My new hero
Then there is the story of Mohammed Hussain. Apparently, Mr Hussain was a self-described poet who was detained on Nauru by Australian authorities under the Howard government’s so called “Pacific solution”. But his claims for asylum were rejected by immigration officials and he was sent back to Afghanistan. You can read about him here in the Sydney Morning Herald. I’d never heard of him. He is dead because after you and I sent him back to Afghanistan, The Taliban threw him in a well, and chucked a hand grenade in after him. Happens all the time apparently.
Mohammed Hussain - Killed by you, me and the Howard Government
What? Am I mad? Surely I’m not suggesting that locking up an octopus is the same as blowing a guys head off with a hand grenade?
No, Andrew Bolt, I am not. (fyi – I don’t think Andrew Bolt actually reads my blog, I’m responding more to a meta-boltian mindset – a sort of everybolt). But anyway….
It is a continuum.
At one end is our capacity to ignore cruelty, to inflict it on beasts. At the other end is our ability to brutalise and butcher each other. And planted somewhere along there are the mob who made the decision to send this bloke back home so he could get tortured and blown up in front of his family and somewhere on the same line there are the folks who sit by and watch it happen.
There is a link between the bureaucracies we create, the politicians we employ to construct them and our capacity for indifference and cruelty.
I have drawn a picture of it.
Oh dear
We can do these things to animals, and we can do them to each other and we can do them to ourselves. And here I am making political capital out of it. La la la. I think I need a lie down.
8 Comments
Oh dear FD.
I’m inspired by Otto’s abilities and sorry for his incarceration.
Distraught at Mohammad’s awful demise and
deeply ashamed at our part in it.
So all I can do, is to offer this to cheer you up.
Isabella Rossellini’s love affair with small creatures.
http://www.sundancechannel.com/greenporno/#/watch-worm
Thanks Paddy,
It’s a bit lonely here with the just the two of us. But I’m not sure if watching Rossellini’s inexplicable muppet insect porn is how we should be spending our time together.
Oh stuff and nonsense FD.
I’d watch paint dry if it looked like Isabella.
But if you insist on practical measures, instead of daydreams….
Email Otto the following instructions.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4007016107763801953
Um..it’s not really something one should make fun of is it?
paddy, you want to be careful watching paint dry – inhaling those fumes can make you do strange things. Like wrapping yourself in old couch cushion foam and excreting from multiple orifices… earnest is not the same as useful, sadly…
Our Hastings Point resident Octopus – just right of the Cudgera Creek bridge on the in-tide and left on the out-tide – is clearly a relative of Otto. Today he asserted his inlet position by taking everyone’s bait including the stuff we offered to the bream on their way upstream. Turn of the tide he moved a couple of rocks east to gobble all our prawns silently and gently as the bream went out to sea. Never under estimate an octopus with a mind of its own. And never under estimate governments with a similar predatory psyche. Today our family said sorry to Mr Hussein. He and his family didnt enjoy the freedom we enjoy with our octopi??
Don’t make me cry :-(
It would be kinda neat to have Otto living in great comfort in the Howard residence. MEMO John, before you leave you must build a swimming pool for Otto, while transferring John and Janette into Otto’s current address. To add to the Howards’ torment Mohammed Hussain’s photo undergoing torture should be plastered on the sides of the tank, alternating with shots of JWH’s failed application to become a Knight of The Garter. This should keep them occupied for the next ten thousand years.