English noun ‘democracy’, which, along with its adjective ‘democratic’, has been so perverted by demagogues, demuckrats and democrazies around the world in their attempts to pass-off their dermocracies, dimocracies, dumbocracies, doughmocracies, diremocracies, doomocracies and sundry other dire mockeries of democracy as the genuine article.

And last but not least, at least for now, is one of my all-time favourite examples of the destruction of a formerly at least apparently respectable English word by the forces of Spinglish and outright Lyinglish, “family”.

Attempting apparent unawareness of the fact that the family, albeit admittedly at its best a haven of safety, comfort, caring and affection for its members, is also the scene of most physical, psychological and sexual crimes against spouses and children, right up to and including murder, and is misused as a model by such nefarious organisations as religions and the Mafia, politicians and their spinglish speechwriters love to cynically claim their support of alleged “family values”, whatever the hell they may be.

In short, so many and in fact an apparently increasing number of what may have formerly seemed to be perfectly innocent and straightforward words have been systematically stripped of their genuine meanings by lying mother-fakers in politics and mongrel elements in media, both online and off, that it’s getting harder every day to discern who’s speaking or writing with a forked tongue.

With the result that those of us who respect and seek to talk, write and above all think ourselves towards the truth, have to carefully analyse virtually every word, English or otherwise, that we hear or read, so as to detect and reject those that are lying, or, even better, turn them into new, true words of our own.

It’s a mother of a task, I know, But just as eternal vigilance is proverbially the price of freedom, eternal verbal vigilance is the price we can’t afford not to pay if we’re to prevent English or indeed any other language from being degraded from a mother down to a truth-suppressing or in other words smother tongue.

 

 

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Lunar techies and lunatics.

The fiftieth anniversary of the NASA Apollo 11 mission that rocketed Neil Armstrong to fame as the first human to land on the moon and inspired him to utter the unforgettable phrases “one small step for (a) man; one giant leap for mankind” seems a most appropriate occasion on which to consider the strange selectivity of human credulity.

To most of us who are old enough to have watched and heard the fuzzy but fabulous live telecast of this epochal event, as I was fortunate to do with my colleagues in the boardroom of Best & Swift Advertising, Sydney, it was a triumph of combined skill and technology.

But of course, despite the majority of us lunar techies, there was, and has apparently been ever since, a minority of what we like to think of as lunatics who’ve consistently claimed that the whole thing was nothing but a bunch of Earth-bound special-effects, or, in other words, lunar tricks.

And I have to admit that, as an avowed sceptic and thus apt to doubt or at least question everything that anyone tells or tries to sell me, I somewhat sympathise with these trickery-conspiracy theorists.

Because, let’s face it, we’re all of us, very much including myself, highly illogical if not outright loony-tunes when it comes to choosing what to believe/disbelieve, credit or discredit, or have faith/refuse to have faith in.

For example, I fail to see why I should believe in some God or other allegedly Almighty being when there have been and still are so many competing claimants for this position, and countless associated religions all clamouring for recognition as the sole one capable of guaranteeing the ‘salvation’ of my ‘immortal’ so-called ‘soul’.

Especially in light of the fact that most if not all religions, as heavenly as they claim to be, are used and abused by their earthly representatives and most unholy, indeed wholly-hypocritical adherents, to amass massive wealth, or profane power over the masses, or more usually both.

And none of these ‘religious’ so-called ‘faiths’ can produce the slightest shred of evidence for their ‘truths’ aside from such dubious sources as ‘sacred’ texts replete with accounts of ‘miracles’ and other such mumbo-jumbo.

Whereas just a few of my motives for believing in the moon-landing is that neither NASA nor anybody else has ever claimed that this astonishing technological achievement was outright ‘miraculous’, nor demanded that we dedicated lunar-techies do anything so loony as to pay homage to the Moon goddess, that dead-and-gone Nordic ‘divinity’ whose ‘holy’ day is memoralised in the English Mo(o)nday, just as her fellow imaginary inhabitants of Valhalla are fossilised in Tiewsday, Wodensday, Thorsday and Freyasday, Saturnsday and Sunday.

