As I suggested on Saturday, Amy Winehouse’s death exemplified the power and the vacuity of fatalistic and misogynist tropes. As Kim suggests today, the out of control Islamophobia which greeted news of the awful massacres in Norway also bore very little relation to truth.

Winehouse’s travails will have been magnified by the refraction and repetition at enormous volume and stunning intensity of a bunch of useless and prejudicial discourses, just as the climate in which Anders Behring Beyrik’s thoughts and deeds were inculcated is part and parcel of a decade or more’s Islamophobic obsessing.

In both instances, we can see clusters of ill-informed, prejudicial and stupid sentiments take on their own force. Razer makes the connection deftly.

If there’s ever a time that people should pause and take stock, it’s now. Helen Razer’s piece is here.

I’ll cite again Jens Stoltenberg’s remarks about “more democracy and more humanity”.

One of the ironies of a few weeks which has also seen the media fight back against the claims of democratic accountability in the wake of calls for enquiries stimulated by the #NoTW scandals, is that its more articulate defenders have framed arguments in terms of enlightenment principles. We now have ample evidence that the early 21st century mediascape is anything but enlightened and rational.

It’s time, well past time, that citizens called time on the sort of rubbish that pervades the privatised sphere of the information industries.

Perhaps the most pressing fight, on a whole range of fronts, has to be one for humanity and rationality.

I think we need to be quite careful about how we respond to the political dimensions of the tragedy in Norway.

To be more precise, some responses in kind to the right wing noise machine have been quite distasteful, and only serve to reinforce the discourse which created the awful Andrew Bolt style commentary in the first place.

If we’re to heed Jens Stoltenberg’s call for “more democracy and more humanity” then we need to heed both parts of that.

Commentary which seems to gloat “Oh look! It wasn’t a Muslim, but a right wing Christian” reinscribes the crazy narratives about terrorism and political violence which precisely require a more dispassionate analysis.

I think there is a duty to analyse why these things happen, and why they are talked about in the way they are, but I’m not at all certain that a pause for reflection isn’t in order first. The human scale of the tragedy affects how people respond, but that response has to be calibrated and sorted out from the emotional impact. Not easy to do, and so probably wise to pause.

In the meantime, all those directly and indirectly impacted by this tragedy are very much in my thoughts.

Elsewhere: Tigtog at Hoyden, Don Arthur.

Update: Some clarification of my argument is in this comment, in particular clarifying that I’m not arguing that the events should be depoliticised.

If you sit back and take the longer view, reality is actually shaping policy – the reality of climate change, the reality of female workforce participation, the reality of changing attitudes to gender equality, the reality of an impending end to dirty and unrenewable fuel… and same-sex marriage can’t be far off.

And the forces of reaction have nothing to peddle but fear. The peddling of that fear, in terms of public opinion, has of course, been spectacularly successful. To date.

But there may be another tipping point – the decline into collapse of industrial media. Given that the NotW scandal has now seen it suggested, plausibly, that the Murdoch family may lose control of News, I’ve seen it argued, also plausibly, that come the next election, there may be no Australian to run its “campaigning journalism”. It’s not outside the realm of possibility.

Thinking, though, that everything will always be the same in the Australian mediascape is almost certainly also out of step with reality. We may be seeing the end of newspapers as we know them.

Elsewhere: On some of the issues tossed around concerning mooted and current media reviews, Mr Denmore at The Failed Estate. Anthony Burnett has an interesting UK take at Open Democracy.

NB: Earlier Murdochracy discussion on LP is here.

But when central elements of the Mass – such as the chanting of the Gospel – were overlaid with asinine journalist interviewing journalist moments, we really did have a parable of the idiocy of the postmodern media, and maybe an answer to Saint Luke’s question too. Similarly, the Mass was obliterated by ceasing the coverage at its most meaningful moment – the Eucharistic Prayer – and ironically Pope Benedict’s communion was seen only on a screen behind a babbling journalist at the MacKillop Shrine in North Sydney later on during the news.

