Bullshit

The Nationalists

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

An occasional series on the new nationalists –  dingoes and drongos like Trump, Farage, and Bernardi – and other Oz twerps.

I

A Prototype?

He has a lust for power and his ambition is gluttonous.  He was undistinguished at school, and he is only ever at ease when talking to other mediocrities.  He rose up primarily talking to those who had failed in life.  He did so by addressing those people in their own terms.   He is scarcely literate if he puts pen to paper, but in front of a crowd, he loses all control.  He loves crowds and cameras – they are his mirrors. He loves hand signals too. He can be very childish.  He doesn’t have real friends.  He affects to show emotion but he dissembles and he is a manipulator. He is not really a liar – it is just that he has only contempt for truth.  He became popular, massively so with those who were not doing so well. He came to power after a huge shift in world economics that allowed him to despise what he calls the elites.  He hammers his scapegoats all the time – shamelessly.  He said it was the elites who had caused the economic failures of his nation and the world.  He himself is very elitist, except for the things that matter.  He rarely seeks to articulate a program, but proceeds by slogans, incantations, and rants.  He loves labels, but plays more on nationalism than socialism.  He contradicts himself and he talks nonsense – but what does it matter if truth is irrelevant?   He has no conscience that we can see. He is loathed by the liberal establishment and he and his followers loathe them – he really is so jealous. He feeds on conflict and confrontation – if he is not fighting, he may have to stop and think.  He is not there to bring people together – he is there to crunch anyone standing in the way – because winning is everything.  He and the faithful sense that against all the odds, their time in the sun is at hand, and for that chance of elevation, they will cancel any doubt and suppress all decency.  He promises them the world, and it matters not that his promises are impossible to keep – their blood and their lust are both up, and they have turned out the lights in their heads.  He gives them their dignity by telling them that they are members of the greatest nation on earth – even if he and they had done little or nothing to make it so, and even if that ‘greatness’ derived from very different people. He knows that they have their citizenship which they see as threatened by outsiders.  He hates intellectuals, or just people who have been well educated.  He has a romantic view of his own history and the history of his nation – it is a history that is either imaginary or faked.  He revels in the word ‘patriot’, even though aspects of his past show an utter want of devotion to his country. He has a limited lexicon that does not extend to ‘No’ – unless out of his mouth in response to a request from his nation that he pay tax or serve in the army – see the previous sentence.  He may on a bad day refer to some mystic writer and then ramble on about drive and energy.  His magic words are struggle, rich, and power – and of course me.  He is corrupted by victory more than by power.  He and his followers are not about to share the greatness of their nation with outsiders.  He loathes foreigners and those of different faiths, even though he has no religious faith at all. (He certainly has no room in his ego for anything as inconsequential as God.)  He is remarkable for his lack of tolerance generally.  He is hopeless with women, and in company generally.  He wants to dominate all conversation, and he can rant on about the failure of the world to grasp his greatness.  He is only contradicted or even queried by others at their peril.  He is therefore surrounded by sycophants and he cannot let a person of quality get too close to him and deflect his grandeur.  He has appalling manners, a foul mouth, and an evil temper – he might perhaps be invited as a guest at a gentlemen’s club, but he would never be admitted as a member. He may be the most selfish and self-centred person ever born.  He has no interest at all in the life or fate of others unless it connects directly with his own. He will disregard all the rules to get what he wants.  He has never had limits effectively set for him, and he has never seen, much less acknowledged, his own limitations, which are immediately apparent to all but the faithful.  He has no interest in equality – he is, after all, so very different in himself. He projects his ego on to the nation – it should disregard all rules to get where it wants, and not give a damn about what any other person or nation thinks.  He gets enraged by any criticism, and provoked into making even more bizarre claims.  He goes berserk if someone questions his legitimacy – his paranoia makes the misgivings of Henry IV and Henry V about their legitimacy look trifling.  He is driven to magnify his achievements in ways that insult the intelligence of everyone else.  He becomes enraged if anyone queries the numbers at his rallies. He is at his worst when he drops his voice, gives his manual salute, and enters into a rote incantation where everything is very.  His colossal self-love leads to a very sick suspicion of anyone who is against him.  His preoccupation with face shows a deeply flawed and insecure psyche.  He has zero capacity to be left in doubt or uncertainty and he could go totally mad if asked to sit alone in a room for an hour and think. He could also go mad if he opened a newspaper and could not find his face anywhere on it.  He of course never has to say he’s sorry; among other things he never is, and he rarely has to do anything.  He will spend fortunes on the military to better the standing of his great nation in the world as he sees it – even though he dislikes if not despises the rest of the world.  He will build mighty airports and freeways and he will make the trains run on time.  He is untroubled about how to fund these mighty projects. He manipulates public opinion.  He will collapse all differences between fact and fiction.  He will in truth have ‘alternative facts’ and so confute the whole basis of Aristotelian logic. He has his own reality in his own world – it’s all just his, and it’s so bonzer, and – sotto voce – so very, very, very – patriotic.  He can leap tall buildings in a single bound. He glories in the heroic view of history because he is its ultimate hero, the most powerful man alive since Achilles. Had he been a Roman, he would have become a god ages ago.

