Poetry

Passing Bull 57 Bullshit about sport and money

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 3 Comments

 

Australians do not like sports administrators.  That is putting it softly.  They were revolted by what the Panama Hat Brigade did to our Dawn and at Kevan Gosper’s spoiling Kathie’s night by presenting her medal.  Now we have to put up with John Coates.  Is there anyone in this wide land who likes or respects this man?  He is a lawyer from Sydney with tenure with the IOC and AOC longer than that of most African dictators and he pulls down north of $700,000 a year so that he can schlep about the planet in the right part of the aircraft and then point the bone at everyone but himself for any perceived failure.  If the Australians have ‘failed’, whatever that means, at the Olympics, who could be more responsible than John Coates?

For reasons given by David Crawford and others in The Australian today, I think that our athletes did incredibly well at Rio.  The problem was that people had created unrealistic expectations that put an unfair burden on our chosen few.  Another problem was that the games should never have been held there.  Another problem was that the Russians should never have been let in, and the athletes were left to repudiate their minders.  This combination of ineptitude and corruption blights and typifies the IOC and taints anyone inside their shadow.

Yet this Sydney lawyer waffles on – before the games have ended – about Australians not getting an adequate return on their capital investment.  Not in my bloody name, Sport.  I don’t pay taxes to swell the egos of professional entertainers or to gratify couch-dwellers with an unabashed nationalism that would make Kipling look like a shy novice.  I don’t sponsor spoiled brats with no brains and less manners to pose as tennis players or any other over-paid service-provider.

Does any sane person think more of the Poms or the Japs now that they are in the business of buying Gold and puffing their chests through the medium of the IOC?  Do the English not see that they have destroyed their national identity in football through that moral and intellectual trainwreck called the English Premier League?  Is that not sufficient warning of the dangerous futility of spending treasure on circuses and colosseums for the masses?  Why don’t we apply our capital for sports facilities for kids at the bottom rather than adults at the top?  Do these people not see an almost universal revolt against what people call inequality and elitism and entrenched hierarchies – all qualities made flesh in John Coates?

After the women’s sevens, the unsurpassable highlight at Rio for me was Chloe Esposito.  (The women may yet save rugby in Australia – God knows that the Wallabies need all the help that they can get.)  Chloe’s was a colossal achievement in areas where European nations are so much stronger.  It was an achievement to match that of Michelle Payne – and Chloe, God bless her, has the same sunny, Australian plainness of outlook and speech.  We can all be mightily proud of Chloe and her family – and it would be so much worse than vulgar even to mention money in the same breath.  I may just add that her brother finished seventh – the place filled by Chloe in London.  This could be the start of a dynasty!

Mr Coates was also quoted as saying that the issue of crime was not addressed in Rio’s submission to stage the games.  I went there in about 1989.  Most parts were no-go and we were advised not to wear watches.  A few years later urchins spewed out of the sewers and overran the beaches.  Criminality in Rio is notorious around the world.

It is time for Mr Coates to move on.   One of those ghastly gaming companies that blight sport on TV would give you long odds against his doing that sans dynamite.

Poet of the Month: Kenneth Slessor

Adventure Bay

Sophie’s my world… my arm must sooner or later

Like Francis Drake turn circumnavigator,

Stem the dark tides, take by the throat strange gales

And toss their spume to stars unknown, as kings

Rain diamonds to the mob… then arch my sails

By waterspouts of lace and bubbling rings

Gulfed in deep satin, conquer those warmer waves

Where none but mermaids ride, and the still caves

Untrod by sailors…aye, and with needle set,

Rounding Cape Turnagain, and take up my way,

And so to the Ivory Coast…and further yet,

Port of all drownéd lovers, Adventure Bay!

Passing bull 56 – Bullshit about manners, taste and identity: Part II

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

 

In his piece about identity politics, Mr Kelly wrote about the reaction to the Four Corners program about the abuse of young aboriginals in detention in the Northern Territory.   Mr Kelly said that the media had been reluctant

….to mention, let alone canvas, the underlying causes – the breakdown of the indigenous social and family order through a range of issues including family dislocation, neglect, violence, parental abuse and drunkenness.

