Don Watson > Quotes

“For Hindus, banyan trees are sacred. For Buddhists, bodhi trees; for the Arabs, certain date palms. To be stalwart in a ‘tree-like’ way was to approach goodness, according to Confucius. The Normans built chapels in the trunks of yew trees. Many other cultures attached religious significance to particular trees and groves and forests. Adonis was born of a tree. Daphne turned into one. George Washington confessed to cutting one down and the United States, as a result, was all but immaculately conceived. The tree is the symbol of the male organ and of the female body. The Hebrew kabbalah depicts Creation in the form of a tree. In Genesis, a tree holds the key to immortal life, and it is to the branches and fruit of an olive tree that God’s people are likened in both the Old and New Testaments. To celebrate the birth of Christ his followers place trees in their sitting rooms and palm fronds, a symbol of victory, commemorate his entering Jerusalem. A child noted by Freud had fantasies of wounding a tree that represented his mother. The immortal swagman of Australia sat beneath a coolabah tree. In hundreds of Australian towns the war dead are honoured by avenues of trees.”
― Don Watson, The Bush

“Imagine, a First World country founded on egalitarian principles in which the top 20 per cent of households have 84 per cent of the wealth, while the bottom 40 per cent have 0.3 per cent; and one family, the Waltons, owns more than the bottom 40 per cent of US families combined; and the ratio of CEO salary to unskilled worker is 354 to 1 (fifty years ago it was 20 to 1). A minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, which is 34 per cent less than workers on the minimum were getting in 1968. More than 20 per cent of children in the United States live in poverty, more than twice the rate of any European country. With a quarter of totalitarian China’s population, democratic America has about the same number of people in jail.”
― Don Watson, Quarterly Essay 63 Enemy Within: American Politics in the Time of Trump

“Hubris is an incurable American disease. As incurable as the military-industrial machine that keeps coming up with the armaments that make wars seem like slam dunks, but which last for decades; wars that are fought by a very small percentage of the population and, regular effusive acknowledgement of veterans notwithstanding, can be ignored for years.”
― Don Watson, Enemy Within: American Politics in the Time of Trump

“When the words are suspicious, go after them, insist they tell us what they mean. Go after the meaning of the words. And if the speakers say they are the kind who call things as they see them, that they don’t mince words, and call a spade a spade if not a bloody shovel, go after them even harder. They’re often the worst liars of the lot.”
― Don Watson, Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language

“Crockery has been withdrawn from American culture below a certain level.”
― Don Watson, American Journeys

“The strip runs forever along the Gulf Coast, and it makes you wonder why, on the night of Katrina, the Holy Comforter didn’t take the opportunity to make a more comprehensive town-planning statement.”
― Don Watson, American Journeys

“Yet it remains a commonplace of the official Australian worldview that all that is distinct and admirable in the national character and belief comes from the bush. It made Australians what they are.”
― Don Watson, The Bush

“Decried every day as a feckless thing without initiative or ambition, a thing not to be mentioned in the same breath as private enterprise, government became that thing. First sequester its responsibilities, sell off its functions, grant it no respect; run it into the ground and then declare it incompetent.”
― Don Watson, American Journeys

“Similarly, dubbing everyone whose reading of history leads them to conclusions different from the preferred ones black-armband historians; channelling frustrations felt by the politically powerless to the politically correct; isolating chattering classes and elites from a pretended mainstream – all these and many terms of political abuse are common and inevitable in democracies – and all have parallels in tyrannies.”
― Don Watson, Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language

“Michael Young, the English sociologist who coined the term “meritocracy,” despised the fashion for it: first, because it is largely a smug fantasy perpetuated by those who sit at the top of the social pyramid; and second, because it bestows on those at the bottom the slur that they are there because they have no merit. Even feudalism spared the poor that insult: their lowly station was an accident of birth.”
― Don Watson, Enemy Within: American Politics in the Time of Trump

