BY: Andrew Bolt.
THE bullying of Casey Heynes, a student at Sydney’s Chifley College, is a story meant to end with a happy-ever-after. You’ve already seen it sketched out on television, in the papers, on talkback and online.
The theme is as old as human cruelty, and almost as popular. A friendless fat boy who has been picked on since primary school finally turns on his latest tormentor—some punk who punched him in the head, and shaped for more—and body-slams him into the concrete.
One of the bully’s mates films the lot, as is now customary when someone is assaulted right in front of your snotty nose, and puts it up on YouTube, demonstrating that today’s children can be both morally retarded and technologically advanced. Bingo! Casey, who turns out to be emotionally wise at just 15, becomes a worldwide hero, and the bully an international villain…
And straight away this nice morality tale—the revenge fantasy made flesh—starts to fall to pieces, and a long-neglected pit of misery lies exposed, right under our feet. You see, the bully, Ritchard Gale, is just 12 years old.
How many people—let alone year 7 boys—have had so much hatred heaped on them this week, whether it’s through vilification on national television here and in the United States, or the most vicious emails and postings to internet sites?
Here are some very typical examples among thousands, taken from postings to YouTube: “7 people thought Casey should have curb-stomped the f...er after he slammed him...if every bully like him died the world would be a better place”. No wonder that when Channel 7 decided for some cruelly selfish reason to interview Ritchard on Today Tonight—and I repeat, he’s just 12—he finally started to cry.
His father Peter also cried, from fear and the pain of humiliation more public and more personal than he could ever have believed possible.
“All I’m going to say is ‘Stop’,” he wept. “We’ve had enough.”
But nothing is so merciless as righteous indignation, and the bullying of Casey Heynes has in turn licensed the inner bully in so many adults, who now do to a 12-year-old what they claim to deplore when he did it to Casey. Have you ever before seen a mere boy stuck on a chair on national television to be told he’s a bully with an “anger problem” who should say sorry?
It’s scandalous. Who is looking after his interests? What money changed hands to buy his public scolding?
And what possible good do all these finger-waggers imagine they are doing, throwing this boy into the maw of their great ratings monster? It is perfectly true Ritchard acted like a thug, even if we were to accept as true his claim that Casey had been “calling me an idiot and stuff”.
But that ‘t’ in his name—a semi-literate protest against the sheer ordinariness of the underclass—already hinted at what seeing him and his father confirmed. Ritchard has a rat’s-tail haircut and a stud in his eyebrow—more cries of assertion through store-bought rebellion.
He was caught between defiance and pride at this attention, at last, and the sorry that his father had to signal him into making. He claimed to have been bullied himself at school until he’d resolved to hit those who’d hurt him, much as we now cheer Casey for having done: “If people say stuff I just chase ‘em. Hit ‘em.”
Indeed, that YouTube video starts with Ritchard confronting Casey with: “Have you been talking s...?” And then we see Ritchard’s father, with missing teeth, exhausted eyes and wild hair, as if dragged through life backwards by his ankles.
As we may have guessed, he’s separated from Ritchard’s mother, also missing teeth and defiant. “Not making excuses, but it’s been hard for me,” he pleads. “I’ve been trying to do the right thing by him and teaching him the right ways.” Uh huh. And what are the right ways to get on in North St Mary’s, a suburb that the local council’s social plan valiantly describes as “a typical post-war working-class Australian community”, to which has been added large Pacific Islander and Arabic-speaking communities, plus the leavings of the welfare state—part of that exciting diversity we’re told in Government ads is our “strength”.
There the Chifley College’s Dunheved Campus, which Casey and Ritchard both attend, battles the uneasy consequences, noting on its website that “our families come from 15 diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds”.
Absenteeism is high, academic results are low and the school warns (or merely concedes) that it imposes “reasonable and fair discipline that fosters resilience in our students”. So how did such fostering of “resilience” work for Casey?
Now in year 10, he says he has been bullied for eight years. One punch broke something in his nose. He was duct-taped to a pole. The fear and loneliness, he says, made him contemplate suicide.
He claims he wrote more than 60 incident reports to the school about the bullying, yet never got a break from the harassment. Any suspended student soon came back. Oh, yes, blame the school, if you wish. Many have, hacking into its website and sending foul abuse to the principal.
But have any of you worked in such a school, with such parents and such children? Have you any idea what some of our grimmer suburbs are really like, where a boy like Ritchard can even now consider a lecture from Today Tonight as a seeming sign of success, and smile? Blame the school, but note that Casey’s father, also missing teeth, says he had no idea his son had been quite so bullied these past eight years. None.