Mr Kelly referred to a commentator who referred to ‘the politically correct ‘selective outrage’ and [who] told the ABC that ‘Blackfellas’ had ‘to take responsibility for their own children,’ and another indigenous commentator who told the newspaper that ‘this was primarily about children who had been failed by their families rather than race’.  Mr Kelly said that ‘then an honest debate had been sanctioned.’

Australia, once famous for its straight talking, seems a frightened country.

Why were the alleged failures of parents of black children relevant to a story about revealed cruelty and mistreatment by government of the products of those failures?  We are again talking at a very general level but how does the suggestion that children have been let down by their parents bear on the actual mistreatment shown in the program?  I don’t get the point.  Are we, God-like, apportioning some kind of universal blame?  I don’t know.

Perhaps the problem comes from the author’s reference to ‘the underlying causes’ – causes of what?  The mistreatment of aboriginals in detention, which was the subject of Four Corners, or the miserable condition of blackfellas at large?  If the latter, how do you avoid going back to 1788?

The cartoonist, Bill Leak, had a cartoon depicting three figures in the outback.  A Northern Territory copper holds a kid by the scruff of the neck before his father.  Both blackfellas are depicted as ugly – some would say Neanderthal – and in bare feet.  Dad holds a can of beer.   The copper says: ‘You’ll have to sit down and talk to your son about personal responsibility.’  Dad replies: ‘Yeah, right, what’s his name then?’

 

What that cartoon means to you will probably vary on where you come from.  It will mean some things to some white people and some other things to some coloured people.  What it suggests to me is that blackfellas are drop-out drunks incapable of being responsible for their children.  On that meaning, the cartoon is plainly racist, since it denigrates a people by reference to their race.  I find it hard to see how you could avoid saying the cartoon is tasteless and, yes, offensive.  How would you like it if someone said that about you?

 

Mr Kelly has a very different and very clear view.  He says that Mr Leak has made clear the purpose of the cartoon.

… If you think things are pretty crook for children in the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre, you should have a look at the homes they came from.  It wasn’t hard to get.  But the fascinating thing about Leak’s piece was the feedback he got that people couldn’t understand his cartoon.

That’s right, they didn’t get it – surely a victory for a politically correct, dumbed down education system and the spread of identity politics culture where such images turn the brain into a non—functioning, non—computing defence mechanism.

Well, if that was Mr Leak’s purpose, he failed to make it clear to me.  And what does it add to the Four Corners story to say that the victims of the government were worse victims of their own upbringing.  How is that allegation relevant?  Well, it might be relevant if you are trying to spread responsibility for the unhappy fate of these people.  ‘Responsibility’ is the dominant word in the cartoon; Mr Leak omits it from his description of his purpose; Mr Kelly says that the cartoon depicts an ‘irresponsible indigenous father who couldn’t recall the name of his son.’

The real problem with the cartoon is that it can have no relevance to the news story unless the shoddy beer-can-bearing black father is said to be typical of blackfellas – and on no view is any such proposition attractive.  And the problem for Mr Kelly is that his inability to see how other people might react differently to the cartoon reveals that he is used to speaking to the true believers who are happy to share the same bubble.

Mr Kelly then offers himself some gratuitous legal advice, saying of s.18C that ‘on racial issues, the test is subjective – whether the individual is offended.’  Mr Kelly wants a reference to ‘community values’.  If it is the law that a person can succeed under this statute simply by saying that ‘I personally am offended – at being described as of Scottish descent when I’m really Irish – even though no reasonable member of the community in my place would be offended’, then I agree with Mr Kelly that the law needs some attention.  But I very much doubt whether that is the law.

 

As it seems to me, at the core of people’s worries about this statute, is the fear that ‘offensive’ is too plastic or personal or variable to be safely made the criterion of a law.  People think that the law should be made of sterner, clearer stuff.  They fear that it will be too hard to draw the line.  People might then be inhibited in what they say – the law may have ‘a chilling effect’.

 

The answer is that exactly these kinds of issues arise a lot of the time in all areas of our law without giving rise to the suggestion that as a result the relevant law should be abolished.  So much of our law is founded on moral questions of degree or issues of current standards or practice.  Was he honest?  Was she careful?  Did he break his word?  Did she intend to be legally bound?  Did he mislead her?  Did she lie to him?  Would what he said make others think less of her?  Did he mean to hurt her when he said that?  Was she offended by that remark?  What did he mean when he said that?  In that meaning, was it true?  Was it fair comment?  Will he get a fair hearing?  Will my renovation annoy my neighbour?  Will it be bad for the amenity of the area?  Was her purpose proper?  Was he acting with a good conscience?  On a bad day, a judge might ask you whether you have come to court with clean hands.  (That is the very wording of the law.)

