Author: Geoffrey Gibson

Passing Bull 81  –  A Portrait of an Idiot

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

In a book soon to be published called Language, Meaning, and Truth, you will find something like what follows.

Unfortunately, and notwithstanding the obvious problems we have just referred to, labelling is not just common but mandatory in far too much political discussion in the press, and certainly for shock jocks and those who make a career out of working TV chat shows.  While some people naturally thrive on conflict – Napoleon and Hitler are two bad cases – some people in the press engage in conflict for a living.  These people rarely have a financial motive to respond reasonably, much less to resolve the conflict.  To the contrary, they have a direct financial interest in keeping the conflict as explosive as possible.  It is notorious that controversy feeds ratings and that bad news sells newspapers.

If you put up an argument to one of these people who live of the earnings of conflict, the response will very commonly involve two limbs – a personal attack  on you (the Latin tag for which is ad hominem), followed by some labels, which are never meant as compliments.  So, for example if someone, were to query the rigour of the policies of the government toward refugees, a predictable response would be ‘What else would you expect from someone who subscribes to the ABC?  How would you like these people to move in next door?’  There is no argument – just vulgar abuse.

The CIA reported that Russia had intervened in the US presidential election.  That report did not please Donald Trump.  In trashing his own intelligence community, the president elect gave a text- book example of the response referred to above – a personal attack followed by some labels – no argument – just vulgar abuse.

These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again.’

This is what we must expect as we go from a president of intellect and integrity to a buffoon and bully who has neither.  This is the reaction of an uneducated spoiled child – which is what Trump is.

Poet of the Month: Vergil (Eclogues)

Need I mention him who, having sown the seed,

follows closely, and flattens the heaps of barren sand,

then diverts the stream and its accompanying brooks to his crops,

and see, when the scorched land burns, the grasses withering,

he draws water, in channels, from the brow of the hill.

Or him who grazes his luxuriant crop in the tender shoot,

as soon as the new corn’s level with the furrow,

lest the stalks bend down with over-heavy ears.

Or him who soaks out a marsh’s gathered water with thirsty sand,

especially in changeable seasons when rivers overflow

and cover everything far and wide with a coat of mud,

so the hollow ditches exude steamy vapours?

Passing Bull 80 – He’s at it again

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

Greg Sheridan has excelled himself in the last few days.  On Saturday, his piece began:

François Hollande is Donald Trump’s first big casualty in Europe.

The bland French president, who only a few days ago looked every inch his country’s Hillary Clinton, has made the shock announcement that he will not seek re-election.

Trump-style populist insurrection is roiling Europe as strongly as it roiled the US.  Europe’s professional political class is under as widespread and sustained attack from the continent’s own populists as the American political class has been from the Trumpers.

… France has now had two presidential terms of unequivocal failure, one from the centre-right, one from the centre-left.  This is an almost perfect analogue to the conditions that brought Trump to power in the US.  They are tailor made for the National Front’s Marine le Pen.

It is, frankly, a bit hard to see how Trump could have brought down the French president – whose approval rating had fallen to 4% before Trump was elected.  And you notice we still get those references to the ‘professional political class’  – of which Mr Sheridan is certainly a member.

Then a few days later on the front page of the newspaper we got this:

US president-elect Donald Trump was absolutely right to take a phone call from Taiwan’s President….

By this one 10-minute call he has done something that was utterly beyond Barack Obama in eight feckless years in the White House – he has put the Chinese leadership off balance.

How would he know how China is reacting, and if he is correct, how does it help the US – or us – will to put China off balance?

But the prize for bullshit on the weekend, and a strong contender for bullshit of the year, goes to Chris Kenny.  He has a very different view of the significance of the election of Trump for Australians.  The heading of the piece is Trump’s triumph vindicates Abbott.  It starts as follows:

Our political/media class –[Look, Mum, no hands!] – seems to have conveniently overlooked the most telling domestic lesson from the Trump ascendancy.  Perhaps they worry it exposes their lack of judgement. 

Donald Trump’s election triumph buttresses the argument that Tony Abbott’s overthrow was unnecessary – that he would have won this year’s election.  It gives weight to the claim his poor mid-term polling was meaningless and that his known strengths were electorally compelling.

Those of us who have long made this case believe that, for all his faults, Abbott’s strong positions on border protection, national security, climate caution [!], union corruption and budget discipline would contrast sharply with Labor.  The political/media class, however, declared Abbott an embarrassment and barracked for a coup.

We will never know.  But everything that has transpired since Abbott’s knifing tends to bolster the position: from the way Malcolm Turnbull has struggled to display certitude to how Bill shorten hasn’t had to duck a punch; from the Prime Minister’s own polling and near defeat to Britain’s clear statement of faith in sovereignty through Brexit; and from Trump’s focus on borders and disdain for the dominant media narrative to his victory despite the polling consensus.

This flight from reality is truly unnerving.  The bullshit is mind blasting.  What on earth do we understand from ‘Britain’s clear statement of faith in sovereignty through Brexit’?  They have been like bunnies under a spotlight since they realised that they got sold a pup by two crooks who are almost as bad as Donald Trump.

These people who are so happy with Trump – yes the political/media class or part of it – are riding for a big gutser.  It is a shame this newspaper is so infested with Liberal rejects and Labor rats.  When the government announced a review of policy, the paper launched an editorial and three columnists.  They are helping the reactionaries to ensure a Labor win.  One of the cavemen said of the proposed review: ‘It was a clear attempt to reintroduce a price on hot air to satisfy the extreme greens and others seduced by the socialist alarmism of anthropogenic climate change.’  Goebbels would have been in awe.  So would Freud.

Poet of the month: Vergil (Eclogues)

Here, wheat, there, vines, flourish more happily:

trees elsewhere, and grasses, shoot up unasked for.

See how Tmolus sends us saffron fragrance,

India, ivory, the gentle Sabeans, their incense,

while the naked Chalybes send iron, Pontus rank

beaver-oil, Epirus the glories of her mares from Elis.

Nature has necessarily imposed these rules, eternal laws,

on certain places, since ancient times, when Deucalion

hurled stones out into the empty world,

from which a tough race of men was born.

Come: and let your strong oxen turn the earth’s rich soil,

right away, in the first months of the year,

and let the clods lie for dusty summer to bake them in full sun:

but if the earth has not been fertile it’s enough to lift it

in shallow furrows, beneath Arcturus: in the first case

so that the weeds don’t harm the rich crops, in the other,

so what little moisture there is doesn’t leave the barren sand.

Imagination and courage – and Paul Keating

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 4 Comments

Paul Keating said that Winston Churchill inspired him to go into public life.  ‘If that’s the business he’s in, I’d love to be in that business.…  I was attracted to him for his braveness, sense of adventure, compulsion, and moral clarity.’  That last phrase, ‘moral clarity’, is an interesting proposition to come from one politician talking about another. ‘Leadership, after all, is as I have so often remarked, about two things: imagination and courage… Churchill had these qualities in spades.’   Keating admired his open ‘swashbuckling’ and ‘risk – taking’ approach to politics.  ‘He was the one who was not prepared to cede Western Europe to Hitler in order to save Britain, and it was on that moral point that I always found him to be so attractive a character.’  Well, there we have the word ‘moral’ again, and Churchill was, if nothing else, a big–picture leader, the phrase in the subtitle to the book Paul Keating by Troy Bramston.

Keating found an interest in music early in his life.  ‘The arts give expression to inner feelings and impulses in a way that I think sport, with all its greatness, can’t do.’  That remark is about as un-Australian as could ever have fallen from the mouth of any politician in Australia.  But the following remark of Keating is dead true: ‘One of the sad things about my colleagues is that few of them had an inner life.’  Sadly, their outer life isn’t too bloody flash either.

Music would always play a big part in Keating’s life.  ‘Music for the mind is like electricity for a motor. Later in life when he was at his busiest, he would spend forty-five minutes charging his motor up on say Brahms or Shostakovich.  ‘I would always go down to the office in a bigger spirit.  You’ve always got to walk in the door with your imagination working.’  That, too, is a very Keating remark.

During the time of the moratorium about the Vietnam War, Jim Cairns met Keating standing at the loo in Parliament House. He expressed regret that Paul wasn’t wearing his moratorium badge.  ‘Look, Jim, that’s the difference between you and me.  I’m not here to protest; I’m here to be in charge.’  There you have a very radical difference in perspective on the role of the Labor Party – on one side, one of Labor’s great successes; on the other, one of its quintessential tragedies.