And in any event, I’m capable of at least dimly comprehending the scientific challenges that had to be overcome in the achievement of the first manned lunar landing, largely thanks to the best book I’ve ever read on the subject, Norman Mailer’s magisterial Of a Fire on the Moon.

Admittedly I have no detailed idea of how this feat was achieved, any more than I have of how stationary-orbit satellites are so astonishingly capable of relaying terrestrial communications; or how electronics work to transmit radio and television; or indeed what the internet is or how it manages to put me in touch with everything from massive stores of movies and computer games to Facebook friends not only by text, but also audio and video.

But at least I have hard evidence that that the internet actually works, or, if you prefer, wwworks, as I’ll once again demonstrate, at least to my own Lunar-techie satisfaction, when I finish this post and see it appear wwwherever the hell I happen to send it.

Unlike prayer, which, though many perfectly sane, sincere and dear , which people I know swear by its importance and effectiveness, has never in my personal experience proven to either reach its intended recipient or inspire any recognisable response.

Though Australia’s current Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, a Pentecostal Christian, attributed his coalition’s winning of the recent federal election to the power of prayer, declaring at his moment of victory that he had “always believed in miracles.”

But surely, at least as it seems to me, no God worthy of the title would be bothered wasting his/her/its miracle-working talents on a matter this trivial when there are wars, natural disasters and terrible diseases still urgently awaiting divine intervention.

And in any event, as far as I’m personally concerned, you’d have to be a religious loony to attribute Scott Morrison’s  political success to the power of prayer rather than what all-too-clearly actually works wonders for him, which is his God-forsaken or in other words sinful talent for spinning, dissembling and lying.

Just as you’d have to be something of a lunatic to keep claiming that the 1969 moon landing was a loony confidence trick rather than what the vast sane majority of us are so appropriately celebrating this week: an almost incredible but totally believable combination of human curiosity, ingenuity, courage and both lunar and tech know-how.

 

 

 

 

Falling foul of Faithbookers.

I’m not sure what it was that I wrote recently that brought the wrath of the godly, if not God him/her/itself down on me via Facebook.  All I can be certain of is that by far the most of the faithful who suddenly sent me such a multitude of ‘friend’ requests and messages that my site nearly went into meltdown have hailed from Africa.

And by far the freakin’ majority of these Africans were Christians. Which figures, I suppose, considering that, as a former member of one of the countless versions and perversions of Christianity competing for the title of the ‘true’ one, I’ve written far more crossly against what I regularly call Christinanity or Christinsanity than about religions with which I’m less familiar.

Anyone would be forgiven for expecting that similar familiarity with the Christian ‘faith’ or at least the more flagrantly hypocritical of its followers, would have bred even more contempt among Africans, since they, along with indigenous South Americans, have historically suffered some of the very worst atrocities at the hands of ‘Christian’ European slavers and colonists.

But of course religious ‘faith’ is a matter not of reason but of wild, indeed wanton irrationality, and thus it makes a kind of nonsensical sense that if Africans are hell-bent on abandoning their traditional religious beliefs in favour of some imported set of superstitions, they must figure that it’s better to go with the proverbial devil they know.

Whatever and whyever, however, it’s clearly evident that increasing numbers of the sorely-persecuted peoples of the so-called ‘dark’ continent that white ‘Christian’ and allegedly ‘enlightened’ Europeans have so disgracefully robbed, raped and pillaged for centuries are themselves becoming Christian.

Or, more specifically, I should say, selectively Christian, because, as is apparently almost always the case with most of the adherents of this and all other ‘faiths’ of which I’m aware, they have seemed suspiciously selective in electing which of the directives of their founder they choose to follow.

For example, the virtually countless self-styled lambs of God who’ve been flocking  to my Facebook site have been such woolly thinkers as to on the one hand (hoof) ignore their alleged Shepherd’s urgings to ‘turn the other cheek’ against those who smite them, instead of smiting their smiters in return or revenge; and on the other hand they’ve all paid obeisance to the biblical “blessed are the meek” message by doing all their flocking completely in peace.

