The Cuckoo's Nest

2007-06-13T11:43:00.000+10:00

Radio National watch: When a stranger calls

I have to give the ABC credit when and where it's due. This morning, Radio National AM gave considerable coverage to a news item not calculated to win any new friends for the ALP. It concerns the leaking of an ACTU manual describing a program to target union members in marginal seats and none-too-subtly pressure them in case they are in any doubt about how to vote. The money quote is a perfect distillation of the bitterness, paranoia and self-righteousness of the professional unionist. Cold-callers who find that their subject might actually have the temerity to prefer the Coalition are advised thusly:

"It may be despicable to you that the member may agree with some of the Federal Government's policies. But avoid getting into heated arguments; such debates are likely to make the member dig their heels in."

Good advice, that. Avoid abusing someone you've just rung up at their own home, without invitation, probably while they were getting dinner or putting the kids to bed. Maybe they save that for the doorknock with baseball bats later on. Almost as sinister is the advice:

"Callers are asked to pay particular attention to the language members use, and to find out about their ambitions and if they have a family or a mortgage."

Perhaps there's also something in the manual about making knuckle-cracking noises at appropriate moments, or soft warnings about how "accidents" can happen, tsk, tsk, tsk.

2007-06-11T10:09:00.001+10:00

The somnambulists

As I may have said already, watching the ALP/commentariat in the last few federal elections has been like watching a sleepwalker who gets up in the middle of the night, walks over to the window, falls out of it, and wakes up in the garden below, picking twigs out of his hair and wondering how he got there - and the next night does the same thing all over again.

This sleepwalking is a matter of picking issues dear to themselves, but to which the larger electorate are indifferent or even hostile, and deciding that these are the key election issues. Today's example: the Age runs a front page article informing us that evil big business is scheming to neutralise what would otherwise be - and I quote - a "major federal election issue". Any guesses? It's the advertising of 'junk' food to children. If I needed a sign that Howard is going to romp it in in November, this would be it.

I'm almost sorry that the David Hicks issue has so completely and suddenly disappeared. I was really counting on this being yet another tripwire for the sleepwalkers. (Julian! Are you there? Feel free to stop by!)

2007-06-09T13:27:00.001+10:00

One day in November

Just want to lay this one down good and early: John Howard will romp it in this November. Why? The question is really, rather, why won't he lose? Simple: the two issues which the commentariat and their political wing, the ALP, have decided are the key issues - climate change (pffft!) and industrial relations.

Climate change is the ultimate 'doctor's wives' issue, and has no significant electoral traction. As for IR, did I miss something? The laws came in, the sky didn't fall in, the economy ignited its second-stage boosters and went into orbit. Then when the election appeared over the horizon, we're suddenly in the ALP's off-Broadway tryout of Les Miserables. ALP pollster Rod Cameron summed it up, saying that the unions who will supposedly win it for Rudd are:
"very unpopular and they are not part of most people's lives - The majority of voters are anti-union and they don't want the unions back in their lives."

2007-06-09T13:14:00.000+10:00

'Reset' switch for moonbats

I see where President Bush is having trouble with his bill to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants in America. Whatever happens to the bill, it has at least been useful to me. On two occasions recently, when trapped in an argument with some raving moonbat (something I will normally do anything to avoid, short of jumping from a moving car or a second-storey window), I have managed to short-circuit them by raising Bush's bill. When I tell them that Satan Bush is actually pushing a bill to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants, it literally stuns them into silence, because (1) they have never heard of this bill, and (2) they simply cannot process it into their narrative of the Bush hegemon. It works a treat: give it a try.

2007-05-24T09:04:00.000+10:00

RN Breakfast watch: tea-splutterer

Fortunately I wasn't drinking a cup of hot tea this morning, during the interview with Amnesty International chief Irene Khan. She described Australia's human rights record as "appalling": if you have to crank up the dial to 'appalling' for Australia, what's left for Cuba, North Korea, Iran, China or practically any Arab or African country? What's 'eleven' on Irene's dial? But I was particularly glad I didn't have a mouthful of tea when the interviewer asked Irene if she had any tips for Australian voters in the coming election. She recoiled like a Victorian maiden having received an obscene suggestion:

"Amnesty International is not a political organization".

2007-05-23T16:27:00.000+10:00

When the sleeper wakes

Watching the mainstream anti-Howard media at the moment, I get the uncomfortable feeling you might get from watching a sleepwalker marching towards the edge of a precipice. If you could wake them, wouldn't it be almost as dangerous?

I confess to being disconcerted by the degree to which the media have wrapped themselves up in the story spun from the ludicrous polling being delivered at the moment. The 'story' of Howard's imminent annihilation is, as of about 48 hours ago, now the new gold standard in reporting on this subject, and everything is framed against this assumption.

I'm not discounting the possibility that Howard might lose, though personally I think it unlikely. My real question is, what will all these people, who are now so convinced that Howard is finished, do if he wins? I've noted before the need of the Howard-haters to invent myths to explain his repeated election victories, when everything in their worldview tells them that such a thing should be impossible. The emotional investment at this point, however, seems so great that no myth could explain it. Still, I probably underestimate the capacity of the Howard-haters for mythic rationalizations. If you can persuade yourself that vast numbers of people who normally vote for Howard are now enraged by his IR laws, you can surely believe six other impossible things before breakfast.

2007-05-19T10:10:00.000+10:00

Nation shall speak unto nation

The ABC were wetting themselves with excitement yesterday over the first official recognition by Gordon Brown of the continent of Australia. ABC correspondent Rafael Epstein was at a press conference; he piped up, identifying himself as an Australian, and posed a question on - what else? - climate change. Brown flustered for a moment and then came out with "you led the way on the long-life electric bulb". Somehow it just doesn't have that Churchillian ring to it.

2007-05-10T15:58:00.000+10:00

Second life

One of the intellectual heroes of this blog is the sci-fi visionary Philip K. Dick. He had a habit of clipping weird headlines from the newspapers which mirrored the skewed fantasies of his writing: one of his favourites was "Scientists say that mice cannot be made to look like human beings".

Dick is dead, but the crazy headlines go on. One of the best I ever saw was about a plan to use virtual-reality helmets to subject people suffering from various manias and psychoses to simulated experiences of their fantasies, as a form of therapy. That would be one of the best stories he never wrote. (Though you could argue he did, in a story like "I hope I shall arrive soon".)

One of the few things about our crazy modern world which Dick didn't predict was the 'Second life' phenomenon: people acting out fantasy lives via real-time networked computer animations. Today's Dickian headline concerns the legal question as to whether people who perform actions in their second life, whose images are proscribed by law (I won't spell these out or link to the article, for good reasons), are guilty of a crime.

The legal question is not my main concern: despite the surface craziness of the question, the answer actually seems fairly straightforward, at least to this layman. What really intrigues me is the story that Dick could have made out of this. Surely he would have enjoyed writing a novel in which the Police create a second life squad, who enter the world of the avatars and bust the perps online. There must be at least a dozen scripts on this idea doing the rounds of Hollywood at the moment: 'Joe Avatar, SLPD'.

2007-05-10T12:03:00.000+10:00

Today's head-scratcher: an angry man

Stop me if you've heard this one. Local guy in an Islamic country - Morocco, as it happens - invades a tourist resort and attacks western tourists with a machete. The Melbourne Age is absolutely baffled as to what motive could possibly lie behind such a deed. (The link keeps getting updated, and the version as of this posting is even more careful to hose down suggestions of links to a particular cultural group. It emphasises a quote by one of the tourists that the attack was "random" and the work of "just an angry man".)

2007-05-09T12:53:00.000+10:00

RN Breakfast watch

The normally sensible Fran Kelly asks today's silliest question, in an interview with Treasurer Peter Costello about the Budget:

"But wouldn't most people rather see their $16-a-week tax cut spent on combatting climate change?"

2007-05-03T14:47:00.000+10:00

Can this be the end of Vosco?

One bit of good news yesterday was the conviction of vandal/tagger Simon Nelsen, whose tag was 'Vosco'. Graffiti 'artists' are bad enough, but taggers are so moronic that they make Greens candidates look like members of Mensa (which some of them they probably are, come to think of it). For one who wanted to write his name across the city, he was remarkably shy about showing his face, and with the familiar and reassuring click of a mechanism falling into place, came the assertion of his defence that he had suffered from depression and attention-deficit disorder while at school. Why does ADHD only ever seem to afflict feral bogans, or spoilt middle-class brats?

For the record, Simon is 23 and lives at home with his parents in the very heartland of Melbourne's leafy middle-class eastern suburbs. From his brief appearance on TV, he appears to be overweight, which is remarkable given the athletic feats he must have performed to put some of his tags where I see them every day on my commute into the city. None of the news reports make any mention of him having a job. For his pains, he gets 300 hours of community service, which will apparently include cleaning off some of his tags. One of the most interesting things about Vosco's story is what his father does for a living, but out of regard for his parents, who have already suffered enough, I must decline to publish it.

2007-05-01T19:32:00.000+10:00

On elections, trickster gods and cargo cults

As they teach us in Classics 101, myths are a way of explaining the world, and the fact that left-wing political parties usually have a greater store of myths and rely more on myth-like thinking to explain their world, tells us something about them.

I was made to think of this again today during a conversation with an old friend who happens to be a rusted-on Howard-hater. I asked her what she thought would happen in the coming Federal Election, and she immediately started talking about a new golden dawn under Kevin Rudd. I gently interrupted her: "M., don't tell me what you want to happen, tell me what you think will happen". At which point she came out with exactly the response I was expecting. Howard-hater she may be, but even she thinks Rudd has gone too far in his plan to wind back Howard's workplace laws, and that this will allow Howard to sneak back in. That's what I was looking for. Every Howard-hater I speak to on this subject - without exception - always believes that Howard only ever wins an election by some last-minute piece of cunning, guile, deceit or infernal good luck. The idea that Howard wins because a majority of the electorate actually prefer his government and his policies is quite literally inconceivable to them.

Howard, in their 'analysis' resembles something out of the old myths, a trickster-god like Hermes in the Greek myths, or Loki in the Norse, or Mantis in the Bushman mythology: someone who achieves a mischievous success by trickery and guile.

The Howard-haters' view of democracy in Australia also has a lot in common with the phenomenon of cargo cults. These cults, which flourished on Pacific Islands particularly around the period of World War Two, often involved a belief that the vast amounts of material goods which Europeans seemed to have at their disposal were in fact intended by the gods for the islanders themselves, and had been feloniously intercepted by superior European 'magic'. This is exactly how the Left think about Government in Australia: it's a gift, self-evidently intended for them, but which time and again is mysteriously snatched from their grasp at the last moment by the inexplicable magic of the Coalition.

