One remarkable feature of this week’s eulogies for “crazy� John Mustafa Ilhan is that two columnists at opposite ideological poles have both loaded his body into their respective barrows and taken it for a victory lap around the graveyard.
Irfan Yusuf celebrates the life of Mustafa Ilhan as a ‘mozzie’ who represents the true, harmonious, forward-looking face of Islam.
Meanwhile, Janet Albrechtsen celebrates the life of Crazy John as the hero-capitalist who epitomised the best of entrepreneurial spirit and derring-do, and lest we forget, to whom we owe our society’s prosperity, which falls upon us like spring rain from the lofty twin peaks of self-interest and the pursuit of profit.
One death, two very different lives, apparently.
And while Albrechtsen did not see fit to mention the putative role of Allah in John’s success (and untimely death), she did at least manage to take a swipe at lefties. Thus her missive reads less like obituary and more like obitchuary.
If we can put aside for one moment the general distaste for such hearse-chasing, we can wincingly admire the chutzpah of those who would stand upon the newly deceased as a rhetorical soap-box. But when they’ve finished worrying the body, I hope they give him a peaceful send-off.
Meanwhile, let us also moralise over the lives of these remarkable ex-people, and the important lessons they bequeathed to us:
Isaac Newton - What grows up must slow down.
Michel de Nostradamus – He knew this would happen one day.
Thomas Malthus - He warned us there are limits to growth.
Erwin Schroedinger – Curiousity killed the cat.
Albert Einstein – God doesn’t play dice with the universe. He plays chicken.
Rachel Carson -
The jury is still slightly out on how It is amusing to read the capitalist-tragic Albrechtson lecturing capitalists on how they are insufficiently capitalist. This is quite common on the Right. The loudest cheer leaders for business are those who have never run a business and never could, but hold a cartoonish view of what business is actually about.
Of course Albrechtson would never mention Ilhan’s faith even though he it was important to him and the way he lived. Here was a devout Muslim who loved Australia, was a devoted famiiy man and gave generously to medical research. He didn’t fit the stereotype, so Albrechtson air brushed his faith from his life.
How typically shallow of her.
Oops. Cut and paste error.
One death, hundreds of viewpoints. Each of us has so many facets, do we not?
So why shouldn’t commentators latch onto an aspect that tickles their fancy, and ignore all the other characteristics of the deceased? Perhaps it’s only those of limited imagination who believe a life can be shoe-horned into one category only? Such habits of thought might be called “The Sociological Fallacy”.
Bertrand Russell [?]: “people can be divided into two groups, those who feel more at ease when they see a policeman, and those who do not.”
Garrie Hutchinson: “People can be divided into two groups, those who think that people can be divided into two groups, and those who do not.”
Let a hundred flowers bloom, let nineteen schools of thought contend.
That’s right, because once you’ve writen 300 words on anyone then that’s it, you can’t write about that person any more and everything that could possibly be said about that person has already been written.
Albrechtsen has to spend the rest of her life digging herself out of the hole she fell into over Howard: Howard did everything I could have hoped for, but I’m still going to dump on him. She’s looking for Australia’s Howard Roark and she found him in a guy who retailed mobile phones.
I didnt know the man, the enterprise, the retailed commodity there.Are my comments less value than The Rupe Empire of Uncles about good business sense,with token female uncle,or Ambi-whats it! Hope not!?And let his family get on with it!?
Loved the writing in this post, Mercurius, thanks.
I wish that John never donated for any medical reaserch and never had cosmetic dentistry.He would still be alive.
Did anybody ever reflected why in last 10 years we have so many young people droping dead or commiting suicides?