He says that he will make his nation great again.

And some poor bastards believe him.

Am I speaking of Donald Trump or Adolf Hitler?  That’s a matter for you.

Passing Bull 89 – The glory of alternative facts

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

The Trump administration is not shy about its mission to annihilate truth.  The President of the United States does not understand or respect the notion of truth.  Ms Kellyanne Conway does understand it, but she flouts it brutally.  When people talk about ‘spin’ they are engaging in euphemism.  Spin is deception wrought by evasion, equivocation, and deliberate untruth.  Ms Conway favours the last.  When the new Press Secretary harangued the press, he told a lie.  Ms Conway defended him.  She said that he had merely offered ‘alternative facts.’

You can have alternative versions, or allegations, or arguments, but how do you have alternative facts?  If I say that there are three people in this room, and you say that that there are five in the next room, that may I suppose be called ‘an alternative fact’.  But if you say that there are five people in this room, there is no basis for that curious label – you have directly contradicted me.  We both can’t be right – there are either three or five people in the room.

As it happens, shortly after I read of Ms Conway’s contribution to modern languages, I was reading The Moro Affair by Leonard Sciascia.  The writer  introducing the book said that the Italian political system was ‘drenched in a rhetoric that gave Italian political prose a horrible, ornate quality of dishonesty and meaningless incantation.’  That looks to be a fair description of what Trump intends for politics in the U S.  Later on Sciascia introduces us to the notion of a real true fact.

The White House Press Secretary was not content with polemics and lies.  He was out to murder our language.  ‘This was the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period.  These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong’.  The first statement was false.  The second was nonsense – an inauguration consists of a series of events – how can they have an ‘enthusiasm’?

Ms Conway then went on TV with other whoppers.  The President had promised to hand over his tax returns – as is the custom there.   ‘We litigated this all through the election. People didn’t care.’  Each of those statements is false, and neither affords a foundation for Trump to welch on his promise.

It is sad to see real Republicans not blush at all this raw insolence.  One stupid Congressman said that Trump was ‘having a good time.’

The commentary in The Australian was alarming.  Janet Albrechtsen gushed over the jingoism of the speech and the roars of the crowd.  Rush Limbaugh laughs.  ‘So do I.  What a four years it’s going to be.’  Chris Kenny is the most petulant man in our press and he denounced the protests as ‘mass petulance.’  Greg Sheridan showed how little there is between inanity and insanity.  He compared Trump to the Pope in their capacity to unsettle their staff by shooting their mouths off.  I don’t think you have be Catholic to be unsettled by this.  Trump made a rank ‘stump speech’ (Sheridan’s words) before a CIA memorial in which he lied and boasted in full.  He infuriated and offended many in the intelligence community, and when one of them responded, Sheridan took offence.

That Trump style is not uplifting, but nor is it a moral offence in itself.  Trump has said plenty of offensive things, but for senior and responsible people to take offence where none is intended is absurd.

Brennan’s public attack on Trump, calling his speech ‘despicable self-aggrandizement’, will do more to damage the faith of ordinary Americans, and people round the world, in the CIA’s impartiality than anything Trump has said.

All that is so wrong it takes your breath away.  Of course Trump’s behaviour before the memorial was morally offensive and despicable self-promotion.  That’s how he got the gig.

The failure of this nation to develop a decent conservative newspaper is so depressing.  The Wall Street Journal is a quality conservative paper.  It ran a piece by Peggy Noonan, who knows something about speeches by real Republicans.

