I know this is way off the reservation but it’s a slow day and I can’t let the one moment in my personal history when I agree with Andrew Bolt go by without comment. Here is our doyen of loon making ball-tearing good sense:
HEAR that cheering — that soundtrack of our shame — as Schapelle Corby is released from a Bali jail? See media outlets wave as much as $3 million at the convicted drug smuggler for her story, to add to the $270,000 her family earned from her autobiography?
See Corby, the heroine of last night’s Channel 9 biopic, whose writer sighs she feels “very much for Schapelle” and “I carry that compassion before being worried about legal things”.
…So I don’t blame Indonesia’s Justice Minister, Amir Syamsuddin, for that curl to his lip when he announced on Friday that he’d granted Corby early parole, not through “generosity” but “the laws of the land”.
You see, he said, “we are a dignified nation”. Unlike … Australia?
I love this country, but then a Corby opens a jail cell and lets out a fetid blast of our convict culture — that deep, feral resentment of the mob of any check to its licence.
How that mob has trashed our reputation in the name of “our” Schapelle, the big-eyed former bar hostess at the mercy of those brown foreigners.
…we made a national hero of a thieving murderer called Kelly, and we’ve only got worse.
Killer Mark “Chopper” Read had leading journalists make him so famous with books of his alleged exploits that a movie was made of his life.
Then came the Underbelly books and television series that made cheap crooks and their molls household names, dusting even the dead ones with the bright dust of fast money and faster women that so impresses losers and fools.
…And now Corby is coming out of her cell. What feral spirit is freed with her?
Something in that.