With each election defeat comes first the stupor of astonishment, quickly followed by the scramble for a myth to explain it. If Rudd loses in November, which I personally expect he will, it will be interesting to see what they come up with.

2007-05-01T19:14:00.000+10:00

Taking it to the streets

Tim Blair links to a meditation by Melbourne's Rosa Luxembourg, Jill Sparrow, on the waning effectiveness of street demonstrations. Even Jill gets it now: she realizes that 'demos' are so patently ineffectual that they actually function as a badge of failure on whatever cause they espouse.

As should be apparent to anyone, street demonstrations in a modern, western capitalist democracy have about as much to do with any kind of authentic political will, or mass movement, as a Civil War re-enactment has to do the Civil War. Rather less, in fact.

As the political philosopher Guy Debord observed some decades ago (in the high summer of street protest, as it happened), supposedly spontaneous, revolutionary gestures such as the street protest suffer an almost immediate petrifaction by repetition. The first time, it's a gesture - the second time, it's a piece of theatre, a re-enactment, a spectacle.

2007-04-10T13:30:00.000+10:00

A guest in the Nest

My previous post, the first in many months, was not meant to signify a return to blogging: it was just one of those itches I had to scratch, and frankly, I hoped nobody would notice it. Imagine my astonishment when it attracted a comment from none other than Mr. Julian Burnside QC. Without irony, I welcome Mr. Burnside as an honoured guest of the Nest, and sincerely thank him for taking the time to read and respond.

We will still have to differ on the points of commentary. I won't attempt to answer Mr. Burnside's comment, partly because it wouldn't be polite to a guest, partly because I suspect his worldview and my own are so divergent that no real dialogue is possible. But I stand by my original point, based as it was on a subjective reading of the mood and character of public comment on the Hicks verdict. That point was, and remains, that the supposed popular support for Hicks within the broader Australian community was a complete fiction. Philip K. Dick used to treasure the following definition of 'reality': "Reality is that which, when you stop thinking about it, doesn't go away." The popular support for David Hicks was precisely the kind of chimera which, the moment newspapers stopped talking about it, ceased to exist.

2007-04-01T12:15:00.000+10:00

The carnival is over

Surprising though the verdict is, it's equally surprising how, even a mere 24 hours later, one can feel all the energy draining out of the David Hicks carnival. The tents are folding and the clowns are moving on. I have a feeling that, from now on, Julian Burnside, Marilyn Shepherd, Robert Richter, etc., will all suddenly find they have something more important to do when the subject of David Hicks comes up. They sure won't be returning his calls. Maybe he and Mamdouh Habib can get a spot on Celebrity Squares, but that'll be about it. Get Jihad Thomas in, and they can fill a row.

In any of the great causes espoused by the Left, there is always a tiny core that will hold on, literally to death. (I don't know if there are still any Grand Prix protesters at Albert Park, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were.) But because these great causes are mostly delusory, their supporters never last, and when the end comes, it tends to come very suddenly.

2006-10-20T13:27:00.000+10:00

Cloaking device

Now if only the Islamists can figure out a way to make a burqa out of this material.

2006-10-20T10:57:00.000+10:00

The Homeless and the heartless

ABC Radio National Breakfast continues its never-ending story of the dystopia that is John Howard's Australia, with the most recent national 'study' of homelessness. Host Fran Kelly headlined her introduction with the shock-horror announcement that the study finds we are less compassionate towards the homeless, and this was repeated when she began her interview with Tony Keenan, the head of the charity which commissioned the report. When asked for his major findings, he begins:

The major findings are that we’re probably far less compassionate as a country than we used to be, there’s certainly a lack of empathy...

Fran, to her credit, then asks the simple question of how this decline in compassion has been measured, and Mr. Keenan's answer is illuminating:

(pause) Clearly there’s not a previous study we compare ourselves to, and I guess I’m just making that assumption…

And that's it: no real evidence at all. Zip, zilch, nada. But a mere detail like lack of evidence is no hindrance on Radio National as long as the guest is 'on message', and Fran gives him a pass on this. I try to imagine what she would do to a Government minister, or a climate-change-sceptic scientist who made a comparable admission.

2006-06-08T19:16:00.000+10:00

The thrill is gone

Reader(s) might have already suspected that Cuckoo is suffering from blogout. As B. B. King would put it, "the thrill is gone". There have been no shortage of things to blog about, but I no longer feel that unmistakable 'got to blog it' tingle about any of them. It just ain't there anymore. Not even the brief return of the Nest's bete noire Stephen Crittenden to ABC Radio National Breakfast can rouse me to the keyboard. Why it has vanished so suddenly and completely, I cannot say. Let the bloggers of sterner stuff continue their fine work: I can only return again to those lyrics of B. B. King:

The thrill is gone
It's gone away for good
Oh, the thrill is gone baby
Baby its gone away for good
Someday I know I'll be over it all baby
Just like I know a man should

You know I'm free, free now baby
I'm free from your spell
I'm free, free now
I'm free from your spell
And now that it's over
All I can do is wish you well

2006-05-25T15:12:00.000+10:00

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

I was recently lunching with a friend, and the conversation turned to matters of the uncanny and inexplicable. I quoted, as I always do in this context, Hamlet's line to Horatio about there being more things in Heaven and Earth than poor Horatio dreams of in his philosophy. My friend then astonished me by giving, as her example of such an inexplicable phenomenon ...spoon-bending.

She's an intelligent person, who works mostly with computers, so you can imagine my perplexity. At that moment I was very glad that one of my youthful hobbies was magic: nothing prepares you better for a lifetime of spotting hokey old tricks dressed up as New Age miracles. Anyone with the slightest practical acquaintance with conjuring would instantly spot spoonbending as a trick - it's one of the purest examples of the most fundamental principle of conjuring, misdirection. When you need to bend the spoon, just create a diversion, and by the time everyone looks back, Hey Presto! If you're doing your job right, everyone there will swear blind that they never took their eyes off the spoon for an instant.

But I think I'm even more shocked by the persistence of something that I would have thought was by now just a 1970s pop-culture tag, an answer to a Trivial Pursuit question. By the way, I see that celebrity spoonbender Uri Geller has bought the family home of Elvis Presley on eBay. It must have been on Platinum Reserve.

2006-05-24T15:18:00.000+10:00

Wonder of wonders

At last! A journalist - published in the Age, too - who is finally willing to call the Australia Institute a "left wing think tank"! Unfortunately we don't know the name of this latter-day Luther: it's an unbylined piece from AAP. The boys and girls from AI have apparently been identifying possible sites for nuclear reactors in Victoria. Now, I assume that if they hate 4WDs, which they do with a passion, they're going to hate nuclear reactors, but the piece gives the impression that they are spotting reactor sites in a constructive way. The actual press release, available on their home page (under media releases) is in fact strangely non-committal.

2006-05-24T08:49:00.000+10:00

Back in the saddle

One of the good things about travelling is that it breaks you out of your normal habits of media consumption. This was made vivid to me when I tuned back into good old Radio National this morning. The 6:30 to 7:00 slot consisted of the following three items: someone from Medecins Sans Frontieres complaining about the evil Big Pharma companies not devoting enough research to unprofitable Third World diseases, someone from Amnesty International complaining about evil First World democratic governments and their woeful human rights records, and then just to take us up to the news and weather...an interview with Cindy Sheehan!

The actual 7:00 bulletin was no better. A recap of the latest Amnesty International report, someone from the Law Institute complaining that current reporting of Aboriginal social problems is serving to 'demonize' customary law, but the cake-taker was their item on PM John Howard addressing the Irish Parliament. This was reported solely in terms of the 'boycott' of his address by various Sinn Feiners and Greens. I'd been waiting for something like this, being able to remember how eager our media were to report, when Howard addressed the US Congress in 2002, that various office staffers and gofers were rounded up to fill an otherwise underpopulated chamber. Interestingly, one of the things that the Irish boycott group, which included Sinn Feiners, held against Howard was his contribution to global terror. Boycott is an Irish word, but obviously 'irony' is not. The psychics of the ABC were also able to inform us that Labour party members who did not show up for Howard's address did so due to 'lack of interest'.

As a seasoned RN listener, I seem to detect a small but distinct ratcheting-up here, if it isn't just a statistical blip. If I were really paranoid, I might even wonder whether this is a tree-pissing, territory-marking exercise for the benefit of the new Chair of the ABC, i.e., 'Don't even think of trying to pull us into line'.

These bulletins also suggested a new 'thought experiment', to be used in case I ever find myself in a debate over ABC leftwing bias. Let's just suppose, for the sake of argument, that there is a parallel universe, in which there is the kind of flagrantly leftwing ABC that David Marr thinks is just a figment of the rightwing imagination. OK, now that you're imagining that other ABC, answer one question: how would its programming differ from the kind of bulletin described above?

2006-05-11T15:14:00.000+10:00

Dear Reader(s)

There will be about a week's pause in blogging while I go on the road to catch a few exhibitions interstate and get some much-needed R&R. Vale!

2006-05-09T09:14:00.000+10:00

An audience with Lord Love-a-duck

Just a few things to say about the Michael Leunig interview on Enough Rope last night. Firstly, it's interesting that he home-schools his children. I wonder if he'll cop any criticism for that, given that there's a general suspicion of home-schoolers, who in Australia tend to be mostly 'fundamental' Christians, and in America either fundy or just trying to keep lefty moonbat ranters out of their kids' heads.

Secondly, I was intrigued by the exchange in which Denton confronted Leunig with a quote from the period of the 'Holocaust cartoon competition' episode, "there are people determined to bring Leunig down". Leunig vigorously denied ever saying anything like that, and though I suspect Denton would do his research well, one has to give Leunig the benefit of the doubt, until the quote gets definitely sourced. All kinds of people get misquoted, for all kinds of reasons. But in the very next breath, Leunig himself then goes on to attribute an improbable-sounding quote to "a Melbourne columnist" (let me guess, initials AB?), who supposedly called on his readers to "take Leunig down". This sounds like absolute balderdash, and I won't be surprised to see a rebuttal from, er, AB. (Update: 'AB' has indeed rebutted this absurd claim).

Asked by Denton for an exposition of his notorious Israel=Auschwitz cartoon, Leunig was mealy-mouthed and evasive: "Cartoons are ambiguous, they have many meanings". The closest he came to an explanation was merely fatuous: apparently Israel is like Auschwitz because both are surrounded by barbed wire. A hint to our Living National Treasure: the wire around Auschwitz was to keep people in, the 'wire' around Israel is to keep people out. There's a difference.

