Mood:
accident proneTopic: election Oz 2007
We wrote to Catholic Cardinal Pell recently in an open letter widely circulated accusing the senior cleric of vain posturing, and alot worse, in his climate change denial, and pro nuke reactor, positions in the Sunday Telegraph newspaper in the last month. Like a tonne of bricks 4 Corners on Monday night just past
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2007/s1854517.htm
, and every third news bulletin carries more grave news of the reality of the Warm, that it's big and it's real.
Pell in his next column in the Sunday Telegraph returned to safer ground with a solliliquy on the religous season of Lent. It was all about restraining one's vanity including that author.
And just so, PM Howard attacks rival Rudd for being "full of it" especially after a feature in The Australian colour mag some weeks ago quoting Rudd he would 'have fun playing with Howard's mind' like a condescending intellectual alien visitor to Earth. Rudd quickly retreated from that ugly perception in the Oakes interview on Sunday 9 25th Feb 07 show humbly stating he is a long way behind Howard 'at the base camp of Everest' or such like metaphor. That was necessary but was it sufficient? What he should probably have said is:
Yes it was a smart alec comment and I apologise to the PM for that. It was an insecure thing to say because Howard's record and budget war chest is just so intimidating. So it actually reflected my own nerves. But now I am refocused on the enormity of the challenge for our side and concentrating on winning with integrity to quote Gandhi and not simply to win.
Glenn Milne, a Treasurer Costello booster vying with the ALP leader to be PM, pushed the vanity line against Rudd too in his column in the Sunday Telegraph last week showing it's a real risk for Rudd and his pompous ALP, and indeed all of us in the political community.
The real politik of vanity. It's a dangerous befuddling emotion, and pride before a fall usually.
Now today high profile Catholic and Minister Tony Abbott writes in the conservative friendly Fairfax of guess what: Vanity with this quote:
"Has NSW now come to resemble Italy [SAM's editor is 1/8 Italian too], where an incompetent and venal government is accepted as an unalterable fact of life?"
with the quote extracted on the front page for good measure, full story at: Tony Abbott: A Government so bad should be thrown out
But here is the thing: Tony Abbott's own federal government has a huge dollop of vanity informing it's support for risky long term nuke energy technofixes one day, synonymous with expanded fossil fool economic (read material) growth in the short and medium term against all ecological reality:
Businessmen deny nuclear proposal - Sydney Morning Herald - 21 hours ago
Turnbull says Labor waging nuclear scare campaign - ABC Online - 1 hour ago
Not just the Howard Coalition government, most western governments suffer such vanity that it's market based business as usual with their mates on top in society, unlike say far more ecologically sustainable, far more radical countries like Cuba according to a World Wildlife Fund Report of 2006: WF - Living Planet Report, and much earlier EIJ Winter 94: The Greening of Cuba,
That's human vanity and why in all anthropological history no civilisation has transcended that exhaustion of its ecological bubble to inevitable demise.
Odds are that vanity will bring on dangerous climate change, with or without nuke energy, for failure to really know our place in the scheme of the universe endlessly pursuing personal affluence. We are fast approaching the pointy end of vanity vis a vis global warming, nuke waste, and technological religous faith, and we all would do well to consider these images of urban inundation via YouTube and Hurricane Katrina there in New Orleans a year ago:
