When I was in the fifth grade, my teacher was a fretful hippie. To be specific he was a Canadian fretful hippie and he was un homme sympa. But despite his gentle disposition, Mr L told our class the ocean was running out of fish and that we were also running out of clean drinking water. He said we were going to run out of energy and consequently we wouldn't be able to travel anywhere, to cook food or heat our homes. We were in Sydney, so the prospect of not being able to heat our homes was rather comforting. Heating a home in a sub-tropical city that manages to get down to a chilly 15°c a few weeks every year is silly. He used the words greed and profit as synonyms because he hated corporations; it didn't seem to matter which corporation - he hated them all. He would insist the world was overpopulated and then in the next breath he'd tell us how sad it was so many people in poor countries were dying from starvation and preventable diseases. He drove a Mini Moke with a 998cc engine, it didn't have a roof and I think it produced power to the equivalent of the front end of a knackered horse. He didn't eat meat and seemed to deny himself most things the rest of us enjoy - like nutrient rich foods. He was unmarried and he lived alone with his dog. I used to worry that he didn't enjoy anything besides the joy he got from telling us how self-denying he was. He got upset with one class member because he brought in pictures of a hunting trip where he shot rabbits with his dad and brother. Mr L was horrified and called it 'animal cruelty'. Rabbits are an introduced and destructive pest in Australia. They're extremely bad for the environment. It was the first time I remember thinking there was some inconsitency with Mr L. If rabbits were introduced and so destructive, why was he against hunting them? He liked to tell us how we had 'invaded' Australia, but apparently rabbits got a pass. He was also the first person to ever tell me about AIDS - he showed us a video documentary on the AIDS crisis from the American show Frontline. Afterwards he opened up a class discussion and showed us some charts we didn't understand on a noisy overhead projector. I also learned how an area the size of ten football fields was being felled in the Amazon every day and how the ozone layer would be gone by the year 1990. "Guys", he would say, "the ozone layer is like Mother Earth's sunscreen and we're destroying it." He said that eventually it would cook us all to death. But that was okay, because he said we'd all die of thirst and starve before we got a roastin' and besides, nuclear war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact would finish us off. In his role as a high priest in the Church of the Perpetual Strife he'd occasionally express pastoral concern that we all seemed anxious for reasons unknown.

I just remember thinking that cooking should always precede eating and especially the eating of fish, which needs to be cooked, but we were running out of fish and if you preferred boiling, there wasn't going to be enough water to cook them anyway. But then I remembered being reassured that despite running out of energy, humans would pretty much self-cook and so all I'd need to do was get over that ol' cannibalism hurdle and I'd be alive long enough to get fried by a nuke. I also remember my older brother telling my mum that AIDS can spread because the 'anus bleeds' and that's how it's passed on in the gay community. We were in the car and on our way to school and my mother, alarmed at the unexpected details, told my brother to 'hush' and gestured towards the back seat. "He's the one who told me!" he protested. That's right, Mr L told us about anal fissures as a risk factor for HIV and AIDS. In Australia, if I haven't already mentioned it, you're between the ages of ten to eleven years old when you're in the fifth grade. As far as I know, Mr L was never challenged for his pedagogical methods or his lesson content. That's probably because he'd been handed the poisoned chalice of the remedial class. He would come in every day and sit on his desk, not at his desk but on it and he'd cross his legs, take a deep sigh and say: "Guys, I've been thinking..." and then we were away. But one day he came in and just stood in front of us, he still sighed, but then he got teary and tilted his weary head. "Guys, I've been wrestling with something big, I feel we can share each other's burdens, you all know how I feel about drugs - any kind of drugs - I won't even take aspirin for a headache, but since I've had this class..." Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a white pill and told us that he was now taking 'this little pill three times a day' to cope with teaching our class. My first thought was to ask him if it was a legal or an illegal drug, but then I saw he was crying, so I reconsidered and slowly lowered my hand. My second thought was that perhaps we all needed to take the same pill to cope with the fact that he gladly told us about HIV infected seminal fluid, but wouldn't answer the more important question of who would win in a fight between Han Solo and Luke Skywalker.