I'm sorry Denton passed up the opportunity to ask Leunig the one question I would want to put: given that Bush, Blair and Howard, to say nothing of the evil Zionists, are getting it all horribly wrong, what exactly would Leunig's plan be to deal with militant Islam? Your time starts now, and answers involving hugging or ducks will not be accepted...

2006-05-08T13:39:00.000+10:00

Klassix Korner

I'm pleased to see the Federal Government doing what wise men have always done, i.e., following the example of the ancient Romans. I refer to the new plan to extend a (modest) aid benefit to families of three or more children, which are now officially considered 'large' families. Knowing full well the benefits of a growing population, Augustus instituted the ius trium liberorum ('right of three children'), a parcel of benefits granted to the parents of three or more children. Among these benefits was the all-important one of precedence in public office. Just imagine if today's public service had accelerated promotion for parents of 'large' families. Like many such benefits, the ius became just another in the Emperor's rich store of bribes and carrots, and was granted to such people as the historian Suetonius, the poet Martial, and the administrator and lettrist Pliny the Younger, even though none of these had any children at all.

2006-05-05T20:55:00.000+10:00

Guards

In a bit of spin worthy of the former Pravda, SBS has reported that the new far-left President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, has sent in troops to "guard" privately-owned resource companies which he intends to confiscate. Just like Russia sent in tanks to "guard" Czechoslovakia from counter-revolutionaries in 1968.

2006-05-03T12:04:00.000+10:00

Towel-head

One of the funnier things I've heard on Radio National recently was the interview with Colonel Mike Bumgarner (interesting name: presumably a version of 'Baumgartner'), about the recent behaviour of David Hicks in Guantanamo Bay. To retaliate for not being given an extra towel (the standard issue is one per prisoner), Hicks has gone on a laundry strike, refusing to change his clothes (Oh the humanity!). The RN interviewer then asked, in the kind of sepulchral tones that might normally be used by counsel for the accused in a capital crime: "Why did David Hicks ask for a second towel?"

Who gives a crap why Hicks wanted a second towel? Well, the Melbourne Age, for one. Their 'diplomatic editor' Mark Baker will probably need more than one towel to mop up the tears he has spilt for the wannabe jihadi. According to Baker, Hicks, who had travelled around the world to join the Taliban in Afghanistan, was a "wide eyed" innocent, who was "appalled" by the September 11 attacks. Yes, all Hicksy wanted was to lop off the odd hand, shoot an 'adulteress' in a soccer stadium every so often: who could have guessed such simple desires would all go so horribly wrong? Baker is worth a long quote:

"If the worst Hicks did was to hang out with the Taliban at the time they were in the thrall of Osama bin Laden, he is more deserving of pity than punishment. While the Taliban invited overthrow by their excesses of medieval zealotry and their culpability in giving sanctuary to bin Laden and his cohorts, at the time the wide-eyed Muslim convert David Hicks went to Afghanistan they were an internationally recognised government in control of a sovereign state."

Why do I think that Baker is one of those people who would only describe the Bush administration as an "internationally recognised government in control of a sovereign state" through gritted teeth, if he could bear to at all? Even the UN, at their most supine and craven, did not recognize the Taliban as a government. A grand total of three nations did so: the UAE, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. And someone should tell Baker that 'hanging out' is what teenagers do down at the mall, not what Hicks was doing in Afghanistan. Maybe one of Hicks' duties with the Taliban was handing out second towels to prisoners.

2006-05-01T13:29:00.000+10:00

Put money in thy purse...

In a piece on the late J. K. Galbraith, Radio National this morning ran a rather interesting soundbite to summarize his astonishingly long career. To paraphrase, it was JKG saying that money, and economies, aren't everything: Shakespeare, after all, was the product of a country with a very low GDP.

Hmm, up to a point, Lord Copper. I certainly agree with JKG that a flourishing economy doesn't guarantee artistic creativity, but it's also clear that an unhealthy, declining economy pretty much guarantees a heavy brake on the creative impulse. People with less disposable income are less likely to go to plays, or to commission playwrights, to take the Shakespearean example.

Of course, one wonders whether Galbraith meant that the GDP of Elizabethan England was low in absolute terms - say, compared to 20th century America - or in relative terms, compared to the earlier Tudor, or later Stuart periods. My history's a little rusty, but I'd bet two angels and a hogshead of sack that the Elizabethan Renaissance coincided with a booming economy, as renaissances tend to do. In short, despite what Galbraith and the ABC would like to believe, even with Shakespeare it really is the economy, stupid.

2006-05-01T12:50:00.000+10:00

Link mix-up: Cuckoo accepts 'full responsibility'

A follow-up to my previous post, which won't be of interest to anyone, but which I need to put up in the interests of accountability (mine). I contacted the very helpful Andrea Harris, webmistress of Tim Blair's site, to check the HTML of my comment post there, and she assures me that the two URLs I posted - under the impression they were to two different articles - were identical. So there is no evidence that I ever saw what I thought I saw, and you should disregard everything of a supposedly factual nature that I ever publish again. Even though there is that pesky link on the Australian's website to a article titled Body mix-up: PM accepts 'full responsibility', which just takes you back to the article you're already on, which does not have that title.

In any case, my underlying points about journalistic practice seem unaffected: (1) journalists are dishing up massaged paraphrase-quotes without supplying the raw audio/video backup, or (2) with the bare underlying direct quote, stripped of context which might inconveniently conflict with their constructed meaning. I'm still trying to find a transcript of the original radio interview.

On the underlying question of responsibility, of course Howard is right to claim responsibility for what happens to soldiers in armed conflicts to which he has committed them. But if it turns out that Private Kovco died as a result of an accident, which happens to soldiers back here on their bases in peacetime, does that mean Howard is responsible for those deaths too? Was he responsible for the deaths of those personnel in the Sea King helicopter crash in 2005?

2006-04-28T20:48:00.000+10:00

It was him

While the lefty media go crazy over the death of Private Kovco in Iraq - tonight's ABC item was an especially disgraceful piece of ghoulery - SBS still carries off the nightly prize. According to Cassandra Hill on tonight's bulletin:

"Prime Minister John Howard has accepted full responsibility for the death of Private Kovco..."

This statement was made against vision of Howard in a radio studio with headphones on. Funnily enough, there was no direct audio, no quote of him making this extraordinary claim of responsibility.

ABC's Matt Brown got every bit of vision he could to make the point that morgues are dismal, unappealing places. Gee, you mean they're not like a tapas bar or Disneyland? Apparently the morgue in which Private Kovco's body briefly resided is 'dimly lit'. No kidding? No disco balls or fairy lights, you mean? Not even a lava lamp? The hand-written label on his body-drawer showed signs of having been 'crumpled'. Oh, the humanity!

Update: In the matter of the PM's supposed claim of 'full responsibility' for the death of Private Kovco, it gets interesting once you do a little googling. Shortly after posting a comment on Tim Blair, I found two different articles on the Australian's webpage, using what was obviously the same original quote to mean two very different things. In one article, Howard was claiming 'full responsibility' for the death of Private Kovco, in another, it was for the bungled repatriation of his body. Within minutes, the second article was replaced by the first, and the second link (which is still up as of this writing, and which is titled Body mix-up: PM accepts full responsibility) then led back to the first article

You'll have to take my word for that, because I didn't get a screenshot. In fact, I would encourage you not to believe me, but at least I've got a screenshot of that second link, my only evidence that that second article ever existed.

2006-04-27T12:42:00.000+10:00

Not a good feeling

Last night I had the unpleasant experience of seeing John Howard as I imagine the Howard-haters see him. He was taking questions on the new health-welfare ID card, which, he stresses, is not an ID card, or a 'trojan horse' for one. Right. It's not compulsory, just as the current Medibank card is not compulsory, unless you fancy paying your compulsory Medibank levy, and then your uncompensated medical bills on top of that. The term 'weaselly' came to mind.

The card will come in, and I will no doubt end up carrying one, photo and all. As noted in a much earlier post, one of the few compensations will be watching the parties of the Left tie themselves in knots trying to bag Howard for carrying out a policy they all cherish, deep in their narrowing and straightening little hearts.

2006-04-24T12:16:00.000+10:00

Civilians

Occasionally, even a hardened Radio National listener like myself looks up into the shaving mirror and asks his reflection 'Did she say what I thought she just said?' This morning, the normally fairly sensible Fran Kelly was talking to Foreign Minister Alexander Downer about the latest 'Osama Bin Laden' tape, and led with this observation:

"...again, the main target of the war on terror remains on the loose and now he's essentially threatening not just governments, but civilians..."

Obviously, it's a gaffe, and if she'd thought a little harder, she wouldn't have said it, but in the end, your mindset determines the kinds of gaffes you make.

2006-04-23T10:10:00.000+10:00

The glittering prizes

Congratulations are in order to the first Australian to win a Pulitzer prize, Geraldine Brooks. Even those who, like me, have read neither her March nor the classic novel from which it is derived, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868), are aware that Brooks' novel belongs to that modern literary genre known as 'sharecropping'. The idea is simple: take a classic novel, and write a spinoff involving one of the characters, preferably one who only plays a minor role, or better still, who never actually appears in the source-novel. In Little Women, the father of the March family is away at the Civil War, and exists mostly as an offscreen character. Brooks has won her Pulitzer by writing a novel in which we follow what Mr. March was doing all that time.

Others with a canny eye to this kind of ploy have included Peter Carey, who wrote Jack Maggs to follow what happened to the convict Magwitch, from Dickens' Great Expectations, after he vanished to Australia. Then there's Sena Nashlund's Ahab's Wife, which tells the story of, you guessed it, Captain Ahab's wife. We can only look forward to a version of Moby Dick, told from the whale's point of view. How could you beat an opening sentence like: "Call me Moby" ? Probably the grandaddy of the sharecropping novel is Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, which is a prequel to Jane Eyre, filling in just what happened to the first Mrs. Rochester.

I have respect for the mercenary motive in literature, and agree with Dr. Johnson that 'nobody but a blockhead ever wrote for anything but money'* so I have no qualms about any writer who wants to maximise their chances by pitching directly for the biggest market, and by piggy-backing on an established best-selling classic. However, that liberality should not be mistaken for a willingness to judge the end result by any standards other than the literary.
(* which makes me a blockhead, or should that be 'bloghead'? Perhaps Boswell misheard the Doctor, who really said 'nobody but a blogger...')

