Bullshit

Passing bull 51 Missing the point – or answering the wrong charge

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

 

If you are charged with rape, there is not much point in saying that you’re not guilty of murder.  Socrates tried that on and took hemlock.  But Blair and Howard are doing exactly the same.  They say that although they took their nation into a war on a false premise, they were not guilty of lying.

Let us give them the benefit of the doubt on lying.  They are on any view guilty of having taken their nation into a war on a false premise.  It goes much further than that.  As I have sought to show elsewhere, they were guilty of misrepresentation.  Leaders cannot reveal the nature of their advice on intelligence.  We just have to take them on trust.  When they recommend war on the basis of secret intelligence, they are telling us that their intelligence is sufficient to warrant that decision.  In the case of Iraq, that representation was false.  And Sir John Chilcot offers them no comfort.  (Is it not surprising how quickly people can unpick a report of 2.6 million words?)

And do you remember that time under the Westminster system when we made such a fuss about misleading parliament?  And when it was not enough for a minister to say the civil service had badly advised him?

Now Howard has made it worse.  According to him, our problems with terrorism do not derive from the decision of Blair, Bush, and Howard to start the war on false premises. They derive from the decision of President Obama to end the war – which he was elected to do.

There is a view, which I think has a lot of merit, that if the process or the aftermath of the surge had been reinforced by a greater continuing Western, particularly American, presence, the situation would have been lot more stable.

Howard’s successor as the Australian PM took us out of Iraq, too, but notwithstanding the terms on which President Obama was elected, he should have continued to shed American blood in defiance of the military maxim that you don’t reinforce a losing position.  The presumption of Little Johnnie passes belief.

Another problem for Blair was like that of another Boy Napoleon, Boris Johnson.  He got all dressed up and then found that he did not know where to go.  The target nation fell apart, and it is madness to suggest that the people of Iraq and the rest of the world are not so much worse off as a result.  Madness.

But Howard’s mates stay loyal.  Mr Greg Sheridan says:

Listening to Tony Blair’s epic press conference and John Howard’s shorter but no less commanding performance, I was struck by just what master politicians these two men were, and how far they tower over all their successors from both sides of politics in either country.

Thirteen years after the events, these two giants are still masters of all the detail, picking their way through the fog of war in real time. 

The most important conclusion arising out of Chilcot is that there is nothing of substance that is new……Chilcot establishes yet again that the intelligence agencies didn’t lie and Blair, Howard and George W Bush didn’t lie about the intelligence agencies.

Chilcot rightly concludes that Blair oversold the intelligence, giving the impression that it was much more certain than it was.

What worse fault can a prime minister commit than to mislead his nation about going to war?  Then we get this:

Howard yesterday was on his strongest ground in arguing that it is utterly intellectually dishonest to attribute the terrible instability and conflict in the Middle East today to Iraq.

Islamic State emerged out of Syria….

As it happens, of the facing page of The Australian today there is a detailed analysis from The Times headed ‘How Islamic State rose up from the ashes of Iraq conflict.’  The analysis warrants the headline.

The reactions of Blair and Howard, and the bullshit of their supporters, show why people have lost all faith in the political system.

Poet of the month: Keats

Ode to a Nightingale – Part VIII

Forlorn!  the very word is like a bell

To toll me back from thee to my sole self!

Adieu!  the fancy cannot cheat so well

As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.

Adieu! adieu! thy plaintiff anthem fades

Past the near meadows, over the still stream,

Up the hill-side; and now ‘tis buried deep

In the next valley-glades:

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

Fled is that music – Do I wake or sleep?

Passing bull 50 – Shoving it up the elite

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

With the political rise of ghastly people like Farage, Trump, and Hanson, and the rejection of the two party system of government – the only kind of democracy we’ve known here or the in the U K or the U S – there has been a lot of bullshit about ordinary people shoving it up the elite.  You will get different takes on what the phrase ‘ordinary people’ might mean – we no longer speak of the common people, and only Marxists ever embraced the ‘masses’.  In the current context, it tends to be applied to people who are missing out on the benefits of globalisation, technology, and immigration, and are at the lower end of an increasingly unequal spread of wealth and income.  My own view is that inequality is the biggest problem of our time.  I’m fortified in that conclusion by the fierceness with which doctrinaire reactionaries dispute it.

I wish to say four things about the current fashion of shoving it up the elite.

The first is that ‘elite’ means ‘chosen’.  The OED has ‘the choice part or flower (of society, etc.).’  Well, we don’t dislike people because they’ve been chosen, or elected, to play for the Wallabies or the All Blacks, and so have become part of their nation’s sporting elite.  Nor do we ordinarily react to people good enough to be the captain or dux of a school, and so part of the elite or flower of the school.  But some react against people getting into Eton, or Melbourne Grammar.  The relevant emotion is called envy.   People can be put out when they see some much better off than them.  This timeless tension between the haves and have-nots – it’s what got Eve thrown out of Eden – is reflected in two clichés: ‘the tall poppy syndrome’ and ‘having a chip a chip on your shoulder.’  We are world class exponents of each down here.

