Surely the FBI could have saved itself a lot of time and trouble if it had rung our very own Alan Jones, the visionary broadcaster, to find out who was behind the Boston bombing.

Possessing powers beyond those of mortal men, Alan knew instinctively who had done it: left-wing students. The carnage had barely been cleared away before he was on breakfast television to reveal the ghastly truth behind the attacks. It springs from those sinks of terrorist conspiracy, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which, believe it or not, are quite close to Boston.

''I wouldn't be surprised if this was a conspiracy amongst students, left-wing radical students in Boston, and I think we have to think also very seriously here about our own student numbers,'' he explained.

This warning - this tocsin, dare I say it - must not be ignored. The pursed lips, the knowing frown, the ruddy cheeks, the matching tie and hanky set, all indicate a thinker of great purpose and wisdom. And there was more: ''We're very keen to have foreign students pay the way of universities in this country without a lot of discernment about who comes in," he added.

Quite right. There they are: your hordes of illegal, disease-carrying, Islamic foreigners again. I'm still outraged by those wicked invaders who stormed ashore at Geraldton the other day from a boat cunningly labelled "Deutsche Bank", a sinister ruse if ever there was. Clearly they will stop at nothing.

Unkind people might think that Alan is a bit low on marbles these days, or even that he's lost them altogether, but I cannot agree. He and his wonderful radio station, 2GB, are all that stand between us and the abyss.

No more patronising Australian jokes about Kiwi sheep-shaggers, then. Turn your back and our trans-Tasman cousins have made a giant leap forward to legalise same sex marriage.

The bill went through the Parliament in Wellington on Wednesday by 77 votes to 44, supported by the conservative Prime Minister, John Key, and seven of the country's eight political parties. The Labour MP who introduced it, Louisa Wall, was justifiably over the moon. ''Nothing could make me prouder to be a New Zealander," she said.

Right on. It continues a fine Kiwi tradition of social reform. New Zealand was the first country to give women the vote, in 1893.

By most counts there are now 13 nations that recognise gay marriage. Britain, France and Germany are about to, and more and more individual American states are following suit. In Australia we hang back, apparently terrified that allowing it will bring the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah upon us.

Every poll I have seen suggests that Australians are comfortable with gay marriage, by a large majority. It is our political leaders who do not have the guts to get on with it.

In the way of things, Anzac Day has pretty much become Anzac Week. As I get older I grow more melancholy at the thought of it. The remembrance of courage and mateship is good and right, but I fear, increasingly, that the flags and bands and florid speechifying serve to conceal the horrors of war from younger generations.

"Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori," wrote the Roman poet Horace. "It is sweet and proper to die for your country." It was all right for him: he died in bed at the age of 56. That ringing aphorism, though, has been flaunted ever since to exalt the slaughter of young men in battle. It took centuries for another writer to explode the myth. Wilfred Owen, the great British poet of the First World War, took the words for the title of a searing poem about a soldier gassed on the Western Front in 1917:

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

Owen himself was killed in France on November 4, 1918, just a week - almost to the hour - before the Armistice. I think of his poem when April 25 comes around and I hear some blowhard civic worthy blathering on about the "supreme sacrifice" or "the fallen" or "our glorious dead".

Most of them haven't a clue what they are talking about. There is nothing glorious about death in war. I saw it as a correspondent in Vietnam and know that it is brutal and infinitely disgusting. The truth is hideous.

It is to have your guts ripped out by shrapnel in No Man's Land, or to slowly drown in a torpedoed warship, or to be burnt alive in a shot-down bomber or - in our own time - to be blown to pieces by a jungle booby-trap or an improvised explosive device on some road in Afghanistan. No glory in that.

And soldiers do not die with a patriotic slogan on their lips. My late father-in-law, who fought with the Black Watch at Monte Cassino in 1944 and later with the Australian Army in Malaya, always maintained that a man's last words were most often a cry for the mother who bore him. No glory there either. Only unbearable sorrow.

There must be ways of telling our children all this, but I do not know what they are. I despair that our political leaders these days so willingly lie about their reasons for committing us to futile wars and attempt to justify the inevitable deaths with obscene banalities about "fulfilling the mission".

It is the ultimate betrayal.

Mike Carlton