Tag Archive for 'Culture Wars'

“The gloves are off”

Published
by
Mark
1 day, 10 hours ago
in Economics, Foreign Elections, Markets, Sociology and USA
. 79 Comments

The McCain campaign has gone into full on negative smear mode, with Governor Sarah Palin playing the traditional attack role of the Vice-Presidential candidate.

Apparently Obama has been consorting with terrorists, because he once knew a member of the Weathermen (long afterwards and when Bill Ayers had become an educator and a Distinguished Professor at the University of Chicago). All these allegations were aired during the primaries - and no doubt the Rev. Wright stuff is being readied for an encore. Reading this article on the campaign in Florida really does show how much dissemination the loathsome “Muslim sleeper” stuff is getting as well, and Palin’s attack on Obama as some sort of terrorist sympathiser will reinforce that theme among those disposed to believe it, or to have doubts.

Continue reading ‘“The gloves are off”’

Bill Henson, visual shock and the democratisation of art

Published
by
Mark
1 day, 13 hours ago
in Art, Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, Ethics, Media, Photography, Politics and Sociology
. 13 Comments

As no doubt everyone has noticed, there has been a vigorous discussion in comments about the latest Bill Henson brouhouha. I don’t want to comment explicitly on the issues raised by David Marr’s “revelation” that Henson had visited a primary school in St Kilda to scout for subjects for his photographs, because I honestly don’t think the debate’s much advanced over the last round, which was covered very extensively here at LP in a series of posts, and I haven’t shifted my own view. Except to note that I agree that David Marr is probably the person who should be brought to task for dealing unethically with Henson in his rush to find a salacious story to publicise his book, which was released today. I’m sure we’re quite sensitised now to the confection of “news” to help book sales after the unending Peter Costello sales job. As a professional journalist of long standing, Marr knows better than most how to manipulate a story, and perhaps it’s the ethics of his dealing with his subject that should also be questioned.

I did want to talk about one comment which really goes to the heart of the bigger issues around Henson’s art and his professional practice - and which when viewed from a long term perspective, I think explains more of what’s going on than the framing of the previous debate in terms of “freedom of speech”. Alison Croggon, who organised the petition to Kevin Rudd about Bill Henson’s images some time ago when they were seized by police from the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Paddington, had this to say:

Alison Croggon, who organised an open letter supporting Henson from cultural delegates to the 2020 Summit, said the controversy also exposed distrust of the arts community.

“The thing that shocked me most of all about the debate was the perception that artists were above the law or were asking for special exemptions, but that was never the case,” she said. “There is a responsibility in the artistic community to address that.”

It has, of course, been addressed to some extent with the development of guidelines for artists working with minors by the Australia Council, after a request from Arts Minister Peter Garrett. But that, of course, is not as salacious a topic for the media than a beatup about putative pervs in schoolyards. Nevertheless, the disjunction between “the arts community” and publics who aren’t necessarily normally aware of its norms and practices is at the centre of all this. I didn’t know, for instance, that all manner of cultural and media industries folk seek permission regularly to utilise schools for casting, which has been the defence of Henson’s actions offered - see for example, this article in The Age by Peter Craven. A while back, my interest piqued by the whole Henson furore, I read American cultural historian Michael Kammen’s Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture.

Continue reading ‘Bill Henson, visual shock and the democratisation of art’

More Governor-General dissing: Quentin Bryce a “radical feminist”!

Published
by
Kim
4 days, 21 hours ago
in Media and Politics
. 17 Comments

Those freethinkers and mavericks and contrarians at the Opposition Organ are at it again. In the wake of the serve Christopher Pearson gave Governor-General Quentin Bryce on Saturday, his colleage Frank Devine piles on today. But with even less sense!

This is not an attempt to portray the accomplished and charming Bryce as a Cromwellian dark star on the horizon.

Sometimes the kowtow can make a useful contribution to the common good, but to be characterised as a kind of household robot would have been hard to take for a girl from the bush who has raised five children and climbed to the top in the demanding profession of the law.

There was also a disconcerting ambiguity about Bryce’s announcement that her first travels would be to the Murray-Darling. Did she mean she would traverse these two immensely long rivers and make whistlestops at all the settlements within their vast embrace? Or was she intending to brief herself on the politics of climate change, conservation and state-commonwealth relations now implicit in the phrase Murray-Darling?

Entirely shamefully, as I contemplated the elegantly coiffured and accoutred new GG, admired her perfect profile and struggled to share her angst, it crossed my mind that if we had played our cards differently we might have recruited Boris Johnson.

Go figure.