He [Trump] presented himself not as Republican or a conservative, but as a populist independent.  The essential message: remember those things I said in the campaign ?  I meant them……

The Trump Wars of the past eighteen months do not now go away.  Now it becomes the Trump Civil War, every day with democrats trying to get rid of him and half the country pushing back.  To reduce it to the essentials: as long as Trump’s party hold the house, it will be stand-off.  If the Democrats take the house they will move to oust him.

The last point depends on Trump holding the Republicans – which will be hard when the subject of money comes up.  But how sane does Peggy Noonan look compared to Greg Sheridan?

A lot of the criticism of his inaugural address was wildly overblown.  There are two paths to unity – the soothing platitude or prosecuting the case and winning the argument.  Trump’s brand is always the latter.

There is a fearfully false dilemma there, a text-book case, but where the Australian sees a path to unity, the American sees Civil War.  

Poet of the month: Chris Wallace-Crabbe

LOSS

Experience was only

what you lose every day,

huge, blown-away clouds

which memory may

think to have drawn back

live to you

but those images

are all untrue

The only trick

is to write them out,

replacing moribund life

with phrases about

what verdantly might

have sprouted again

till amber clouds float up

from your table again

Passing Bull 88 – A new political fallacy

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

The syllogism is the skeleton of any argument.  (It is explained fully in a forthcoming book Language, Meaning, and Truth, by Chris Wallace-Crabbe and me.)

All men are mortal.  (The major premise.)

Obama is man. (The minor premise.)

Therefore Obama is mortal.  (The conclusion.)

Unless you can reduce any argument to that form, it is no good.  That’s one indicator that Trump has problems with the notion of rational thought.

Now check this failed attempt at a syllogism.

Bob did something that surprised me and others.

Bob therefore made me and others look foolish.

Therefore I should say of Bob………what?

The first premise does not say whether what Bob did was good or bad.  Did Bob surprise people by blowing up a convent or by endowing hospital?  The second premise does not seek to apply part of the first – rather it goes to the effect of something Bob did on other people.  That premise is unlikely therefore to be any use for predicting what Bob might do in the future, much less lead to any inference about whether that future conduct may be good or bad.

It would therefore be a fallacy to argue that the first two premises warrant a conclusion that Bob will do good things in the future or is otherwise entitled to our respect.

If there is an argument at all, it looks like one that says because we were wrong in predicting what Bob did in the past, we are less credible in predicting what he might do in the future.  But that conclusion does not follow.  It is a case of branding or, if you prefer, smearing – ‘You were wrong before.  You are therefore liable to be wrong again.’  Any prediction is wholly fallible, and one failure does not make the next one more fallible.

Michael Gove, the man who betrayed Boris Johnson, interviewed Trump.  The interview and its aftermath were nauseating.  Gove was like a cheesy, flatulent poodle, begging for scraps, and too timid to ask a pointed question of the biggest political target of all.  Gove has the difficulty of all conservatives in trying to explain how a once reasonable conservative party came to be led by such a man.  It forces Gove to mangle truth as much as his subject does. ‘….but in his conversation with us, he was at pains to be gracious and generous.’  The office had ‘framed magazine covers festooned over every wall, chronicling his business achievements; Trump’s office is an echo chamber of his achievements.’  Gove does mention that the son-in-law is a trusted adviser – of man whose idea of banishing conflicts of interest is to have his sons run the business and his son-in-law run the country – or at least the Middle East.  They are some of the reasons why Gove says ‘much of the rest of the world is frankly terrified.’  Then we get this.

There is no guarantee that he will follow the best advice he gets, but before any of us are too quick to pass judgment on how successful he may be in office, we should at least acknowledge that he made fools of many of us in winning the presidential prize in the first place.

You will see that Gove does not try articulating his conclusion. This is because there is none.  In the dishonest argot of our politics now, this is just a throwaway line to get people off the point.  Our being surprised at the election says nothing about Trump, but lots about those who were persuaded to vote for a candidate who many see as incorrigibly nasty, arrogant, stupid and dishonest, and therefore a man of whom ‘the rest of the world is frankly terrified.’

I’m not into labels, but I propose one for this bullshit – the Trump fallacy.

Poet pf the month: Chris Wallace-Crabbe

SUMMONS  IN  THE  PEAK  PERIOD

A phone is ringing in the cemetery A

loud enough to be from the Resurrection.

