As a bit of a follow up to the discussion of Germaine Greer’s latest book On Rage here, I was interested to see Gary Sauer-Thompson observe that most of the reaction (and there’s been tons of it) to her writing and various speeches and appearances in the press has completely avoided the issues she actually raises, and concentrated on interweaving loud denunciations of her - and claims that she’s irrelevant - with already well established “media narratives”. If she’s in fact got nothing of relevance to say, as one of our commenters observed, you have to wonder why all the energy expended.
Her book hasn’t hit the shelves in Brisneyland as far as I can tell, but I’m awaiting it with interest. There’s a taste of what’s to come at Public Opinion.
Update [by Kim]: Elsewhere, Legal Eagle agrees with Tracee Hutchison about Greer. I think the post is unfortunately all too typical of one of the weird confusions that swirl around Greer’s thought and indeed have a much broader contemporary purchase - that to explain something is to justify it. Greer appears to be setting out to explain Indigenous male rage. From what I’ve seen of her interviews over the last few days, she is insistent that this is not a justification. But apparently people either can’t understand that distinction, or believe that any reference to the origins of phenomena in Indigenous Australia in dispossession and colonisation signals justification. It does not. But it does indicate that we are not exempt from blame. Perhaps the demand that Indigenous people take responsibility, as I was arguing the other day, evades our own mutuality and our own responsibility, and as Greer has been suggesting, diminishes our humanity if we make it in the absence of providing the conditions of its possibility and understand that those conditions involve determinations made by communities whose freedom is a pre-condition of any successful partnership and any true reconciliation.
I liked her a lot better when she was an anarchist.
I’m not across what she’s said in the past about her political commitments. However, I thought what she meant when she said “I’m a Marxist” on Q&A was making an epistemological point - a materialist if you like who thought that ideas were secondary to economic conditions. Though she did certainly want to oppose all the “Marxists killed millions and therefore capitalism is teh excellent” bluster from Sheridan and Carr. There are of course a lot of other excellent reasons for doing that.
But I doubt that it makes any difference to assessing her views in “On Rage”.
(#1): Dude, I’m sure she’s crying into her pillow.
Yes it’s all very strange when you consider you have to be my age to even remember who she was and what she represented. To be quite frank on Q and A she came across as a typical middle age women articulator a pretty reasonable view. Another hunter gather culture fell as have many before. Those effected are pretty upset.
“To be quite frank on Q and A she came across as a typical middle age women [sic]articulator [sic] a pretty reasonable view.”
Yes, she’s intelligent, well-informed and thought provoking in the genuine sense, and how many other women-of-a-certain-age get to peform that job in the media. So the media doesn’t quite know how to deal with her. I’d prefer to sit next to her at a dinner party rather than, say, Bob Carr or, god forfend, Julie Bishop. Not because I’d agree with her every statement, but because she would provoke me to think about why I disagree. And when I do go to dinner parties, chances are I do sit next to someone who shares some of her opinions.
And she get’s even more attractive as she gets older. In Max Gillies/Guy Rundle’s ‘Your Dreaming’, Gillies portrayed her as very school maam’ish - very humorously (I laughed, I cried, but every moment was very, very special), but it only caught one aspect of her character. What it missed was her self-deprecating irony (humour) on the one hand, and her sexiness on the other.
I wonder what it is about Greer that makes people who’ve never met her or even read any of her books feel perfectly comfortable about making personal judgements of her personality, appearance and manner while completely ignoring her arguments.
She will be 70 next birthday, which means she’s probably moved on from ‘middle aged woman’ to ‘elderly woman’, an even more invisible and despised social/demographic category, and one even less expected to have the gall to express opinions and make judgements. I think the reason people have such extreme reactions to her is that she is so outrageously different from those stereotypes. This may be one reason why the Gillies/Rundle version was perhaps the least successful satire on a particular figure that I’ve ever seen them do, despite the prodigious gifts of both.
I think this is just a sort of hunch or a hypothesis, Dr Cat, but I suspect that Greer has a spectral double - “Greer” - or the figure that exists in the popular and media imagination. I’m not sure there’s much connection between the two, though there is obviously some. Clearly there’s an over-writing of her image with all sorts of gendered stereotypes, and I think that if this were to be teased out, the figure of the “feminist” would be somewhere near the heart of all this.
That’s one consideration - analysing why she creats such a stir (and I think Gary Sauer-Thompson has demonstrated it’s got something to do with listeners and readers as well as any possible intention of hers to stir the pot). Theoretically, at least, what she’s arguing should be separable from all these images, ghostings and projections. Maybe that’s a big ask for some people, but I think also they’re losing something in the process of not attending to what she actually has to say.
had a flick through of her book this evening at work… it is really small!
“I wonder what it is about Greer that makes people who’ve never met her or even read any of her books feel perfectly comfortable about making personal judgements of her personality, appearance and manner while completely ignoring her arguments.”