“How many years have you put up with this sort of treatment?’ he asked rhetorically. (Of Casey’s mother we hear nothing.) Oh, pray for these kids. If you’ve seen Casey, you’d agree there is something there to save. He has a level-headedness. An insight. A modesty. A clarity of expression and phlegmatic disposition: “School isn’t going to last forever.”
In another environment I wonder what might be made of him. But now he and his father have decided he won’t be going back to school, or at least not to this one. Maybe, he says, he’ll one day go to a TAFE college. For now, at least, Casey has the world’s attention and an affirmation any such boy, so lonely for so long, would crave. Would need. “I’ve never had so much support,” he grins shyly.
And as he checks all his messages of support, the television shows again and again what won him this fame and approval: again and again, we see him picking up a 12-year-old and hurling him onto the concrete, head first, back first, neck first, leg first, whatever…
And today, in hard-scrabble towns and suburbs around this divided land, the mutinously anonymous sons of defeated anonymous parents slope from their torn and impassive homes to brave the asphalt battlegrounds of their torn and impassive schools.
What have we just taught them? Have we any idea what we’re doing?
20.3.11
Would you brake for a cane toad? A kangaroo? A cat?
Drivers should slow down, be aware, and avoid killing native animals without putting their own lives in danger. Other animals, though, may not deserve so much care. You shouldn’t run down kangaroos, for example - but cats could be another matter. Wicked Campers - providers of psychedelic patchouli and body odour-scented vans to cash-strapped backpackers dependent on two-minute noodles and goonbags - are in strife.
They had stickers on 1000 of their hire vans that read: "Kangaroo’s: run the f(*&kers down’’ (in some instances it was `run the buggers down’). Once you quell the red-raw rage that comes from the inappropriate use of apostrophes, you’ll realise it’s also a fairly abhorrent idea. Boss John Webb defended the stickers.
He said his kangaroo-loving clients risked rolling the campers when they swerved to save the life of our emblematic animal. So he advised them to mow them down instead. That excuse was never going to stop the righteous animal activists of the world from having a crack. OK, they’re right that it was stupid, inappropriate and probably encouraged our backpacking brethren to target poor roos. Not to mention a roo is likely to leave you in a bad, bad way if you hit it. So, overall, stupid. But they don’t have to be so earnest about it. I digress.
There may be a place for a `run the f***ers down’ campaign, perhaps with a little less outright aggression. But it’d have to be far more strategic. Certainly any pegless clothesline, Leatherman and Teva-toting visitor to our shores - or any grey nomad or Britz van driver for that matter - should learn it is acceptable - nay, desirable - to mow down cane toads. Make that one a national sport.
Cats? Ah, cats. Ferals are not worth slowing down for - but the problem is the difficulty telling whether the slinking creature in front of you is a wild beast that will single handedly eat every last surviving purple-crested bandiroo, or if it’s Auntie May’s sole, toothless companion. But hypothetically speaking, if you can see that it’s the former rather than the latter, the world is a better place without it.
Hares aren’t killers, but they are pests, so don’t feel too guilty if one of them goes under the wheels. Foxes you should never feel too bad about - although baby foxes are bloody cute, the sight of a chicken that’s met one of the deadly ginger bastards is most decidedly not.
The main problem is you just don’t generally have time (especially on country roads) to work out whether the moving thing up ahead is friend or foe. And I’m not sure how many people would, even once they’ve identified that the potential roadkill is something that should be eradicated, have the intestinal fortitude to deliberately run it over.
Roadkill. It’s a fact of life. But all drivers should be trained - maybe using one of those movie-style shooting practice ranges where different silhouettes pop up - what is worth even attempting to avoid.
And judging by the amount of decomposing roos I’ve seen on the side of the road lately, plenty of drivers could use a refresh. But no one should feel they need to jam on the brakes, putting their own life at risk, to avoid hitting one of our many deadly and destructive pests.
17.3.11
Going nuts!
We bought some safari chairs to sit on for a bit of comfort around the plastic patio table. A safari chair is a lot like a director’s chair – in fact, it would be the chair a director takes on safari. But the point is, we arrived home with the two chairs nicely packaged in a couple of flat(ish) packs. I opened them to find instructions, a few wingnuts and the fabric for the seats loose in the ever-present clear plastic bag. I felt cheated. The words weren’t there on the box. You know those words, the catchphrase words that symbolised the get-the-furniture-home-quickly-in-as-many-pieces-as-it-takes 21st century: ‘Some assembly required’.