So far, at least, I’ve received not a single critical or carping, let alone abusive message from any of these dozens if not hundreds of mostly African Christians who’ve been requesting me to confirm them as Facebook/Faithbook friends.

But, perhaps unfairly, I’m more inclined to ascribe the spirit of charity with which they’ve responded to my criticisms of their own and other religions to the fact that these people, like many others I know who see themselves as ‘true believers’, have so much innate and genuine goodness, gentility and generosity of spirit as to have no need for faith in Christianity or any other kind of imaginary inanity or insanity, but only in their own true humanity.

Stupormarket musings.

All my life I’ve loathed shopping, especially supermarketing. So much so that way back when I was a very young adult, and thus even more of a dolt than I am now, one of my direst dreads was that I would someday end up as one of those sad-looking old guys to be seen wandering up and down the supermarket aisles in the wake of their specials-shopping wives.

And now, of course, decades later, every time I find myself wandering after my wife up and down the aisles in the same crowd-, superfluity- and claustrophobia-stupefied way that I once so dreaded, I wryly regret failing to learn earlier in life that we should be wary of what we wish, or, as in this case, don’t wish for.

So I entirely blame myself for finding myself in this situation, not my wife. And thus, feeling that it’s entirely up to me to find a way to save myself from going totally off my trolley with the super-tedium of the experience, I some time ago started wondering how to make myself, less of a basket-case, stupormarketingwise.

The strategy I came up with hasn’t been completely successful, I’m afraid, but has considerably improved the situation for both parties.

For a start, it leaves my wife free to fully enjoy the first stage of her supermarketing, which is snoopermarketing around to see what’s available at acceptable if not affordable prices this week, while I go off unsupervised to check-out what’s currently on the shelves at the shopping centre’s two free book exchanges.

That way, even though most of the books in stock every week are vampire and assorted other fantasy fables or else bodice-ripping romances and other such gruesome generics of the chick- and clit-lit genre, there are usually a few there that look bearable enough to take with me to sample while my wife’s busy perusing the package labels on products whose contents and prices she’s comparing.

But, lest I block the paths of fellow trolley-pushers, get jostled by hordes of harassed shop-til-they-droppers , or else fail to keep pace with my wife and her purchases and thus have to figure-out where she’s disappeared to, I don’t get too engrossed in my reading.

Nor, however, do I any longer allow myself to descend back into the trance-like state that was my former defence against the dullness of stupormarketing, but instead choose to switch to my new super-musing mode.

A state of mind in which I can amuse myself by dreaming-up new writing topics, or coming-up with fresh thoughts on one or more of the topics I’m currently tackling, or even simply playing mind-games with with whatever words happen to come to mind via either via my subconscious or from my subliminal viewing of the brand-names on the stupormarket shelves.

I find that I get such a superabundance of thinking and writing done this way that I’ve almost come to not only almost enjoy the stupormarketing experience, but also to extend my new-found supermusing technique to taking productive advantage of other situations I’ve formerly dreaded as dead-boring.

To getting some mental writing done instead of wasting my time, not to mention getting bored witless, waiting for public transport or the start of events for which, due to my distaste for last-minute rushing, I’ve turned-up super-early.

Or when, having arrived either typically too early or even right on time for appointments with doctors, dentists or other inevitably tardy professionals, a little mental literary effort gives me all the protection I need from not only tedium, but also and more crucially from the temptation to risk the kind of mind-cancer that I’m convinced must be caused by even the briefest exposure to those pathologically-moronic gossip magazines with which far too many waiting rooms are infested.

In summary, rather than resisting and railing-against stupormarketing and other such super-time-consuming and super-patience-testing experiences that I’ve been dreading and attempting to exempt myself from all these years, I’ve finally realised I could and should have been seeing them as super-abundant opportunities for super-exercising my mind.

Better late than never, I suppose, as the old saying goes. But even so I can’t help regretting that I so super-stupidly failed to learn such a superior, indeed utterly super-dooper lesson a great deal super-sooner.

 

 

 

 

Recycling ourselves.