Having taste-tested March, I can say that it is not as badly written as one would expect. Not well written, but at least not offensively inept, and it is surprisingly free of the ear-gouging linguistic anachronisms and factual bloopers which normally pepper the modern literary historical novel. Its outstanding fault, on a quick survey, is the 'voice' of the central character - a dreary, lifeless pastiche of an imaginary nineteenth-century novelistic voice. I have always suspected that the men and women of the nineteenth century did not talk like the people in Dickens and George Eliot any more than modern Americans actually talk like the people in Hemingway or Richard Ford.

I am probably hopelessly idealistic about artists and writers, but I found Geraldine Brooks's attitude to her former critics not encouraging. Referring to a 'wrist-slittingly' bad (i.e., mildly critical) review given to March by Thomas Mallon in the New York Times, she has said gleefully "He'll get up tomorrow and read the news and puke." Maybe. But if he's any kind of critic, he'll be puking because a mediocre literary airport novel has - yet again - won a major prize, not because he's been 'proved wrong' by the infallible Pulitzer Committee.

Brooks' Australian publisher, Shona Martyn, offers perceptive, but somewhat backhand praise: "Geraldine … goes to the heart of what I would call the book club market". I've often wondered what happened to that market, once ruled by giants like Morris West, A. J. Cronin, Irving Stone...

2006-04-19T11:21:00.000+10:00

To kill a (protected species) bird

A Victorian policeman is under investigation on several charges arising from the fact that earlier this year he shot dead a swooping magpie, while off duty, in his own home. Apparently he nailed the avian aggressor right through the abdomen while it was on the wing: forget about prosecuting him, anyone who can do that deserves a marksmanship medal. Perhaps he should have used capsicum spray and called for a negotiator instead.

Update: In a searing expose that brings back memories of the legendary 'Who Killed Cock Robin?' series that scooped several Walkleys, the Age today runs an x-ray of the dead magpie (print version only), and quotes a vet's autopsy report: "She found bullet fragments in the heart, the base of a rib and the left thigh muscle." We are yet to learn whether the magpie was affected by drugs, or was receiving treatment for a mental illness. Did they do a chalk outline of the body-drop spot?

Even wackier, the Age report quotes someone who was at the policeman's home at the time, but "who cannot be named for legal reasons".

Further update: greetings to visitors from Tim Blair's site. Presumably that unnameable witness was an undercover agent from The Birdwatchers' Society, or a stool pigeon. The police officer, upon conviction, has been fined $2000, and barred from carrying a firearm while off-duty. The magistrate condemned him thus:
"It's all the worse where the person discharging the firearm is a member of the police force, who ought to have understood that this is an inappropriate activity."

I must differ with the magistrate: I'm not crazy about people discharging firearms in suburban backyards, but if anyone's going to do it, I want it to be someone trained in their use.

2006-04-18T16:29:00.000+10:00

Who reads the third paragraph?

I think it used to be a rule in newspapers that your headline had to be substantiated somewhere in the body of the article. I say 'used to be'. Take a look at this article in today's Age, with the screamer:
Some think I lied on AWB, admits Howard

The article itself doesn't contain a single direct quote from Howard that even remotely approaches this. Not even a massaged-paraphrase. Surely if he had made such a staggering admission, it would be worth quoting verbatim? The closest is that a talkback caller accuses Howard of cowardice over the AWB affair, and Howard replies - quite reasonably:

"It's a view that some Australians will have but it's not a view that all Australians will have."

The real thing, of course, is to get the words 'lied', 'admit' and 'Howard' into the same sentence.

2006-04-17T11:11:00.000+10:00

Belated thoughts on Good Friday

I never hear St. John's account of the Passion - as we do every Good Friday - without some new and surprising note hitting my ear. This year it was the detail about how the Jews were unwilling to enter Pilate's precinct - the Praetorium - as this would have defiled them, and they would be unable to eat the Passover. Even though the Jews here are a subject population, there are some things they won't compromise on: Pilate doesn't order them to come before him, defilement or no, but instead goes out to them. Readers of Josephus will know of the remarkable lengths to which the Roman rulers of Judea went in order to accomodate the religious scruples of the conquered populace. They even enforced a death-penalty on trespass in certain areas of the Temple, against their own - Roman - citizens.

Pilate wasn't all touchy-feely, though. The only other mention of him in the Gospels is in Luke 13:1, where he is described as having had a number of Galileans killed, 'mingling their blood with their sacrifices'. Presumably this means he had a number of people set upon and killed in the midst of a religious observance. Obviously, respect for the religion of the conquered had its limits.

His dialogue with Jesus and the Jews has always seemed to me one of the most psychologically vivid forensic dialogues we have from the ancient world. Anyone who considers it a work of fiction has a lot of explaining to, purely on the grounds of literary criticism, let alone theology. Above all, its insights into the relations of power are piercing. Pilate, despite his power, ends up bouncing like a pinball, back and forth between Jesus and His accusers. The High Priests effortlessly blackmail him by 'spinning' how bad the acquittal of a pretender to kingship would look in a supposedly subject province: "If you release him, you are no friend of Caesar". Jesus is even harsher: to Pilate's bluster "Do you not know that I have the power to release you, and the power to condemn you to death?", He coolly replies "You would have no power over me if it had not been given to you from above".

2006-04-15T15:52:00.000+10:00

Sad clown

News from France that an MP has secured an undertaking from a Japanese paint manufacturer not to close its factory in his departement, by staging a hunger strike. In a country in which riots by a few thousand students and unionists are considered adequate grounds for the reversal of government policy, government-by-hunger-strike suddenly looks almost rational. With the poetic eloquence so characteristic of his nation (or else delirium brought on by malnutrition), MP Jean Lassalle rhapsodized:

"I like the Springtime. It's lovely. I love life, everything about it. I love my family so much. I have no desire to die whatsoever but after nearly 40 days without food I can't stop. Like a sad clown. I'm not asking to win. I'm asking for good sense to triumph."

2006-04-07T16:53:00.000+10:00

Smashing time

We all know those stories that we read, reported as sober fact, but which never quite sit right. For me, one of these was the account in January of the man who smashed three large and very valuable Qing vases in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, after he supposedly stumbled down a staircase. Now it seems it was no accident. Mr. Clumsy turns out to have a conviction for assault, and attempted to re-enter the Museum during a media presentation on the proposed restoration of the vases. Having viewed CCTV images of the 'accident', police have laid charges of criminal damage.

2006-04-07T16:17:00.000+10:00

By the beard of the prophet

I had seen this picture on LGF, and was pondering the strange habit of these sheikh types to dye their grizzled hair and beards a screamingly fake Pavarotti...

...Death in Venice...

...black. I got to wondering whether this practice is haram: surely, if Allah sends grey hairs, man is not worthy to defy or deny them? I dialled up the helpful Ask an Imam site: the very first question sitting there on the notice board was on this precise subject. Spooky. The answer is somewhat confusing. Apparently men are allowed to dye their hair, but in any colour except black. I always knew Henry Ford wasn't a muslim.

2006-04-06T13:46:00.000+10:00

The last time I saw parrots

There are just so many layers of irony to this story, that I don't know where to stop peeling. The Federal Government has nixed a planned windfarm in the Labor state of Victoria, on the grounds that it would pose a threat to the habitat of the highly endangered orange-bellied parrot. The Federal Minister responsible, Ian Campbell, is depressingly susceptible to Kyoto flim flam, but he deserves a Logie for his straight face in announcing the cancellation of a $220 million project for the sake of a population of parrots estimated at no more than 200.

The Age, for whom every kind of environmental study has hitherto been holy writ, has suddenly discovered a newfound scepticism towards them, wonder of wonders. They now realize that 'environment' can be cynically used as a smokescreen for political manouvering. And they don't think windfarms themselves are a political ploy?

Spare a thought for the poor greenies, whose heads must be exploding, like the archetypal evil robot, whose CPU housing starts to smoke and spark when he is defeated by having two contradictory instructions programmed into him: Parrots good! Windfarms good! Windfarms bad for parrots! Coalition bad! Coalition defends parrots! Parrots..er..good..er..arrgghhHHH!!

2006-04-06T13:01:00.000+10:00

Sounds of silence

Apologies again for the hiatus in posting, but in a sense this reflects the strange hush that has fallen over the Australian political scene. The AWB enquiry, set to run longer than The Mousetrap, has dwindled to a background hum, and the sale of Australian uranium to China, which would once have set the streets ablaze, passes with barely a murmur. The Age was reduced to running a 'where are they now?' story on the old faces of uranium protesting, and the fresh, new young faces in this exciting lifetime career.

Similarly, the prompt granting of visas to the Papuan refugees has been a great disappointment to the media, because it deprives them of one of their favourite memes. Still, on the age old principle that there's no good side to a John Howard story, they are concentrating on the problems this has created with our 'relationship' with Indonesia. If Howard, on one of his morning walks around Lake Burley Griffin, spotted a drowning man and dived in to save him, the Press Gallery would no doubt find that he'd broken some by-law.

2006-04-03T13:44:00.000+10:00

Of dingoes, dogs, ducks and men

When I saw Bill Leak's cartoon in response to the Indonesian 'two dingoes', my first thought was, 'Will he get away with that bone through the nose'? By and large, it looks as though he has. As for those tender souls who worry about Indonesian Muslim sensibilities over being depicted as a dog, has anyone asked the Papuans how they feel about it?

I saw Leak being interviewed briefly on ABC news on this issue, and was struck by a couple of things. Firstly, he is well known as someone who has an absolutely pathological hatred of Alexander Downer, and of Downer's supposed patrician accent. (I've never been able to hear it myself, but maybe you have to have grown up in Adelaide, as Leak did.) Knowing this, I was surprised to hear a distinctly plummy tone in Leak's own voice. Bit of transference going on, perhaps? In fact, the conspiracy theorist in me wonders if Leak didn't stage this piece of provocation just to rattle Downer's cage.

Secondly, I was interested to see that Leak draws his cartoons directly on one of those digital tablets. I'd like to know whether that's his own choice, or whether his editors foisted it on him in the interests of efficiency. Leak, despite his pretensions as a painter, is a fairly middling cartoonist to begin with, and I strongly suspect that a recent decline in the quality of his drawing could be traced to the use of this technology. The Age's John Spooner - a genuine artist-cartoonist - has no truck with these things, and creates all his work as an ink-on-paper original. Leunig makes some use of this technology, but I suspect he also starts with a pen and ink original.

