Dumb and Dumber

 

 

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grand-children's time - when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness."

So wrote Carl Sagan in "The Demon-Haunted World - Science as a Candle in the Dark" in 1995, twenty-seven years ago. How prescient was that!

 

Read the book online at www.archive.org
or listen to the audiobook here

 

And he continued: "The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudo-science and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance. As I write, the number-one video cassette rental in America is the movie 'Dumb and Dumber'

 

 

To which I can add only four words: Not only in America!

 

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Auf der Heide blüht ein kleines Blümelein ...

 

 

ERIKA is a German marching song, mainly associated with Nazi Germany. The marching song is from the perspective of a soldier who is longing for his sweetheart back home. The theme of the song is based on Erika being both a common German female name and the Latin name (Erica) of the heather plant that grows on the heath.

 

 

The above postcard features only the first stanza of the song. The full song is written below:

 

Erika On the heath, there blooms a little flower and it’s called: Erika. Eagerly a hundred thousand little bees, swarm around … Erika. For her heart is full of sweetness, a tender scent escapes her blossom-gown. On the heath, there blooms a little flower and it’s called: Erika. Back home, there lives a blonde little maiden and she’s called … Erika. That girl is my faithful little darling and my joy, Erika! When the heather blooms in a reddish violet, I sing her this song in greeting. On the heath, there blooms a little flower and it’s called … Erika. In my room, there also blooms a little flower and it’s called … Erika. Already In the grey of dawn, as it does at dusk, It looks at me, Erika! And then it’s to me as if it’s saying aloud: “Are you thinking of your fiancée/bride?” Back at home, a maiden weeps for you and she’s called … Erika.

 

Before I could become a teenaged "Halbstarker", I had already joined the "Fahrenden Gesellen", who, on hikes and in camps, taught me my self-reliance, which has kept me in good stead throughout all my life.

 

'Yours truly' on the left

 

And, yes, we marched as we sang, and we sang as we marched, which included such old favourites as "Erika", because those were the 1950s and 1960s, a time well before the zenith of German self-flagellation.

 

 

Remember Oskar Matzerath? In Günter Grass's "Blechtrommel", on his third birthday, Oskar Matzerath, disgusted by the mundane and hypocritical adult world around him, throws himself down the cellar stairs to halt his physical development, remaining the size of a three-year-old child while his mind matures. He uses his glass-shattering vocal shrieks against anyone who tries to take away his red-and-white toy tin drum, which he constantly beats in protest against society.

Where, in today's brow-beaten Germany, are the people who are prepared to halt their personal and professional development to "beat the drum" in protest against what is happening in their country?

 

 

I am no longer a German and I no longer live there to have to witness the Untergang des Abendlandes, and no-one can stop me from singing "Auf der Heide blüht ein kleines Blümelein, und das heißt: Erika ..."

 

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A permanent solution to a temporary problem

 

 

I was phoning a neighbour across the river to check how much rain their gauge had registered after last night's downpour, when she asked me, "Have you heard?" "Heard what?" I said. "Yesterday the postman found our neighbour dead. He had hanged himself!"

If this keeps going, little Nelligen will soon need its very own suicide help-line because this has been the fourth suicide since I've lived here.

The first one was a young bloke in Nelligen Place who shot himself after his girlfriend had left him. The second one was a neighbour up the lane whose wife left for Sydney to visit her daughter. Before she left, she'd told him, "When I come back, I want you gone!" So he put one end of a hose onto the exhaust pipe, started the engine, and put the other end of the hose and himself into the car. He was gone alright. The third one was a gunsmith who was professional to the end: he shot himself. And now this Indian rope trick by someone who hadn't even been an Indian!

I have never liked the word 'suicide'. Nor have those who committed it "passed on" or "gone to a better place". They killed themselves and are dead! FULL STOP! Germans used to call it "Selbstmord", literally "self-murder", but they, too, seem to have gone soft and now call it "Suizid".

Why not call it even more euphemistically 'a permanent solution to a temporary problem'? If you have a temporary problem, don't call the suicide help-line, call me! I will come over with a couple of beers and talk and talk and talk so much that you'll kill me instead of yourself!

 

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P.S. As for that offending hyphen in "Help-Line", I am right now reading "Meet Mr. Hyphen (And Put Him in His Place)", a book written entirely about the hyphen. More about that tomorrow. I know you can't wait!

 

To say nothing of the cockroaches and the diarrhoea

 

 

In 1987 I answered an advert for a six-month electrical position at OK Tedi. I guess they must have been desperate as they took me. I flew to Cairns to catch the twice-weekly charter flight to Tabubil, the township for the mine. The landing was a bit frightening, with high mountains on either side and in front, as the plane entered thick clouds, which only cleared just before the wheels touched down.

Dongas, identical to those I had lived in on Bougainville Island, had second, peaked aluminum roofs over them because of the heavy rains during most afternoons. The rainfall was approx. 8000 mm a year, and when it rained it was deafening on the aluminum roof. Offices were a selection of sheds, and any communication with the outside world was mainly by fax from the main office which was just another, bigger shed.