Whitlam was something of a snob intellectually.  Someone close to him said that Gough believed that you could not make it without a degree.  He was always on to Keating to get a degree.  ‘Why?  Then I’d be just like you.’  On the other hand, Kim Beazley Senior looked at Keating and said: ‘You see that man.  Watch him, because he’s a political killer.’

At the first meeting of the caucus of the Whitlam Government in December 1972, 94 men assembled – there was not one woman.  The government may have looked radical to a lot of Australians who had been anaesthetised by Menzies, but it looks Neanderthal to us.  We forget now that the opposition to Medibank was such that it had to be put before a joint sitting.

It did not take long for Keating to establish his own profile.  In 1981, Jennifer Hewett described Keating as a ‘Hell’s Angel in a suit… Keating is so sharp it hurts.  Thought, speech, dress.  He’s never had much time for half measures, for wavering.  The lines are always clear, the intensity is always dazzling.  The overriding presence is of cool, supercool, leavened by a tongue that can strike like a snake’s and claws that can scratch like a tomcat’s.’

When Hawke got elected, there was some fear that Hawke might deny Keating the Treasury portfolio.  Keating told Graham Richardson: ‘You had better tell Hawke that if he wants to remove me from the Treasury portfolio, it will be the Harry Truman doctrine of massive retaliation.  And I do mean ‘massive”.  That is an authentically Keating position: and the reference is not to Harry Truman the man, but to the nuclear bombs he released over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Keating was referring to what others would later describe as the Hiroshima option.  The Labor Party has always had more than its share of good haters, and political assassins.

The first Hawke government had a very strong ministry.  Hewson would say it was probably the best front bench since World War II.  The cabinet of the workers’ party only had two members without a university education – Keating and Mick Young.  Keating was nervous at his first stint as Treasurer. He told Max Walsh: ‘You should be here, not me’.  Andrew Peacock could recall seeing the papers shaking in Keating’s hand as he stood at the dispatch box.  That bear pit is no place for boys or girls.  Especially if you had to face Keating on a bad day.

Charm is important in politics.  When Keating met Reagan he realised immediately why Reagan was so successful.  ‘He was a completely charming individual.  Only after you saw him actually doing what he did best, you realised what personal qualities he had used to get as far as he had got.  They were not intellectual qualities, but they were gentlemanly, gregarious, and humorous.’  This respect for Reagan, with the respect for Churchill, shows that Keating was not into typing or labelling, but rather dealing with individuals on their own merits.  That, some might think, is the mark of maturity.

A fundamental part of the success of the Hawke government was the way it worked with the unions.  Bill Kelty played a major part.  He said: ‘This is a fundamental period of restructuring in the economy.  These changes are going to be better for the country, but it’s not necessarily going to make it easier for you,’ he said to the unions.  ‘The majority of the unions accepted that argument.’  As Troy Bramston remarks: ‘This is a notion foreign to most contemporary union leaders’.  You bet – and to most oppositions.

The book is littered with references to Keating filing and commenting on items in the press.  This is not something that you could imagine Churchill doing.  It does suggest some kind of insecurity in the face of what might now be loosely referred to as the establishment or the elite.  The author notes the dislike for Murdoch within the Labor Party for its role in the fall of Whitlam, but says that at about the time when Keating made his reference to the banana republic, Keating reserved a particular disdain for Fairfax.

Keating got very close to the Australian historian Manning Clark.  His newspaper archive contains several of Clark’s essays that are heavily underlined.  He greatly admired Clark’s six volume A History of Australia.  Toward the end, Clark had written: ‘With the end of the domination by the straighteners, the enlargers of life now have their chance.’  Keating would frequently pick up a bundle of CDs and head over to Clark’s house where they would listen to music.  ‘I wanted to get a handle on Manning’s personality.  I wanted to understand how he had impacted on the country, what motivated him, what drove him.  I was interested in the resonances of his personality.’  It is not easy, offhand, to think of any other Australian politician doing anything remotely like that.

When Keating reached his famous agreement with Hawke about succession at Kirribilli House, Keating asked Kelty as they left the meeting whether he thought Hawke would keep the agreement.  ‘I doubt it.  It didn’t come naturally.  It didn’t come out of a negotiated process.  Hawke’s a negotiator.  You actually keep agreements out of a negotiated settlement.  But this wasn’t negotiated.  It was almost given flippantly as a statement.’  Well, at least Keating was on notice from the start that Hawke might welch, which he subsequently did.

When Keating finally moved on Hawke, those close to Hawke begged him to stand down.  Hawke gave the fatuous response that he would not give in to ‘terrorism’.  He may have forgotten what had happened to Hayden when he got deposed.  When the faction gathered in the office of Richardson, Stephen Loosely thought they looked like a group of rebels preparing for battle.  ‘People cleaning their rifles, checking the sites, and putting extra ammunition …… It’s a little bit like that scene in The Magnificent Seven where the bandits arrive at the village to find the seven ensconced and heavily armed.  I said if Hawkie walked in the door now, it would be like Eli Wallach saying ‘Who are you and why have you come?’  One of us would have to be Steve McQueen, mate, and look up and say, ‘We deal in lead, friend.”  Keating burst out laughing.

Keating won and Hawke cried.  Hawke promised not to ‘utter one word to harm Paul or his government.’  Other caucus members sobbed.  But unlike others who would be deposed in similar passion plays, Hawke by and large did keep that promise.

It is at this point that the author summarises the achievement of Keating as Treasurer.

In May 1991, Keating surpassed Ben Chifley’s record as a Labor treasurer.  His legacy as the most significant treasurer in the post-war era, if not since Federation, was secure.  No treasurer has presided over more significant economic reforms: the float of the dollar and the deregulation of the financial system; six iterations of the Accord that moderated wage increases and helped to contain inflation; fundamental change to the taxation system, including cutting marginal income – tax rates ( from 60% to 47%), slashing company tax (from 49% to 39%) and abolishing the double taxing of dividends by introducing imputation; industry – sector deregulation, reducing tariffs, and selling government assets; introducing compulsory superannuation; and delivering for surplus budgets – the first since the early 1950s – and decreasing expenditure in real terms.  Although the recession detracted from this scorecard, the economy was to emerge from it with a record 25 years of uninterrupted growth and low inflation.  And no treasurer had been more instrumental in the delivery of a government’s political messages, its overall narrative, and thus in its electoral successes.

That seems to me to be a very fair summary, but I am biased.  Prior to that reform of the tax system, I had been paying tax at about 66%, and provisional tax on that.  Since I was taxed on receipts, then if my receipts went up, I would have to pay about a $1.30 for every dollar I received over the level of the previous financial year.  This sort of madness led people into schemes to avoid paying tax which developed into a different level of madness.  But for reasons I have never understood, I had to wait for a Labor government to do something about either sort of madness that people who falsely called themselves conservatives had simply sat and watched over like bored tomcats.  And if you look at the efforts of our treasurers since Keating, it is hard to see anyone who might come even close.

We tend to forget now how important was the part played by Keating in developing the APEC conferences.  Keating floated the idea with Clinton and then developed it as part of his intense concentration on Asia.  Greg Sheridan wrote in The Australian: ‘It was a masterful and effective performance by Keating and must be one of the few occasions in Australian diplomatic history when an Australian Prime Minister has engaged in effective shuttle diplomacy.’  When the 18 APEC leaders met, they represented more than half the world’s GDP.  In his memoirs, Clinton would claim responsibility for what Keating had done.

We tend to forget now how backward those we refer to as the Coalition could be.  Do you recall that paranoid furore when Keating guided the Queen through a door?  The Queen was so disturbed by the hysteria of the tabloid press that she raised the matter directly with Keating.  She said: ‘Take no notice of them.’  ‘Your Majesty, a British tabloid editor is a particularly low form of human life.’  Her Majesty laughed.

