Politics

Passing Bull 120 – An abundance of dogma

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

A dogma is an opinion that is stated with authority and that is held as binding by those who adhere to that authority.  Dogma is big in ‘think tanks’, the current repositories of secular faith.  But also among our scattered fuellers of civil discord.  The Oxford English Dictionary has for dogmatic: ‘Asserting dogmas or opinions in an authoritative or arrogant manner.’  If someone says that you are being dogmatic, they are not paying you a compliment.  Rather, they are suggesting that you are too heavy handed in the way you hand out your views and seek to impose them on others. 

The quote above is from a book I wrote with Chris Wallace-Crabbe called Language, Meaning and Truth.  Dogma may be necessary for faith or football, but it seldom helps thought.  There’s a fair bit of it about at the moment.

The ‘fuellers of civil discord’ are hard at work – on all sides as Mr Trump might say – in the debate, if that’s the word, on marriage equality.  The church relies on dogma, without querying its moral right to inflict its articles of faith on others.  The no-sayers on Sky stand by their trademarks of leering, sneering, and jeering, while handing out coat-hangers.  Mr Bolt says his side is being bullied by the Left.  This is all very sad, because it debases sound secular dogma – that we are all equal under the law.

There is a debate, too, about the spate of hurricanes in the U S.  They appear, to put it softly, to be influenced by an increase in sea temperatures.  But that won’t wash with Mr Trump or his supporters.  This is not so much dogmatism as intellectual blindness induced by tribalism.  If the supporters of Mr Trump share his world view, truth simply doesn’t matter.  Others can prove what they like; they just solemnly keep the faith.  To that extent, the marriage equality and climate change debates have something in common.

There has been a curious failure of dogmatism in Texas, the throne room of capitalism.  People there are compelled by law to insure against flooding through a government body.  That sounds like the ‘socialism’ involved in Medicare, the Antichrist of Ted Cruz and other Republican senators.

But some Republican Senators have stayed true to their dogma.  Some actually voted against government relief to victims of the weather.  There has always been a curious reluctance to legislate for the welfare of the citizens of the United States.  Section 8 of the U S constitution may therefore come as a surprise to many Europeans and Australians.  It provides:  ‘The Congress shall have Power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises to pay the Debts and to provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.’  The anti-Welfare dogmatism of Republican welfare-deniers strikes not just at sense but decency.

Finally, we have our Prime Minister invoking Stalin because someone complains of an untrue statement about the inscription on a statue, and his government denouncing the Opposition for ‘socialism’, whatever that means.  They are issuing their denunciation while they endeavour to regulate every aspect of the power, energy, and banking sectors.  And they are engaged in seeking to regulate markets and the way trading companies run their businesses because they are incapable of devising much less implementing a political program for our welfare at least on energy and the environment.  Most electors know that the failures of government on energy are driven by dogma on coal and renewable energy.  Sane people are mystified that otherwise intelligent people can get dogmatic about coal or issues of fact that can be tested by accepted empirical means.  What has faith got to do with coal?

Poet of the month: Emily Dickinson

“Houses”—so the Wise Men tell me—

“Mansions”! Mansions must be warm!

Mansions cannot let the tears in,

Mansions must exclude the storm!

“Many Mansions,” by “his Father,”

I don’t know him; snugly built!

Could the Children find the way there—

Some, would even trudge tonight!

Passing Bull 119 – Two pieces in the AFR compared

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

In last Friday’s AFR Laura Tingle, in my view the preeminent political journalist in the country, and John Roskam had pieces on facing pages that had as much in common as clotted cream and Chateau Yquem.  They give insight into the failure of our politicians.

Laura Tingle reports on items in the news and then offers this inference to be drawn from those facts.

Yet increasingly, what is occupying federal politics is the need for the government to step in and correct market failures, or even just the impact of sheer market greed. In other words, the business community has brought any such ‘reregulation’ on its own head.

Apparently unsatisfied with enjoying one of the longest runs of the highest profit shares of GDP in the post-war period, the government’s sense of obligation to act in the financial and energy markets reflects efforts to stop profit gouging in oligopolistic markets that are a testament to the limits of, or policy failures, of deregulation.

If you compare the performance of ASX sectors against similar international indices, it is instructive that the utilities, finance and energy sectors in Australia – all oligopolistic in nature – wildly outperform global figures.

Equally, if you look at indices covering information technology, consumer staples and discretionary spending, and the industrial sector, the performances reflect an underwhelmingly poor comparison, which raises questions about the calibre of our business leaders…..

My colleague Phil Coorey reported earlier this week that the banking industry had noted that the weight of regulation and taxes imposed on banks over the past 18 months was costing shareholders of the big four almost one-quarter of their returns…..

But most of the other imposts complained of by our banking insiders are responses to actual or looming market failures by the banks themselves. And that’s what governments ultimately should be there to correct or address…..

Lose the moral high ground and you soon start to lose all the arguments – something the business community is increasingly finding to its cost.

This is an engaging analysis of what is going wrong for our political and business leaders.  We need this because people have lost faith in all of them and the old labels and dogma are useless.

By contrast, John Roskam begins with a sententious trombone blast of his tribal allegiance.

The refusal to celebrate Australia Day by a handful out of the more than 500 local councils nationwide represents more than just another example of political correctness run amok.

Once you see that weasel term ‘political correctness’, you know that it’s just a matter of time before you will see ‘political’ or ‘media elites’ (or ‘class’) and ‘populism’.  And sure enough, out they pop.  Those labels are worse than useless.  They are bolt-holes for the intellectually lazy.  Mr Roskam may be aware of this because he refers to some brand new labels invented by a former director of an English ‘centre-left think tank’ – ‘Anywheres and Everywheres’.

Most Anywheres are comfortable with immigration, European integration and the spread of human rights legislation, all of which tend to dilute the claims of national citizenship.

Anywheres are likely to be highly educated with professional jobs who have a commitment to notions of mobility and novelty and who place less emphasis on ‘identity, tradition and national social contracts [faith, flag and family]’.