But the food was absolutely woeful – unbelievable! Very little came in by air. Most was shipped from Australia and was still in perfect condition when it was dropped onto barges at the mouth of the Fly River. But the tug-and-barge trip, which took several days for the 800 kilometres from the mouth of the river to the small town of Kiunga (the riverport for the OK Tedi mine), usually ended in disaster. The crews were Nationals, and either the diesel generators connected to the refrigerated containers broke down or, more often, the diesel for the generator was stolen when the barge guards were asleep. In the tropical temperatures, the frozen food had defrosted long before the barges reached Kiunga, and long before being trucked up the mountain to the township of Tabubil.

The cooks did what they could, but the meat and fish were black. I never touched them. I lived on baked beans and locally baked bread for breakfast and, on alternate days, tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce. Lunch was tea and plain cake (the milk was powdered, so that was OK); dinner was tinned peaches or apricots and anything else that looked edible. Of course, there were plenty of cockroaches running around. Local vegetables caused so many cases of diarrhea that the cooks had to wash them in a weak solution of Dettol.

Because of a mix-up I found that I was assigned to the instrument section, while another new guy a couple of weeks later, who was an instrument bloke, was allocated to electrical. We suggested that we swap positions but that was too difficult, so in instrument I remained. Actually, it worked out well as the two of us in the small instrument section had to travel down to the port of Kiunga regularly. The distance from Tabubil to Kiunga was about 120 kilometres, mainly up and down hills, except for some 20 kilometres of flat before the port. The road was metalled and reasonably wide, so there was no trouble when meeting another 4WD Toyota travelling in the opposite direction.

Trucks were another story: the company’s fleet were "Pacific" trucks made in Canada , which were very rugged prime movers. These were based in Kiunga and a convoy of some eight to a dozen, all driven by locals, would leave early each morning for Tabubil or on to the mine itself, and return in the afternoon. They would drive like maniacs on the downhill sections, as knew every bump in the road, and cut every corner. Early in the morning before driving down to Kiunga, I would ring the dispatcher who would give me the number of trucks in the convoy. Driving down the mountain range, I had a rough idea where I would meet the convoy, so some distance ahead I would stop and switch off the engine, and, if I heard nothing, would continue for a bit and listen again. In the quiet mountain air, once the truck engines were heard, I would quickly get off the road by driving into a drainage ditch. If it was an uphill section, the trucks were slow, but if it was flat or downhill, they were anything but slow. First, an Isuzu truck, acting as a lead vehicle, would rush past. Then I would count the following trucks. The Isuzu maintenance truck with spare tires would make up the end of the convoy. More than once, a missing truck and no maintenance truck meant there had been a breakdown, and so I would carefully drive on and keep listening for the missing truck, which eventually would drive past me just as crazy as if it had still been part of the convoy.

After finishing my work at Kiunga, I would head back up the mountain which was just as interesting, as trucks generally returned empty and going downhill fast, so that there was still a lot more stopping and listening, and, invariably, there were also heavy afternoon rains.

When I finished my contract, even though I was offered more work on higher pay, I'd had enough. I did not go back to Australia but went to Port Moresby and then to Indonesia and on to Singapore to work there. I have never been back to PNG, and it's not on my bucket list."

 

After more than forty years, and now living in Malaysia and nearing his dotage, an old workmate from my years on the Bougainville Copper Project, Roy Goldsworthy, put pen to paper to write the above article. It describes his six months in 1987 at the Ok Tedi mine when it was still under construction and didn't look like anything in this corporate video:

 

 

I had come to Port Moresby in 1982 to assist in the setting-up of the tug-and-barge operation that would supply the Ok Tedi Mine - see here - just after Bechtel Corporation, who would built the mine, had arrived.

I had worked for Bechtel Corporation during the construction phase of the Bougainville Copper Project ten years before, and when it turned out that my boss from those early days, Sid Lhotka, was again in charge of the accounting side of the Ok Tedi Project, I was keen to join him.

He and I and my then wife had dinner at the Papuan Hotel in Port Moresby, where he told me that the Ok Tedi Project was so rough that they only hired single staff. For a short moment I regretted being married, but having read Roy Goldsworthy's article, I know now that it saved me from eating lots of baked beans and tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce, to say nothing of the cockroaches and the diarrhea (although I prefer "diarrhea" spelt the English way which is "diarrhoea" because it really looks like I've completely lost control of my vowels).

 

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What time is it?

 

 

Don't forget that Daylight Saving Time in New South Wales begins this Sunday, 4 October 2026, at 2:00 am, when clocks move forward one hour to 3:00 am.

First popularised during World War I and World War II to conserve fuel and lighting energy, Daylight Saving Time was meant to shift an hour of sunlight from the morning into the evening. Of course, only the government would believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket and sew it to the bottom and have a longer blanket.

I had better write it down on a piece of paper so I won't forget it!

 

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