I'm reminded of a rather sad story about one of my favourite comic artists, the great Carl Barks, creator of the authentic Donald Duck comic books. Barks was one of those artists who, in a funny, clever story for kids, could craft parables of the human condition which were all the more penetrating for the apparent slightness of their means. The kind of thing many a Booker Prize winner can only dream of doing. Anyway, Barks, who laboured for years in anonymity - fan letters came addressed to 'the good duck artist', to distinguish him from the lesser talents working in that field - happily received a full measure of recognition and material reward late in his life. In one interview, he spoke of the decline in the quality of his drawing late in his career. Partly it was due to old age - you can see the hand shaking in some of his lines - but he explained that it was also because, after a certain point, in order to save a few dollars, Disney started supplying him with cheaper, inferior artists' board, which simply didn't take the pen as well.

2006-03-31T13:35:00.000+11:00

A new word

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.

*Eat your heart out, Dr. Seuss

2006-03-30T14:08:00.000+11:00

In this country, you gotta make the money first...
Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, you get the woman

2006-03-30T10:18:00.000+11:00

My head hurts...

...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...

2006-03-28T10:36:00.000+11:00

Period piece

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.").

2006-03-28T09:58:00.002+11:00

So where the bloody hell is Kerry Nettle?

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.

2006-03-27T12:56:00.000+11:00

A warning from Greg

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).

2006-03-24T14:38:00.000+11:00

Not so fast, John

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.

2006-03-24T14:20:00.000+11:00

Board shorted

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.

2006-03-22T09:29:00.003+11:00

Grain of truth

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.

2006-03-21T12:02:00.000+11:00

Autumnal lull

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).

2006-03-18T20:21:00.000+11:00

Looking for Mr. Goodbarber

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.

2006-03-18T14:08:00.000+11:00

The Baghdad Papers

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.

2006-03-15T18:29:00.000+11:00

The anonymous famous

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).

2006-03-15T13:16:00.000+11:00

Greetings...

...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.

2006-03-11T12:20:00.000+11:00

Revival meeting

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.)

2006-03-11T10:24:00.000+11:00

The gentle art of sarcasm

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."

Indeed.

2006-03-10T12:18:00.000+11:00

Happy families

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.

2006-03-09T16:46:00.000+11:00

Sweet bird of ute

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.

2006-03-08T10:35:00.000+11:00

Road to Utopia

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.

2006-03-07T08:54:00.000+11:00

Simply Red

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.

2006-03-05T11:37:00.000+11:00

Close-ups and beat-ups

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?

2006-03-05T11:24:00.000+11:00

Gimme that poll-time religion

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).

2006-03-03T21:10:00.000+11:00

Munich

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.

2006-03-01T12:34:00.000+11:00

Those evil bastards

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.

2006-03-01T11:53:00.000+11:00

Architects of their own demise

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.

2006-03-01T08:54:00.000+11:00

Boob tube

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'.

2006-02-28T10:28:00.000+11:00

A blow to the solar plexus

So climate doomsayer Dr. Tim Flannery has been reduced to spruiking for a solar panel company. He fell foul of the agency which licenses commercial television advertising over his claim that "global warming is the greatest threat facing humanity", and that you should therefore rush out and buy Horatio Huffnagel's fantabulous solar panels. Commercials Advice refused to allow the ad to go out with Flannery's puff, leading to predictable howls of "censorship" from the usual quarters.

As usual, the real question here is a Journalism 101 no-brainer. Look at the ABC's report and ask, what's the question the journalist is avoiding? Anyone...anyone...Bueller? Of course, it's why the ad was pulled. The answer, presumably, is that while hysterical claims of climate doom might be all very well to fill the op-ed pages of quality broadsheet newspapers, (and to sequestrate untold oceans of public money) they are, being highly debatable, inadmissable as an inducement in the more rigorous arena of commerce. Dr. Tim should stick to proven, tested science, like the Ab-blaster.

Update: the ad has now gone to air, as originally scripted. Miranda Devine has a good piece on this story. The solar panel company brags that they're "doing Kyoto anyway". Well good news, kiddies, so is the Australian Government.

2006-02-24T13:18:00.000+11:00

Multiple choice

Readers of the Age will be aware that the paper recently ran a poll on attitudes to the Howard government at its 10-year mark. Even with the hopelessly skewed methodology employed (including idiotic rorschach-blot questions about how 'mean' Australia has become), they still came up with some good results for Howard, such as strong approval for his handling of terrorism. This must be biting, because today they ran an editorial cartoon from Ron Tandberg (who looks almost sensible next to Michael Leunig but, hey, who doesn't?) which takes the rather extraordinary step of bagging the respondents to the poll for giving inconsistent, and insufficiently Howard-bashing, answers.

Now there's a first: newspaper asks your opinion on something, then runs cartoon bagging you for not giving the right answer. Actually, Ron is right to point to the inconsistency of some of the responses, but he fails to draw the correct conclusion, i.e., that the methodology of the poll was loaded and confused. I thought this myself when seeing the result that many of the respondents who approved of Howard's handling of terrorism simultaneously thought going to war in Iraq was 'wrong'.

2006-02-24T09:32:00.000+11:00

Mushy multiculturalism

ABC Radio National was running hot this morning over Treasurer Peter Costello's speech to the Sydney Institute, which apparently referred to "mushy multiculturalism". If it hadn't been so early in the morning, I would have instituted the 'Fran Kelly drinking game', with one rule: every time Fran repeated the phrase "mushy multiculturalism", you take a drink. You'd have been legless before the weather report.

Costello made the unremarkable comment that Australia would not be adopting sharia law anytime soon, and anyone who preferred to live under such a system might seek a more congenial homeland elsewhere. Fran and regular commenter Michelle Grattan were scratching their heads as to why Costello, and PM John Howard, a week ago, have felt the need to make these "un-nuanced" comments at this particular time. Well, a time when half the muslim world is ablaze because of some cartoons might be a good time.

Michelle was particularly hard on Howard's recent comments that a small section of the Muslim community in Australia presented problems that no other immigrant group did. Well, huffed Michelle, there was always the 'Yugoslavs' in the 1960s (an Ustasha training camp in rural Victoria) and, "if you go further back, the Irish were pretty bolshy". The Irish? Is this woman kidding?

2006-02-23T14:23:00.000+11:00

See you later, facilitator

David Williamson, the man who wanted to nominate Michael Leunig for Greatest Ever Australian, is at it again. He has a piece in today's Australian which I won't even try to summarize - it would be like trying to arm-wrestle a jellyfish. Suffice it to say that the Howard government is apparently lulling us into a lotus-eater obliviousness on the subject of Global Warming by conducting vicious midnight purges of artists and intellectuals, the only people who can warn us of Mother Gaia's impending day of wrath. 'kay? Reading this piece, I was reminded of a tragic figure I used to see at my local market. Jim Cairns, Treasurer in the Whitlam government, ended up self-publishing books with titles like New day: liberated biological human potential and selling them - or rather, not selling them - from a folding card-table. Formerly rational people become enthralled to some deceptively simple theory which explains everything, and they can't understand why the rest of us just don't see it!

Global warming is clearly one of these all-embracing ideas for Williamson, but looking at an article about his latest play, it seems he has at least one other. 'Conferencing' is apparently some kind of technique for conflict resolution (a new 'technique' for this sort of thing seems to come along about every ten years or so). This radical new technique involves people, er, sitting down together and, um, talking. Williamson is so enamoured of it that he trained as a 'facilitator', and has written a trilogy of plays structured as 'conferencing' sessions, of which his current play is the last instalment. Even the Sydney Morning Herald has to admit that, as a way of making plays, it "sounds dire".

2006-02-21T13:30:00.000+11:00

Climate Cassandra

So the Age has a new environment reporter, Liz Minchin. Surely the former incumbent, Melissa Fyfe, can't have found something more important to do than warning us, in dire tones, of the doom about to break upon our heads? What other kind of reporting could possibly compete with that? Maybe it was that email I sent her, inviting her to enlighten me on a glaring contradiction in one of her reports. She never replied. Maybe she quit that day, in tears.

Still, the new tenant of Cassandra's Corner has made a good start, reporting the heroic decision of new-chum climate guru Dr. Clive Hamilton, of the invaluable Australia Institute, to name names. The names, that is, of those he deems to be involved in a conspiracy to silence dissent on climate change. Because, let's face it, one never hears a word about this subject in Australia. Read Liz's report in full: it has the kind of breathless hysteria that makes Who Weekly look like The Economist.

2006-02-17T14:16:00.000+11:00

Not a good look

The cover of today's Age carries a photo of two female politicans laughing and clinking champagne flutes to celebrate the passage of the bill which will effectively make the abortifacient drug RU-486 available in Australia. That's right, they're drinking champagne to celebrate the release of a drug which only does one thing: it poisons a human foetus in utero. Do I really need to say anything? The Age is curiously ambivalent on this, because it runs the picture, even while acknowledging that it's not really a good look, with a headline so weaselly it almost looks like sarcasm:
After the battle, the winning women drink a toast, decorously

Oh, decorously. Well, that's okay then. I mean, it's not like they're choofing magnums of champagne and spraying them over the Press Gallery, Grand Prix-style.

The article continues (print version only):
"But even in the historic moment, they were nervous about appearances: too much joy on the touchy topic of abortion could be misconstrued."

Gee, d'ya think?

2006-02-17T13:57:00.000+11:00

Duck season continued

An informant with a better memory than mine has filled in that gap about the television debate I mentioned at the start of my Michael Leunig post below. Apparently it was hosted by the ABC, to choose the greatest Australian, past or present, living or dead. The first person I recalled was in fact standing up to nominate Lord Love-a-duck for this honour. That's right: forget Sir John Monash or Weary Dunlop or Vivian Bullwinkel. Leunig for The Greatest. But wait, it gets better. The person doing the proposing was none other than...David Williamson, the man who is to the Australian stage what Leunig is to the editorial cartoon.

As for the young woman who stood up to rudely prick the bubble of Leunig-love, my informant doesn't substantiate my recollection of an audible gasp running around the room, but does assert that they cut to a reaction shot from David Williamson, who could be seen open-mouthed and speechless. In the commentary that followed this golden moment in Australian television, it emerged that the young woman was a Sydneysider, and it all fell into place. The Leunig cult is very much a Melbourne thing. Unlike real prophets, Leunig is without honour, save in his own land.

2006-02-16T19:36:00.000+11:00

The paint-pot blues

Today comes the maddening news that the morons who vandalized the Sydney Opera House in 2003 with an anti-war message, will get their paint pot back after all. It had earlier been ruled that the pot and roller would be withheld and destroyed by the Police, as part of the policy against criminals profiting from their crimes (the morons wanted to auction the pot and rollers for charity). As I jocularly blogged at the time, this also meant these implements would not end up in the lefty-friendly National Museum. The curse of Cuckoo strikes again: there is now talk that these sacred relics may well end up in Sydney's Powerhouse Museum. On the other hand, the Police, who evidently have a sense of humour, appear to have also made a bid to acquire them for their museum.