The culture wars on tv… live!

Published
by
Kim
5 days, 12 hours ago
in Culture, Media and Politics
. 25 Comments

Tom Switzer, former op/editor of the Government Gazette and the Opposition Organ and subsaquently Nelson staffer is a panelist on tonight’s final instalment of the ABC’s Q&A. Switzer famously proclaimed that the right was now winning the Culture Wars. Let’s see if culture war logic stands up to questioning!

Ps: Media tart Peter Costello is also on, in close proximity to David Marr. Perhaps sales of teh book are disappointing? Can he revive them by starting another round of leadership rumours?

Welcome to the Palindrome!

Published
by
Kim
6 days, 13 hours ago
in Foreign Elections and USA
. 83 Comments

[I’m borrowing the pun from Michael Bérubé]

In the absence of any more “game changing” impulsive madness from Walnuts, all eyes will probably be on the Veeps debate on Friday - although our friends in the House Republicans or more spectacular crashes on Wall Street might diminish the focus a tad. Sarah Palin won’t be able to pull a McCain though, and “suspend” her campaign, after that trick spectacularly failed as Walnuts slunk out of Washington calling for bipartisanship on one hand while slagging off Obama on the other, after fairly poor reviews of whatever contribution he may have made to the crisis from his fellow Republicans. Nor will Palin be dropped from the ticket - I think (presuming there’s any rationality to the McCain strategy). As Nate Silver observes, there are at least three good reasons why it would be dumb (but again, I’m thinking dumb is the name of the McCain game). And the last time a Veep candidate was dumped - Thomas Eagleton in 72 - McGovern dropped 7 points in the polls.

Anyway, that’s that for the moment, but in this increasingly bizarre campaign which in true postmodern style seems to have as fictive a relationship to the real world as all that fictitious capital swirling around Wall Street waiting for the government to buy it, who knows what lies ahead, or even what lies lie ahead. My main purpose in posting was to draw attention to two excellent pieces from two of my favourite Stateside online writers on the bizarre phenomenon that is the Palin pick, something I continue to believe deserves more analysis than just political calculation or the desire to diss implies.

Continue reading ‘Welcome to the Palindrome!’

Terror academics! Feud!

Published
by
Mark
2 weeks, 1 day ago
in Authoritarianism, Education, Media, Security, Terrorism and War
. 58 Comments

My colleague Terry Flew takes a look on his blog at the latest controversy over teh evils of postmodernism (and neo-Marxism!) in academia. In regard to The Australian, he writes:

In two articles (Sat and Mon) referring to the Culture Wars and ‘Terror Academics’ , it discussed claims made in the most recent edition of Quadrant by James Cook University academic Mervyn Bendle that Tony Burke was ‘pro-terrorist’, and should not hold a position at the Australian Defence Force Academy.

Flew goes on to say:

Whether a new McCarthyism is too strong a word for this is a moot point. What is apparent is that The Australian has taken on a extraordinarily partisan position in relation to scholarly disagreements, and is looking like a sounding-board for Quadrant and the Young Liberals. Bendle, Donnelly and Windschuttle have received a lot of space in its opinion pages, in what looks like an orchestrated campaign to use the paper to politically shape university teaching in directions that would be at odds with assumption about academic freedom.

I think that’s right, but there’s the added dimension here of links between the security state and academia, and also of the willingness of academics to prosecute basically private (and often employment related) disputes through the pages of the public press. The latter was a significant component of the attacks former QUT academics John Hookham and Gary Maclennan launched on Michael Noonan’s PhD project on disability and humour. It doesn’t appear to have occurred to Bendle, with all his complaints about so-called breaches of “scholarly etiquette”, that he might have committed one himself by attacking Burke publicly in such risibly inquisitorial terms.

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Australia is well served by its public intellectuals. Discuss.

Published
by
Mark
2 weeks, 5 days ago
in Levity
. 57 Comments

Post of the day from Lyn Calcutt at Public Opinion.

These guys have too much time on their hands? Or the most pressing public issues of the day are related to positions adopted in the late 1960s on Suharto’s crimes in Indonesia?

The End of Politics and the Last McCain

Published
by
Kim
2 weeks, 6 days ago
in Foreign Elections, Philosophy and USA
. 12 Comments

Alexandre Kojève

If Man becomes an animal again, his arts, his loves, his plays must also become purely natural again. Hence it would have to be admitted that after the end of history, men would construct their edifices and works of art as birds build their nests and spiders spin their webs, would perform musical concerts after the fashion of frogs and cicadas, would play like young animals and would indulge in love like adult beasts.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man.

John McQuaid

In 2004, George W Bush’s denunciations of John Kerry as a liberal Washington insider who had trouble articulating clear positions also had the ring of truth.

Those campaigns were slick and sophisticated attempts to shape public opinion. By contrast, McCain’s ads and rhetoric sound like they’re generated by a bunch of twentysomething Republican bloggers, strung out on caffeine at 3am, each trying to out-snark all the others. The main thing the campaign has going for it is sheer outrageousness – that is, by hitting every conceivable cultural hot button and repeating untruths over and over, it will both get an anti-Obama message out and also dominate the news cycle.

What if they held a History War and nobody came?

Published
by
Kim
3 weeks, 6 days ago
in Education, History, Howardia, Media and Politics
. 109 Comments

Now that the Howard gubbermint is ancient history - except in the memoirs of the ghost of Peter Costello who wants you to know that Howard LIED six times and failed to hand him the leadership on a platter (ps. don’t waste your 55 bucks on his stoopid book - it’s been scooped, and that’s about it, except Pete WAS TEH BEST TREASURER EVAH! and could have singlehandedly sorted the international credit crisis) - there’s very little force, I’d have thought, in a claim that “the history wars have been revived”. A claim made by the usual suspects - particularly Dr Kevin Donnelly - that teh Communists have their hands on the history curriculum under a Labor Government. Read all about it here - in Crikey - by Jeff Sparrow - who skewers this nonsense without even raising a sweat, I suspect. As you were. No narrative here. Look away. There’s commies under your bed though.

Continue reading ‘What if they held a History War and nobody came?’

McCain: Gaming the media and the blogosphere

Published
by
Mark
4 weeks ago
in Blogging, Ethics, Foreign Elections, Media, Polls, Sociology, USA and Women
. 129 Comments

Although aspects of his critique are tentatively sketched by his own admission, Jay Rosen has hit more nails than he’s missed with his analysis of the significance of the Sarah Palin veep selection by the McCain campaign. Rosen’s article is rightly getting a lot of attention. It’s “personalities, not issues” as McCain’s campaign manager Rick Davis said, and the dark divisive arts of Karl Rove are being revived for the umpteenth time, and to date, are apparently working. Though in an somewhat problematic article in Salon, problematic because of the gender stereotypes it re-enacts while purportedly criticising them, Gary Kamiya provides some hope for thinking the Democrats might turn things around. But the controversy over Palin’s claims to have opposed the infamous “bridge to nowhere” illustrates the double bind the GOP have the Democrats in.

At least the turf this issue - the purported opposition to earmarks and pork that Palin is supposed to share with McCain - is being fought over is a public policy issue rather than all the personalised stuff which just puts the Democrats and the media where the GOP want them. But Obama’s reluctance to use the words “lies” and “liars” shows he knows the score. He’s being criticised for that by liberal bloggers, who are cheering on the media “fact checking” exercise.

But all this truthiness is also at great risk of playing into the GOP’s hands - because it reinforces the equation of the media and blogosphere with the Democrats Rosen identified as the tactical positioning the Republicans want - and which George W. Bush reinforced with his claims about “the angry left” in his RNC video link. The culture wars schtick works - because the America of Wal-Marts and small town “values” has more electoral power in the swing states that count than the wonky redoubts of the blue staters. And a lot of those voters - who don’t source their news from the internet but from cable tv - and get their analysis from others of like mind in their own circles rather than bloggers, commentators and wonks - are seeing what McCain wants them to see - a feisty outsider being beaten up by the Beltway elite. Hence McCain’s polling gains, among other demographics, with white women.

Continue reading ‘McCain: Gaming the media and the blogosphere’

RNC and McCain’s speech: responses roundup

Published
by
tigtog
1 month ago
in Blogging, Foreign Elections, Media, Policy and USA
. 1 Comment

John McCain made his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, and others watched it so you didn’t have to. Some of them even liveblogged it.
Continue reading ‘RNC and McCain’s speech: responses roundup’

Advance Australia Fair?

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 1 week ago
in Anzac Day, Australiana, Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, Ethics, History, Indigenous, Markets, Media, Nationalism, Philosophy and Politics
. 23 Comments

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?’