Four things immediately come to mind. 1. Her gender. 2. Her feminism 3. Her profession. 4. Her subject matter. We all know what some 60s feminist academic would say about women and blacks, so why bother reading it? Besides, she’s an old woman.
d
Aas far as I am concerned Greer is brilliant and far better than this hick country deserves as an ambassador.
More the same old, same old middle class dross attacking her, this time in the Age today, this time from yet another Hauseggar clone; Tracee Hutchinson. They are great in their coward’s castles- no linx provided for public feedback. They talk at you and down to you; never to you- but I’d rather one Germs than a trillion (hitchhikers guide…?) useless, stuck-up and vapid, opinionated media ornaments.
Of course, in this instance, she’s writing about Indigenous men.
‘…a materialist if you like who thought that ideas were secondary to economic conditions…’
Like Swifts Big-egg-enders and little-egg-enders? Or Medievalists arguing about angels on the heads of pins?
Seriously mate - if Marxism is the answer…then what was the question again?
An Aquarian Tiger no less!
The attacks on her after her piece on Steve Irwin were just unbelievable. John Birmingham produced the stereotypical misogynist, content-free rant, and it was noticeable how completely unwilling her “critics” were to actually engage with anything she said. I doubt anything better will be produced in the future, though there might be a little less extreme misogynist insults (”hag” indeed!). If ever one were wondering why intellectuals leave Australia, the treatment of Greer should answer all one’s questions.
Elsewhere, Legal Eagle agrees with Tracee Hutchison about Greer. I think the post is unfortunately all too typical of one of the weird confusions that swirl around Greer’s thought and indeed have a much broader contemporary purchase - that to explain something is to justify it. Greer appears to be setting out to explain Indigenous male rage. From what I’ve seen of her interviews over the last few days, she is insistent that this is not a justification. But apparently people either can’t understand that distinction, or believe that any reference to the origins of phenomena in Indigenous Australia in dispossession and colonisation signals justification. It does not. But it does indicate that we are not exempt from blame. Perhaps the demand that Indigenous people take responsibility, as I was arguing the other day, evades our own mutuality and our own responsibility, and as Greer has been suggesting, diminishes our humanity if we make it in the absence of providing the conditions of its possibility and understand that those conditions involve determinations made by communities whose freedom is a pre-condition of any successful partnership and any true reconciliation.
Heh. Indeed. My dad is an Aquarian Tiger and he’s just as scary as she is.
“Do you think that feminism was the most successful revolution of the 20th Century?” Carr: the capitalist triumph in China. blah blah blah capitalism is good, urbanisation is good for women. Sheridan: revolutions are ghastly. Murder! Genocide! Marxist regimes! Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot; Oh that’s right, we’re talking about feminism, feminism is not as bad as those other revolutions. Westbury: Ah, I, I, I,… some extent,… partially completed,… I think it’s, I don’t think, I don’t think,… necessarily… I like Greg actually. Bishop: the rise of democracies was the greatest change in the 20th Century, because… the power of the individual. Greer: …I believe in permanent revolution,… what has to happen is a constant process of criticism,… when people don’t have… enough to eat,… believe me, a capitalist revolution won’t do it for them….
Greer made more sense than all the rest of those clowns put together. But when asked about revolutions in the 20th Century nobody thought to mention the total dominance of the nation state, the hegemony of the United Nations and the sovereignty of its member states. Surely that has been a more successful revolution than “democracy” or “capitalism.”
Mind you, I shudder to think what we would have got from Sheridan and Carr if they had given us their opinions on feminism as opposed to blather about teh evils of Marxism and glories of democracy.
Sorry, I can’t get over the fact that people can’t work out why aboriginal culture, after two hundred years of forced absorption exclusively of the bad traits of western culture, combined with the worst traits of their own older culture, produces dysfuntional, psychotic elements whose behaviours are unconsciously performed by its victims in public view, like trained bears, for the incidental cynical amusement of Hansonist whites.
And I can’t get past the take of middle- class women (or male white thugs of the same profession) journalists and politicians in their Iago-esque blame-game reading of the current problems.
Must be careful here, for the benefit of those who have stuck out their necks to agree with Greer’s commonsense observations, against all this other despicable puffery trying to booster the neolib Abbotist/Pearsonist blame the victim reading and its dubious raisons detre.
Btw, there was a lengthy article by Greer in the SMH on August 2:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/a-look-at-the-rage-epidemic/2008/08/01/1217097533898.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap2
I can’t find anything in it that justifies what her “critics” have projected on to her.
Yes, the SMH article. Since am in a Shakespeare mood tonight will move from nauseating white Iagos to “Lear”, when the flawed hero complains on occasions about them making him mad. We know now, from the the example of Australian race relations, that it was only ever in the old boy’s head: same with his old mate with the eyeballs that we know now, just jumped out of their own volition
“.. Out thou jelly, etc…”; that was was just imaginary in his head, too!
Read our feathered friend’s take as recommended and found it stunningly insular and naive as well as disturbingly familiar.
