This guy – the dude in the right imagic frame – actually owned the entire twentieth century of human history. So name Pahpa John another candidate. Hit me with your best shot. Who have you got, Stephen Hawking? Jesus freaking Christ. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s spirited frisky missus?? Lived-experience maestros like Doris Lessing, David Malouf or the A Hundred Years of Solitude man???

Michel Foucault, not bad. Jacq Derrida, hmmm. Ronnie Laing? Herbert Marshall McLuhan? Seligman. Godel, Uncle Tom Cobbley ‘n All?

Anyway NE one of eight compass points in grifty Scot & king-presbyter Adam Smith’s 1774 Pin-factory¹ Slavery Ecognomy world of rampant warrior prince maiden-deflowering gentlemen in gentlemen’s, or’hellfire’ clubs, OR riding little boats across painted junkie² oceans or jet-planes large and small across isometrically junked and broken skies.

I mentally gobbled down A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich at 17, I think (thence to Victor Serge’s Men in Prison).

It is Monday in southern Australia.

” ‘Your excellency. allow me to point out … we don’t know what may happen to us … If we fall into enemy hands … All documents, all badges of rank … There is no reason why we should make it easy for them …’

“Samsonov did not understand. make what easy for them?

” ‘Alexander Vasilich, we are burying everything that could identify us. We have made a record of this spot and we will either come back for our things later or send someone to recover them. If you have any documents, or anything likely to reveal your name … And you should remove your epaulettes …’

” ‘My epaulettes!’ Realising at last what they were doing, Samsonov gave a hoarse roar and stood up from the tree-trunk like a bear roused from its lair. As though unused to standing on two legs, leaning forward slightly, forearms dangling, he placed hid hands on Postovsky’s narrow shoulders. Unable to believe his eyes in the faint light of the moon shining between the pine-trees, Samsonov found that it was true: the shoulders of his chief of staff were devoid of epaulettes. Only a torn scrap of cloth still flapped on his coat.

“With the same stooping gait, his arms hanging slightly forwards, stiff from having sat so long, he walked up to the nearest officer and put a hand on his shoulders – the epaulettes were gone. He moved on to the next man -gone too!

” ‘Gentlemen! Samsonov bellowed, straightening up. ‘You are betraying your oath of allegiance. Who gave you permission to do this?’ ….

“The only problem was that suicide was accounted a sin.

“With a faint click, the hammer of his revolver slipped readily int the cocked position. Samsonov put it into his upturned cap, which he had laid on the ground. He took off his curved sword and kissed it, then felt for his wife’s medallion and kissed it too.

“He walked a few paces to a clearing open to the sky.

“It was cloudy now, and only one small star could be seen. It vanished, then appeared again. He knelt down on the warm pine-needles, and because he did not know where the east lay he prayed to the star.

“He began with the set prayers, then none at all, simply breathing on his knees and looking up into the sky. Then, casting aside restraint, he groaned aloud, like any dying creature in the forest; ‘O Lord, if thou canst, forgive me and receive me. Thou seest – I could do no other, and can do no other now.’ ”

Team 🦘🇦🇺🕋🌏

¹ The “pin factory” refers to a famous engraving from Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie, which illustrates the division of labor in an 18th-century pin manufacturing workshop. This image, a key example of industrial artistry, depicts the detailed, step-by-step process of pin-making and served to highlight human ingenuity and the importance of manufacturing. It is famously used by economists like Adam Smith to explain the concept of the division of labor. 

² Samuel Taylor Coleridge, somewhen Jimmy Chi