Feminism good for families

Published
by
Kim
1 month, 1 week ago
in Activism, Developing world, Economics, Europe, Feminism, History, Industrial Relations, Middle East, Parenting, Poverty, Religion, Sexuality, Sociology, USA and Women
. 123 Comments

It’s been 45 years since Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. Via The Global Sociology Blog, I’ve just read this op/ed by historian Stephanie Coontz - author of Marriage, A History - writing in the Guardian to mark the anniversary. Coontz deftly turns many of the usual anti-feminist narratives on their head. Continue reading ‘Feminism good for families’

Cities and suburbs and transcending the dichotomy - creatively

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 2 weeks ago
in Australiana, Brisbane, Climate change, Culture, History, Life, Media, Melbourne, Politics, Sociology, Sydney and Urbanism
. 76 Comments

I’m not sure where it came from, but there’s been a bit of praise for the suburbs around the joint lately, and dissing of the dissers of the suburbs.

Age columnist Shaun Carney attracted a bit of ridicule recently in some quarters when he wrote a column making the rather tenuous and certainly debatable claim that the Rudd government faced a delicate balancing act between inner city and suburban voters on climate change.

The article itself was entitled “Leftists who sneer at suburbs betray Labor”.

Carney mentioned that he’d been spending time recently in Carrum Downs “for family reasons”. Writing as if he were an anthropologist in unfamilar territory, he informed his readers:

You cannot get to the suburb by train. There are connecting buses from Frankston that snake their way through the suburbs in between, making it a very long journey. It would be very difficult to get around if you lived in Carrum Downs and did not have a car.

Now, the funny thing about this whole “latte left v. suburban real Australians” thing is that I’ve never met any “leftists who sneer at suburbs” and I’ve met a lot of lefties in my life. Having read a really silly column - whose author I’ve fortunately forgotten - in the SMH earlier this year where the writer really did manage to convey the idea that no Fairfax reader had ever stepped foot west of some imaginary line running through, say, Marrickville, I am willing to believe that there are some very urbane snobs around the shop. But I’m not sure they’re actually lefties in any meaningful sense. Small l liberal toffs who vote Labor, perhaps. It might also be the case that I have a different view on all this because I grew up in the northern suburbs of Brisbane, and though I now live in the “inner city”, there really hasn’t been any such thing in this town in the same sense as in Sydney or Melbourne.

Continue reading ‘Cities and suburbs and transcending the dichotomy - creatively’

Guest post by Aaron Darc: Morgan and the Multiplex

Published
by
Guest Poster
2 months ago
in Consumerism, Culture, Film, TV, Video etc, Food, Foreign policy, Life, Masculinity, Relationships, Religion, Sociology, Terrorism, USA, Urbanism and War
. 193 Comments

Aaron Darc, whose work will be familiar to LPers from his incarnation as Eye on Big Brother, recently interviewed film maker Morgan Spurlock. Spurlock came to prominence with Super Size Me and his new film Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? will be released in Australia next week. You can read more of Aaron’s writing at Pop Psychology for Beautiful People.

MORGAN & THE MULTIPLEX

From fat to fatwah, Murgon Spurlock has lost the pounds he gained for his smash-hit, Super Size Me, and hired himself a camel, for his latest film, Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden? I caught up with Morgan, this week, on his press tour of Sydney.

My 20 year old brother, Glenn, lives in a distant galaxy from me, on a planet called Regional Suburbia. He likes football, easy girls and fast cars. His favourite film is The Fast & The Furious; he calls it “wicked sh*t.” It would never have dawned on me, it goes without saying, to peruse my brother’s DVD collection. I knew it would be large, and I knew it would have been entirely purchased at JB Hifi; I know probably more than I should about Revolution Plasma and its disturbing power to appeal to the working and middle classes, and replace what would once have been their lives; draining whatever connection to the real world they had, by offering their unconscious longing to escape, a glistening, mostly poisonous, apple. Here, everybody! Plug into this - you’ll find it… easier. You will have a purpose. You will own that 42″ plasma, even if you f*ck yourself up on credit to do it, and you will build thyself a DVD Tower. There, thy shall easily access The Fast & The Furious; it shall keep the company of Face Off, Rush Hour, the Terminator Trilogy and, but of course, the Die Hard Box Set. Got plasma? check. Got plasma tower? Check. Okay, then, you’re all set to waste a good deal of your life plugged right into consumer oblivion. Isn’t modernity just fabulous?!

I only neared my brother’s DVD tower, out of that familiar desperation to escape the reality of my awkward bi-monthly family visit. Somewhere, in between the time your mother has once again implicitly let it be known you’ve not amounted to what you should have, and the moment following eight meaningless remarks about the state of recent weather, you look around the room, and you think, quite simply, “What can I do, here, to pass the time without having to sincerely engage my family?” My brother’s DVD tower seemed like a pretty good idea.

Continue reading ‘Guest post by Aaron Darc: Morgan and the Multiplex’