It’s true that many blackpeople maybe could take a bit more responsibility forthemselves, but white society dares scarce point the finger at ANYONE, in ITS current state of deplorable denialism.
Dr. Cat and Mark @ # 6 & 7:
PC: “what it is about Greer that makes people who’ve never met her or even read any of her books feel perfectly comfortable about making personal judgements of her personality, appearance and manner while completely ignoring her arguments.”
Mark: “I suspect that Greer has a spectral double - “Greer” - or the figure that exists in the popular and media imagination. I’m not sure there’s much connection between the two, though there is obviously some.”
Wouldn’t you say that a person as savvy, artful and charismatic as Greer is, does the lion’s share of constructing their public image, esp. one so purposefully at odds with various orthodoxies? And that that image constitutes a sort of readable text, complementary to the written record? I’ve read only a smattering of say Norman Mailer, but I have an idea about the nature of his work and ‘thought’ (we’ll be generous today) and general direction that is probably not too far mistaken, based in large part on the way he cultivated his image and public antics. People who do this (and not everyone does, or with quite so much verve and articulation as the Greers and Mailers of the world) leave themselves open to the sorts of pre-judicial commentary and interpretation Dr. Cat notes, at least for purposes of forming a grounding or platform of criticism; whilst it may not be the most sober way in the world of proceeding, neither is it necessarily shallow or disingenuous. When an anonymous voice says, “Don’t do drugs,” you take it FWIW, as you’re inclined to read it. But if Lou Reed says “Don’t do drugs,” then at the very least, the mind is set a-turning. There’s an awful lot of backspin on that ball. It’s just the rules of the game.
Mark: “Clearly there’s an over-writing of her image with all sorts of gendered stereotypes…”
Another way of putting this might be: “Clearly there’s an interpretation of her image based on the pattern recognition capabilities of the human brain, with its 60,000+ years of acculturation, the reversal of which has been attempted over the course of the historical equivalent of a three-day weekend…”
Not sure about others, Mark.
But I read her “Quarterly Essay” a wile ago - White Fella Jump Up! - and thought it was a poor effort. (just briefly: unsubstantiated sweeping assertions, guesswork; I’d say it was poetics rather than serious policy work. She pontificated.)
I didn’t borrow that judgement from a review or an article in the newspaper, it was just my reaction to the words on the page. Of course I was aware that persons discuss her writings and TV appearances. just sayin’
I recognise her work has many admirers, but I think it’s too easy to dismiss her (possibly very few) critics as some kind of media creation. Of course, I don’t think she should shut up. Neither do I think her various critics should.
I think they’d be a very small minority PC. On the other hand there are plenty; I am one of them; who have read her articles and have criticised them and have faced the very same irrational “judgements”, from her acolytes that you deplore.
Totally agree with you. Greer’s theory of rage in the communities for the men who have been humiliated for more than 200 years holds water. It is a feature of many dysfunctional communities where normal hierarchies are torn apart. We see it in areas of high unemployment or in places ravaged by war and then occupied. Of course it isn’t an excuse and I don’t think she said it was. But if you understand it you can start to help people deal with it . The critics of Greer are angry at her because she confronts you with the question of who did this to the communities. All those stolen children, half castes or whatever we chose to call them were fathered by white men who raped and pillaged their way through the outback and then took no responsibility for the damage they caused. Now we do it as a nation. The children stolen were all those with non Aboriginal blood in them so their colour could be bred out. The rest of the theory was to just leave the full bloods to die out. A O Neville drove the policy in W A
When Greer or someone else raises uncomfortable matters we attack them.
You have to wonder about our media and the way it attacks people. Greg Sheridan has written two columns this week about Georgia which are so delusional as to have you wondering about the state of his mind. It is a distortion of how this thing started and only after digging around in Saturday’s SMH did I finally find a McGeough piece which set out what is happening. Why the Herald chose to bury it and instead run the Gerard Henderson piece which delivered no new information about John Howard is inexplicable. But the Australian allows the increasingly unhinged Sheridan drivel to appear while lining up as many journos as it can in a vendetta against Greer. Even Rosemary Neil who I thought was better than that made an extraordinary attack.
Thank goodness the blogs.
As I was just staying at Slim’s:
I read in The Australian some snide remark from a journalist who when he said he was sorry for interrupting Greer, at some function, she retorted ‘No you’re not’. Which was undoubtedly an accurate comment. He thought it necessary to report that she had made this remark with a ‘wine glass in her hand’. So you see, not only is she a woman and therefore wrong about everything, she’s also a drunkard.
I think the contempt between Greer and Australian journalists is mutual. Although I think she hates them more. They are thoroughly deserving of every spray of venom that comes their way.
I saw her being interviewed by Leigh Sales. Greer was clearly exasperated an exasperation that detracted from her argument. But she was quite right. This ‘get over it’ attitude that prevails in Australia is entirely heartless and ignorant.
(Luckily for Slim) I was just ’saying’ it.