Somewheres are more rooted and usually have ‘ascribed’ identities – Scottish farmer, working-class Geordie, Cornish housewife – based on group belonging and particular places, which is why they often find rapid change more unsettling.

A ‘populist’ backlash against ‘elites’ was inevitable. In a democracy it is unsustainable for the interests of the Somewheres to be ignored as they’ve been. Goodhart has a nice summation of populism: ‘If there is a single idea that unites almost all variants it is that the interests of the virtuous, decent people and corrupt, liberal elites are fundamentally opposed.’

What is the point of any of all this abstraction and labelling?  As if to acknowledge the problem, Mr Roskam quotes his source as saying that three bodies have a common emotionless analytical style – ‘corporations, think tanks, consulting firms’.  What nonsense.

Well, Messrs. Roskam and Goodhart remind us with their nice summation of what a weasel word ‘populism’ is.  We might wonder at the differences between ‘decent people’ and ‘liberal elites’, whoever might wash up under those brollies, but it is hardly surprising if there is some opposition between the ‘virtuous’ and the ‘corrupt’- presumably, the good guys and the bad guys, the white hats and the black hats.  And the whole house of cards wobbles over a myth.  This is soul-stirring bullshit.

(It is interesting to learn that some people still use the word ‘virtuous’, although we may be forgiven for doubting if many followers of Hanson, Farage or Trump are addicted to it.  Robespierre, the ultimate terrorist, was very fond of the word ‘virtue’, and that was part of the reason that he lost his head.)

As best as I can follow Mr Roskam’s drift, it is that because the natives are restless, we should lower our sights and our standards.  That seems to me to be the very problem that afflicts both our political and business worlds, so I’m unsure if that is what Mr Roskam had in mind.

Poet of the month: Emily Dickinson

‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers—

That perches in the soul—

And sings the tune without the words—

And never stops—at all—

And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—

And sore must be the storm—

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm—

I’ve heard it in the chillest land—

And on the strangest Sea—

Yet, never, in Extremity,

It asked a crumb—of Me.

Here and there – Two Nationalists Compared

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

 

But of course there are vast differences between Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump.  Hitler came to power with brownshirts and only the semblance of legality.  He trashed the constitution and put his secret police in black shirts.  He set out to rule the world and to murder a race.  He betrayed his nation and left it a smoking rubble.  Trump will do no such things.  But the two men still have a lot in common.

Both call themselves ‘nationalists’.  This celebration of the home team leads to a perverted kind of ‘patriotism’ and to nativism – a preference for home grown people over imports.  This is a curious result in a migrant nation.  It leads to conflict and division at home and a loss of respect abroad.

Few educated people in the West call themselves ‘nationalists’.  Those who have failed in life grab their nationalism with both hands.  If they have nothing else, they have their birth certificate.  They must resist their prize asset being soiled by others – like Muslims, or migrants, or refugees.  The losers among us also need to have someone to look down upon.

They want war with those they call the ‘elite’.  That weasel term here means those who have won life’s glittering prizes of wealth and power.  Since it’s the losers against the winners, we should not be surprised if the results aren’t pretty.  There is not much point in talking about ‘populism’.  That’s just a loose label for what follows.

Both leaders came to power on the back of the failure of the international economic order.  For Hitler, it was the Crash of 1929 and the Depression.  For Trump it was the Great Financial Crisis.  Both events undermined confidence in the status quo and created a giant reservoir of hurt below and vulnerability above.

Both leaders appealed to their people who had been most hurt by these world events.  Creating a sense of massive injustice was simple.  The world system hadn’t just failed – it was rotten and evil.

And with this sense of injustice came self-righteousness.  The mob looked like the sans–culottes in Paris in 1793.  They had lost out because of the crimes of others, and they were in no mood to leave vengeance to God.

Both leaders promised their followers that they would utterly cast out the old order.  They would cleanse the stables and restore the nation to the glory of a largely imaginary past.

Their thinking on how they might do this is equally obscure.  Mein Kampf says that Hitler stood for nationalism, hate, and the destruction of the Jews.  There is little else left in these ravings.  Trump doesn’t stand for anything at all.  His self-love is so consuming that there’s no room for any logical policy.

Trump will do or say anything to get power.  That’s all that matters.  A ‘policy’ could only stand in his way.  He and his followers are destroyers not builders.  It’s not what they’re for that matters, it’s what they’re against. 

Both leaders don’t just disregard truth – they look with contempt on those who respect it.  Their followers happily join them in their own world.  The assembly looks like a religious cult with its own language, rites and values, all taken on faith alone.

Trump is not out to trash the Constitution, but he shamelessly shows his ignorance of the rule of law – and his disdain of it.  He routinely scorns the judiciary and Congress.  He has now pardoned a government officer found guilty of contempt for abusing the constitutional rights of others.  This crook routinely sneered at racially different people.  He looks like a true fascist.  Trump likes him, and rewards him.  The world looks on at the old spectre of that frontier love of violence and lawlessness.

Trump stands for all that others fear in America, but he puts more value on throwing a scrap of meat to his crowd than on his sworn task of maintaining the constitution.  In this he resembles Nero and the circus, or Pontius Pilate and Barabbas.  Of one thing we may be sure – neither God nor the oath means anything to Trump.  His ego leaves no room for either.

Trump, too, seeks to rule in part by force and fear. He showed his powers of intimidation in a shameful episode – the self-abasement of his ministers at that first North Korean styled cabinet meeting.  People outside the U S again looked on in horror.  This happened in a nation that had given the world Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt.

Both leaders can turn viciously on people they think have let them down, including bunnies who have been loyal to them.  But Hitler maintained his key supporters for twelve years.  Trump has discarded most of his in eight months.  The one thing you mustn’t do with Trump is to hug the spotlight.

Both leaders brought their own scapegoats.  Hitler had the Jews and the banks.  Trump has Muslims, migrants, international trade, and that hold-all of the politically inane – ‘political correctness’.  Neither leader ever said ‘sorry’ in his life, and because neither can do any wrong, each finds scapegoats to cover for his mistakes.

