Of Cloth, and being “’UnAustralian’

The opening verse of Deep Purple’s ‘Burn’ seems appropriate to this post.

The sky is red, I don’t understand,
past midnight I still see the land.
People are sayin’ the woman is damned,
she makes you burn with a wave of her hand.
The city’s a blaze, the town’s on fire.
The woman’s flames are reaching higher.
We were fools, we called her liar.
All I hear is "Burn!"

aaah, yes, British Heavy Rock at it’s very, very best. But to what am I referring? Why, the infamous flag-burning incident which took place yesterday on the front pavilion of Parliament House. Let’s put aside…..nay, let’s entirely dismiss the pretence being mooted by the idiot right in this country over who said what to whom, before/during/after breakfast/lunch/dinner at where-ever in Canberra. Let’s also admit that Canberra is the most sterile of cities. It needs a little sensation from time to time, just so that the rest of us are made to realise it exists. Hype aside, let’s also admit that Tony Abbott, without a script, will always fall over his bottom lip and offend someone every time he opens his flapper. What he said was entirely innocuous…..from my perspective. However, I’m not indigenous. I’m not in the least understanding of what it is the activists at the Tent Embassy were told, thought, felt or wanted. Frankly, I don’t care. Those people who banged on glass & shouted irrelevancies are responsible for their own actions. As disgraceful as the vision appeared to be, the event….wasn’t. Okay, so a few frightened security folk hustled their charges into a car. Big Fricken’ Deal. Yet, that’s all Australia has been presented with by the 24/7 media cycle for the past three fucking days!!! Get over yourselves people. Find some real news.

Of course, the political tacticians – if indeed such a term can be applied to tentatively employed party faithfuls who are only in place until they screw up – are making a motza from Thursday. Gillard has called ‘TIME’ on the gig, an advisor has sacked himself, a union organiser he spoke to has been named and the ever-reliable conservative cabal think they might be able to make some mileage from another Labor Party fuckup which didn’t originate from the politics, but from the ineptitude of one of it’s foot-soldiers. I see whiney-Pyney mouthing all the appropriate words. ‘Inquiry’, ‘dishonest Prime Minister’…yaddayadda. It’s all so monotonously predictable.

So, anyway, the flag. Well, Twitter was going off last night over this fucking flag burning issue. All the jingoists, the pretend aussies, the flag-wrappers & wavers, the juvenile, adolescent and brainlessly bored uni students, and of course, those who deliberately flaunt Twitter rules by running multiple accounts, each one more offensive & hollow than the last. “A flag is sacrosanct”, “ you can’t burn a flag”, and “you’re UnAustralian if you burn a flag”. Yeh, right. So what’s ‘UnAustralian’ about burning a piece of coloured cloth? Might as well claim not liking lamingtons is ‘UnAustralian’. Yeh, I don’t like lammos either. Too fricken’ messy.

So, I thought about how to express myself on this subject, and simple text doesn’t cut it. So here…..just for you, dear reader: