I think I’ve figured out why Planet Janet is seeming increasingly irrelevant. Consider (as Paul Kelly would say) her latest column:
The leftist glitterati is justifiably upset about Mamet’s rejection of progressive beliefs.
Hundreds of words piled on top of each other about playwright David Mamet converting to Milton Friedman-ism or something. Earth to Planet: Couldn’t give a toss. Had never heard of Mamet. Don’t care what his political beliefs were or are. Don’t think a crusty old bloke’s move to the right proves some eternal truths about teh left or teh luvvies.
Aside from Planet, I don’t think anyone else in Australia has written a word about Mamet’s conversion experience.
Let me let you into the secret. The Culture Wars only had an illusory grip on our imaginations because John Howard was PM. He started it off with all the bleh about “political correctness” which was actually a dog whistle rather than an attack on the putative phenomenon itself – something that didn’t exist in Australia in the same way it manifested itself in America (and that’s a much more complex story, but anyway…) – There might have been grumbles about sexual harrassment legislation in the early 90s, but the real force of Howard’s “wars” lay in the declining economic position of the suburban and provincial ununionised working class (later reinvented as prosperous “aspirationals”). Hanson appealed to them on racial lines, displacing the effects of economic liberalisation onto Indigenous and Asian Others, and Howard whistled along.
When the Iraq War came along, we got the full panoply of American ranting and raving about “values”, and the meejah scoured the land to find an Antipodean equivalent of the British “Decent left”. But the nature of the targets of the columnists’ opprobrium should have told us something – David Marr, Robert Manne, and even David Williamson (who’d earlier written his own backlash play – so much for luvvies)… It was always really difficult to pin the tail on the Labor donkey. And this nonsense only resonated when it opened up racial cleavages that really did have purchase in this country – as with Windschuttle and his schtick.
But sunder the imaginary idenfication with America and Australia that Howard imposed on us (and for which he received a salad bowl as his due reward), and suddenly all this ranting seemed forced, unreal and basically whistling in the wind. A puff of hot air. Nothing more.
It’s a pity you haven’t heard of Mamet, because he’s a very fine playwright/screenwriter/director. But the news that his politics were of the left surprises me. I always just assumed his politics were right wing. His work seems to come from a belief in masculine ruggedness and individuality, a suspicion of women and a Hobbes=ian belief in the rule of the jungle. Try reading, or watching ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’, ‘Oleanna’, ‘House of Games’ or ‘Homicide’, for a start.
He’s also famous as an outspoken gun-nut, who’s vociferously defended the US’s lax gun laws, along the line of ‘a man has a right to test his masculinity by going into the bush and killing animals’. File this story under ‘beat-up’.
What’s more worrying is Albrechtsen’s characterisation of artists as muddle-headed wombats, emoting all over each other. Obviously she has no idea of the intellectual rigour that’s needed for the creation of good art and no respect for the people who do so. And she’s on the Board of the ABC. Can you imagine the patronising and mistaken views sho would have of the program makers there? When is the government shifting her off the Board?
Tim Blair and Alison Croggon have both written about Mamet’s apparent conversion. Croggon’s piece is here
http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com/2008/03/heat-is-on.html
Thanks for that, Fine.
And thanks for the info, TimT. I’m not sure it invalidates my point because Blair is the American blogosphere imported, and Croggon is a theatre/drama blogger. What’s absent from the Australian scene is any of the “outrage” among lefties and luvvies that Planet quotes from Britain and the US. I still don’t think Mamet’s political about turn (if that’s what it was, and I take Fine’s point) has caused soul searching or some sort of “burn the apostate” frenzy among the Australian left.
David Mamet explains himself at the Village Voice. As I’ve argued elsewhere, when people declare that they’ve spent the first X decades of their adult life being “brain-dead” or the like, it raises the question of whether we can have any confidence that their brain has really become any more alive with their conversion.
“I still don’t think Mamet’s political about turn (if that’s what it was, and I take Fine’s point) has caused soul searching or some sort of “burn the apostate” frenzy among the Australian left.”
Well then, let’s get one going!
“Of course, even before Mamet’s political conversion it was easy to work out that left-wing politics is essentially emotional, not logical.”
As opposed to Janet’s supreme commitment to logic demonstrated in this column.
