I'm always grateful to learn a new word, as I did last night. I had the TV on while preparing dinner, so I couldn't be sure I heard what I heard, but a bit of Googling confirmed that I did indeed hear that word*. The word is: foeticide. It occurred in a report on sex-selective abortions in India. As you could guess, the female unborn are being aborted at much higher rates than males in certain cultures, such as in India. This has always been one of my (theoretical) debating points with the pro-choice crowd: why complain about this? After all, we all know that a foetus isn't a human being, so why should you care if so-called 'female' foetuses are being aborted by preference? Surely that also represents part of the right to choose?
So why haven't I heard this word before? My Googling seems to indicate that it's used almost exclusively in the context of these sex-selective abortions. Could it possibly be that some people are using it to convey an insulated, negative connotation - which, for them at least, is not at all conveyed by the usual term 'abortion'? I don't know about you, but 'abortion' always makes me think of sunshine, lollipops, rainbows and unicorns.
...because I've just found myself agreeing with Dr. Clive Hamilton. Head of the back-to-the-bronze-age thinktank The Australia Institute, he is a frequent butt of these pages, but today he has an op-ed in the Age, over which I find myself nodding in broad agreement. His basic point is, why do we seem to have no comeback against offensive advertising, his prime example being the fcuk brandname? Here in Melbourne, the biggest single piece of advertising in the city is a fcuk hoarding; I should be grateful that it's out in the desolate West, and you really only see it when you're taking the road to or from the airport.
Decent people have to suffer in silence, knowing that if a complaint were ever raised, some sniggering gel-headed 'creative' called Adam or Brett would respond: "if you're offended by it, hey, that's your problem". Some time ago, a young woman in England, attending a country fair, was arrested for the crime of wearing a t-shirt which said "Bollocks to Blair". Presumably, if it had said "fcuk" that would have been OK.
So good on Dr. Clive for speaking up on this matter. Advertising of this kind inevitably suffers from the law of diminishing returns, but the rest of us have to live with the grimy mess left behind - the high-tide mark of a sewer overflow, that you never quite completely wash away. In my own neighbourhood, the epitome of decent, old-school middle-class Melbourne, our main shopping strip is now overlooked by a huge billboard for a brothel (in another, less salubrious suburb), which screams "Got the urge? Do it now!" Sometimes I feel like I'm in Biffworld.
On another matter of decency, I note that today's Age also has an article about Indonesian displeasure over Australia's decision to grant asylum to a number of Papuans: a cartoon has been published, which shows Howard and Downer as two copulating dogs (in a padded room somewhere, Michael Leunig is probably muttering 'I wish I'd thought of that'). In the public interest, the Age has of course reproduced this cartoon - although the printing is so bad you can barely make it out. Now if only I could think of some other cartoons that might be considered too offensive to publish in the Age...
Hotel Sorrento, by lefty agitpropper Hannie Rayson, is supposedly one of the classics of the modern Australian theatre. However, in its current revival, even the Age's Helen Thomson finds it somewhat dusty (no link yet):
"16 years on, its focus on Australian national identity seems like the last gasp of a now nearly irrelevant preoccupation...a faded sepia version of an affectionately remembered photograph of where we were in 1990".
Helen Thomson, we must recall, is a reviewer normally so generous - especially to pets like Rayson - that if you set fire to a bucket of dung on stage, she would find something good to say about it ("searing indictment of Bush's America ...passionate...incendiary..etc.").
Readers will remember that, when George W. Bush visited the Australian Parliament in October 2003, our own Man of Steel, John Howard, had to join the scrum that physically prevented Greens Senators Bob Brown and Kerry Nettle from harrassing the President. Apparently, when Tony Blair addressed the Parliament yesterday, Bob Brown was among those queuing up to meet and greet him. Surely Tony's hands are as deeply incarnadined with innocent Iraqi blood as the Texan warmonger's? And where was Kerry Nettle? Busy printing t-shirts, perhaps.