The second point is that if some people are objecting to others for being better off, we may want to ask in what ways the objectors are worse off.  Well, they may obviously be worse off in wealth and income.  And they may also be worse off in upbringing and manners.  We all tend to feel differences between creeds and peoples, but those who are well brought up usually have the manners that prevent those feelings hurting others and creating division in the community.  People fortunate enough to have come from good homes or to have gone to good schools are less likely to allow any innate bigotry to give offence.  But it is the people who are not so fortunate who are appealed to by the likes of Trump, Farage, and Hanson.  They go straight to the gutter.  You will not find many supporters of Farage who went to Eton or many supporters of Hanson who went to Melbourne Grammar.  We have seen what people like Hanson can do in Australia – aided by people like Jones and Bolt – and we are now seeing just how hateful bigotry can be when it is unleashed by someone like Farage.  And when did you last hear a well educated person saying that they subscribe to the views of Bolt or Jones?

Now, the hardline reactionaries respond to this simple observation by invoking the label of snobbery.  Well, perhaps we’ve got something to be snobbish about.  I don’t know anyone who would allow anyone like Trump, Farage or Hanson into their home – much less their deluded acolytes.  In the name of Heaven, is it not plain that these people are invoking a stratagem that is as old as the Bible and as infected as Hitler and Stalin – the scapegoat?  And we certainly have got things to be snobbish about with the mainstream politicians.  We now have in Victoria our first unclean state government and the (former) leader of the federal opposition has earned the title of Billy Liar.

The third thing is that when members of the press celebrate this rejection of the elite, they don’t realise, or they just decline to accept, that they are an integral part of what people are rejecting.  Our press here in particular has failed to monitor and analyse our politics.  The commentary is short-term and partisan.  If you fail in politics you get a job with Murdoch or Sky.  Just look at the bitchy and witchy backbiting and infighting going on between former Liberal staffers on Sky.  They are not commentators – they are fighters; they are parties to the cleavage.  It is not so much that people are rebelling or revolting against an elite – they are appalled by the whole bloody system, of which the press is an essential part.  The hypocrisy of the press more than matches that of our politicians.

The fourth thing is that it doesn’t add much to say that when people like Farage, Trump, or Hanson, enjoy electoral success, this is democracy at work, and we should be heartened to know that we have ascertained the will of the people.  All judges, juries, and peoples can make mistakes.  Those who lose on a plebiscite may or may not have to live with the answer, but they don’t have to agree to it.  This expensive form of opinion poll may have legal consequences, but it is unlikely to have moral consequences.  The instrument can of course be abused.  Some, including me, think that the proposed plebiscite on same sex marriage is an odious consequence of a factional split among conservatives – as was the recent plebiscite in the U K.  The will or voice of the people has no claim to moral endorsement.  Napoleon and Hitler knew how to get overwhelming endorsement from the vox populi- the voice of the people.  When that voice belongs to people like Farage, Trump, or Hanson, it is both envenomed and venomous.

Poet of the month: Keats

This living hand, now warm and capable

This living hand, now warm and capable

Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

And in the icy silence of the tomb,

So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood

So in my veins red life might stream again,

And that thou be conscience-calmed – see here it is –

I hold it towards you.

Passing bull 49 – Et tu, Gove, and Nordic noir

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

There is so much bull in the UK fiasco, but Dante would have to have created a new circle at the very bottom of hell to accommodate Michael Gove.  It is too distressing to talk about, so I will mention some bull of a lighter nature.

Nordic noir is fashionable.  One competent exponent is Anne Holt.  She lives in Oslo.  I just read her thriller Dead Joker.  The lead character is a woman in the police of high rank who lives with her partner.  At a critical time in an investigation, and in the lives of various parties, she goes to bed with one of her officers – who happens to be a man.  He has already generated a number of bastards from prior unions, but he is about to marry the most recent mother – who is also a police officer.  His boss was slated to give the speech of the best woman.  It may have caused something of a stir if she had had to confess that she had been made pregnant by the groom.

They apparently got themselves into this frightful fix when at least one of them became entranced by music.  It was a piano concerto.  It was said to be by Schubert.  The trouble is that so far as I know, Schubert never wrote a piano concerto.  I bet that the author was thinking of Brahms’ second piano concerto, the third movement.  It is as beautiful a piece of music as I have heard.

Whether it is powerful enough to achieve the effects here described might I suppose be an accident of history.  But if you want to test the issue get the version by Claudio Arrau with Haitink and the Concertgebouw Orchestra.  It is a recording of surpassing beauty.  I’m due to visit Stockholm and Oslo shortly, but I will leave that recording home, for fear of unsettling the natives.

Poet of the month: Keats

On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He stared at the Pacific – and all his men

Looked at each other with a wild surmise –

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Finally, the people of Victoria get a chance to vote tomorrow for the CFA in what is clearly a federal issue.  I urge all people – whether in the bush or not – to vote to save the CFA.  And like the O’Connells of old in Richmond – vote early, vote hard, and vote often.

Passing Bull 48 – Slippery radicals

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

The word ‘radical’ is slippery.  Donald Trump, and people of comparable intellect in the Australian press, get upset when President Obama does not use the term ‘radical Islam’ in referring to people who are alleged to be Islamic terrorists.  What does the word ‘radical’ mean?  If you look at the Oxford English Dictionary, you won’t get much help.  In our context, the word means something like ‘extreme’ – far from the centre, or the end of the line.

We therefore get questions of degree.  Was Jesus of Nazareth a radical Jew?  Was Emperor Augustus a radical Roman?  Was Galileo a radical catholic?  Was Beethoven a radical composer?  Was Chairman Mao a radical Communist?  Was Nelson Mandela a radical terrorist?

You can get an idea just how slippery the word ‘radical’ is from Churchill’s account of the start of the American Revolution.  It began with what is still the American bête noire – tax.  The Stamp Act really upset the colonists.  It included a tax on newspapers ‘many of whose journalists were vehement partisans of the extremist party.’  Future ‘revolutionary leaders appeared from obscurity.’  ‘A small but well organised Radical element began to emerge.’  When cargoes of tea that would be subject to the tax arrived at Boston, the ‘Radicals, who began to call themselves Patriots, seized their opportunity to force a crisis.’  They dressed up as Red Indians and cast the tea upon the waters.  By the time that Paul Revere had written to Lexington, the radicals were being addressed as ‘rebels’.

Were the Tea Party participants ‘terrorists’?  They used extreme violence for political reasons, but no one was killed in this incident.  Is that enough to make them terrorists?  John Adams, the second President of the United States, said ‘that I cannot but consider it as an epoch in history.  This however is but an attack upon property.  Another similar exertion of popular power may produce the destruction of lives.  Many persons wish that as many dead carcasses were floating in the harbour as there are chests of tea.  A much less number of lives however would remove the causes of all our calamities.’  Well, John Adams was ready to embrace terrorism, and there followed acts of terrorism, and appalling terrorism, on both sides, as happened with the birth of the state of Israel.

The Boston Tea Party led Dr Johnson to say that ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.’  The members of the Tea Party now see themselves as extreme patriots, just as Eichmann thought that he was merely doing his patriotic duty.  ‘Patriot’ is even more slippery than ‘radical’.  E M Forster is fondly remembered for the reflection: ‘If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’

Poet of the month: Anna Akhmatova

Requiem: 9

9

Already madness trails its wing

Decisively across my mind:

I drink its fiery wine and sink

Into the valley of the blind.

 

I yield to it the victory:

There is no time, there is no room

Except to sue for peace with my

However strange – delirium.

 

I fall upon my knees, I pray

For mercy.  It makes no concession.

Clearly I must take away

With me not one of my possessions –

 

Not the stone face, hollow blanks

Of eyes, my son’s, through pain’s exquisite

Chisel; not the dead’s closed ranks

In the hour of prison visits;

 

Not the deer coolness of his hands;

Nor, dimmed in distance’s elision,

Like lime-trees’ shady turbulence,

His parting words of consolation.

Passing bull 47- Statutory bull

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

 

Lawyers have given up hope of getting sense out of acts of parliament, but you rarely see bullshit of the quality on display in the CFA Act in Victoria.

s. 6A Accountability of Authority

(1) The Authority is subject to the general direction and control of the Minister in the performance of its functions and the exercise of its powers.

(2) The Minister may from time to time give written directions to the Authority.

The net result is that the heading is misleading.  The Authority is not accountable at all.  The Minister is.  Well we know that.  If the Board doesn’t toe the government line, the Minister fires it.  Why bother to have a board?

Now cop this

s.6B Objective

The objective of the Authority in performing its functions and exercising its powers under this Act is to—

(a) contribute to a whole of sector approach to emergency management;

(b) promote a culture within the emergency management sector of community focus, interoperability and public value.

That is Grange quality bullshit – world class.  They nearly used the word ‘holistic’ in a statute.  It gets picked up in the EBA that may be the final monument to the bullshit of the IR Club.  It is more than 400 pages long.  How would you like to run a business under that kind of diktat?

3.1.5. A joint approach on “productivity policies” that embrace the drivers

and enablers of performance and are consistently applied.

3.1.6. recognising that a productivity model recognises the changing

knowledge requirements of employees covered by this agreement

in all phases of the enterprise activity and also caters for:

(a) increasing requirement for innovation

(b) accelerating adoption of technology

(c) management of risk

(d) motivation of a diverse workforce

(e) working conditions as a work value differentiator

‘Drivers’ and ‘enablers’!  That is premier grand cru bullshit.

But there is a part of the CFA Act that is intelligible.

s. 6F Recognition of Authority as a volunteer-based organisation

The Parliament recognises that the Authority is first and foremost a volunteer-based organisation, in which volunteer officers and members are supported by employees in a fully integrated manner.

How does Danny Boy square that with handing control over the CFA to those who are not volunteers?  Don’t ask Danny Boy.  Ask the Premier of Victoria.  A tiny minority gets a veto over the parliament preferred volunteers.  Danny Boy must have some kind of dispensing power – like James II.

That king got run out of town.

 

Ali again

For the first time I can recall, The Economist obituary ran to two pages.  It contained the following.

Denied entry to diners on a southern tour, he made one of his raps of it: ‘Man, it was really a let-down drag.  For all those miles I had to eat out of a bag.’  Told in a Louisville hamburger joint, when he went in wearing his Olympic gold medal, that they still didn’t serve niggers, he said that was fine; he didn’t eat them.  But under the joshing lay depth upon depth of furious resentment…..Black heavyweights who were not new men like him, still managed by white mobsters and dutifully silent about politics, he called Uncle Toms and ‘great white hopes’, and mimicked their grunts and shuffles…like bears or apes.  It became a habit, turned most viciously against Frazier and Foreman, funny and appalling both at once.

Ali was not a saint.  (Does Islam have them?)  He was just the greatest.

 

Poet of the month: Anna Akhmatova

6

Lightly the weeks are flying,

What has happened, I can’t take in.

Just as, my dearest, the white

Nights first watched you in prison,

So they gaze down

With their warm aquiline eyes and

Of your cross transcendent

And of death I hear them speak.

A Dictator in a Banana Republic

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

 

The people of Victoria want their fire services supplied by people who are subject to the orders of people they elect into government – and not by people who are subject to the orders of unelected agents of the federal government.  The people in Victoria outside of Melbourne – the people in what we call country Victoria – want their fire services provided by people who are dedicated to the cause of country Victorians – the Country Fire Authority – and not by people who are dedicated to the cause of the City of Melbourne – the Metropolitan Fire Brigade.

