Bullshit

Passing Bull 26: Tolstoy, Napoleon, and flawed greatness

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 1 Comment

 

On my fourth reading of War and Peace – in the wonderful new Folio edition – I marvelled at it more than I had previously.  It is a truly great testament to humanity.  For what it is worth, I would now rate it above Ulysses and Don Quixote.  And I would do that even though the masterpiece is shot through with a rotten flaw – the nagging bullshit about Napoleon and his role in history, and some very quaint views about free will.  Still, readers of Shakespeare know that Tolstoy can make an idiot of himself, and genius is not proof against inanity.  Indeed, the rest of us might be relieved that genius can err, just as we used to feel some wonder when the Tiger duffed a shot before he hit the wall.

In his recent book Napoleon the Great, the historian Andrew Roberts said that in his opinion, as the title of the book suggests, Napoleon was great. Napoleon was certainly a man of great industry and he had what many regard as a kind of military genius. Mr Roberts does not give his criteria of greatness, but let me state briefly some of the reasons why that title might sit oddly on a man that Mr Roberts describes as ‘the Enlightenment on horseback’ – which presumably means something different to a philosophical killer or an intellectual cowboy.

As a statesman, Napoleon worked wonders in France and he left the Code named after him as his testament. But if he found Paris and France ablaze, he left them smoking ruins. It took France more than four generations to recover from Napoleon – if indeed it ever did.

His wars cost somewhere between 4 million and 5 million people killed. If you are being bayoneted or raped, you do not enquire about the motives of the person attacking you.

Napoleon lost because he had to lose. He was a compulsive gambler who kept doubling his bets. He was profligate with the lives of his French and soldiers of other nations in a way that the Duke of Wellington could never have been.

He committed the one crime that is unforgivable in a soldier in command. He deserted his own troops. He did that twice. He did it in Egypt and he did it in Russia. Each of those campaigns was commenced to satisfy his own pride and not to pursue some seriously arguable military objective. He apparently had the absurd idea that people would welcome him as their liberator or as the person bringing them the benefits of French civilisation. That idea is absurd, and it was seen to be absurd, by a leader of the French Revolution whose name is now generally reviled – Robespierre. Robespierre opposed starting the wars that were to lead into the wars that we call revolutionary. In the course of doing so, he made the following observations:

The most extravagant idea that can arise in the mind of a politician is the belief that a people need only make an armed incursion into the territory of a foreign people, to make it adopt its laws and its constitution.  No one likes armed missionaries; and the first counsel given by nature and prudence is to repel them as enemies.

We have seen the truth of those observations borne out in different theatres of Asia and the Middle East time and again in our own lifetime, but a man purporting to be a great soldier and statesman must forfeit any claim to any kind of greatness for failing to see what the terrorist Robespierre so clearly saw.

Napoleon also fails as both a general and a statesman because of his being embroiled in the two theatres where he was defeated, Spain and Russia, for no adequate military objective. The losses sustained by France in Russia, and the crimes committed against humanity in Spain and Russia, alone disqualify Napoleon from any claim to greatness.  The Russian campaign showed his double or nothing gambling instinct, and his swansong at Waterloo cost more than 40,000 men their lives or their welfare.

The failure in Russia was made worse by his inability to publish a declaration to free the serfs. This champion of French liberty was no champion of the spirits of 1789, and no such champion could ever have made himself Emperor and created his own nobility as Napoleon did.  He had become more and more hostile to the Revolution, and he had instituted a despotic police state.  He then made stupid members of his family kings in Europe.

Napoleon, therefore, might fairly be it accused of having betrayed his men, his country, and the ideals of the French Revolution. Mr Roberts may have succumbed to Romance in the form of bullshit. This is how the distinguished French historian Georges Lefebvre concluded his biography of Napoleon:

Yet the Romantics were not wholly wrong about him, for his classicism was only one of culture and cast of mind. His springs of action, his unconquerable energy of temperament, arose from the depths of his imagination. Here lay the secret of the fascination that he will exercise forevermore on the individual person. For men will always be haunted by romantic dreams of power, even if only in the passing fires and disturbances of youth; and there will thus never be wanting those who will come like Barres’ heroes to stand in ecstasy before the tomb.

Others may prefer to spend time before the tombs of some of the five million people who died so that Napoleon could pursue la gloire.