When I went looking for an online photo of the 2003 incident mentioned above, I failed to find one, but found instead this priceless image, now safely deposited for posterity as a screenshot in the Cuckoo Swiss bank deposit box. Apparently the Calcutta Telegraph thinks Bob Brown really is, er, brown, and that must be Kerry Nettle in the chador next to him, which is only to be expected, if the Greens ever get their hands on Foreign Policy.
For once, ACTU Secretary Greg Combet and I agree on something. He has delivered a dire warning to the Mainstream Media that they should ease up on their obsessive 24/7 wall-to-wall reporting of the AWB inquiry, and cover a few other issues for a change, like Howard's workplace laws, which come into effect today. Nice to see that even someone from their own side is willing to finally come out and admit that this AWB-mania is tiresome and unproductive. (Note: I saw this on the ABC last night, but, funnily enough, cannot find it reported online. So feel free to disbelieve me, or join me in suspecting something more sinister).
PM John Howard has apparently 'admitted' he would lose a plebiscite on Australia's deployment of troops in Iraq. Firstly, you can't 'admit' to a future deed or event - I can't 'admit' I will eat muesli for breakfast tomorrow, even though I probably will. I can concede that I might eat muesli. On the other hand, I might die in my sleep, or opt for raisin toast. Bad news for journalists: words actually mean something, and different words mean different things.
Secondly, John knows that a 'plebiscite', supposing we had such things, would not be the same as an opinion poll. There's always a proportion of the electorate which will respond more conservatively to an actual election - where their choice has consequences - than they will to an inconsequential opinion poll.
He said he accepted there was a lot of criticism of the Government's decision and if there was a vote "I would probably lose the vote", a conclusion supported by the straw poll Jon Faine took of the crowd outside the ABC's temporary Federation Square studio.
Oh well, that settles it. A straw poll taken amongst a gaggle of Jon Faine groupies. Those troops are as good as gone.
Expect the moonbat Friends of the ABC to go jihad over the news that the Government is abolishing the 'worker'-elected Board position, currently held by Comrade Ramona Koval. Security staff at the Ultimo headquarters have been warned to look out for Volvo station wagons left unattended in the area, or behaving suspiciously, especially if they bear any of the following stickers: Free Tibet, Not Happy John, Amnesty International, Uniting Church. As for Comrade Koval, it will be interesting to see, once her term expires, if there are any more leaks of confidential boardroom matters to Media Watch.
My joke in the previous post about needing to 'sex up' the lagging Australian Wheat Board enquiry was truer than I realized. I learn from Tim Blair that Media Watch has found out an ALP staffer phoning in a fake question to a Kim Beazley talkback about her concerns - as just another ordinary young voter - about AWB. Fantastic. The fact that they have to fake up a 'concerned voter' proves, if proof were needed, that this issue has absolutely no traction in voterland. The ABC/Fairfax will be running their 'AWB scandal watch' right up to the day Howard wins the next election.
My apologies for the poverty of posts lately. There's only so many times you can get into a lather over the latest fatuity from Radio National; the Age seems to be just treading water during the Commonwealth Games; even the AWB scandal-that-isn't seems to have gone quiet - maybe they'll have to photoshop an image of John Howard bare-chested and waving a handgun around. In the meantime, they're scraping the bottom of the op-ed barrel. Unlike professional journalists, I can't just beat up a story when I need to fill a quiet day - and even the pros seemed to have stopped bothering. Not even the latest antics of Nest favourite Azlan McLennan - who bids fair to become the Peter Hore of contemporary art - can raise much of a flutter.
Actually, I take that back: let's have another look at Azlan. The normally sensible Australian writes that McLennan's playschool agitprops have been "censored" three times in the past two years. Let's see: his shopfront display about evil Israel was painted out when the City Council that had funded it actually bothered to find out what they were spending ratepayers' money on. Then his posters about wannabe jihadi Joseph Terrence Thomas (subsequently convicted) were quickly removed from bus and tram stops when the company which had paid to put them there - as an 'art' project - bothered to apprise themselves of the content.