The MFB and the CFA have as much in common as Venus and Mars.  They are separated by far more than history and geography.  There is a huge and irreconcilable difference in character – or, if you prefer, soul.  The difference can be stated this way.  The CFA are givers; the MFB are takers; the CFA volunteer themselves for their families, friends, and neighbours; the MFB do it for money.

And what money!  MFB firefighters enjoy pay and conditions that most other workers can only dream of.  This is because they play in a sandpit under the umbrella of an Enterprise Bargain Agreement that is enforced by their protectors in the Fair Work Commission.  They are the people who really run the MFB.

The act of the Victorian parliament that regulates the MFB provides for disciplinary action to be taken by the CEO.  I was the Disciplinary Hearings Officer for the MFB from 2002 until 2016.  The MFB declined to give reasons for the termination. The present CEO and his predecessors have effectively discarded the statutory discipline procedure – they have only applied it on about three occasions in six years.  What drove management to down tools – to go on strike?

What does this tell you about discipline in the MFB?  What does it tell you about the management of the MFB?  In what may be the last case ever heard under that act, senior counsel for the accused said that they were applying to the Fair Work Commission to get it to hear and determine the matter – and so perform a function given by the Victorian parliament to the CEO of that statutory authority.  So much for the parliament of Victoria!  How long will it be before the Fair Work Commission officially takes over running the MFB?  When in trouble the firies run off to them every time.  The UFU and the FWC are very close.

You should get hold of the EBA – it will be about ten times as long as the Australian Constitution, and it is a gift from God for casuists and urgers.  The EBA is a thicket to entrap management, and a dead weight of red tape that annihilates initiative, leadership, and loyalty.

In truth, the whole life and work of the MFB has been blighted by a class war that has gone on for generations – as can happen in a closed shop.  Both sides blame each other.  The lawyers have been on a gravy train for decades.

Whether you blame management or the men – women are in substance banned from the MFB – might depend on where you come from.  But does it matter?  Both sides feed off conflict, demarcation, bush lawyers, and a contempt for women.  The whole body is infected by congealed hate, and you can take your pick for the saddest apostle of hate.

For things to get better in this permanent war zone, there will have to be a sea change in both management and firefighters.  Government must rise above the class war.  At the moment, there is a revolving door for senior management, but the leader of the men appears to have been afflicted with a form of life tenure.  And he looks to have friends in high places.  And after all these years, he still sounds like the loudest boy who cried wolf in Christendom.

There is one step that the government could take right now to start to dispel the class war and put some sanity back in the war zone.  They could start drilling some sense into these men by bringing women up to equal numbers.  That would give us a real chance of breaking the inbred generational chain of hate.

And don’t take my word for just how poisonous this outfit is.  Just ask Sharan Burrow, the former head of the ACTU.  She thought that it was about the worst case of industrial poison that she had seen.  People in the country know all about this poison – it’s in the papers all the time – and they don’t want to be infected by it.

Now you will have some idea of why people in the country are outraged at the suggestion that the MFB might have some say in the fire services that they get.  People in the country like and respect the CFA – at least those who live and serve in the bush; they neither like nor respect the MFB – and that is putting it softly.

Why then are so many in this government so intent on acting against the wishes of so many men and women of Victoria?  Can anyone think of a clean reason why Victoria has been reduced to an adjunct of the Philippines and why the hirelings put into the CFA board will learn the meaning of the word scab?

Which management do you think should go?

Passing Bull 46 – How low can we go?

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 5 Comments

 

It wasn’t hard to guess who were the sponsors of Greg Sheridan’s attack on the Prime Minister in today’s Australian, but the inanity and vulgarity are breathtaking even by our standards.  The white-anting is said to reflect internal grief about the refusal of the PM ‘to campaign on key Liberal issues such as national security’.

The Prime Minister’s decision to tour a mattress factory on Thursday when the coffins carrying the remains of Australian soldiers killed in the Vietnam conflict were returned through the RAAF base at Richmond, in Sydney, has left some liberals astonished, confused.  They regard the politics of this decision-making as bizarre.

The official line, that Turnbull and Bill Shorten stayed away so as not to detract from the occasion, is nonsensical.  A respectful, non-campaigning prime ministerial presence would have underlined the nation’s gratitude to the fallen.

Without any overt politicising, the benefit to the PM of pictures of him welcoming home the coffins would have been very powerful.  Many Liberals think that any recent previous Liberal PM would have been there as a matter of course.

This is worse than bullshit.  It is revolting.  Our politicians are on the nose because they lack decency, taste, and balls.  The typical stunt that revolts us is a politician seeking to gain votes out of a sombre event, one that should never be tainted by politics.  One such event is the public return of our war dead.  Any politician who sought to make political capital of that would most politely be described as a jerk.  Yet when the P M and the Leader of the Opposition reach accord on respecting this basic level of decency, Sheridan says they are being ‘nonsensical.’  He, and his spiteful backers in the party, think that Turnbull should have made capital out of this photo-op, but that he should have done so covertly, rather than overtly.  Get out there and be political – but lie about it.  It takes a disgusting level of chutzpah to seek votes for welcoming back coffins of young men that his political party sent to their deaths on false premises.  The only thing that Sheridan is right about is that any recent previous Liberal PM would have been there as a matter of course.  Of course they would – that is just why they are so much on the nose.