“I’d say it was poetics rather than serious policy work”
With all due respect, Ambi, your criticism is a bit beside the point, because there is nothing in that essay claiming that is should be taken as ‘policy work’. Greer is clearly working at the level of a cultural politics, not at anything as concrete as policy. Having said that, there are still obvious problems with the essay.
I’d be interested in what you think those are, Klaus. I’m not suggesting that Greer’s essay is beyond criticism, just that it’s obvious given the gap between what she’s saying and what people think she’s saying shows that a lot of the criticisms are invalid.
One of the striking things - for me - Greer said on Lateline the other night was that the children who are the object of “protection” are the same people as those from whom they are being “protected”. Stats on std infections, which were referred to in one of the other threads, don’t just imply sexual abuse. It’s clear from the various reports and indeed from some cases from North Queensland which have gone to the courts that there is consensual sexual activity going on among Indigenous kids - some very young. The same of course is true with non-Indigenous kids - it’s well demonstrated that sexual activity is taking place at a much younger age than it was a couple of decades ago - but of course our response is different - fleeting, and displaced onto concerns about sexualisation in the media which may or may not have a causal role, but certainly not welfare quarantining and authoritarian “interventions”. That’s not to say that sexual abuse isn’t a problem, but its etiology - along with that of all forms of domestic violence - isn’t reducible to a lack of “responsibility” or “welfare dependency”. Greer, for me, has made a contribution to suggesting a broader understanding - and in fact a deeply political understanding - of why it might be occurring, which has the effect of calling into question some of the assumptions underlying policy.
I also think she shows that the “innocence” of children is something of a construct here - and one which has a logical tendency to lead to measures which in some ways have the same motivations as those which lead to the Stolen Generation.
I’m also fairly astounded that her statement of the fact that abuse begets abuse is taken as somehow outrageous - for instance in the post by Legal Eagle which has been linked here. I’d have thought it was:
(a) true and uncontroversial;
(b) suggestive that more is needed to break the cycle than demands for responsibility (which doesn’t mean that responsibility doesn’t need to be taken, but by all concerned, including us whitefellas).
j_p_z, I don’t know whether or not Greer consciously tries to shape her own image - at least beyond the obvious point that anyone who appears regularly in the media must be doing that to some degree. I can’t look inside her mind, but it seems to me that the bad press she constantly gets must say something about what she’s saying and how it’s received over and above any desire she might have to be provocative. For one thing, a lot of it must be exasperating and hurtful, and I think she’s demonstrated on occasion that it is. I doubt that anyone sets out consciously to be exasperated and hurt.
Onya, Mark, re 29: They never quarantined Indoorapilly and subjected the kids there to coerced physical examinations to see what turned up.
In fact, your whole top post just shows up so well what a despicable farce the thing has been from, all along.
Well, paul, the point could also be made that sexual abuse - and indeed high rates of sexual activity among young adolescents - also occur in middle class White Australia.
Mark, that is beyond naive. She is a professional contrarian and controversialist.
And she is good at it. So she gets the response she wants.
Give her the respect she deserves.
It’s hard to explain, then, GregM, her obvious frustration on Thursday night on Lateline.
Not at all, mark. All part of the act, which she does so well.
Did you watch it, GregM? I think in this instance cynicism is driving out observation.
That strikes me as an extraordinarily ungenerous interpretation of her. Does she aim to provoke discussion? Of course she does, but that’s not the same as being contrarian purely for the sake of it.
If she was just acting, she’d actually be better at handling the controversies to her advantage, more like Ann Coulter. I’m with Mark, her frustration at continued wilfully obtuse misinterpretations of what she’s actually saying is genuine, not an act.
Well that’s what Salman Rushdie thinks of her. As does any objective observer of her career.
And if she chooses to be be wilfully obtuse, which she does, because that’s part of her m.o., then you must expect wilfully obtuse interpretations (not misinterpretations) of what she is saying.
Mark, I’m working on some of the issues with ‘Whitefella Jump Up’ for a book chapter, although my head’s not really there at the moment to list criticisms as I’m busy on the thesis. What I’m interested in is the strategic redeployment by Greer of a fairly common figure in white Australian culture and literature in the last 100 years - that of the ‘white Aborigine’. Greer offers a particularly unreflective and explicit version of settler indigenization (a concept from Terry Goldie).
However, I agree with the thrust of your argument in this post and comments, and as you can see I’m starting from a quite different point in offering criticism. I haven’t teased out the implications of all of this yet, either.
Have you read the published responses to ‘Whitefella Jump Up’? I like Tony Birch’s. As he does elsewhere and with other authors, Birch picks up one of the visual metaphors - to do with looking in the mirror - and changes it in an interesting way.
