Blogging politics, culture, sociology and life from Brisvegas
Elliott Bledsoe reminds us not to take men wearing robes all that seriously. Make sure you look at this photo very carefully indeed.
Note: If you don’t like what you see - tough - it’s now legal to be annoyed.
Continue reading ‘World Youth Day: The dark side of the force?’
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.
It’s no secret that “the sectarian strand” is one of the less attractive aspects of Australian history, and interestingly, probably not one featured highly either in the so-called “black armband” or triumphalist narratives so beloved of our home grown Antipodean culture warriors. That may be because the deep cleavages - overlapping but not identical to class and ethnicity - around Catholicism and Protestantism needed to be elided and to be buried in order to construct the “Anglo-Celtic” identity which came into its own at the same time that the state aid controversy was settled into its grave and multiculturalism launched on its career. And not coincidentally. “Anglos” and “Celts” were on different sides of the political and cultural coin in the Great Southern Land of the Holy Spirit for most of its whitefella history. In a way, Gough Whitlam is probably the progenitor of the “mainstream” Anglo-Celtic Australian. But sectarianism typically rears its head as a defensive accusation whenever the Catholic Church is particularly prominent in public debate, and whenever criticism is directed at the Church’s institutional power.
In the context of World Youth Day in Sydney this week, this accusation has been levelled both with regard to criticism of the extraordinary powers granted to police by Greg Craven and with regard to the ABC’s highlighting of Cardinal George Pell’s ethically very questionable handling of clergy sexual abuse complaints by Andrew Bolt. More broadly, the media sponsors of World Youth Day at News Limited have worked themselves into a lather of holy righteousness, denouncing “aggressive secularism” and lauding all the Popey goodness they’re sponsoring - without disclosing that sponsorship in their journalistic or opinion pieces.
It may well be that a residue of sectarian anti-Catholicism might be in play on the margins of all this, but one of the big ironies is that while Tony Abbott and others speculated that Pope Benedict’s message might not be communicated effectively, the Pope himself has seemingly become a football to be kicked around by the usual suspects in distinctly Australian culture wars which often have only a tenuous connection with his concerns. But are there not genuine issues - of public interest - that can and should be raised at a time when Catholicism is top of the pops in the media stakes?
Continue reading ‘Is criticism of World Youth Day automatically Catholic bashing?’
I hope that we will be spared the sermons from an authoritarian leadership about the spiritually dead, the soulless, secular uncaring, of liberal Australia society violating the sacredness of life etc etc as well as the repeat of the attacks on Islam and Muslim-Australians for undermining western civilization.
Can I suggest a theme? Sermons on reconciliation with a liberal Australia and secular humanism instead of ones on heartless and godless liberalism.
It doesn’t look like his prayers will be answered: Populate or perish: Pell
“There is a crisis in the Western world. No Western country is producing enough babies to keep the population stable, no Western country,” he said.
With the exception of Mark Latham’s Diaries, few books on Australian politics hit the best seller list these days. Whether that’s a sign of the anodyne and airbrushed nature of political personalities Latho himself took aim at is, I guess, a matter for speculation. Perhaps it’s because the insider horse race stuff really does have a very limited audience outside those who see themselves as Insiders. But in the promotional stakes, now, it seems, forthcoming books are mined for whatever juicy tidbits (or otherwise) might actually influence the insider horse race, or at least get Insiders excited. Typically, there’s a fair bit of astroturf going on here, with rival newspaper chains Fairfax and News contending for serialisation rights and trying to extract “news” value from touting otherwise tedious memoirs or turgid accounts of political history.
Peter Costello’s forthcoming tome is being talked down by the News Limited punditariat as likely to be “boring”. In other words, he supposedly won’t be tipping a petulant bucket on John Howard, according to “insiders”. This - for the News Limited opposition cheer squad - is good news because it means that their quixotic and probably doomed quest to install Costello in the Liberal leadership can proceed. It’ll be interesting to see how the Fairfax papers - which have the serialisation rights - play the book, which in any case won’t be released for yonks.
One that will be released soon is Peter Van Onselen and Phillip Senior’s Howard’s End (the ghost of E.M. Forster should sue). Continue reading ‘A tale of two books’
Big Brother 2008 has been an inglorious farce. It seems there will be no Big Brother 2009. Reports in other media that the show has been cancelled by Channel Ten appear to be confirmed by posts on the show’s forum site.