I agree utterly with Fine that David Mamet is a great playwright and screenwriter. His politics don’t concern me in the least. His artistry transcends his politics and in any case I quite enjoy works that make me feel a bit uncomfortable even when I don’t agree with the writer’s ideology. That’s one of the many things art is all about, isn’t it?
I agree with you, Kim, that despite Howard’s gargantuan efforts, PC never really took in Australia.What we4nt on with Hansen was something that has been here since day one of the European arrival/invasion (eg Excusives v. Emancipists) in one way or another. To pretend otherwise is to deny the dark side of this nation’s soul. And one can’t really condemn Mamet from writing from an American perspective, even if it is/was that of a RWDB.His talent, I think, far transcends ideology.
Tim Blair ran a few (typically snarky) posts aimed at Mamet a week ago. I can’t help thinking that Planet J. gets her talking points from fools like Timbo, who are on the GOP Talking Points distribution list. Janet has links with online wingnuts like Arthur Chrenkoff (check out their facebook “freinds” etc).
I’m with Kim in not even knowing or caring who Mamet is (so sue me), and I think her analysis of US-derived nonsense which doesn’t really fit an Australian context is spot on.
Just as Howard acted as a pillar of PR support for Bush’s insane war in Iraq, there are plenty of Aussie wingnuts ready to “catapult the propaganda” on other US-emanating issues.
I think the vast majority of Mamet fans – of which I am one – responded to the article he wrote with a puzzled “Really? You were on the left? When did that happen?” Aside from giving me something else to consider when enjoying the classic “Everybody needs money! That’s why they call it money!” line from ‘Heist’, this really won’t affect how I partake his work.
I mean, ‘Oleanna’ is at the very least highly problematic for a leftwing audience – which is incidentally one of its strengths. It problematises your gut kneejerk responses in a very provocative way.
From reading his original article, it seems Mamet identifies being on the ‘left’ as having a belief in the inherent goodness of humanity. Anyone who’s seen one of his movies or plays knows that’s not a belief he subscribes to, so the wonder is that it apparently took him this long to realise. I mean, you tell me the writer of ‘The Untouchables’ and ‘The Edge’ isn’t a leftie?? Who would have guessed?
And it’s not like he says he’s now going tobe a Bush acolyte, so my copy of ‘Wag the Dog’ will remain intact (actually I’d keep it even if he now wrote “THE INVASION OF IRAQ WAS JUSTIFIED, DAMMIT!”)
Janet’s clutching at a highly irrelevant straw that simply doesn’t mean what she thinks it does.
One of The Asp’s tropes of 2007 was her casting of Ayaan Hirsi Ali as a voice of “modernisation” and “reform” “within Islam”. Over lunch I picked up a back issue of Women’s Weekly containing a bio of, and interview with, Hirsi Ali titled “enemy of Islam” and making clear that she is an atheist who thinks Islam should simply be rejected rather than modernised or reformed. (We discussed this last year.) It is symptomatic of quite a lot of things when WW can be closer to the mark than a leading right-wing commentator and ABC Board member writing in Australia’s “quality national broadsheet”.
Saw the movie “Oleanna” and thought it was verbose and ponderous and not very interesting.
link
Certainly was a problematic work (and hardly liberal) in its reflections on male/female relations. It certainly reflected a lack of any shade of grey (which most humans beings exist in). The worst thing any artist can be is overly ideological on any side of the fence.
The whole thing is remarkable, and all of her columns since the election have, for me, been slightly worrying in their irrationality and their fantasising about the mind of teh lefties. As you say, Kim, what it underlines is how much of the “culture wars” is actually located in the imagination of Janet et al. The whole thing amounts to shadow-boxing with an imaginary constituency that *cares* who David Mamet votes for. Really bizarre.
Yes, James. Some weeks ago she proclaimed that TEH LEFT was irrelevant and destined to remained so. Every column she has written since then has been about TEH LEFT. It’s surely a symptom of something clearly wrong with one’s head when one obsesses about something which one claims to be irrelevent.
It’s deeply ironic that Mamet has come round to this view:
At this very instant the Big End of Wall Street is manoeuvring the governing classes in the US into giving them the biggest taxpayer-funded bail-out in the galaxy!
Maybe Mamet just likes being a loser.
On the broader point, since when was it illiberal to respect free markets?
This left-libertarian lives from the free market, and I love the fact that the free market generates millions and millions of people like Mamet who love the free market better than they know it.
I kinda think Mamet’s a little over-rated, but anyway.