I had proposed to vote informal, but Mr Sheridan has persuaded that I should vote for Mr Turnbull.  He is, I fear, our last best hope for any decency in Australian public life.

Poet of the month: Anna Akhmatova

I

They took you away at daybreak.  Half wak-

ing, as though at a wake, I followed.

In the dark chamber children were crying,

In the image-case, candlelight guttered.

At your lips, the chill of an ikon,

A deathly sweat at your brow.

I shall go creep to our wailing wall,

Crawl to the Kremlin towers.

Passing Bull 45 – The Sick Humour of Mr Dean

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 4 Comments

Mr Rowan Dean edits The Australian Spectator and he participates in political talk shows on Sky News.  He also has an occasional piece in the AFR which purports to be humorous.  Mr Dean is the ultimate partisan.  When Mr Abbott fell, Mr Dean held a well-publicised wake for the True Believers.  The current Prime Minister is too soft on too many things for Mr Dean.

On Saturday, Mr Dean had a ‘Poor Me’ piece mocking seven Australians who have known more success in life than he has.  Here are two examples of what Mr Dean regards as humour.

  1. Adam Baddes: Forced to change his name because the Good Life he presumed he was entitled to had in fact turned out to be really, really Bad thanks to endemic racism, xenophobia, intolerance etc (see above), this hugely talented sportsman and elite athlete soared to national prominence in 2013 when a five-year-old girl poked her tongue out at him and wiggled her fingers in front of her nose, thereby suggesting that Mr Baddes was descended from an obscure species of Bonobo that once thrived in the Serengeti (as indeed we all are.) Not content with having the girl put under house arrest and humiliated for life, Mr Baddes was appointed Australian of the Year and National Treasure in quick succession. The judges were particularly impressed by Mr Baddes’ heartfelt attempts to express goodwill and unite the nation by throwing imaginary spears at crowds of onlookers and by his Australia Day speech in which he poured scorn on all privileged, white, male, Anglo-Saxon, non-indigenous Australians. 10 stars.
  2. Nova Peris-Backbone: Top Olympian and role-model to Indigenous girls, Ms Backbone was more surprised than anybody when former Prime Minister Julia “La” Grillard decided that as an Indigenous female Ms Backbone should a) be catapulted into the Labor Party and b) be catapulted into the Senate despite having no interest in either. With Ms Backbone happily immersing herself in the senatorial largesse provided by mainstream taxpayers, the judges were hugely impressed by her tearful announcement that the only people worthy of criticising her are Indigenous women. 8 stars.

This is worse than bullshit.  It is vile.   Mr Dean is an ideologue who proudly asserts the rights of bigots, and says that we should all be free to insult or offend people because of their race.

I do not believe that this kind of stuff has any place in a quality newspaper.  I have written to the Editor, Michael Stutchbury, as follows.

….. I wish to complain about Rowan Dean in your newspaper.

Take Saturday’s piece.  It is not just that it is not funny – it is tasteless, and it is predictably so.   The man is, like Andrew Bolt, fixated on race.  Four targets of the Saturday piece are people of colour.  The article oozes jealousy.  His targets have done something.  Mr Dean comes across as a man who leers, sneers, and jeers. 

A colleague of mine described the letter as puerile bigotry about people who have achieved more than the author could ever hope to do.

Shouldn’t we have lost this undergraduate tribalist view of politics, that some call ‘culture wars’, back in the ‘50’s?   When I heard people like Bolt and Dean last year saying that the crowd abuse of Adam Goodes was not related to his race, I knew that they lived in their own sealed world.  I wonder whether either of them has ever stood in the outer at the AFL or NRL and heard the abuse directed to Aboriginal footballers?

I subscribe to your newspaper because I like it and I respect it.  It is close to being nauseating to find someone like Rowan Dean in the same space as Laura Tingle, Tony Walker, or Phillip Coorey.  May I suggest that your readers deserve better?  It is hard enough enduring another ghastly election without this sort of rubbish.

Frankly, it gives me no pleasure to write like this, but I think that I should.

Other people whose opinion I respect have expressed much stronger views.

Poet of the Month: Anna Akhmatova

The first husband of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova was one of a large number of people shot in 1921 under the government of Lenin.  During the worst of the purges of Stalin, known by the Russians as the ‘Yezhov terror’, Akhmatova spent seventeenth months in prison queues trying to get news of her son.  This great poet was therefore well-placed to write of terror in Russia.  The people of Leningrad in 1940 would soon be able to compare the brutality of Hitler to the terror of Stalin.

Akhmatova wrote of the period of terror in a masterpiece called a Requiem.  The extracts for this month come from that poem.  The translations are by D M Thomas in this year’s Folio Edition.

In the Epilogue of the poem the author speaks of the others outside the jails:

I should like to call you all by name,

But they have lost the lists….

I have woven for them a great shroud

Out of the poor words I heard them speak.

She said that she would accept a monument if it were placed

….here, where I stood for three hundred hours

And where they never, never opened the doors for me.

 

Here, then, is the first extract from Requiem by Anna Akhmatova.

 

Prologue

In those years only the dead smiled,

Glad to be at rest:

And Leningrad city swayed like

A needless appendix to its prisons.

It was then that the railway-yards

Were asylums of the mad;

Short were the locomotives’

Farewell songs.

Stars of death stood

Above us, and innocent Russia

Writhed under bloodstained boots, and

Under the tyres of Black Marias.

