Of course the real John Howard would never attend anything so culturally significant as a folk festival. For heavens sake, there is all that anarchist type stuff there where people actually think that money is not the most important thing in the world and that the refugees arriving from overseas are not nasty terrorists but scared and desperate human beings seeking a new life in a land of plenty. The sort of people who actually think about things and don't believe everything the Murdoch press tell them to believe. Why would he want to talk to people who won't grovell in front of him and say he is wonderful.

John would not dream of mixing with that sort of person, crikey some of them even speak funny. Although at least 2 people there spoke with an American accent which I am sure John is extremely comfortable with. Interestingly both were poets and I am sure John would have turned in his grave, if he was dead, when he heard their poems. Dick Warwick, disconcertingly pronounced War-Wick, presented a number of gentle and nostalgic poems in the cowboy idiom then on the last day he presented a lengthy poem that basically slammed George W in a way that has been rarely heard from Americans in Australia. The Green Man estimates that it was no stunt. He was pallid and drawn when he left the stage, clearly he felt grief stricken and betrayed by a country he loves dearly.

Who would have thought this kind and gentle man from Idaho was a terrorist but clearly he must be because George W knowingly informed us that anyone who did not support him was a de-facto, if not a real, terrorist.

Anyway on the photo. This is a bronze statue cast recently which gained some notoriety. There has been a suggestion that John Howard took us into Iraq, in part, because he had always fancied the notion of being a war time Prime Minister. Hence the “digger” outfit he is wearing. The Green Man would normally not be comfortable with a parody of a person’s size, the uniform being that of a man of greater stature, however in this instance he prefers to look on it as a statement of Johns integrity and moral stature rather than his physical stature.

Each of the plastic hearts you see surrounding it contained a message of grief or compassion or empathy for the thousands who have suffered, one way or another, from the divisive, isolationist or military policies of the current government.