Rants in their pants

Right-wing ranters brighten my day. No one takes much notice of them so they're pretty harmless, but they're usually good for a laugh while reading the paper over breakfast, and it's good to start the day with a laugh.

For today's chortle, thanks are due to James Allan, professor of law at Queensland University, who gets his knickers in a twist over, wait for it, bumper stickers, or more precisely people who dare to express their political opinions publicly in anything less than a PhD thesis.

The great thing about being a right-wing ranter must be that you can pour out any old tripe into a word processor, or at least have a secretary do it, and The Australian will print it.

Anyhow, back to Prof Allan, and remember, this man is a professor of law, so he knows about logic. He gets himself in a bit of a dudgeon about people who "plaster Save the Whales stickers on the back of their car".

There's an irony in this, the legal eagle says, because: "it's an upmarket Toyota to which they're attaching the thing".

For a moment I thought I was missing something, why should people who drive Toyotas not care about whales? This is a law professor, so he must know what he's talking about and there must be some subtle logic hidden in there somewhere.

Then the penny dropped: people who want to save the whales must be anti-Japanese, just as people who oppose the Iraq war must be anti-American, according to the cruder of Prof Allan's fellow op-ed writers for The Oz.

After this masterly piece of analytical complexity, Prof Allan goes on to whinge about people taking simplistic approaches to political issues. Well, okay Jimmy, if you say so, you're the law professor, although I think your gripe is really with people who have opinions that differ from yours.

Over the years I've driven a Toyota a few times but I've never owned one, but I did own an old Datsun for a few years, so maybe that counts, and I have to say I don't feel the least bit hypocritical about opposing the Japanese whale hunt.

This extraordinarily complex position has emerged over a lifetime of opposing the actions of governments without equating the people of a country with their government. I oppose many policies of the Australian government, but that doesn't make me an anti-Australian self-hater. I guess they don't teach that sort of complexity at law school in Queensland.

If there is one government in the world I have opposed more than any other over the years, it's the pack of scoundrels that usually infest Washington DC, capital of the Land of the Free.

This den of thieves and murderers first came to my attention about 40 years ago when my government suggested that I might join the army and go to fight in Vietnam alongside our "American friends". I wasn't to have any choice in this: my birthdate was to go into a barrel and if it was drawn out I was in the army.

This prompted me to find out a bit about the Vietnam War, and I became an opponent of it. Then came Chile, and the slaughter of 20,000 people in a military coup that installed a dictatorship backed by the US government.

I've opposed a lot of US government policies over the years and never for a minute have I been anti-American. In fact there are some Americans doing very admirable things in world politics at the moment. Hugo Chavez, president of Venezula, and Evo Morales, president of Bolivia, come to mind. They're not US citizens, but they are undeniably American.

I've met many US citizens, including a few distant relatives, who substantially share my opinions, and I've never detected even a hint of anti-Americanism in them either.

We choose our friends, and my American friends are not the ones my government wanted me to go and kill Vietnamese for all those years ago. I have higher standards.

So, for the benefit of Prof Allan and other simplistic ranters, opposing the whale slaughter is not the equivalent of being anti-Japanese.

Prof Allan's column went on to explain why he didn't think global warming was very important, but I only skimmed that bit. A bit of a laugh over breakfast is great, but too much right-wing idiocy is bad for the digestive system. I pity the law students at Queensland Uni if Prof Allan's thoughts on bumper stickers are typical of the standard of scholarship there.