Gather ’round, ye lovers of the ludicrous, ye delectators of demonologie! I have for you a tale as twisted as a fakir’s rope, as misconceived as Leda’s progeny, as labyrinthine as the guts of a gorgon!
Do not lightly look upon this miasma of misappropriation! It hath rendered dark the brightest of minds, and driven the most sanguine logicians to babbling madness!
Behold! The third nomination for the famed Award d’Agincourt, for the longest bow in journalism:
The fair lady Elizabeth de Farrelly hath, from the insubstantial air, summoned a swarming hornets’ cloud of distract’d notions to sting and prick away all the noble faculties that give sense to reason.
The lady doth detest too much. From Peter Garrett to Wollongong council. From primary school citizenship to fuel prices. From eating too much fat to Aristotle. No segue is too tangential. No bird in the hand goes unturned. No picnic proceeds – thus! – with all its constituent sandwiches.
I know not where her arrow fell to earth. Look fast, but don’t look long, lest it pierce thy pate and dash out thy brains!
I would love to think some party head-hunter is stalking EF this moment for a career move using the Maxine massager to show where she might headstart wih a junior ministry. For all I know it could be one of those ‘calls and emails’ she says she often receives from those frustrated with Canberra’s failures…fuel watch in the face of peak oil…grocery prices and global warming. Take the plunge Liz, you know you could do better.
Elizabeth Farrelly says:
I thought that citizenship was about the right to vote for your elected representatives, and to have a say about how taxes are collected and used by public officials. No taxation without representation and all that …
… or have I missed something?
[I certainly couldn't see the connection between fuel taxes and Bill Henson's photographs].
Good point, above by Ms Farrelly I would have thought, although I haven’t read the entire article.
“…unless you’re snowed in with them for the weekend”??
“…phooey. Enough with the handkerchiefs already”??
I condemn these Americanisms.
Mercurius, I’m a bit bemused that you link to one of her articles on consumption and environmental strategy, which are quite sensible, instead of one of hers on gender, which are completely daft. If it’s the long bow you’re wanting, try this for size!
Sample size: 1. and he’s fictitious!
Green consciousness, meanwhile, has sucked the heroism from the cowboy ethos, which depends on an oppositional, rather than nurturing, view of nature. Pluralism and multiculturalism have legitimised weakness and difference, undermining the old brawn-based hierarchy.
So, Farrelly wants us to change our lifestyles and our relationship to the environment radically… but not by pussyfooting around with all these limp-wristed greenies, apparently. As long as it’s done in a stern, parental, preferably fatherly style (cf the article you quoted, Mercurius!)
etc. I think I have a winner.
Thanks Helen. Everybody is welcome to enter their nominations for the longest bow!
The Agincourt winner will be announced October 25th – upon St Crispin’s day, of course.
Societies are changed by tax? Yeah, think the American Revolution.
Well, I’d reckon she’s light-years in front of the alternative tendency (Dahvine, Albrechtsen, Pryor, the late Bone etc. etc). Her line seems not dissimilar to Ackland, Adele Horin, or a few the other survivors from the Age of Broadsheet still at SMH, eg she derives from a better than tabloid culture. Her articles seem well constructed and there are comparatively original thought lines involved. Nah, she mightn’t be Christ on the Mount, but compared to some of the others she stands out like a diamond in a cowpat. Especially after some of the real dross written earlier during the Henson purges which she later commented on a couple of times on, for example,
I’d follow Helen’s explanation almost word for word and her stuff fits way too well to be all phony.
But I take on board the warning about why she’ d be employed at Fairfax, her place in the commentariat cosmogony and the futility of ever expecting too much from mass media or press culture.