Category: Faith

I Will Tell My Story # 9 The Vertigo Of Police State Life

Today is the 65th anniversary of the release of the Hitchcock classic “Vertigo”. (Pictured above are Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak in a still from the movie with words added by me.)

Today my head is spinning. Living in a nascent police state which used to be a liberal democracy will do that to you. Vertigo.

Today, I was due to go on trial in this state of Victoria as a result of proudly and quietly seeking prayer and spiritual communion with a Warthaurong man at an Anglican cathedral on 9/11 last year during the Queen Elisabeth memorial service. (Connecting with indigenous people is a big part of my life. I believe my grandmother was the granddaughter of someone from the Aboriginal cricket team in England in 1868. Maybe part of my heritage is Aboriginal. I wish I knew for sure. Vertigo.) Police removed me from that prayer.

I am pretty sure that the young police officer informant who instigated this trial was one of three officers who them physically assaulted me (in the words of one eye witness they “slammed me to the ground”) when I protested loudly to them at being removed from my prayer at the entrance to a crowded cathedral. A little later the same informant stood by and did nothing while another officer sexually assaulted me. At the time, I said quite clearly, “For God’s sake you are groping me now. A hand in my underpants.”, but the informant, a police officer standing one meter away, did not do a thing to investigate this report of a crime. Instead he has gone on to put me on trial on trivial charges.

Just after I entered the courtoom today at about ten o’clock in the morning before the magistrate had arrived, I said a prayer in which I invoked God in both Aboriginal (“Under Bunjil, Under Baiame”) terms and and in monotheistic more Abrahamic terms and then said “This is my court today.” or words similar to that. I made that claim because I was confident that I could get the magistrate to look at the evidence and recommend an IBAC (Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission) investigation of Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Shane Andrew Patton for one or more of his own crimes or the crimes committed by his police officers against me. I was wrong. Today. Maybe I will have better luck next time. No way of knowing for sure. Vertigo.

As I sat down again at the front of the court where I believed, based on previous information given to me by court office staff, that there would be a three hour hearing relating to my case, the police lawyer leading the attack on my rights today approached me and told me, as I recall, that I could be removed from the court. I forget her full statement. (I am stressed. Vertigo.) I angrily told her it was not her job to decide who gets removed than the magistrates’ court. w

When the female magistrate came in, everybody, including myself, stood. When the others sat down, I remained standing and angrily told the magistrate that the police lawyer was trying to preempt the magistrate’s role and that one of the police officers had sexually assaulted me last year.

I was told by the magistrate to leave and that I would be called back when she was ready to hear the case. I was then escorted from the court by three impatient police force personnel wearing guns. I was taken out to the pavement on a cold day and told by one of them that I was not welcome in the court. I asked him if he knew what legislation governed his human rights responsibilities in Victoria (he gave no answer) and I also told him that I thought this action of his might deny me a fair trial since the magistrate had said she would call me back for the case. On the day when I was representing myself against police state crap, I stood alone on the pavement not knowing what would happen next. Modern Australian justice. Vertigo.

Fortunately one of my magnificent support people then arrived. He was late, because he had travelled by car from approximately 100 kilometers away and had misjudged the time needed. He went in and got me a piece of paper saying that that case was adjourned about six weeks till June. If he hadn’t been there I could have been waiting hours and ignored.

Praise The Lord Our Saviour, Sustainer and Protector, for those with the courage to give fellowship in times of injustice against police state crap.

Modern life can be so hard. Especially if you are a 65 year old man in Australia trying to do good but thwarted constantly by authoritarian PC crap:

Vertigo.

Geoff Fox, 9th May, 2023, Australia

Women For Freedom #31 Annie Dillard

“You can’t test courage cautiously.” wrote Annie Dillard, an author born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on April 30, 1945.

The above two peices of Word Art are my words added to a photo of Annie Dillard from Free Software Foundation and are published under this GNU Free Documentation license

She undetstood the complexities and straightforwardness of robust life:

“There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.”

“Eskimo: ‘If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?’ Priest: ‘No, not if you did not know.’ Eskimo: ‘Then why did you tell me?’ “

Dillard knew that how we discipline ourselves to use our freedom is important:

“There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.”

“The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.”

God Bless Annie Dillard.

Geoff Fox, 30th April, 2023, Down Under

Annie Jump Cannon

Annie Jump Cannon died on this date in 1941. She had co-created the Harvard Classification Scheme for organising our understanding of stars. She manually catalogued more stars in her lifetime than anyone else – about 350,000.

