Another musical dispatch from the front

Dear reader,

we’re not sure if this latest missive from our scribe from the North West frontier is on the right tram.

We’re not sure if they have trams up north?

Perhaps they use them to transit more efficiently prisoners in conjunction with Transurban and Serco the rivers of First Nation’s Australians that must be processed and conditioned by NT incarceration. This efficiency, (unconfirmed at this stage) would be a Nation Building Exercise worthy of greater acclaim.

Whatever the case Frank, is confused. He’s equating medals as some sort of tawdry honorific. This is clearly an example of a false- hood writ large. We at PCBYCP love medals. They’re both shiny and unquestioned as a mark of pedigree and service. As kids we all used to scrounge the Corn Flakes Box and find our token. Tokens are like medals. They hold us in standing amongst our peers. On Anzac day we’d proudly wear our father’s medals to demonstrate that we were delighted to be proud of our committment to a great cause. If we hadn’t rescued Sth East Asia from the ‘yellow peril’ they might not have known how lucky they were to be part of a great empire. And recently in Afghanistan our serving men and women won medals by the kilo for delivering the boons of civilisation to benighted masses unanointed by Sportsbet 24/7 and Payday lending.

But Frank’s insights are of interest just the same. He clearly has anti-establishment tendencies in part or wholly because he perhaps never attained a ‘Leaping Wolf badge’ in Scouts, or was passed over as a kettle drum player in the School Cadet Corps. Or perhaps more recently he was unable to obtain the position of Ticket Inspector (remote regions) on the Yuendumu prison light rail system. ‘Sour grapes’, you may say? Whatever conjecture seems apt we leave you, ( the reader) to determine a cause. Some people don’t need a cause, which can make them, like Julian Assange very frustrating indeed.

Frank writes…..

Guten tag,

A few Olympics ago, a new verb was added to the English language- “medalling”. It immediately occurred to me that it was a homophone of “meddling”. Make of that what you will.

It is almost half a century ago that, in Yuendumu, I read Gabriel García Márquez’s El otoño del patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch), so forgive any inaccuracies when I recount what to me was the most indelible scene in the novel.
The Patriarch’s wife used to regularly attend the market accompanied by their little boy. She was attired in a rare arctic wolf (?) fur coat (despite Macondo’s oppressive heat). Her little boy was wearing a general’s uniform complete with a chest full of medals.
Some plotters opposed to the dictatorship, trained a pack of bloodhounds to attack arctic wolves. They let the hounds loose in the marketplace, which devoured the Patriarch’s wife and child. All there was left after the hounds finished with the pair were the medals.