 

You can hear it over busy morning traffic

where the living drive on to work, or merely shopping:

 

not a soul appears to have heard the summons,

but maybe they’re all sick to death of phonecalls.

 

It’s very loud; probably needs to be.

The majority have slept there for a while.

 

Still, what if this were a long-distance call,

God calling collect from paradise?

 

Through cypress fingers and elegant ironbarks

it keeps on ringing, grossly magnified

 

so that nobody fails to get the point.

It surely disturbed those paint-bright lorikeets

 

and brand-name kids dragging across to school.

The call might just have been from grandma,

 

or even for her.

Hello?  Hello?

There’s nobody awake.

Passing Bull 87 – Cheats who prosper

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

People who hold positions of trust – like Rupert Murdoch or the paper boy – have to act honestly and in good faith.  They must act in the interests of those putting trust in them and not in their own interests.

Politicians cheating on travel allowances behave as if that precept was dead.  They have not acted honestly or in good faith.  They have acted in their own interests.  What really gets up our noses is that their sense of entitlement – do you remember that word whose age had ended? – so blinds them that they treat us as if we had come down in the last shower.

Part of the problem is that there are too many rules and regulations.  These small minded greedy people then say that they are within the rules.  Even where their conduct stinks – or, as the press say, even where it fails the pub test.  (Tony Abbott or his publisher had to hand back $14,000 claimed to promote a book.)  You see a similar problem with directors and so much black letter law, and it gets hellish when industrial lawyers legislate for the workplace.  Then all sense of individual responsibility goes clean out the window.  Lawyers have a lot to answer for in the decline of our moral fabric.

In a book called Law for Directors, I said:

Of course, the obligations of directors derive from the fact that they have accepted responsibility for looking after the affairs of others – but this is also the case with members of the committee of a club, union organisers, or the elders of the church – or the person who agrees to hold the keys to his neighbour’s house or to sell his friend’s Nolan – or get me a copy of The Herald.  Nor should it shock our egalitarian  sensibilities to be told that a paper boy shares the same moral plain as the Chair of Telstra or that the meat-pie vendors at the MCG and the Chair of the ANZ Bank are both equally subject to the decrees of the Georgian Lord Chancellors and the subsequent divinations of their Antipodean acolytes.

A complete train wreck exists in the form of a man named Culleton.  His position in the Senate is in issue because of a conviction for a criminal offence and his bankruptcy.  He asked that the Senate be reconvened to consider is position.  Just think how much that exercise in futility would have cost you and me!  He said that he is not insolvent.  It’s about 40 years since I did bankruptcy cases, but I don’t think you have to be an insolvency expert or even a lawyer to know a reasonable test of solvency.  If you say that you are able to pay their debts as they fall due, the simplest way to establish that proposition is by paying them.

But more fundamentally, why should we have to wait for a court to make a formal order before this drongo is disqualified from sitting in our parliament?  Is it not enough that he has defaulted on his obligations to other Australians?  If he is that hopeless in looking after his own affairs, what possible right has a got to claim to look after mine?

Here again we have a fetish about rules that undermines ordinary decency.

What was the first move of the new regime in Washington?  To seek to abolish a committee of ethics for Congress – possibly on the ground that the next president could not spell the word.  And don’t forget that this crowd in Canberra in its last manifestation was determined to relax the general precept I started with for financial advisers.

As I say, our politicians keep treating us as if they think we came down in the last shower.

Poet of the month: Chris Wallace-Crabbe

Do I Sleep or am I Slept?

At morning there came the dream that includes all dreams,

its detail unclear, but mastery quite profound;

with no visible character

it owned all the pigeonholes:

the future was eaten away.

 

 

Perhaps it was the Word.

Needing no breath of syntax it reached out,

imposing domination on the first

half of my ordinary Sunday.

 

Clearly it had prejudged

parking spot, dates, tennis booking, proper names

just when that bill was due.

Design! Design!

 

 

On top of my questions, the answer lay

like an old cat.

 

 

Celestial timber, silent joinery,

the universe had been fitted out with shelves

on my behalf.

Passing Bull 86 –  Government, privacy, and madness

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

You may recall that I had a sad experience with Medicare.  I emailed a query about an unpaid doctor’s bill.  A machined response said they would not discuss private matters by email.  I should ring.  I did and I gave up after 20 minutes.  I tried again at 3.30 am.  I got straight through.  But Lo!  I had to have my file ready.  Not so fast, Sunshine!

After a decent interval, I emailed again.  I referred to my prior sad case and asked if they could write to me or ring and I authorised them to email me.  Silly me.  I got the standard response.  The law, Sunshine, is the law; and the machine is the machine.  No deus ex machina here, Sportsman.

The sender was NSW.IC.TEAMS.MANAGER.A@humanservices.gov.au and it was ‘Re’ my Medicare number (SEC: UNCLASSIFIED).  Its text went:

 

Thank you for contacting the Australian Government Department of Human Services (DHS).

Accessing personal information from an email is restricted to protect your privacy and the integrity of Medicare records. 

Our phone line is also open Saturday and Sunday to assist you.

Please call the Medicare public line on 132 011, 24/7 and, subject to a security check, a service officer will assist you with your enquiry.

I trust this information will be of assistance.

 

Yours sincerely

 

Enquiry Resolution Team – P18236

Health Support & Business Services Division

Australian Government Department of Human Services

humanservices.gov.au

I have two comments on the response – one of form and one more substantial.

How could Team P18236 be sincere?  For that matter, who, how, and where does ‘I’ fit into Team P18236? It is the quintessence of impersonal anonymity. Or, does the DHS know I’m a republican and automatically switch from the royal plural to the republican singular – the smooth-talking bastard of a machine?  And why bother to define ‘DHS’ when it does not appear again in the message?  Why bother to define it all?

Now for the substance.  When I screwed up the courage to ring again, I got through after not much of a wait, and a helpful lady soon ascertained that the refund had been sent to my bank in May last year.  In the sweet name of the son of the carpenter, couldn’t someone have sent an email saying that their records suggested that the refund had been credited with my bank and that I might take it up with them?  What’s so bloody private about that?

And does anyone believe that there is such a thing as privacy when you entrust your soul to the Net?  If you do, ask Vladimir Putin.

We might compare our civil service to that of the English.  I recently directed a question by email to Cambridge University.  I got back the following response.

Good Morning Geoffrey,

Thank you ever so much for your recent enquiry regarding our short courses at ICE.

Unfortunately our last set of short courses will take place between 7-9th July and then restart in September.  I do apologise for any disappointment this may cause. However, if you are interested in joining our International Summer Programme you can find further information here.

If you have any further questions or queries please do not hesitate to ask.

With best wishes,

Emily

Emily Wells
Programmes Assistant
Institute of Continuing Education, University of Cambridge
Madingley Hall, Madingley, Cambridge CB23 8AQ

 

Don’t you just love that ‘ever so much’?  It’s so English that it could almost be sexy.  (How would you be if Julie Christie raised her eyes and said ‘thanks ever so much?’)

We’re going bad if the convicts have to ask the screws for lessons in civility.

Poet of the Month: Chris Wallace-Crabbe

GRASSES

Sternly avoiding the asphalt, treading on grass

I pick my pernickety way across

this common urban transliteration of landscape,

the oddly broadcast parks and median-strips,

saluting the god of grass with the rub of my feet:

 

 

feet which are held at bay by animal-skins,

tanned, sewn, polished, and frequently scuffed.

Whitman wrote about your multiplicity

as leaves, and yet those thousands of blades are you,

 rather. Bland in your closepacked greenness,

 

 

your number exceeds those from whose fate you sprout.

Lushly after rain or wispily blond in summer,

bowing briefly you offer a carpet’s welcome

still to the odd with

 Lightly arriving

at a roundabout, I would choose the diagonal,

 

 

taking note of kikuyu, buffalo, bent and sedge,

feeling in touch, treading a kind of worship

or else, playing with language, my worship of kind.

Old Whitman thought you the hair of young dead men

but you whisper at my feet

 that something will survive.

Passing Bull 85 – The evil of banality

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

The citation that follows shows why this author and this book are so popular, still.

