WHAT do James Bond, Mick Jagger and Tim Paine have in common? They have all been run over at the intersection of New Old-Fashioned Values and Old New-Fangled Sensibilities. More on that below. Let’s start with the auto-da-fé in whose flames religious authorities just burned Australia’s cricket captain. While it’s true that aroused males don’t always make prudent decisions – Mother Nature’s way of hampering childless bachelorhood, I guess – nor, let’s be frank, do randy females. How else to explain the forlorn army of single mothers pushing prams in every mall from Bunbury to Bundaberg? God bless the babies but if all were planned I’m a Cubist.
I press that comparison to the point of indelicacy for a reason. You hope the national conversation can’t possibly get any worse and then you see Paul Murray discussing a cricketer’s penis this week with Bronwyn Bishop. What next, John Howard on the Brazilian? In The Australian, Helen Trinca explains why men “feel the need to flaunt” their genitals. Her conclusions are admirable but a more interesting column would be on why women feel the need to flaunt their expertise on what all men feel. Both ladies are right that Paine acted foolishly and wasn’t thinking with his head. Not the big one, anyway. Ho ho ho. But he hasn’t committed any crime, nor – thankfully – adultery of the kind formerly committed habitually by our future King. His marriage is safe, according to reports – and, more authoritatively, his wife. Enough with the tut-tutting.
I was moved, as I’m sure many people were, when he tearfully apologised and resigned. But I was left wondering, OK well, there’s a missing voice here and it’s the alleged survivor of this alleged misconduct.”
– Q&A panellist Yaara Bou Melhem on one brave 47 year-old girl
So why did Paine fall on a stump’s business end? Why did he feel compelled to preemptively cancel himself Kim Hughes-style? Why has he announced an indefinite leave of absence from all cricket? Before answering those questions, here are two more: why has the Rolling Stones’ frontman retired Brown Sugar and why is it the mission of pop culture prigs to erase the 007 you know and possibly love? The answer for ‘conservatives’ is that woke killjoys obsessed with ‘misogyny,’ ‘patriarchy’ and ‘white privilege’ mean to supplant customary freedoms with a ‘safe’ and ‘diverse’ culture. That the latter dispensation is a revolting Maoist empowerment scam may be taken as read. But not so the hallowed status of Jagger lyrically ravishing slave girls or Sean Connery bedding every woman he encounters between hearing M’s orders and detonating a villain’s lair. These were both gratuitous rebellions against prevailing social mores.
We on the right call it cognitive dissonance when the left gets tangled up in its own contradictions. They mocked the Hays Code, we laugh, and now they’ve written their own. But conservatives used to believe in dignified limits and now find themselves lamenting the censorship of rock ’n roll louts and Fleming’s debonair lech. This, then, is the postmodern war zone all of us seem to inhabit and the one Tim Paine wandered into. Progressives don’t want to be seen as prudes but as guardians of equality. Conservatives don’t want to be seen as prudes but as sticklers for solidity. He may not be a political adept but the ex-skipper was bright enough to know what was coming. Short of setting Veritatis splendor as a text for all school seniors – which I would happily do – I have no normative prescriptions for a way out. Except forgiveness.
A wonderful column, CL, that deserves an equally brilliant cartoon by Johannes Leak.
I’ve not followed this stuff at all because zero interest, never heard of this person till now. But
Well we all have. Point is the bar is impossibly high CL.
Jesus said: “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”
And we are here as on a darkling plain
swept by confused alarms of struggle and flight
where ignorant armies clash by night
My guess is that Cricket Australia want to put the disaster of 20/21 behind them and that means Paine goes down the Memory Hole.
Wickety is a unique position, they nearly always make poor captains.
Anybody who posts or responds here would prolly need a wide angled lens to take a dick pic.
“Except forgiveness.”
There is no forgiveness in the cult of wokeism.
Ted ain’t Shy!
Tim Paine was a poor captain.
It appears he finished second in the battle to get rid of Justin Langer as Coach, so he shoulda realised his time was up and retired gracefully before the season commenced.
Basically, no one get’s appointed Captain unless the Board already has the Wood on them.
Being lambasted and attacked for stating a simple, absolute scientific fact, such as “only women have a cervix” is what I would call a real example of “misogyny.”
It used to be the case that the Left was opposed to wowserism and censorship, and pro-free speech.
Not any more.
I was bewildered by the media coverage.
The majority are now avid readers of the modern day equivalent of material once only found in the Truth?
Great column CL
Paine had to go.
He was over 30 had one kid with another on the way when he went bonkers. He was never going to continue to be captain after that.
The rolling stones was vastly over rated. Only the Beatles were more over rated.
Would the Jeff Beck group. John Mayall’s blues brakers or even the Who have written a song on such a distasteful topic?
James bond movies were like the rolling bones vastly over rated.
I had a girl friend a long time ago who though The rolljng bones were possibly the most ugly men she had seen.
That’s nice, Homer Paxton. Even though none of us had any single idea what that rambling, incoherent attempt at Mumble-Rap-by-blog-post meant.
What were you trying to troll us about again?
If you did not miss your ESOL classes you would understand
Rex A
As well as making baseless allegations about other commenter’s educational attainments (ignoring his own inability to write a coherent sentence, or even to punctuate his own incoherent sentences), Non Compos Mentis has now displayed his inner wowser.
I think that his former girlfriend might have been trying to tell him something?
Non Compos Mentis
If you had listened (or perhaps actually attended) your classes in English, you might be able to write more coherently, and even punctuate.
given your inability to pass primary class I think i might ignore your advice.
JC has always had trouble with basic english
Homer, you realize the comment you’re responding to isn’t me?
JC he talks like you, he writes like you he abuses like you.
gimme a break.
JC
Non Compos Mentis frequently mixes me up with you. Given that you are successful at investment (a function that I have only limited expertise in) I feel quite flattered. He, on the other hand, sometimes seems quite jealous of you.
As for the semi-literate fool himself, he (falsely, and without evidence) claims that I did not finish primary school, while his writing standard suggests that he never even started primary school.
It isn’t you, I have never even hinted it was you. Go back to primary school and read it properly. Another own goal. That is the only thing you share with JC.
I might add he makes the same stupid errors on basic statistics. Only you do that JC
Non Compos Mentis
It isn’t you, I have never even hinted it was you. Go back to primary school and read it properly. Another own goal. That is the only thing you share with JC.
This coming from the perpetual scorer of own goals is good for a laugh. Have you even looked at your sentence construction and punctuation in the vast majority of your comments? Start with your comment at 1258.
PS, speaking of own goals, I notice that after I responded to your inane comment on the All this Madness thread that “CL confesses there is no violence at all” with a very incomplete list of instances of police violence (at varying levels) just in Victoria, you fled the scene without responding. Not even willing to defend your own stupidity? A bit like not being willing to back down on your baseless assertions about my educational level. Pig headed to the extreme!
Oh, and go back and read the second sentence in your comment at 1447. Yet another classic own goal. But please continue, it is fun watching you squirm and wriggle, like a worm on hot concrete after rain.
Non Compos Mentis
What is amusing is the way that you have now internalised your own lies. You have gone from a baseless assumption that I never finished primary school to a flat statement “given your inability to pass primary class”. Perhaps you could remind me of the mark I got? Was it 21% or 48%? And which subject was it? Or was it the same in all subjects?
You live in a delusional fantasy world.