She worked hard driven by faith in God: she praised her work as “Teaching man his relatively small sphere in the creation, it also encourages him by its lessons of the unity of Nature and shows him that his power of comprehension allies him with the great intelligence over-reaching all.”

Geoff Fox, 13th April, 2023, Down Under

Aussie Dorothy Cumming As Mother Mary

Australian actress Dorothy Cumming was born in Boorowa, New South Wales, on this date in 1894.

She starred as the Virgin Mary in Cecil B DeMille’s 1927 epic The King Of Kings.

in 3 decades as a midwife, I never tired of the magnificence of mums.

As Wittgenstein wrote: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

Just look,

In wonder,

Geoff Fox, 12th April, 2023, Down Under

The King Assassination Riots – A Lesson For All Times

The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, on the 4th April 1968, was an extremely sad and tragic crime, which lead to many very violent criminal reactions on April 5th and the following few days. In the King assassination riots, there were 43 deaths, over 3,000 injuries and over 20,000 people arrested.

President Lindon Johnson said of that extreme reaction: “What did you expect? I don’t know why we’re so surprised. When you put your foot on a man’s neck and hold him down for three hundred years, and then you let him up, what’s he going to do? He’s going to knock your block off.”

King can be said to have predicted the riots with these words: “…….  in spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones. Violence is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all.”

Lord Please Bless Our Freedoms With The Good Sense To Keep The Peace And Not Kill Out Of Hate

Geoff Fox, 5th April, 2023, Terra Nullius

Theology For Freedom #1 Thomas Aquinas

St Thomas Aquinas died on this date in 1274, 749 years ago.

The ideas of Aquinas on Natural Law are echoed in the assertion in the American Declaration Of Independence: ““We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights ……. “

In his letter from the Birmingham City Jail in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr also referred to Aquinas: “A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.” 

Towards the end of his life, Thomas Aquinas pointed at his own books and said that his writing “appears to be as so much straw”. This rejection of bookishness by one of the great book writers in human history reminds me of the insightful rearticulation by my new friend Father Michael Bowie of the essence of his own Christian faith: “God is a person not a book.” I have made my own adaptation of these words to suit the emptier spaces of part o the Guercino portrait of Aquinas distracted from his writing seen above and below.

As I see it, the eternal law of God, which Jesus said he came not “to destroy, but to fulfil“, can also be fulfilled in all of us at our best.

Our best is when we speak our minds in ways that help us hear.

I would like to call that theofreedom.

Aquinas.

Thomas Jefferson.

Martin Luthor King (Jr)

And, hopefully, that God-based freedom still lives in us, here and now.

Sincerely, Geoff Fox, 7th March, 2023, Down Under

IWOTA #3 SHIRLEY TEMPLE

In my childhood in the ’60’s, a few years before Seargent Peppers swept me up into its ear-candied Beatlemania, Shirley Temple was my favourite star.

As a little boy in Australia, I believed she was my friend.

She had three fulltime careers in her lifetime:

1. Movie Star

2. Wife and Mother

and

3 Diplomat

And today, on the 9th anniversary of her death, I call her an Indigenous Woman Of The Anglosphere.

A Great American.

For all of my English Speaking World.

Geoff Fox, 10th February, 2023, Down Under

PostScript April 23rd, Shirley’s birthday.

She served as a diplomat for two years under President Ford and almost three years under the first Bush and one day under Carter. She met the new president that day and expressed a willingness to continue in public service. She didn’t. Early cancel culture?

Could she have been America’s (and the world’s) Sweetheart in movies today?

G.O.A.T. – Novak – A Triumph Of Clean Culture

Novak Djokovic was falsely imprisoned in a cheap hotel in Melbourne last year and excluded from the Australian Open because he refused to compromise on his right to bodily autonomy.

This year he returned in triumph and won. To me this is clearly because he is culturally clean.

Owing to the generosity of a Serbian community leader, I was able to watch this glorious achievement among beautiful Serbian people who idolise their hero.

They live clean in loving families who have fun together.

What a lesson.

Geoff Fox, 29th January, 2023, Down Under

Police State Crits #14 Channeling Douglas MacArthur Now

Today is the 143rd birthday of General Douglas MacArthur.

I believe he was a quality thinker and, sometimes, a truly great wordsmith.

When he suggested that moral decline can either be countered by a a spiritual awakening or cause national disaster, he could have been talking about what I see in Australia now.

I see a loss of trust and real authority in nearly all Australian institutions because of profound dishonesty and selfishness.

The moral foundations of religions are a possible solution.

What MacArthur called “a better world ….. based on faith and understanding.”

Geoff Fox, 26th January, 2023, Down Under