During dinner, Mr. Bennet scarcely spoke at all; but when the servants were withdrawn, he thought it time to have some conversation with his guest, and therefore started a subject in which he expected him to shine, by observing that he seemed very fortunate in his patroness. Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s attention to his wishes, and consideration for his comfort, appeared very remarkable. Mr. Bennet could not have chosen better. Mr. Collins was eloquent in her praise. The subject elevated him to more than usual solemnity of manner, and with a most important aspect he protested that he had never in his life witnessed such behaviour in a person of rank – such affability and condescension, as he had himself experienced from Lady Catherine. She had been graciously pleased to approve of both the discourses, which he had already had the honour of preaching before her. She had also asked him twice to dine at Rosings, and had sent for him only the Saturday before, to make up her pool of quadrille in the evening. Lady Catherine was reckoned proud by many people he knew, but he had never seen anything but affability in her. She had always spoken to him as she would to any other gentleman; she made not the smallest objection to his joining in the society of the neighbourhood, nor to his leaving his parish occasionally for a week or two, to visit his relations. She had even condescended to advise him to marry as soon as he could, provided he chose with discretion; and had once paid him a visit in his humble parsonage; where she had perfectly approved all the alterations he had been making, and had even vouchsafed to suggest some herself,- some shelves in the closets upstairs.

It is the same in the movie, or at least in the Olivier/Garson version.  Mr Collins positively wallows in the condescension of Lady Catherine de Bourgh.  This is not just class – it is caste.  Only the French were worse.

Now let us look at some of the responses of Donald Trump to the actions of his President based on findings of all the nation’s intelligence agencies – and the conclusions accepted by those who lead what Trump claims to be his party.

Take two tweets:

  Great move on delay (by V Putin) – I always knew he was very smart!

Russians are playing CNN and NBC for such fools – funny to watch, they don’t have clue!  Fox News totally gets it!

Here he is in an interview:

I think computers have complicated our lives very greatly.  The whole age of computer has made it where nobody knows exactly what is going on.  And we have speed – we have a lot of other things, but I’m not sure we have the kind of security we need.

Well, that all just tells us what we already knew.  This man is stupid, completely stupid.  His gluttony for publicity leaves him a conflict freak – he must start fights to hold the cameras on him – even fights within his own staff and party – on issues of national security.  And it is just a matter of time before his cosying up to duplicitous thugs like Putin and Netanyahu comes back to haunt him.  They are just as brutal and devious as Trump is – but they are far, far smarter.

Both of them now look to be playing Trump like a violin – on Twitter.  (Please, God, tell me it ain’t so.)  Russia has never been well governed; it has never known democracy, let alone the rule of law; it is not fit for anything than other than autocracy. If Trump believes one word that Putin utters, he will be compared to Chamberlain with Hitler. Putin is not there to make America great again. At best Trump will wind up with the problem of the Andrews government in Victoria – no-one can think of a polite or decent reason for their having acted in the way they did – in Victoria, by doing a deal with the UFU that was plainly not in the public interest and left them utterly on the nose in the bush.

We can now see that not only was Trump brought up so that he has no manners at all, so that he has been set no limits, but that also he has never before been held accountable at all – he has not held any office or served in a public company.  And his age is not a good one to be putting on L-plates.  The consensus seems to be that Trump and his cabinet of generals and billionaires will cut taxes for the rich, reduce benefits to those not so well off, but throw money around like Keynes.  Fox News will be delirious – but what about the dispossessed and the real Republicans?  If you get stuck on labels, you will see nationalism and socialism; the last thing you will see would be conservatism.

Now let us look at the terms of a considered press release:

It’s time for our country to move on to bigger and better things.  Nevertheless, in the interests of our country and its great people – you’ve all been so very, very good –  I will meet with leaders of the intelligence community next week in order to be updated on the facts of this situation. 

All the banality is there – if a kid in grade three said it was time to move on after getting caught cheating, you would know you had a problem.  But do you see what I see?  Condescension – loftier, far, far loftier than anything reigned down on Mr Collins by Lady Catherine de Bourgh.  ‘I, Donald Trump, your chosen President, have reached my conclusion on this little matter – but in the national interest, and since you are a great people, I will condescend to go out of my way and talk to the people who have the evidence, and who know what to do.  You will understand the magnitude of my condescension when you recall that I have dispensed with security briefings because I am so smart – and of course I have the dispensing power that the Stuarts didn’t.  We’ve moved on.’

It reminded me of that part of Richard II when the usurper suggested that the king descend to ‘the base court’ – ‘We are amazed!’  And John Gielgud fills the air with the sheer horror of lèse majesté.

