It may be Australia’s longest-running literary festival, but Adelaide Writers’ Week shares little resemblance with the big-name east-coast counterparts that followed it a generation later.
The event’s idiosyncrasies reflect much about the city that gave it birth: august, commodious Adelaide, temperate and traversable, capital of the festival state, with its surrounding circlet of parklands in which the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden could be an understated crown jewel. Far from the air-conditioned concert halls and crowded café venues of the Sydney and Melbourne festivals, Adelaide Writers’ Week passes in the open air and sunshine of this glorious garden.
And it feels like a gathering in a forest clearing, an enchanted grove. You sit, encircled by a dwarfbrick wall and screens of greenery sun-washed and backlit, presided over by each panel as they hold court beneath the beneficent maternal gaze of Ola Cohn’s 1941 Waikerie limestone statue, a goddess of the glade. Overhead, a lacing of cables, fairy lights, tree branches and blue tarpaulin spans the space between six sentinel lampposts straight out of Narnia. There’s the constant imposition of planes passing above, and sun and shade sweep over you in shifts as the clouds roll on, offering the discussion cheerful or ominous punctuation. ‘That’s global capital,’ jokes the Wheeler Centre’s Michael Williams when a sudden darkness falls at Laleh Khavidi’s mention of gun stock divestment. ‘It doesn’t like what you’re doing.’ Beneath you are humble green plastic chairs like your nan has on the patio and, should they grow too hard on your backside, you’re free to plant yourself on the nearby grassy slope where locals snooze under hats and children periodically frolic a little too loudly. Kick your shoes off, lay back, close your eyes, and let the conversation wash over you. ‘It’s a pretty friendly festival,’ poet Pamela Brown summarises in response to an audience question. ‘The air’s good.’
Mem Fox reads from I’m Australian Too.
It’s simply different. Fanatical volunteers stand smiling guard over the bins, racing to intercede before any recyclable item is denied its rightful reincarnation by mistaken consignment to general waste. The dignified demountable bathrooms offer expensive soap and proper mirrors. For some reason, there’s a joey in the writers’ green room and, occasionally, in the audience.
And, indeed, everything about the event is free and easy. No pressure to attend pre-booked and paid-for sessions. You may come and go as you please between the twin stages that sit companionably close in the riverside park. Follow your fancy through a program as well-balanced and legible as Adelaide’s city grid—from the intimately personal to the sweepingly geopolitical, local to international, grand historical narratives to confessional poetry. Unbound by the confines of the indoors and its attendant fire codes, audiences expand and contract like a breathing organism according to the popularity of the speakers. Events at the more intimate west stage like The Life to Come with the radiant Michelle de Kretser send the crowd fanning out into the wings of shade beyond the garden walls and curling up the slope, while drawcards at the east stage such as insightful international heavyweight Barbara Kingsolver and the delightfully peculiar festival-favourite Robert Dessaix break the banks entirely to engulf the little island of the stage in all directions.
In such a setting, the thirty-third iteration of the festival assembled almost a hundred writers, loosely united, as outgoing director Laura Kroetsch writes in the event programme, by the concept of ‘change.’ Unlike the parkland setting, this theme is a convention endemic to all literary festivals, to any gathering of those most sensitive vessels of social anxiety and conscience that are writers. Aside from helping stimulate the book sales that sustain our wordsmiths, this, it could be said, is what writers’ festivals are for. They are time that attendees collectively set aside to pay attention to the things in our world worth writing about: the troubles plaguing democracy chronicled in a genteel Monday-morning dialogue between British philosopher AC Grayling and local journalist and commentator George Megalogenis. The fury and shame about Australia’s ‘extreme cruelty to refugees’ that inspired beloved and formidable festival dedicatee Mem Fox’s latest book I’m Australian Too. The capitalism-driven environmental destruction foreseen in the fiction of Cory Doctorow, Maja Lunde and Jennifer Mills. The institutional racism and radicalisation contemplated by Laleh Khavidi and Kamila Shamsie. The introspection and commitment to the common good Judith Brett finds missing in contemporary Australian politics. The threat of climate change to Pacific nations such as the Marshall Islands that poet Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner spoke of. And, most pervasively this year, the sense that somehow it is all going wrong. That meaning, the media, and politics have lost their way. That, in Kingsolver’s words, ‘the rules don’t apply any more.’ As literary critic Sean Hooks once wrote, ‘it’s all going south tout de suite—awry and amuck and astray, combustible, doused in petrol, the fuse already lit.’