 

Dealing with the issue of whether conduct is offensive in a legal sense is neither harder nor easier than any of those questions of degree that have either a moral base or that relate to conduct in the community at large – if you like, community values.

 

And of course there will be laws against offensive behaviour – such as a depraved professional man ogling or pawing schoolgirls on a tram; or a jilted suitor standing outside a church shouting that the bride is a slut and that her mum is worse; or a bystander abusing veterans in an Anzac Day march as war criminals; or a drunken blackfella bursting into the best pub in Kununurra and throwing up in front of a busload of Japanese senior citizens.  We have laws to allow police to intervene in such behaviour because in our opinion, it would be uncivilised for any of our citizens to be exposed to the hurt caused by that kind of offensiveness without protection from their government.

 

The other reason for these laws is related to the first – these kinds of offensiveness constitute a breach of the peace in themselves, and they are likely to lead to worse breaches of the peace if people ae left to help themselves.

 

And, yes, these laws could be abused, and they were abused by the police in the past before compliant magistrates, but the answer is to control the abuse, and not to abolish the law.  All this seems obvious.  Do those who want to abolish s 18C – Mr Kelly is not one of them – want to exclude behaviour that offends on the grounds of race – when that kind of offence is likely to be the most wounding and also the most likely to start a fight?

 

And, yes, laws against offensive language or behaviour do have an inhibiting effect – or, if you prefer, a chilling effect – on the way people behave.  Most laws are made for precisely that purpose.

 

Finally, where and when was the Golden Age of Mr Kelly’s ‘old Australian character’ when the nation was ‘famous for its straight talking’?  Assuming that Mr Kelly is not talking of the time of the White Australia Policy, when did we use to talk straight, and when did we stop?

 

If Mr Kelly is talking of times before laws were made against offensive language or behaviour, he will have to go back before the First Fleet to seek his Arcadia.

 

Poet of the month: Kenneth Slessor

Waters – Part I

This Water, like a sky that no one uses,

Air turned to stone, written by stars and birds

No longer, but with clouds of crystal swimming,

I’ll not forget, nor men can lose, though words

Dissolve with music, gradually dimming.

So let them die; whatever the mind loses,

Water remains, cables and bells remain,

Night comes, the sailors burn their riding-lamps,

And strangers, pitching on our graves their camps,

Will break through branches to the surf again.

Passing Bull 55 Bullshit about manners, taste and identity

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

Do you know about identity politics?  Have you never heard the phrase?  Could you give a damn?

If I were to sit down to dinner with Paul Kelly of The Australian, I suspect we could agree on a lot of political issues.  But I don’t think that we could agree on how to write about them.  Most of what Mr Kelly writes sounds to me like waffle – or bullshit.

Here are extracts from a piece on Saturday under the heading Race, gender: the risk of identity politics; Political correctness is stifling debate and dissent.

Identity politics, pursued in the U S and on display within university campuses and at the recent Democratic National Convention, is about laws, norms and etiquette to protect and advance identity causes. 

A powerful movement with deep cultural roots, it testifies to the revolution within leftist and progressive politics since the failure of Soviet communism and the supplementation of class consciousness with identity based on race, sex, gender and ethnicity.  This is fused by historic grievance suffered by such identities and their contemporary demand for redress.

The rise of politics based on the question ‘who am I?’ poses further problems of voter fragmentation for both the Coalition and Labor, though Labor has proved astute in channelling some of this sentiment.

This movement proves the ideological creativity of the Left, the manipulative power of human rights law and the perversion of the idea of justice – seen in this country in section 18 C of the Racial Discrimination Act where individuals can initiate legal action because they are ‘offended’ by others.

The politics of identity speaks to deep human need.  Yet its application veers towards narcissism, censoring of public debate, vicious campaigns of intimidation and a diminished public square.  It is extraordinary to see how many institutions and prominent figures buckle before the campaigns of identity politics, too weak to stand on principle.

The author then refers to the Four Corners program on the shocking abuses of indigenous children in the Northern Territory and says that politicians and the media were reluctant…

….to mention, let alone canvas, the underlying causes – the breakdown of the indigenous social and family order through a range of issues including family dislocation, neglect, violence, parental abuse and drunkenness.

The author then refers to an aboriginal commentator who referred of ‘the politically correct ‘selective outrage’ and [who] told the ABC that ‘Blackfellas’ had ‘to take responsibility for their own children,’ and another indigenous commentator who told the newspaper that ‘this was primarily about children who had been failed by their families rather than race’.  After those disclosures, the author says that ‘then an honest debate had been sanctioned.’

Australia, once famous for its straight talking, seems a frightened country.

The author then referred to the cartoon by Bill Leak ‘depicting an irresponsible indigenous father who could not recall the name of his son.’  The author refers to the outrage this cartoon provoked, including that of one Minister who said that it was racist, and said that the cartoonist had pointed out the purpose of the cartoon:

… If you think things are pretty crook for children in the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre, you should have a look at the homes they came from.  It wasn’t hard to get.  But the fascinating thing about Leak’s piece was the feedback he got that people couldn’t understand his cartoon.

That’s right, they didn’t get it – surely a victory for a politically correct, dumbed down education system and the spread of identity politics culture where such images turn the brain into a non—functioning, non—computing defence mechanism.

Is this Australia’s future?  It is certainly the future the progressives want…

…The essence of identity politics runs as follows: because you haven’t shared my identity, you haven’t shared my own oppression and you cannot understand my pain and if you cannot understand my pain you have no right to tell my group how to behave.  Identity politics, therefore, is hostile to ideas and debate.  Indeed, it mobilises the argument of ‘offence’ as a disincentive to debate and to challenge the right of others to engage in vigorous or provocative public discussion.…  Yet it is driven by powerful idea whose essence is ‘respect my identity and don’t offend me.’

….The parallel mechanism is social media – used to brand institutions and people as racist and sexist as a means of destroying them by mass hysteria.  In this climate the spirit of Orwell and Voltaire face a slow but sure death.  Let’s hope there is still sufficient left of the old Australian character and courage to turn back the tide.

What is going on here?

  • There is hardly one assertion of verifiable fact in this piece.
  • What we get are general comments on the kinds of behaviour of kinds of people. There are two levels of abstraction – the kinds of groups of various people, and the different ways in which membership of such groups are said to affect their behaviour.  In effect, Mr Kelly is applying labels to groups of people and then more labels to their perceived behaviours.  There is no room for you or me as individuals – we only get verbal constructs – that represent phantasms from the fear zone of the author.
  • What are the criteria for the author’s groups? ‘Race, sex, gender, and ethnicity.’  The first and last look to be identical.  The author also mentions class.  For reasons we are not told of, any distinctions between groups of people based on caste, class, creed, wealth, sexuality, health, education or age do not qualify for creating issues of ‘identity politics’.  Why not?  Each of them has been or is poisonous in Australia as setting up barriers between people.  Each label has been invoked to deny the individual dignity of real people and not just that of pictured groups.
  • What is the alleged problem with the behaviour of these groups? People inside the group say that people outside it do not and cannot understand them and are therefore precluded from commenting on them.  This is the broadest generalization of all.  Many French historians get very close to this precipice when discussing ‘their’ revolution’, but any Chinese, Jewish, gay, Muslem, aged or poor person who made such a claim in Australia would be plain bloody silly.  Would they accept the apparent converse – that they might be incapable of understanding or commenting on their estranged critic?  Of course white people have trouble following what is happening with blackfellas in the Northern Territory.  Most white people in Australia don’t have the faintest idea of how blackfellas live – and most of them are desperately keen to keep it that way.  It is the same with refugees.  But is absurd to suggest that as a result, white people are not qualified to discuss either.  If you want to attach a label to that kind of silly suggestion, one would be ‘racist’.
  • Mr Kelly does not claim to be standing in the middle on all this. He has a position, or, if you prefer, an agenda.  He names his opponents – leftists, progressives, the Left, perverted views on human rights and justice, and the politically correct.  The reader is taken to understand what those terms connote.  My understanding of them, which is limited, is that these terms have no intellectual content at all, but are code for the labels applied to those who follow Fairfax or the ABC.  I gather that the label for the conflict as a whole is ‘culture wars.’  I find it hard to imagine anything more sterile or unbecoming.
  • May I say something for the term ‘politically correct’, the Antichrist of Mr Kelly? Most people are conscious of differences between themselves and people of a different race; very few think that their group is inferior; most proceed on the contrary basis; there is therefore the basis for conflict between people of different races.  We tend to describe such conflict as ‘racist’ or ‘racial’.  To take a religious example, it would seem safe to posit that very few Muslems think that their Islam is inferior to the religion of Judaism, Hinduism, Voodoo, or Christianity.  The best that we can hope is that people are brought up well enough to avoid showing their feelings to people of a different race in a way that will offend them.
  • Now, what good manners or courtesy may require are matters of degree in time and space. They are matters on which reasonable people may differ.  The phrase ‘politically correct’ is I think too often a label used to obscure if not smear the role of courtesy in discussing sensitive issues like differences in colour or creed or sexuality.  We might think that some people go too far and get too precious, but that is no reason to discard courtesy altogether.  Courtesy and cutlery are what separate us from the apes.  I can well remember a gentle Catholic man at Blackwood telling me he thought a black footballer had gone too far in complaining of being called a black cunt, and I nearly fell over when I read that a former federal minister (Amanda Vanstone) could not understand why Adam Goodes objected to being called an ape, because we are all descended from them!  (It is I suspect reactions like these, which I regard as absurd, that cause some blackfellas to say that you have to at least have lived like a blackfella before you can understand how wounding white people might be to them.)  But debates at the edge do not warrant the abolition of the centre.
  • Mr Kelly does not need to explain a lot of his terms because he is using language familiar to most of his readers – who are expected to share his assumptions and to adopt his values. We are then talking in club.  At a guess, could that group exceed one in twenty of the adult population?  Put differently, could say ninety-five per cent of adult Australians give a bugger about any of these plays on words?  What do these questions tell us about the relevance of the Australian press to our politics?  Is this a perfect example of the kind of intellectual elitism the wholesale rejection of which has led to the uncomely rise of people like Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, Marine le Pen, and Pauline Hanson?
  • Some of Mr Kelly’s judgment, and it does read a little like a judgment, is not without condescension. We get references to the failure of Soviet communism, the fusion of historic grievances, and the ideological creativity of the Left.  We are told ‘the politics of identity speaks to deep human need.’  Well, survivors of the holocaust, or any other genocide, would agree.  But would they then ‘veer towards narcissism’?  Is this sweep not a bit large?  If, as we are, told the question is ‘who am I?’, may not the enquirer face the question put by Snow White when she looked at their mirror?  And what is wrong with ‘respect my identity and don’t offend me’?  Is that not just to put as a prayer in the first person an injunction normally expressed in the second?  How many people walk about asserting the contrary – ‘just walk all over me and get right up my nose?’
  • And as for the invocation of Orwell and Voltaire, could we have done a bit better with the Enlightenment than Voltaire? What about Kant, who said that each of us has a dignity that derives solely from our humanity?  Or are human rights inexcusably suspect?  As for Orwell, he said this about political language.

Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

And if you are looking for snobbery, we may put to one side ‘the mass hysteria’ of social media – of which I am blessedly ignorant – but it is hard to overlook ‘the politically correct dumbed down education system.’   Dear, dear, dear – a slogan and a cliché, and some of the poor buggers may have been exposed to government schools.

  • That is enough for this post. What we have so far is, I suggest, pompous drivel, or, in the style of Mr Kelly, a rant from the Right.  I will come back later to deal with the cartoon, the references to the alleged failures of parenthood within the indigenous community, the complaints about s 18C, and Mr Kelly’s invocation of a Golden Age.
  • May I just mention a piece in The Saturday Paper that made verifiable allegations of fact about aboriginals in the N T? We are told that the Territory has the population of Geelong but that they at Geelong don’t face the same problems – thirty per cent of the population are indigenous, not literate, speak another language, and suffer from various disadvantages.  It is then alleged that the government spends more on white people in Darwin than on black people in the sticks.  It then offers other critiques of government based on evidence that at least leave me better informed.
  • Finally, surely the big lesson from recent events in the U K and the U S is not that white people do not know enough about coloured people, but that they don’t understand enough about their own white people outside the current version of the Pale. In short, the complaint is the old one – people who live in Mr Kelly’s bubble don’t know how real people live.  They haven’t got the foggiest idea.