Update: Glenn Dyer in Crikey:
There’s more to the demise of Big Brother than meets the eye. It’s a final and emphatic rejection by Australian TV viewers, especially younger ones, of a nasty, confrontational approach to culture.
Ten’s core audiences, the 16 to 39 and 18 to 49 viewers have said ‘not interested any more’. It’s a message for all Australian TV. The positive, affirming debut of So You Think You Can Dance Australia started in spectacular fashion in February and finished its first season strongly.
Just in: “Lefty” Tim Brunero mourns the demise of BB. Well, he would, wouldn’t he?
In honour of World Youth Day (doubt any “youth” read this blog, but what the hell), and just because a little music on a Friday night is nice, here’s a clip of Jennifer Warnes singing “The Song of Bernadette” from her wonderful Famous Blue Raincoat album.
Tim Blair has followed the lead of the Insiders - and that astute judge of comedy, Gerard Henderson - in deciding that Working Dog’s new series - The Hollowmen - is all about Kevin Rudd. Despite, as Grodscorp points out, the denials of its creators. I guess the intention of the author is irrelevant in a postmodern world. No doubt Kevin Donnelly and Keith Windschuttle will point out how this hermeneutical laxness potentially threatens all that is great about Western civilisation.
I think it’s reasonably clear that the proximate inspiration of the series - in development before Rudd was elected - is the Blair government, and more broadly, trends in governance and the media across the Western world over the last couple of decades. But its biggest problem is… it’s a one joke show which isn’t actually all that funny. It’s neither West Wing nor Yes, Prime Minister. I think we need a lot more political satire with a cutting edge - I’m thinking about the glory days of the Gillies Report which tore Bob Hawke apart just as much it did Andrew Peacock and Ian Sinclair. But The Hollowmen ain’t it. Pity.
Continue reading ‘Our dried voices, when we whisper together are quiet and meaningless’
There’s been some (rather entertaining) discussion on a recent thread about alternative names for mainstream media blogs. After all, they really are a different sphere, aren’t they? Coincidentally, and it’s a happy coincidence, a guest Hoyden at Hoyden About Town has posted a very comprehensive guide to how to attain that bloggy success you’ve always hankered after. And the rules aren’t all that complex. One of the important tips - men blog about sport and politics, and women blog about dating. However, some things transcend the gender of the writer:
Now whether a male or female writer, one simply *must* make all sorts of gender generalisations, mostly about de wimenz.
The really comforting advice is that you don’t need to write all that much at all. Continue reading ‘“The bitch from Prada”’
I was interested to read of the loud condemnations by Morris Iemma and Kevin Rudd of the cover of the latest issue of Art Monthly Australia. The cover features detail from a print of Polixeni Papapetrou’s Olympia as Lewis Carroll’s Beatrice Hatch before White Cliffs. In this artwork, the artist’s then six year old daughter, Olympia Nelson, is portrayed naked. My first thought was to wonder whether either Iemma or Rudd had actually seen the magazine in question, and that’s still unclear to me. My second thought was to wonder whether one of the media themes of the day - embodied in this piece by Nicholas Pickard in Crikey - had any merit. Pickard argued that the magazine’s editor, Maurice O’Riordan, was a “total fool” who was playing into “Hetty Johnson’s hands”. The two subtexts appear to be that the Bill Henson controversy had faded away, leaving artists to go about their business as normal (or something), and that O’Riordan was courting more controversy in order to increase sales of his mag, heedless of the dangers of raking up the cinders of the fire the Bill Henson controversy started.
But, unlike a lot of people who might have an opinion about this new controversy/furore/”debate”, I thought I might go and buy a copy of the magazine in order to form my own view. So I did.
Well it’s July so it must be time again to condemn. Here’s a twenty second open condemnation thread. What’s getting up your goat this month so far? Which evil political, cultural, social, musical, religious and other phenomena need condemnation? (Or loud denunciation?)
You can condemn anything you like except short films from Auckland about monsters.
A fortnight ago, after the characters at The Opposition Organ went into full on attack mode, confecting a picture of governmental chaos and evil spin from Kevin Rudd and his minions, we could witness the construction of one of those “media narratives” we’re constantly told by… the media… are so important. Last year we saw the then Government Gazette go into brain explosion mode, trying desperately to shore up the foundations of the then media narrative - that Howard was a political genius blah blah with a veritable plague of rabbits concealed in his Akubra. That was a bridge too far. Because it showed the narrative dissipating before our eyes as the effort being put into walling it off from reality was too painfully evident. Something similar is happening this year, with the cracks very indiscreetly showing, as the beleaguered “political class” of punditocrats effectively bemoan their lack of influence by letting a few too many cats out of the bag while trying to sew up the rips in the fabric of their dreams.