Of course, attendees at such events tend to broadly agree on these topics, nodding and applauding so vigorously and universally that it is hard at times to understand why no one has done anything about them yet, to remember that this sample isn’t representative. We risk veering into self-congratulation, but we also remind ourselves we are not alone, steel our resolve, and reflect upon solutions. And, occasionally, answers arise. Australian Book Review editor Peter Rose’s eloquent question elicited one such (even more eloquent) answer from Queensland poet Sarah Holland-Batt: ‘Where does poetry sit in a world consumed by material objects, materialism, pragmatism, careerism, professionalism, managerialism, all those –isms?’ asked Rose. ‘How does poetry survive in a world so devoted to the object?’
‘Poetry,’ came Holland-Batt’s answer ‘really is the last […] vestige, the last bastion of a space where every word is consequential, where language is reduced to its most core purpose, to its most exacting, its most particular. A poem is a perfect machine where every word has its use, has its meaning […] Poems are the one place where sane and exacting language lives at the moment, in this morass of fake news and loose use of language.’
In other words, one of the ways we can save the world is: more this. More reading, more thinking, more discussion, more devotees to the compassion and rigour of literature and poetry, where standards of quality are cherished, not abandoned, where ethical engagement with the world persists, where meaning something still means something, where thoughtfulness lives, where we can learn the tools of discernment and critical thinking that allow us to dispatch the dissembling messages of governments and corporations and demand better.
One of the ways the writers’ week instantiates this impulse is particularly fitting for the state where (white) Australian women first won the right to vote, the birthplace of Australian suffrage. Without explicitly stating it, without excluding anyone, it is on so many levels a festival by and for women. Dedicated this year to a woman writer, set in a garden memorialising the contributions of women, on and around International Women’s Day, it is a worthy alternative to a corporate breakfast agitating for more gender-representative economic inequality. This year the lost diary of Australia’s most influential woman writer Miles Franklin was even found during the proceedings. Among such auspices, it was impossible not to notice the makeup of the crowd—most abundantly middle-aged women, Australia’s largest reading demographic. A woman runs the festival, the discussions are most deftly facilitated by female chairs, and women appear onstage over half the time, often speaking on topics relevant to the cause.
Next year’s Writers’ Week passes from Laura Kroetsch to Sydney Writers’ Festival CEO Jo Dyer. We can hope that, as an Adelaide native, Dyer will know how to preserve and enhance what makes Writers’ Week so unique and so very important as a home for careful thinking in a world of bombast and bluster.
Following on from my discussion of audiobooks in my last post, 'Reading habits in the modern age', and considering the interest this review generated on Facebook when it cross-posted from Goodreads, I thought it was worth throwing up here as well. Stay tuned for more scathing reviews as I continue needlessly to torture myself with Goodkind's works until I'm all caught up ...
Deplorable Ayn Rand fanatic Terry Goodkind's sole plot device of separating hyperbolically perfect lovers Richard and Kahlan recurs yet again in Chainfire, if in a slightly more interesting incarnation this time, with the erasure of Kahlan from everybody's memories but Richard's. This results in some characteristically tedious, repetitive, unrealistic, interminable, eyeroll-inducing exchanges between Richard and other characters as he tries to convince them of his inevitable correctness against their insistence that he is deluded. Oh and also something about an invincible beast that (of course) horifically mutilates people to get to Richard.
Goodkind has only my obsessive compulsion to finish what I start to thank for my continued consumption of his free market capitalist propaganda, and the fact that the books have been turned into audiobooks. I don't think I'd get through them if I had to will my eyes to continue relaying the derivative, uninspired words on the page to my brain instead of just tuning out and doing something else as the poor voice actor drones on and on, trying to intone the author's awkward phrases with any sense of realism. There are also, of course, the obligatory clumsy, transparent, desperate, deluded attempts from the author to trick the reader into endorsing morally untenable positions that glorify selfishness and pose helping others as the greatest kind of evil, as well as other philosophies that support a purely self-interested free market capitalist, minimal-government, nonexistent welfare dystopia.
