On Your Bicycle

When I was a boy my two friends and I were fascinated, like all boys, with car engines. We read stories and watched films where brave men in clean overalls drove fast cars even faster, and clever men in dirty overalls repaired and tuned those cars. Car engines could be taken apart, we learnt, fascinated, and quickly put back together, better than new, a few tweaks here and there making the engine sound even better, run even faster.

And we, of course, not having cars to dismantle and tune, turned to our bicycles, in our imaginations sleek racing machines. And we would oil them and polish them and pump the tires. And then one day we decided that we needed to do what they did with the engines. Take apart the bicycles, every piece, spread them out on a clean cloth on a work bench, clean and polish each one and then re-assemble to make even better bicycles.

So we began, and the wheels came off, and then the chain, so far so good, and then we started to unfasten the wheel hubs with their ball bearings, and the gears, and the brakes, and, not knowing what we were doing, how the bicycle was actually functioning, things began to go wrong. Ball bearings, previously invisible, would, when released, suddenly spill across the bench and onto the floor. Small bolts and springs, their presence unsuspected, when a nut was unscrewed would go flying across the workshop. Small washers, handled with clumsy fingers would suddenly disappear down a crack in the concrete.

After a few hours of this our previously functioning, though unglamorous, bicycles were reduced to a jumbled spread of unrecognizable parts. We panicked, and hastily tried to start putting them back together, surely we could remember, this goes with that, that goes in there. But mysteriously this spring could no longer be packed back into that space, this pin no longer fitted that hole, and where on earth was the screw that used to hold all this together? We managed to pack it back together somehow, but there was a pile of bits and pieces left over that we thought didn't matter. Unfortunately the bicycles not only didn't run faster now, they wouldn't run at all. In the end we had to get adult help to sort out the mess we had made.

Well, the metaphor has been a long time reaching its punch line, but my regular readers will already have guessed the ending. George Bush and Tony Blair and John Howard had watched the movies about how their elders had gone to war in 1939. Had seen Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill and John Curtin defeat terrible enemies, free prisoners, restore democracies, rebuild economies, make the world a better place after 1945. They had seemed to be heroes in white suits overcoming great odds, and George and Tony and Johnny thought they could be just like them. But they had forgotten, or never knew, that Roosevelt and Churchill and Curtin were really the men in oily overalls who knew what they were doing and worked hard and skillfully at saving the world.

And now we are faced with a Middle East that was dismantled by ignorant children who didn't know what they were doing and have no idea how to put it back together. We can say to them 'on your bike'. But where are the adults who can help sort out the mess they've made?

Don't forget, if you would like to take a look back down the road I've been traveling for some three years now, the rag bag I carry on my journey, with all of my recent writing in it, is here in the archives of http://www.blognow.com.au/mrpickwick.

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