So that's two cases where patrons exercised their right to change their mind about the art they were paying for. Not exactly censorship, is it? The third case is presumably the removal from public display of Azlan's partly-burned Australian flag, by two policemen, although it's not clear what grounds they were acting on. I believe Azlan has got his flag back. I'm prepared to grant that 0.1 points. Oh, and if you want to sign a petition supporting young Azlan - a U.S.-born Muslim, by the way - please be my guest. (Be sure to read the comments).
The official version of Multiculturalism wished on us by our betters in the bureaucracy, academia, leftwing thinktanks and the commentariat - most of whom only ever meet a member of an ethnic minority when they're getting a takeaway home delivered - is so dreary, that it's often a surprise to be reminded how delightful the reality on the ground can be.
I found myself in search of a new barber, my old one having done a mysterious bunk over Christmas, after a relationship of 16 years. I thought the shop of 'Vince and Dom' looked promising, tucked away in a part of Melbourne's central district that is so unfashionable that the rents are obviously still low enough to enable something as unprofitable as a barbershop. As I stepped in, I found a small crowded shop, with absolutely no attempt at decor, and four chairs, all of them occupied. The four haircutters at work were (1) a young Chinese woman, not long in the country judging by her very rudimentary English, (2) a young Italian man, with the large soulful eyes of Armand Assante, (3) an Italian man in his 60s, and (4) a young Greek woman, of the classic, extroverted, friendly, brassy 'wog' type.
Seated was another older Italian man, happily cradling a very new, sleeping, Asian baby. At first I wondered what I had stumbled into, but there was no mistaking the happy vibe of this place. It was like a big family Sunday dinner. The cutters were constantly talking to each other, and joking with their clients. When the Chinese woman finished with her client, she gathered up her baby, with much cooing and many endearments from her colleagues - the man who had been nursing was another of the barbers. By this time, I was in the chair of Armand Assante, who didn't hesitate to leave me in order to help the Chinese woman out of the doorway with her pram.
By way of repartee, I asked Armand to make me look like George Clooney. "Ahh..", he rolled his dark Mediterranean eyes, "to have his women..." In the end, he decided that I looked even better than George Clooney. At least I'm sure George has never had a better haircut. "Hope to see you again", said Armand. He will.
One story I'll be following with interest - and which will probably remain invisible in the Australian mainstream media - is the release by the US government of thousands of documents from Iraqi state archives: Michelle Malkin is on the case. In related developments, I believe that Sandy Berger has been spotted at a Gap outlet in Washington, buying up bigtime on XXL cargo pants.
One story guaranteed to prick my interest is when someone comes forward claiming to be the hitherto-anonymous subject of some famous, iconic image of modern history. One such image was Alfred Eisenstaedt's famous photograph of a sailor kissing a nurse in the middle of wild V-J celebrations in Times Square. When Life magazine set out to track down that sailor and nurse decades later, they found no shortage of applicants.
Again, on the osculatory theme, Robert Doisneau's 1950 shot of two young lovers kissing on a crowded Paris footpath drew several claims for compensation from couples claiming to be those lovers, when the image became a best-selling poster.
In the less labially-fixated culture of Australia, our iconic image of post-war rejoicing is a wonderful piece of movie footage of a man dancing ecstatically, but decorously, down the middle of a city street. Many have come forward, claiming to be that Dancing Man.
So when I read that someone had come forward claiming to be the hooded prisoner in the most famous of the Abu Ghraib photographs, a little bell tinkled in the distance. Ali Shalal Qaissi apparently even uses the photo on his business card, and no, I don't know what his business is. The New York Times broke this story, and other papers followed suit, but Salon.com has come up with evidence that Qaissi is not the man in the photo (hat tip: LGF).
...to anyone finding their way here via the kind words of The Currency Lad. (I first knew something was up when my site meter rocketed into double-digits). In return, I should say that for as long as I've been reading blogs, I've regarded Currency Lad as one of the best online essayists of the Anglophone blogosphere. I remain mystified by his ability to pull a deeply erudite, cogent essay on history or politics seemingly from behind his ear, the way other people might produce a rollyourown. In the meantime, I'm making enquiries about how to get a screenshot bronzed.