They both know about propaganda.  The American Constitution and press make the Goebbels model unavailable in the U S.  Trump simply brands any statement he doesn’t like as ‘fake news’.  That’s enough for the faithful.  Why interrupt the dream?  And Trump has something Goebbels didn’t – the fantastic reach of Twitter.

Both leaders had trouble with ratbags at the bottom of their base.  Hitler murdered a lot of his in the Night of the Long Knives.  Trump does not have that option.  Hitler was in a murderous class of his own on race, but America has entered a new dark age on the world stage when Trump reneged on his denial of his dregs.

Americans now have to live with the nightmare that they have elected a president who cannot unequivocally repudiate his Nazi and KKK supporters.  Trump sees ‘very fine people’ among them.  They in turn are jubilant and very grateful to their president.  Has America ever stood so low in the world – even during the agony of Nixon and Watergate?

Both leaders seek a kind of religious aura.  They demand that their followers give them faith.  This notion of faith is vital.  The followers must have faith to withstand all opposition.  It also helps them reject any evidence against the leader.  Visceral politics lives on faith.  It’s something that you pledge in your guts.  It is by definition irrational.  People like Hitler or Trump can’t bear rational analysis.

Both leaders also put great value on personal loyalty.  That is what cost the Wehrmacht so dearly with Hitler.  The generals had sold their soul, and given up their selves.

Both leaders are at their happiest when they are ranting to their adoring ‘base’.  Whether either believes any part of their rant is a matter for conjecture or God.  Some independent observers saw glimpses of Germany in 1933 in Trump at Phoenix.  Trump there looked like he may have studied the Führer.  You get someone to work the crowd and then come on – and stand silent.  Hitler would let the tension build, like a guileful lover.  But he was much better at modulating his pace than Trump.

Hitler was a lot more astute than Trump.  Trump just can’t help himself when the spots go on him.  He soaks up the applause while clapping himself, like a spoiled child being commended over nothing.  If only it could last forever, and if only he didn’t have to face Congress, judges, and journalists – or the facts.  At least Hitler knew what the word ‘leader’ entails; Trump has no idea.

Both Hitler and Trump did all they could to warn the whole world of their unfitness for office, but their bond with the faithful is unbreakable.  It derives from an unsettling communion between people who are desperate in different ways.  The leaders are desperate for power, and they will say and do anything to get it.  The faithful are desperate for vengeance, and they will give up almost anything to get a leader who can deliver it.  What you then get is a kind of Faustian pact, where people on both sides burn their bridges.

The upshot is that the followers cannot believe that their chosen champion could betray them.  Their leader can do no wrong.  They have surrendered the right to say otherwise.  The Germans believed this to the end, even when it should have been obvious that Hitler was betraying them.

With his health care and tax policies, Trump has signalled that he will betray his followers.  He will strip them of benefits to give tax cuts to his promoters.  But the mob doesn’t see this.  They don’t want to see it.  They have to believe that their ‘redeemer liveth’.

What, then, do we have?  President Obama is a man of intellect and integrity.  Trump has neither.  Obama gave the nation health care and sought to extricate it from Afghanistan.  Trump promised to repeal health care and to get out of Afghanistan.  He has broken both promises.  He has now committed his country to an indefinite participation in a war it cannot win – in a world that no longer respects America.  Was ever a nation’s fall from grace so swift and so complete?

There is one more difference between Hitler and Trump.  Hitler fought for Germany through the worst war the world has seen.  He was rejected for command, but there was no doubting his courage under fire.  He was awarded the Iron Cross, First Class.

There was never any risk of Trump taking up arms for his country.  That was as likely as his paying his fair share of taxes.  The suggestion that Donald George Trump may be a true American patriot is just another hideous untruth in a life made up of moonshine.  The permanently spoiled brat called Donald Trump is a disaster for America and the world.

Passing bull 118 – Bull about the Commonwealth Bank

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

The following letter was published in the AFR.

Dear Editor

We discuss CBA in a legal vacuum.  The law says the business of a company is to be managed by or under the direction of its directors.  We talk as if the CEO is responsible for managing the business.  That’s wrong.  The board might delegate some powers – it cannot devolve its responsibility.

If the directors are truly responsible for failures of management of CBA, they should resign.  But our business community lost that moral fibre two generations ago.  And because our discussion is premised on a legal fallacy, the board is allowed to pass the buck to the CEO.  That’s as satisfying morally or intellectually as a footy club firing its coach because of the weakness of the team.

But still, no one goes.  Executives lose bonuses – north of a million each.  But given executive pay levels, this will hurt executives less than a speeding fine would hurt me.  And a fine that is ten times the pay of high school teachers will be defended by those who say there is no problem of inequality of income.

So, we have a shot-duck government that no one believes, and a business community that is spineless at the top, corrupt in the middle, and bitterly deprived and discontented at the bottom.  That’s just the cocktail that gave us Farage, Hanson, and Trump.

It also makes the case for a full inquiry into our banks unanswerable – if only to educate company directors.

Yours truly,

Geoffrey Gibson

The following piece was published, with some amendments, in The Guardian.

Koalas at the tills

If I drive above the speed limit, I may be fined.  I may lose my licence, and therefore my job.  If I kill someone while speeding, I’m liable to go to jail.  In weasel terms, I’m ‘accountable’ or ‘responsible’ for my driving.  The CBA mess raises this question: are its directors legally responsible for that mess?

We talk in a legal vacuum.  The law says that a company’s business is to be managed by or under the direction of its directors – but we talk as if the CEO is responsible instead.  That’s wrong.  Directors can delegate powers – they cannot devolve responsibility.  The CEO is responsible to the board; the board is responsible to shareholders. But armed with a legal fallacy, the directors try to duck for cover.

The banks say their problems are ‘cultural’ and the law can’t fix cultures.  What nonsense!  What if there is a ‘culture’ of greed driven by remuneration schemes put there by the board?  What if a macho culture drives men to intimidate women?  Is the law then powerless?

No, the directors of CBA are responsible for all this mess – and here it’s strike three.  Two generations ago, directors would have been pushed to resign.  But that was when bank managers mowed their nature-strips with Qualcasts on Sunday arvos.  Now we do not respect the City, and it’s left to the regulator to tap the directors’ sense of decency.  Their licences may not be presently at risk, but might not a court rule on their legal responsibility?

The directors relied on management.  In court, they would have to show they made independent assessments of the executives’ advice.  This law is hard.  How many of the CBA directors knew enough about banking to assess independently what their whizz kids were saying?  Did the directors reasonably believe that their powers were always being properly exercised?

Here is the Volkswagen dilemma.  Either the directors knew what was going on or they didn’t.  The malefactors were either working under the directors’ direction or they weren’t.  Which is worse?  If the government was telling CBA that something was wrong, can the directors now say that they thought everything was OK?  Weren’t they at least put on inquiry?  Win, lose, or draw, should we not spend some taxes putting these directors in the witness box so that they can explain to us Australians just what they do for their money?  And as for winning – well, it’s curious, but the banks don’t often win in court.

If you watch The Big Short at the cinema, you will hear groans of resignation at the end – nothing happened to the crooks.  Big corporates never get to face our criminal justice system.  Two teams of ineffably urbane lawyers stitch together an evasive dissemblance of regret – apologies are so demeaning; the corporate pays an agreed sum to government, which would otherwise be called a bribe; the shareholders take the hit; and the executives collect their bonuses and move on to the next fatted calf.

We learned long ago that power corrupts.  We are now learning that wealth – itself a form of power – is even more corrupting.  Have those at CBA been allowed to get away with all their wrongs because so much money slushes around that no one will mind the odd little leak?  Is it possible to imagine a more corrupting sentiment in a bank?

So far as we know, no one has yet gone from CBA.  Some executives have lost bonuses north of a million dollars.  That’s more than ten times what we pay high school teachers.  That will have hurt them less than a speeding fine hurts me – and their ticket hasn’t been at risk.

Very few directors went to jail over the GFC.  We protect them like we protect koala bears.  Company directors’ status appears to put them outside the law.  This apparent privilege deeply upsets the punters.  Our criminal justice system really works over those at the bottom – but we don’t lay a finger on those on high.  Are these koalas, then, untouchable?  More invulnerable even than cardinals?

This class difference is very cancerous.  We should all have the same legal rights.  But, then, this company pays its CEO more than 100 times what it pays its tellers.  Do you see why inequality – in both money and status – is such a loaded word now?

So, we have a PM reduced to a grinning buffoon; a government that gets everything wrong by either instinct or tradition, and that just ignores us; and a business world that is indolent and protected at the top, greedy and corrupted in the middle, and deprived and angry down below.  Those are precisely the forces that generate a sense of caste and that gave us Farage, Hanson, and Trump.

They also make the case for a full inquiry into our banks unanswerable.

Warren Buffett manages differently.  A scandal at American Express left subsidiaries owing $60 million.  Should the parent voluntarily honour those debts?   Buffett said their business depended on trust.  We hear that truism a lot now, but Buffett paid the debts to set ‘standards of financial integrity and responsibility which are far beyond those of the normal commercial enterprise.’  For Buffett, it was not enough just to comply with the law; the CBA can’t even manage that.

And what happened to the good old bank set up to guard our common wealth?

Poet of the month: Walt Whitman

A Child Said, What Is The Grass?

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;

How could I answer the child?. . . .I do not know what it is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,

A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,

Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child. . . .the produced babe of the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,

And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,

Growing among black folks as among white, Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,

It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men, It may be if I had known them I would have loved them;

It may be you are from old people and from women, and from offspring taken soon out of their mother’s laps, And here you are the mother’s laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,

Darker than the colorless beards of old men,

Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues!

And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,

And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?

What do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere;

The smallest sprouts show there is really no death,

And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,

And ceased the moment life appeared.

All goes onward and outward. . . .and nothing collapses,

And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

Here and there – Entertaining migrants

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

Some of us are old enough to remember just how cold and drab this dump was until we were blessed with waves of European and then Asian and African migrants that helped to break the choker hold of Saxons and Celts.  Arthur Boyd, A Life, by Darleen Bungey deals with some of the first wave.  The names are familiar to the art community, but their vibrant contributions to our national life deserve wider notice.

Yosl Bergner was a Jewish refugee from Warsaw.  His father had implored Polish Jews to quit Europe.  He had come to Australia looking for land for a Jewish settlement.  For that purpose, he explored the Kimberley with a young blackfella and a white truck driver.  It wasn’t the heat, or the wet, or the remoteness that put him off – the author tells us that he couldn’t imagine the new Zion with so many flies.  When Yosl got here, just in time, he did so with firsthand knowledge of the great art of Europe.  He quickly befriended Arthur Boyd and declared that most of Arthur’s work was rubbish.  This was new for Arthur.  He thought that Yosl, who scavenged the discarded vegetables at Victoria Market, was ‘a very forward bloke.’  Yosl described himself as ‘a Jew with a complex’ who saw anti-Semitism all around him.  He traded in his bike for three tubes of paint, but unlike the native artists, he didn’t like the bush.  Arthur looked at Yosl – who would surely have been at home in Catch 22 – as his first contact with Bohemia.  (He was I think yet to meet the Reeds and their set.)  It may have gone both ways.  I didn’t know this, but some hookers in Melbourne then used cigarette shops as fronts.  Yosl stepped into one – but he didn’t like what he saw.  So he asked for a packet of cigarettes!  That’s when Yosl learned the local terms of trade.  ‘First pay, then fuck, then buy cigarettes.’  To his enduring credit, Yosl complied.  He believed that ‘prostitutes have their professional pride and self-respect and you don’t have to hurt their feelings.’  What a noble expression of tolerance!   Could this perhaps be a true Australian value?

Stanislav Halpern was known as Stacha.  The author says this:

Halpern’s pottery describes Halpern: earthy, solid, with an alluring overlay of vivid decoration, applied with great eagerness and speed.  He was a Jewish-Polish refugee who spoke broken English through the side of a twisted mouth that usually sprouted a cigarette.  He was a blower of kisses, an embracer of life.  Stacha Halpern and Arthur became great friends.  They shared characteristics, such as shortness of body and strength of arms, and both worked with robust physicality.  Neither cared a jot about convention.  Both wore their hair long and both were amused at the abuse thrown one night from a passing car: ‘Get off the road, you poofters!’

There’s something inalienably homely about that story.

Danila Vassilieff hit town like a typhoon.  He was a Cossack peasant who had fought on the Eastern Front in the Great War and had become a Colonel in the October Revolution.  He was captured by the Bolsheviks, but he escaped to live with nomadic Tartars in Azerbaijan and Persia.  He travelled through India, Burma, Manchuria, and Shanghai.  This man of the world had an overpowering personality.  He was a ‘history-laden’ figure.  He helped build a railway line at Katherine, and he took up banana and sugar-cane growing before painting.  The Medici at Heidi (the Reeds) took him in for his ‘curious splendour’ and his expression of the ‘pathos and loneliness, the violence and tragedy’ of the human condition.  Nolan thought it was the man rather than his art that carried the whack.

Karel Zoubek was a gifted Czech musician.  He had been a soloist at both German and Italian embassies.  He was detained in Tehran and transported to Iraq.  From there he was deported to Australia.  There he was interned.  He got out in 1945.  His wife left him ‘after he beat her with hands he had declared too sensitive for manual labour.’  He was fined two pounds, but served seven days instead.  He entertained the inmates with violin solos.  He was a small man who had one other flaw.  He was a pathological pants man.  He just couldn’t help himself.  He propositioned every woman in the Boyd family.  He said ‘I am eunuch.’  This puzzled the ladies – until they realised he was saying ‘I am unique.’  Boyd’s wife answered the proposition with a flying tomato, but Boyd’s mum, Doris, fell for him.  This was too much even for the peace-loving Arthur.  He convinced the family that they should get Zoubek committed.  They got him before a shrink.  The meeting, the author tells us, went well – too well.  Zoubek sounded OK.  But just as the interview was ending, Zoubek lent across the table and gave the shrink the benefit of his mind: ‘The trouble with you is you fuck too much.’  Well, that bloody did it!  As he was bundled into a cab, Zoubek realised what the game was.  ‘Some party.  I’m surprised at you.’  The men in white coats were in the car behind.  Zoubek was sandwiched between Arthur and another in the back seat.  John Perceval was in the front in the death seat.  This was Arthur showing his cold side – but, in the name of heaven, this dude looked like he was having it off with Mum!  Later, Arthur painted Zoubek with mad fierce eyes – ‘he’d hypnotise you with his absolute madness.’  Some may have felt something like that while looking at the paintings Boyd and Nolan were painting around then.

Well, that’s how the land of the long week-end and six o’clock closing under an English monarch got some exposure to Europe.  This was about a generation before Victoria banned Playboy and some idiot proposed an entertainment tax on contraceptives.  God only knows what the matrons of Balwyn or Brighton may have made of these four migrants.  But the more important question is: would our government let any of them in now?  As best as I can see, they all arrived by boat, and their English may have been as doubtful as their manners – or their religion.

Passing Bull 117 – The ungenerous generalities of the IPA

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Followers of the IPA are different to most Australians.  The IPA team revels in generalities, abstractions, dogma, and philosophy.  Most Australians are too sensible to take any notice of that sort of ideological stuff.  Our disinclination is, frankly, one of our pluses.  It was therefore a little surprising to see Mr Roskam of the IPA publish the piece below in the AFR this morning.  Mr Roskam there acknowledges why most Australians cannot be bothered with this sort of generalised political philosophy, but he then goes on to make the observations in the three other passages that I have underlined.  In doing so, he resets his own very high bar for bullshit.

After this country’s politicians eventually work out who is and isn’t entitled to sit in Parliament, hopefully they’ll turn their attention back to more important things – like the plebiscite on same sex marriage.

Despite the seemingly endless discussion about the issue and the cry from advocates for change for politicians to “just do it because it’s popular”, there’s been remarkably little public debate about the consequences if a majority of people vote “Yes” to change the legal definition of marriage.

Partly this is because both supporters and opponents of same-sex marriage are for the moment arguing about the technicalities of what marriage is, and partly it’s because Australians take a narrow and utilitarian view of human rights and are reluctant to engage in philosophical arguments – unlike in the United States.

The debates around the free press and the Gillard government’s attempt in 2013 to regulate the media, and now the ongoing controversy about the appropriateness of legislation which makes it unlawful to offend someone on the basis of their race reveal that in Australia when it comes to fundamental issues of principle, there’s a tendency to pick a partisan side first and invent a rationalisation for it second.

In the wake of a “Yes” vote, how we talk about same-sex marriage and how we’re allowed by the government to talk about it, is part of a much larger conversation about how Australians talk about questions of sexuality, gender, race, and politics. Gradually the bounds of what by law we can and can’t say about these things are being limited, and at this stage there’s certainly the potential for the legalisation of same-sex marriage to reduce our freedoms rather than extend them.

The question to be asked in the plebiscite: “Should the law be changed to allow same-sex couples to marry?” is at best disingenuous – and at worst dishonest. The answer that many reasonable people would give is – “it depends”.  It’s completely consistent for someone to believe that two people who love each other should be able to get married, while at the same time also believing that those who publicly state that marriage can only ever be between a man and a woman should not be guilty of breaking the law for expressing such an opinion.

If the plebiscite passes, whether it will in fact be unlawful for say a Christian or Muslim school to teach the “traditional” view of marriage is unknown – as yet no politician has wanted to answer. The question is not hypothetical.  Last year the Catholic Archbishop of Hobart was alleged to have breached Tasmania’s anti-discrimination laws for distributing a brochure saying marriage was between a man and a woman.