The book ends on a cliffhanger to propel you into the next book in the triology, and I have to admit despite my innumerable objections that I'm usually interested in what happens at the end of each book as events (finally) reach their climax. Anyway, I'm one book closer to catching up to Goodkind and hopefully not reading another book from him for many years to come (or ever again).
When it comes to sport, it seems that, rather than inheriting the athleticism of my father, a personal trainer, in playing it, I have acquired (along with bad skin and bad knees) his signature brand of cynicism and his propensity for abrupt moments of abstraction while watching it.
'Son, I was always proud … that you weren't a short man.'
Dad enjoys spectatorship as much as the next bloke, but he appears simultaneously to hold the whole enterprise in contempt: teams and clubs branding themselves with the names of cities while buying and selling players from all over the world who don't have any real connection to those communities. It's too much like supporting a corporation. I find this sentiment echoed in myself.
How does one pick a team, anyway? If it's not the team of the region where you live, and not a team you grew up supporting, what determines your choice? Is it who's winning the most? Who has the prettiest colours? The best mascot? Your favourite player? My girlfriend's dad supported the Cronulla Sharks for years until he converted to the North Queensland 'Toyota' (!) Cowboys, and then to the 'iSelect' (!) Gold Coast Titans, and now has no problem using the pronouns 'we' and 'us' to refer to 'his' team, despite residing in the Illawarra. Isn't it all rather arbitrary?
'The Isotopes are winning? To the bandwagon!'
This is less applicable, I suppose, in international sports, where teams actually comprise nationals of the countries they represent, but even here Dad and I have a shared tendency to experience moments of almost Brechtian alienation, wherein the viewing experience is transcended by a sudden and profound awareness of the insignificance and absurdity of investing ourselves in such a pointless activity, a kind of 'opiate of the masses–style' reluctance to be diverted by an exercise in corporatised nationalism, the outcome of which will ultimately have no impact on our lives.
One such moment occurred for Dad last Friday night as we watched the match between Sam Stosur and Ana Ivanovic in Rod Laver Arena. 'What are we doing here?' he asked at one point, nudging me and laughing, a common effect of the incongruous jerk out of the immediacy of the experience and into comprehension of its ludicrousness. 'Why do we care? Does it pay my mortgage if Stosur wins tonight?'
Although I generally disapprove of any form of slavish utilitarianism ('I AM A CAPITALIST DRONE; EVERY ACTIVITY IN WHICH I ENGAGE MUST PROVIDE ME WITH SOME DIRECT, CONCRETE, PREFERABLY MONETARY BENEFIT'), and I harbour a vague inclination that sport fulfills some subtle but important purpose* in our society, I still find these to be compelling questions. Why do we care so much whether one entity beats another entity in an otherwise entirely useless endeavour?
'Oh my God, Marge. A penalty shot with only four seconds left. It's your child versus mine! The winner will be showered with praise; the loser will be taunted and booed until my throat is sore!'
*I know, I know, it's about an outlet for primal aggression, social rituals and cohesion, blah blah.
In this instance, however, I couldn't fully share in Dad's characteristic momentary bewilderment. For reasons not entirely clear to me, tennis exempts itself from my usual spectatorial reticence, especially once a year for the term of the Australian Open when, time permitting, I become a rabid tennis fan. A were-fan, if you will. I look up rankings, download apps, text friends about matches, and follow every game I can.
I'm aware that, if anything, the 'pointlessness' of sport is exaggerated in tennis, where the match is confined to 260 square metres and the task can essentially be decocted to 'get the ball over the net and within the lines', but perhaps it's that there's something more honest about it as an individual pursuit that allows it to evade my cynicism. These aren't footballers professing some kind of loyalty to their team before scarpering off to the highest bidder the moment their contract is up, particular personalities subsumed into the larger team identity. They're individuals playing for themselves whose characters are on display to earn your support or opposition.