 

 

Passing Bull 44 – Outstanding hypocrisy in the Press

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

Politics and politicians are on the nose all around the world.  There is a savage reaction in the West against political parties and political elites.  Since the system as we know it has been worked by political parties run by elites, the results may be disastrous, if not terminal.  Corbyn was bad enough, but Trump is a genuine nightmare.

In Australia there is a very unhappy union between politicians and journalists.  There is much to be said for the view that our press is in large part responsible for the awfulness of our politicians.  They are far too cliquey and close to their subjects; the worst kinds of would-be journalists are tribal, and feed themselves on hits from other followers of the cult on the Internet.  The real disasters are former political staffers who then want to pose as journalists.  Instead, they become boring and loaded cheerleaders.

Two of the worst examples are Chris Kenny and Niki Savva.  They could not hope to pose as being objective, but they sadly think that that they are intelligent.  They live in confined echo chambers quite cut off from the world, just like the politicians in Canberra.  They are part of a useless but self-appointed elite that is quite out of touch with what they call the mainstream.

It was therefore quite a surprise to read the following from Chris Kenny in The Australian last Saturday:

There is a great and pernicious divide in Australia.  It is not between the eastern seaboard and the western plains, or between the rich and poor, city and country, black and white, or even between established citizens and refugees.  The divide is between the political/media class and the mainstream.

There is a gulf between those who consider themselves superior to the masses and want to use the nation’s status to parade their post-material concerns, and those who do the work and raise the families that make the nation what it is.

That is a reasonable statement of the problem, even if it comes from one of the worst examples of those who give rise to the problem.  And what on earth is a former Liberal staffer – attached to Lord Downer; no wonder his syntax is shot – and employed by The Australian and Sky doing referring to ‘the masses’.  Has Mr Kenny ever met one of them?  But then it all becomes clear when we get this:

In this election we are seeing the chasm open up, like a parting of the seas, as the media elites and their preferred left-of-centre politicians seek to determine what issues should be decisive.  They lecture and hector the mainstream.  Worse, they try to dictate what facts can even be discussed.  They seek to silence dissent.  They have compiled an informal list of unmentionables, facts that should not be outed: the truths whose name we dare not speak.

And then Mr Kenny goes on to ‘lecture and hector’ those poor souls who share his echo chamber, the true believers who know that Satan masquerades as the ABC and the Fairfax press.

This is all as boring and predictable as anything said by Mr Kenny in The Australian or one of those ghastly Sky chat shows that demonstrate that the chattering classes, the former chardonnay socialists, have long ago swapped sides graphically and terminally.  We reached a new all-time low recently when Peta Credlin joined Andrew Bolt for a nocturnal tryst on Sky that will be sure to upset at least three dinners a night.  It might all be boring, but the hypocrisy of Mr Kenny takes your breath away.

We get some idea of the problem from the article immediately beneath that of Mr Kenny.  It comes from the paper’s former editor, Chris Mitchell.  Mr Mitchell looks like he may be as unattractive in the flesh as he is in print.  On the same day, Mr Coorey in the AFR – part of the Anti-Christ and my paper of choice – referred to those journalists who scramble like Spitfire pilots when someone says something rude about the Liberals.  Mr Mitchell gives us a roll call of those he invokes to defend that brute Dutton – Paul Murray, Judith Sloan, Mark Latham, Andrew Bolt, Peter van Onselen, Paul Kelly, Chris Kenny, and other pilots in The Oz or Sky squadrons, the usual suspects.  There is apparently honour among sellers because Mr Mitchell informs us that Peta told Andrew that she would not criticise Niki over her bestselling book.  Here surely was grace that passeth all understanding.  And guess what – Peta’s ‘appearances throughout the week were sure-footed and incisive.’  Has tribalism got any lower than this?

And Mr Mitchell gives us an insight into the light years between him and the ‘masses’ when he says:

Latham sees Labor being trapped in a world in which the Left rejects the notion of observable truths, but ordinary voters see Safe Schools as an extreme attempt to reconstruct gender.

In the sweet name of the son of the carpenter, is there any bastard outside the Canberra bubble who knows what ‘reconstructing gender’ might mean?  Does any decent Australian give a bugger about the alleged Left/Right divide or any other of those profoundly stupid chat shows called ‘culture wars’?  Have they not yet seen that everyone else rejects all this bullshit and all those who want to wallow in it?  Does the press just not get that they are an essential part of the package that people are rejecting all around the world?

Then there is poor sad Gerard Henderson who looks like he has never smiled, let alone laughed.  Gerry must be the text-book example of a man who preaches – and, like Mr Kenny, and most of these cave-dwellers, he does preach – only to the converted.  It looks like the lawyers may have been at Gerry’s piece, because he wants to say that the Royal Commission is loaded against our George, but he concludes by saying that their behaviour raises issues of fairness.  His sub-editor said the Commission ‘fails the test of fairness.’

And Gerry has come up with some hard evidence.  Someone on the Commission staff had worked for the ABC!  Worse, Gerry had followed that person’s journalism – no ABC journalist ever escapes the gaze of either Gerry or God – and Gerry ‘happened to know that he was a vehement critic of the theological conservatives in the Catholic Church, such as Pell, layman B A Santamaria and more besides’.  Just think of it – an ABC journalist being a critic of Bob!  But the case is even worse!  Gerry just happened to run into this one-time journalist in the street – the corner of Phillip and Bent streets.  For some reason, Gerry was surprised to see the man.

Crittenden was dressed in a fine suit, well-pressed shirt and tasteful tie.  I asked him how it came to pass that a one-time left wing ABC journalist [really, Gerry, the left-wing part was otiose – we and God know they all are left-wing at Auntie] looking so CBDish so early in the morning.