Today I was intending to follow-up my previous ‘$elling our $elves’ post with a discussion of some of the multitude of possible personal attributes we can use to convince others that we’re worth buying and possible keeping. But I’m afraid I’ve had to put that on the back-burner, as an incident at my favourite cafe today diverted me from the issue of self-selling to that of recycling and then to self-recycling.

This diversion was triggered by Deb, a member of the cafe staff, who, as my daughter has similarly been urging me to do, suggested I might consider equipping myself with a so-called ‘keep cup’ so that I can bring it with me for refilling on each visit instead of having my cappuccino in a disposable cup, the better to enable me to wander away from the no-smoking table area whenever I fancy a cigarette.

“If you get a keep cup,” said Deb, “you’ll be saving lots of these disposable ones from going into landfill”, she politically and ecologically-correctly said. But, somewhat to my own surprise as well as hers, I found myself spontaneously responding that at my advanced age I’m less concerned at the thought of my cups’ going into landfill than that of my corpse’s doing so.

As I’m sure you can well imagine, that pretty-well killed the disposable-versus-keep-cup conversation. But it also got me thinking further grave thoughts. When I inevitably, heaven forbid, die, and probably die coughing, considering how long and how much I’ve been smoking, will I be content to have my remains buried in landfill, albeit in the comfort of a single-use and thus decidedly non-recyclable cougher’s coffin?

Or would I on the whole prefer incineration/cremation, a practice that to my mind must inevitably exacerbate already-dire levels of air pollution. And the scattering of the resultant ashes, though admittedly an act of re-distribution, is not, as far as I’m concerned, strictly speaking recycling.

Nor, indeed quite the opposite, is the inordinately expensive and I think overly optimistic practice of having one’s carcass snap-frozen and kept in cryogenic storage in expectation of eventual resuscitation, or reincarnation, or even both.

In fact as far as I’ve been able to imagine, my only opportunities for truly environmentally-friendly self-recycling is to donate my mortal remnants to medical science in the hope that I can be useful for dissection by students, or that at least some of my organs and tissues will be re-usable as transplants.

But everything considered, I think that if it’s legal in this country, which I grant you is unlikely, I’ll opt for air-burial.

There are some people, I know, who consider that the exposure of the deceased outdoors is barbaric and thus for the birds. But as far as I’m concerned, becoming bird-food and thus flying free and soaring high as part of some vulture, or buzzard or other scavenger culture is about as ideal as the concept of self-recycling gets.

Meanwhile, however, as long as my life-cycle continues, I can console myself that the passing-on of my genes, albeit both randomly and only partially, to my son and daughter and their descendants is one of the most rewarding form of pre-mortem self-recycling I could possibly contemplate.

Almost sufficient, in fact, if it wasn’t for my feelings of anticipatory grief at eventually leaving my children and other loved-ones, and the thought of the pain they may feel at and beyond my passing, to put the ‘fun’ back in the word ‘funeral’.

A remark that reminds me of another form of self-recycling that I and I’ve noticed lots of other writers practice: the repetition of favourite old jokes, puns and other plays on words.

The fun/funeral one above, for example, I’ve recycled or, even more reprehensibly, self-plagiarised from a piece I wrote back in 2011, celebrating the richly-served deaths of two notoriously homicidal dictators, Generals Ne Win of Burma and Galtieri of Argentina.

And regular, long-term readers of my blog, Facebook posts and  years of Malaysiakini columns, old-stagers like Antares, Ktemoc, Kim Quek and Din Merican, to name just a few, are surely well aware of lots of other such literary self-recyclings I’ve committed over the years.

But what the hell? At least the old lines been given new lives in new contexts for the possible enjoyment if not edification of a whole new generation of readers, rather than having been left for dead and forever buried in the metaphorical landfill of  my old files.

$elling our $elves.

Earlier today, my wife and I had an interesting conversation, as we often do, verbal intercourse having proven at least as vital to the thriving of out 25-year marriage as sexual or any other kind of intercourse has.

This morning’s discussion was sparked by the concern currently most crucial to us both, which is the campaign she’s on to try and sell herself, her personal qualities and academic skills to a university that’s located somewhere liveable and is prepared to pay a salary sufficient to support us both.