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It’s hard to tell from Albrechtsen’s juvenalia, but it seems that Mamet has switched from a one-eyed, simple minded liberalism to a one-eyed, simple minded conservatism. It’s quite possible for example to respect the sacrifices of military personelle and also oppose the Iraq War, it’s likewise possible to laud the innovations, products and services of corporation whilst being angry at the iniquities of Halliburton.
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Albrechtsen’s characterisation of the Left as ‘emotional’ is amusing in the light of the last five years of rabid hysteria that’s resulted in the Iraq mess. Funnily enough those unspeakable radicals who originally declared that it was gyp to use American military resources to secure oil reserves for firms with which many persons in the administration have connections turned out to be right. This is not strictly an ideological matter. It’s simply one of good governance. Such good governance has been damaged by the current US administration which got away with it largely due to the high-pitched hysteria of ‘patriots’. So much for the Left’s monopoly on emotive politics.
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I do sometimes wonder about the judgement of artists because of their political views however. I think it does happen and comes from both sides. However if Hollywood were a liberal totalitaria it does seem that such individuals as Clint Eastwood would not prosper. Is John Malkovitch excluded from the theatre world in New York? Whyever not? He’s been said to be so right-wing you think he’s joking. Of course when one realizes that Malkovitch is in business with the traitorous Francophile Johnny Depp and that out and out Commie Sean Penn -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Ray_%28bar%29 – well you have to wonder about the accuracy of this characterisation don’t you.
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Still I have had some discussions with left-leaning persons who appear to disregard Tom Wolfe as a writer because he’s a conservative. For myself I was a fan a long time before I ever realized that he supported Dubya. I support Dubya. I think he has a right to a fair trial and should get one as soon as possible. Cheney? No. Straight to execution.
Ah. Ms Albrechtson. How has she annoyed me, let me count the ways. But now agree with the general comments above re shadow boxing – it doesn’t amount to a hill o’beans really. But I still can’t forget a column of hers, back in the days, where she suggested anti-war people were gloating and enjoying the mess in Iraq, because it gave them an opportunity to say ‘I told you so’ (something to that effect). I found it a bizarre way to think – I was genuinely amazed that someone could have such a warped view of other people who happened to hold different views. I must admit that this offended me – I suppose now I might be more inclined to ignore and dismiss such comments.
As for the overblown fuss about political correctness – seems to me that many of us of broadly ‘left’ persuasion were perfectly capable at rolling our eyes at received wisdom from our own ‘camp’… after all, that’s all pc is – applying a template on the world according to a set of rigidly held ideas – and you don’t have to be from any particular political persuasion to do that. Unfortunately, it’s part of the human condition. There’ll always be some who like to think outside the box & others who enjoy staying cosily inside it. Behoves us all to challenge ourselves & as Paul Burns says here, a little discomfort may sometimes be beneficial. Perhaps Janet herself could take a dose of the medicine she is recommending (ie. be open to new ideas).
Well, again, Adrien, I’m quite partial to Tom Wolfe’s work and I neither knew nor care now if he votes Republican.
I wasn’t making any inference that people in general left-wing or otherwise judge artists by their politics. Some people do. I’ve encountered it. I think it’s strictly irrelevant. I also have to say that I find the polemics of Bolt etc hypocritical. There’s a continual discourse on the left-wing arts ghetto but when Bolt writes about Picasso he infers that the guy doesn’t deserve his place in art history because he was a communist.
Picasso is a giant and his art transcends his politics.
Parts of Pablo Neruda’s oeuvre are a bit dodgy because tainted by his Stalinism, but other parts shine brightly because they transcend his communist politics. Other pertinent leftish examples abound.
Likewise as observed by others, even rabid right-wingers are capable of producing great art. To insist that critics wear their commo/anti-commo glasses when viewing art, is to take such a narrow view of life as to be laughable, I think.
Why, I’ve even heard that present-day atheists can appreciate Mediaeval and Renaissance paintings done by Christians! Fancy that.
!Viva Pablo Picasso!
!Viva Pablo Neruda!
I like Mamet and was disappointed in the way he tacked right – sort of Neoconnish and Friedmanite as opposed to Jesse Venturish and Ron Paultardite. ( I also wrote about it)
Still I feel a touch of the tiller to starboard is incumbent upon all good and true contrarian’s when the Left is so obviously on the ascendant. Not many want to be a flunky and lickspittle lackey to power like Allbrechtson and Blair all their lives do they?