Good heavens – an uppity socialist!  And what in heaven has the earliness of the morning got to do with this dastardly conspiracy?  But Satan can be devious with his disguises – just look at that unfortunate incident in the garden when he got us all damned, and one half of humanity proscribed for the ages; it was a bugger of a day for the girls.

Having mounted this massive case about his surprise ‘that a Pell critic such as Crittenden had been appointed to a senior position at the royal commission’, Gerry delivers the coup de grâce.

It would have been like appointing Andrew Bolt to a senior management position at the royal commission into trade union governance and corruption.

Poor, sad Gerry – he does not understand, and he never will, that very many Australians, including me, think that his mate Tony Abbott did a lot worse than that in appointing his mate Dyson Heydon to run that royal commission.

And Gerry – that other royal commission can say what it likes about George, but nothing they say will come anywhere near to causing the damage that George has brought on himself and his church.

And finally, Gerry – in addition to harbouring Bolshie views, I’m a ghastly snob; I only wear shirts from Jermyn Street; I only wear ties by Hermès or Ferragamo; and I have just acquired a Zegna scarf to add to the Hermès number – so you can put me down as a card carrying communist who should go straight to the head of the Watch Lists maintained by Opus Dei and the Society of Jesus.

A Big Thank You…

….to the person who kindly sent me that wonderful hamper.  Your graceful note did not disclose your identity.  I recall some reference to being saved from the communists.  Was it, you, perhaps, Gerry?  God does after all work in mysterious ways.

Poet of the month: A D Hope

The Apotolesm of W B Yeats

Such a grand story

Of Willy Yeats,

Keeping his warm bed

Under the slates

To a tale of milkmaids

His friend relates:

 

‘At churns in Sligo

The wenches hum:

Come butter, Come butter,

Come butter,

Come! 

Every lump as

Big as my bum!’

 

A milkmaid mounting

The poet’s stair;

A blackbird trilling

His country air;

Butter and bottom,

The muse was there.

 

Sheep in the meadow,

Cows in the corn;

Come Willy Butler

Blow up your horn!

Out of such moments

Beauty is born.

Passing bull 43 – Bullshit about insults

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

Election time is a very bad time to be an Australian.  We are now squarely in the world-wide pattern of rejecting major parties.  I would prefer to avoid politics, and observe that most of our first white boat people in the First Fleet were illiterate, and undesirable, but some ideologues refuse to lie down.

More than twenty years ago, I attended an IBA conference in New York.  It had been scheduled for Nairobi, but the venue was changed to New York because of terrorist unrest in Kenya.  (The Kenyans said this was all a CIA plot.)  Our media law section was to have a session with the editor of The Kenya Times.  My American colleagues were First Amendment lawyers and ‘free speech’ fanatics.  I, not being a fanatic, was asked to look after the editor in the debate on the rostrum.  The room was packed with coloured people, and it soon became obvious that my man, the editor, who was coloured, had the numbers on his side.

The editor produced that day’s morning edition of the Murdoch tabloid of New York. The front page had a crude, full-on full-page swipe at the love life of the then wife of a crude lout called Donald Trump.  The back page hurled abuse in giant headlines at the Yankees and said: ‘Stick a fork in them.’  The front and back pages were therefore colossal and provocative insults.  They were standard fare for New York but the editor said, entirely credibly, that if he had published either of those pages in his paper, there would have been blood on the streets of Nairobi before the sun had set.

This was a sobering reminder that our tolerance of insults varies from place to place and time to time.  There are still many places in the world where I could be executed for saying that God does not exist.

Any society that has laws will have laws against killing people or physically hurting them.  We have laws, civil and criminal, about assault.  What about when the assault is verbal?  Do we have laws against insulting language?  Yes – at least where the insult is made in public.

What is involved when one person insults another?  The key meaning in the OED is ‘to assail with scornful abuse or offensive disrespect; to offer indignity to; to affront, outrage.’  If you look at the OED, for both the noun and the verb, you will see the link between ‘insult’ and ‘assault’.  An insult is a verbal kind of assault or attack by one person on another.   To ‘outrage’ someone is to do something they resent so much that they are enraged.  The usual reaction of the victim is to seek revenge.

We have laws against verbal assaults called insults because we realise that verbal assaults can be just as wounding as physical assaults.  We also know that one of the primary objects of the law is to keep the peace, and that one easy way to produce a breach of the peace is for one person to insult another, just as it is for one person to strike another.  In many cultures, an insult could lead to a duel and death.  In many cultures, a religious insult, or an insult to a family, will lead to death without the formality of a duel, much less a trial.

So, if in Australia one person approaches another in public and says ‘Your father is a coward and your mother is a slut’, that person has committed a criminal offence.  It would be silly to say that the father and mother should be left to a civil action in defamation, if they have one, or that the person directly insulted, and outraged, might inquire of a lawyer whether he or she has any form of action at all.  We think that the police should have the power to make an immediate arrest in order to keep the peace.  And it would be just as silly to say that such a law affects something called ‘freedom of speech’.  Most laws do, especially if the law expressly refers to speech.  It adds nothing to this conversation to state that inevitable result.  The question is whether such a law is warranted.  Very few people think that such a law is not warranted.

Most see such a law as essential to keeping the peace in a civilised community.  Similarly, most people think they should be able to walk down the street or go the football with their family without having to listen to or read obscenities.  There is no great issue of policy much less ideology here – we are just talking about keeping the peace.  Most people know what that is and what we should do to achieve it.

