I find the Latham story important and extraordinary and far from put away, and thus distracting (OK, and funny). I’m therefore grateful for access to LP to blog ongoing reflections. Apart from irresistibly challenging the knowledge and imaginations of labour movement historians, it’s an important political story because of its destabilising effects on the opposition, and how these may or may not figure in the important task of changing the Australian government next time around. Kevin Rudd’s interview on the 7.30 Report last night supplied an example of the difficulties Labor now faces. As many folks are Latham-saturated, I’ll post my take under the fold.
Update: “Dear diary, I lied my head off again today, and again no-one noticed. This is so easy.” Yes, guess who else is keeping a political diary? Meanwhile, Peter Beattie channels LP in also alluding to Noddy, and Mungo makes some useful points.
So, said Kerry O’Brien, more or less, was Latham lying about the US alliance when he was running for office, or is he lying now? Rudd initially opted for the theory that the book is basically a confection of defeat. On cue, O’Brien appealed to the technical issue that underpins Latham’s authority in this game: “These are things he was writing in his diaries over years. This is not the reflections of a man who started reflection after an election loss. These are in the diaries going back over years.” This left Rudd rarely stumped, and a sitting duck for O’Brien’s next: “if your critiques and yours and your colleagues and Kim Beazley’s criticisms and rejection of his now are accurate, when you read his character, his personality essentially you read his character wrong.”
Before we get to Kevin’s interesting final answer, again note that we’re at the technical question about the status of the ‘diaries’. My bookshop reckons it will have a copy for me today, so I still don’t know if the book has any technical discussion of its production and, in particular, the editing process. I’d be grateful if anyone who’s got the book can advise if it contains any production details. This is a threshold question. Is the publisher prepared to allow inspection of the original diaries? If not, why not and are we therefore safest in assuming that there has been significant post-election tampering with the entries?
Anyhow, getting back to Ruddy, he finally said: “It’s possible that [in] someone like Mark we ended up with somebody who couldn’t quite tell the difference between what was true or false.” This is interesting because it goes to one of Hannah Arendt’s arguments in her famous essay “Truth and Politics” (on which I blogged a summary some time ago). The destruction of the truth/falsehood categories, she suggests, is a consequence of living under the experience of long-term organised lying, as in totalitarian societies. It’s the experience of organised propaganda constantly being adjusted only so as to absorb/cover undeniable contrary facts that leads, not to lies being accepted as truths, but to the breakdown and loss of the truth/falsehood categories themselves. In my own experience, this seemed to be validated and in some ways extended by people I met some 10 years or so ago who’d grown to adults in Ceaucescu’s Romania. I was constantly struck by the way in which these folks paid absolutely no attention whatsoever to official advice, but seized upon every piece of gossip going by. Observing this over a long time, I became convinced that this was fully internalised, in the sense that they were not aware that others tended to award their official/gossip weightings inversely.
Now I don’t suggest that Latham’s life in the ALP has been analogous to living in a totalitarian society, but perhaps in his own way and taking into account his full life experience, something like this has somehow happened to him. If Latham does indeed have a generalised problem in telling the difference between truth and falsehood, as Ruddy has hypothesised, and noting that this would also fit with him being such easy prey to gossip, and if we resort to Arendt, all this perhaps does suggest that he has lived under a long-term experience of constantly changing falsehoods being offered up as real stories, such that he now suffers from category loss. Perhaps this does go to the experience of someone who virtually grows up in a political party. Perhaps it also goes to the many contradictions he apparently embodies and - to refer to something I know to my pain - the incoherence of his book on globalisation. The notion that someone would lose the capacity to tell the difference sounds dramatic and far-fetched. Yet, to some extent, I’d suggest, we can see this phenomenon more generally in Australia today. Whether a political matter is true or false has increasingly become beside the point, just so long as interest rates don’t go up.
Nice post, Chris.
My instant reaction when watching Ruddy last night was - you need the cs question in response to Kerry!
I think we’re talking memoir rather than diaries.
He does refer to the diarising process (page 2) which, it seems, was events-driven, episodic note-taking rather than a methodical daily write-up of events - he owns large gaps in the record, etc. These (hand-written) notes were reportedly transcribed to his PC within a week and the subsequent whole was eventually turned into the manuscript. His reported aim was to capture the “colour and movement” of the “discontinuous narrative” rather than the potential “mind-numbing boredom” of the daily record. More Kitty Kelley than Sam Pepys….