I'm sure I will not be the only one to note the exquisite irony that Dr. Tim Flannery has addressed a rapturous audience on the subject of global warming, in London's St. Paul's Cathedral. What better place for members of a new religion to gather? I also note his statement that as he flies around the world, he sees, to his horror, the lights of energy-hungry Europe and Asia blazing below. Do they have business class on solar-powered dirigibles, I wonder?
(And if Dr. Flannery is so distressed by the sight of cities lit up in the darkness beneath him, he might charter a flight over North Korea. That ought to cheer him up.)
If revenge is a dish best served cold, it is enhanced even more by a vinaigrette of gentle sarcasm. John Howard normally eschews sarcasm, which makes it all the more effective when he does employ it, as he did in a recent radio interview. On the prospect of action by the UN to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, he had this to say:
"This will be an interesting test of the United Nations. People who are critical of George Bush, and myself and Tony Blair and others because we didn't keep endlessly going back to the United Nations in 2003 now have an opportunity to see how effectively the United Nations will work."
Again with the Julia Gillard! Can't you just let it go?! Yeah, sure, just after this. I can't get out of my head the one tiny tell-all moment in that Australian Story profile (see posts below), the thing that every documentary maker dreams of getting. We follow Julia into Kim Beazley's office for a brief conference. (Kim, incidentally, remains seated while Julia stands at his desk.) Despite the businesslike tone and stagey bonhomie, the tension is palpable, although it might be charitable to ascribe this to the presence of a camera crew. As she prepares to leave, there is some uncertainty over a file, and who should deal with the - apparently fairly minor - matter it involves. For a few seconds, the file is passed back and forth between them, until Julia declares that she will handle it, and takes the file. Beazley's dilatoriness is all there in this little miniature: Julia's tone, as she takes the file, is that of the long-suffering wife who, having assigned her husband a task, acknowledges that he won't do it properly anyway, and snatches it back from him.
Dr. Germaine Greer has got her ample bloomers in a knot over a commercial for a Holden ute. The commercial shows a blokey type being interrogated in bed by his (not bad) wife about his 'fantasy'. It is, he tells her, the Holden ute. 'Is that all?', she queries, underwhelmed by his lack of imagination. 'Yeah', he replies, somewhat evasively. We fade back to him in the ute, with the gorgeous Susie Wilks squirming and pouting in the passenger seat, while he makes a conspiratorial 'shhh' gesture. (That's Susie on the right, above, and that photo does her little justice).
Poor old Dr. Greer, so skilled in other areas of hermeneutics, has failed to read something as simple as a TV commercial. She obviously has no idea of who Susie Wilks is, and that the point of the ad depends on recognising her. Susie is a TV presenter of such breathtaking pulchritude that it verges on parody - she's the sort of woman, who can really only appear as a fantasy figure, especially for the kind of ordinary bloke in the ad. In short, it's a joke, Germaine.
Addenda: I also had to laugh when Dr. Greer asserted that 'sexist' ads like this would not be allowed in 'Europe' - "They wouldn't dare". Hmmm. Next time Channel 7 runs one of those compilations of the 'hottest, adults-only commercials from Europe that we can't show you in prime time', I'll make a tape and send it to the good Doctor.
And I'd like to know what this popular-culture expert would make of the current commercials for another automobile, the Nissan Tiida, featuring actress Kim Cattrall in her Sex in the City persona, as a woman capable of achieving orgasm from the act of driving a car. Come to think of it, Greer would probably approve of something that enables women to achieve orgasm without male intervention. But only as long as it was, maybe, a petrol-electric hybrid. With a solar panel.
My apologies for the third Julia Gillard-related post in a row, but, hey, you go with what's happening. Julia's call for structural reform in the ALP might be enough to divert the attention of jaded hacks for a day or two, but just how much real change could one effect in the ALP with this kind of tinkering? Surely, at the end of the day, you will still have the large ideological blocs which make up the membership: you might as well try to stop continental drift by concreting over the fault lines. The ALP has often reminded me of the kind of governments that prevailed during the Interregnum in England (1649-1660), the so-called "government of saints". After an initially successful burst of reforming zeal, the various religious parties of government split and fractured because, when it came to building Heaven on Earth, everyone had their own, differing blueprint. The ALP is, in effect, a kind of secular religious party: everyone has a different road map to Utopia. Conservative parties, which tend to shun ideology, and to accept human nature and society pretty much as they are, find it easier to broadly agree within themselves.