Not that I don’t still work, but these days, having long exceeded my use-by date, at least employmentwise, and now being subject to a penalty of sixty per cent on every dollar over $200 that I earn to supplement my pathetic age pension, there’s no point in my working freelance, except in the unlikely event that it earns me a pension-eclipsing fortune.

But failing such a windfall, I’m not only free to write if and when and whatever I like, as long as it doesn’t earn me a fee, but also totally liberated from any need to go on selling my services by touting for assignments, meeting deadlines, or shaping my style and content to satisfy the demands of clients in the hope that they’ll keep hiring me.

In other words, I can finally follow English literary identity Cyril Connolly’s dictum that it’s “better to write for yourself and lose your audience than write for an audience and lose yourself.”

But of course I’d be kidding myself as well as you and whoever else I’ve thus far failed to lose from the advertising and other mass audiences I formerly sold or rather sold-out to if I went on claiming here that my writing is totally candid and free of self-censorship or other more or less subtle forms of what could be called salesmanship even now.

For example, even in the state of complete literary liberty fancy I’m now enjoying, I still conceal my true self, and by extension the identities of my family and intimate friends, by writing under a nom de plume that’s an abbreviated version of my real name.

And, though what I write these days is the or at least what I sincerely see as the truth, it is, and perhaps can never be, what I could swear to on some allegedly ‘holy’ book to be the or even the whole truth or nothing but the truth.

Or, to bring the discussion back to my sales theme, I may not be trying to sell myself as a writer any more, but in truth have to admit that I persist in avoiding topics so embarrassingly or even shamefully self-revealing that they might threaten to un-sell the product-identity or brand-image that I’ve made it my life’s work to carefully-craft for the purpose of marketing myself as successfully as possible to the people and publics that have been or at least seemed important to me.

In this sense it seems to me that all of us, in or every waking moments, are, whether we’re aware of it or not, selling, trading, and otherwise engaged in self-interested and self-sustaining transactions between ourselves and the people and institutions we depend on for our economic, emotional physical and mental well-being, and indeed survival.

And some of the most testing challenges most of us face in our cradle-to-grave self-sales careers are the campaigns of personal promotion we have to wage for the purpose of landing the best possible jobs.

Because, as I mentioned above that my wife and I discussed earlier today, it’s not a matter of selling our whole selves, which is difficult enough if not impossible, given that, as I admitted above of myself, we all have aspects of ourselves that we’re too ashamed or simply too shy to reveal to others, especially those who are judging us on our potential worth to them as personable, presentable and above all profitable employees.

This is particularly problematic for my wife, who loathes, and thus has precious little will to or skill in, presenting or rather misrepresenting herself as anything but what she perceives as her real self.

And as admirable and attractive as I find her “what you see is what you get”, “take me as you find me or fuck off” attitude, which was in fact what sold me on her when we met 27 years ago, and has kept me besotted with her ever since, I’m as sadly aware as she is that it tends to alienate those grim impersonalities known as  ‘human-resources’ personnel, and po-faced allegedly impartial members of selection panels.

But at least she’ll never find herself left unsold on the shelf, as long as she continues to be appreciated by the all-too-rare professor at one of Sydney’s universities, who is apparently such a real person himself as to sufficiently appreciate her genuine worth, metaphorical warts and all, as to regularly hire her as a part-time tutor.

In which role her students, according to their official feedback, vastly appreciate her selling and telling them the real thing, instead of, as the rest of us are all-too inclined to do, keeping a whole variety of alternative ersatz selves in stock for selling in a whole range of situations to various categories of customers ranging from families,friends and students through to conquests, colleagues and employers.

In closing, however, I must conceded that among philosophers there remains some doubt as to whether such an entity as a ‘self’ actually exists, or whether what we think of as our ‘selves’ are are actually anything but what David Hume (1711-1776) famously wrote-off as mere “bundles of impressions.”

And, even if we do have selves, some psychologists believe that we’re unable to perceive them in their entirety. As postulated, for example, but the duo who came up with the ‘Johari Window’ theory of the self as having four components: the one that everybody can perceive, the one that only the person him- or herself can perceive, the one that only others can perceive, and the one that nobody can perceive.

