As my life is trashed by police state crap in Melbourne, Australia, I look to certain people to seek a recovery.
The innate systemic goodness of most human beings can defeat the evil which sometimes corrupts this world.
But it takes work.
Together, we shall return.
I revere the leadership towards such ends of General Douglas MacArthur in World War Two.
He took the essential human yearnings for discipline and peace and channeled them for victories from this date in 1942 (when he was recorded making his iconic “I shall return.” promise in outback Terowie) till Japanese imperialism was decisively destroyed.
He had to get past lazy stupidities like the Brisbane Line to achieve his success.
He once said, “There is no security on this earth. Only opportunity.”
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.
The movie King Kong, which was released in New York on the 2nd of March, 1933, made Fay Wray famous as a Scream Queen.
The movie was a fantasy.
But the impact of her screaming was real.
It extended the boundaries of onscreen freedom of speech to freedom to scream.
Her character, actress Ann Darrow, had been promised a tall, dark and handsome leading man.
This could have created various expectations in the heart, mind and body of the young woman picked out from the streets of New York to star in a mysterious adventure movie.
When the leading man she hoped for turned out be a gigantic, hairy, ferocious ape, the build up of emotions lead to the unleashing of screams unlike anything Hollywood had heard before.
Wray later said, “When I’m in New York I look at the Empire State Building and feel as though it belongs to me … or is it vice versa? … “
How does this relate to modern, victimhood feminism?
In King Kong, Fay Wray As The Beauty Killed The Beast.
In my eyes, The Beast of Third Wave Feminism kills the beauty of women in the modern world.
Its not supposed to be that way, to quote a country song.
The true holy spirit of women is in caring for others and helping people share.
Women do this most often as mothers in families, but can also do it socially and professionally when willing and allowed.
On her 109th birthday last year, I named Rosa Parks an Indigenous Woman Of The Anglosphere (IWOTA) , because, as a native speaker of English, her words showed a great command of the language which I believe did a lot of good in the world.
Today it is Rosa’s 110th birthday. To mark the occasion, I fuse her words with images of good, beautiful females I know and like and admire. One is a real woman, Deeanna Appadu, born and raised in Mauritius, and now in Australia. The other a goblin art comic and street-dwelling superhero, Shine Of The Moon. Both are women of color. In Shine’s case the color is tawny.
I brought them together once in one of Shine’s artistic homes
Geoff Fox, 4th February, 2023, Melbourne, Australia
America’s iconic anti-war politician, Robert Francis Kennedy (RFK), was born on this day, American time, in 1925.
In words that remind me of the efforts and ethos of my freedom fighter friend Billy, of AUM (Australian Unified movement), Kennedy said:
“The glory of justice and the majesty of law are created not just by the Constitution – nor by the courts – nor by the officers of the law – nor by the lawyers – but by the men and women who constitute our society – who are the protectors of the law as they are themselves protected by the law.”
The current, horrible, dictatorial government tyranny in the Australian State of Victoria will not prevail, if leaders like Billy and other Australian freedom fighters get the justice which they both deserve and earnestly strive to build.
RFK could have been talking about the challenges faced by Billy and his many courageous colleagues and followers when the American leader said:
“Every time we turn our heads the other way when we see the law flouted, when we tolerate what we know to be wrong, when we close our eyes and ears to the corrupt because we are too busy or too frightened, when we fail to speak up and speak out, we strike a blow against freedom and decency and justice.”
When Kennedy said this, he was speaking for freedom fighters of all eras in all places.
Kennedy had a very privileged background but also served in the navy during World War Two. He enlisted 6 weeks before he turned 18 and was undergoing V-12 officer training at Harvard when the War ended.
Billy is young and overcame enormous personal challenges to become the self educated man he is, but his thinking is philosophically deep and rhetorically powerful:
God Bless Freedom.
God Bless Billy, who is a gifted rapper and respects freedom culture, unlike the nemesis of freedom in Victoria, Premier Daniel Michael Andrews who has yesterday tried to win votes by saying:
“We’re much better than violent extremism. We ought to leave that to the United States. This is not America, and I for one will do nothing to contribute to the Americanisation of our politics.”
Daniel Michael Andrews, Criminal-In-Chief in what is now, for many innocent victims of a politicised police force, the police state of Victoria, I say to you:
This state and nation needs something like an American style Bill Of Rights because of all the ways you have trashed the human rights of the people you are supposed to serve.
So as the grandson of professional theologians, I pray with all my heart and soul that the wrath of God descend on Daniel Michael Andrews in the form of a crushing defeat at next Saturday’s election and his arrest for his human rights and other crimes and long, long subsequent imprisonment when convicted, if justice prevails.
Geoff Fox, 20th November, American time, 2022 (It is American time as I publish this post so I use that time to honour and respect RFK, whose son, RFK Junior is now one of the world’s best critics of lockdown excesses by stupid corrupt incompetent and IMHO evil governments.)
NB I neither totally condone nor condemn the red mist comments of Member Of Parliament, Catherine Cumming, to which Andrews was responding with the above quote. Cumming’s words were tasteless, open to misinterpretation and therefore poorly chosen. It was excessively robust free speech on the campaign trail. If free democracy is to prevail, human errors like this have to be accepted as part of what is going to happen. Robust freedom of speech must be defended not criminalised.
FREEDOM, DEMOKRASI AND CIVILISED HUMANITY 