So I was in what was informally called the 'spastic' class, populated by the kids who were future 'garbage collectors' or 'ditch diggers'. My mother liked to remind me that I was going to be a ditch digger and my father was indifferent about it, just as long as I remembered to mow the lawn. I had my friends in my class to keep me from getting ahead of myself. Life just isn't fair and I accepted the forlorn reality that I would probably never become a ditch digger. We were tucked away in the darkest and dampest part of the school, as far from the administration block and the library as you could get. Mr L would only allow himself to use forty watt light globes at home; in our room, where things were already pretty dim, he generously allowed sixty watts. Being the designated rejects meant the other kids didn't play with us, but they'd acknowledge us by calling us 'rejects' instead of spastics on a regular rotation with 'deadbeats', 'freaks' and 'losers.' So we'd often choose to stay in our musty little classroom, or play in the small, sunless strip of land just behind it. One member of my fifth grade class went on to become a surgeon, another became one of Australia's most respected artists. And another one burned down the library, the administration building and most of the school hall. Our little room was unaffected by the fire, presumably because of the isolation and moistness. Incidentally, I went on to become nothing, I'm not a surgeon and I'm not an artist, I'm a bit of a firebug, but ditch digging will always be the dream. In case you're wondering or anything, you're not allowed to use the word spastic anymore. Long ago it became a childish insult, but the jokes on them, because spasticity has never been about intelligence. I had a deaf friend who was in the 'deaf and dumb' school over the road and another friend with cerebral palsy who was called a spastic. Both were very capable. My closest friend for a while was a blind guy called Cristo, he used to get called 'Ray Charles' all the time. Our school principal chose Cristo as the official tour guide for new students. While being called Ray Charles was undoubtedly a highly original insult, Cristo wasn't too upset about it because he loved music and became a radio DJ and then a producer. The Spastic Centre of New South Wales rightly changed its name to something else. It took a while, they changed it in 2011, which is about thirty years post-pejorative. I don't know, maybe it took three decades to choose a new logo or something, these decisions are important.

Regardless, I'm genuinely stupid and if you think I'm just saying that, then you should know that I flunked out of a Bible college during a twenty year phase of religious mania. That's right, I flunked in a place that teaches old superstitions and believes in angels and demons, heaven and hell and loquacious self-immolating shrubs. But failing to get a grip on the intellectual bar room brawl that is medieval unreason is just one of my achievements. For instance, I also refused to eat mince pies every Christmas for over thirty years because I thought they were miniature cold meat pies. I was worried I'd get food poisoning. I had my first mince pie when I was about forty six and only after my wife promised me it was minced fruit and not meat. I warily ate one while she watched and marked the milestone. Another arrow in my stupid quiver was how I didn't understand the concept of three quarters. I thought three quarters was three sets of four, this was before I found out what it really meant at the age of twenty one. I remember the day, because it was just after my birthday and my father asked me to fill up a bucket with three quarters of water, but then I stopped and asked where the other buckets were. "What other buckets?" he asked. "The other buckets for the quarters." I replied. I also don't understand any game show except Sale of the Century which just asks questions and people answer them and win five bucks to go towards buying expensive items for hardly anything. As a child I understood that the economy of Sale of the Century was scaled down and that's why it was a big win to answer correctly. But Deal or No Deal confuses the hell out of me even now. Why do they get so excited about fifty cents but express disappointment when the model opens one of those sparkling cases and it says fifty dollars? Fifty dollars is much better than fifty cents, it's at least twice as much money for a start.

I get annoyed sometimes because I've worked hard on my stupid for my entire life. I'm a walking work of art, an installation, a grand masterpiece of cretinous existence and moronic subsistence. It's my life's work and yet I can't reach the level of stupid needed to believe that the world is going to end because we haven't taxed molecules that have one carbon atom covalently double bonded with two oxygen atoms. Nor can I embrace the conviction that publicly-funded media is entirely independent simply because it's funded by tax revenue. I can't get my head around tax at all if I'm being honest. Apparently it can make people thinner and lower the temperature of planets as well. I just thought it was money collected by the government to build roads, maintain a military and pay the salaries of people in the tax department who chase down the people who don't contribute to the building of roads, the maintaining of the military and pay the salaries of people who chase down the people who don't contribute to the building of roads, maintaining the military and pay the salaries of people who chase down the people who don't contribute to the building of roads, the maintaining of the military and pay the salaries of people who chase down the people who don't contribute to the building of roads, maintaining the military and pay the salaries of people who chase down the people...

If I could just get to a level of stupid where these things made sense, I sincerely believe I would be stuffed and mounted at The Louvre next to The Wedding Feast at Cana.

Human progress attracts ideologues and they should likewise attract attention from what police agencies call a Fixated Persons Unit. Left wing ideologues are fixated to the point where even the most reasonable propositions are hateful to them in the same way stalkers respond to 'no, I don't want to marry you, I really don't and could you please stop shitting on my front lawn?' But they're leftists and they'd follow Socialism and its older and more delusional brother Communism into the abyss repeatedly if it meant more time to whine about human beings and their pesky civilisations that destroy everything.