It’s surprising the “conservatives” in the Coalition who were so eager to have a popular vote on same-sex marriage did not demand that the public should vote on the actual legislation implementing same-sex marriage. The result of a “Yes/No” plebiscite on same-sex marriage is as meaningless as that from Labor’s own proposed plebiscite on Australia becoming a republic.

Same-sex marriage is often presented as a matter of personal freedom. But freedom cuts both ways. At the moment anyone is free – without threat of legal sanction – to describe traditional marriage as a product of the capitalist patriarchy that enslaves women. In fact that’s exactly how marriage is labelled in more than a few critical theory classes at universities across the country. The advocates of a “Yes” vote in the plebiscite would increase their chances of success if they reassured the public that should the law be changed, same-sex marriage could be talked about in exactly the same way as is traditional marriage.

Marriage is more than a legal construct, it’s a cultural and social institution and it’s entirely appropriate the community should have a say on its future.  But it should be a real consultation about the specifics.  It’s incumbent on those who want change – whether to the definition of marriage, or our head of state, or anything else so significant – to explain how the change will work in practice.

One of the lessons of history is that the habit of authoritarians is to talk in generalities.

Is Mr Roskam really afraid that when this nation does recognise same sex marriages, which is just a matter of time, the law that grants that recognition may not avoid the possible consequence that ‘those who publicly state that marriage can only ever be between a man and a woman should not be guilty of breaking the law for expressing such an opinion’?  We hold our politicians in low regard, but could they really be as bad as that?  Or is Mr Roskam just giving new meaning to the term ‘scare tactics’?  I know that members of the IPA are morally and intellectually warped by their obsession with bans upon some kinds of discriminatory speech, but must that obsession lead to this kind of logic chopping?

In truth, what I think you see here is that sad wish of those who falsely call themselves ‘conservatives’ to find ever more complicated reasons for maintaining that we must never change.  That I think is what Mr Roskam meant when he said that ‘in Australia when it comes to fundamental issues of principle, there’s a tendency to pick a partisan side first and invent a rationalisation for it second.’  That’s not just the method of the IPA – it’s the whole bloody point of its existence.  They daily go into the trenches to ensure that we remain forever frozen in the cocoon so finely woven for us by the Holy Imperial Trinity of God, the Crown, and the Church.  It’s not hard to name a team that wants to genuflect at that throne or altar.  Messrs Abbott and Roskam, and Teams Sky and Murdoch, are up there with the best of them.  And the rest of us just have to put up with the nappies.

Poet of the month: Walt Whitman

A glimpse

A glimpse, through an interstice caught,

Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room, around the stove, late of a winter night–

And I unremark’d seated in a corner; Of a youth who loves me, and whom I love, silently approaching, and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand;

A long while, amid the noises of coming and going–of drinking and oath and smutty jest,

There we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little, perhaps not a word.

Why history? 5 MEDIEVAL

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5

MEDIEVAL

If you go from about the time of the sack of Rome in 410 to about the time of the fall of Constantinople in 1453, you span a phase that we call the Middle Ages, the period that comes between what we call the ancient world and the modern world.

Rome had ruled what we call Europe and when it lost Rome’s governance, the world was a mess.  England would be settled by Danes and Germans.  The now peaceful Scandinavian peoples sent out wild raiders called Vikings.  The murderous insecurity of these dark times – that we call the Dark Ages – is pictured in epics like Beowulf and The Poetic Edda.  People looked for protection.  One person would pledge loyalty to another in return for protection.  You can see this in the Mafia in the film The Godfather.  We now call this the feudal system.  Although the relations may have begun voluntarily, the burdens and benefits were passed on from one generation to the next.   They became issues of caste – whereas our law is seen to move from status to contract, here that process was reversed. The feudal system did lead to the institution of knighthood, and romantic ideas and ideals about chivalry, courtesy, and honour. Le Morte d’Arthur is very different to Beowulf.

Europe came to be dominated by the teaching of a Jewish holy man called Jesus.  The Jews believed that they had a covenant with God and that they were his chosen people.  Jesus taught that God was open to all – his teaching was therefore Catholic.  He took up with prostitutes and lepers and got right up the noses of the local religious Establishment.  He effectively signed his own death warrant when he took to the money people in the Temple. Jesus may well have breached the local religious law, but the imperial man on the spot had him crucified on a false charge of treason in an act of judicial murder.  The followers of the man called Christ – ‘Christians’ – believed that he had risen from the dead and that following him could lead to eternal life.  The creed spread very fast, in some part because of the way the Romans persecuted his followers.

As we saw, Constantine converted, and moved the empire to the east – although the church would remain firmly seated in Rome. The priests drenched the simple teaching of Jesus in Greek philosophy.  They loved casuistry. They claimed a monopoly of knowledge.  Only they knew the mystery. They even forbade people reading the words of Jesus in their own tongue.  It has always been hard for an establishment body to cope with the teaching of a man born to blow up the establishment.  The church became hopelessly corrupt and inbred.

In 570, an Arab called Mohammed was born at Mecca.  He too believed in only one God and that he had found the only way to Him.  Mohammed thought that he crowned the teaching of Moses and Jesus.  (Muslims don’t believe in the crucifixion, much less the resurrection.)  He was a fighting prophet, and he taught that his followers would go to paradise if they died fighting for their faith.  That faith was quickly carried by the sword across the north of Africa and Europe into Spain.  The surge of Islam was first stopped there and later outside Vienna.  The Arabs developed arithmetic and made paper, and served to store the bases of Western learning.

The religions of Greece and Rome look silly to us, but since they did not claim to have the answer, they were a lot more tolerant than the three that came out of the desert in the Middle East. Three does not go into one.  The German or French ruler Charlemagne was instrumental in stopping Islam’s advance into Europe.  In 800, he revived the notion of Caesar when the pope crowned him head of the Holy Roman Empire.  This curious body would endure for a thousand years, and muddy the development of the German nation.  But the church intervened more darkly to inspire crusades against Islam.