Again, credit points to the Age for reporting these cretins as vandals, plain and simple.

2006-02-15T09:06:00.000+11:00

Lord Love-a-duck

I wish I could remember exactly what it was: some years ago I was watching a televised debate, from the heart of ABC-land, and at some point, a speaker used Michael Leunig as a reference point for something positive, that everyone could agree on. The next person to speak was a twentysomething young woman, who began by observing parenthetically that she hated Leunig, and so did all of her friends. Even watching at home, you could hear a kind of gasp go round the audience. Hate Leunig!? B-but how could anyone hate Mr. Curly-ducks, whom we all love?

Those people, and the rest like them, are a big part of what's wrong with Michael Leunig. He started off decades ago as an edgy, ratbaggy young cartoonist working for the 'alternative' press at a time when that term still meant something, and some of his cartoons from that period still strike me as clever and funny. It's probably inevitable that with the passage of time, he should have acquired a more reflective outlook, as most of us hopefully do. His problem was that, as his audience aged with him, and assumed their places in the cultural establishment, they immersed him in a hot bath of sycophantic adulation that seems to have completely leached any kind of self-critical faculty out of him.

It's clear from the cartoons themselves that what we might call his thought processes are fairly muddled - his mis-remembering of a key detail of his 'Auschwitz' cartoon (see top), in a recent interview, is significant (he recalled the figure of a Jewish death camp prisoner as a Nazi guard - Prisoners? Guards? Whatever.) But what really sets the seal on this matter are his embarrassing attempts at a written response to his critics (here and here). Without fisking these in detail (it's been done) the main conclusion to draw is that Leunig has obviously never had to argue one of his 'points' to a critical or sceptical interlocutor.

It's not irrelevant to observe here that, on any objective professional standard, Leunig's work has declined markedly in the last few years. Instead of drawing a cartoon from scratch, he has come to rely increasingly on existing photographs, artwork and illustration with minimal or in some cases no intervention. On at least one occasion he has simply submitted an existing news photograph with a 'funny' subtitle. The cartoon he published today in the Age, when eyes are on him in a way they haven't been for a long time, plumbs a new depth of pointlessness: two retro ad illustrations of a man and woman, emitting empty speech- and thought-bubbles. Leunig has arrived at the point where, if he blew his nose on a piece of paper, the Age would publish it, and that can't be good for any artist or cartoonist.

As a critical exercise, I tried to construct a meaning for the 'Auschwitz' cartoon, but eventually had to give up, foundering upon the hopelessly woolly notion of 'war' in the Leuniverse. On the most generous interpretation, i.e., that by 'war' Leunig means the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians, one can only ask, what alternative does he offer? That everyone should just go off to their hobby farms and hug a duck? We don't expect editorial cartoonists to solve the world's problems, but it's not too much to ask that their visual shorthands should represent some kind of reasoned, defensible position.

Leunig's tone-deafness to the real world is also painfully apparent in his waffling on about his hobby farm. It's obviously meant to make him look like a humble, modest man, in touch with the things that really matter, when anyone outside the Age-Leunig bubble sees it for what it is: an indulgence available only to a relative few, mostly the kind of people Leunig likes to excoriate - businessmen, executives, professionals, rich people.

Why do people hate Lord Love-a-Duck? Here are a few suggestions:

Hypocrisy
Leunig has an agenda, as you would expect of an editorial cartoonist, but he pretends he doesn't. He claims to be against universal evils called 'war' and 'fascism', but he's never done a cartoon about Ba'ath torture cells or Palestinian suicide bombers or Jihadi head-hackers. On the contrary, he's only too happy to publish nonsensical cartoons excusing Sheik Yassin as a 'poor defenceless old man in a wheelchair'. Compare him to Peter Nicholson or John Spooner, who both have back-catalogues of strong cartoons on these subjects.

Cant
As in 'religious humbug'. Leunig loves to drag God in. He is, for that matter, the only star in the Age stable who would dare do this, and moreover not be mocked for doing so. According to Brother Michael, we were supposed to love and forgive Osama bin Laden. I might take this appeal a little more seriously if it were not apparent that Leunig hates John Howard and George Bush with a venom that clearly goes well beyond the good Christian's righteous anger against wickedness. This gentle, loving man of God can obviously imagine no fiery pit sufficiently deep or sulphurous to receive the souls of Howard and Bush.

Finally, in my longest post ever (may I find a worthier subject next time) a word on Leunig's Pacifism. George Orwell identified two different kinds of pacifists: the honest ones, who realised and acknowledged that pacifism may mean submitting yourself to destruction at the hands of an enemy who does not share your scruples, and the frauds, who preached pacifism, but were always careful to do so within the borders of a country with a strong standing army, and a firm policy of self-preservation. Leunig obviously fits into the second category, but one suspects that, while an honest fraud always knows somewhere deep inside himself that he is a fraud, Leunig has for so long lived such a sheltered, unchallenged life that he genuinely does not make that connection. That most of the people who live quiet lives in peaceful, prosperous countries are able to do so only because somewhere down the line, "rough men stand ready to do violence in their behalf". Why, he wonders, can't the whole world just be like his Peaceable Kingdom, where the ibis lies down with the grasshopper? If he really wants an answer, he might start by asking the people who used to own his paddock.

2006-02-14T12:51:00.000+11:00

Hello young lovers...

Australian journalists have twigged by now that if they ever need a wacky, ratbag quote on a popular custom or festivity, they need only phone the lef...I mean, independent think tank The Australia Institute. This growth-phobic institute makes much of "happiness" studies, but its recommendations usually seem to involve the avoidance and discouragement of things people actually enjoy doing. When last we saw them, they were trying to stop us feasting and giving presents at Christmas.

Faced with the tragic spectacle of yet another growing market - red roses for Valentine's Day - they had this to offer:

"For those concerned about the cost, Andrew Macintosh, of public policy research centre the Australia Institute, says: "Given the exorbitant prices that are charged for roses on Valentine's Day, a suggestion is to pour more energy into your anniversaries. You'll get the same outcome at half the price."

2006-02-14T09:52:00.000+11:00

Curse of Cuckoo

Unfortunately, the Curse of Cuckoo is something of a boomerang. Only a few days after I was sneering at the failure of Media Watch to reappear, it, well....reappeared. Tim Blair is having an early taster's report.

2006-02-11T14:56:00.000+11:00

To paraphrase Wordsworth...

Bunyip! Thou shouldst be blogging at this hour.
Australia hath need of thee...

2006-02-11T14:33:00.000+11:00

Those cartoons again

A bad situation to find yourself in is when you have to either do a particular thing, or not do it, and both actions are completely predetermined by the circumstances around you. Not doing the thing has become just as much an action as doing it. You can't really abstain. Of course, I'm talking about the Mohammed cartoons. Once, it wasn't an issue. Who, after all, ever needs to publish a Mohammed-mocking cartoon? Now, however, if you edit a major newspaper or magazine, it's become an action that you really can't make a free choice about any longer. If you do want to do it, fine; if you don't want to do it, no matter how good or valid your reasons are, you end up looking like a gutless appeasenik. Blatant hypocrites - the various media who have demonstrated a long-standing hostility to non-Muslim religious sensibilities - are not entitled to this sympathy, but there are a lot of other people out there caught in an uncomfortable no-win zone.

At the same time, when I see the increasingly bewildering lists of who has and who hasn't published the cartoons, it seems to me no longer relevant. The genie is so comprehensively out of the bottle that it doesn't matter who pulled the cork. Does anyone really think that the burn-a-flag rent-a-crowd are keeping some kind of score on who did and didn't publish? That Tariq and Azim are rushing to renew their subscriptions to the New York Times because they spared Islamic sensibilities?

2006-02-10T11:19:00.000+11:00

Family-friendly

Currency Lad is keeping a keen eye on the fatuousness of our legislators in the RU-486 debate, and thinks he has a winner: the head of the Democrats Lyn Allison has described the passage through Senate of a bill effectively granting freer access to the abortifacient drug as a "win for women and their families".

I think I have a close second to that, from last year, when a minor scuffle occurred outside a Melbourne "fertility clinic". (It took me a while to realize, while watching the news report of this incident, that what they meant was "abortion clinic".) Approached for a quote, Democrats senator Natasha Stott-Despoja gravely remarked that "fertility clinics" needed to be the kind of places "women felt safe to attend with their families". Safer for the women, than for their families, perhaps. Or, to paraphrase the old cartoon, "Two go in, but only one comes out".

2006-02-09T13:45:00.000+11:00

Just takin' out da trash

Crime is normally no part of the Cuckoo's beat, but I can't help posting on something I saw on the news last night. Since the recent re-eruption of Melbourne's gangland slayings, camera crews have been permanently posted outside the house of one of the last surviving members of the 'Carlton Crew', Dominic Gatto. So far, all this has told us is that Mr. Gatto prefers 'shortie' dressing gowns, and his weapon of choice against pesky cameramen is a fresh egg. They should count themselves lucky: he could have grabbed their cameras and returned them in pieces, but surely it would take a truly warped criminal mind to do something like that.

Anyway, what really caught my eye was the sight of Mr. Gatto taking his own wheelie-bins in, including the recycle bin. Somehow I can't see Tony Soprano getting Joey Two-fingers to separate the class 4 plastics from the glass and neatly flattening the empty cereal boxes. The other thing about this vignette was its uncanny resemblance to the final scene of Scorsese's Goodfellas. Failed mobster Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), hiding out under witness protection, has become the very thing he most despised: a 'civilian', lost in suburbia, paying taxes, taking in his own rubbish bin, but still, at least, wearing his shortie dressing gown.

2006-02-09T13:07:00.000+11:00

Nettle fails to sting

What is it about abortion that turns our legislators - some of them - into puerile idiots, as exemplified by Greens Senator Kerry Nettle giggling like a schoolgirl over her t-shirt slogan "Mr. Abbott, keep your rosaries off my ovaries"? I don't know what score Senator Nettle got for biology if she thinks abortion has something to do with ovaries. And of course the impeccably politically correct Senator would never indulge in religion-based ridicule, would she?

Watching Health Minister Tony Abbott answering the usual inane, hostile buzz of questions at the door of Parliament House (and incidentally, one of the reasons Australia is a great place is that a senior minister in the Federal Government can arrive at Parliament on his racing bike, and go straight into an interview while still in his Lycra), I had to admire the restraint with which he answered the idiotic slurs against his religious affiliation. Playing the game of 'what would I say?', my answer was something like this: "If I were an orthodox Jew - another religion that opposes abortion - would you be trying to paint me as some kind of zealot? Would you even dare to refer to my religion?" (Memo to researcher: find out Islam's position on abortion).