I have encountered something of a blurring of the truth-falsehood distinction in most of the political contexts in which I’ve personally been involved, manifested (amongst other things) in:
* the receptiveness of members of political parties and factions to believe rumours and whispers without either seeking independent corroboration or asking the person/s whispered about their side of the story;
* the readiness of members of opposition factions or sub-factions to believe, without evidence, that an unprincipled or dishonourable “hidden agenda” lies beneath the overt position of the majority grouping which has been endorsed by the relevant decision-making gatherings;
* the willingness of University students to believe the contents of anonymous “shitsheets”.
I have also encountered at least one skilled and practiced whisperer (a sometime member of the ALP Left in Brisbane) who gave every indication of a tendency to come to believe in the truth of statements which she initially began circulating knowing that they were lies.
As an academic researcher and a writer on political and social issues, I am also constantly struck by the willingness of political actors and commentators, not only to propagate “discursive myths” which are helpful to their cause, but to persist in believing them in the face of readily accessible evidence to the contrary, and in the absence of evidence in their support - for example, the willingness of socially conservative elements in the ALP and the Coalition to believe that there is growing popular support for anti-feminist and anti-abortion positions when all the available research shows the opposite to be the case.
I suspect that what is also at work is something highlighted by the theory of cognitive dissonance - that people often believe certain things, not on the basis of evidence and arguments, but because they *like* to believe them, and can be both very stubborn and very imaginative about finding “reasons” to go on believing them rather than suffer the emotional distress of letting go of those beliefs in the face of evidence and arguments showing their falsity. For instance, in my experience people from Sydney (such as my late paternal grandmother), confronted with Bureau of Meteorology statistics showing that Sydney gets almost twice as much rain from Melbourne (as my Melbourne-dwelling mother presented to grandma during a conversation) can be perversely ingenious in thinking of reasons why the BOM can’t be trusted (as grandma was on that occasion).
BTW, whilst I’m sure Lindsay Tanner would not have refused a puff of the stuff when he was a student leftie at Melbourne Uni, he has never struck me as being the pothead that Latham has described him as. I say this on the basis of having encountered Tanner in political contexts at various times since 1980s, and also on the basis of having been at parties in the 1980s at which Tanner and his close friends such as Andrew McKenzie were also present.
Insightful, cs. So much so that I read it twice.
A phenomenon related to my previous comment is the willingness of many people to enjoy believing conspiracy theories, borne out most recently by the popularity of The Da Vinci Code. I think this phenomenon is due to the fact that (a) believing in conspiracy theories makes the world seem a more interesting place and (b) believing that bad things happen because bad people make them happen (and can therefore be stopped by good people doing something about the bad people) is more satisfying than believing that bad things happen because we live in a universe where that’s the way things are.
One amusing corollary of this is that we should not be surprised that the greenhouse sceptics are pushing shit uphill in terms of public opinion. This is because the sort of mentality they appeal to - i.e. the psychological propensity to believe in a conspiracy by sinister elites to fabricate scientific claims that the climate is changing - will be at least as attracted, if not more so, to the belief that there is a conspiracy by sinister elites to actually cause the climate to change!
Yes, some good points Paul. I particularly enjoyed this one:
I have also encountered at least one skilled and practiced whisperer (a sometime member of the ALP Left in Brisbane) who gave every indication of a tendency to come to believe in the truth of statements which she initially began circulating knowing that they were lies.
This again goes to Arendt’s essay, where she observes, sharply:
Arendt is surely correct in holding that the conscious, deliberate, ‘cold-blooded’ lie is much more harshly treated in society than the case in which the liar himself is also deceived. Just think of how many times you have heard the mitigating plea that ‘what he said may have been untrue, but he is not really a liar because he honestly believed it was true when he said it’ (or, closer to home, ‘that was the advice I received, which I honestly reported’). To get within reach of this plea, it follows that self-deception is almost always integral to the act of lying. Indeed, self-deception can actually appear as a moral imperative. Arendt cites Antonio in The Tempest, who had to make a ’sinner of his memory, to credit his own lie’.
Worse, the more successful a liar is, the more likely it is that he will also fall prey to his own falsehoods. Arendt again appeals to the material world to support this point — and incidentally goes someway to explaining the blogging phenomenon — by referring to the extent to which our apprehension of reality is dependent upon sharing these apprehensions with others. To illustrate, she tells the story of the night watchman given to practical jokes. Sounding the alarm to give the townsfolk a little scare, he succeeded in having everybody rush to the walls, and the last to rush was the night watchman himself.