You probably think this should be no problem. Well, yes. But you only do it yourself in materials that you can work with. The thing about the chipboard-based modern furniture is that if you do try and work with it using ordinary tools, you tend to be left with a pile of wood chips and bent laminate.
They pre-drill their furniture in the factory because they know how to do it, and they aint telling us. So it’s not do-it-yourself. Somebody else has already done it. It’s doing what somebody else has already done. Self re-assembly. There’s no challenge, unless you strike it lucky and get something from one of the new Asian boom economies, where everything is lost in the translation. When you don’t have ABC in your alphabet and the person translating is a backpacker trying to earn enough for his plane fare home, step-by-step instructions become one step forward, three steps back and two to the side. That’s when self-assembly furniture is fun!
I blame the Europeans. They made self-assembly compulsory for their furniture. They couldn’t have done it without that bloke Allen. You know, then inventor of the Allen key. And just to turn the last chipboard screw with the plastic dome insert in the coffin of ready-made furniture, they came up with cute names for cupboards, wardrobes and even bookcases. ‘Have you met Bjorn? That’s him with the books. Next to Vince, the magazine rack!’
Now don’t get me wrong. They make good products, and at affordable prices. I’ll rephrase that, you make their good products. Any book looks good in a Bjorn. It’s just that it seems wherever you shop now, instead of the old six-to-eight-week wait, you buy the furniture, put it in the car and, provided all the parts are there, assemble it by dinner-time. Fair enough in the case of something bulky. But safari chairs? Surely something which folds up to stack away can be put in a box in on piece?
Machines can do everything except actually put the stuff together. So the furniture manufacturers include us in their workforce. You, brothers and sisters, are unpaid labour for giant multinational sofa-bed and side-table conglomerates. People on the other side of the world are growing rich on the fruits of your labour. As I look around my bedroom, I realise that I assembled the small desk this computer sits on, the television cabinet on wheels, and even had to put the back on the chair I’m sitting in. How does anybody ever get any work done when we’re spending all our time doing it for furniture companies?
Won’t be long before computer companies cotton and we’re putting in motherboards and hard disks ourselves. With Allen keys. It’s the thin edge of the wedge. We’ve got to put a stop to it now or nothing will come to you as a finished item.
This blog comes to you via Ralph, an IBM 386SX clone. Some assembly required. Here’s the last sentence. Nreightdfjspo ioinre??/ !! ---,... 4. Please follow the instructions on page 865 carefully.
6.3.11
Beauty bandits.
I note that outside every beauty salon and health spa I pass this summer there's an ad for a "detox" treatment. Yep, the beauty bandits are out in full force, along with the sand flies.
It's a compelling notion that you can clean out your body in the same way you might pour Drano down the sink, especially if it feels as if your system is clogged after too much festive season indulgence.
According to the quacks, you can clean your body of toxins - your liver, bowel, intestines, skin and even your hair - with everything from lemon, cayenne pepper and vinegar to exotic "botanicals" gathered from the Amazon jungle, the plains of Africa and the mountains of Tibet. You'll flush "poisons" from your body, lose weight and boost your immune system.
I don't suppose it's worth pointing out that detox products have been proved to be absolutely useless by a large body of scientific research. Fact is, your body is superbly designed to naturally rid itself of toxic substances. If your body did retain nasty wastes and toxins you'd be dead by now. You'll note that no one ever specifies what these "toxins" are, or indeed any medical information on how to assess or gauge if they've actually been banished.
The whole concept of detox is dodgy and in some cases dangerous, the experts warn. In these restrictive and nutty eating plans you run the risk of depriving yourself of nutrients and actually weaken your body's ability to fight infection. Side effects can include fatigue, headaches, irritability, aches and pains.
Still, everyone's intrigued by celebrities who advocate these regimens - like Beyonce, who attributed her 10kg weight loss for the movie Dreamgirls to the "Master Cleanse", in which she swallowed nothing but lemon juice mixed with maple syrup, water and cayenne pepper, salt water and a laxative tea for 10 days. Eyew! Beyonce must have spent a good deal of time in the loo, I'm guessing. Sexy!
And likewise, you'll be flushing money down the toilet when you buy these expensive detox treatments. The solution to those extra kilos? Eat less and have a nice lie down, say the scientists. Excellent advice.
And when you're kicking back in the hammock, don't forget to spray yourself with repellent - not for the sand flies, but as protection from those pesky beauty bandits who are trying to put the bite on you this summer.
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