2006-02-09T12:40:00.000+11:00

Virginia - afraid of the big bad wolf?

News comes from Tim Blair that ABC radio presenter Virgina Trioli has made an on-air remark that she is reluctant to even raise the matter of the Mohammed cartoons, for fear that "someone will set fire to the building". I will wait with interest to see if the Broadcasting Authority, or Media Watch (should it ever reappear) will censure Virginia for this comment, which on the face of it characterizes muslims as a class of people prone to violence against persons and property in the expression of their grievances. If a shock-jock had made this comment, David Marr would be all over it. If Virginia had said it in Victoria, she would probably find herself in receipt of a summons inviting her to follow the trail blazed by the two Dannys. Or maybe not.

2006-02-06T13:24:00.000+11:00

Sacco and Vanzetti

I've been told that one of the many entertaining claims made by the late actor and fabulist Al Lewis (Grandpa Munster) was that, as a very young man, he had worked on a committee to free Sacco and Vanzetti. As Hollywood seems to be in liberal overdrive lately, I'd be willing to bet a small sum of money that at least one script is circulating on the Sacco and Vanzetti story. Anyone familiar with American popular culture knows that S and V - two Italian immigrant anarchists who were executed in America in 1927 on a charge of armed robbery and murder - are martyr-saints in the pantheon of American leftism (classic poster at left by Ben Shahn). I often wonder, in an age when a sexual-harassment class action is seen as a good subject for a multiplex movie, why no-one has revisited this story. As far as I can see, the last time it was filmed was an Italian production of 1971. Maybe my people can talk to George Clooney's people.

2006-02-06T13:02:00.000+11:00

Say your (standard) prayers

"Islamic prayers could be illegal under new laws" screams today's Age on page two, reporting recent comments by international law specialist Dr. Ben Saul. Gee, which prayers would those be? Oh, you know, the standard ones. Such as? Err, y'know, the standard prayer - as the Age describes it - "May God grant victory to the mujahideen in Iraq".

This post is about the idiocy of the Age, and of 'international law specialists', even when they're speaking at government-funded conferences, not about any wish to 'make windows into men's souls', which would be as evil as it was futile. Still, I can't resist the tu quoque of wondering what would happen to any Christian priest or cleric who dared to offer public prayers for the victory of coalition forces in Iraq.

2006-02-06T11:23:00.000+11:00

Cartoon corner

I have nothing special to offer regarding the Danish Cartoons saga. The kind of people we've seen burning the Danish embassy in Beirut suffer from the defect of possessing in combination an emotional age of about seven and the memory of an elephant. As for their attention span, who can say? I hope it will blow over, but then I have a feeling that a British officer in India in 1857 might have said the same thing at news that his Muslim Indian troops were getting agitated over a rumour that their rifle cartridges were greased with pork fat. At least this affair has already had the effect of showing up the hypocrisy and cowardice of the Western mainstream media - and beyond them, the community of 'transgressive' artists - always so ready to bravely challenge Christian religious sensibilities.

On that subject, I recall the fuss here in Melbourne when Andres Serrano's Piss Christ was on display. A meeting was organised by the bien-pensants to show support for Serrano, and in my morning coffee spot, I overheard two artists discussing it. Asked if he would be going, Artist B replied that, unfortunately, he was busy that evening preparing his next grant submission. I felt a warm inner glow, knowing that the rotten capitalist system would somehow remain upright as long as the transgressive artists - who could otherwise smash it with a single blow - had had their mighty right arms permanently frozen into the handout or 'baksheesh' position.

2006-02-03T12:05:00.000+11:00

Moira Shearer

So, Moira Shearer has finally 'taken off the red shoes'. I confess I was amazed to learn that she was still alive. The Red Shoes (1948), in which she starred at the age of 21, seems to belong not just to another age, but almost another world, and she did not appear in many other films. One of the muses of director Michael Powell, she also appeared as the victim of a serial killer in Powell's career-ending Peeping Tom (1960). I always found that bit of casting particularly disturbing: it was like casting Julie Andrews or Audrey Hepburn as the victim in a slasher flick. But then, I suppose that's just the unsettling effect that Powell was aiming at.

If I had to pick a single scene to commemorate her by, it would be that wonderful scene in The Red Shoes, in which she is summoned to the Monte Carlo villa of the impresario Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), to be offered the part in his new ballet of 'The Red Shoes'. Most of Powell's films are fairy tales, in one way or another: either directly (Tales of Hoffman, A Matter of Life and Death), or as fairy tales that somehow bleed into real life (TRS), or as stories of charmed 'worlds apart', where a different reality holds sway (Black Narcissus, A Canterbury Tale, I Know Where I'm Going).

The moment when Vicky (Shearer) goes to Lermontov's villa presents an almost Surrealist change of mood, in a film which up to this point has been a romantic, lighthearted backstage drama. Dressed in a ballgown and wearing a regal tiara (in the middle of the afternoon!), she is diverted from a dinner engagement by a chauffeur bearing Lermontov's summons. She is driven to the gate of an apparently abandoned villa high in the hills above Monte Carlo. A vast stone stairway rises before her, thick with weeds. She slowly mounts the stairs, to appropriately eerie music. (At this point, a blooper occurs which should wreck the moment, but somehow doesn't: one of the reflectors being used to fill in the shadows slips, and a square of errant sunlight skids across the scene.)

Once inside, the previous mood of the film resumes. But this is the pivot-point. Vicky has entered the world of the fairytale, and something has been set in motion which will lead inexorably to that moment when she reaches the fatal limit to which the Red Shoes have dragged her. For many years, one of my personal favourite movie last-lines has been the one Vicky utters, to her lover: "Take off the red shoes".

2006-02-01T18:05:00.000+11:00

Shagadelic

The running gag of the Austin Powers movies is that Austin's sexually liberated swinger philosophy is constantly at odds with the uptight, politically correct world of the Nineties and Oughties. I was reminded of this when visiting the exhibition British Art and the Sixties at the National Gallery of Victoria today (touring from Tate Britain). Most of the work is only interesting historically: artistically, it's as dead as a dodo, and I think it's significant that the NGV chose not to use the Tate's original and rather ambiguous tagline "This was tomorrow".

Pop Art relied heavily on images of women taken from girlie/nudie/soft porn magazines, and modern-day curators writing explanatory labels for these works have quite a job on their hands. Their solution in this exhibition is in fact quite simple. In every single instance in which some kind of 'sexy' image of a woman is used, we are told categorically by the label that this represents the artist's 'critique of the objectification and commodification of women', or words to that effect. In some cases, it's arguably true, as in a Richard Hamilton work comparing aspects of American cars to female anatomy (hey, it seemed profound 40 years ago). But there are many cases in which it's not so clear, and the texts offer nothing like a quote from the artist to substantiate the clairvoyant assertion. There are definitely examples where the artist is dealing with something he does get his jollies from.

In itself, this would simply be the standard PC schoolmarmishness of modern cultural institutions, but in this particular exhibition, there's an added twist. The show also contains one of David Hockney's paintings of a man taking a shower, and, as I'm sure the curators are aware, Hockney based these paintings directly on gay porn magazines of which he was an avid collector. He talks about this in David Hockney by David Hockney, one of the most entertaining memoirs ever written by an artist, after Benvenuto Cellini's Autobiography. Now, it doesn't seem to be presuming too much to guess that Hockney actually enjoyed this subject matter, but funnily enough, the curators don't find anything problematic about this, nor do they feel the need to invent a fiction about him 'critiquing the objectification of the male body'.

2006-01-31T08:49:00.000+11:00

The torch has been passed to a new generation...

At a time when pop music seems to have long ago run out of ideas - when pop music as a category, in fact, seems extinct - comes news which brings me the kind of frisson I haven't felt for twenty years. Devo have done a deal with Disney (sounds like a line from The Court Jester) to create Dev2.0, a kiddie cover band reprising the Devo back catalogue.

The beauty of pop (but also, perhaps, its ultimate limitation) is that it can contain every conceivable gesture without contradiction. It is the Whitmanesque 'multitude'. Dev2.0, which should look like a nauseating sell-out (think Muppet Babies, for example) comes across as a perfectly logical extension of the Devo worldview.

In the repertoire of poses available to dinosaur-rock (and dinosaur post-punk of every kind), the most laughable has always been the pose of the band as a Promethean brotherhood, bringing empowerment from on high to The Kids. Classic example: Pink Floyd's The Wall. Modern example: Green Day. But I recall the video for Devo's Through being cool: Devo are a kind of quatermaster's corps, issuing prop rayguns to young teens, who take them onto the streets to disintegrate numerous examples of daggy, mediocre middle-aged bad taste (joggers in velour tracksuits, etc.) When Pink Floyd do it for real, it's funny; when Devo do it as a joke, it feels real. Now it is real.

2006-01-30T15:31:00.000+11:00

From Roe to woe

It’s a rare treat to be present when a shudder passes through the zeitgeist, and this feels like one of those moments. What I refer to is a sense – suddenly everywhere in the rightside blogosphere - that the tacit assent to the notion of a pregnant woman’s right to an abortion, which has held sway for at least two decades, has quietly evaporated, almost without anyone noticing. See Currency Lad and Michelle Malkin on the subject.

In the noble pantheon of human rights, it suddenly seems difficult to make a ringing Jeffersonian endorsement of what Ann Coulter has summarized as the right of a woman to have unprotected sex with a man whose children she doesn’t want to bear. As fundamental freedoms go, I somehow can’t see Norman Rockwell doing a painting about this one.

2006-01-28T09:13:00.000+11:00

The end is nigh

Tim Blair links to a recent scientific report which uses the familiar metaphor of the history of our planet, scaled to the compass of a 24-hour clock, to remind us just how far gone we are in our death spiral to cinderdom. While such metaphors are arresting, the sense of illumination they provide is brief and illusory.

I'm reminded of the old joke: two astrophysicists are sitting on a bus, chatting about the eventual collapse of the solar system - "Sun becomes a red giant, in about twenty billion years, expands to engulf the inner planets, earth is vaporised, sun contracts to become a cold dead rock, etc., etc." At this point, a man sitting in the seat behind them, who has overheard this conversation, reaches forward, ashen faced with fear: "Wh-what did you say?" "Well", replies one of the scientists, "we were talking about the end of the solar system in about twenty billion years."

The man falls back in his seat with a gasp of relief: "Phew! For a minute there I thought you said twenty million."