The commentary itself – particularly from ABC Religion and Ethics Editor Scott Stephens – was sometimes worthwhile, and later on ABC1, Compass did a much better job. But most of the coverage was indicative only of the sole frames the media appeared to find handy – celebritisation and nationalist hooha. Journos didn’t appear to be able to reach for the right cliches, though most of their comment was cliched. Claims that “naturally irreverent” Australians in Saint Peter’s Square would have cheered as if they were at a sporting event had they not been cautioned otherwise are incomprehensible when one considers that most of those present were presumably Catholic and would have been well aware of the difference, and the different dispositions appropriate, between the Commonwealth Games and a solemn liturgical celebration. Yet such claims were closely articulated to the prevalent mythos that the canonisation was an event for “all Australians”.

The ceremony itself, to the degree it was visible through the coverage, resisted this theme, inscribing Mary in a communion both synchronous and diachronic in time, and universal in global space.

That nationalistic motif may be, in part, a defensive political projection, seeking to ward off claims that the state is breaching its public secularity by giving aid and comfort to the rites of a particular faith. There is some legitimate debate to be had on Julia Gillard’s perceived about face, and the degree to which legislative fiat (protecting the “brand” of “our Mary”) and the attendance of Kevin Rudd and Julie Bishop at the Vatican is warranted. But, largely, the state’s role has been one of recognition, of integrating those of Catholic faith into the national story and Australian imaginary. The flipside of this process of inscription and narrativisation is the triumphalism of some elements in the Church. Some prelates still appear to be compelled to worship the idol of political power.

However, those concerns are no doubt going to be occluded by a false debate – an encounter that never really takes place – over such sideshows as miracles. The diktats of the atheist rationalists, or rather of those who are actively and prominently anti-faith, reinscribe a narrow range of tropes little changed from Reformation polemics. Anyone who doubts that many of the ‘atheist’ talking points have a direct lineage with English Protestantism need only read the more crazed sections of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, the anti-Roman bits they don’t teach these days in political theory school. If a reading list were to be compiled for the disciples of Hitchens and Dawkins, the spectral mouthpieces of Calvinist rationalism, it ought also to include John Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration. Perhaps then they’d realise that secularism is something quite distinct from anti-religious abuse, something which Scott Bridges observes is the stock in trade of too many alleged rationalists.

Much of this vitriol is directed, unsurprisingly, at the Catholic Church. Some of it, in the works of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, also reflects a hatred of Islam. Neither, as Jeff Sparrow wrote in his piece for Meanjin earlier this year on the “New Atheism”, is a necessary implication of a rationalist rejection of faith, but neither is really contingent either. Both anti-Catholicism and anti-Islam, in this discursive register, have their origins in a particular conjunction of English Imperialism and the construction of its knowledges and its enemies, a tradition which profoundly influenced the social dissensus between Protestant and Catholic, British and Irish, in Australian history. It’s no surprise to see it resurface at this moment, and attempts to contain and meliorate it through social re-integration – the real purpose of the political and media insistence that Mary MacKillop, or rather, Saint Mary of the Cross, is a saint, or an exemplar, for all of us.

But, to what degree is this true?

The proclamation of Saint Mary as true blue has accreted to itself a range of contemporary pre-occupations – authority in the Church, pedophile clerics, the role of women in religion and in community. All of this is potentially divisive, so there’s something of an attempt by her auto-authorised hagiographers, both Churchly and Stately, to appropriate her for something that can be represented as a common denominator of Australian “values” – so Mary started her own Education Revolution, and stood for “fairness”. No doubt, had Tony Abbott been in power, she’d have been something of a different saint.

It’s hard to be a saint without attracting hagiography.

Almost impossible, by definition.

What we don’t really have a sense of, in all the “celebration”, is the challenge Mary makes to us on two levels. First, the empty rhetoric of “fairness” dissolves next to the much more confronting notion of a radical preferential option for the poor. Secondly, the idea that one’s life must be subservient to divine will and to an overarching thirst for justice sits uneasily with the idea of her as a precursor to the palliative care our neo-liberal society deems right and just for the deserving poor. In truth, it’s in her strangeness to us in the Australia of 2010, that St Mary of the Cross speaks to us most clearly.