“Consciously or not, the Senator (or his staffer) was only attempting to speak the language of the locals. He was value-adding (or adding alpha as very refined managers say). Value-adding is a mantra of modern economics: it describes the increase in value that a particular manufacturing process, or design or labelling or some other enhancement brings to a product before its sale. Those who talk a lot about value-adding often sound as if they are trying to achieve the same effect with the language: they force it into a new mould, streamline it, give it cachet. They make it into a machine with a minimum of moving parts, but with constant upgrades and (naturally) enhancements. And if you want to get reconciliation taken seriously, you had better put your case in these terms. The Senator’s imitation of the style is a remote sign of the gathering belief that the whole world – or such parts of it that function properly – can be understood either as a metaphor for free market economics and the management philosophies it has spawned, or as an actual consequence of them. That is to say, as an outcome or an event.”
― Don Watson, Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language

“When I opened the curtains in the morning I saw the intersection of two six-lane highways. It was a comfortable, well equipped, practical sort of place, as Holidays Inns tend to be. You can be happy at a place like this so long as you stay away from the coffee. And the restaurant, if you want to be sure. Perhaps not happy, but not unhappy. Or if unhappy, at least not threatened. A good motel creates a kind of stasis for the soul in transit. One should leave no worse than one arrived: that is the minimum requirement.”
― Don Watson, American Journeys

“The prolonged solitary exposure to the bush that makes some people odd or crazy might in others bring the active and contemplative life into perfect harmony or grace.”
― Don Watson, The Bush

“Nimbin now continues life in its post-Aquarian form as an icon of alternative living, or, taking the view from the street as a measure, a fossilised relic of hippiedom, a marijuana-pickled, bad-taste rural slum.”
― Don Watson, The Bush

“Outside half a dozen youthful demonstrators chanted about the rights of the ‘young unemployed’. The Prime Minister excepted, they were the best dressed people in West Torrens. There is no disguising a Young Liberal’s haircut.”
― Don Watson, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: A Portrait of Paul Keating PM

“Capuchin monkeys have no faith in America; they hold to no dream”
― Don Watson, Enemy Within: American Politics in the Time of Trump

“Kitsch and tourism are inseparable partners. Perhaps it is because, by definition, both are inauthentic.”
― Don Watson, The Bush

“There is nothing quite like a real political whiz. Some adopt an inscrutable, almost somnolent demeanour and make you beg for their wisdom, while others come at you like a whirlwind. The effect in both cases is the same: even when you think they must be extracting certitude from guesses or cucumbers from sunbeams, you are captive, not only to the verbal artistry but to the weight of the movement, the sense that on these matters to which you are now privy the course of history depends, Politics being civil war by other means, it is fought with the same volumes of smoke and passion and ruthless brutality, and it leaves some of the same psychic wounds. All political environments - democratic, republican and monarchical - have this much in common: it is never more than a short walk in any direction to find someone who disagrees with the last person you spoke to, or who envies or disapproves or wants to thwart him, or who feels thwarted, threatened or misused by him.

As our conversation in the Four Seasons concluded, my friend stubbed out the butt of his cigar. I still had three inches to smoke. I left with it and later that evening I met a consultant, also from the Democratic side, who tried to put me wise to the first man’s failings. To be frank, I was left not knowing whom to believe. The consultant told me that these days he thinks it impossible for the US political system to throw up people or parties of true character, vision or integrity. (A businessman from the Republican side once told me the same thing.) Rather, the system is now ideal for hacks, ‘yes men’ and fodder for lobbyists. Political thinking has become institutionalised and incapable of solving the country’s problems. The press has lost character in proportion to the politician, and accepts their values and arguments almost without question. He thought universal national service with a non-military option might be one way to spread the burden and rekindle a sense of shared responsibility.”
― Don Watson

“You know what you did? You embraced the insanity you were telling us about. – Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street”
― Don Watson, Enemy Within: American Politics in the Time of Trump

“Across the continent since Europeans first arrived, 92 per cent of old-growth forest has been destroyed. The”
― Don Watson, The Bush

“The bush is a home for martyrs.”
― Don Watson (author)