Pre-emptive homesickness

“The farther from Texas a Texan gets, the more Texan he becomes,” wrote Willie Morris. Even though he was from Mississippi, he got that right. He’d spent some time at the University of Texas in Austin before moving to New York, writing books, and editing Harpers magazine. After a few years in Massachusetts, I developed a taste for something I had disdained while growing up: country western music. C&W for short.

All that “born to lose” and “your cheatin’ heart” music, I’d concluded, contributed to the pervasive sense of depression and defeatism I experienced in the part of rural Texas in which I grew up. I wanted nothing to do with that. Give me jazz and folk music and rock. Then, after a few years, I began to re-discover Ray Charles and Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn and Willie Nelson. Next thing I knew, I’d begun to care, for the first time, if Oklahoma beat Texas in the Cotton Bowl. Suddenly, I could be brought almost to tears by hearing Dolly Parton sing about how she would always love me. Yee gads! Football? Country music? Thousands of miles from Texas, I had, in fact, become more Texan than I’d ever been.

Now, although I’m living in an entirely different hemisphere, I don’t feel so distant from “the old country.” The world is tighter because of this – the Internet and email – and because of air travel and cheap long distance phone cards. On so many different levels, everything is interconnected now and we’re only beginning to realize how profoundly that is so. I’m in Australia and one of every 20 Australians is living somewhere else, many in the United States, some in Texas. I wonder if it’s all different now, or if some of them have begun to develop new-found appreciation for Slim Dusty?

For sure they have to miss the sound of kookaburras. Just thinking about a time when I might be living somewhere else and unable to occasionally hear their loud, racous, insane, laughter-like sounds gives me a taste of what a nephew of mine refers to as “pre-emptive homesickness.”

Now there’s a term that could form the basis of a country and western song: homesickness for something you haven’t left yet.

Oh, wait… I think it’s already been done. I vaguely remember a C&W song that says “I miss you already and you’re not even gone.” Drat! My song-writing career is over before it could soar.

Hmmm. Maybe not. Let’s see... in the key of G… “Before I got started…”

The smell is not Chanel...

To my friend, Bill: Thanks for not accepting uncritically the email headed: ‘From Ed Chenel, A police officer in Australia.’

This not-dated email claims to offer statistics on what’s happened Down Under now that it has been ‘12 months since gun owners in Australia were forced by a new law to surrender 640,381 personal firearms to be destroyed by our own government, a program costing Australia taxpayers more than $500 million dollars.’ Ed Chenel, if there is such a person, claims that in the first year homicides increased 6.2%, assaults were 9.6% more frequent, and armed robberies shot up 44%.

His point: ‘The Australian experience speaks for itself. Guns in the hands of honest citizens save lives and property and, yes, gun-control laws affect only the law-abiding citizens. Take note Americans, before it's too late!’

A quick search of the Internet’s Australian sites reveals that this email has been circulating, unchanged and apparently unquestioned by touch-not-my-gun folk, since at least as far back as Dec. 7, 2002, when members of a forum were asking, as you did, ‘Can this be true?’

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Ed Chenel email wasn’t accurate in 2002. Charged with keeping national crime statistics, this government agency reported: ‘Between 2001 and 2002, the proportion of murders, attempted murders, kidnapping/abductions and robberies that involved a weapon decreased.’ Note: DECREASED.

Two researchers, Mouzos and Rushforth, published in the January 2004 journal of the Australian Institute of Criminology a study entitled, ‘Firearm Related Deaths in Australia, 1991-2001.’ They found a 47% decrease in the numbers of firearm-related deaths during those ten years.

In April of 2005, using data submitted by police in Australian states and territories, the National Armed Robbery Monitoring Program found that more than twice as many people reporting armed robberies faced knives (46% of victims) as faced guns (20% of victims).

My web search of Australian sites showed me that the Chenel piece smells, but not like Chanel.

Finally, it occurred to me that this email might be something long since identified as bogus, so I went to the www.snopes.com web site and typed the supposed author’s name into their site-search engine. Bingo!

This much-circulated email has been well known for quite some time as untrustworthy. The Snopes site says: ‘The piece quoted above leads the reader to believe that much of the Australian citizenry owned handguns until their ownership was made illegal and all firearms owned by ‘law-abiding citizens’ were collected by the government through a buy-back program in 1997. This is not so. Australian citizens do not (and never did) have a constitutional right to own firearms — even before the 1997 buyback program, handgun ownership in Australia was restricted to certain groups, such as those needing weapons for occupational reasons, members of approved sporting clubs, hunters, and collectors.’

The guns banned after 1997 were primarily semi-automatics and pump-action weapons and ownership of those is allowed in some cases.

Writing in January 2004, the fraud-busters note that ‘the Australia-wide percentage of homicides committed with firearms is now lower than it was before the gun buy-back program, and lower than it has been at any point during the past ten years.’

Maybe that’s one of the reasons this American living in Australia feels safer here than at home. Take note Americans, before it’s too late.