But when Keating took exception to having a British flag in ours, Hewson and the rest of the opposition expressed outrage.  When Parliament resumed, they ringed their desks with small plastic flags.  John Howard had referred to the golden age of the 1950’s.  This led to the signature annihilation of all that Howard stood for then and later.  You can get it on You Tube as the cultural cringe speech.  After bursts of comedy that are serene, we get:

I was told that I did not learn respect at school.  I learned one thing: I learned about self-respect and self-regard for Australia – not about some cultural cringe to a country which decided not to defend the Malayan peninsular, not to worry about Singapore, and not to give us our troops back to keep ourselves free from Japanese domination.  This was the country that you people tethered yourselves too, and even as it walked out on you and joined the Common Market, you are still looking for your MBEs and your knighthoods and all the rest of the regalia that comes with it.  You could take Australia right back down the time tunnel to the cultural cringe where you have always come from… These are the same old fogies who doffed their heads and tug the forelock to the British establishment; they now try to grind down Australian kids by denying them a technical school education and want to put a tax on the back of the poor.  The same old sterile ideology, the same old fogeyism  of the 1950s that produced the Thatcherite policies of the late 1970s is going to produce Fightback!  We will not have a bar of it.  You can go back to the 50s to your nostalgia, your Menzies, the Caseys, and the whole lot.  They were not aggressively Australian, they were not aggressively proud of our culture, and we will have no bar of you or your sterile ideology.

It was pure mayhem, and it says a lot for the magical powers of Shostakovich.  When Hewson asked Keating why he wouldn’t call an election, he got the celebrated reply: ‘The answer is, mate, I want to do you slowly.  There has to be a bit of sport in this for all of us.  In the psychological battle stakes, we are stripped down and ready to go.  I want to see those ashen-faced performances; I want more of them.’  It is a blood sport. The nastiness went both ways.  Hewson was intent on smearing Keating over the famous piggery.

The ultimate political goal is to inflict fatal damage on P K’s credibility in the eyes of the voting public (if this is what the merits of the matter justify).  We are seeking to expose a conflict of interest in circumstances that give rise to a grave suspicion that there may have been improper or reprehensible conduct on the part of PK.  We are not alleging actual impropriety, only the possibility of impropriety.

Well, if you going to do a knife job, you might at least have the courtesy to be honest about it.  This is just weasel gutlessness.

In the campaign, Keating lacerated Hewson and Howard.  ‘Even Marie Antoinette didn’t put GST on a cake’.  In the end, Keating enjoyed his sweetest triumph, the triumph for the true believers.  Later he would get to taunt Downer.  ‘How are you going over there Curly’….or old darling or Shirley Temple?

Perhaps the strongest part of the book is in its treatment of Keating’s efforts on behalf of indigenous Australians.  The Redfern speech is treated at length.  More importantly, the author makes it plain that Keating used all his political capital and political experience to get through legislation on native title against the opposition, the mining industry, most of primary industry, the states, and a lack of interest in parts of his own party.  He was careful in selecting the correct allies. One asked Keating what his attitude was.  ‘Well, basically, I reckon for 200 years we’ve been sneaking around in someone else’s backyard.’  ‘Shit, that sounds alright then.  You’re on my wavelength.’  The author says this:

No other Prime Minister had ever paid such a high priority on indigenous issues.  It was more than just a priority.  Keating was so involved in native-title negotiations that he effectively micro-managed it.  This was not design, but by necessity.  It was the High Court that made the Mabo judgement and it demanded a response from government.  But for this response to prove durable, it had to win broad acceptance from stakeholders and then passage through the Senate.  This required prime ministerial authority, and Keating set about using it.  He engaged directly with indigenous leaders, farmers, and miners.  He ran a cabinet process.  He carried the debate in the media.  And he negotiated directly with the states and the Senate cross bench, while fighting a protracted battle against the Coalition.  The odds were stacked against him, but Keating worked the political system to produce an outcome.  This was achieved while diminishing Keating’s political capital, and was of nil political benefit.  Keating brought indigenous issues from the margins of politics to the centre of government, where it has remained in the decades since.

The key here is the observation that this heroic exercise diminished Keating’s political capital and ‘was of nil political benefit’.  If that assessment is fair – and it looks fair to me – Keating stands well above other political leaders of our time in this country.   There is blue sky between him and them.

But Labor had been on power too long.  It gave way to a man who would redefine our ideas of mediocrity.  Keating was hurt by the loss, but more hurt by the separation from his wife.  After the election loss, he invited Howard to the Lodge for a cup tea.  No outgoing prime minster had shown that courtesy. ‘I thought it was important for the sake of the country, and the polity, that the Prime Minister who is leaving The Lodge doesn’t leave it as some sort of vacant possession.  I wanted the country to see and witness a generous and healthy change of government.  I showed him around, and I said some things to him which I thought were important to say.’  It is both curious and sad that no former Prime Minister had apparently thought of this.

What is the biggest regret of Keating for Labor leaders after him?  ‘While ever we borrow the monarch of another country as our head of state, we will never be as great as we are entitled to be.  It has always been a matter of wonderment to me that my colleagues could not see that.  They don’t think it is important, because they do not get the spiritual essence of what the change to a republic meant.  It means that we will be a society to our self.’

What other Australian politician speaks of the spiritual essence of a society to our self?

Passing Bull 79 – What is populism?

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

There has been a lot of chatter – some call it white noise – about populists. What are they?  One of the problems with this word is that people who use it rarely say what they mean by it.  For example in today’s AFR, John Roskam of the IPA says that the reaction of the ‘elites’ to wins by ‘populists’ amount to threats to democracy.  The IPA rarely misses an opportunity to miss the point.  The author does not define any of those three terms, but it is hard to imagine any definition of ‘elite’ that would not embrace the IPA and AFR.

The OED, at least in my version is no help.  (The OED on line gives this citation for ‘populism’:  ‘your populism identifies with the folks on the bottom of the ladder’; and for ‘populist’: ‘she is something of a populist—her views on immigration resemble those of the right-wing tabloid press’.  The two are not the same.) If you go elsewhere on the Web, you will find references to ‘ordinary’ or ‘regular’ or ‘common’ people against political insiders or a wealthy elite.  These vague terms don’t help – to the contrary.  What do they mean? Is dividing people into classes a good idea in Australia now – or anywhere at any time?  And if it is simply a matter of the ‘common people’ wresting control from a ‘wealthy elite’, who could decently object?  Would this not be just democracy triumphing over oligarchy?  Or is the world perhaps not quite so simple, or quite so black and white?

Populus is the Latin word for ‘people,’ with pretty much the same connotations as that word in English.  Do populists therefore appeal to the people for their vote?  Well, anyone standing for office in a democracy does just that.  The most famous political speech in history concludes with the words ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’.

But the word populist is not used to describe anyone standing for office.  It is used to refer to only some of those, and the difference seems to be in the parts of the people that are appealed to and the way in which that appeal is made.

So, what kind of people do populists appeal to?  Well, the people who use this word say that the people appealed to are anything but the ‘elite’ – those who have got on well in life because of their background or education, or both.  In both the UK and the US this feeling about the elite – which might look like simple envy to some – is linked to a suspicion of or contempt for ‘experts’.  People do, however, tend to get choosy about which experts they reject. This rejection does not extend to experts who may save their life or their liberty, but it may explain the curious intellectual lesion that many people of a reactionary turn of mind have about science and the environment.

Another attribute of people appealed to by populists is said to be that they have missed out on the increase in wealth brought about by globalised free trade and changes in technology.  These movements obviously have cost people jobs and are thought by some experts to be likely to cost another 40% of current jobs over the next ten years.

A third attribute of people appealed to by populists is said to be that in their reduced condition, they value their citizenship above all else, and they are not willing to share it.  They are therefore against taking refugees or people whose faith or colour threatens their idea of their national identity.

Now, if people who use the word populist are describing politicians who appeal to people with those attributes, they may want to be careful about what pub they are standing in before they articulate that meaning.  The picture that emerges is one of a backward, angry, and mean chauvinist, the loser with the definitive chip on the shoulder.  That picture is seriously derogatory, but in my view it adds warmth and not light to the discussion.  If that is what people mean when they refer to populists, then it’s just a loose label that unfairly smears a large part of the population.  The term does then suffer from the vice of labelling that we have identified.

In truth, this meaning calls up another Latin term vulgus.  This means the mob or herd or ‘the folks on the bottom of the ladder’, who are very commonly people whose ‘views on immigration resemble those of the right-wing tabloid press’.  These sorts of people have been typed for the ages by Shakespeare in Coriolanus, and the inability of the hero to bend his knee to the mob costs him his life.  It is from here that we get our word vulgar, and that is a seriously insulting term.

It may be more helpful and honest to identify the opinions that some politicians appeal to and then comment on the reactions, rather than trying to lump a large and diverse group of the populace under the one pigeon-hole.  Then you might get something like this: People who believe in the promises of Farage or Trump are not too bright.  People who support Farage or Trump in venting spleen against those who are not so well off on the ground of colour or faith are not very nice – at best they are ungenerous.  And any American who believes that there may be one iota of communion between Donald Trump and Jesus of Nazareth is hopelessly deluded to the point of being diagnosably insane.