It takes your breath away.  God help us all.  In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt upset some people when she referred to the ‘banality of evil.’  We now have to live with the evil of banality.

Poet of the month: Chris Wallace-Crabbe

Forgetting

Your philosophical moth

flutters against the glass

with hardly more than a shadow

of coarse doubt:

 

these nimble skipping images

are they, perhaps not even

reflected jags and fragments of

kaleidoscopic glassware

 

while anything tear-shaped

runs terribly slowly

down the sheer

pane.

Passing Bull 84 – Why does Sheridan hate Obama?

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Even by our appalling standards, our press hit a new low yesterday with a piece by Greg Sheridan headed ‘Obama delivers last-minute hit to democracy.’

Barack Obama’s presidency is ending with a fine contempt for democracy as he exhibits every trait of hubris, arrogance and disregard for the messy business of elections and democratic mandates in his efforts to tie the hands of his successor on policy that Obama was never willing to take to the electorate, or put before congress.

On two contentious issues – Israeli settlements and off-shore drilling in the Atlantic Ocean and the Artic – Obama is taking actions directly gainst the spirit and practice of democracy by using bureaucratic and legal manouevres to try to put policy decisions beyond democratic revision.  Obama chose to wait until after the presidential election to take these steps.  Obama, with Hillary Clinton, was always the best advertisement for Donald Trump, even more so now, for Obama, at the extreme end of lame duckery, demonstrates a peerless elite disregard for democratic process and the messy and inconvenient business of electoral results.

It is Obama, and not Trump, who pioneered American weakness and retreat from leadership…… 

Let’s be quite clear about this.  Obama, with extreme irresponsibility, is licensing a new wave of global anti-Semitism.  And he knows exactly what he is doing….

Obama cannot leave office a day too soon, though God alone knows what other harm he might accomplish before January 20.

What evil demon could have caused all this foul bile?  What could cause a newspaper with some pretence to liberal values to look forward to a man of intellect and integrity being succeeded as the President of the United States by a lying bully who prefers the word of a former KGB operative to that of the CIA and who sets out to spook the world by tweeting about his nuclear ambitions?

It is hard off hand to see what is anti-democratic about a democratically elected President instructing his UN Ambassador not to veto a UN resolution that expresses the views of a majority of the UN and that is consistent, as the Ambassador said, with warnings given by the President to Mr Netanyahu, both in public and in private, over eight years.  The President’s view is that the attitude of the Israeli government to settlements is not consistent with their preferred two state solution.  It is not hard to see how the President came to that view.  As one Israeli commentator (in Haaretz) said:

The U.S. warned Netanyahu for eight years that his policy would have a price, but he preferred pacifying the settler lobby instead of making a plan of action. He has only himself to blame.

Well, I suppose that if you were of a casuistic caste of mind, you could argue about this.  You may want to choose a different advocate to Mr Netanyahu – his intervention on behalf of Trump against the Democrats was even more blatant and improper than that of Mr Putin – and he has now changed from a lying bully to a little boy playing with matches – who thinks it is a good idea to deny the Sermon the Mount before his Christian godfather.

But what you cannot argue is that this failure to veto a UN resolution means that Mr Obama is consciously licensing ‘a new wave of global anti-Semitism’.  It is not just that the proposition is an obvious non sequitur.  It is not just that this is an infamous lie.  It is both of those things.  It is that this intolerant lashing out at a contrary opinion with group labels of hate is precisely the kind of pathology of the mind that is ruining public life, and yielding up false leaders like Trump.  It is hard to imagine a more insidious and inflammatory lie than that which says that if you oppose the government of Israel, you despise Jews.

Truth no longer matters now; only venom counts.

Poet of the Month: Vergil

So all things are fated

to slide towards the worst, and revert by slipping back:

just as if one who can hardly drive his boat with oars

against the stream, should slacken his arms,

and the channel sweep it away downstream.

Passing Bull 82 – Bull about opposition

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 1 Comment

Compare and contrast, as university examiners used to say, two points of view.

The law says that if you enter into a contract with someone, you should co-operate with them to allow them to get the benefit of the bargain – or at least you should refrain from conduct that would deny them that benefit.

