In late March,when the country was in lockdown and football matches cancelled,a demographer predicted a baby boom. “What else can you do when you can’t watch the footy on Friday night?” she quipped to a Murdoch tabloid.
Even as a joke the idea was dispiriting. Was it really only a choice between ball sports on TV or in bed? I could think of plenty of things to do besides. Something was seriously askew. I looked fretfully over my life for the root of my problem,no pun intended,and it became glaringly obvious. I am the product of a rat-bag breeding course that will soon become punitively high-cost,a “low-priority course”,as defined by the Federal Government,or “vandal studies” as dubbed by a Murdoch broadsheet,which can always be trusted to spell out what Prime Minister Scott Morrison is really thinking.
Yes,I’m a humanities graduate,which makes me dangerously prone,apparently,to waking up in the middle of the night frothing with the urge to pummel the statue of a dead white male. I confess:what I did on Friday nights in lockdown would never qualify me for Team Australia. I scoured the book shelves for the extremists who corrupted me during my years of vandal studies,who lured me down the shadowy path of critical-thinking,who tempted me with their charismatic word-play and hypnotising imagery,who lead me to believe that living for art was better than prostrating oneself to money.
I picked their manifestos from the shelf,lay on the couch,and read. Some of these radicals are the luminaries of the Western Canon,which must be confusing for humanities-haters. Take James Joyce. Well,actually,I find him hard to take. As an undergraduate,I limped through Dubliners. During lockdown I decided to tackleA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
I soon saw the error of my ways. The protagonist,Stephen Dedalus,a thinly disguised Joyce,struggles with his faith and concludes:“I will not serve that in which I no longer believe,whether it call itself my home,my fatherland,or my church:and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can,using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use – silence,exile and cunning.”
Only the rich can be trusted to study such truly heretical things.