Socialism is relentless, maddening absurdity that won't give up. It's like the guy my housemate at university told me about at Kmart Bondi Junction, where he worked part time while he studied Engineering. This dude had been banned from the store for shoplifting but he'd show up every week in a farcical disguise to try again. They'd catch him and he'd show up a week or so later with dyed blonde hair and big black rimmed glasses. Sometimes he'd try a fake mustache, another time he shuffled in with a trenchcoat on, doubled over with a walking stick pretending to be an old man. Every time they thought they'd stopped the comedy, he'd show up again. At the start of one shift, my housemate's boss assured him the guy would not be there on that day because he had a court hearing. The boss knew because she had to go to the hearing as a witness at 10 am. My housemate found the master of disguise in the shoe section stealing flip flops at around 10:30 am. "Shouldn't you be in court?" My housemate asked. When he came home with the story, he was laughing, but in an admiring way. "He just won't quit," he said. "This guy is so determined, I almost think it's cool." I admit that I almost admire Socialism, but I've never thought it was cool. It's a determined little stupid ideology, it gets defeated by reality and then comes back in another lame disguise to try to steal our progress. It's amazing. Some of these disguises are suspiciously similar to the ones proposed by a manic Canadian hippie teaching a class full of deadbeats in a dark corner of a Sydney primary school forty years ago. A disguise that says everything is going to be a total disaster if we don't stop doing nearly everything that makes life better (it just so happens). The World Wildlife Fund 2022 report on their participation in Earth Hour has the best title for those sensitive to absurd ironies: WWF Earth Hour Highlights 2022. Highlights? That's funny. I thought you weren't supposed to use any lights during Earth Hour - boom tish. In the Executive Summary, the head of the WWF says something about 'climate justice' and 'fairness something, something'. What's fairness and justice got to do with it? Nothing and everything. Nothing if it was a real emergency and everything if it's just Socialism dressed in a trenchcoat doubled over with a walking stick and pretending to be an old man. Even though history has banned it - it's still trying to get back in. Whenever Socialism has a court date to answer for its crimes, you'll find it in our marketplace trying to steal our progress. 

"Socialism is not in the least what it pretends to be. It is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build, it destroys. For destruction is the essence of it. It produces nothing, it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership in the means of production has created."

Ludwig Von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis

Again, I'm stupid, but let's talk about 'global boiling'. Yes, global and boiling - together at last. The existence of global boiling is of course 'evidence based' in that it is evident that these Seriously Highly Indoctrinated Talkative Scientists (SHITS) are so desperate for total control that they lost track of their own credibility. First it was global cooling, then global warming, then climate change and now they're back with global boiling. For a while there, some SHITS even tried to sell us Global Dimming which is when there isn't enough sunlight reaching Earth and this causes the opposite effect of Global Cooling/warming/boiling/pinching/biting/slapping/sexting. If you haven't worked it out by now, Socialism doesn't care what these things are called, hell - it doesn't really care what they are - just as long as it's something that can generate fear and loathing and force us into unnecessary and damaging regulation. The SHITS get lots of money from the government to produce their studies that tell us we're all doomed and unless they get more money to tell us just how all doomed we all are, we're doomed. "Global boiling is real guys..." and it just so happens that Socialism is the answer because it produces nothing and feeds off itself. Eventually it dies, we say 'good riddance' and then, as I've already pointed out, it comes back dressed as something else. I'm an idiot and even I know water boils at one hundred degrees celsius because unlike most people (rolling eyes) I took the time to do some research and looked it up on Ask Jeeves. Goodness me, I just realised something, Mr L would've loved Greta Thunberg! He would have come into our room, sat on his desk crossed his legs and said: "Guys, I've found God, she's an omnipresent and admittedly slightly pushy, if somewhat uppity tween with anger issues from Sweden - but she's probably taking the same medication as me and more to the point she says the world is going to end soon - so we should definitely follow her into hell." I also have no doubt he would have relished showing us An Inconvenient Truth. I can picture him earnestly pacing in front of the blackboard, stroking his beard and saying 'Guys, this is real..."

Is it? And is it wrong for me to want just one of these 'inevitable' disasters that never happens but forces so much expensive, collectivist nonsense on us to bravely step off the infinite loop of prediction-definitely-will-happen-doesn't happen-prediction - and actually happen? It would be somehow reassuring. I admit I was pretty discouraged when I realised some thirty years after being told the Amazon was losing ten football fields of land every day that it was still pretty huge. Maybe football fields in the 1980s were really small, or maybe Mr L was talking about Barbie football fields or something. By my calculations, one billion forty-two million four hundred forty thousand three hundred sixty-five square metres of Amazon jungle has vanished since the day Mr L told us the terrible news. But wanting the Amazon to vanish is too dark, maybe something more manageable, like a sinkhole opening up under Phil Collins when he's singing that Sussudio song (it sounds like a car alarm), or an asteroid sponsored by Pepsi. It would make me think that perhaps, just maybe, these 'environmentally concerned' people weren't hiding something behind all that rhetoric. 

I liked Mr L. He was a terribly earnest man who sincerely thought he had the answers. Turns out the only answer he ever had was Socialism. And as we now know, if Socialism is not dressed in an absurd disguise, it will always, for some reason, be dressed badly and have a long beard.