“Obvious frustration” is one of her more time-worn media strategies. From the coruscating rancour directed at people stupid enough to think that the ghastly Bob Dylan is a “poet,” to the appalling pretensions of Richard Neville assuming he’s “famous,” to the disgraceful “good guy” eulogising of Steve Irwin, she is eternally - and strategically - frustrated. It’s become her schtick and as she’s aged, it has opened a whole host of new media opportunities - of the curmudgeonly old bluestocking genre - to add to her already crowded schedule. Indeed, she has been a featured performer on Brit TV’s “Grumpy Old Women,” has appeared as her obviously frustrated self in “Extras” and galumphed and harrumphed about as an unlikely – and obviously frustrated - milkmaid on “Celebrity Big Brother.”
She was as frustrated with Leigh Sales as she was with Andrew Denton and indeed Tony Jones on Q&A. She is perpetually frustrated.
Q&A was vintage Greer. Wave one’s arms about, roll one’s eyes and pull faces at the contribution of other panellists; pronounce “Ossetia” and “Shaskavilli” with what might pass as native-speaker enunciation (demonstrates superior cultural understanding and expertise) and avoid affirming anything anyone else might say. She is a study in calculated frustration.
In fact I love the way she demonstrates her superior knowledge. Memorably, in offering very rare congratulations to the stingray that took Irwin out, she insisted on using the correct genus descriptor, “Dasyatidae,” thereby establishing her superior zoological credentials and her manifest irritation at those who would see this heroic creature as just some weird, grouchy, flat fish.
I note that her publisher, Melbourne University Press, is billing, “On Rage,” as follows:
“Germaine Greer’s passionate and powerfully worded essay about Aboriginal rage is a provocation that will cause heated and intense debate.”
It seems a curious choice of words for one frustrated at being perpetually miscast as a provocateur but quite gratifying, I guess, if the reverse is the case.
On her essay, (which I’ve yet to read) I note, along with many others, that her thesis - that dispossesion and cultural deprivation provoke male rage - is scarcely new. Alan Duff’s “Once Were Warriors” explored this theme memorably as did Tom Keneally’s “The Chant Of Jimmie Blacksmith.” Arguably, Tennessee Williams’ Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar Named Desire” traverses the same territory from a class rather than an ethno-cultural perspective.
I’ll be interested to see what she has to say but some of the early out-takes – indigenous women could be perceived as colluding with the enemy - do sound like the sort of carefully planted literary landmines that can only result in the whole cycle of misunderstanding, frustration - and endless publicity - repeating itself. Poor Germaine.
Klaus, thanks for that - I haven’t read either Whitefella Jump Up! or any responses though.
I think it was on “Enough Rope” (or after…?) that Ms Greer made some observations on her treatment by the Australian media. She said that her reception in the Australian media is dominated by critique of her media relations, rather than the content of her material, and that this reception is unique to Australia. So in Australia her latest article will be portrayed (by otherwise “intelligent” (lol) journalists and theorists) as “attention-seeking” or similar; while in the UK the content of the article will be addressed.
I think the Australian media and academic establishment are so blinded by rage at/ envy of her that they just can’t engage with her ideas any more, whether or not those ideas are straightforward (Irwin), kooky (that weirdo book of nude boys) or stupid (insert random article I haven’t read). I wonder if this is why Peter Singer left Oz as well…?
“I wonder if this is why Peter Singer left Oz as well…?”
Or John Pilger who cops it with triple barrels.
Maybe Greg Sheridan and Bob Carr could move to London and see how they go as global public intellectuals?
“Maybe Greg Sheridan and Bob Carr could move to London and see how they go as global public intellectuals?”
I don’t recall either of them claiming to be public intellectuals, Mark, but it’s curious that you think that one needs to go to London to be one.
joe2, Peter Singer spent most of his career at Monash before he was offered a chair at Princeton in 1999 and John Pilger cops it with triple barrels regardless of his current geographical location.
I don’t think that, Geoff. I was being sarcastic.
Even if Greer actually approved that blurb (not especially likely from what I’m told of how publishing operates) it doesn’t necessarily follow that “provacateur” is necessarily the same as “contrarian”, which is the claim that was made. Provoking people to think of issues in different ways is a good thing, IMO.
As sg said, the Australian media almost never engages with the actual content of her writings. I certainly don’t think that she gets everything right, far from it (her opinions on transgender identity and intersex conditions I especially take issue with, along with some of her arguments re FGC) but I do think that there’s a lot of her writing that hits the nail squarely on the head, and that’s rarely acknowledged.
“However, I thought what she meant when she said “I’m a Marxist” on Q&A was making an epistemological point - a materialist if you like who thought that ideas were secondary to economic conditions.”
If she meant that why didn’t she use the term Marxian?
I really wish the media would stop giving Germaine Greer oxygen by publishing her opinions on subjects she clearly knows little about, but the media loves people of the Greer/Ruxton/Hanson variety because they generate heat and sell copy.
Geoff, I’m not so sure that Pilger cops it with triple barrels so much in the UK. Maybe double.
Ok, so here we have steve munn’s sockpuppet, Lord Sir etc., comparing Greer with Pauline Hanson and Bruce Ruxton.