Poet of last month – Burns

Let Not Woman E’er Complain

 

Let not Woman e’er complain

Of inconstancy in love;

Let not woman e’er complain

Fickle Man is apt to rove:

Look abroad through Nature’s range,

Nature’s mighty law is change;

Ladies would it not be strange

Man should then a monster prove.

 

Mark the winds and mark the skies;

Ocean’s ebb and Ocean’s flow:

Sun and moon but set to rise;

Round and round the seasons go:

Why then ask a silly Man,

To oppose great Nature’s plan?

We’ll be constant while we can

You can be no more, you know.

 

And that, too, is on any view bullshit that conforms my views about Burns as a nativist curio.

Passing bull 24– A good mantra?

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

Two phrases must go on the Blacklist – ‘boots on the ground’ and ‘stand shoulder to shoulder.’  The second is what you do when you don’t have the first.

But our Prime Minister – AND MAY GOD DEFEND HIM! – has unwrapped a pearler.  He said that this is not a time for ‘gestures or machismo’.

Our PM had the Sniper in mind.  The Sniper had nothing but gestures and machismo.  One great gesture told us that he was mad – knighting a duke – and one exercise in machismo confirmed that he was stupid as well as mad – threatening to shirtfront a Mafia Tsar.  In the result, we now have a PM in cities like Berlin and Paris who does not make us ashamed or give us nervous breakdowns while we wait for the next inane gesture or threatening machismo.

Do you, too, still share the immensity of the relief?  Or as Gough said to Margaret: ‘Did the earth move for you too?’  I feel like Kant did when told of the fall of the Bastille – ‘Now let your servant go in peace to the grave for I have seen the glory of the world.’

All we have to put up with now is Doctor Death, the Grecian Poodle, telling us to put boots on the ground and form an alliance with the Mafia Tsar – and put boots on the ground with him.  Doctor Death did not refer to the Death Cult.  The Sniper has world rights to that bullshit.

And how apt is the phrase ‘gestures and machismo’ for the best mates of the Sniper, the Parrot, and the Lowflying Dutchman?  It might remind us of the difference between Shock jocks and hookers; the latter sell some grubby transient togetherness for money; Shock Jocks peddle grubby permanent enmity for money.  Otherwise, they have lots in common.  They cloister around the gutter.

And now look at the two World’s Best Practice in gesture and machismo – Erdogan and Putin.  At each other’s throats.  No one believes a word that either says, but Doctor Death wants us to hold hands and walk in boots on the ground with both.  While they do their best to wipe each other out.  The Leader of the Free World must be deeply grateful for the gratuitous advice given to him by that Master of Wars, the Grecian Poodle.

Should we have our own Thanksgiving Day?  We have left behind what Churchill called ‘a new Dark age made more sinister by the lights of perverted science’ and we now have the chance also described by Churchill to ‘walk in those broad sunlit uplands.’

And while we are on good news for the Liberal Party, take a look at the Premier of New South Wales, Mr Mike Baird!  It is not just that he can make a decision and take a stand, and stare down a fear campaign from yesterday’s tired men – he has the Michelle Payne effect.  An open Australian face and a flat unpretentious Australian voice.  He just oozes political premiership form and style, and good luck to him!

Final Gwen Harwood poem

I apologise for splitting Oyster Cove.  The following may be my favourite poem.  There is more than a bit of Michelle Payne here, too.  It is what I think poetry is about.

In the park

 

She sits in the park.  Her clothes are out of date.

Two children whine and bicker, tug her skirt.

A third draws aimless patterns in the dirt.

Someone she loved once passes by – too late

 

to feign indifference to that casual nod.

‘How nice’, et cetera.  ‘Time holds great surprises.’

From his neat head unquestionably rises

a small balloon….’but for the grace of God…’

 

They stand a while in flickering light, rehearsing

the children’s names and birthdays.  ‘It’s so sweet

to hear their chatter, watch them grow and thrive,’

she says to his departing smile.  Then, nursing

the youngest child, sits staring at her feet.

To the wind she says, ‘They have eaten me alive.’

Passing Bull 23 Downplaying thought and the hope of the side

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 1 Comment

 

A full page Hewlett Packard Ad contains the following bullshit.

Tomorrow belongs to the fast.

Winners and losers will be decided by

how quickly they can move from what they

are now to what they need to become.