Julia Gillard was indeed let off lightly in Australian Story on the matter of her possible leadership ambitions.
"If the leadership is open in the future, I would make a decision at that time."
So that's that, then. Now all Peter Costello has to do, next time he's being badgered about "ruling out" seeking the leadership of his party, is to repeat this simple formula, which has proved so satisfactory to the ABC on this occasion.
Still, old habits die hard. On this morning's Radio National Breakfast, Fran Kelly simply could not help herself. She described this part of the interview as Gillard "refusing to rule out" a leadership challenge.
ABC's Australian Story will be profiling Julia Gillard tomorrow night, and if the promo is any indication, the tone will be frankly adulatory. I have no real problem with this: there's room for this sort of 'soft' profile of political figures, though I wonder whether Philip Ruddock or Amanda Vanstone will be getting a similar vaseline-on-the-lens treatment anytime soon. I'll be interested to see how the question of Julia's leadership ambitions will be handled: again, from the promo, it looks like they get kid-glove, Barbara Walters handling.
Funny, isn't it? Because you'd be forgiven for thinking that there's a clause in the Australian Constitution which requires Peter Costello to make a lifetime-binding oath to foreswear ever-ever-ever seeking the leadership of his party, or of even entertaining any private opinion on the matter. This oath is to be renewed to the press every six months, or sooner if deemed necessary by any public-sector journalist faced with a slow-news day.
Here in Victoria, we've just been through a couple of weeks of 'leadership tensions' in the State Liberal opposition which were, from beginning to end, a complete confection of the local ABC office. It's a quaint journalistic convention, this 'rule out' gambit: the most empty-headed, wet-behind-the-ears cadet journalist is free to ask - in effect, to demand - of a Government minister that he 'rule out' any hypothetical course of action that said journalist cares to dream up. I wonder if it's as common in other political cultures.
Still, it's not too hard to understand why the public sector of the fourth estate treats the ALP so differently to the Coalition on this matter. Leaving aside the matter of bias, why would they need to manufacture stories of internecine brawling when the ALP dishes up the real thing so consistently? These beat-ups are also harder to manufacture on the ALP side because, let's face it, in the foreseeable future, what sane adult would actively seek the leadership of that party?
Hard on the heels of revelations that Tony Blair - shock horror - prayed while deliberating over the decision to join the war in Iraq, comes news that Simon Crean has attended a Buddhist prayer service, and the 'Catch the fire' ministry has performed a laying-on-of-hands on Victorian opposition leader Robert Doyle. (The latter service was performed by Pastor Danny Nalliah. Gee, that name rings a bell...wasn't there something...). It can only be a matter of time before the Democrats/Greens bid for the Satanist/Wiccan vote (if they haven't already).
I had planned to be just about the last person on the planet to write a review of Steven Spielberg's Munich, but now that I've finally seen this bizarre epic, I know that anything I could decently call a 'review' would have to run to many thousands of words, and I have no intention of subjecting my readers to that. But let me try to boil this down to a few hundred:
Munich is unquestionably an utter mess of a film, but one into which so much effort and creativity has been poured - obviously at fever pitch - that I stand in some kind of awe of it. Spielberg is a filmmaker I have often admired for his sheer dedication to getting films out, but this is a case where he and his writers definitely needed to spend a lot longer developing, pruning and refining the script.
Munich has enough material in it for at least three films, and one of Spielberg's problems is that, from moment to moment, he can't decide which film he is making. There's the quasi-documentary straight telling of the Munich massacre and its aftermath. Then there's the Frederick Forsyth drama of international intrigue and assassination. Then, in the third (or is it the fourth?) act, we spin off into a John Le Carre existential nightmare, where invisible assassins begin to effortlessly pick off the previously invincible hit-squad led by Avner (Eric Bana), and it's hinted that absolutely anyone, from the CIA and the KGB, to Mossad itself, might be responsible.
