Published in Culture,
Economics,
Feminism,
Foreign Elections,
History,
Media,
Polls,
Poverty,
Race,
Religion,
Sociology,
The Web and
USA .
Writing in Salon, Gary Kamiya describes the near hysteria to which “movement conservatives” are reduced in confronting a likely Obama victory:
…typical of the Limbaugh-inflected (or infected) movement as a whole is the apocalyptic attitude of right-wing columnist Mark Steyn, who thundered that an Obama victory “would be a ‘point of no return,’ the most explicit repudiation of the animating principles of America.”
The ludicrous hyperbole of such Jeremiads is self-refuting. Americans are desperate to fix their economy, end a ruinous, endless war and restore a sense of common purpose to civic life. As they face these challenging real-world goals, the abstract buzzwords trotted out by the right ring hollow.
Of course, Obama hasn’t won the election yet, and it’s vaguely possible that he may not, though highly unlikely if the polls are taken into account.
Kamiya’s analysis of the internal contradictions of the American right is sharp, and it’s certainly true that the movement conservatives’ dogmatic bag of tricks isn’t holding up too well in confrontation with reality. (And there’s some amusement to be gained from observing the cognitive dissonance in the right wing blogosphere.) But I wonder whether the implication - drawn by some - that an Obama victory would represent an epochal end to the culture wars craziness is overstated.
Obama’s election would, more than almost any other Democratic candidate, represent the long-overdue crushing of the barely-disguised racist “Southern Strategy” pursued by the GOP since the time of Richard Nixon. In doing so it would also represent the effective end of the Christian Right as a driving force in US governmental politics.
Continue reading ‘Exit Nixonland, stage left?’
Bruce Moore’s new book, Speaking Our Language: The Story of Australian Language got a fair bit more press coverage - in the news pages as opposed to the reviews sections - than is usual for a tome authored by an academic. And why not? It’s a lively read, and one that is likely to inspire a lot of curiosity and interest above and beyond the questions of whether Ned Kelly spoke with an Irish or an Australian accent and whether talking like Alexander Downer and Crocodile Dundee at opposite ends of the accent pole is on the way out.
What I found most interesting about Moore’s work was the close attention he gives to the intimate links between language, place and culture. (Incidentally, there’s something of a moral here about how cultural studies first arose - a tale told neatly by Raymond Williams in Writing in Society - as a counterpart to the separation of supposedly timeless aesthetic qualities from their social contexts.) Moore tracks the creation of new words, shifts in meaning and the appropriation of Indigenous names to the distinctive geographical and social formations of a culture forged by the interplay between colonisation, landscape and dispossession. The ups and downs of the reputation of Australian English follow the ebb and flows of nationalism, particularly as related to Britain and the idea of Empire.
Moore is well placed to communicate the results of recent academic research on the origins of accents - dispelling misconceptions about the putative derivation of the Australian accent from “Cockney” (he demonstrates in passing that “Cockney” didn’t mean what we think it means in the Nineteenth Century) intermingled with Irish forms of speech. After all, as he argues, the population composition of all the British outposts in the Southern hemisphere was quite similar - yet very distinct accents developed in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the Falklands. He draws on research done in New Zealand to establish that new accents form through a process of selection among children of the second generation. Continue reading ‘Australian accents: Speaking Our Language‘
Well, I shelled out $24.95 for David Marr’s book, The Henson Case. I’m still inclined to think that Marr is being a bit disingenuous in claiming that he’s horrified and surprised by the furore that’s arisen over the “scouting in schools” affair/beat up and I still think it raises some broader questions about the appropriateness of the use of schools for any commercial/culture industries purposes, but that horse has probably bolted now. I’m not sure everyone’s aware that this particular media storm didn’t arise via some journo or researcher for tv or radio pouring over the book and striking headline paydirt on p. 108. Marr was actually the first to highlight this aspect of the book, featuring it in an article he wrote for his own Sydney Morning Herald on Friday - tagged as an exclusive. The book wasn’t on sale on Monday, and advance copies would have been tightly controlled by his publisher prior to that - I can’t see Alan Jones or Andrew Bolt or whoever being on Text Inc’s reviewers list.