When it came to the race laws of Hitler in 1933, Dietrich Bonhoeffer expressed the exact opposite of that position.  He challenged these immoral laws and called on churches ‘not just to bandage victims under the wheel, but to jam a spoke in the wheel itself.’  Bonhoeffer did not just seek to spike the machine – he sought to kill its driver.  He was executed for his part in plots against Hitler.  (His church doesn’t go for saints, but he would be at the top of their list if they did.)

So, there are two completely opposed positions – you try to make the arrangement work, or you try to frustrate it, and you destroy the other side.

The recent failures of the political system here and in the US have been in large part caused by the failure of our politicians when in opposition to adhere to the first position – instead they have opted for the second.  The role of the opposition is to check the government and its policies and proposed laws.  It is not the role of the opposition to make government impossible or to seek to block everything that a government does.  There is one hell of a difference.

We could see this most clearly in Senator Cruz, a man more loathed by Republicans than Donald Trump.  Cruz unashamedly sought to bring Washington to a halt by blocking what we call supply.  We saw it again with the refusal of Republicans to cooperate to replace Justice Scalia.  The Supreme Court had to proceed a man down, and Americans may get new abortion laws from a court rigged by this unconstitutional means.  We saw the same universal negativity from Tony Abbott in his guise as Doctor No.  We are now seeing something very like it from Bill Shorten, who at least doesn’t try to hide his insincerity.  In truth, Cruz and Abbott behaved like fanatics, and wearing their faith all over their fronts didn’t help.

The idea is to create a paralysis that will reflect badly on government.  People will say that a government that can’t act is a bad government.  The scheme has been defined with precision by President Obama.

Some of this is really simple, and it’s the thing that Mitch McConnell figured out on Day One of my presidency, which is people aren’t playing close attention to how Washington works.  They know there are lobbyists, special interests, gridlock; that the powerful have more access than they do.  And if things aren’t working, if there’s gridlock, then the only guy they know is supposed to be in charge and is supposed to be helping them is the President.  And so the very deliberate strategy that Mitch McConnell and the Republican Party employed during the course of my Presidency was effective.  What they understood was that if you embraced old-fashioned dealing, trading, horse-trading, bipartisan achievement, people feel better.  And if people feel better, they feel better about the President’s party, and the President’s party continues.  And if it feels broken, stuck, and everybody is angry, then that hurts the President or the President’s party……The President-elect, I think, was able to make an argument that he would blow this place up.

In short, the Republicans jammed a spoke in the wheel in order to make the machine seize up.  This is bad faith made manifest.  It is worse than strike action – it is sabotage.  For short term political gain, the Republicans were prepared to inflict lasting damage on the system as a whole, including the Supreme Court.  That causes more distrust and contempt, and you get disasters like Trump, or the cruel farce of the last two weeks of our parliament and insanity about the environment.   Abbott the wrecking ball was a disaster in government, and Trump promises to be even worse.

And so the downward spiral goes on. People lose faith in a stalled system. There is a sense of stagnation, and a sense that politicians are at best useless.  People feel helpless; they are certainly leaderless; and they feel more insecure for themselves and their children; the system has let them down.  The main media don’t help – they have hardly noticed this sabotage, and the press just rabbit on about issues that most people couldn’t give a damn about.  When Trump claimed that the system was rigged, he struck chords with the dispossessed, but it is a little hard for a billionaire to bang on about inequality.

And writing this, I can fear another disaster for me flowing from what I see as a disaster for the US.  Garrison Keillor wrote a piece in which he expressed fear for the effect of Trump on children – Trump does everything that we tell children not to do.  My fear is that Trump will set back the republican movement here.  I don’t think much of that inbred, jug-eared Charlie Windsor, but he is a saint compared to that stupid pussy-groping pig who is about to become President of the United States.  The monarchists can say that if we give up the hereditary Crown, we might end up with a jerk like Trump as our Head of State.

And who would say that that could never happen in this sad billabong?

Poet of the month: Vergil (Georgics)

Before Jupiter’s time no farmers worked the land:

it was wrong to even mark the fields or divide them

with boundaries: men foraged in common, and the earth

herself gave everything more freely, unasked.

He added the deadly venom to shadowy snakes,

made the wolves predators, and stirred the seas,

shook honey from the trees, concealed fire,

and curbed the wine that ran everywhere in streams,

so that thoughtful practice might develop various skills,

little by little, and search out shoots of grain in the furrows,

and strike hidden fire from veins of flint.

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.

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.