And if you think that any nation can be governed other than by reliance on ‘experts’ and ‘insiders’, then you are in Fantasyland.  Do you recall when Mao unleashed the Red Guards in the maternity wards?   Or just look at the mayhem in federal parliament caused by idiots, amateurs, and ego-primers that are all hopelessly out of their depth.  Have we ever seen a more depressing circus than the display over backpackers’ tax?

I would myself prefer to drop the word ‘populist’.  In whatever meaning it is used in, it will provoke the routine incantation of inane mantras like identity politics or class warfare or elitist snobbery – that are all just bullshit.

This discussion is I think correct, or at least, arguable as far as it goes.  But it does not deal with the principal fear of people about those who are called populists. The fear is hinted at in the two OED online citations.  Let us look at two dead ones – Mussolini and Hitler.  What frightens and repels us about these terrible people is that they directed their powers of persuasion to vulnerable people in order to bring out the reverse of the ‘better angels’ of those people and entrust the persuaders with power (which would never be given back).  They went straight for the gutter and they stayed there. The ‘liberal elites’ who thought that the ‘populists’ could be reined in later were cruelly deluding themselves.

What might be described as the failure of the better people of Italy has been described by a biographer of Mussolini in terms that could be transposed word for word to the Germans and Hitler.

Mussolini still needed their [the moderates’] help, for most of the liberal parliamentarians would look to them for a lead.  He also took careful note that chaos had been caused in Russia when representatives of the old order were defenestrated en masse during the revolution:  fascism could hardly have survived if the police, the magistrates, the army leaders and the civil service had not continued to work just as before, and the complicity of these older politicians was eagerly sought and helped to preserve the important illusion that nothing had changed.

The liberals failed to use the leverage afforded by his need for their approbation.  Most of them saw some good in fascism as a way of defending social order and thought Italians too intelligent and civilised to permit the establishment of a complete dictatorship.  Above all, there was the very persuasive argument that the only alternative was to return to the anarchy and parliamentary stalemate they remembered….Mussolini had convincingly proved that he was the most effective politician of them all: he alone could have asked parliament for full powers and been given what he asked; he alone provided a defence against, and an alternative to, socialism.  And of course the old parliamentarians still hoped to capture and absorb him into their own system in the long run; their optimism was encouraged by the fact that his fascist collaborators were so second-rate. 

How is that relevant to recent events?  That is a matter of opinion, but Mussolini was, rather like Berlusconi, seen as an ‘absurd little man’, a ‘second-rate cinema actor and someone who could not continue in power for long’, a ‘César de carnaval’, a ‘braggart and an actor’, and possibly ‘slightly off his head.’  The only difference to the next President of the US is that he is ‘an absurd big man.’

Perhaps two generalizations may be offered about populists.  Their reign may be short. They don’t know what they are doing; they are untrustworthy; and they are much bigger on protesting than on governing.  And the possibilities of breakdown of trust at either end between them and their supporters look to be endless.

Poet of the Month: Vergil (Georgics)

In the early Spring, when icy waters flow from snowy hills,

and the crumbling soil loosens in a westerly breeze,

then I’d first have my oxen groaning over the driven plough,

and the blade gleaming, polished by the furrow.

The field that’s twice felt sun, and twice felt frost,

answers to the eager farmer’s prayer:

from it boundless harvest bursts the barns.

But before our iron ploughshare slices the untried levels,

let’s first know the winds, and the varying mood of the sky,

and note our native fields, and the qualities of the place,

and what each region grows and what it rejects.

Passing Bull 78 –  The evil of labelling

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

Some years ago, a lady at Oxford, en route from the reading room to the dining room for breakfast, was heard to say: ‘I have just been described as a typical Guardian reader, and I’m trying to work out whether I should feel insulted.’  A discussion about the meaning of the word ‘presumptuous’ then followed.

There is no law or custom that says that we should apply a label to people – or put them in boxes, or in a file, or give them a codename.  There is no law that we should not. But most of us can’t help ourselves.  So what?

Well, most of us don’t like being put into boxes.  That is how we tend to see governments or Telstra or a big bank behaving toward us.  Nor do most of us want to be typed.   When someone says that an opinion or act of yours is ‘typical’ of you or your like, they are very rarely trying to be pleasant to you.

Most of us just want to be what we are.  You don’t have to have a university degree specialising in the philosophy of Kant to believe that each of us has his or her own dignity merely because we are human.  We are in a different league to rats and flies.  So, if I am singled out as a Muslim, a Jew, or an Aboriginal, what does that label add to or take away from my humanity?  It is often not easy to see anything positive coming from someone else subtracting from my humanity by labelling me in that way.

So, the first problem with labelling is that it is likely to be demeaning to the target, and presumptuous on the part of the labeller.  We are detracting from a person’s dignity.  We put registration numbers on dog collars, and we brand cattle, but we should afford humans the courtesy – no, the dignity – of their humanity. After all, we can scarcely bring ourselves to think of that time when some people were tattooing identifying numbers on the bodies of other human beings.

The second problem with labelling is that it is both loose and lazy.  If you say of someone that they are a typical Conservative or Tory, that immediately raises two questions.  What do the labels Conservative and Tory mean?  What are the characteristics of the target that might warrant the application of the label?

In this country, at the moment, the terms Left and Right hardly mean anything at all – except as terms of abuse (which is how the words Tory and Whig started in England).  These terms are now generally only applied by one side to the other.  Not many people are happy to have either of those labels applied to themselves. They are just too plastic and fluid.

There is one curious distinction in the way that these terms are applied in this country at the moment.  The Murdoch press is happy to call followers of the Fairfax press or the ABC ‘the Left’ (or ‘the P C Left’ or ‘the Love Media’), but those members of the press very rarely respond by calling readers of the Murdoch press Right wing  (or Far Right, or worse).  Is the difference one of custom or courtesy – or don’t we know or don’t we care?  Just how many people are left who could give a hoot for these outmoded terms?

Similarly, the labels Liberal and Labour hardly stand for any difference in principle any more.  At the time of writing, on any of the major issues in Australian politics, what were the differences in the policies of those parties that derived from their platform?  The old forms of name-calling between Liberal and Labour mean nothing to my children – absolutely nothing.  These old ways are as outmoded as name-calling between Catholics and Protestants.  And there is some common ground in the two shifts – very many people have lost faith in both religion and politics.  The old tensions or rivalries just don’t seem to matter anymore.

Unfortunately, and notwithstanding the obvious problems we have just referred to, labelling is not just common but mandatory in far too much political discussion in the press, and certainly for shock jocks and those who make a career out of working TV chat shows.  While some people naturally thrive on conflict – Napoleon and Hitler are two bad cases – some people in the press engage in conflict for a living. These people rarely have a financial motive to respond reasonably, much less to resolve the conflict.  To the contrary, they have a direct financial interest in keeping the conflict as explosive as possible.  It is notorious that controversy feeds ratings and that bad news sells newspapers.

If you put up an argument to one of these people who live off the earnings of conflict, the response will very commonly involve two limbs – a personal attack  on you (the Latin tag for which is ad hominem), followed by some labels, which are never meant as compliments.  So, for example if someone, were to query the rigour of the policies of the government toward refugees, a predictable response would be ‘What else would you expect from someone who subscribes to the ABC?  How would you like these people to move in next door?’  There is no argument – just vulgar abuse.

The disintegration of thought is palpable, but a lot of people are making a handy living out of it – and not in any way that does the rest of us any good.  So, when someone I know was described as a typical ‘Julia Gillard Labor lawyer,’ he expressed some interest at what that might mean, particularly since he has expressed the views set out above about the lack of difference between Labor and Liberal, and since he also had said that he had voted for Malcolm Turnbull (professedly a conservative) at the last election.    Since the label as a whole hardly looked to have been intended to flatter, he was also interested to know what our first female prime minister had done to be loaded into the shotgun.  The response was sadly of the shirtfront plus label variety.

What does a labor lawyer look like?
Take a look in the mirror.
You will likely see someone who feels superior to the masses.
Who knows best
Struggles to entertain concepts outside of their bubble.
Hugs up to socialism.
Likely not understanding that sooner or later the cash runs out.
You can only squeeze a lemon so far.