I first felt the film coming unmoored when, during the second assassination, the team wait to detonate a telephone bomb in a Paris apartment, where their target is alone, having just bid goodbye to his wife and daughter. As the team members momentarily look away, the daughter dashes back into the apartment to retrieve something. Will they realize this before they push the button? It's suspenseful, sure, but at this point, I felt the contract between the film and the audience was broken. We'd begun by watching a 'based on true events' story, opening with a sickeningly realistic depiction of the murder of the Israeli athletes: now we're suddenly into the slick but basically empty suspense set-piece that Spielberg does so well.
And so it goes on. One of the detours this film loses itself in, in fact in which it bogs down at the very end, is the psychological question of what a mission like this, of ruthless pursuit and assassination, with an ever-increasing toll of innocent bystanders, might do to the decent man commissioned to carry it out. Spielberg's answer to this is pat, predictable and unconvincing. When one of Avner's comrades tells him a story about an agent who so lost his nerve that he could never sleep in a bed again, and could only sleep in cupboards, the astute viewer knows that before the film ends, we will see Avner doing exactly this, and we do. But it's still an interesting question, and Spielberg inadvertently provides a different and more interesting answer, when he includes authentic television footage of some of the surviving Black September killers being interviewed shortly after Munich. These are men who carried out an horrific slaughter, and yet there isn't a cloud on their faces - they are happy, playful, relaxed. As Avner and his men watch, one remarks in disgust that they 'look like rock stars', and they do. How they do is a question that might have made an even more interesting film.
This post, like Munich itself, is already both too long, and far too short, but I can't end without a few words on the central problem for Spielberg, namely that both sides are attacking him for this film. His characters, both real-life and fictional, agonize and argue about the rights and wrongs of turning Europe into a private shooting gallery for extra-judicial assassinations. These scenes are among the worst, simply because, as rhetoric and dialogue, there is really nowhere for them to go: especially the earliest, in which Golda Meir gives Avner his assignment. When this long, talky scene ends, all the issues have been aired, but you feel the film hasn't moved forward one inch with its argument, if indeed it has one. And this, finally, is Spielberg's problem: these questions, for him, really are unanswerable, because a film-maker doesn't have to solve them, however much he might want to. In reality, statesmen, soldiers, security agents, do have to make these impossible choices between equally unattractive and dangerous options. In the wake of the massacre at Munich, there was no obvious right choice of action, only a range of more or less equally bad choices, including doing nothing, and this is what Spielberg and his writers seem to have missed.
In today's Age, Dennis Altman, Professor of Politics at La Trobe University, seeks to remind us that Christian fundamentalists in Australia are just as much a threat to our way of life as their Muslim counterparts. However, when it comes to providing a concrete example, all he can offer is (1) picketing of certain films by Christians (no recent notable examples spring to mind), and, wait for it, (2) "pray(ing) for rain every Mardi Gras". (The Prof is of course referring to Sydney's Gay Mardi Gras). Surely bringing about particular weather events by prayer is not just an abuse of free speech, but little short of terrorism itself.
The ALP has often been criticized, from all sides including its own, for its Byzantine structure of factions, branches and promotion, which leads in turn to an inability to promote people of real talent and diverse experience, instead of political hacks, timeservers, and people who happen to have the same surname as previous incumbents. Acres of print have been written on this subject, but I've never read a better, punchier, or more concise assessment than Matt Price's recent column in the Australian. In brief, he takes the case of David Fawcett, an outstanding candidate who was Federal member for Wakefield within a year of first fronting up to a Liberal office. Much of Matt's column is given over to a devastating analysis by former ALP numbers man Chris Schacht, of what would have happened to someone like Fawcett in the ALP. Read it all, as they say.
Television is a fickle medium. Barely a month ago, the Age's Michael Gawenda was gushing over the latest liberal wet-dream, A(merican)BC's Commander in Chief, starring Geena Davis as the feisty, caring POTUS. Now comes news that it has tanked. Well, gone into hiatus, which is the network equivalent of 'resigning to spend more time with my family'.