I’ve also often been bemused about this one before, and not only in trying to find ways for Australia to win lost cricket matches:
… that people often believe certain things, not on the basis of evidence and arguments, but because they *like* to believe them, and can be both very stubborn and very imaginative about finding “reasons” to go on believing them rather than suffer the emotional distress of letting go of those beliefs in the face of evidence and arguments showing their falsity.
I read the couple excerpts in the papers, just recently and his reactions seem to be to me, just the reactions of a “nerd” thats been picked upon once too often.
one thing that has been missed is that Latham has made a deliberate sea-change and like cortez has decided there is no going back.
As a person who has had the main job of bringing up his two boys I caan empathise with this.
He ssems to have decided all he wishes to do now is to stay at home and do the ‘home duties’.
With an indexed pension of $80k+ I would do the same if I could.
Homer… not! How is selling himself to the media ’staying home and raising his boys’?
Re Mark’s comment:
My instant reaction when watching Ruddy last night was - you need the cs question in response to Kerry!
The problem with politicians taking this issue up is that there is small (in view of Geoff’s comment) risk that they are in fact real diaries, and thus the query could ultimately lead to the conferring of more legitimacy. No, the question of the document’s status as a ‘diary’ is a point those responsible for sorting out the truth in current affairs should take up, i.e. the media.
Rudd’s response to O’Brien’s “you read his character wrong” should have been: “So did you.”
By the way, why the apostrophe on “Latho’”?
Kate,
I have some news for you.
Merely becauseb one is at home looking after the kids doesn’t mean that occurs all the time.
By the way most interviews I am told have been over the telephone.
Keeerist. For once I agree with Tim Blair. This media fixation with Latho is rather amnesiac in tone…..
Latham is getting plenty of support via talkback radio. It’s like people think he is now one of us and is sticking it up the politicians.
As for his lies. How do we know there are lies and which are those lies?
As for the revelations of this bloke smoked dope etc - who cares either way. Not very polite to put it into a book, but it’s very forgettable stuff.
Agreed - the media didn’t do a very good job of unravelling Latham’s true feelings in policy, if they are indeed his true feelings.
“By the way, why the apostrophe on “Latho‚Äô”?”
Why, no doubt to inspire more pointless punctuation/grammar focused posts from you, Tim!
of course pollies will not be so open with each toher now in case someone else is writing a diary!
Thought provoking cs.
I just thought: as a service to historians, and in order to advance historiography, politicians should keep a public blog.
Bartlett Biographers rejoice!
His reported aim was to capture the “colour and movement” of the “discontinuous narrative” rather than the potential “mind-numbing boredom” of the daily record.
Sounds like a Foucauldian. At last, a new reason to like Mark Latham!
I believe the true blue ease the squeeze pronuciation is “Fuck-oh”, Rob.
Ridgey didge, digger!
That how they do it in Green Valley.
Ken oath Bluey! So the stream of consciousness is actually the dogs pissing on his swag.
Actually my expert reading of The Lathe Rampage (ie: someone at work who’s read it gave me a detailed if somewhat boozy rundown during a long lunch today) is that he does have some very good points to make about the corrosive nature of our political-media establishment on the making of good policy and decent lives for the players. However it generally gets lost in self-serving and salacious anecdotery and half-baked musings about the big picture.
wbb at 3.38pm makes a very interesting point though about how it’s being received by some sections of the public. There’s lot of people out there who are increasingly jack of politics as usual and if there’s one role Copper Mark was born to play, it’s a self-starting lightening rod.
Who knows? There have been stranger second acts in politics (OK, not that many though.) And he’s not the kinda guy to go gentle into that good night.
Can anyone say “manic rollercoaster fringe independent party helmed by charismatic nutter”?
I mean, as the Wiseguys used to say, no one who’s in The Life ever leaves it voluntarily. Or alive.
I should recommend my Comrade Cesare’s review of the diaries—he’s not got much work to do at Macquarie Street and he’s obsessed with the perfidy of NSW Head Office. So he’s a perfect reviewer.
I daresay Latho will dominate Talking Pictures on Insiders this Sunday for another week.
Well, I have my copy now, and hope to review it here at LP when I get a chance to read it. I already flicked through the pathetically twee ‘more in sorrow than anger’ intro, before I went out, and then to dinner, where captain clutz X MP typically spilled the bottle of red wine all over the table. He’s a piece of bloody work. As if I give a shit. Then skunk Y MP from the Liberals came in to dine over the other side of the restaurant with two women, prompting the log Z MP to tell me all about the menage a trois cult that’s diverting the extremist Christian Clarke right-wing. This is pathetic stuff. If only the public could see how politics in the restaurant really works. I’m part of an idealistic dying breed. The whole restaurant was run by machine men in cahoots with the best restaurant guide deadbeats. Talk about sick. Bullshit and trivia. Start a whispering campaign if you like. See if I care. I’m for decentralised community-based restaurants. Always have been. How do I put up with these arseholes. It’s all voyerism. I’m leaving it behind. Excuse me while I climb back into the purity of me mum’s womb, after I publish my diaries and cash out the public tit I’ve been sucking on for years, and fair enough too. Social justice at last.