The popes also offered paradise to those who fell for Christ.  At the start of one crusade, the Christians got into practice by slaughtering Jews.  Wars between these three faiths are still going on. They all have blood on their hands. None of those religions was good for that half of humanity called women.  The Catholic Church made a woman the Mother of God, but did little for her daughters on earth.  The doctrine of Original Sin suggested that women were the source of evil, and infected the attitude of humanity to sex for millennia.  On the plus side, the Church was instrumental in setting up universities.

Genghis Khan led the Mongol hordes out of Asia in the thirteenth century.  There was then an empire from Beijing to Russia.  This opened Europe to Asia.  Marco Polo travelled in Asia and opened Asia to Europe.  One result of the Mongol risings was a drifting bunch of refuges called gypsies.  China went through a form of rebirth, but then kept to themselves behind their wall.  At least until the time when Constantinople fell to the Turks, China looked much more advanced than the West.  Some in Islam may have felt the same, but all that was about to change.

Here and there – Playing way from home

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During the Vietnam War, the Americans forgot all the lessons that they had taught the British during the War of Independence about fighting wars on someone else’s land either for or against regime change.  Both America and Britain forgot the lot when they invaded Iraq to effect a change of regime.  The price we are all paying now is horrific.

A number of people have written books about the nature and grossness of the errors of the invaders (the most unrepentant of whom is Mr John Howard).  One of them is Occupational Hazards (2006) by Rory Stewart.  Stewart spent some time in the army before walking across Afghanistan and joining the Foreign Office.  He was one of the Englishman charged with bringing Western democracy to Iraq.  He is now a Tory MP.

As you read this book, you are torn between laughing and crying.  This note is a very anecdotal reflection upon that book.

Shortly after Stewart got to Iraq, a local told him that:

Uneducated people, tribal people, without reading and writing are now in the city…..They do not understand what is government.  Because they do not understand what is religion….Religion is about the respect for the other human being.  Each of us is created by one God.  Each of us is respected.  This is religion.  Even the Jewish religion.  But these men do not respect one another.  Things are very bad now…..We are not stupid.  We know what games your government is playing with oil and with Israel…

How could you overcome those misgivings?  They were, after all, justified.  Stewart soon lost his faith in our human quest for order.  The Iraqis insisted that only a police state could restore security.  But people back home thought Iraq could be both secure and democratic.  They thought they could get good order without secret police, brutality and torture.  They disbanded the army, sacked all senior Baathists and discussed the possibility of psychometric tests for senior officers and ‘gender-awareness workshops’. ‘We had arrived promising democracy not a warlord.’  It defies belief.

There was an ugly tribal murder. (Well, not many murders are pretty.)   One British officer spoke of the rule of law.  The answer was that:

Ninety-five policemen in my force are related [to the deceased] and they are in shock…We all know the best way to do this is through the tribal channel, and if people play fast – putting on police uniforms and taking them off, giving a few people a rough time – well that’s just how it goes.  I don’t know where you think you are living…..

There were always problems with interpreters – conscious and unconscious.  A bad example was ‘Coalition’ being translated as the ‘occupation’, ‘a word of great resonance for Arabs, conjuring the French occupation of Algeria and the Israeli occupation of Palestine.’  How did the Coalition expect the Arabs to forgive them for supporting ‘the Israeli occupation of Palestine’?  An opinion poll showed two thirds of Iraqis thought they were occupied.  How could they not?

This is how a local thanked the Coalition.

The occupying forces have proved that greed, cruelty and ambition are their guiding ideals; that insensitivity and stupidity are the only qualifications for your administrators; cowardice and pusillanimity for your soldiers; stinginess and prejudice for your development workers.  Large and small puppets on the hands of grasping fists of the elders of Zion….

Other than that, everything in the garden was rosy.

There were problems with clerics as well as with the tribes.  One cleric responded to the notion of the rule of law this way:

What matters is God, children, possessions, lives.  These things are more important than the law.  Forget the law.  God is above the law and I represent God.

Given that the rule of law in England was the product of more than a millennium, how could the English answer this invocation of God?  Well, the ‘democracy experts’ in the US were on the case.  They said Iraq was not ready. Bosnia had taught them that elections that were too early led to extreme sectarian parties.  That left the occupiers as king-makers and any model they chose was going to be controversial.  They were like blind men in a darkroom looking for a black cat that wasn’t there.

The power brokers were the sheikhs.  Stewart thought they were more ‘an irrelevant feudal remnant…[but]….little more than small-time rural gangsters, setting up extortion rackets under the pretence of security or skimming from contracts.’  But Stewart, who is now a member of Cabinet in Britain, managed to pay ‘them the respect they thought they deserved.’

Security – maintaining the peace – was the constant issue.  A new governor told Stewart that he intended to ‘take full control of the police, establish a secret intelligence service, ban demonstrations, arrest a journalist who had criticised him, and expel his Sadrist opponents from the council.’  What could be more natural?  One Iraqi policeman gave a response that was pure MFB.  ‘It’s not my fault that things are a mess – it’s your fault that we police are poorly trained and poorly equipped.’

An American ‘democracy expert’ came to Baghdad for ‘capacity-building’.  He put up a drawing that looked like a dog.   One sheikh said: ‘We are an ancient civilisation and they treat us like Congo cannibals.’  The democracy expert said: ‘Welcome to your new democracy.  I have met you before in Cambodia, in Russia, in Nigeria.’  At which point, two sheikhs walked out.  The expert had no runs on the board.

It was only after Abu Ghraib that Stewart saw ‘for the first time that they had always assumed that we were doing these things and had never believed my statements about human rights and the rule of law.’  The game was up.

Stewart wrote a speech.

We stand at the Ziggurat of Ur at the centre of the world’s first civilisation.  Within one hundred meters of us lie cuneiform tablets written in an alphabet invented here 5000 years ago, 85 generations before anyone in Italy, Britain, or America began to write…A little further and we come to the oldest law court in the world and the house where Abraham was born.  Here is the birthplace of civilised man, the foundation of our urban life and of our philosophy.