I really don’t think Marr is so naive as to believe that others in the media wouldn’t pick up on that one aspect and make it into a very predictable story - as a senior journalist, and a former host of Media Watch, and incidentally someone who traces minutely and with great acuity the process by which the Henson story blew up in the first place (and displays an intimate knowledge of pr strategies) in his book. While Pavlov’s Cat has a lot of things to say that I agree with in this excellent post, I would respectfully disagree with her argument that Marr, publisher Michael Heyward and Text Inc. wouldn’t be attentive to the need for publicity for the book. Sure, Marr’s a very well known writer and the case was big news. But attention spans are short, and surely the whole point of marketing in book publishing is to create a buzz about a book and generate free publicity. When I bought it on Monday in a Brisbane CBD bookshop, it had been walking out the door and I was lucky to grab the last copy.
Continue reading ‘The Henson Case and David Marr’
I recently heard Hugh Mackay give a talk on his forthcoming book, Advance Australia…Where?. Amongst his many claims was the idea those thirstysomethings and fortysomethings without children are becoming increasingly separated from those with them. To paraphrase, the child-free find the child-inflicted’s endless stories about their children’s bowel movements incredibly dull, the child-blessed find their child-deprived peers’ endless jaunts rather self-indulgent.
But it was not until Melbourne Business School economics professor and econoblogger Joshua Gans sent me his latest book Parentonomics to review that this point really sank home. Intellectually, I can imagine myself in his shoes. But the issues about which he writes are ones I haven’t directly experienced since I went through them from the other end of the stick.
Continue reading ‘Parentonomics’
In The Blogging Revolution Antony Loewenstein takes us on a personal journey through some of the more difficult places in the world to blog. Iran, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and China.
It’s a timely book on the importance and necessity of blogging and the open web given recent un-informed opinions by writers like Christian Kerr.
The book is also important in that it more thoroughly expands on ideas expressed in David Burchell’s clumsy opinion piece in the Australian in July of this year where he attempted to contrast the “pseudo-expertise and vituperation” of Western bloggers with their counterparts in the less democratic corners of the world; using Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez as an example.
The most impressive thing about Sanchez is her complete disregard for the bad habits of Western bloggers. She refuses to engage in histrionics, vainglory, pseudo-knowledge or personal posturing. Instead she trades in the gentler arts of allegory and satire.
Sanchez is also mentioned in The Blogging Revolution and Burchell is right. She does not engage in the histrionics of so many Western bloggers (mea culpa) but then again our personal circumstances are different to those that live in repressive states.
Are critics like Burchell and Kerr right? Are non-Western bloggers really better than their western counterparts? Are they less vituperative and undergraduate in their opinion? Does living in an information poor society mean that their views can be nothing more than that of a pseudo-expert? What do non-Western bloggers sound like? The Blogging Revolution gives us a peek behind the government filters.
Continue reading ‘Holidays in blogging hell’
Published in Anzac Day,
Australiana,
Books, Writers & Writing,
Culture,
Ethics,
History,
Indigenous,
Markets,
Media,
Nationalism,
Philosophy and
Politics .
At one stage, having read a lecture by Mark Davis in Overland, I thought his new book was going to be an update of Gangland. I’ve just started reading The Land of Plenty: Australia in the 2000s (expect a full review in due course), but it appears very much as if at some point in the course of writing, it turned into an update of the late Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country. Certainly the idea that we’re coasting on our luck, riding on the back of another resources boom, is both enough to set in train a comparison between the Australia of 1964 and the nation of 2008 and to recognise a powerful structure of feeling which Kevin07 articulated all the way to the Lodge.
One of the more interesting arguments Davis makes in the opening chapter is that “being Australian is an ethical project”. He quotes Nettie Palmer, writing in Meanjin in 1944:
A new country that is merely an imitation of its predecessors, that discovers no new thoughts or forms, that contributes nothing to the meaning of the world - would it deserve to exist?
In a way, the dislocations and the sense of insecurity Davis seeks to trace over the past three decades reflect a disjunction between the nation and the state - a disjunction embodied in the casual bipartisanship of the major parties, even if some of the wellsprings of everyday doubt and pain were harnessed by Kevin Rudd and Labor in 2007. If one were to compare political ideologies, both conservatism and social democracy - in quite different ways - want to see the state as a vehicle for creating meanings and symbols, for fostering a shared and collective culture. One looks back, the other forward, but it’s characteristic of both to regard governance as something like steering a ship - while one may tack often, there’s an intention of heading in a determined direction.