Surely not.
From my experience artists mostly don’t have a very considered political viewpoint. They tend to vague anti-establishmentarianism. Put a ‘commie’ like Picasso in the Soviet Union and he’d be a libertarian. I guess I could draw on the similarities of sensibility and aesthetic of the French and Czech New Waves in cinema and then contrast them with their respective pro/anti communism to illustrate the point. But I’m already tedious enough I’m sure.
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Orwell was a true political artist, a good writer and a good political thinker. I’m reading his letters and essays from the war years where he is constantly wrestling with the questions of a command economy and the compatability or otherwise of it with liberal democracy. Amongst this collection is his review of Hayek’s The Road To Serfdom which contains the line: the trouble with competitions is that someone wins them. Bertolt Brecht was also a good artist. The Good Woman of Szechwan nicely illustrates certain difficulties of virtue in a competetive economy.
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Have an architect friend who hates From Bauhaus To Our House probably because its true. The sleek minimalism favoured by the school manifests in the designer lofts of the haute culturati. ‘Ordinary’ people favour Tudor or classical style McMansions. Andrew Bolt once cited the book when he was wiling against the art scene. I believe he had the wrong book. – http://www.amazon.com/Painted-Word-Tom-Wolfe/dp/0553380656
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Generally I tend to think rigid politics incompatible with good art. But rabid right-wingers are capable of great art. Check this out: http://www.bford.info/album/2003/0527-Barcelona/gaudi-lg.jpg
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Delicious. Funnily enough Orwell the left-winger hater the right-wing Gaudi’s work. He’d never heard of him but remarks on his unfinished cathedral in Barcelona with bile in Homage to Catelonia.
Well, just out of curiosity, if LP-er’s generally reject Janet’s theory about why artistic types disproportionately lean to the Left, what is the explanation?
I would also say that the Culture Wars did take on direct relevance and harm the Keating government in the Hindmarsh Island scandal. (Poor Robert Tickner; I reckon he knew he had been had, but PC would hardly let him say it.)
Is this the David Mamet whose recent efforts include schlocky action thrillers like Spartan? I wonder how much cash he gets for this tripe. Why are we so obsessed with the politics of folk who live in La La land?.
Well there’s been a study on cognition and political alliance -
http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/blog/2007/09/10/study-finds-liberal-conservative-difference-in-brain-functioning/
University culture often displays a difference in ideological viewpoint by major area of study. The Arts are lefties, the Business faculties are right-wing etc. There may be a generalised correllation between brain-type and career choice and/or capabilities.
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Why are so many arty-farty types lefties? Why are so many bankers conservative?
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I think Albrechtson is right. We need to ensure that 50% of the artists are right-wing. We also need to ensure that 50% of the bankers are commies.
The political discourse in Oleanna was on a par with Alice Cooper’s in The Department of Youth.
“Brain-dead liberal” clearly has a different meaning in Australia. Unless someone has forgotten to hit the shift key.
I think it’s becaue ‘arty-farty’ types are by definition creative, interested in new ideas, looking at things at an odd angle, tend to se themselves as outsiders and have the imaginatve capacity to place themselves in another’s position. Add these things tend to add up to a leftish position. But of course, this will vary greatly and, of course, there are good rifgt wing artists.
David Mamet and David Horowitz fight over DM stealing DH’s gig as the Ex-Liberal voice.
interesting debate, but I’m really only commenting to say ‘nice choice of illustration, Kim’.
From the opposite perspective (and without malice): I think it’s because business types are down-to-earth, used to carving their own path within the system, and think more in terms of liberty than liberation.
But I reckon there’s crossover: some managerial social-democratic types can be extremely hard headed and practical, for example, and conservative (vs. libertarian/classical liberal) thinkers can be very waffley/imaginative.
Kim says:
In proper democracies it is the followers who make the leaders. Democracies dont come any proper-er than Australia.
The conservative authoritarian political times called forth the man, rather than vice-versa. It was Howard who said, with appropriate modesty, that “the times will suit me”.
You could hardly blame him for cleaning up after the ridiculous farce that was the post-modern Cultural Left (c 1985-95), with clowns like Kim leading constantly with her chin. Too tempting a target.
Its not as if Howard was the orchestrator of the Culture Wars. Has the Hanson political episode already been consigned to a memory hole? All state ALP premiers have run hard on conservative authoritarian “law and order”. No doubt they are mere puppets knee-jerking to Howard’s political string pulling.