In every business, IT strategy

is now business strategy.

Accelerating change.

Accelerating growth.

Accelerating security.

And today, to help you move faster

we’ve created a new company.

One totally focussed on what’s next

for your business.

A true partnership where collaborative

people, empowering technology and

transformative ideas push everyone forward.

Accelerating innovation.

Why did it take so long to get to the ‘I’ word, and then only after the bullshit reached gale force?

Oyster Cove

(concluding)

……God’s creatures, made

woodcutters’ whores, sick drunks, watch the sun prise

their life apart: flesh, memory, language all

split open, featureless, to feed the wild

hunger of history.  A woman lies

coughing her life out.  There’s still blood to fall,

but all blood’s spilt that could have made a child.

Passing Bull 22 – The poem

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

My apologies for forgetting a poem of the poet of the month, Gwen Harwood.  It is below.  I will shorty put out a note on terror and Paris.  First it must be vetted – by lawyers, ASIO, the CIA, and my household fire insurers.

Oyster Cove

Dreams drip to stone.  Barracks and salt marsh blaze

opal beneath a crackling glaze of frost.

Boot-black, in graceless Christian rags, a lost

race breathes out cold.  Parting the milky haze

on mudflats, seabirds, clean and separate, wade.

Mother, Husband and Child: stars which forecast

fine weather, all are set.  The long night’s past

and the long day begins.

To be continued.

Passing Bull 18 – The Dean’s Wake Syndrome

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

....unlike progressives, conservative commentators tend to stand on principle rather than indulge in partisan or personal cheerleading….

Chris Kenny, The Saturday Australian, 17-18 October, 2015.

On any given Saturday you can get about five whoppers like this from that newspaper as the ‘conservatives’ make faces at the ‘progressives’, like little girls to little boys behind the shelter-shed.  What was the context?

Rowan Dean, the editor of the Oz Spectator, and the leader of the unattractive pack described in Passing Bull 15, threw a wake for the former PM.  We are told that Dean was smarting if not seething.  The usual idolaters were there – Andrew Bolt, Miranda Devine and Paul Murray (who has been inconsolable on Sky ever since, routinely throwing objects as well as tantrums, and imploring the new PM to be tough on Muslims).

Mr Kenny, another idolater in his time, says he knows how these people feel.  He does so in terms that contradict point blank the silly boast set out above, and which show why Australians are revolted by the cabal of politicians and journalists that have dragged us down to our present level, on both sides of politics, and where all except the addicts, or those who profit from or traffic in the addiction, are praying for relief, if not enlightenment from a mix of the Wars of the Roses and a New Dark Age.

After years of sneering at the poll-driven, media-grovelling superficiality of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd Labor years, the Liberals have descended into the same sand-pit.

And with the ABC, Fairfax Media Newspapers, Canberra press gallery, academe and sundry other elements of the love media and political/media class railing against their version of the anti-Christ – a socially conservative prime minister – a great opportunity to prove them all wrong has been frittered away.

Most of us with a view to the structural ebbs and flows of politics could see that despite the antipathy directed at Abbott, some obvious failings and poor poll ratings, the Coalition was most likely to be re-elected next year.

This would have confounded the love media and twittersphere, and confirmed the good sense of mainstream voters.

In Abbott’s failure were strong policy settings (border protection, climate change, and attempted budget repair), the escalating issue of union power and corruption being teased out in the royal commission he established, and how all this had rendered Bill Shorten nigh-on unelectable.

When an impatient Turnbull launched his challenge the week before the Canning by-election he not only robbed Abbott of a chance for recovery but denied many true believers the pleasure of this social-political experiment – this vindication.

It passes belief.  If you did not know that you were the victim of an experiment, at least you know it is not one that will be repeated.  Here is why politics presently revolt Australians.  There is hardly any reference to principle, but just a focus on partisan political cheerleading.  And do you know why?  The people and their representatives do not know as much as Messrs Kenny or Bolt.  They cannot be trusted.

As usual, the crucial partyroom votes were exercised by inexperienced, impressionable and self-interested MPs, many of whom would not have entered parliament if not for Abbott’s campaigning skills and who might have been less than helpful in briefing journalists and voicing disharmony as they fretted over the polls.