Good grief, who are ‘the masses’ outside the dreams of 1948 Marxists? What on earth could ‘hugs up to socialism’ mean in Malmsbury 2016?  That the person being abused believes in Medicare?  Does the complainant actually look like a squeezed lemon?

This example shows the third problem with labelling – it generally tells you a lot more about the labeller – some would say the sniper – than the target, and the answer is rarely pretty.  (Have you noticed that people who use labels and who abuse abstractions expect that others will do the same?  Is this what Freud called ‘projection’?) And if you pile cliché upon label, and venom upon petulance, the result is as sad as it is predictable.  You disappear up your own bum – publicly, and painfully.

So, I would leave labels with George Bush senior, who said that labels are what you put on soup cans.

Poet of the Month: Vergil: Georgics

I’ll begin to sing of what keeps the wheat fields happy,

under what stars to plough the earth, and fasten vines to elms,

what care the oxen need, what tending cattle require,

Maecenas, and how much skill’s required for the thrifty bees.

O you brightest lights of the universe

that lead the passing year through the skies,

Bacchus and kindly Ceres, since by your gifts

fat wheat ears replaced Chaonian acorns,

and mixed Achelous’s water with newly-discovered wine,

and you, Fauns, the farmer’s local gods,

(come dance, together, Fauns and Dryad girls!)

your gifts I sing. And you, O Neptune, for whom

earth at the blow of your mighty trident first produced

whinnying horses: and you Aristaeus, planter of the groves,

for whom three hundred snowy cattle graze Cea’s rich thickets:

you, O Tegean Pan, if you care for your own Maenalus,

leaving your native Lycaean woods and glades, guardian

of the flocks, favour us: and Minerva bringer of the olive:

and you Triptolemus, boy who revealed the curving plough,

and Silvanus carrying a tender cypress by the roots:

and all you gods and goddesses, whose care guards our fields,

you who nurture the fresh fruits of the unsown earth….

Carlyle, Dickens and the Strange Death of Liberal America – Part II

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

[This is the second part of a note on what Carlyle and Dickens may tell us of events in 2016.  You may recall that Carker was the character in Dombey and Son who lusted after revenge for the humiliation that he suffered all his life.  Both writers saw the decline of religion and the worship of money.]

 

The word ‘revolution’ is much abused, but we do appear to be going through something very like that with technology.  In any revolution, people have to get hurt.  Mao Zedong said that ‘A Revolution is not a dinner party’.  He should have known – if he had had a conscience, he would have been haunted by tens of millions of dead souls.

During the recent US election season, Donald Trump campaigned on Twitter – a device made for people who have trouble thinking or writing, and part of the ‘revolution’ that is closing minds and forbidding manners, both processes that are hallmarks of demagogues.

It was the fear of revolution that led England in the 19th century to abandon laisser-faire and to intervene across all markets by legislating to protect the young and the weak and the infirm.  They were legislating against the darker downside of capitalism, and the emergence of Karl Marx would spur them on.  England saw a vast reform movement that would culminate in the final containment of the powers of the British aristocracy in the House of Lords.  What was in truth a constitutional crisis was provoked by Lloyd George and Winston Churchill.  In the People’s Budget of 1909, Lloyd George said:

These problems of the sick, the infirm, of the men who cannot find a means of earning a livelihood … are problems with which it is the business of the State to deal. They are problems which the State has neglected for too long.

Well, this doctrine, called New Liberalism, certainly looked revolutionary to the aristocracy, and for a moment the nation came close to a real revolution.

The English version of New Liberalism has never been accepted in the US.  Indeed, it is anathema to a large part of the Republican Party.  It was however reinforced by the Welfare State after the horrors of two world wars, and it is now in principle applied across the Western world except in the US.  As a result, the State became larger and larger and more expensive.

So, in the 1980’s, there came reactions.  In both the US and the UK Conservative governments sought to reduce the role of the State and to reduce taxes.  The movement was led by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.  They wanted to go back to laissez-faire.  They did not see themselves as winding back the clock.  They thought that government should defer to the markets.  They said their programs would help create wealth for all.

Well, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher may have helped people get wealthy, but they certainly didn’t help to spread the wealth around.  The fruits of all the growth in the West from free trade, immigration, and technology have mostly tended to go to those at the top of the tree.  In the UK, Mrs Thatcher was said to have been cruelly indifferent to those who lost jobs or who otherwise missed out under her.  Statistics are not always helpful, but two are critical to our present problems.  The first is this from the OECD: between 1975 and 2012 around 47% of total growth in US pre-tax incomes went to the top 1%.

Most would say, I suggest, that this result shows that during that time the US was badly governed.  Some would go further and say that the new regime of Ronald Reagan was badly flawed and ultimately cruel.  Very many certainly said the same about Margaret Thatcher.  But whether or not you agree with either of those propositions, there had to be a reaction – a revolt, if not a revolution.

So, we get Donald Trump elected on a demand to end laissez-faire.  The Americans now want their government to intervene in the markets and to give relief to the jobless and to the poor.  They want something like the People’s Budget of Lloyd George.

The people voting for Trump are, we are told, feeling vengeful and humiliated.  In a piece in The Monthly, Richard Cooke said:

The persistent thread linking those I speak to is one of humiliation….  Overwhelmingly, they want some sort of revenge.  On those who told them otherwise.  On those who should know their place.  On those who don’t belong here.  And they have chosen a bully to enact that revenge.

They are in short, John Carker writ large.

But why should people feel humiliated because the world has passed them by?  Because Americans like winners and they have little time for losers.  Hell for them is what Carlyle saw: ‘the terror of not succeeding; of not making money.’

The Americans have really dug themselves into a very deep hole.  And the worst is yet to come.  This brings us to our second relevant statistic.  There is a body of opinion that claims to be informed to the effect that over the next ten years, about 40% – two out of five – of present sources of employment will disappear because of disruption by technology.  It would I gather be unsafe to proceed on any other footing.

But we are not just speaking about humiliation.  The failure of the United States to implement the Welfare State has not stopped many Americans from blaming their government for all their woes.  (This is very Australian, but our history is very different – dependence on government is part of our DNA, even when the money’s run out.)   Too many Americans feel cheated.  The glaring wealth and contentment of the Clinton dynasty fuels their conspiracy theories.  The poorest of the two candidates was worth north of $100 million.

Many Trump voters are oblivious to the mainstream press, which are part of the chosen few that they are revolting against, and they are content with what they get from their soulmates on Facebook or Twitter. One horrifying statistic was that 44% of Trump voters were content to get their news from Facebook.

And if you have been cheated, who better to look to for revenge than a cheat?  Trump is not just a compulsive liar – he cheated on the draft and he cheated on tax.  When he was called out for not paying tax because he had failed in business, the revolting Rudy Giuliani said that Trump was a genius.

There was a time during the French Revolution when people at the bottom of the tree felt that the only thing they had in life was their French citizenship.  One of the worst parts of the Terror involved government agents or informers stripping suspected people of their citizenship or at least of their rights as French citizens.  (They got over this under Napoleon and then they decided to spread the benefits of the revolution around – even though Robespierre had correctly warned them that no one likes ‘armed missionaries’).  In America, this preciousness means that many American citizens do not want to share their only and priceless asset with others.  Sadly, we see the same process here.  A large part of human history involves those getting into the cubby-house slamming the door on those coming after them and kicking away the ladder.

Trump supporters rejected both parties.  They rejected the Republicans as much as the Democrats.  Rejection of major parties is all the go around the world – but in the US a president wearing a Republican label will try to be seen to implement a policy for what used to be the electorate of the Democrats.

We have seen enough to see the contradictions.  The rejected poor are looking to a billionaire egotist to save them.  Do they really expect that his tax cuts will suit them?  Has any Republican economic scheme ever suited them?   How many of these people rely on government entitlements which it is the object of Republicans to abolish?  How on earth could Trump ride to the relief of these people on the back of ‘small government’?

Trump’s supporters say that he is an outsider; the downside is that he doesn’t know what he is doing or what he is talking about.  God knows that he has not been backward in advertising that fact.  (One European leader said that they will waste two years while Trump finds his way around.)  And we may be sure that he will be surrounded by sycophants and place seekers like Giuliani and Christie.  And of course his family – the revolt against dynasties will not preclude Trump from perpetuating that error.  The Americans have an 18th-century English view toward sharing the spoils of election wins.  (It is not far removed from that which prevails in Kenya.)

