Sidebar: It's Gettin' Uglier Down Under

I’ve hardly said anything about a recent “holiday” (vacation) I took with a friend to merry old England and the rest of the British Isles—that is, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. It was one of the top items on my “Bucket List.” Recent events, however, bring to mind something that happened when we were a bus load of people from all over the world stuck together, sharing a common bond for almost two weeks traveling the British/Irish countryside.

The national makeup of our group was mostly Australian, with a few Americans and Canadians thrown in. My friend and I got to calling them the Ugly Australians, like the Ugly Americans. It started with my friend who had an experience where a very large Australian fellow traveler physically pushed then clumsily pulled her out of a lift (elevator) along with her luggage because he wanted to accompany his wife who was already in it. He didn’t ask her, he just did it. He totally ignored her, unapologetic, as she fell over her luggage. For the frequent times he saw us later during the trip, he acted like it never happened. It briefly paralyzed my friend’s enjoyment of the trip in her angst and anger toward this man; as we experienced some other questionable conduct we came to appreciate the appropriateness of that nasty epithet about arrogant American tourists, only this time it wasn’t us. It surprised me because before I retired I worked with Australians in my position and found them to be warm, friendly and self-effacing.

Suddenly now more meaning has been brought to that expression the Ugly Australian with the exposure of the corrupt business practices of Rupert “Fox News” Murdoch:

Reporters at a Murdoch-owned newspaper in Britain hacked into a 13-year-old kidnapping victim's voicemail to get tabloid gossip, even deleting messages to make room for new messages. Their actions led her parents and police to believe she was alive. But she wasn't—she'd been murdered.

It appears Murdoch's reporters regularly hacked into the cell phone accounts of prominent politicians, celebrities, and crime victims. And news just broke that they may have even hacked the phones of 9/11 victims.  (from an e-mail by Daniel Mintz of Moveon.org)

Our experience with the Australian tourists may have just been something anecdotal that could be chalked up to that occasional bad traveling episode. But Rupert? In a way, we see what greed can do through him—and I don’t care what those Ayn-Randian Gordon Gekko disciples say about the “good” of greed—in the greater scheme of things, it’s not just ultimately nasty, sleazy, corrupting and destructive….it’s ugly.