A tired tirade about George W

I like to torment my children by reading poetry to them. While perusing Hillaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales For Children, (1907) I found the following, which I have brought up to date by adding one letter to the title.

GEORGE W
WHO PLAYED WITH A DANGEROUS TOY, AND SUFFERED A CATASTROPHE OF CONSIDERABLE DIMENSIONS.

(upon the dangerous toy exploding…)

The Lights went out! The windows broke!
The Room was filled with reeking smoke.
And in the darkness shrieks and yells
Were mingled with Electric Bells,
And falling masonry and groans,
And crunching, as of broken bones,
And dreadful shrieks, when, worst of all,
The House itself began to fall!
It tottered, shuddering to and fro,
Then crashed into the street below –

Belloc ends the poem by simply stating “The moral is that little Boys should not be given dangerous toys.”

We are the company we keep. Our PM is fraternising with a man who led his nation, and ours, to war based on five falsehoods. Weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist, links between Saddam Hussein and Al Quaeda when one was secular and the other fundamentalist, Iraq, he said, posed a threat to its neighbours, each of whom had superior military powers, Saddam Hussein, we were told, with his antiquated and exhausted military, posed a real and present danger to the juggernaut United States and finally, altruistically, George W wanted "liberate" the Iraqi people.

But all of that is old news and I am merely joining the long queue of Bush Bashers.

As John Howard and George W approached the media throng last week, their dual images beamed into my lounge room on the six o’clock news, I couldn’t help but notice the matching blazers, the twin pale-blue shirts, their button down collars jauntily askew – the absence of a necktie on both of them seemed to say, “We do more than just business, we’re pals.” And while giving our PM a verbal pat on his bald pate, George W declared their hair to be their only difference.

In the daily deluge of stories from Iraq it’s easy to forget this started (sort of) in 2001, as one plane and then another crashed into the twin towers when with dreadful shrieks and worst of all, the House of George began to fall.

At tables lit by 19th century candelabra and dressed in pistachio-coloured silk cloth, feasting on squash soup and barramundi, our PM toasted the President “a world without a dedicated, involved America will be a lesser world, a less safe world, a more precarious world."

Elsewhere, in our precarious world, in the darkness shrieks and yells were mingled with electric bells, and falling masonry and groans, and crunching, as of broken bones as another 36 liberated Iraqis were added to the daily body count.

For Eileen Dorothy (My Gran)

Recent news that the government provides funding to pregnancy counselling services who advertise their organisations as being non-directive, but refuse to provide abortion referrals, has been a good excuse for folk on both sides of the debate to dust off their polemics and give them a good airing.

The thing I find sinister is that pregnancy counselling has been singled out to receive its own medicare item number, when counselling for no other surgical procedure is deemed worthy of such an honour. In announcing this initiative, the Ministers, Prime and Health, stated, “Australia’s abortion rate is far too high.”

No doubt that Medicare number will allow a compilation of data, which can be polished up and worked into a nice graph, which the current Medicare numbers for the abortion procedure don’t allow, they remain politely unclear.

Based on statistical data compiled from both sides of my extended family it seems that as soon as it was possible to avoid having six children, one tended to avoid it like the plague. Of my ten Aunts and Uncles, five on each side, none of them was keen to repeat the experience. One of them became a Nun.

Catholic and poor, my maternal Grandparents had four daughters and two sons over a period of twenty years. In an attempt to terminate her fifth pregnancy my Grandmother drank gin and took a hot bath, which was rumoured to induce miscarriage. As a young woman, unable to imagine the shame and terror of seeking an illegal abortion during the 1950s, I found the story sort of funny. My austere old Gran knocking back a bottle of gin and soaking in a hot bath while elsewhere in the house her children fought each other over food. Rethinking it, aged forty, as she was, I feel profoundly sad.

Freakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, links the startling decline of crime in America during the nineties to the legalisation of abortion 18 years earlier. It’s not much of a leap to interpret the impressive display of graphs and statistics as saying that the sort of woman who sought an abortion was the sort of woman bound to raise a future criminal.

Malcolm Gladwell, author of Tipping Point, counters the argument. The fertility drop caused by the pill, which was far greater, “… didn’t lead to a decrease in crime eighteen years later. In fact, that generation saw a massive increase in crime.”

Gladwell writes respectfully of Levitt “if we are to have an honest conversation about things like crime and abortion, we are obliged to consider those phenomena in all their dimensions.” And “It takes a certain amount of courage to make an argument like that.”

All the number crunching and theorizing doesn’t change the fact that every abortion is experienced by a woman who is scared, confused and sad and that what she chooses to do is nobody’s business but her own. Whatever her decision, it’s one that will take a certain amount of courage.