So we had Andrew “Insider” Bolt, who recently “celebrated” ten years of his column by “toot[ing] [sic] [his] own triumphs [sic]” (the link is to Grodscorp’s fisking not to Bolta’s auto-Birthday party), claiming - how embarrassment! - that it was journalists who swung the Gippsland by-election (the link goes to the post at LP not to Bolt’s blog). On Saturday, we had Christopher Pearson joining his News Limited colleague Glenn Milne in touting the saviour like potential of Peter Costello - the “man of the future”, we’re told! Although he apparently has “no malice” for Brendan Nelson, what’s one of the factors that Pearson cites as demonstrating that Nelson is doomed?
Partly it’s a case of not having won over the press gallery.
Yep, that’s the reason why Nelson bombs in the polls. Must be all those journos who live in Gippsland being over-sampled. I actually suspect Costello’s smart enough not to believe this nonsense, though I also imagine he takes the flattery in the spirit with which it’s given. Continue reading ‘Good spin and bad spin and media narratives (and the Garnaut Report)’
Folks who read my going on hiatus post last weekend might have noticed I came back this weekend! I’m still in break mode, and in fact I’m off to the beach for a week on Tuesday, heading up north where it’s nice and warm, but I was feeling bloggy today so - because I was in the mood, I did some blogging. While, as noted in a couple of posts here and around the shop recently, a lot of portentous debates swirl around blogging, the baseline should be that it should be fun. Of course there are all sorts of private and public benefits to blogging, but if you’re not enjoying it, then it’s not worth doing. I did want to thank everyone for their kind words in the thread last week, and also observe that the reason why I thought it was a good idea to take a break had nothing to do with that post I wrote about Tim Blair and the concerned feminists of the Australian right, though I do regret the fact that I let some of the animus generated last year lead me into personalising the issue that I was writing about. I expect better of myself. But mainly I just got to the point where I was feeling that some of the frustrations attendant on blogging were outweighing the benefits, so I thought it was time to take a spell.
This post isn’t quite as long as I thought it might be, and I think that’s a good thing. There’s no doubt the Garnaut Report [link to pdf] is seriously big as well as eminently serious, and I suspect a lot of the blogosphere’s climate change wonks are waiting to digest it rather than rushing in to write insta-commentary. Although the report is a very serious piece of policy work, its release is also a political event par excellence, and taking the time to understand the report’s arguments and proposals is a template that could usefully be applied to other big political happenings - including but not limited to the Budget - even if it goes against the grain of the 24/7 media cycle. It’s also worth noting that these sort of issues really lend themselves to the power of aggregating distributed knowledge - given the number of seriously informed people out there participating in the climate change debate - and therefore the comments threads are possibly more important than some of the posts themselves - which informed the approach we took at LP on Friday by posting an open thread.
So, what has the blogosphere had to say about the Garnaut Climate Change Review interim Report? Continue reading ‘Garnaut: the blogosphere reacts’
From her cast iron balcony, Helen writes:
There’s a lot of rubbish written in the dead-tree media about blogging. On the one hand, there’s an obsession with comparing it with journalism (thus setting up a frame in which blogging can never seem worthwhile). Political blogging isn’t journalism. It’s not “breaking news”. Personal blogging isn’t simply a series of trivial comments about “what I had for breakfast”. Blogging is writing. That writing may tend more towards personal, literary, academic, political, parenting, food or craft, but it’s all writing. That is what we practice and we have a lot of fun on the way.
On a related note, Mark also recently suggested that the blogging/journalism conversation (or stoush) acts to obscure much of what is actually interesting about the practice of blogging (and presumably if a lot of bloggers actually wanted to be journalists, not being shrinking violets and being generally smart cookies, they’d have done that), particularly insofar as it avoids all sorts of conversations being dominated by “white blokes in suits”. So, as Helen suggests, if you want to read something sensible in the dead tree media about blogging, read this piece written by… a blogger. Elissa Baxter riffs off some research into blogging and happiness, and interviews a range of Oz bloggers, including Helen herself and our own Suze, about why they blog and what they get out of it.
Elsewhere: More from Lauredhel at Hoyden and Suze at Personal Political.
Larvatus Prodeo is an Australian group blog which discusses politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
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