In the next post, I will try to spell out this disease of the mind, but Mr Kenny does offer one frightening thought:

I sense the republican cause may be at the heart of much conservative antipathy.

These embittered relics of Plato’s Republic and the Split are not just harmless Looney Tunes.  They are intent on not allowing us to break with the Mother Country and become self-governing without support from the Anglican Crown.  Bring back 1788 – and the lash.  They are Monarchists envenomed.  Don’t they know about 1789?

Poet of the month: Yeats

The Choice

The intellect of man is forced to choose

Perfection of the life, or of the work,

And if it take the second must refuse

A heavenly mansion raging in the dark.

When all that story’s finished, what’s the news?

In luck or out the toil has left its mark:

That old perplexity and empty purse,

Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.

Passing Bull 17 – Ripe Post-Modernist tripe

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Fredric Jameson (born 14 April 1934) is an American literary critic and Marxist political theorist. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends. He once described postmodernism as the spatialization of culture under the pressure of organized capitalism.

The beginning of this Wikipedia entry suggests that Frederic Jameson might be a mine of premium grade bullshit and a recent London Review of Books critique by Jameson of a book by David Wittenberg Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative (which itself suggests ripe bullshit) does not let us down.

It is probably not immediately obvious what interest a new theoretical study of science fiction holds for the mainstream adepts of literary theory; and no doubt it is just as perplexing to SF scholars, for whom this particular sub-genre of the sub-genre, is as exceptional and uncharacteristic of their major texts as SF itself is with regard to official Literature.  To be sure so-called alternative or counter-factual histories have gained popularity and a certain respectability…..

But where did the genre come from?  My own hypothesis is a very general one: namely, that the late 19th century invention of SF correlates to Walter Scott’s invention of the modern historical novel Waverley (1814), marking the emergence of a second – industrial – stage of historical consciousness after the first dawning sense of historicity so rudely awakened by the French Revolution.

***

I want to reinsert this problem into a philosophical context of far greater consequence, which is that of representation as such.  Increasingly, in the late 19th century, writers became aware that the world of newly emergent capitalism was an unrepresentable totality which it was nonetheless their duty and vocation to represent.  The great moderns – Mallarmé, Joyce, Musil et al – achieved this impossible and double-binding imperative by representing their inability to represent.  They earned their right to sublimity by using ‘picture-thinking’ against itself, and for them failure was success.  The postmoderns seem to have renounced this agonising mission by taking the impossibility of representation for granted and revelling in it (you will say that by now we know what the totality of capitalism is anyhow, representation or no representation).

But science fiction was not crippled by such representational doubts and scruples; or rather, it emerged as a genre at the very moment in which the representational dilemma began to make inroads into literature, and it was able to do so owing to its possession of a representational instrument rather different from those faltering in the hands of traditional realists.  Kant distinguished between two kinds of non-conceptual language: the symbol and the schema.  Traditional literature cleaved to the symbol and its ‘picture-thinking’ (thereby allowing Hegel to pronounce its supercession by philosophy as such, in his theory of the ‘end of art’).  But science fiction had the schema; and it is what we have been calling literality, the use of visual materials not to represent the world but to represent our thoughts about the world.  It is no accident that Deleuze celebrated Foucault’s work in terms of its schematism, something which in his own writing he called ‘the image of thought’ – as opposed, clearly, to its referential content. Virtually everything designated as structuralism and poststructuralism is marked, in its so-called spatial turn – indeed, in its synchronic tendencies – by schematism.  This is a kind of ‘picture-thinking’ very different from what Hegel understood as Vorstellung; nor does it fall under the anathema of representation since it does not represent.

