Tag: Australia

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Acting

A Monologue You Will Never Hear

Happy New Year!

Among the many monologues you will never hear, we include this from the (Australian/American/British) – fill in the gap – (Prime Minister/President/Almost all senior officials) in public address.

“My fellow (Australians/Americans/Britons ) the time has come to admit that we have completely fucked it up. Our politics are uselessly toxic, and we are destroying the Earth.

Devastating and deadly floods and fires are on the increase the world over. We are now forced to confront what environmentalists have been attempting to bring to notice for more than fifty years. We of the ruling classes have hitherto chosen to distort, deny, delay, obfuscate, ridicule and in every way ignore the responsible warnings of scientists, conservationists and concerned citizens.

Beyond this, we have filled the airwaves with unending speeches of self-congratulatory lies and international xenophobic aggression while we knowingly continued to allow massive pollution and environmental degradation on all fronts, to the extent that the seas are dying and our food is toxic. We did this even when, especially when, feasible solutions were offered to us.

We in government have all had a complete change of heart. This is due to an outbreak of Common Sense, and we are now taking immediate action. Our measures will include:

Creation and distribution of 100% clean energy from wind, wave, solar, geo-thermal.

We realize this initiative will be met with resistance, in the aforementioned form of; distortion, denial, delay, obfuscation, and ignorance.

And lots of anger.

Why?

Because:

“Hell hath no fury like a vested interest masquerading as a moral principle.”

Middle-aged white men in positions of power who find themselves so enraged are referred to:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl99R6FM5s8&w=640&h=497]

It merely remains for me to thank you for listening, I acknowledge that we never did that, and my resignation takes place with immediate effect.

Happy New Year.”

Categories
Acting

Australia is on Fire

Australia is on fire.

It probably is a good idea to know about it. Why so? Because if nothing is done, the equivalent will happen here, wherever that happens to be…

In the absence of any detailed reporting apart from the usual sound bite/video clip sensational pictures of walls of flame, social media is the best source of information.

#AustraliaFires

This astonishing kid is motivating millions of people.

@GretaThunberg

Which is a good thing because there’s plenty of this…

#climatechangedenial

There was a time when doctors would advise people to smoke cigarettes. They don’t do that any more do they?

The world needs to give up smoking.

 

 

Categories
Acting Writing

This isn’t (likely to be) happening

The late great Douglas Adams in his fabulously inventive ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” gave us “The Improbability Drive” as the motive power for nipping from interstellar points A or B to C, D, and beyond.

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Now we have improbability politics. If you haven’t seen it already, I recommend Gail Collins’s op-ed today (August 23rd 2018) in The New York Times in which she responds to a prospective film treatment which clearly comes from an alternative universe.

When Bill Bryson first published his Yank’s-eye-view-of-Australia in 2000 titled “Down Under” – in subsequent editions changed to “In a Sunburnt Country” – he pointed out that during the late 1990s the mighty New York Times published numbers of articles on Australia commensurate with those on Peru and Albania and far fewer than that in its reporting of Cambodia and Korea.

Much has changed since then, although I can personally attest to this turn-of-the-millenium ranking of general US interest in matters Australian. When I arrived in New York in 1999 you’d have been hard pressed to find a bottle of Jacob’s Creek Shiraz. Today of course, Aussie plonk can be had in any supermarket in any state in the Union. It is still somewhat rare though, to find even a theatrical professional whose ear can reliably discern the difference between an Australian and a British accent. New York is different, the place has, since the turn of the millennium been flooded with Aussie professionals, and Aussie meat pies and flat white (coffee) can be found in parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan.

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But today the New York Times has devoted part of its editorial page to current Australian political moves. Moves that leave improbability somewhere beyond the calculation of Pi (π). In brief, the current Aussie administration has abandoned previous modest efforts to take action on climate change. Notwithstanding that there is a State-wide drought in New South Wales, nor that the Great Barrier Reef is dying, nor that more sunshine falls on Australia than almost anywhere in the world…

By the way, I recommend Bryson’s book on Oz, in either title, not least because it contains about the funniest ever description of the game of cricket by one foreign to the game.