A party that is dedicated to free trade and laissez-faire is being asked to legislate to reduce inequality and help those who missed out.  Protection may or may not lead to trade wars, but it will lead to higher prices.  And about the only part of the Republican platform that Trump has accepted is the abolition of healthcare of the kind that the rest of the western world has enjoyed since shortly after the end of World War II.  How will that help those who led the revolt?

This party prided itself on a repellent form of patriotism.  (Is there a form of patriotism that is not repellent?  Do you recall when Obama was chastised for not being a patriot because he turned up one day without a flag in his lapel?) This party is now being fronted by a draft dodger and tax dodger who admires, and who has just got a ‘beautiful’ letter from, the KGB stooge who is the head of Ronald Reagan’s Evil Empire?  And you will recall that Mr Reagan suggested to the Russians that they should tear down a wall.  How many real Republicans, or Reagan Republicans, want to cosy up to Putin?

And a party that makes a lot of play with God is in bed with the most ungodly man on the planet. Between them, they fuel a suspicion  that the evangelical Christianity espoused by many politicians in the US is just so much bullshit.

The Republicans themselves are in large part responsible for this diabolical mess.  They have idolised Ronald Reagan.  I thought that he was an idiot before he was elected and I did not see much evidence to the contrary while he was in office.  But I have to admit that I am biased – I don’t like people who rat on their mates for their own political well-being.  But whether or not Reagan is to blame for the massive movement of wealth toward the rich, a large part of his program will have to be reversed if Trump is to even look like he might be trying to deliver what he has promised.

The Republicans never accepted the legitimacy of Obama and led an unprincipled and unscrupulous opposition that was aped here by Tony Abbott (and even he now admits to regret at his part in lowering the tone of politics).  You can see the lack of principle in the Republicans in their point-blank refusal to follow the Constitution, a document they purport to admire, in appointing a new justice to the Supreme Court to replace the loaded gun called Scalia.  You could see it with the suggestion of Trump that if he lost the election would be rigged.  (Now, his campaign leader says that the current President is not doing enough to stop the protests about the election result.)  You can see it in their determination to stack the Supreme Court on the issue of abortion, an issue which is beyond the reach of Congress. They will debauch the judiciary to get what they want – the fact that the other lot are not stainless on this does not help the disenchanted.

How will decent Republicans react when the hard-heads flirt with fanatics of the Right?  Mr Stephen Bannon has a lot of form for racism.  He is set to be the leading hate-figure or punching-bag of the new regime.  He has already invited Marine Le Pen – who gushed over the election result – to see what they can do ‘to work together’.  On what?   The campaign manager defended his appointment.  He was ‘the general’ of the campaign, a former naval officer with a Harvard business degree.   Presumably he is not one of the rejected.  Has the nation of Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Truman come to this?

The truth is that the Republican Party has brought every aspect of this disaster on itself, and the gormless hypocrites at the head of that party now stand, if that is the term, fawning on the man they had reviled.  And remember this – that during a large part of the primaries, Ted Cruz was seen as a bigger threat to the US than Trump – by the Republican Party.

Now, Carlyle and Dickens may have foreseen all this, or something very like it.  It may after all be just another cycle, and one the like of which we have seen before.  But it also looks to be pregnant with some of the horrors that those two great writers were so apt in describing.  They both wrote of the death of God and the idolatry of wealth.  We see the apotheosis of both in Donald Trump – the deposition of God and the coronation of the dollar.  This is far and away the scariest and the saddest thing I have seen.

But we are told that we should respect the outcome of the election.  This means that Americans should not behave in the way Trump threatened to.  If any American reacts unlawfully against the new President, they can be dealt with by the laws of the US.  But that’s all that it means to say that people should respect the result.  It would be absurd to suggest that the election means that anyone should respect Trump.  For some years the most popular politician in the history of Europe, if not the world, was Adolf Hitler – and it stayed that way until he was seen to fail.

Perhaps we might go back to Mommsen and let him have the final word.

On the very threshold of his despotism, he was confronted by the fatal dilemma, moral and political, that the same man had at one and the same time to hold his ground as a captain of robbers, and to lead the state as its first citizen – a dilemma to which Pericles, Caesar, and Napoleon also had to make dangerous sacrifices.

The Bible may be right – there is nothing new under the sun.

Passing Bull 77 – The bull of political correctness

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

The phrase ‘political correctness’ is a slippery weasel.  It involves reducing common courtesy to absurdity.  Most people have sufficient manners to avoid saying ‘I don’t like Jews’, or ‘all Scots are mean’, or ‘Muslim men make bad fathers even though they don’t drink’ – even if the people making those statements have the misfortune to believe them to be true.  So, if someone said ‘Aboriginal men make bad fathers because they drink’, they would be making an offensive statement based on race.  Most people would have sufficient courtesy to avoid making any such statement in public because other people would very likely be hurt, or offended by such a statement – and the object of courtesy is to avoid our hurting other people when that hurt can be avoided.  (It also distinguishes us from gorillas.)  And it would be downright silly to say that such a simple exercise in good manners could be dismissed as political correctness, whatever that phrase might be taken to mean.

At the other end of the line, it would be just as silly to say that we should not address a group of men and women as ‘guys’.  That would be worse than silly – it would be bullshit.

So, we are talking about matters of degree, and there may be differences of opinion at the edge.  But if there is a problem, it is not one that troubles most people.  In truth, it is an issue that is confined to a very small number of people in government and in the media and in those revolting things called think tanks.

The term ‘political correctness’ or P C has in truth become abused and debased.  People of a reactionary cast of thought claim that their freedom of speech is imperilled by exponents of political correctness.  Commentators in The Australian pepper their pieces with this complaint tirelessly.  In the gibberish of Jennifer Oriel, it is a machine-gunned cliché that rat-tat-tats with the same ghastly monotony as ‘sovereignty’, ‘free speech’, ‘free thinkers’, ‘elitism’, ‘populism’, ‘activism’, ‘systemic political bias’ (from The Australian!),  ‘draining the swamp’,  ‘identity politics’, ‘sovereign borders’, ‘open border activists’, ‘pride in Western culture’, and ‘fundamental Western values’.  (Those last two are black-shirt Dutton sinister – so much for the East!)  Here is a simple example:

The P C left can smear us with false accusations of racism and we have no recourse to action under the RDA.

(As Lenin asked, who are ‘we’?)

Here is another sample:

The restive public is leaning towards political figures who oppose the P C establishment’s open border lunacy, its intemperate approach to channelling public funds into the activist class in the media, academe and non—government organisations, and its censorship of politically incorrect speech.

In that piece, the author used the word ‘sovereign’ or ‘sovereignty’ on nine occasions.  I wonder what that word meant on any of them.  This is transcendental bullshit.

Now may I offer what looks to me to be a sure–fire case of political correctness?  Let’s say that you believe that anyone who believes what Trump says is a fool and that anyone who agrees with him is a jerk.  If you dared to express such a view, they – the people who support some aspects of Trump – will come down on you like an avalanche.  What might be your crime?  You – Brother or Sister – have looked down on and insulted the people, the ensainted and sovereign populus.  You have therefore branded yourself as part of the dreaded ‘elite’.  It is as if you had outed yourself as an ‘aristocrat’ in Paris in 1793.  Shame on you!  Do not pass Go, but go straight back to Eton.

Here is an example of a reprisal by the politically correct.  As you may know, the Murdoch press is very jealous of the ABC.  They make war on Aunty.  Almost every day, they air some complaint in a petulant, bitchy and unprofessional manner.  On 10 November this year, one piece began:

ABC Breakfast presenter the Virginia Trioli has been caught live on air saying Donald Trump’s supporters should be ‘subjected to an IQ test’ and that Mr Trump must have been looking at his wife’s breasts while voting.

She’s been ‘caught’!  The author of the piece goes on to tell us that Ms Trioli has form.  She has also been caught on air making ‘crazy’ circles with her finger next to her ear when Barnaby Joyce was on the TV.  Was she suggesting that our Deputy PM is nuts?

Well, perhaps the Murdoch press over-sauced the goose here.  They do pose, after all, as the champions of freedom of speech – except for the ABC, and anyone who criticises one of their darlings.  And while we recoil with horror at the suggestion that Trump voters might be subjected to IQ tests, we presumably just put to one side one of Trump’s more lunatic suggestions – that he and his opponent be subjected to a drug test before the next debate.