Shortly before Stewart left, the Sadr militia executed a female student at Basra University Engineering Faculty for wearing jeans at a picnic.  The Governor of Basra justified the militia.  The picnic had been ‘decadent.’  Women had sat with men.

The people who invaded Iraq forgot all their history.  What about the civil war we call the American War of Independence?  The older Pitt, by this time the Earl of Chatham, one of the most experienced war time leaders England has ever had, knew what the home ground advantage meant: ‘My Lords, if I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I would never lay down my arms – never, never, never.’

What about the French Revolution?  When it was first suggested that France go to war to export the revolution, Robespierre, the latter-day terrorist, said that no one ever liked ‘armed missionaries’.  Doesn’t that sum up the main problem for the absurdly named Coalition of the Willing in Iraq?

Passing Bull 116 – Father does not know best

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Donald Trump Junior made a fool of himself about a meeting he should never have attended.  If you believed in genetics, you might say something mordant.  He then made a bigger fool of himself by forgetting about the meeting and then lying.  When this was brought to the attention of pater on Air Force One, Dad immediately dictated a response for Junior.  We can just imagine pater bathing in the awe of his minions as he worked with granitic splendour in the crisis.  The President’s response was both stupid and misleading, and seriously damaging to Junior’s case – and the standing of the government.  The White House met the furore by saying that Dad had acted ‘as any father would’ and ‘with the limited information available.’

First, the President of the United States is not just ‘any father.’  Putting to one side that the President might be mad, our Prime Minister has the President’s personal assurance that he is the greatest man in the world.  Secondly, the son is of age, and allegedly capable of looking after his own affairs.  How many sane parents want to dictate to adult offspring indefinitely?  (Junior turns forty this year, more than half the biblical allowance.)  Thirdly, the case is a fortiori here, when Junior is supposed to be running the business of the family to the exclusion of Dad.  Fourthly, a person of average intelligence in a crisis with limited information would wait until he gets decent information before committing himself and others.  What if this idiot invokes the codes on limited information?

While on the subject of bullshit, a lot of people are calling for the head of Ian Narev, who is a serious challenger to Tony Abbott for the tile of the most loathed Oz.  He has presided over a disaster while being paid $12 million plus – the worth of 155 tellers.  The directors are responsible for managing the business.  Why don’t they resign?  For them to fire the CEO would have the same moral and intellectual value of a football club firing the coach for its failure to accept responsibility.

Finally, there is a group of embittered old men who are bigoted in religion and who are standing in the way of how ordinary people wish to conduct their lives.  They invoke God to do so.  Of whom do I speak – Parliament House, Canberra, or the Vatican?

Poet of the month: Walt Whitman

A child’s amaze

SILENT and amazed, even when a little boy,

I remember I heard the preacher every Sunday put God in his statements,

As contending against some being or influence.

Why history? 3

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

3

GREECE

The Iliad of Homer tells of the Trojan War.  The myth was handed down by word of mouth until it was put in writing in about 700 BC.  Together with Ulysses, it became a kind of bible for the Greeks.  These myths looked back to times well before Moses of prehistoric cities at Mycenae, the seat of Agamemnon, and in Crete.  I said elsewhere of the hero of the Iliad: ‘Achilles is the worst kind of aggressor – he is super-sensitive to insult or affront.  T.S. Eliot called Achilles a ‘spoiled teenager’. The capacity of Achilles to sulk is limitless.  This is a characteristic of a high-born, spoiled brat.’  At bottom, things don’t change.  We now see Achilles in the White House.  That is apt for a book that links us to animal acts in prehistory.

Especially in the fifth century BC, the Greeks went through a phase of explosive growth that looks unique in the history of the world.  They lived in and about towns.  They never formed a nation, and their internal jealousy would be their undoing.  They went through phases of monarchy, aristocracy and oligarchy.  They wound up with a gentlemen’s club version of democracy – only male citizens need apply.

Athens at its height rested on slavery and a protection racket, a kind of empire.  Athens had achieved this pre-eminence by leading the defence against Persian invasions in battles like that of Marathon.  It was they who stopped an Asian takeover of Europe.  It was about the time Athens had its empire that Greece produced dramatists like Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles, historians like Herodotus and Thucydides, and philosophers like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.

But the Athenian confederacy became an empire, and an empire of free states is a contradiction in terms.  Then Athens made Sparta jealous. If you reflect on the English in Ireland, or the Dutch and other whites in Africa, and apartheid, or, perhaps, the Nazi occupation of France, you will begin to follow Sparta. The people Sparta conquered were called ‘helots’, state controlled but privately managed.  This Spartan form of slavery was cruel, greedy, and unique.

The State ruled this version of Animal Farm with an iron discipline that the Prussians admired.  The first object was to create invincible warriors, and their soldiers frequently adopted the Japanese model of atoning for defeat by suicide.  To pursue their ideals, each Spartan had to be relieved of having to maintain himself or his family.  Education and marriage were all conditioned to maintain a perfect army.  There was of course a Krypteia or secret police.  The young Spartans had to get practice at killing. They were sent out with the power to kill any helot who looked suspicious.  And as with any fascist state, corruption was everywhere.  Nor should we leave Athens out here.  The Republic of Plato is a blueprint for fascism.

The war between Athens and Sparta – the Peloponnesian War – dragged on for decades.  The Greek city states were exhausted.  A cunning ruler called Philip of Macedon had little trouble subduing the shattered Greeks.  His son found himself in trouble at home, so he went out and conquered the world.  This was Alexander the Great.  He got as far as India before dying in 323 BC.  The following period is called the Hellenistic period.  One city Alexander created, Alexandria, became a store house of knowledge in dark times that followed.  Otherwise, European intervention in that part of the world was about as useful then as it has been recently.

The blazing meteor of ancient Greece had just burnt out. It subsided into the Mediterranean, never to be revived.  Even now, it looks like a failed state.