As for the future of the Culture War without Howard, one does not have to look very hard. It is here with Kevin Rudd, who has accepted Howard’s basic policy settings on the key Culture War issues: indigenous affairs, border protection, multiculturalism, immmigration and family values.
Headline politics may swing to the Cultural Left. That is the default tendency of a political culture where headlines tend to be edited by Cultural Leftists.
The urge of liberal white people to flaunt their ideological halo in public is so strong it can easily overcome double-think on policy science.
Jack: I don’t think Bracks or Brumby in Victoria have run hard on conservative “law and order”. Au contraire, I’d say Attorney-General Hulls has been fairly mild with occasional flashes of liberal or slightly progressive views.
You could be correct about other States, but.
Kim says:
You wonder what it would take to get Kim to “care about the beliefs” of a politically incorrect person. Obviously Oscar’s and Nobels dont do the trick.
This must be what unkind people mean when they talk about the invincibility of ignorance.
Talk about pot calling kettle livivng on another planet. What a loser.
31 Ambigulous Mar 20th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
Your hazy impression is at odds with the brute facts. The VIC govt locks up crooks and trouble makers like they were going out of fashion.
This neatly illustrates my basic point about the the Culture War dilemmas of successful Left wing politicians, attempting to reconcile their true believing base with their lyin’ eyes believing constituents. Solved by tokening Left politics but tacking Right policy.
It is wishful thinking to expect that something as substantial as the Culture War will be seriously affected by something as superficial as a change of government.
The Culture War emerged in the 70’s when minority group top-dogs began to struggle for equal status with majority group top-dogs. This brought the relationship b/w special natures and social structure into a political topic. It highlighted the tension b/w socio-biological science and liberal cultural scripture, which is the genesis of political correctness.
17 Kim Mar 20th, 2008 at 3:01 pm
You would expect this comic gold to trip from the mouth of a dopey monarch, complimenting her piss-taking jester. How perfect that it is republicans who now have a tin ear for ridicule of her Person [-is-political].
The way Kim is going, she may well end up in one of Tom Wolfe’s works. An almost perfect specimen of Left-liberalism c 1985, preserved as grist for the likes of his mill.
A blogging inversion of Kant’s aphorism about God: Since She exists, Tory anarchists do not have to invent her.
Keeping dry under that tinfoil, Jack?
“If LP-er’s generally reject Janet’s theory about why artistic types disproportionately lean to the Left, what is the explanation?”
The current Quadrant, the first under Keith Windschuttle, has an attack on the politics of Australian theatre which tends to reverse this (and JA’s) formulation, suggesting that the left/PC-dominant types who dominate Australian theatre aren’t so much ‘artistic types’ as artistic fakes (or bad artists), as a result of their political straitjackets/blinkers. The tagline announces that the writer (Michael O’Connor) will be writing on the theatre regularly for Quaddy; KW has already made it pretty clear he regards the arts as the next CW battleground. Whacko, eh. The article’s chock-full of the usual sweeping generalisations about ‘teh…’ and the usual token detailed Hatecrow Stuff-n’-Scruffs – Stephen Sewell and Hannie Rayson get the treatment here. So my feeling is that it’s rather going to be an Arts CW from here than any Ruddian-led Phase II, Jack S. You need two vaguely matched armies for a stoush that’s anything more than plain embarrassing, and some of the veteran CW protagonists retain a bit of Howard-sinecure Arts scene firepower after The Great (Political) Rout, at least. Salusinzsky was probably the driver behind Koch and Murnane, neither ‘in’ with teh Left, apparently, getting their $50,000 arts thingies. I’d expect to see a lot more of the ‘conservatives are the real artists’ skirmishes over the coming years. Political stoushes of any profile are gunna be thin on the ground, let’s face it, and Culture Warriorhood abhors an absence of public conflict. So they’ll be going after the arty-farties, I expect.
To be honest I’m not entirely unhappy about the prospect of a good punch-up on those fields. The Yarts – especially the writing bits – in Australia could probably use a good mass brawl. Some claws-n-fanging might send a dose of castor oil through a few complacents. The problem is more one of looooong-term incumbency than lefty politics as such, but if Keef & Co’s ideological assault on quasi-tenured arts yawnmakers like David Williamson – who lettered back at JA today in The Oz (fuck me, he can’t even hold an audience for three fucking pars these days) – has the effect of getting some hot blood flowing all round (on Arty floors, in Arty veins, through Arty pens), then…huzzah. No-one gets hurt. It’s art.