Tingle hones in on the virulence of the partisan campaign, not just in the Opposition Organ but across the News Limited tabloids, that has been evident since pretty much the day after the election. Noting that the anti-Labor push was ramped up after Julia Gillard became PM, she writes:

But this was nothing compared with the rage of the News Ltd papers since voters delivered an outcome they clearly didn’t like.

It took just two days before various News Ltd papers started calling for a fresh election and predicting the demise of the nation into chaos and anarchy under a minority government.

She goes on to cite the polls commissioned of the rural Independents’ seats and instanced The Australian‘s downplaying of a Newspoll which found a majority of respondents supported the country MPs’ allowing Julia Gillard to form a minority government. Malcolm Fraser and Bob Brown’s questioning of the ethics and conduct of The Australian are also discussed:

Greens leader Bob Brown – another target of News wrath – has had enough. The paper, he says, “sees itself as a determinant of democracy in Australia. It believes it has replaced the people and it’s time to bell the cat.”

“It’s stepped out of the role of the fourth estate to think it’s the determinant of who has seats in the Parliament, and it needs to be taken on.”

Whether Labor will, in fact, take News on is the central question, according to Tingle.

She notes that Kevin Rudd had refused to put The Australian‘s columnists and journos “on the drip” on coming to power, and that he went public with criticisms of the paper and News Limited’s journalism more generally. Labor figures were first puzzled, but now the company’s stance has become clear as day. Tingle doesn’t go into the way in which The Australian campaigned for Kevin Rudd’s downfall, but she does point to the fact that there’s serious discussion within ALP circles about how to tackle News Limited:

Labor believes it is confronted with the prospect of a ferocious and apparently continuing campaign against its legitimacy.

At some point, senior figures in the government argue, it will have to make a decision about whether it takes that on.

Tingle’s article largely speaks for itself, but I’d add a few observations (as well as noting that the “ferocious… campaign” is surely already evident).

First, I think that people who sometimes argue that we in the blogosphere ought to ignore the MSM alarums, in the hope that they’ll go away, or that we can somehow squeeze them of legitimacy, are on the wrong track. It is vitally important, I’ve always thought, to watch the so-called watchers, and where possible, given the limited resources we have, to expose the artificiality of ‘the narrative’. If you consider that furphies such as the BER “Waste” no doubt helped the Coalition to get as close to government as it has were only possible on the back of a sustained campaign in The Australian, in particular, and how difficult it is for sites like this one and Crikey to correct the record for anything like the same sort of audience, then you have the essence of the dilemma in a nutshell.

Secondly, I do think the degree of expressed dissatisfaction with the MSM, and the refraction of News Limited’s themes through other outlets (including but not limited to the ABC), has reached a critical mass, and is an interesting phenomenon in itself.

Lastly, perhaps that dissatisfaction has crystallised around two events – the absurdity of the heights of “look, over there! shiny!” behaviour by the press during the election campaign (where discussion of policy was foregone almost completely in favour of obsessing over leaks and Latham – with the trope of “but the Prime Minister’s policy announcement was overshadowed by x” employed on a ritual basis), and then the way that the interruption in the game of politics as usual exposed not just a lot of lazy assumptions but a lot of power structures outside their normal context.

Interesting times indeed.

Update: Laura Tingle will be on Lateline tonight (along with George Megalogenis).

So what we have is a media strategy rather than a negotiating strategy, setting the stage to continue the onslaught of bullying and blather if a Gillard government is sworn in this week.

Perhaps the last throw of the dice in this game is a bizarre opinion piece by Tony Abbott himself in the comfortable environs of the Sydney Daily Telegraph. Presumably if this absurd combination of hyperbole and untruths doesn’t influence the Independents at this late stage, Tony Abbott is preparing to resume his career as “Australia’s Most Successful Opposition Leader” to the general acclaim of Paul Kelly, Dennis Shanahan and David Penberthy.

The question, though, is whether another installment in The Party of No show will work in the actual parliamentary conditions under which an Abbott opposition will operate. If the prospect of an election recedes, and conciliation becomes entrenched, could the Liberals start looking for a less combative leader? And are they confident that every single one of their 72 members will follow Abbott’s lead on every vote?

Elsewhere: Grog’s Gamut.

Also, Mr Rabbit has a sad.