Maybe it’s someone who feels compelled to make risible comments like this who’s the contrarian and the provocateur in the bad senses of both words? It’s such a self-evidently wrong analogy that it can only be designed to rile people. Not playing, sorry.
Greer’s bizarre and ill-informed swipe at a recently deceased Steve Irwin was every bit as crazy as Ruxton and Hanson’s rantings. Greer’s antics of Big Brother were, well, ineffable.
There’s nothing particularly bizarre about what Greer wrote about Irwin, which can be found here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/sep/05/australia
She’s arguing that a certain over-confident masculinity characteristic of the “Aussie larrikin” demonstrating mastery over the animal world is dangerous. How does that constitute “rantings”? I think a lot of the reaction had to do with the “speaking ill of the recently dead” thing, not with the substance of what she had to say. Which you don’t bother to address.
I think a lot of the tossers who diss Greer just want to make their own little minds seem bigger than they are. Ultimate tall poppy syndrome.
What special insight can you give us on what she wrote about the Bali dead, and those still dying as she wrote her piece, Kim?
My own take on it was that it was a peculiar piece of filth without any substance and I think a lot of the tossers who support Greer just want to make their own little minds seem bigger than they are. Ultimate wankers.
The link can be found here: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/10/21/1034561443711.html
Just a few details dragged over from my comments on LE’s post (and expanded somewhat):
1. Australia treats its genuinely eccentric intellectuals shockingly - that’s why they leave. Boiler-plate intellectuals like Craven or Manne are fine (that’s why they don’t leave). Oddballs like Greer are doomed.
2. An Australian intellectual who chooses to leave Australia needs to realise that ‘ex-pat’ status means Australians will probably react badly to any commentary on the old ‘home’. Greer is very English in the way she engages (including the talent for confected outrage Geoff pointed out above). I do think she has become much more English as time has passed, with the inevitable consequence that Australians react to her as a ‘bloody Pom’.
3. It’s very easy to get out of touch with a place when you’re away from it. I’ve found this when I’ve been living away from Australia - things get harder and harder to grasp, people change etc. I fully expect my ability to make intelligent remarks about Australia will have evaporated within the next five years.
4. I did notice some fairly basic errors in Greer’s piece for the SMH and subsequent interview. Clarence Thomas wasn’t the first black justice on the SCOTUS, Thurgood Marshall was. Bob Katter has no base in the NT that I’m aware of, although Jacques Chester may be able to advise otherwise.
SL, yes there are some errors - or apparent errors anyway - which may indeed be a product of distance. But I don’t think they necessarily invalidate the broader argument as they don’t seem to me to be central to it.
Btw, the thread on LE’s post is an interesting one - comments are worth reading:
http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2008/08/what-has-happened-to-greers-feminism/#comments
GregM, I hadn’t read that piece before. I’m not setting myself up as a “defender” or “supporter” of Greer’s. I am pointing out that she makes arguments which are worth discussing - whereas the evidence on this thread appears to be that those who don’t like her want to ignore that and abuse her personally, make silly analogies, or suggest all sorts of things about her motives. Calling an article a “peculiar piece of filth” hardly establishes anything about its merits.
The article seems to me to reflect an isolationist streak which is there in Australian culture, and also to put forward a view that was widespread at the time - that our involvement with Bush and his “war on terror” may have put our citizens at risk from terrorism, and that there was no good reason for that involvement. An awful lot of Australians shared that view. Again, you seem to be upset by the timing - “lay dying” etc. On this basis, I can’t understand how you could support any publication of any opinion at the time of Bali or s11, unless what you really mean is that any opinion departing from the government approved view somehow insults the dead or dying. That strikes me as an absurdity.
There is an argument in this piece as well, and not one I’d endorse in toto, but it’s there. But you respond with hyperbole and put downs. Again, less is said about Greer and rationality here than about her critics.
The Thomas error is fairly telling, Kim - she clearly knows little or nothing about him. Much of his rage came about because employers assumed his Yale JD was the product of affirmative action, when he actually achieved the appropriate entry requirements and did not require ’special consideration’ on the basis of race. Discrimination against affirmative action recipients is actually economically rational (ie, employers stand to win in the long run). Ordinary taste-based discrimination (aka bigotry) by contrast is irrational; in the long run employers who do it will take a hit to the bottom line.
Well, that’s a difference of opinion about AA and rationality you have with Greer, isn’t it, SL, rather than an error she made? The actual error - about Thomas being the first rather than Marshall - doesn’t seem to me to be a material one, though if she’s writing in major newspapers, she should check her facts (and so should editorial staff!)…
No Kim. You are transparently setting yourself up as supporter of Greer, and uncritically so.
How you can find anything in Greer’s piece as being about Australian isolationism is quite beyond me. A large part is a diatribe about Australia’s all to ready willingness to get involved in the disputes of others.