I KNEW LP would cave and blog the most important political book of the moment.
Good on you.
Myself and Quantum Meruit are both blogging as we read, and we’ve both noted how different it is to what we expected.
The intro is a fantastic 20 page essay on the state of social democratic politics, pessimistic of course but surprisingly low on vitriol given that it was written recently.
I’m only about 20 odd pages on into the diary proper, but am finding it no more aggro than something one of us might write if we were keeping a personal blog.
The media focus on his vitriol leaves out all the complimentary stuff. Whatever he says about Keating later, his eulogy for Keating post the loss to Howard is almost fawning- Latham shows a clear preference for people with policy vision over fixers.
I think this is a classic case of the beat up preceding people actually reading it.
It’s extremely easy to read, very well written and punchy. If you love politics and don’t read it you’re letting yourself down.
And perhaps, just a little, following the bidding of the machine men…
Whatever he says about Keating later, his eulogy for Keating post the loss to Howard is almost fawning
Noddy, as he writes in his intro, “grew up with a love of Labor history, enchanted by the big characters and mystique of the movement.” At the beginning, every day Noddy would go to work, thanking god that he could be part of this great movement. Gradually, however, Noddy discovered that the “big characters” were only human, and he found that the “mystique” could not be seen anywhere in the corridors of opposition. Then, one day when the citizens said “piss off Noddy, you shit us”, he went home, cried, and decided he would write a diary to get even with the meanies, and resolved to only hang-out with his little kids instead.
A couple of points: CS writes: “If Latham does indeed have a generalised problem in telling the difference between truth and falsehood … all this perhaps does suggest that he has lived under a long-term experience of constantly changing falsehoods being offered up as real stories, such that he now suffers from category loss. Perhaps this does go to the experience of someone who virtually grows up in a political party.”
Is it just ‘a political party’ or more specifically the ALP? This would seem to support Latham’s own critique of the rotten culture of the ALP and/or Australian politics.
Re talkback and Latham’s current popularity (or not) - I was interested to hear some young friends of mine who are not and never have been politically involved say that they thought Latham was saying things that needed to be said.
Re some of what Latham says (I’ve only read the extracts so far): I thought his critique of Michael Brissenden during the election campaign was totally spot on. As were most of his comments on specific ‘media personalities’.
I have a big problem with what seems to be becoming the accepted version of the past which is that Latham was personally to blame for the ALP losing the last election. That his personaility, as evidenced by his diaries, was to blame. That seems like, from the left, revisionism, and from the right, a continuation of the same old same old. Maybe Latham has a solid point to make about the Liberal ad campaign. Well, I think he does.
CS
-”decided he would write a diary to get even with the meanies”-
So you ascribe to the helen demidenko theory that it’s all a fraud?
You could be right. It doesn’t read that way, it reads like it really was a diary, but you could be right.
-”the “big characters” were only human”-
Not all of them, as evinced by the piece of my comment you chose to lead with. He doesn’t let them off with that plea, and makes the point that some people DO retain some vision and passion even AFTER they get comfy in parliament.
Conservatism and apathy aren’t biologically determined traits…
I don’t think his carry on about his first wife “needed to be said” at all. In fact, it all needed very much to remain completely unsaid in the public arena. I stayed on the holding-out-hope-for-Latho train long after it was sensible to do so but there’s no coming back from that, pal. The political stuff is a diversion, a sometimes fascinating but mostly pretty pathetic psychodrama, but the personal stuff is just reprehensible.
And has been pointed out many times, if the corrosive media-political relationship or bastardry in either arena comes as a surprise, you surely haven’t been paying attention. This is not Labor behaviour, it is human behaviour. There are any number of critques of the ALP all vastly more constructive than this one. So, no, there was no burning need for it to be said at all.
Most probably, anyhow, perhaps there are dazzling insights in the book which haven’t yet been splashed over News Ltd or the ABC.
Latho is on Lateline again.
By the way, I think it’s an absolute disgrace that he’s giving lectures at Uni telling young people we shouldn’t get involved in organised politics.
What are people meant to do, keep a bloody diary?