Goat Friday

Our goatly aspirant for this Friday is a blast from the past, who for some strange reason suddenly came to mind the other day. Most likely it was the theme of goatery that suggested this person. On the other hand, the comparison is probably rather unkind ... to goats, I mean.

Some years ago I went along to a meeting of the Philosophy Society at a ‘prestigious’ university in Melbourne. They’d advertised a speaker on abuses in psychiatric institutions (electric shock therapy, unlawful restraint, etc.). This seemed an intriguing topic, and wine and cheese were, of course, an added sweetener to be served after the proceedings.

Our speaker – I don’t recall the name – carried a full head of hair. By which I mean: hair falling halfway down his back, a wholly extravagant beard and whiskers, etc. Here hair, there hair, hair everywhere! Not that there’s anything wrong with that...

It turned out that he happened to be a member of the Church of Scientology. Not that there’s anything wrong with that... An unadvertised purpose of the meeting seemed to be to recruit suitable volunteers for the cause of ending psychiatric abuses.

The primary purpose, however, seemed to be for this man to give a withering dissertation on his view of life, people and everything. The matter of the cause seemed lost amid his copious condemnation of people, customs and practices which, in his view, were absolutely undesirable.

The objective of the rant apparently was to discourage anyone who did not measure up from volunteering their services to the cause. He told us he especially didn’t want anyone who imbibed in any measure any form of drug, including of course ‘legitimate’ drugs such as alcohol and tobacco. I don’t recall if stimulants such as coffee, etc., were included in the index of proscribed substances.

At the point of his denouncement of imbibers of alcoholic substances, I noticed the person who was the keeper-of-the-wine-and-cheese surreptitiously push the wine-cask further under his seat. A dry evening seemed assured.

At some stage our professor berated all young men who artificially removed their facial hair, i.e., anyone who shaved their faces. Invoking Freud, he insisted that such men were lackeys of the authoritarian, patriarchal structure, because in shaving their faces clean of facial hair they were deferring utterly to their fathers and/or elder males. Thus have they established their absolute inability for original thought or for dissent from authoritarian paradigms (which, it seems, were responsible for those psychiatric abuses).

As most of his audience were fresh-faced, clean-shaven undergraduates (no women, by the way), this must have went down a real treat. For my part, I felt something like disgust or anger towards the speaker on behalf of the younger blokes there, who couldn’t have helped feeling demeaned by this sort of treatment.

After the maledictions came question time, which elicited two enquiries, one of them from me. I don’t remember exactly what my question was, but it was to the effect that I thought our speaker was excluding so much talent from the cause with his absurd and pedantic proscriptions.

My question was more or less fobbed off with a grudging reference to something-or-other I should read, quite possibly by L. Ron Hubbard, in order to get my answer. Or maybe it was Orwell – every other crank with an axe to grind seems to invoke Orwell! Well anyway, perhaps he just couldn’t be bothered talking to people.

The meeting ended desultorily, with no wine or cheese consumed. In fact, the haste with which the gathering dispersed indicated that the evening had been less than a success for all concerned. Especially for those poor souls suffering abuse in psychiatric institutions.

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Indigo Girls
(from Closer To Fine)
I went to see the doctor of philosophy
With a poster of Rasputin and a beard down to his knee
He never did marry or see a B-grade movie
He graded my performance, he said he could see through me
I spent four years prostrate to the higher mind, got my paper
And I was free