***

History is then also a text, and we are its readers.  But to introduce the reader at this point will have even more momentous consequences.  Wittenberg, now following Shklovsky closely, has done what none of the currently fashionable celebrants of ‘reading’ have dared to do: he has theorised its structure, which consists in the positing (as Hegel might say) of fabula over syuzhet, that is, in the necessity of some prior ‘belief’ in the fabula which can alone enable our reception of the syuzhet.  ‘Reading for the referent’, the structuralists contemptuously called this; but it is surely true, and a better way of saying it than ‘suspension of disbelief’ or other ingenious attempts to ensure the difference of fiction from fact, to hold on to the old conventional notion of reality while ensuring a momentary grace period for the consumption of literary narrative.  But if everything is narrative, as we seem nowadays to believe, then this division no longer holds; and as for belief or disbelief, Rodney Needham long ago demonstrated the incoherence of this pseudo-concept in Belief, Language and Experience (1973) – though nobody believed him.  If, however, you like the word, let’s keep it (if only provisionally): so the new Wittenberg/ Shklovsky doctrine maintains the priority of a ‘belief’ in the fabula over the syuzhet (which nobody believes, it is nothing but literature).  Reading then involves what Wittenberg (following Kant’s example) will ingeniously and pertinently call ‘the fabula a priori’.  Even when reading those patently false narratives called novels, we still believe in something, namely the fabula; and this holds, as he demonstrates, for the so-called experimental or modernist novel fully as much as for the allegedly traditional kind.  But in that case, there is at least one term we can get rid of for good, and that is the word ‘fiction’: fiction is a fiction, if you prefer, and in a world where everything is narrative, we can eliminate it.  ‘Fiction’ was the now discarded theory that the fabula could be either true or false; whereas, if you want to put it that way, the fabula is always true.

That bullshit is unbeatable – and some taxpayers in the U S are funding it.

Poet of the Month: Yeats

Presences

This night has been so strange that it seemed

As if the hair stood upon my head.

From going-down of the sun I have dreamed

That women laughing or timid or wild,

In rustle of lace or silken stuff,

Climbed up my creaking stair.  They had read

All I had rhymed of that monstrous thing

Returned and yet unrequited love.

They stood in the door and stood between

My great wood lectern and the fire

Till I could hear their hearts beating:

One is a harlot, and one a child

That never looked upon man with desire,

And one, it may be, a queen.

That is nothing if not Celtic, but its mystery and magic remind me of the movie The Russian Ark.

Passing bull 16 – the omitted poetry

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 6 Comments

At the first opportunity, I omitted to add to this Passing Bull item an extract from the poet of the month, Yeats.  I had promised not use his best known lines, but the revival of Sodom and Gomorrah really makes me now do so.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

A propos of another form of trading in sex, Playboy is going clothed.  Do you remember the time when some diffident younger or older men said that they bought Playboy for the articles?  Now, I can warrant you that some will say that they watch Nigella to learn how to cook.

Passing Bull 15 – Knights and Dames and Bad Sports – Very Bad Sports

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

The Australian Spectator greatly admired and strongly supported Tony Abbott as PM.  Its writers were very rude about people they saw as ‘Abbott-haters’ – a term they had to share with shock jocks and The Australian about the ABC and the Fairfax press and others.  It was therefore natural that the fall of Mr Abbott would cause as much pain to The Spectator as it did to Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones.  And the pain really shows.

The cover for 26 September has a crude cartoon of the new PM with some waffles.  The editorial refers to the ‘excruciating love-in’ with Leigh Sales on the ABC – Anti-Christ at home in Hades.

Mr Turnbull’s entire 22 minutes of verbiage could be summed up in half a dozen slogans: Terrorists are bad.  War is dangerous.  Governments must work.  And so on.  His lengthy interview with David Speers on Sky News was more of the same with a bit of ‘innovation’ thrown in.  The art of communications – and leadership – is to simply express single-minded core ideas and more importantly, to clearly convey goals your government can be measured by, such as ‘stopping the boats’ or ‘scrapping the carbon tax.’  Mr Turnbull’s banal, patronising platitudes seek to obscure the tough decision-making required of government under a fluffy blanket of cheeky smiles and good intentions.  This is government for the asinine twitter generation.  As we saw back in the days of ‘programmatic specificity’, its charm soon wears thin.

Well, let us put to one side the murder of the English language, and the dynamiting of infinitives – we now know that the Bolt poster-boy is one who has ‘single-minded core ideas.’  Mr Abbott qualifies there – he was not capable of anything else.  You think that Syria is tricky?  Not on your Nelly.  Just pick out a ‘death cult’, keep repeating that ‘single-minded core idea’, and bomb them.  But Mr Abbott was fired not because he was beyond ‘the tough decision-making required of government’, but because he had lost the nerve to make any decision at all.

