All of this really misses the point. Pointing the finger at dining companions of Burke is a basically meaningless gesture to anyone who’s either (a) under 40 years of age and lacks the desire to google Brian Burke, or (b) didn’t follow WA Inc. at the time.

Well if the online responses to the letters in today’s Azerbaijan Leader are any guide, I’d say they’re running 3:1 in Rudd’s favour.

http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/letters/index.php/theaustralian/comments/some_sympathy_for_those_that_would_sup_with_the_devil/P0/

While most of the punters won’t have seen it, Costello’s performance on Lateline was a masterful demonstration of piss and wind.

When challenged by Tony Jones about what the difference between Liberal Party donors entering into a business relationship with Burke, and Rudd having dinner with him, his answer was essentially ‘Well they’re not Kevin Rudd.’

All of this really misses the point. Pointing the finger at dining companions of Burke is a basically meaningless gesture to anyone who’s either (a) under 40 years of age and lacks the desire to google Brian Burke, or (b) didn’t follow WA Inc. at the time.

I’d say that’s a lot more of the electorate than not.

In Crikey, Richard Farmer writes “Memo Kevin Rudd: it’s time to defend by attacking
Former Labor Party campaign strategist and former lobbyist Richard Farmer offers Kevin Rudd some advice.”

Au contraire Rudd is right in the thick of it and he does not need to get used to the disgraceful culture that has developed in the ALP in recent years.

Anyone who believes that it is all not 100% cowBOY is kidding themselves. BTW for some reason i started writing this comment pressed ctrl c to paste my beginning quote and then presto it was double c ing and then posted as the above comment from the computer remembered name above patrickm. Sorry about that.

I would certainly not like to be in the same party trying to organise against their factional interests. When you’ve got the numbers in the ALP you’ll do whatever it takes to keep them and vice versa. WA more corrupt than the rest? I don’t think so.

Come on wake up and smell the ALP instead of the coffee!

Aw look, Andrew Reynolds have you considered that perhaps Burke was trying to use Rudd, not the other way around? Rudd rocks in as Edward’s guest only to suddenly find his name up in lights as the guest of honour at Burke’s celebratory dinner. Then Burke suggests another meeting with journalists. Rudd says he agreed to this out of ‘politeness’ but then he felt that he was possibly ‘being used’, so he backed out. End of story. Maybe Burke thought Rudd would be a glittering jewel in his lobbyist crown, a notch on his belt, a top name in his rolodex, another card in his hand. Maybe Rudd nearly fell for it, but then prudently backed away although whether he backed away soon enough is a question for the Australian public to ponder.

http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,21319747-2761,00.html

LOBBYIST Julian Grill worked against his own party at the last state election when he was paid “thousands” of dollars to help a campaign against the Labor Government.

And disgraced former premier Brian Burke helped the campaign with “advice.”

Rockingham Mayor Barry Sammels confirmed yesterday that the council paid Mr Grill thousands of dollars and took advice from Mr Burke at meetings at his home about a campaign designed to put heat on the Gallop Government about a local train line.

But Education Minister Mark McGowan, also Rockingham’s MP, said ratepayers’ cash had bankrolled what was a political campaign against him and the Government – engineered by local Liberals including Mr Sammels – that enlisted the services of the notorious lobbyists.

“Don’t agree there, Jack. Not only are they not mutually exclusive, they’re not even separable.”

Pavlov’s Cat, in kinder times I would concede. In fact I kind of do: the way I expressed my assertion was nonsensically circular. Of course ‘good’ non-fiction has by definition to have ‘good’ content. I agree that the two parameters ought to be inseperable. Touche.

What I meant was more along these lines, by way of pointing out that the Enlightenment ideal above is manifestly not the case these days:

Triumph of the Will (to filch a JPZ teaser from another thread hereabouts) is emphatically not a ‘good’ documentary. No matter how much any celluloid enthusiast cares to wax fanatical about its craft, its technical scope, its aesthetic wonders, it’s a ‘bad’ non-fiction film because its (non-fiction) content is ‘bad’ (ie untrue in the broad sense of its being rank propaganda)…and this parameter must always trump style when judging its overall merits, especially if there is a serious disconnect. So, likewise, a ‘good’ Op Ed piece in support of invading to rid Saddam of ‘his WMD’s’ must be in fact an oxymoron. Saddam did not have any WMD’s to disarm. That piece must now be adjudged as ‘bad’ non-fiction writing, no matter how ‘good’ its writerly style. And while a stylistically ‘bad’ piece that (clumsily, perhaps even counter-productively) sought to demolish the WMD argument – and I wrote my fair share for Webdiary, as you can see – doesn’t necessarily deserve the assessment ‘good’ non-fiction just because its content was more or less true and prescient, it is (must, must) certainly be ajudged superior non-fiction to even the stylistically finest pro-WMD invasion stuff that turned out to be…er, plain wrong.