Yes, I agree Mamet’s deluding himself if he thinks he was ever a lefty. But in the context of the above that’s a double-edged sword, by the way, for any of us who think he’s a good writer (as I do). It could well be that Keef’s Quaddy might be onto something sellable: or maybe Wet Lefties really do make shithouse artists, after all. I’ve had a tiny bit to do with the peripherals of Sydney’s theatre scene, on a few occasions helping a very successful award-winning playwright develop/pitch new plays. He’s generally regarded as a bit un-PC, even right-wing by his peers. And that does make it tougher for him to get plays up. There’s no question about it. It does. And it shouldn’t be like that.
Thanks, Boris!
Ambigulous, I’ll be buggered if “tough on law and order” is actually part of the Culture Wars in Australia. First I’ve heard of it. It was part of the Nixonian schtick which in many cases prefigured the American Culture Wars coz it was code for “tough on uppity blacks”. I think Jack’s talking out of his hat. His “cultural dry-ism” is a moveable feast. Whatever nonsense suits his argument gets roped into it, depending on the context.
If Rudd proclaimed compulsory lesbianism, Jack would still be pivoting on the head of a pin arguing it was John Howard’s sound idea all along.
I mean, consider this definition!
Whatevs…
I don’t think even Tom Wolfe could do anything with that. It self-deconstructs into ludicrous parody too quickly to be satirised.
Interesting speculation, Jack R, and remember Windy was getting his knickers in a knot about NUDITY IN OPERA!!! Oh noes!!!
But (a) as I said, Williamson ironically actually bought into the culture wars with his dumbassed anti-pomo and OMG! Sexual Harrassment Laws Give Women Power Which They Will Use To Emasculate Men plays of the 90s. Which were shithouse plays. Give me “The Club” any day.
And (b) any such spat about the theatre really will be an elite discourse. It’s hard to see this stuff interesting the punters that read Bolta for instance.
Gosh. Since I was all of 11 at the time, I musta been a prodigy…
41 Kim Mar 21st, 2008 at 12:02 am
The Jesuits used to say “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.” Based on that timeline I would say you were a case of arrested development.
Bit dangerous to quote the Jesuits, Jack.
Gosh, Strocchers really put your in your place, didn’t he, Kim! I’m all moist in the underwear after those hairy-chested denunciations.
False dichotomy there intellect and emotion are indivisible. And shouldn’t Ms Election Day Meltdown be fully cognizant of that.
Oops wrong twin. Carry on.
No good “Planet Schmanet Janet” headline or “Dammit, Mamet!” moniker should go without accompaniment…
The blog is secure but I’ll spam it,
Mamet.
The male lead is hard, but I’ll ham it,
Mamet.
These rhymes are really running the gamut,
Mamet.
So please, don’t tell me to cram it,
Mamet.
Now I’ve one thing to say and that’s
Dammit,
Mamet –
I liked your earlier stuff like “American Buffalo” and “The Duck Variations,” but after around “Glengarry” and “Homicide” you kinda lost me and plus the macho schtick got a little too repetitive. Same thing, sorta, with Shepard’s ‘cowboy beatnik poet’ routine, except that great early Shepard like “Buried Child,” “Killer’s Head” and “Tooth of Crime” has sort of got you beat in those entertaining old-fashioned late-nite Mamet-vs.-Shepard debates…
ooh, now I gotta go. A great Wilco song just came along on the shuffle…
I know
We should take a walk,
But you’re such a fast walker…
“Williamson ironically actually bought into the culture wars with his dumbassed anti-pomo and OMG! Sexual Harrassment Laws Give Women Power Which They Will Use To Emasculate Men plays of the 90s. Which were shithouse plays. Give me “The Club” any day.”
Quite so, PQ. You can almost analyse formally the whiff of ‘do-gooder’ didacticism that’s breezed in and out of DW’s arty orbit over the years like a farty Charders waiter by lining up his worst (and best) plays with his/their embrace (or eschewal) of the political fight-fads of the moment. In those pretty obvious times when the Muse was off shagging elsewhere he could have done himself a real favour by resisting the temptation to overlook Sam Goldwyn’s advice on ‘messages’ in drama just to fill those terrifying blank pages. The truly godawful Brilliant Lies and the sub-Stoppardian Dead White Males were every bit the wildly sprayed – and gormless – early vollies in the silly Oz version of the US CW as those imported prototype anti-PC riffs by PJ O’Rourke, the Eddie Murphy ‘comedy’ tirades about divorce law, etc.
