outback to jungle

Musings on experiences of volunteering in Papua New Guinea with some gratuitous domestic social and public comment

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

problem of the hanging participle

I just picked up my hanging participle in the Blog about David - "on arriving (we saw that) two other friends..." I get bothered by the participialisation of the news and so I try to avoid the same type of grammatical offence myself but somehow it just slipped through in the way this computer regularly mis-spells words.
Individualism and Nationalism are becoming more problematic for this developing nation. On the one hand there is pride in the idea of nation but it comes second (I think) to loyalty to tradition and wontok and province. For effective civil society to operate, citizens have to give up something of themselves and this may take generations of negotiations to work out what is essential to the being of the individual - whether highlandism and the rituals and ceremonies and stiories of the culture are more important than the wider collective common good of the nation which you hardly identify with on account of the still undeveloped communication naetwork. As for my own nation, I watched Australian news on the TV this morning and I see it reinforced that the TV is the Colosseum of today: mass entertainment to keep the lumpenproletariate quiet for the purpoises of strengthening the power of the ruling elite. One "celebritiy" as they like to be known these days takled about rattling cages on her programme. As if. The only cages they rattle are those of mean minded petty rogues who are too dumb to do rip off the big white collar shonks and power brokers.

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