Mr James Allen is in a more mortal form of agony.  ‘But why are we Abbott supporters now supposed to help Turnbull.’  It would I suppose be damned silly to respond: ‘Perhaps because you are Australians?’  Mr Allen contemplates what might be called the Japanese gambit of hara-kiri:

It’s better sometimes to blow the whole thing up and –let’s be honest – lose to the other team.  Why?  Because you’ll have sent a message that loyalty ‘and no white anting’ and giving us support when things are a bit tough are the price they have to pay, not just that you have to pay.  Reciprocity baby.  Signal-sending my friend.

This sulking really is selfish.  Political parties are what used to carry the system.  The failure of the system comes in large part from the failure of the parties.

Can Mr Turnbull redeem himself?  Yes.  How?  ‘Bring back the pre-election promise to repeal most (or better yet all) of the ghastly 18C.’  Here you have precise insight into the doctrinal purity, so removed from the sense of the nation, which saw our last PM hit the fence with such vigour.

Mr Philip Murphy likes the kitchen sink in the gutter.  The reference to King Cnut is a reference to the crude abuse of an Abbott staffer to the new PM, in itself a golden reminder of the failure of that part of our constitution that said an impartial civil service was essential to our system.  Apart from puerile vulgarity, we know that we are again lost in intellectual abstractions and labels by the sub-heading: ‘Will Malcolm Turnbull be able to hold back the rising tide of illiberalism.’  If you are too liberal, you become illiberal.

Poor Mr Murphy also got Leigh Sales.  Why do these people torture themselves acquiring the stigmata of Antichrist from the ABC and Fairfax?  What really scares Mr Murphy?  Mr Turnbull’s

….following the pattern of others who have been involved in creeping republicanism.  The mooted execution of Knights and Dames is no doubt on top of such a list.

The disease of eternal irrelevance extends to the once respectable parent.  It says that Pope Francis ‘has become the darling of the international left’ and ‘an engaging chatterbox’, but that he should spend less time on the environmental crisis – where his view is ‘alarmist’ ‘and whose scale he may be exaggerating’ – and more time worrying about Christians in the Middle East.

You must feel sorry for these people, eternal victims not just of Fairfax and the ABC, but of Islam, and now the Holy Father and the Supreme Court of the USA.  They have to carry the whole Christian world on their shoulders surrounded by all those demons.

But they are so removed from the rest of the nation that they are political poison.  Australians distrust political theories and ideologies and people who claim to have the answer and look down on others.  We look for something that works, not for doctrinal correctness.  Since we get that from the English, it is curious that people who treat English as a comfy rug do not get it.  Make no mistake – these are the people who brought Abbott down.

Just ask Mark Textor, the man who got him the job.  (Peta says she got it for him, but Mark’s is the stronger claim.)

Nothing says more about the reality marginalisation of shock-jocks and news columnists than their misinterpretation of the decency of middle Australia over Goodes.  Most want media-fuelled division to end.

If I may say so, that was exactly my sense of the reaction of most Australians, and it was an occasion of an appalling lack of leadership on the part of the then P M.  He was the victim of ideologically induced gutlessness.  It used to happen all the time.

And he is now just a bad loser.  As is Mr Campbell Newman.  According to the AFR, he is publishing a memoir Can Do which includes the following:

They [journalists] are not interested in the government or reform or the reasons behind the decisions we made.  They are only interested in the tactical, the here and now, they only ever look for short-term politics and gossip.  And they have got a nerve to ridicule people like me who tried to actually get things done.  And they have always ridiculed and sneered.

Failed politicians are desperately unattractive people.  They and their failed fan clubs are very bad sports.

And we beat the Poms in the World Cup.  On their own turf.  And one of the princes was there.  Barracking for the wrong side.

Poet of the Month: Yeats.

I propose to add to the bullshit column, when I remember, an extract from a poet of the month.  The poet for October is Yeats.  The poetry will not relate to the bullshit, but hopefully provide some respite from a tedious world.  The following extract is from A Prayer for my Daughter.

And may her bridegroom bring her to a house

Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious;

For arrogance and hatred are the wares

Peddled in the thoroughfares.

How but in custom and in ceremony

Are innocence and beauty born?