Generally dramatic artists who go mining for easy razzamatazz in among the transient cultural/political talking points of the day are asking for empty seats, unless they’re of the calibre of a Tony Kushner or a Dennis Potter. Even Pinter’s stuff gets bloody draggy at times, frankly. And maybe it was just me, but there were times watching West Wing where I really wanted a juicy red-blooded Republican to materialise and really up-fuck everyone’s thick-lidded luvvie repose. I thought the Alda ‘decent’ RWDB was a real underhand dig in the Repubs’ ribs overall…and that ending – for all its sentimental power – a fey Lefty’s wet dream, what with AA’s man ending up as a kind of liberal White House-trained domestic ‘conservative’. Ick! (You wanted Kissinger to stride into the Oval Office like Iago at the last and give Vinick’s potential (Dem Admin) Sec. of State a good hard slap in the duchessed, wavering gob, to snap him the fuck out of of it…talk about writer(s) betraying their own character for the sake of their clocked-off politics!)
Anyway, I digress. Planet Also-Now-Desperate-To-Fill-Those-Blank-Pages is obviously a bit at sea for Op Ed drama herself now that Muse Howard has fled. Still, it’s a worthwhile barby stopper, this politics-arts thing, even if the barby is more tempura-n’-pesto than snags and chops. It would be a bit refreshing to see a few big brash bold brassy unapologetic and fully-fleshed Australian conservative characters – who don’t achieve that full-fleshiness by ’selling out’ and ’seeing the light’ (a la Shylock) in the final reel – in our dramatic fiction for a change.
Go Keef-wiv-yer-kooky-goldcock-prodding! I say. Nyah-nyah-nyah, Quadders – g’warn, wind us luvvies up, big boys. Let’s get it on in da art hood, blud.
Oops, I was using ‘luvvie’ in the nicest possible way, everyone. Happily admit to being one m’self, don’tchakno…or a wannabe one, at least!
(How’m I doin’, Strocchs? Jages? Every Thesp needs feedback, my sweets…)
Nah, it’s simpler than that.
It’s April 1945 and Zhukov has just crashed into the outer suburbs of Berlin.
Meanwhile, down in der Fuhrerbunker, Janet, Sheridan, Windy and Hendo are pushing little symbols across a map of already occupied territory.
As she plonks a little Mamet icon down in the region of Warsaw, Janet exclaims, “See? We’re winning! We’re winning! Mamet is now one of us! It’s just a matter of time before the playwrights of the world rise up as one to win this war for us! The Future Belongs to Me!”
Heh. Now can you weave in something about “burning apostates.” I had something worked up about fireships up to the gunnels in combustibles and Christopher Hitchens but it was too stodgy to be funny.
Noone has commented about Janet’s throw away starting line, that it’s not only Islam that burns apostates.
Firstly, does Islam? Doesn’t like them, takes out the occasional fatwa, but ‘burns’? In any case, we only stop toasting our Joans of Arc a couple of centuries ago.
Secondly, Mamet’s treatment at the hands of all those nasty lefties scarcely rates as ‘burning’ – what? a couple of critical articles and hissy fits? If that’s burning, no wonder Janet herself has taken to wearing sackcloth and ashes.
I also wish she’d sort out her message a bit – either conservatism has won or it hasn’t. Either it’s good to be emotional or its not. At the moment, the only thing you can predict with confidence about Janet’s articles is that they’ll be taking a diametrically opposed position to one she wrote a fortnight ago, whilst proclaiming that, as a doyen of the Right, she is into reasoned argument and the upholding of fixed and unchanging values (whilst at the same time proclaiming that people who don’t change their minds in the light of new facts are fools).
Oh..and that her sources of information are a couple of guys she met in a pub somewhere.
Spot on about the West Wing there, Jack. Democratic dreaming.
The Opposition Zealot (aka the OZ), predictably, reprinted Mamet’s apologia.
Mamet can’t think straight.
Mamet associates conservatism with realism and liberalism with perfectionism.
