RESISTANCE

The City of Homs, Picture courtesy of Reuters

Cannot you conceive that a man may wish well to the world, and struggle for its good, on some other plan  than precisely that which you have laid down? Mankind ... is but another yoke of oxen, stubborn, stupid and sluggish. But are we his oxen? And what right has he to be the driver?"
Nathaniel Hawthorne quoted in The Engineer of Human Souls by Josef Skvorecky.


Years of harassment, it was taking some time to recover.
Radio National had abandoned gay marriage aka marriage equality as the social justice issue of the moment; and in between swathes of climate change was inserting urgent new stories on the pros of a fortnight of Domestic Violence Leave as part of all employment accords.
Decades of disastrous social policy and the perpetration of the gendered agendas of the 1980s was playing out in the public sphere, circa 2016.
The Apostle birds came each morning now, expecting to be fed.
"Do you know I'm here?" a voice asked.
"Yes," he replied, rolled over, willed himself promptly back to sleep.
"He would like to have said, welcome back old friend, but he had been betrayed too often by too many thugs on too many government payrolls, and would not engage again.
The wall to wall surveillance he had endured for so long built up its own narratives, erupting synapses, distorted visions; some of the images, or narrative threads, as the brain naturally filled in the gaps, made connections, tried to make sense of conflicting data.
Nobody in all that time had the decency spoke to him directly, and Glen, who for a moment Old Alex had thought was actually speaking to him directly, was showing signs of decency, turned out to be more dishonest and more treacherous than the simple minded thugs who had kept up their prolonged bullying, day in day out, month in, month out.
A fortnight's domestic violence leave.
Yet the government, through its surveillance regimes and psychological operations could bully citizens for years, and not feel any obligation to pay compensation. 
Imagine, Old Alex thought, if a man tried to claim domestic violence leave, although a significant number of researchers and a significant body of evidence world wide pointed to domestic violence as an equal opportunity employer; word would spread, the complainant would be back stabbed as an hysteric, and become the subject of office hilarity, just like that.
How often could you claim it? Once a year? 
Would it discourage employers from hiring women?
Was it open to gay couples?
The thuggish group think of political correctness allowed for no debate.
And just like gay marriage, domestic violence leave was now, at least as far as the national taxpayer funded broadcaster was concerned, an unalloyed good; and away, through the long summer months, the discussion would go, hour after hour, expert after expert, mingling with refugee advocates and climate change experts; as the public switched, firmly, off.
It may well be a good, who was Old Alex to judge?
But a simple test of other goods, what was the government doing about the extremely high rates of suicide for separated men, a disastrous social outcome with which it was integrally involved through its public policies, family court and child support agencies? 
Precisely nothing.
What coverage did that get on the taxpayer funded channels?
Precisely nothing.
There was no simple fairness. There was nothing but madness; in those long nights when he surrendered to colourful dreams; and stopped ranting in his head about social injustice and media incompetence, about the brutality of a country which was being driven straight down a garbage strewn hole, into a new and even more barbaric totalitarianism.
Each morning he filled the buckets from the tanks, and trundled them out to water the corn, bean, tomatoes, cucumber, rock melon. 
They made jokes about the Babylonian gardens and the slaves in the fields; as if in that fay grandiosity there was some humour. In reality the nights stretched out across arid fields, and, in some weird way, he was trying to come home to roost, to bring the fractured lineages back into one place.
Enemies approached.
He twisted a hand.
Cutting edge weapons went mashing through their brains.
And at last, at very long last, the the vindictive, excited buzz of hatred, their whirring intensity of dissatisfaction, anger and frustration at not simply being able to bring out a shotgun, their malevolent, putrid, stinking animosity towards a target they neither knew nor understood, all of it ebbed away.
And he turned over and mumbled: welcome back old friend.


THE BIGGER STORY:

INTERNATIONAL:

Islamic State fighters appear to have reconquered the historic city of Palmyra after days of intense fighting on its outskirts prompted a withdrawal by the Syrian military.
“The catastrophe has happened, I am in absolute shock,” said Maamoun Abdulkarim, Syria’s director of antiquities, in a phone interview. “I am losing hope, it looks like we have lost the city.”
An Isis-affiliated news channel claimed victory in the battle on Sunday, saying its soldiers had reclaimed control of the entirety of Palmyra, once a Silk Road oasis that boasted some of the best-preserved ruins of antiquity.


AUSTRALIAN:

CENTRELINK is ignoring Islamic polygamy, paying spousal benefits to Muslim families with multiple wives in an effort to save taxpayers’ money.The welfare agency has revealed it refuses to collect data on polygamous marriages under Islamic law, despite the fact some families are claiming to be living in a domestic relationship with more than one woman when claiming welfare.
Describing the decision as “political correctness” gone mad, MPs last night called for a full investigation and demanded the welfare agency start collecting the data.


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