In late March, when the country was in lockdown and football matches cancelled, a demographer predicted a baby boom. “What else can you do when you can’t watch the footy on Friday night?” she quipped to a Murdoch tabloid.

Even as a joke the idea was dispiriting. Was it really only a choice between ball sports on TV or in bed? I could think of plenty of things to do besides. Something was seriously askew. I looked fretfully over my life for the root of my problem, no pun intended, and it became glaringly obvious. I am the product of a rat-bag breeding course that will soon become punitively high-cost, a “low-priority course”, as defined by the Federal Government, or “vandal studies” as dubbed by a Murdoch broadsheet, which can always be trusted to spell out what Prime Minister Scott Morrison is really thinking.

Yes, I’m a humanities graduate, which makes me dangerously prone, apparently, to waking up in the middle of the night frothing with the urge to pummel the statue of a dead white male. I confess: what I did on Friday nights in lockdown would never qualify me for Team Australia. I scoured the book shelves for the extremists who corrupted me during my years of vandal studies, who lured me down the shadowy path of critical-thinking, who tempted me with their charismatic word-play and hypnotising imagery, who lead me to believe that living for art was better than prostrating oneself to money.

I picked their manifestos from the shelf, lay on the couch, and read. Some of these radicals are the luminaries of the Western Canon, which must be confusing for humanities-haters. Take James Joyce. Well, actually, I find him hard to take. As an undergraduate, I limped through Dubliners. During lockdown I decided to tackle A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

I soon saw the error of my ways. The protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, a thinly disguised Joyce, struggles with his faith and concludes: “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use – silence, exile and cunning.”

Only the rich can be trusted to study such truly heretical things.