TheBanyanTree: The world ahead

[Peter Macinnis]

My feet are bare, as they have been for months, but now the last flowers 
on the jacarandas have fallen. This is the latest they have ever been -- 
usually they have gone by St Andrew's Day, but the winds have been kind 
this year.

I am sitting here, writing my way into a new project, and the sub-topic 
for today revolves around the interactions of radicals, Chartists and 
democrats of western Britain around 1848.

As I started, Elgar's 'Nimrod' variation was playing, a tune that I 
associate with the funeral of a true Australian working-class hero, 
Bernie Banton, a man who was most foully killed, done to death by 
asbestos-caused mesothelioma, but not before he had pursued those 
responsible and undone them.

He was born in Australia. I don't know his antecedents, but I think the 
honest Cornishmen of 1848 would have admired the way he turned up the 
heat on the evil-doers and claimed him as a brother. As a matter of 
fact, one of the Bad Guys (a woman, as it happens) is toasting in court 
today, charged with lying about the way the company had allocated funds 
for future victims. Bernie had got his money, but he wanted to make sure 
that those who came after would be paid as well.

I care, because I know that in 1972, just four years after Bernie Banton 
started work on asbestos, I banned asbestos mats from my laboratory 
because of the dangers to my students (and myself) of asbestos dust. If 
a science teacher knew the deadly nature of the dust, and was prepared 
to face down a brutal threat of disciplinary action for not replacing 
the mats, how could James Hardie not have known of the danger? Dust 
masks and ventilation would have done a lot in his workplace, bans on 
asbestos would have been better.

(For the record, I warned the administration that I would have no 
hesitation in going to the media, and that, unlike them, I had the facts 
and would bring witnesses.  There is no lovelier sight than watching a 
bully crumble.  So you can see why Bernie, who humiliated the evil-doers 
in public is my hero.)

Ventilation is often an answer. Outside my open window, the temperatures 
are up to what they were in London where I had a few days off after 
chasing data all over Cornwall and Devon in their summer in 2006. There, 
with no provisions to ventilate, it was a heat wave, but here it is just 
pleasantly warm, though right now, there is a small drawback to open 
windows.

At the start of 1848, the slave trade was over, though there were many 
slaves, and the poor were being viciously repressed in the capitals of 
Europe. By the year's end, their rulers were beginning to worry. Still, 
in the absence of labour-saving devices, most tasks were done by hand, 
and most people spent their lives in the service of others.

We don't have servants any more.  We have machines.  Young people no 
longer know a hawk from a handsaw, because the hawks are mostly dead, 
and handsaws are only seen in museums.  There are no typists now, 
because we are all multi-skilled, which is management jargon for "you 
get to do your own typing".

So we don't have servants any more, though I think of Ron Reagan, not 
the president but the son of the president, who showed he was a man of 
the people by claiming "I mow my own lawn".

Mowing your own lawn is the ultimate democratic act. O. Henry, whom we 
recall at this time of year for his 'The Gift of the Magi', told of a 
man called John Little:

"But for his complexion, which is some yellowish, and the black mop of 
his straight hair, you might have thought here was an ordinary man out 
of the city directory that subscribes for magazines and pushes the 
lawn-mower in his shirt-sleeves of evenings."

The story was 'The Atavism of John Tom Little Bear', a name which gives 
away more about John Little's roots. He was a Cherokee, a Native 
American who wore a tie, patent leather shoes, and had previously 
acquired a college education.

In US legal circles, it seems that they have an equivalent to the "man 
on the Clapham omnibus", the standard person of common sense in British 
and Australian law. It is an ordinary man that subscribes for magazines 
and pushes the lawn-mower in his shirt-sleeves of evenings.

Such a man, if he had been on the grand jury that put O. Henry in the 
slammer in 1898, might have had the good sense to find the one-time 
Greensboro NC druggist not guilty of naughtiness as cashier in the First 
National Bank of Austin, but that's water under the bridge.

Christmas is coming, and the grass is getting flat. Over the past three 
days, there has been a plague of lawn mower men, professional grass 
molesters, the last of the servants, all intent on "getting the lawns 
right for Christmas" for their clients.  The lawns MUST be right for 
Christmas, and at the height of summer, they only last two weeks.

Can you see it?  "Joseph, the Three Wise Men are coming!  Quick, get out 
and mow the lawn!"

Nuh.  That doesn't work for me, not a bit. Bah, humbug, at least to the 
mowers.  Let the grass grow, give the animals a feed.

Ho hum, peace on Earth (once the last mower man has been strangled) and 
goodwill to all men, other than the directors of James Hardie.  In 1848 
in Cornwall, women and boys under 10 could not go underground in the 
mines, even if those who organised could still be put in prison, but 
industrial decency is a slow-growing plant.

I think of Malvina Reynolds and a faster-growing plant:

God bless the grass
That grows through the crack.
They roll the concrete over it
To try and keep it back.
The concrete gets tired
Of what it has to do,
It breaks and it buckles,
And the grass grows through.
God bless the grass.

I hope the grass does well in 2009.

yours fraternally,


-- 
   _--|\    Peter Macinnis            petermacinnis at ozemail.com.au
  /     \   Cross-cultural watercraft maker, polymorphic monohulls
  \.--._*   and Delphic coracles a specialty, also Tribo-economics
       v    http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/index.htm