But whether it’s a partial perception or a product of self-deception, here’s wishing you all, and especially my wife, the very best of luck in getting a great reception to your efforts to sell whatever you consider your self exclusively to those purchasers, especially  potential life-partners and employers, who themselves seem capable of properly and unselfishly appreciating its true value.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An acute case of Australienation.

I’ve always had a tendency to feel like something of an alien on Planet Earth, let alone in Australia, the country of my birth. But lately my chronic sense of being somewhat Austranged has been turning into what feels for all the world like a serious case of Australienation from, if not a full-blown Australlergic reaction to the place.

Or, more Australaccurately, to its politics, which recentlty Austresulted  in the Austrageous Austre-election of the AustraLiberal-National Coalition into federal, or rather feral government by a majority of Asstralians if not outright Australoonies.

Thus prompting the Austreincarnated Prime Minister, Scott ScoMo/ScamMo/ScumMo Morrison to Austrarrogantly declare that he’d performed a miracle, and to triumphantly trumpet the rhetorical question “How good is Australia?”

“None the better and in fact all the worse for your win, you Australying Australarsehole,” I replied to the image of this Australlegedly Austrachristian Austraconservative, who, along with his political Austraccomplices and supporters, is entirely the opposite of truly Christian in preferencing the economic interests of the prosperous and outright wealthy over the well-being of the rest of us and our ultra-threatened Austrenvironment.

And my Austrasian wife, as constitutionally cheery as she customarily is, has been of no Australassistence to me in my hour of Australianeed, as her first flush of Australinfatuation with the sun, sea and sand she so delightedly discovered here has declined into a more settled Australove-hate affair.

Similarly, her Austranitial Australintoxication with what she was at first Austrastonished to see as the nation’s and especially Sydney’s apparently Australiberal if not Australibertarian social climate as ideally suited to her libertine instincts, has been somewhat dimished by more sobering Austrealities.

Austrealisations like the fact that press freedom is coming under concerted Austrattack by the mendacious Morrison and the ministers and other minions of his alleged government, which is at the same time also becoming increasingly secretive and less legitimately transparent; and also, of course that the already yawning gulf between the Austrich and the Austrest of us is growing wildly wider.

Most crucially of all as far as my wife is concerned, however, having at first spurned politics here as she had done in self-defence during the rotten Umno/BN regime’s misrule of Malaysia, years of academic study culminating in a PhD thesis in the field of Government and International Relations have rendered her even more Australienated by, and even more Austroutspoken against the Austruling coalition than I am.

In short, she’s no help whatever in my efforts to keep my Australienation within limits, but rather the Austreverse.

So much so that she won’t even listen to my attempts to Austrameliorate the situation by Austreminding myself and telling her, that this country has Austradvanced to an Austramazing extent in the course of my seven decades here.

Rules about beach-wear for females, for example, have progressed from the preposterous prudery of bans on bikinis back in the 1950s to the point at which these days my wife, like any other female who’s so inclined, is totally free to flaunt her toplessness on almost any beach, or her total nakedness on some other beaches specifically designated for the purpose.

Homosexuality between consenting adults has been similarly liberated, having progressed from being a criminal offence back in my early days, to the point at which it is now rightly and freely permissable, even in nuptials, and homophobic prejudice and abuse are against the Australaw.

Other Austradvances that I’ve Austrobserved in my Australiftetime include the universal social medicine scheme, Medicare, vastly-increased rates of student participation in tertiary education, compulsory superannuation to help workers fund their retirement years, and a significant decrease in state, local-government  and police corruption due to the establishment of commissions purpose-designed to minimise if not totally stamp such rot out.

But, as my wife always Austrargues, a great deal more progress needs to be made, and some former advances are clearly being Austrareversed by the aforementioned citizen-conning conservative and coal-crazed coalition Austruling Austregime.

So I’m very much afraid that, given that this miracle of misleading government has three more long years in power, far from entertaining any hopes of a cure for my current case of Australienation, I might as well try and resign myself to the fact that it’s going to regress from acute to chronic. If not, as is all-too-likely at my Austradvanced age, Austerminal.