MUDDLED ALLEGORY

Tiki Tabloid Supplement, Volume 1, Issue 3, 20 December 1943, Page 1

MUDDLED ALLEGORY

I want you* to meet Mr and'Mrs- Snarl: who are, I suspect, as familiar to you as to ' me, though -they never had a name until just now, lor/Ayhen I come to consider it, have they ever had anything that you could really call a form. Until this moment’,s ne'- s.-;itj of putting them on paper they have boon.as forth -ss is th-.-V tilings the Financial editors dis;.- , bf/nirif'. . . ■■ '.‘Nett If-tangible:-.” Wu'-oic body or so,-.’;' »■'. r-.s are as real as the hole in your. si ck- and as .lisle ing. They arc self-appointed inhibitors. Silently censerious, they arc übiquitous and implacable — our familiars of the sub-conscious. Middle-aged people. Without children. Instead they have opinions. About other peopleand their children. With no real experience of LIFE they convey their omniscience. Snark is that bank chap who doesn’t seem to notice you coming out of Moloney’s pub; but setv--.-. you with a cold notice next day to reduce your ove.'' draft. Or he is the auditor fellow who absent-mindedly leaves a red ink query in that part of your private ledger headed “personal expenditure.” In the depression ■years tie was the fat man in the sports model Cadillac who passed to and from work when you were chipping weeds along his suburban road. . You remember you said you could almost see him counting the weeds after yon left each night, and hear him snort at th. end ct the count. His wife thought that the little old lady who used to bring out ’the morning billy was "just encouraging a lot of lazy loafers.” Her— Snark’s—*-rectitude is so starchy it rasps. She has a lorgnette she inherited from Sarah Gamp’s sister. And her flavour is like that of the red currant wine your wife forgot to put the sugar in. She disapproves. Silently. She is the lady who sends white feathers through the post, and thinks that 25/- a year in Nat. Pat. parcels is wasted on Pacific Peanut Pirates and Cocbanut Bombers. Being empty inside these two stand back to back to hide the hollow. Facing outward they are extiospective— human as two dead jellyfish. Plainly, they are inhuman. Having no soul, they have no anxieties. To them the problems of human-kind ai e no problems at all—just exercises in arithmetic. Demented widow Polowski dies of exposure leaving three young Polowskis in a frozen dugout on the Vistula “one from four leaves three, or maybe it was two from five” Anyway, as simple as that. Manuelo Cela and some Spanish compadres, lazy with a couple of hundred years semi-starvation in their lean bellies, want to work some of the enclosed common land so that they can continue to exist on the 18 pesetas (10/-)

they get for their week’s work in the vineyards. The land was enclosed by the father of Don Calve who lives in the great house on the strada in Buenos Aires. "Certainly,” says the Don’s agent, who is also the Cacique, “You can have as much as you want for 1000 pesetas down and a third of the produce. Don Calve is anxious that the land shall support the peons.” Like bloody hell, he is 1 “So —nothing from nothing leaves no-sum at all, and there really is no need for terrible language.” Of course you want to know what put the Snarks in the same boat as widow Polowski and Manuelo. Mainly, I think, because they are common figures in everyman’s country. the Snarks have a moral astigmatism which translates generosity as extravagance; humanism as # sentimentality; ideals as impractical dreams'; ’and toleiance as the fro it door to th.- iun.jtic :>sylut?i. ■ ■:■■■. coater fiat t et on the ivitfonalj Soul. : . re is a little of the Snarks in each one o a.;. Their ext.,t. 'is part of the explanation of those little private fights that never were settled before the present big fre -forall started. Such small matters as the unchecked looting of whale oil; sporadic ' revolution in South America: Jew versus Arab in Palestine; -instability of French Government; world monopolies in chemicals, raw materials; syndicated news; chronic semi-starvation and insurrection in Spain; Moslem against Hindu; irreconcilable elements in the Balkans; divided Ireland; even Australian Oranges against N.Z. potatoes, and artificial scarcity in our own two-by-four back yard. In a world sense the Snarks are by wav of being the baser part of human consciousness—that embryo conscience that has never managed to grow up. They’re in the same galley with Manuelo, and" the Polish widow, and a whole lot more international figures who are preparing to step out on the world stage again as soon as the present Greatest Drama on Earth rings down the curtain. Last time' the Snarks appeared, you remember, they played Othello to Woodrow Wilson’s Desdemona, and strangled him with his own fourteen points. They will be there with the same brand of help for Winston Bull, Joe the Moujik, Gunhappy Sam, the Mandarin and select company of assistant fire-walkers when they present their new and monumental “World Review” presently. There is talk of putting on an : investigation of Hitler, Mussolini, and their supporting cast as a curtain raiser. It might be at least as valuable ’ for you and I and Mrs Everybody to find out what is to be known about the Snarks with a view to having them strangled in suitable company at the same show. We could start the investigation in' our own back yard with the like of the potato-citrus business. Then Manuelo, the widow, and other ordinary folk elsewhere might be encouraged to do likewise. By the time we all finish that it may be that we won’t have much time left to see the curtain-raiser let alone the great World Review. Anyway, we mightn't have much occasion for the review by then.