Now, we may be forbidden to query the intelligence of those who voted for Trump, or for Farage or Boris Johnson, but one thing is certain – these people are downright gullible.  Some in the press thought that Trump averaged twenty lies a day.  On any view, he was making promises that were contradictory – as did Farage and Boris Johnson.  ‘Gullible’ here means not just that people want to believe, but that they are susceptible to being duped or deceived (or ‘gulled’).  And the gullible in each case will now face the discovery of the price of their deception.  The promises are already being repudiated, and how many might be fulfilled?  You can have even money that apart from protection, the only promise that he will keep will be to cut taxes on the filthy rich.

It is curious how our wishes distort our thoughts.  The Scots philosopher David Hume said ‘Reason is and Ought Only to be a Slave of the Passions.’ A very meticulous and conservative political commentator on the BBC, representing the Tory party, refused to acknowledge that a giant Farage ad in response to open migration that showed an endless line of Syrian refugees was racist.  Indeed, he went further and said that the mere suggestion that the ad was racist was one of the very factors that had incited the populus to rise up against the elite.  You will recall that Ms Oriel also complained about ‘us’ being dubbed racist and being left without the statutory recourse open to the P C left.  The wheel of political correctness has come full circle – if you call someone out on racism, you may just be consigned to the P C left – at least by people in the elite who cannot be bothered to think.  Or who have been frog-marched into intellectual oblivion by the IPA.

And let us come back to ‘identity politics’, a notion that I don’t follow, but which causes great grief to the IPA, and other reactionaries.  With whom has Trump identified?  Poor white losers – that’s what the pros tell us.  And for salvation, the same poor losers are looking to a billionaire who was born into the American version of the purple, who has never been left in need, and who has never had or lost a real job.  And if those of the meek are his clients, to use a Roman phrase, what language will be adequate to express their response to their betrayal by this gross and rich egomaniac?  .

Finally, I may say that I met Virginia Trioli about 25 years ago.  She had been assigned to interview me while I was being bashed up on the ABC and in the lesser media for a gross crime of political incorrectness.  I had queried the intelligence of radical feminists, and the professionalism of some lawyers.  I may have been the only libel lawyer in Melbourne who was not consulted about suing me.  It all happened in the course of my defence of Helen Garner and her book the first stone.  I very much enjoyed my chat with Virginia.  As I recall, she thought that the whole thing was ridiculous.  I’m glad to see that another generation’s worth of time in the commentariat has not dimmed her sanity, or her wit.  God knows, we all need both.

A sugar tax?

In a book that hopefully will be published shortly, provisionally entitled Language, Meaning and Truth, you will find in a chapter on logic the following:

One form of fallacy recurs all the time in political argument.  ‘The State should not worry about the welfare of children being brought up by same-sex parents – just look at the mess that so many heterosexual parents make of bringing up their own children.’  ‘Don’t worry about dying of lung cancer from smoking – you can just as easily die from heart or liver failure from drinking.’  If the argument is that it is good to avoid harm of a certain kind flowing from one kind of conduct or cause, it is immaterial to that argument that the same or a similar kind of harm may flow from another kind of conduct or cause.   One of the arguments against the English abolishing slavery was that if the English did not do it, others would.  Coal miners say that if we don’t dig it up, others will.  When you state the position like this, the argument is obviously a fallacy – but you hear it all the time.   

We see a similar fallacy on the issue of a sugar tax.  We have a problem with obese children.  Sugar, especially in soft drinks, is a major cause.  The problem can be attacked in many ways – say, by education or by increasing the cost of the damaging product.  Both are applied to cigarettes, and are working.  The tax solution is working is working elsewhere on sugar.  But politicians who represent sugar growers say that the problem can be dealt with by dieting and exercise.  But if you can apply a, b, c, and d to fix problem x, it just does not follow that because you can apply c and d, you should not worry about a and b.  If your doctor says that your heart condition can be treated by diet and exercise, you would be mad to conclude that because you can exercise you will forget diet and knock back six Four’n’Twenties a day.  You might soon be a dead lunatic.

Another response was tried on Sky News.  The tax proposal was denounced as ‘The nanny state on steroids.’  This combination of clichés is not an argument.  If it is a way of saying that this intervention by government is excessive, it begs the question.  Most laws interfere with freedom.  The question is whether that interference is justified.  Since we are talking about the health of children, it is hard to argue that the state should leave the field open to individuals.  It is also hard to argue that it should be left to parents.  We don’t do this with education, and what if the parents don’t believe in doctors?

Mr Joyce should come clean about what is driving him to come up with his bullshit.  Peta Credlin, on Sky, may improve with time.

Poet of the month: Rosemary Dobson

The Greek Vase

In the garden a Greek vase brimful

 of leaves fallen from the grape-vine.

When the wind blows

The tendrils spill out like an alphabet.  Twisting

tendrils join the letters in phrases.

A sentence

is blown my way – some words perhaps dissevered

from the Iliad or the Odyssey

re-formed by hazard

of wind and season.  Treading carefully

among sentences, lines, whole stanzas

on the paving

I think: or are they not inscriptions

for Musa and Erinna, friends of my childhood

in cryptic calligraphy.

Beautiful indeed were Musa and Erinna

their epitaphs are composed in an unfamiliar language

and written in leaves by the wind.

Passing Bull 76 – A letter to the Minister for Immigration

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

It is always difficult to decide on how to respond to people whose ethos is so alien, and in fact repellent, to one’s own.  It is not that I take exception to the general points made by you, but that every ounce of my energy has been devoted to an active opposition to cruel bigotry, compulsive violence, and the sadistic persecution which has characterised the philosophy and practice of fascism.

I feel obliged to say that the emotional universes we inhabit are so distinct, and in deepest ways opposed, that nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us.

I should like you to understand the intensity of this conviction on my part.  It is not out of any attempt to be rude that I say this but because of all that I value in human experience and human achievement.

Well, I didn’t write that to Peter Dutton.  Bertrand Russell wrote it to Sir Oswald Mosley in January 1962, but it does say what I would like to say to people like Dutton, Trump, and Farage.

Dutton transcended even his own bullshit when he criticised a dead prime minister for his humanity – and humanity is not part of Dutton’s universe.

I will write separately of the kid gloves that we are supposed to wear when speaking of those seduced by people like Trump and Farage.  Seduction is the one charge that Dutton is immune from.  But to suggest that a person’s worth might be assessed from the votes cast for them may or may not be valid for a gentlemen’s club or a reality TV show, but it is a complete non sequitur in politics.

Poet of the month: Rosemary Dobson

Diving colander

The kitchen vessels that sustained
Your printed books, my poems, our life,
Are fallen away. The words remain
Not all but those of style and worth.

And here, in Age, I feel the need
Of some Divining Colander
To hold the best of all since done
And let the rest slip through.

Passing Bull 75 – Two words to avoid

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

In the last four or five months, some people called ‘the elite’ have been held to be responsible for quite a lot, including political earthquakes in England and America.   Apparently, they have not cared enough about those who are on the wrong end of the inequality stakes.  The people who make this claim are often in the media, which is a principal target of those who have missed out.  The elite are those who are chosen.  It should mean the cream.  It is hard to see the press in general, or the Murdoch press in particular, as the cream.  But it is harder to see just who the elite are here.  In truth, it is just a distracting label for an indeterminate body of people, and a gateway to bullshit.

Another problem word for us now is ‘conservative’.  A conservative political party is one that seeks to keep things as they are and to minimise government action.   The Tories in England claim to be such a party.  Until recently, the Republicans did also in America.  For many reasons, we have never had a real conservative party in Australia.  We are just too reliant on government to allow that to happen.  And we don’t like ideologues.

But now the word ‘conservative’ is claimed by some politicians, such as Abbott or Bernardi, and commentators, such as Bolt.   As best I can see, the ingredients of their beliefs are as follows.  They are concerned about ‘border protection’ – they think it is in order to hold indefinitely people who sought to enter this country by boat in order to deter people they call ‘people smugglers.’  They think that what we call ‘climate change’ is either bullshit or over-rated; they get very worked up over ‘renewables’.  They also get worked up over laws about insulting and offensive words.  They say that a law against insulting or offending people on the ground of race limits their freedom of speech.  Of course it does – the question is why they want to be free to insult and offend people on the ground of race, and how that freedom might benefit them or us.  They are mostly monarchists; Abbott’s mania about this was instrumental in his losing office.  And most of them claim to be close to God – obnoxiously so to those who prefer to see religion kept out of politics – no matter what the faith may be.