PC, in times when there is ubiquitous cognitive dissonance between content and style – when great writers allow their masculine (usually) egoes to get shackled to doomed ‘ismic’ causes – lesser writers have to work bloody hard to make sure they keep their readers’ eyes on the non-fiction qualitative ball. Which is simply…what is true of the concrete world out there, and what is not true. That’s why I made my original point by way of bombastic counter-reaction: if we as a literary society are to insist on splitting the two, I’d rather we judged non-fiction solely on content than style, thanks. To me, manfestly the ideal you and I agree on ( I think) is now so far from being realised as to be philosophically dizzying – worse, when making qualitative judgements about non-fiction allowing style to triumph over content has long become the banal orthodoxy. Wet, weak, profoundly irrational phrasing like ‘whatever you think of X’s politics/views/actions, one cannot help but admire the brilliance of his writing/speaking/political ability…’ are now such ubiquitous preemptive disclaimers in the ebb and flow of public discourse as to be like beige swastika wallpaper. You don’t even notice it’s there, framing every utterance and debate, let alone its profound offensiveness. Yet that you can too-easily imagine even the ruddily sceptical Peter Cravens of the moment writing, of Mein Kampf’s Nation & Race chapter (just to bust Godwin’s Law again): ‘But let us put aside what Hitler is saying here, and turn to the writing itself…’ tells us an awful lot about how much we have forgotten what our non-fiction words are supposed to do for us – beyond preen themselves in the mirror of our over-educated literary sensibilities.

Let me put this in sickeningly narcissistic terms, PC, because it’s the only way I can illustrate what I’m trying to say here with any concrete meaning. (The fact that I feel moved to apologise here is symptomatic of the way things are now.)

As obtuse and obnoxious and overblown – as stylistically ‘bad’ a writer as I well know I am by now – I would still rather have my pre-war debate archives to defend than a Hitchens’, say. I may be a lousy non-fiction stylist, but if you can pick your way through the jungle of jostling adjectives and long sentences, you will find that I was essentially right about the big items: WMD, al-Qaida/Saddam connections and post-invasion implications. But to get to the corresponding meat of Hitchens’s output – and he largely got those key matters wrong, wrong, wrong – you have to navigate the far more daunting and seductive stylistic blind that is his obvious talent with words: his brio, his wit, his erudition, his literary likeability, even. All these are doubtless ‘goods’. But if you deploy them in the prosecution of arguments that subsequent facts prove were manifestly ‘bad’ arguments (ie the case they argued was wrong…this was NOT a bloodless Oxford debate, it was one to decide whether or not to launch an entire war in the real world ie BEING PROVED RIGHT MATTERED, pro-invasionists – it was and remains ALL THAT MATTERS when assessing your own pre-invasion arguments now)…your writing cannot remain regarded as ‘good’ writing. To me this is an epistemological necessity of fundamental criticality. If you’re wrong, you’re a bad non-fiction writer. If words are to mean anything, that is. Because the way we judge the ‘goodness’ or ‘badness’ of our non-fiction lies at the heart of everything else we as a society judge about ourselves and our concrete actions, too. It’s hardly a stretch to observe the implications of this rush to seperate style from content on the page: John Howard lied to us about kids overboard. Surely we could not elect him in an election over Trust? John Kerry was wounded and decorated in Vietnam, while Bush came perilously close to being AWOL…surely, in a US election in which the ‘Fit to command in war’ question is central, Bush cannot prevail?

Well. I think it’s this increasing seperation of style and content on the written page that lies at the core of the anti-Enlightenment crisis of confidence the liberal West is facing. We’ve all forgotten how to say the simplest of things – Yes, that is true. No, that is not true. – without hiding behind a stack of disclaimers and second-guesses higher than Everest. We all seem to have forgotten that when we make such statements, it is taken as read that we accept that we don’t mean in a God sense. For most of us, our inherent implied standing acknowledgement of our own epistemological limitations comes – or used to – as part of the package with even our most bombastic assertions. It’s not as if we any of us need to attach an entire Ph D worth of philosophical bet-hedging to each concrete statement we take a chance and make. Just because I boldly assert that ‘I’m right’ and ‘you’re all wrong’ – it’s true, by the way – doesn’t mean I really think so in an absolute sense. But we don’t have to punctuate every other sentence with that sort of epistemological redundancy. We’re human. Of course none of us knows for sure what is true in a non-fiction sense.