Liberalisms of almost all stripes are quite hostile to the idea of a collective vision realised through the state. Continue reading ‘Advance Australia Fair?’
Published in Activism,
Australiana,
Authoritarianism,
Books, Writers & Writing,
Brisbane,
Culture,
History,
Life,
Media,
Photography,
Queensland and
Urbanism .
Photo credit: me. A larger version of the image can be seen here by clicking on full view once inside the gallery.
The latest issue of Griffith REVIEW - Hidden Queensland - touches on a number of subjects close to my heart. In framing the issue, editor Julianne Schultz opens her introduction with a quote from a “well-connected insider” who expressed puzzlement in the lead up to the 2007 federal election - what did he know of Kevin Rudd and the rest of the crew from the North who might soon be moving into the Canberra corridors of power? Had they been from Melbourne, Sydney or “even Adelaide”, they’d have been on the radar. But what had been happening to transform a bastion of illiberality into the new centre of the “reforming Centre” in the two decades when he hadn’t been looking?
Continue reading ‘Hidden Queensland: Griffith REVIEW’
Well, as I noted on another thread about Germaine Greer, I’ve bought and now read On Rage. I’d like this post to stick to discussion of the merits of her arguments, which I continue to think has been something largely absent from most of the debate to date. I also think that very few people who’ve rushed into print have actually read her book, and instead taken the odd comment here or there that she’s made in the course of promoting it and projected all sorts of things onto her.
Even those who have seem to be reacting to parts instead of the whole - for instance, Marcia Langton, describing the remarks about her in the book as an “astonishing attack on me”. That’s quite odd, because Langton is being challenged rather than attacked in the book - challenged to agree with Greer’s view that - on the basis of the evidence - the literal appropriation of Indigenous women’s bodies by white men, something Greer documents with footnoted citations from both historians and contemporary sources - is part of the reason for Indigenous male rage. All the rest of what Langton says - accusations of “a 1970s style argument”, a “panoply of protest slogans deployed as social theory” and so on - unless I’m missing something, appears misdirected, or at least based on inference rather than the text itself. On p. 88 of the book, any reasonable reader would see that Langton is not the one being accused of “collusion” with the state, what she took umbrage at, and that in fact the point being made is that the differential impacts of gender on the colonised is still used by whitefellas as a lever to avoid responsibility and to divide people. There’s a disagreement of view, but not an accusation, and it hardly justifies Langton’s claim that the essay is “racist”.
What Greer is doing in On Rage is a provocation to the degree that it’s asking a range of people differently positioned within Australian culture to reflect on the totality of what has occurred and how ineffectual slogans are - and there are slogans within the talk of the “responsibilities” crew as well - in the absence of both understanding and a genuine coming to terms with the parade of extraordinary horrors that is the story of Indigenous dispossession. Greer’s essay doesn’t make for comfortable reading, and that’s the point. Langton may be justified in taking umbrage at some of the things Greer has said in the course of promoting it, and I can quite understand that, but I think in this instance it’s vital to separate the force and quality of the argument in the text itself from the personality of its author. Much of what has been published and said elsewhere, for instance in Greer’s Sydney Morning Herald op/ed adds to (and in a way detracts from) the argument in the book, rather than reproduces it. Greer might be her own worst enemy in this case, but that doesn’t absolve her interlocutors from reacting with their own rage, or at least spleen.
Continue reading ‘On Rage: Germaine Greer reviewed’
Here’s another don’t waste your $34.95 book review, and for many of the same reasons as Mark identified as failures in an earlier 2007 federal election tome from Melbourne University Press - Christine Jackman’s Inside Kevin07.
If anything, Peter Van Onselen and Philip Senior’s Howard’s End: The Unravelling of a Government is an even more tedious read. That might have been evident from the fact that even the now obligatory astroturf “news” stories about the book couldn’t find too much in the way of “shock! horror!” type “revelations” to excerpt, as I observed at the time.
The blurb claims:
In the tradition of Pamela Williams’ The Victory, Howard’s End analyses and makes sense of the result and its far-reaching implications for the people of Australia.