Since writing the above, I have watched the Four Corners program.  The brutality is horrifying.  Authorities gassed children held in close detention; two who thought they were being killed, huddled under a sheet and said good bye to each other; this was just one of the reminders of the hell of prisons described in For the Term of His Natural Life.  We have gone backwards since this country started as a barbarous jail.  We committed crimes against humanity against children.  We now stand further indicted of dismissing those crimes with the claptrap pf Mr Kelly and his colleagues about political correctness and identity politics.

 

Poet of the Month: Kenneth Slessor

 

Chessmen

 

Chafing on flags of ebony and pearl,

My paladins are waiting.  Loops of smoke

Stoop slowly from the coffey-cups, and curl

In this fantastic patterns down the room

By cabinets of chinaware, to whirl

With milky-blue tobacco-steam, and fume

Together past our pipes, outside the door.

 

Soon may we lounge in silence, O my friend?

Behind those carven men-at-arms of chess

Dyed coral-red with dragon’s blood, and spend

The night with noiseless warfare.  Queens and rooks

With chiselled ivory warriors must contend

And counter-plots from old Arabian books

Be conjured to the march of knights and pawns.

Passing Bull 53 Bullshit about banks

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

 

People go into business to make profits.  Banks are publicly listed companies in which shareholders subscribe capital and the directors manage the business to maximise the return of profit to those shareholders in the form of dividends.  If they run the business for another purpose, they break the law.

People running a general store in a country town do so to make profits.  But they also provide services that the community needs – bread and milk, newspapers, and postal facilities.  If they drop some of those services because they are not profitable enough, they will lose trust and goodwill.  In a bad case they may be driven out of business.

Any business has to pay some attention to its customers.  The banks certainly have to.  They occupy a privileged and protected position.  They are licenced by government, and de facto guaranteed by government.  A government body also controls the price of the basic commodity of banks – borrowed money.  That is a very unusual intervention into the market in what is said to be a capitalist economy.  It sounds like a kind of ‘dirty float.’

Banks are money lenders.  They borrow money at x% and lend it out at y%.  The difference between x and y is their profit (or loss).  The higher that y is over x, the more profit the bank makes, and the more dividends go to shareholders.

In principle, it would be quite wrong for the bank to prefer the interests of its customers – the borrowers – and take less back from them, because that way they would be putting the interests of bank borrowers ahead of their shareholders.  They bank directors are not allowed to do that.

Yet that is what we hear governments asking them to do by passing on the full fall of the cost of money to the banks to the borrowers rather than doing what they can to maintain profits for shareholders.  The bank directors have to make a business judgment about their standing in the community and its effects on the profitability of their bank, but otherwise government ministers howl for show.  Even our Treasurer might see that.

People don’t like moneylenders, and they have lost faith in Australian banks.  They stop us getting access to real people who know us and what they are doing.  They are offering incentives to their people to cheat and they are paying people more than five times what we pay our brain and heart surgeons.  They ruthlessly exploit silly people who borrow long on credit cards, and they in fact derive a lot of their capital from timid investors who think it is better to deposit their money in a bank rather than profit from investing in it.  Macquarie Bank makes people very ill because it makes big profits from dodgy deals like those that brought on by the GFC – while you and I stand behind it.  As a mate said during the GFC, if Macquarie falls over, it will have been worthwhile.

Yes, banks are ugly and untrustworthy, but they are not there to be ordered around by government.  Leave that to Mr Putin.  We are said to believe in competition.

Poet of the Month: Kenneth Slessor

William Street

The red globes of light, the liquor-green,

The pushing arrows and the running fire

Spilt on the tongues, go deeper than a stream;

You find this ugly, I find it lovely.

Ghosts’ trousers, like the dangle of hung men,

In pawn-shop windows, bumping knee by knee,

But none inside to suffer or condemn;

You find this ugly, I find it lovely.

Smells rich and rasping, smoke and fat and fish

And puffs of paraffin that crimp the nose,

Or grease that blesses onions with a hiss;

You find this ugly, I find it lovely.