2006-01-26T19:52:00.000+11:00

The price of success

Age environment reporter Melissa Fyfe chooses Australia Day to rub our collective noses in our failure as environmental managers. Australia apparently comes a slovenly 20th in the Environmental Performance Index. Care to guess who comes first?

"While we come in at 20 out of 133 nations, our neighbours across the Tasman must be doing something spectacular. New Zealand is, environmentally, the best performing nation in the world."

This is presumably the same New Zealand which, as a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol, is currently facing an A$934 million bill for its heinous carbon debts. If this is how Kyoto treats its success stories, how must it penalize its failures?

2006-01-25T17:41:00.000+11:00

First, the bad news...

One of the simplest techniques used by the Mainstream Media to shape the news is pseudo-narrative sequencing. If you're reporting on A, which you approve of, and B, which you loathe, put B first in the bulletin, then follow it up with the 'good' story, which will have the effect of cancelling out the bad thing, and positioning it as a freak, an aberration which has happily been set right.

For two nights running, SBS TV news has used a report on the new far-left government of Evo Morales in Bolivia as a kind of mouthwash, to sweeten Mary Kostakidis' breath after forcing her to report the success of conservative parties elsewhere (Portugal one night, Canada the next). In both cases, the two stories were run together as a sequence, for no obvious reason other than SBS' need to follow poison with antidote.

Another version of this sequencing rule applies when running a string of vox-pop soundbites. How many times have I heard this on ABC radio? If you have Mr. Iraqi-in-the-street, feel free to have one or two saying something like "Yes, we are happy to have democracy", but always, always make sure that the last soundbite goes to the guy saying "The Americans are just as bad as Saddam".

2006-01-24T10:09:00.000+11:00

Bloody-minded

Given this blog's reliance on Radio National presenter Stephen Crittenden for copy over the Summer period, I feel some comment is owed over the remarkable news that he has been counselled by ABC management for a comment made in an interview with David Hicks' counsel Major Michael Mori. Critts suggested that the prolonged detention of Hicks might finally be due to nothing other than 'bloody-mindedness' on the part of the Howard government. (Already blogged by Slattsnews and Tim Blair). Apparently he also indulged in some overly warm congratulations and good wishes to Major Mori in his closing comments. Crittenden is evidently a fairly cordial person by nature, but does tend to gush when dealing with guests of whom he approves.

Frankly, I find this no worse than any number of other 'Critticisms'. I actually have less of a problem with this kind of frank and open hostility to the Government, than with the soft, steady hum of relentless, unconscious ABC bubblethink - the funhouse mirror which we're all supposed to accept as a transparent windowpane on the real world.

In the meantime, former ABC Four Corners producer Gordon Bick visits the Age letters page today to tell us that we need a 'biased' ABC (scare quotes the Age's , not mine):

"It is necessary and essential for the ABC to always be left of centre — whichever Government is in power."

Words fail me.

2006-01-19T12:20:00.000+11:00

The farmer and the cowman should be friends...and other movie musings

Some might see a pointed liberal convergence in the results of this year's Golden Globe awards - a movie about gay cowboys, a movie about a gay writer, and a made-for-tv drama about a transsexual - but I tend to think it's just coincidence. (And as these pages have asked before, where's Ed Wood when you need him?)

I have no plans to see Brokeback Mountain, but I wouldn't be surprised to find it a good film. Films with gay plots are like any other - there are good ones like Dog Day Afternoon or Magnolia or My Own Private Idaho, and there are dreadful ones like the screechily self-righteous American Beauty.

I suspect the prominence of Brokeback is just another sign that it's been a thin year, in a succession of thin years, for mainstream American movies. I think I first realized this when Finding Neverland got nominated for six Oscars (yeah, okay, TM), including best picture, in 2005. Finding Neverland is a perfectly pleasant little by-the-numbers costumer, (with the usual quotient of glaring anachronisms, both in material detail and social reality). But best picture? (The winner was Clint Eastwood's magnificent Million Dollar Baby).

Historical inaccuracy in movies and books is a favourite topic of mine, and perhaps one for another and longer post, but I can't help noticing that Kate Winslet is in both Neverland and one of the all-time champions of anachronism, Titanic. She's also in the surprisingly good Enigma, by Michael Apted. I have no quarrel with her here. In fact, Enigma not only pays great attention to detail, but manages to evoke, especially in the final scenes, an emotionally convincing sense of the end of the War, and the slow return to peace and civilian normality.

In this last endeavour, it is aided mightily by John Barry's score. I've often wondered what to think about Barry as a film composer, given that he really only has one mode - the soaring romantic, elegiac theme, which he achieves with a surprisingly limited musical vocabulary. But this mode works so immediately and powerfully that it seems philistine to question it. Given that directors almost always commission a composer for the express purpose of recreating his last score, Barry has probably been locked into this mode since his biggest hit, Sydney Pollack's Out of Africa (1985). But it's always been there. One needs only to think of his themes for the Bond movies, especially songs like 'You only live twice' and 'Diamonds are forever', which give them an emotional dimension - a sense of life-lessons earned with pain and the passage of time - that they otherwise would not possess.

I will always be grateful for the revelation I had as a youthful film buff, from Barry's score for Nicholas Roeg's Walkabout (1971), and I find it impossible to imagine a masterpiece like Richard Lester's Robin and Marian (1976) without his music. I still regret that the plans for Barry to score Pixar's The Incredibles never came off. That would have been something.

2006-01-18T08:39:00.000+11:00

Know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em

Time for me to pay up. Readers might recall I blogged the urban-mythlike account of an amateur photographer in the Victorian town of Geelong who was visited by the police shortly after taking some arty sunset snaps of the Shell oil refinery on Corio Bay. I made a bet that the Age would take no steps to verify this - on the face of it - implausible story. Well, they did.

Now that the gaps in the story have been filled out, it no longer sounds like an urban myth. The man taking photos was approached, quite correctly, by a security guard, who noted his car registration and reported it to the police. None of that was in the original account: instead we had a 'men in black' scenario of police mysteriously knowing who he was, what he'd done and where he lived.

I had suspected that if there were a germ of truth in the story, it would probably involve an overzealous constable, which appears to have been the case. The most sensible statement so far comes from Geelong's Chief Police Inspector Wayne Carson:

"While they are not breaking any law, if you take photos (of industry) in the current climate don't be surprised to be asked by police why you are doing it."

Exactly.

The photographer, Mr. Hans Kawitzki, has come out with predictable observations that this is just like being under the Communists in his native Poland [see correction below]. (I think I hear Gerard Henderson's clipping scissors in the background). He also came out with the ever-popular:

"If this is now happening in Australia, it means the terrorists have won."

Yes, right Hans. So by that logic, if a terrorist is free to conduct photographic surveillance of a target and succeeds in blowing it up, the terrorists will have...lost? Or to put it another way, if I have a choice of two alternate terrorists-have-won scenarios, I'll choose the one in which I'm not allowed to photograph an oil refinery, rather than the one in which my legs have been blown off on the 8:42 to Flinders Street.

The Age probably thinks it's being screamingly clever by pointing out that two major Australian libraries have large holdings - much of them accessible via the Internet - of the work of Wolfgang Sievers, well-known for his striking photos of industrial installations. Sievers has been retired for decades, and I don't think even your average jihadi would be dumb enough to plan a bombing based on photos that, at their most recent, are more than twenty years old.

Update: The Age has updated this story, now with predictable advice from Liberty Victoria - whose annual general meeting is held in a bathing box at Brighton, I believe - that freedom-loving shutterbugs everywhere should refuse to follow Police advice not to photograph 'sensitive' sites. Let Freedom ring!

Further update: Mr Kawitzki has contacted this blog to point out the error I made about his nationality. He is a native of Germany and not Poland, and the comparison to restrictions on photography in Communist Poland were made by another member of the Geelong Camera Club. This was stated in the original Age report, and the error was entirely mine, resulting from a too-hasty reading of that piece. My apologies to Mr. Kawitzki.

2006-01-17T10:01:00.000+11:00

House of cards

The renewed Identity Card push will be covered in other blogs, by better minds than mine, but I do want to make a few observations. I think I'll actually enjoy watching the Opposition and the media - whose natural disposition, as social democrats, is to support an ID card - tying themselves in knots trying to criticize Howard for putting it back on the agenda. They're already at work, bashing Howard for introducing a measure he opposed 20 years ago, when the Hawke Labor government tried to bring in the Australia Card.

I'll also be interested to observe the puzzling amnesia which seems to prevail regarding the historical circumstance under which the Australia Card was finally scuttled. In the end, it was only sunk by the last-minute discovery of a crucial drafting error in the legislation, realized by a retired senior public servant, Ewart Smith, early one morning while he was being kept awake by the carolling of magpies. This flaw would have required the legislation to be re-drafted and re-submitted to Parliament. Modern-day commentators rarely mention this, and instead vaguely refer to the legislation being 'rejected'.

For the moment, I'll just wait and see. At least we've moved on from the days when a government minister - Dr. Neal Blewett - could advise a Labor Party conference that:

It is the interests of the community that should come before the individual right…we shouldn’t get too hung up on privacy because privacy, in many ways, is a bourgeois right that is very much associated with the right to private property.

2006-01-16T13:48:00.000+11:00

Canned

Call me petty, but I get a warm glow from the news that the paint pot and rollers, used by two moonbats to deface the Sydney Opera House in 2003 with a 'No War' message, will be destroyed by police. These effects had been seized as evidence, and the moonbats were hoping to retrieve and auction them for charity. Better still, this ensures that the pot and rollers will not end up as exhibits in the propaganda-heavy National Museum of Australia, next to Bob Brown's lifejacket.

(Also, full credit to the Age for describing the moonbats, in the linked article above, as vandals - without scare quotes - and not activists.)

2006-01-16T13:08:00.000+11:00

SBS discriminates against refugees

If you visit the SBS website - which I don't recommend - one of the things you will see is my tax dollars swirling down the plughole of their forthcoming drama series titled Marx and Venus. Geddit? Apparently it's to be a relationship comedy-drama in five-minute episodes, featuring a whiny 29-year-old law student called Marx. According to his housemate Venus, he is given to such bon mots as "This government is stupid". He really knows how to sweet-talk a girl, does Marx.

Anyway, SBS is actually inviting the public to contribute scripts for the show. If your 5-minute script is accepted, you get 2000 of my dollars. Thing is, to be eligible, you need to be "an Australian permanent resident (or citizen)". Note the order of precedence. My question is simply, why don't those with refugee status also get their chance to write an edgy, in-your-face inner-urban relationship comedy-drama?