Well, that might indeed be a worthy aim, but the problem is that the book doesn’t do much analysis, and very little sense-making and if there’s anything in it about the implications for the people of Australia as opposed to the future of the Liberal party (such insight filled gems as “rebuilding the Liberal Party after the 2007 federal election defeat was always going to be difficult…”) I’ve completely missed them.
If political journalism is supposed to be the first draft of history, this is apparently the first draft of the first draft. Through 192 pages, the book tediously recounts the events after Rudd’s ascension to the Labor leadership on an almost week by week basis. Mungo McCallum did much the same thing, but at least it was funny. If you’re looking for a reminder of the interminable “perpetual campaign”, then probably you’re pushing the tragic in political tragic a bit further than it normally should go, but you might do better to read Mungo, or indeed click on the archive of this blog. There’s only so much interest in reading exactly what John Howard announced about training policy on day whatever of the campaign, or what Rudd said in a press conference whenever in May. It reads as if someone’s sat down with a stack of newspapers and paraphrased the tedium of day to day political reporting.
But it gets worse. Continue reading ‘Howard’s End: not E. M. Forster but Van Onselen and Senior’
Hunter S. Thompson, who’s repeatedly if repetitiously quoted in Christine Jackman’s Inside Kevin07: The People. The Plan. The Prize., would be turning in his grave.
I’m unable to think of any good reasons for parting with $34.95 for Jackman’s book, which is touted as the ultimate insider account of the Labor Party’s campaign strategy in the lead up to last year’s federal election. As noted previously at this blog, any juicy tidbits have already been extracted in the News Limited papers, and the non-story of Peter Costello’s alleged popularity is still rumbling meaninglessly on as I write. (Incidentally, the fact that quite a bit of research mentioned in the book showing Costello as electoral poison wasn’t selected for “news” stories tells a bit of a tale in itself.)
The book’s importance - insofar as it has any - lies in what is in effect an auto-critique of the standard of political journalism in contemporary Australia, in what its publication says about the strategies of university presses and particularly MUP, and in whether it actually adds fuel to the fire of the “hollowmen” narrative of colourless political apparatchiks it tries to counter. Let’s take those in reverse order.
Continue reading ‘Inside Kevin07′
Other aspects of World Youth Day 2008 have been discussed in previous posts which can be accessed here. In this post, I’d like to concentrate on why it is being held in Sydney at all.
Dr Paul Collins is probably one of the best known commentators on Catholic affairs in Australia. A former priest, he had his own run in with Cardinal Ratzinger and the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith a few years ago, which didn’t stop him from writing a rather upbeat assessment of the prospects of Pope Benedict XVI’s papacy in God’s New Man. Some of the hopes he had in 2005 have now dissipated and he takes a rather jaundiced view of the Church’s prospects in his new book - Believers: Does Australian Catholicism Have a Future?
Collins is on the “progressive” wing of the Church, and to pose the question in the terms he does implies a view that Catholicism in Australia is in crisis. But it’s worth noting that view is firmly shared by the conservatives, and in fact World Youth Day’s Australian sojourn is supposed to be a big part of the cure for the faith’s ills.
Continue reading ‘What is the purpose of World Youth Day?’
Recent comments
David Rubie, Paul Burns, Brian, David Irving (no relation), kymbos, kymbos [...]
Adrien, Katz, Paul Burns, Kingsley, Mark, Liam [...]
Ambigulous, Adrien, Liam, Mark, Liam, Paul Burns [...]
Paul Burns, David Rubie, Mark, Brian, Paul Burns, Baraholka [...]
equaseks, Peter Wood, Mark, Peter Wood, Peterc, Tim Macknay [...]
Adrien, Legal Eagle, Michael Sutcliffe, Mark, Tyro Rex, Adrien [...]
Ambigulous, dylwah, murph the surf, wizofaus, David Rubie, Mindy [...]
jrbarch, Mindy, Mark, Mark, Leon, Derek [...]
Mindy, Admin!!! HELP!!!, FDB, David Rubie, FDB, David Rubie [...]
Ambigulous, suz, Colin, un ami des beaux arts, adrian, suz [...]
Bilko, Paul Burns, Dave Bath, Bilko, Nabakov, Adrien [...]
RobWindt, Pappinbarra Fox, Ai! Que Dolor!, Patrick B, peter jones, Paul Burns [...]