The dips and molls, with flip and shiny gaze

(Death at their elbows, hunger at their heels)

Ranging the pavements of their pasturage;

You find this ugly, I find it lovely.

Passing bull 52 – Problems with labels

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

 

One of Andy Warhol’s more confronting works was a painting of a can of Campbell’s soup.  Was that art?  Well, it depends on the criteria you apply to fix that label.  And that reminds us of the remark of George Bush Senior that labels are what you stick on cans of soup.

Here in Cambridge for a Summer School on revolutions, you see historical labels used in the conventional way that they are applied by historians.  But we must remember that there was in fact no such thing as ‘the French Revolution’ or ‘the English Revolution’.  Those terms are merely labels that we apply to series of events – and there is great disagreement about which events satisfy that label for the French case, and where it, the revolution, started and finished – let alone how and why.

The purist might therefore be unsettled to read that he is doing a week’s course on ‘John Milton and the English Revolution’ when the same tutor is giving a lecture on the Friday on ‘Was there a revolution in 17th century England.’  Well, most historians would say that there were at least two series of events that would warrant that label, but what if the lecturer answers no?  Have we been walking on quicksand all week?

Similarly, one essay topic is ‘Did the Terror save or betray the Revolution?’  ‘Terror’ is another label for a series of events, and current events show just how slippery it is.  How does one label ‘save or betray’ anything, let alone another label?

Playing with abstractions is an occupational hazard at any university – or indeed in any profession.

Poet of the month: Keats

Ode on a Grecian Urn (41-50)

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede

Of marble men and maidens overwrought,

With forest branches and the trodden weed;

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity: Cold pastoral!

 

When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst,

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Passing  bull 52 – Asking the wrong question

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 3 Comments

 

A simple way to go off the rails and descend into bullshit is to ask the wrong question.  As it happens, the law applied this technique to allow courts to interfere with administrative decisions of government.  Judges can’t override government just because they disagree with the decision, but they can set aside a decision if the government department did not have the power to make such a decision – and if the judges thought that the department had asked the wrong question, then they might find that it had acted beyond its powers in reaching its answer to that question.  On that ground, the court could set aside the original decision.

The FBI has just decided that there was insufficient evidence to charge Hillary Clinton over her emails.  They plainly had power to make that decision.  They then added that she had been careless.  Where did they get the power – some might say ‘right ‘ – to ask a question that could lead them to decide to make and publish that judgment?

There is a clear trend away from the traditional two party system in Australia and the UK, and to a lesser extent the U S.  That being so, you might very well be asking yourself the wrong questions if you analyse current election results in two party terms.  Yet that is what most commentators have been doing after the federal election just concluded.  So many seats turned on the role of small parties and independents, and one major party is rejoicing even though it barely secured a little more than a third of the overall vote.

So far as I know, Laura Tingle of the AFR, who is in my view our best commentator, is the only one to have said so.

What happened in Eden-Monaro on Saturday night is once again a talisman for this election campaign, but not in the traditional sense.

For, like almost every other seat that has definitively changed hands so far in this election, the real story was not about a swing from one major party to the other but a complex story of shifting minor party votes and preferences.

Understanding what has happened in these seats – and we obviously won’t have a complete picture until the count is complete – is important to understand the lessons of the election.

But it also makes much of the commentary about the strengths and weaknesses of both major parties’ campaigns in recent days fairly farcical…….

What the primary votes suggest is that what was noted throughout the campaign – that neither side of politics had really been able to engage a lot of swinging voters – proved true on polling day; that a myriad of other, often very local factors, had as much of a role in determining the outcome as any national message, and that disillusioned voters turned very deliberately to minor parties instead.

Winning and losing candidates from both major parties report seeing an unprecedented level of local issues affecting votes from booth to booth, whether it be council amalgamations, mobile phone towers and in some smaller centres the ‘Mediscare’…….

Both sides – and both winners and losers – talk of all the voters who quite knowingly voted for minor parties in a vacuum of trust of either leader, and a vacuum which also extended to the Greens…….

In this environment, the election outcome became more of a lottery than normal as the differing preferences of minor parties played out, often against each other.

…….. much of the post-election discussion continues to be conducted as if it were a two horse race.

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 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.