I hold the opposite view on each, but it is hard to see how these views qualify for the label conservative.  This is especially so with the views on hate speech and climate change.  I don’t see how the rejection of science or laws needed to maintain public order makes someone a ‘conservative.’  And, if it matters, both look to be pure bullshit – and to be the subject of quite manic pogroms in the Murdoch press.

I saw four exemplars of this weird faction on Sky the other night.  Going from left to right around a bemused and sensible chair they were – Bronwyn Bishop, Mark Latham, Ross Cameron, and Rowan Dean.  I don’t know how much alcohol was involved, but they were like pigs in a trough.  They were bucketing Obama and chortling about Trump.  It was like Animal Farm crossed with Lord of the Flies.  It was seriously scary and nauseating.  Dean may be the most revolting person in public life here, but that night he had three challengers.

This faction is in my view in large part responsible for Shorten being tipped to win the next election by the length of the straight.

That’s all now – I’m being worked over by Telstra again.  I know what it feels like to be rejected – but here the ‘elite’ are certainly not involved.

 

Poet of the month:  Rosemary Dobson

On Christina Stead

I sit beside the bed where she lies dreaming
Of pyrrhic victories and sharp words said,
She will annihilate the hospital …
Suppose her smouldering thoughts break out in flame,
Not to consume bed, nightdress, flesh and hair
But the mind, the working and the making mind
That built these towers the world applauds …
I have dreamt her nightmare for her. She wakes up
And turns to smile with quick complicity.
”I wasn’t asleep. I watched you sitting there.”

Carlyle, Dickens and the Strange Death of Liberal America – Part I

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

If the gap between rich and poor has produced Donald Trump, the problem is not new.

Early in the 6th century BC, a lot of people in Athens found themselves in a position faced by many in that city today.  They had spent more than they had, and had got themselves in the clutches of very tough creditors.  They were now buckling under the austerity and the welfare of the state was in question.  Small farmers without capital had borrowed on the security of their land.  The little farms were covered with stones on which mortgage bonds were inscribed.  The black earth was enslaved.  Solon made laws to alleviate the problems.  If he was not an aristocrat or an admirer of wealthy people de facto enslaving the poor, he did not show sympathy for extremist agitators who were looking for wholesale land redistribution.  Nor did he interfere with the money market.

These laws did not go far enough for some.  There was conflict between the Hill and the Coast and the Plain.  Peisistratus, a friend of Solon, formed a political group, what we might now call a party, based on the Hill.  He seized power and became a tyrant through a stunt much followed later.  He appeared in the agora wounded, he claimed, by his rotten enemies who were against him as a friend of the people.  He got the Hill in the assembly to vote him a bodyguard for the emergency, and then he used that bodyguard to seize the acropolis, and make himself master of the city-state.  People like Mussolini and Hitler would follow the same pattern – an exaggerated threat; an emergency response, and a seizure of power.

Much of the history of the Roman Republic arose from the conflict between nobiles and plebs.  In the 2nd century BC, two leaders named Gracchus suffered horrible deaths trying to look after those down the pile.  In the case of Caius Gracchus, the Senate passed a resolution – ‘the ultimate decree’ – declaring that the state was in danger.  (L’état en danger.)  Consuls and others were charged to see that ‘the republic take no harm.’  The government promised moral support to officers proceeding by summary executive action to protect the state.  In a foretaste of the French Terror, a kind of posse was raised by a general levy, and more than 3000 were murdered.  Caius escaped the head-hunters by getting a slave to stab him.  The great German historian, Mommsen, was disposed to be cool on Caius:

On the very threshold of his despotism, he was confronted by the fatal dilemma, moral and political, that the same man had at one and the same time to hold his ground as a captain of robbers, and to lead the state as its first citizen – a dilemma to which Pericles, Caesar, and Napoleon also had to make dangerous sacrifices.

If we pass over revolts by peasants in England and Europe in the Middle Ages – they were almost a carnival event in France – and if we come to earthquake of 1789, équalité meant a lot more than liberté to a large part of the population who were rural peasants.  They were out to annul the infamy of caste.

That revolution was recorded by Thomas Carlyle in a famous book (that some have read many times) that Dickens would follow in A Tale of two Cities.  In 1843, Carlyle published Past and Present, an essay on medieval England compared to England then – that many thought was on the brink of revolution.  He started by looking at the worrying divide between private wealth and public welfare.  People worshipped money – Mammon – and not God.  There are three motifs in Past and Present – the unholy mix of dire poverty and great wealth; the stagnant condition of the rich; and putting Mammon before God.  The Mammon-Gospel dictated:

We call it a Society; and go about professing openly the totalest separation….Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather cloaked under due laws-of –war, named ‘fair competition’ and so forth, it is a mutual hostility.  We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings; we think, nothing doubting, that it absolves and liquidates all engagements of man.

So, Carlyle was lamenting not just what would come to be called the death of God; he was lamenting the coronation of lucre.  ‘Supply-and-demand, Competition, Laissez-faire, and Devil take the hindmost.’  It is the kind of perverted Darwinism that we find in those regimes we least admire.

But Carlyle’s message would have been revolting to many, not least in the US.  Was he doing any more than asking whether Christianity could live with capitalism?  And if you think that that question is silly, how might the founder of that faith have responded to it?

Between 1846 and 1848 Dickens published Carlyle’s message in novel form.  Dombey and Son is about the sin of pride and the evil of money.  Paul Dombey is the leader of a mercantile house.  He has a child but he hardly notices the girl.  He wants a boy to carry on the name, the business, and the wealth.  He is insufferably proud and remote.  His wife dies in giving him his son.  The novel is about how pride and financial lust desiccate the humanity of Paul Dombey.  He suffers from a kind of monomania that leaves him emotionally – and, of course, spiritually – sterile.  His wealth corrupts him, and allows him to escape reality by shutting out the world with ‘a double door of gold.’

Dombey has a fawning office manager, John Carker, who flashes his teeth in the fixed smile of a flight attendant – but who knows his place.  His address and its contents show that Mr Carker knows his place.  But we become aware that Mr Carker is not just cunning.  He is malevolent; when it comes to malice, Mr Carker makes Malvolio look like a cheer-leader in a mini-skirt and white boots.  He plots to bring Mr Dombey down by decamping from the business that he has imperilled and by defiling his employer’s second wife – who is in her own self an estranged victim of the commodifying of marriage partners, and a match for Dombey in iced arrogance.  Why is Carker so bad?  Because he wants revenge for a lifetime of humiliation.

Carker is pursued to France with Mrs Dombey as an effective captive who has just threatened to kill him.  He is detected and nearly apprehended at Dijon.

The crash of his project for the gaining of a voluptuous compensation for past restraint; the overthrow of his treachery to one who had been true and generous to him, but whose least proud word and look he had treasured up, at interest, for years – for false and subtle men will always secretly despise and dislike the object upon which they fawn, and always resent the payment and receipt of homage that they know to be worthless; these were the themes uppermost in his mind.  A lurking rage against the woman who had so entrapped him and avenged herself was always there; crude and misshapen schemes of retaliation upon her floated in his brain; but nothing was distinct.  A hurried contradiction evaded all his thoughts.  Even while he was so busy with this favoured, ineffectual thinking, his one constant idea was, that he would postpone reflection until some indefinite time.

Carker is an authentic villain who meets an end that obviously had a big impact on Tolstoy – it involves a speeding train – but what we used to call the moral of the novel was set out by the young Paul Dombey, a young boy of brittle health but subtle insight.  The son asks his father: ‘What is money?’

Mr Dombey was in a difficulty.  He would have liked to give him some explanation involving the terms circulating–medium, currency, depreciation of currency… But looking down at the little chair and seeing what a long way down it was he answered: ‘Gold, and silver, and copper.  Guineas, shillings, half pence.  You know what they are?’

‘Oh yes, I know what they are,’ said Paul.  ‘I don’t mean that, Papa.  I mean, what’s money after all….. I mean, Papa, what can it do?’

‘Money, Paul, can do anything.’….

‘Anything, Papa?’

‘Yes.  Anything – almost’ said Mr Dombey.          

‘Anything means everything, don’t it, Papa?’

‘It includes it: yes,’ said Mr Dombey.

‘Why didn’t money save me my mama?’ returned the child.  ‘It isn’t cruel, is it?’

It is not hard to see these universal themes in the recent history of the United States – of which more next time.