Two points you may not read elsewhere:

(a) It’s not at all unexpected that Adam Bandt would side with Labor – it was an explicit promise to his electorate of Melbourne, which had it not been made, may well have dissuaded many former Labor voters from coming across to The Greens. Bob Brown has done well to press for something substantive on the back of a negotiating position where there was never a prospect of Bandt agreeing to support a Rabbit government.

(b) All the “OMG! Labor will be destroyed in the regions and the burbs!” stories ignore the fact that the ALP lost far more votes to The Greens in this election (particularly in Queensland) than to the Coalition. It’s eminently rational to send a signal to those voters that Labor and The Greens are able to lay the foundations for a progressive alliance.

In any case, the balance of power in the Senate was always going to lie with The Greens even had Labor been able to put together a majority of House seats in its own right.

How all this plays out in the longer term is another question – in that The Greens will certainly be looking to increase their presence in the House of Representatives, where Batman and Grayndler are now also Labor/Greens contests on the 2PP. But, in the short and media term, there’s little room for doubting that this agreement is smart politics for both Julia Gillard and Bob Brown.

almost unreadable week

Shorter Penbo: narrative broken, must push for Restoration.

But he’s not alone in being all at sea.

A plethora of furphies have been repeated endlessly by the media – one of the most common being that the rural Independents represent “naturally conservative electorates”.

Oh, really?

The Nationals are well aware that the electors of Kennedy, Lyne and New England have made a positive choice not to support them.

And Bob Katter shot a hole in this meme very early on – pointing out that Kennedy had always been held by Labor except when he and his father were on the ballot, and that 4 out of 6 state seats in his electorate have ALP members. Kerry O’Brien appeared dumbstruck. That news had been slow to reach 7.30 Reportland, apparently.

If we think about Lyne and New England, these two seats are experiencing the same sorts of demographic and economic change as the nearby seats of Page and Richmond, once safe Country and then National party fiefdoms, now both held by Labor.

That’s all nicely captured in a great post by Possum, who estimates that 40% of Rob Oakeshott’s voters in Lyne are former Labor supporters, outnumbering the ex-Nats.

Go read.

Something similar will operate for electoral and donations reform.

To the degree that these processes are positive, and of course they’re obviously conditional on the ALP forming government, they have the potential to move beyond purely procedural improvements to the working of Parliament (for instance, time-limited answers and supplementary questions in House of Representatives Question Time) towards a more deliberative style of policy formulation. That holds true for private members’ bills, wrongly characterised in some media as merely an opportunity for local interests to be debated. Actually the presentation and debate of bills on such issues as same-sex marriage has the potential to widen the scope of debate and policy action beyond the very narrow set of concerns walled off usually by the politico-media complex.

(As an aside, I found it extremely interesting indeed that same-sex marriage became a fairly prominent issue in the campaign through a combination of agenda setting by The Greens and civil society movements, and media attention through question and answer forums such as Q&A and the Rooty and Red Hill events.)

So I think we can definitely see signs of what I pointed to in a previous post: a real widening of the hitherto circumscribed boundaries of political debate and policy action.

We can take this one step further by advocating for a holistic approach to donations reform. It’s properly seen as not so much a corruption of the democratic process (although it certainly is) but, more significantly, a privatisation of the public commons of political action.

It’s all interlinked. The professionalisation of politics rests on the existence of career paths which take major party members from staffer to Member to lobbyist, or straight from staffer to lobbyist. “Government relations” or “public affairs” staff grease the wheels which are further oiled through donations, and the existence of Labor or Coalition aligned consultants, think tanks, economic advisors, law firms and so on. The media uncritically reports a host of advocacy research, done only because it provides talking points intended to influence the policy process through both personal contact and framing public debate. And so it goes on, making a mockery of both evidence based policy and the public interest.

If we were to ban all donations from corporate groups (including unions, as Senator John Faulkner has advocated), and utilise the Parliamentary Budget Office agreed on by the Labor Party and The Greens to validate or invalidate “studies” done by industry lobbies and thinktanks seeking to influence public policy, there’s potential for a powerful shift away from the privatisation and corporatisation of our politics.

That’s a matter of process, then, but one that holds out the possibility of enabling a more open and genuine politics.

Elsewhere: Left Flank.