How ahistorical. Mamet seems to forget that American liberals during the 1960s and 1970s got tribal gods out of the classroom, the state out of the bedroom, and rosaries off ovaries.
Ever since, liberals have been fighting a more and more desperate rear-guard action against conservatives who want to put everything back the way it was before the dreaded 1960s, and more.
Now, I ask you, which of these groups is the more perfectionist?
Who is attempting to establish American theocracy: liberals or conservatives?
Mamet’s mapping of liberal/perfectionist and conservative/realist is just wrong.
This is in itself a ‘culture war’ missive, innit Jack. I don’t think there was any ‘culture war’ in the 70s. What there was was a challenge to the ‘dominant paradigm’.
Please forgive me for using a post-modern riff but I couldn’t resist. What I mean was there was a range of social conflict which had to do with various (what you’ve called) minority groups challenging prejudice, suppression of systematic disadvantage in various ways.
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Therefore you have the movement of African-Americans for emancipation (which properly emerged into the mainstream in the 60s and went back a lot longer. The fight by that ‘minority group’ women for equal pay and conditions (which continued right into the 90s and still does). Challenges to standard history that include, for example, the genocidal tendencies of certain post-colonial governments. The movement by homosexual citizens for mainstream recognition: dignity, recognition, freedom from coercion and random violence not to mention having the State lift its prohibitions against their sex lives. Etc.
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This manifested in several ways. Some of these ways were reasonable, lawful, civilized. Some not so. There are arguments as to whose fault it was, the ratbags or the entrenched establishment. Not enough space here. Generally however this collection of movements was successful.
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Sometime during the 80s a counter-movement emerged. The rhetoric of this counter-movement attacked not so much concrete things like equal pay for women but what they thought of as an attack on free speech = political correctness. Such things as the requirement for non-gnder specific speech and the like. The demonization of views cobntrary to the PC agenda.
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This was the culture war.
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To what extent one side or the other are correct is hard to determine at this point. In ‘wars’, that is conflicts that aspire to victory at the total expense of the opposition, truth is famously the first victim. The more extreme elements of both sides rise to the fore and an investigation of facts and issues is not important except insofar as aids the search for more artillery in the Culture War.
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But in its essence what it boils down to is there have been changes in society since c 1970. These changes have challenged an altered the perception of matters of sex, sexuality, race and the rest. There has been a backlash against this. In the midst of this ‘war’ both sides have their extremists. Each side will point their fingers on the extremists on the other side whilst maintaining the reasonableness of their own.
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That is the Culture War. And it’s truly as pain in the arse.
Couldn’t agree less, Adrien. I’m a Mamet fan and agree with this article: he was never simply left and is not now simply right. There is one cat who will be hard tio stuff into the wet paperr bag of (neo-)conservatism, and Albrechtsen is demonstrating only that she’d never heard of mamet nor had seen any of his work.
Ambigulous: as to Neruda, it’s fair to say that if you can be determinedly blind to Stalinism then it’s fair to say your observations on other stuff are doubtful.
You can’t be a culture warrior if culture bores you. Someone like Allan Bloom or Clive James (or, damn it, even Pablo Neruda) could be left or right or whatever, because they read widely enough that their position could be respected however much you may disagree with it. Has Janet Albrechtsen sat through any Shakespeare since she left high school? Does Keith Windschuttle get opera? Why would anyone want to fight over terrain they don’t want to hold?
Quadrant’s just caught up with David Williamson and Hannie Rayson? Well, it was bound to happen. I must get hold of that article – I see it isn’t online – but Michael O’Connor seems to me to be a bit behind-hand – I suspect these (very conservative) playwrights have had their day. It was a long and boring day too: they are the sort of writers who give political theatre a bad name.
But isn’t it true that they sell well into the MTC/STC subscription base, so those companies still love them?
Well I don’t know Andrew I was only going on the above. I’ve read some of Mamet’s essays, seen some of his plays. I never really thought about his politics. The commentary quoted by Albrechtsen about the radio stations he listens to etc seem typical of a certain kind of political orthodoxy (of both sides) that I’ve always associated with blockheaded simple-mindedness.
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This News Ltd Culture War stuff irritates me when it comes to the Arts as a whole. There are some good point (like ideologically justified bad art) but they’re usually made hypocritically. It’s like: there’s too much lefty bias in the Arts. Disgraceful.
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And then they proceed to explain why there should be right-wing bias in the Arts. Yawm!