VERY FAR AWAY

South Coast, Australia.

In a blind two-step, a dazzling waltz, a drifting sea, in an ancient calm and a terrible present, men gathered in clots, these ancient wisdoms, shared now, as the Falun Gong would have it, here at the End of Days, but of course there would be no end, the reclamation, the harvesters of souls, they were streaming in their rivers of intellect and self-entity, trying to take form, to embrace the species.

The targets watched football on television, made ribald jokes about sex, checked askance at who was watching who, circus of the mind, common frailties, the ever growing expansion of the state, and in these strange states, grasping at tunnels as they erupted upwards, here on the edge, as Eleanor Dark's novel called it, of The Timeless Land.

They were crawling through the undergrowth. They were back from missions in Afghanistan, Iraq. They knew things he wanted to know. Malfeasance. Clumsy bungling. Stories which could be told.

What astounded him the most, perhaps, was how quickly, how easily, the twist into a totalitarian state had been made.

The men made their jokes.

But these places, these communal gathering points, would not be there much longer.

The social engineers had set out to change the culture, and succeeded very well.

Few of the hotels were viable anymore, propped up by poker machines or bottle sales, not much else.

The scrabbling stories of growing up in a seaside town, village more like, remote places which over the past half century had turned into suburbs, houses stood in silent threat, wells of loneliness, where once the neighbourhood kids had streamed running through the trees, scheming mischief, as the young had always done.

Now the cameras watched everything. Adults sprouted views obtained from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The princes, the bastards who led them, who engineered themselves into positions of power and deserted those who had put them there, who did not speak out, who had no courage, who pocketed their salaries and spewed forth cant, Australia was the greatest country on earth, we're lucky to live here, we could be over there.

Heavily funded by government, the surveillance teams spread across the country, the local police, empowered, turned from a service which served the public, people who could always be relied to sort out the normal village problems, who, if not always liked were respected, instead, as staged conflicts on the television offered excuse for ever tighter controls, to agents who were feared. As harassment sorted into a subjugated populace. As the wild dreams of youth disappeared into the entirely mundane. As a knowledge of the future could not be guaranteed. As towers burned in London and he feared would soon be burning here, as death squads and articulate forecasters, analysts of patterns in the subterranean dark, those who could see those streaming screams of the half-formed, those rivers of incandescent light which could not settle into physical form, who could feel their frustration as they warned: be careful. Stop. Go Back. You are going the wrong way. Who knew that now as a time when they faced a terrible precipice of their own making: when, instead of being perched in aeries high in sandstone cliffs they were here amongst the mortals, shouting, shouting, be careful, be careful, you have been warned.

You have been warned.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/comment/citizenship-test-are-you-aligned-with-australian-values-20170615-gwrvhi.html

The Prime Minister this week called upon all new aspiring new citizens to "join us as Australian patriots", as he spruiked his changes to citizenship laws. We are told these changes, which include better aligning the citizenship test with "Australian values", will strengthen the current system.

We are going to have to take the Prime Minister's word for that – because the government won't release any of the public submissionsmade to the consultation process on the changes.

Which is unfortunate, because taking a politician at his word is one of the least Australian acts imaginable, somewhere on the scale between serving sausages without tomato sauce and punching a wallaby.

Keeping secret the submissions to what is supposed to be a public consultation process also seems a bit un-Australian-ish, as it rather flies in the face of the whole transparency-and-accountability part of the democratic system that unites us.

FEATURED BOOK:

"His team’s name was Al Ghuraba’[the Strangers], after a hadith he quoted to me more than once. “Islam began as something strange,”it said, “and it will return to being strange, as it was in the beginning. So blessed be the strangers.”I could see how the theme of strangeness, foreignness, and inversion attracted him. It reminded him that when other people said his religion was weird, he could take their insult as a compliment. Who could doubt that theCompanions were strangers, too, and had faced ridicule for their monotheism and devotion to their Prophet? The muhajirs were also strange, odd as well as foreign, forced into alien lands having been ejected from their own. Ibn Qayyim (1292–1350), an acolyte of Ibn Taymiyyah, had told Muslims to thank God for their strangeness at moments when they were blessed to feel it: Those who are strange are the true people of God. This strangeness does not make the stranger lonely. In fact, when he abandons the deviant people, he is most happy and sociable, and when he socializes with them he is most lonely. So, his allies are God, His Messenger, and the believers, even if the majority of the people oppose him and push him aside."