We in Australia therefore have these laws about insulting people in public.  We are much more sceptical about any suggestion that we should outlaw insulting religion or the nation.  But that scepticism need not disturb our dealing with what we regard as plain cases of insult that the law must deal with.

Similarly, laws against insulting or offensive language have been abused before.  If the coppers could not think of anything else to charge a protester with, they used to produce a ‘sheet of language.’  They don’t do that now, and abolishing a law may be an extreme way to deal with the abuse of it.

So, the Australian states have various laws about insulting or offensive behaviour in public.  Well, then, what if an insult or offence is directed at someone because of their race?  In addition to our general state laws, there is a federal law for insults based on race.  That law says that you must not publicly insult or humiliate people because of their race (Racial Discrimination act, 1975, s. 18C).  Unlike the state act, the federal act does not create a criminal offence.  You can go to jail for insulting behaviour without more under the state law, but if you insult a person on the ground of their race, you cannot be imprisoned or even charged with a breach of the law under the federal act.  The remedy for a breach of this law is a complaint to a government agency.

We are then left with an intellectual curio.  People do not complain about a law that makes publishing insulting words a crime, but they do campaign against a law that doesn’t make such an act a crime, and is confined to cases where the insult is made on the grounds of race.  That qualification if anything would make the insult more wounding, provocative, and dangerous.  What is the explanation of this puzzle?

You cannot help wondering whether an obsession with ideology distorts people’s views so that they lose contact not just with how ordinary people think, but with reality.

Just think of the laws covered by the following exercises involving speech.

I steal your Ph D thesis and claim it as my own.

A man telephones the mother of a child to tell her, falsely, that he has just seen the child run over on the way to school and killed.  He does so purely to hurt the mother.  She miscarries and loses her next child.

A man at a huge religious rally in the Punjab seeks to cause panic by shouting that religious opponents are attacking from another quarter.  He does so merely to test his power and to observe the chaos and death.  Hundreds, foreseeably, die.

A young man tells his best mate in strict confidence that he is gay but that he does not propose to come out in the near future.  His mate immediately goes online to tell the world.  He says that he is doing so to save his mate from cowardice and hypocrisy, and because he believes in freedom of speech.

Someone offers you a fortune to bomb the P M.

A man approaches a husband and wife in the street and abuses the wife and says she is an Asian slut.

A woman approaches the same husband and wife and says that the husband has been having an affair with her for years but she is going to terminate it because he is lousy in bed and has issues with personal hygiene, false teeth, and prostheses.

A man walks around a muslem wedding ceremony with a sign saying that the ceremony is as fake as the faith of its participants.

A man having a dispute with a highly strung Sikh neighbour calls him over to the fence to tell him in front of his family that his culture is intellectually, morally, and spiritually bankrupt.  He does so with the purpose of causing the Sikh to retaliate and so lose face in the neighbourhood, and enable him to go to law against his adversary.

A politician deliberately fans racial division to get elected.  At one rally, he says that the coloured people are the missing link with the apes.  He succeeds, but the banlieues are in flames

A blackfella goes into a bar in Alice Springs and quietly and methodically and soberly begins to insult both white and coloured people at the bar by reference to their race.

In each case, the person making the statement is intending to cause harm to another person.  Is there any moral or political difference in those cases of insult where the insult is based on race?  Has the phrase ‘freedom of speech’ any application in any example?  Should the law be silent for any of these cases?

The French Declaration of Rights of 1789 said in article 4: ‘Liberty consists of the power to do whatever is not injurious to others.’  Some principle like that must underlie any legal system of a nation that says that its citizens are free.  My freedom of speech does not give me a licence to hurt others.  It does not override my liability for using speech to break a contract, commit a crime, make a nuisance, breach the peace, or defame someone else – or for any other form of speech that the law makes unlawful or illegal.

We can argue about the extent to which any crime or civil wrong may impinge on our right to freedom of speech, but singing a hymn to that ‘freedom’, or proclaiming yourself a warrior in its defence, does not advance the argument.  The warrior is left to declaim loudly to the birds – if you seek to settle the differences that arise from conflicts between people by reference to some grand ideological prescription, the most polite word for your world view is bullshit.

If I got booked for speeding between Wodonga and Albury, and I complained that this ticket infringed my right to the absolute freedom of trade and intercourse conferred by s. 92 of the Constitution, I would be making much more sense than if I said that proceedings against me for insulting or offensive words in public infringe my right to freedom of speech.  They would both be bullshit, but there are, after all, degrees of bullshit.

So, when recently someone put out a banner up at the footy that was offensive to people of one faith, there was a general and quick display of anger and a popular wish that the law be enforced to remove the offensive banner.  And the ideologues sensibly said nothing.

Poet of the month: A D Hope

The Sleeper

Our birth is but a sleeping and a forgetting…

When the night comes, I get

Into my coffin; set

The soul’s brutal alarm;

Pull the green coverlet

Over my face; lie warm,

Deaf to the black storm.

 

Ah, but the truce is vain;

Then Chaos comes again;

The Mind’s insatiate eye

Opens on its insane

Landscape of misery,

And will not let me die.

 

A gunshot tears the brain –

That one quick crash of pain

Pays for a lasting sleep.

Be finished with it then!

What argument can keep

You from that step?

 

The argument of fear,

A whisper that I hear

A voice that haunts my bed:

‘The only sleep is here;

Suffer your nightmare; dread

The daylight of the dead.’