Like scientists, what we can know for sure is what we have proven to our own satisfaction to be UNTRUE. We know, for example, that it is UNTRUE that Saddam Hussein was ever even vaguely close to making nuclear weapons, as was repeatedly claimed by many and varied pro-invasionists. That ‘argument’ was simply wrong. It happens to us all. All we ever really need to do in an epistemological or po-mo sense is make fucking sure that we don’t go round maintaining that any non-fiction writing that did advance this argument is or ever was ‘good’ non-fiction writing. This is no less important to those who made the bloody case than to those of us who suspected it was horseshit, and tried to argue that case. Nobody wins the Information War in the long run if none of us can ever admit when we were wrong. Except those like Rupes and his proxy goons (or, if you dress more right-ish, the Marxier loon remnants still feralling up the ABC) who control and occupy the daily Information War weapons. They just keep reloading their word-ammo, keep churning out the next wrong bit of ‘good’ non-fiction writing.

And right now, that simple ‘fact-based’ notion is clearly not in play. Right now, an epistemologically catastrophic quarantining of content from style is being aided and abetted, routinely and without thought, by non-fiction commentators, critics, analysts, academics and writers of all stripes. Me, I think the origins of this lie deep in the unpredecented shocks of WW1 and WW2/the Holocaust/Communist Russia, which over a 30-40 year period gelignited to smithereens Humanity’s post-Enlightenment collective confidence in the possiblity of any trustworthy relationship between the abstract and the material worlds, in a kind of epistemological heart attack from which we’re largely still to recover. But that’s just me and my silly meta-historical fantasies. What matters is that since 9/11, we’ve seen an accelerating epidemic in this parsing of writerly ‘style’ from what that style is actually saying about reality. More’s the point, it is the ‘style’ aspect that is now increasingly taking the dominant role when we come to assess that writing. (Hence, as I say, PC, my countervailing counter-attack above, btw – if we are going to split the two, then we must at least make content still the final benchmark of non-fiction.)

In short, we’ve forgotten how to seperate what ‘sounds like’ good non-fiction writing from what is actually good non-fiction writing. A non-political example is this sort of sentence, which I’ve often seen quoted as an alleged marker of his non-fiction ‘goodness’, by Clive James (re: his own mock-humble approach to non-fiction):

“All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light.”

Sounds great. Sounds erudite, witty, acute, self-effacing and hale-fellow-well-met yeomanlike. So off we trot and laud James’s ‘brilliant style’ – his ‘goodness’ as a non-fiction writer.

But then you stop and think…hang on a tic. What does that non-fiction sentence actually say? How does its content actually relate to the concrete world? And pretty soon, you expose the glib superficiality of it, the emptiness underneath it. Is James trying to say that when he writes a review or a think piece, he takes his (admirable!) arsenal of words and keeps shuffling them around until ‘the light’ of truth catches…well, catches what, exactly? And where does the light come from, for that matter – god, the subject or work under review, his carefully positioned words, his intellect? Any one would be fine if he made it clear, but don’t forget that to ‘catch the light’ means that it reflects into one set of eyes (ie James’s own, as he ‘turns his gemlike words’), which also means that the so meticulously-crafted ‘turn of phrase’ is not going to be catching any other reader’s eye…unless of course they choose to stand chummily up Clive’s clacker and peer admiringly over his hairy, chubby shulder. My point is not to bag a manifestly dazzling writer; it’s to make a claim that what sounds to our over-educated ears like ‘good’ non-fiction writing is very often really just stylistical glibness. For all the po-mo unpacking (and bloggy Fisking) that goes on nowadays, I reckon much more shallow pap passes through to the keeper unchecked now that ever did when all them clever Frogs were but gleams in Eric Blair’s dour eye.

There are many glib give-aways to ‘hollow high style’ in the post-9/11 era. All the profound-sounding but meaningless abtractions – ‘moral clarity’, ‘appeasement’, ‘intellectual rigour’, ‘civilisation’, ‘Judeo-Christian’. Neologisms – ‘Islamofascism’, ‘Horrorism’ (time to go teaching Mart!). Pompous Capitalisations: War on Terror. Axis of Weasels. Axis of Evil. Operation Freedom. But I would say that the triumph of writerly style over content has been so overwhelming that most writers, even good ones, not only won’t agree with this long screed, but will also think that I have rather quaintly missed the whole point of how contemporary discourse is conducted.

To which I can only say: I hope so. I truly hope so. Because I think, PC, that the non-fiction ideal of yours – and I hope I haven’t got your PoV horribly wrong – is fast becoming one of those Rumsfeldian Unknown Unknowns. With ‘truthiness’, a rare post-9/11 neologism with bite and relevance, I think. Typically, it’s the one RWDB trope that even Rummy’s own side seemed to agree was weirdo bollocks, and helped trash. I think there’s something ironic in that, PC, but who can tell these days.

Comment length. Hideous. It seems I can do no other. Sorry, LP. I do try to pay my way.

PS: Thanks for the kind head-pat, Sir Henry. Verily I can rant with the best of them, sirruh.

a) Howard has set a trap, but one of his own has fallen into it; or
b) Campbell has kicked an own goal.