Also at the time the issue of Australia’s involvement in Bush’s “war on terrorism” was hardly a factor. Just about every other Western country and a good few more, had committed to supporting that. Australians knew that, as the Bali bombers later confirmed, this was payback for our intervention in East Timor.
It is too late tonight but tomorrow I will take you, point by point, through the piece of trash, which I may add is illustrative of Greer’s scholarship generally, to demonstrate its factual errors, simple untruths and mendacious and meretricious reasoning to establish its complete lack of any merit.
Not that I think for a moment that that that will shift you for a moment from being an uncritical and unthinking supporter of hers.
Oh, and btw, wrt the whole “provocation” and “attention seeking” thing, I don’t exclude that as being part of her m.o. but so what? Lots of people who want to occupy space in the media have to pimp themselves - it seems as if it’s only the women who do so who get attacked. Which brings me to my second point - it seems that Greer inspires a bit of rage in white blokes too. Ironic, heh?
However, I don’t buy the whole “speaking ill of the dead” totally or “being a critic at a time of a national catastrophe” criticism at all really.
Irwin was a very public figure. His pseudo-canonisation was a public event. My main concern here would be the privacy of his family, though the later schlepping of Bindi around the world suggests that may not always have been theirs.
Certainly you might find it easier to get noticed making a statement such as the one she did immediately after the Bali bombings. But as I said, it didn’t stop lots of other opinionators and pollies, and there were elements of exploitation there too. Insofar as it was a public event of importance, putting a contrary view, which can be argued (even if one doesn’t agree with the argument), and I think, expressing aspects of what was subsequently demonstrated to represent a majority sentiment despite the best efforts of John Howard to turn it around, plays a valuable public role. I wonder how committed some of Greer’s detractors are to even a thin notion of free speech.
He’s been badly taken out of context, even used to support a position that is anathema to him, that’s what I’m saying; this is along with the basic factual error. I must admit when I saw that - along with the comments about Katter - I formed the view that the piece is poorly researched and exists mainly to generate confected controversy, rather than make any substantive contribution to debate.
The hysteria is made worse thanks to Greer’s expat, English status: Australians will grab the ring (look at the hysterical, multi-article response in the Australian for one) and get to be ‘wounded’; Greer then gets to be ‘wounded’ in return.
Ok, take that point, SL. But I still don’t think it establishes she’s being disengenuous. Not everyone knows a lot about the Clarence Thomas story. Having said that, if she’s going to write about it, she should find out.
I read Greer differently. As clarification, I only read her essay On Rage and didn’t see her on Q&A. From that alone, I took a particular interpretation of what she was saying. I’m obviously not alone: Tracee Hutchinson had the same reading as I. It may well be that Greer meant something quite different by her essay, but in that case, she needs to revise it to prevent misunderstanding.
My reading was that she was not only explaining indigenous male violence (in my opinion, a perfectly valid explanation of why indigenous society has turned out the way it has), but I also saw her as excusing certain conduct. So she says in On Rage:
I read this as an excuse for violence by indigenous men towards indigenous women who had already suffered violence and rape at the hands of white men, and it made me mad. I also read her comments as a broader sweeping assumption that it was unreasonable to expect indigenous men to contain their rage, and it is thus understandable that violence is perpetrated against women and children. This seemed to remove individual responsibility from the man and make it into someone else’s problem.
I’m not saying that indigenous people have to take individual responsibility for all their problems all by themselves. It’s impossible to resolve these problems without (a) proper government support, resources, health care etc. and (b) community consultation of indigenous communities as to what their needs actually are. The Behrendt piece nicely illustrates that an “individual responsibility” approach which fails to deal with other problems such as health and quality education is destined to fail. But I think that if someone hits his wife (regardless of what colour or ethnicity he is), he has to acknowledge that he is responsible for that action, and that ultimately, he is the only one who can prevent himself from committing future acts of the same kind.
Further I should say that I’m not diametrically opposed to Greer on principle. I take each piece as it comes. I didn’t like her Irwin piece much (too much like speaking ill of the dead before the body has even cooled) but I must confess that I tend to agree with her assessment of Princess Di…
As one of her detractors, Kim, I’ve a very sound notion of it. She has a perfect right to mouth any nonsense she wants and I am perfectly free to to denounce the nonsense she mouths for the nonsense it is. That is free speech, hers and mine. It’s two way street. I wonder how committed some of Greer’s supporters who have trouble with that are to even a thin notion of free speech.
No, Greg M.
Kim is not “biased toward Greer”, she is a balanced, rational, educated and intelligent woman who can recognise the truth when she reads, hears or sees it.
I want to ask certain wolves in sheeps clothing why they feel the need to alibi and obscure the crippling psychic damage done to indigenes by white settlement, and this urge to provide virtual Aztec type human sacrifices to moralistic reductionist blackletter legal interpretations of complex situations.
For example,I see the Sceptic Lawyer has visited the site. She probably recalls my clumsy post to her site where I suggested her naivety. Her response was unequivocal.