Passing bull 12: Strategic adjancies

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The great corrupter of thought is prejudice.  Tariq Ali, as an old style socialist, would be sympathetic to Greece and the government of Mt Tsipras, and unsympathetic to those who lent Greece money.  In The London Review of Books, he acknowledges the awful corruption in Greece.  They spent a fortune on tanks in 2009 because the defence minister took huge bribes.  But Ali chides the financial press for not noticing that the minister got jail for corruption while the corrupters only got a fine – the quantum of either is not revealed, but it does look like the courts were Greek.  Then we get the German spray:

The EU has now succeeded in crushing the political alternative that Syriza represented.  The German attitude to Greece, long before the rise of Syriza, was shaped by the discovery that Athens (helped by Goldman Sachs) had cooked its books in order to get into the Eurozone.  This is indisputable.  But isn’t it dangerous as well as wrong to punish the Greek people – and to carry on doing so even after they have rejected the political parties responsible for the lies?

Put to one side ‘crushing’ and ‘punish’ – does a country cease to be liable for its wrongs or debts just because it has had a change of government?  This misconception underlay so much of the Greek response.  ‘We are under new management that has a different ‘mandate’’.  This was not a doctrine that the Greeks were keen to invoke in their claims against Nazi Germany.

Still, at least Tariq says something.  Slavoj Zizek often misses out completely.  A recent LRB piece headed Sinicisation started this way:

When Alan Badiou claims that democracy is our fetish, this statement is to be taken in the precise Freudian sense, not just to mean that we elevate democracy into an untouchable Absolute.  ‘Democracy’ is the last thing we see before confronting the ‘lack’ constitutive of the social field, the fact that ‘there is no class relationship’, the trauma of social antagonism.

That is pure bullshit.

The Weekend AFT had a commercial challenger.  In announcing its results, Telstra said:

Core acquisitions address specific capability gaps in our services, expand into strategic adjacencies and extend capacity and presence in specific geographies.

‘Adjacencies’ is going straight into the pool room.  When a bowler went up for a loud appeal for LBW once, the late Richie Benaud quietly said: ‘That looks very adjacent.’

Passing bull 9: Let’s hear it for mere bullies

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Prejudice warps thought.  People who have made up their minds and do not want to change them do not think straight.  They will go around corners to avoid a result that they do not like.

You can see two instances of this kind of warped thinking in the reaction of people like Bolt and Jones to the controversy about Adam Goodes.  They say two things – Goodes asked for it by provoking people (a view endorsed by silly people like Kennett and Latham); and at least some of those in the crowd giving offence were bullies and not racists.  It is not clear whether these arguments are said to be a defence or merely something put in mitigation of the offence.  I rather fear that it is the former.

Let us take the bully first.  Bullies are people who use their superior position to intimidate and hurt those people who are not as strong as they are.  A racist is a person who thinks less of another person because of their race and who as a result is more likely to hurt such people than others.  The racist will usually see themselves as being in a superior position to the person of a different race.  We can then see that using a superior position to hurt others will be common to many acts of bullying and racism.  Put differently, the racist in action is just one type of bully.

Is this not just what we see in the people booing Goodes?  They are using their superior position to intimidate and hurt Goodes, and part of their felt superiority and his perceived inferiority is that they are white and he is black.  Can you imagine a member of the Thought Police asking those booing – are you doing this because you do not like aboriginals, or just because you are a bully?

But even if you could separate some bullies from the racists, where does that get you?  Does the abuse of power become any less vicious or hurtful because the wrongdoer is miraculously oblivious to the difference in race?

Let us then look at provocation.  If there is provocation in some relevant moral sense, it is not generally thought to offer a complete defence, but only some extenuation.  And you may have to be careful how you put the argument and in what company.  If a person charged with rape admitted the offence but said that the victim had asked for it – the argument of the President Zuma of South Africa – or provoked him by getting out in public so scantily attired, the net result might be another couple of years in the slammer.

But when you get down to look at what Goodes has done that is said to have been provocative, you find tension if not conflict between the two arguments.  The mere bully says that race is irrelevant.  Can the person provoked claim this when both acts relied on as provocation – maintaining a complaint of racial discrimination and performing an aboriginal dance – are inextricably bound up with the race of Goodes?  Indeed, at least some of his accusers maintain that it is Goodes who is creating racist division by asserting pride in his own history.  People who discriminate against others and hurt them almost inevitably say that the victim has done something to earn their fate, and that claim in my view only aggravates the original offence.

In my view, each suggested answer is bullshit that only makes the offence and its defenders worse.

There is in truth an air of unreality to this whole discussion, which is a discussion that we should not need to have.  It is only made necessary by the warped judgment of people whose minds are closed, and who refuse to try to look at the position of other people involved.  No one says that the booing of Goodes is good or healthy.  But what its defenders refuse to concede is that real people are being hurt by it.  A blackfella in the Kimberley said this (if it matters, in The Australian):

Hope and opportunity are not words that are used up here very often.  This latest furore has given all those kids who want to be the next Adam Goodes a kick in the guts.  Why would you want to succeed if all you do is cop abuse?  If we are to get ahead, to hope and aspire, our young people must have role models to look up to.  There is no greater role model than Adam Goodes to us blackfellas.  We are proud of his achievements, his drive, his ambition and the recognition he has won in the toughest arena of all – white Australia.  So, the next time you boo a footballer like Adam Goodes, remember you’re booing those young hopeful kids in the backblocks of Australia who only want a chance to showcase the unique skills and talents indigenous footballers bring to our wonderful national game.

And that is before you get to the pain and suffering inflicted on a dual Brownlow medallist and Australian of the Year.

Bigots like Bolt and Jones do not think of this.  It is not just that they will not allow mere humanity to stand in the way of a good conspiracy theory, it is that their livelihood depends on conflict.  People like Kennett and Latham do not want to confront the evidence because they are pig-headed and big-headed, and their people gave them the boot for just that reason.  Even God-fearing doubters like me pray for the day when Bolt and Jones go the same way.

But the Alice in Wonderland – the bullshit – does not stop with silly speculation about the state of mind of the crowd.  We get it with speculation about the state of mind of the victim – or, for Bolt and Jones, the man who is the culprit.

It is apparently said that when Goodes performed his dance, and spear-throwing routine, he was being threatening and warlike.  The blackfellas have a different view of the effect of this ritual and they are insulted by being lectured by whitefellas who do not understand them.  Let us put that to one side.  Let us also put to one side that the three preeminent football codes played in this country are essentially war-like and threatening in their nature: it is of their essence that they are tests of manhood and courage.  Is it suggested that when Goodes performed this dance he was threatening war?  Was one blackfella picking a fight with about thirty thousand whitefellas?  Are we not here in the realm of diagnosable insanity?

Two of the best blackfella footballers in the country play a different code.  Ingles and Thurston are of the ilk of Franklin and Ablett.  Ingles celebrates a try – sometimes for Australia – with a goanna crawl.  Andrew Bolt is relaxed about this.  Why?  ‘That’s not a threatening move’.  Is this what the national debate has come to?  If it is, Bolt should not go to watch Thurston against the Raiders, because J T, as he is known, will perform his own war jig in solidarity with Goodes if he scores a try – and poor Andrew might be scared out of his tidy wits.

In my previous note, I said that the political savoir faire of Adam Goodes may be open to discussion.  If he had asked my advice about the conduct complained of, I may have been cautious.  But who am I to criticise him?  I am a white babyboomer with a public school and university education, topped up now and then at Oxford, Cambridge, or Harvard, a member of an exclusive and privileged profession that involves a monopoly that encourages people to charge like wounded bulls, and who for nearly thirty years has been invested with the full power of the State of Victoria over other Victorians.  I have never been spat on, looked down on, or just abused in public by people who regarded me as racially inferior.  What bloody right might I have to sit in judgment on the conduct of blackfella footballer?  Just where does the arrogance come from for those who claim this right?

That brings me back again to the Prime Minister.  I am very sorry that his response was so late and so anaemic because I had thought that his attitude to the blackfellas was better than that.  His problem is not just that Bolt and Jones are friends and allies – they are soul-mates and political warriors who all thrive on conflict.  It is an old saying but true – if you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.

Marcia Langton was shocked by the ‘the widespread tolerance and support for the most vicious kind of racism that I have seen since the dark days of apartheid.’  As ever, the cover-up is worse than the original offence.  I was not shocked by the attacks on Goodes and the reaction to those attacks, but I was shocked by the viciousness of the attacks on Julia Gillard and the simple refusal of so many people to see that she was being attacked as a woman, just as Goodes is now being attacked a blackfella.  The whitefellas have some awful demons in their Dreamtime that they do not want to confront.  Perhaps we should take lessons from the Germans.  Either way, these failings make you ask just what being an Australian might decently mean.