But nonetheless she is fundamentally following the Leigh Sales lead in reducing the problem of the NT Intervention to naughty black men being wilfully bad.
The misconception rests on the acceptance the NT Intervention was not first and formost a politically motivated stunt predicated on a smear against black victims male and female, rather than something that occurred out of genuine concern for the weaker members of a dysfunctional sub group. But why have people forgotten The Little Children are Precious” report, or pondered why an effort had not been in the years since Wik and Mabo, rather than the wilfully destructive policies of those largely Howardist years?
There is a clear disagreement between certain bloggers and certain other later-day Rev.Samuel Marsden types, as to comprehension or lack of it, of the severity of damage done to black males as well as other black people. Instead, we get this fierce and terrible middle class hunt for scapegoats based on an unquestioning acceptance of Howardist framing of the issue, as exclusively discrete aboriginal wilfull male naughtiness, and is evidence of the continued avoidance of a recognition of the severe undermining effect of white colonisation right up until now.
Fortunately, Greer, Mark, Kim and others DO recognise an effect of white brutality and neglect in the creation of dysfunctional people and their behaviours, for whom the normal expectations of middle class colonial law might not necessarily be appropriate. It is more likely that these could have applied in the case of the police seagent who was let off after brutally murdering an aborigine at Palm Island.
The Sceptic Lawyer, Albrechtsen-like, dismissed the above as “victimology” in the Legal Eagle thread, but I’d love to see what shape this individual would have ended up in had they had to grow up in some of these chaotic environments, rather than her own probably privileged one.
A bit of humanity, please!
GregM, what I’m suggesting that whatever else “a peculiar piece of filth” might be as a characterisation of Greer’s article, it’s not an argument. It’s obviously very affect-laden.
Wrt to your comment about a critique of that article, of course, I will reserve judgement until you have the chance to write it on the morrow and I to read it. But I would point out two things:
(a) Simply agreeing with John Howard that “the War on Terror didn’t put Australians in danger” is not proving anything - because he had a political barrow to push, and it’s been contradicted by many people who know something about all this without the political baggage of having to justify the Iraq War - most recently, Martin Indyk, for instance;
(b) As I recall, nothing was known about the motives of the Bali bombers at the time.
As you’ve pointed out, Greer’s article was an instant response. So you’d need to remember that it was written contemporaneously and therefore to show that she got things wrong or argue that she did with reference to subsequent events and disclosures proves nothing, because she couldn’t by definition have known any more than anyone knew on 22 October 2002, and anything that transpired subsequently.
Secondly, I’m not sure that op/eds written by academics are necessarily to be judged by academic standards. Partly because they’re opinion, and secondly because of their nature as interventions in current political debates, rather than reports on research written over a long period of time and under the discipline of peer review. I don’t think Greer was writing with her academic hat on (as she is with her work on Shakespeare’s wife, for instance). Now you can of course say that she’s “outside her field” but what I see her as doing in these sort of things is cultural commentary. In other words, I think it’s an intervention by a citizen not from a professorial chair.
LE, thanks for commenting around here! As SL said, we’re getting a bit of blog drift, so I’ll just link to my comment at your place:
http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2008/08/what-has-happened-to-greers-feminism/#comment-13874
… and ask people to read subsequent comments and note that we end up in agreement about most stuff other than Germaine on this occasion!
LegalEagle, rather than reading it as an excuse, why don’t you 1) put it back into the context of the entire article where it belongs, and then 2) attempt to answer the question?
The man in the example couldn’t either. So what’s the current political solution? Take away his alchol, that’ll do the trick! Might even shift the focus from cause to effect…hang on, didn’t Greer make that point a few times earlier in the article? What happens when you ONLY deal with effects?
It’s nothing to do with excusing personal responsibility - it’s about not excusing political irresponsibility. Especially that which, for its own convenience, played the victim cards in the first place.
SL, I don’t think she took him badly out of context at all - citing Thomas invited you to explore the contradictions and nature of the turmoil borne in a man who’s been such a strong and widely recognised advocate of individual responsibility.
I’ll have some fun and suggest the factual error was a clue. Like when the bell rings in Eastwood’s Mystic River to tell you who the murderer was, fifteen minutes or so into the film. But that’s just me
though I think there’s more than one pitfall written into the article.
Kim, Re 67,
The feathered advocate once mediated my way on a discussion some time back involving either Greg or Jack G, I think.
Am also aware that this poster is likely motivated by the plight of the helpless and is likely influenced to passionate advocacy at the thought of the worst of the violence and pain.
The fact that Germs at the age of 70 or so is still capable of getting the establishment’s knickers in a knot, I think says more about the establishment’s crustiness than her crabbiness.
If she had a dick, she’d be getting the VS Pritchett or Naipaul treatment by now.
I don’t agree with everything she says but who else these days is stirring the possum with such worldy and earthy yet bulging cranium style?*
*Graeme Bird and his immediate family are restricted by the Victorian Lottery Act 1996 from responding to this question for profit or gain.