When I examine my list of favourite players and try to determine why I like them, however, it's still decidedly arbitrary, just slightly less so. With hundreds of individuals to choose from, you end up being quite superficial – one bad impression can be enough to turn you off someone. For me it seems to come down to a complex subconscious calibration of a player's skill, grace, manner, sense of humour, eloquence, nationality and, as I'm becoming increasingly aware when it comes to women (to my dismay), appearance. Which is my tortuous, Simpsons-like way of getting to the point that I've been thinking about how we pick which players to support in tennis, and who gets attention for what, and particularly how the criteria differ for men and women.
Even as perhaps one of the women's sports deemed most 'watchable' by men, the tennis court is a fraught field for gender issues, dominated for years by 'pin-ups' like Kournikova, Sharapova and Ivanovic and throwing up perennial debates over prize money, air time and the comparative quality and entertainment value of the men's and women's games. What brought the issue of player popularity to mind for me, however, was watching the match between Australian Casey Dellacqua and rising Canadian star Eugenie Bouchard last night.
Whether it's the men's or women's game, one truth universally acknowledged in tennis is the vapidity of the commentary. Tennis commentators seem to struggle to find anything much of value to add. One example from last night's match was Sam Smith's observation that Dellacqua had been eating a bread roll before the match, from which she extrapolated two things: one, that Casey hadn't had much dinner, and two, that she was nervous. Compelling stuff.
Is it any surprise then that we find traces of sexism in the inanities spouted by commentators in their furious verbal attempts to justify their relevance? Not conscious sexism, but the more insidious kind that infects the way even decent people think on a basic level. It's like what I was discussing in my last post (a thousand years ago) regarding Tony Abbott and his 'sex appeal' blunder: when the mind casts around for something to latch onto, something to say, the things it finds can be revealing, a window into a person's way of seeing the world and, therefore, the otherwise invisible ideology that shapes their worldview. It's problematic as it is that female commentators are never assigned a men's match while at least one man is always present in the commentary box for a women's match, but watching last night I became aware that the idle chatter of the commentators differs greatly depending on the gender of the players and the way they look.
As I type I'm watching Smith interview Dominika Cibulkova. Despite having just achieved the considerable feat of vanquishing world number three Maria Sharapova, the Slovak is being quizzed about her relationship status, how long she's been engaged, and her engagement ring. WHAT IS THIS?
It's astounding how much time is spent discussing looks in the women's game, even if it's obliquely, euphemistically. At one point, as I pointed out on Twitter, it was stated that Dellacqua was 'more girl-next-door than the girl next door', which can be translated to mean she is homely and unglamourous. This was underscored by Smith's statement only moments later that Dellacqua's opponent Bouchard is 'the heir to Sharapova in marketing terms', a euphemism for 'she's the hottest, blondest, whitest young player on the circuit.'
Bouchard (left) and Dellacqua (right).
Later Smith's obligatory male 'supervisor' (whose name I'm unsure of) joked that most of Bouchard's supporters, referred to by her as the 'Eugenie Army', seemed to be young men. After Bouchard had won, Renae Stubbs momentarily puzzled her in her post-match interview by saying she was sure her supporters were all about ready to propose to her.
And discussing the match Bouchard's win had set up for her with Ivanovic, the male commentator referred to Ivanovic as one of the 'all time great poster girls', as if she were a model rather than a tennis player, notable for her beauty rather than her skill. In response Smith asked 'How are you going to market it? The beauty of Belgrade versus the princess of Quebec?' and remarked that the pair were two very 'marketable' young girls.
Contrast this with the commentary on a comparable male player, Vasek Pospisil, who defeated Australia's Matt Ebden last Wednesday night. Pospisil and Bouchard are both attractive, white, blonde, young (23 and 19 respectively) Canadians with similar singles rankings (30 and 28) who triumphed over Australians. Yet not once did the appearance of Bouchard's countryman attract any commentary: no mention even of his adoring female fans, no talk of the impending match up between the 'Canadian catch' Pospisil and 'Swiss stud' Wawrinka.
Canadian heartthrob Vasek Pospisil.
Again, it's not that these commentators are bad people, it's that they've been conditioned by the prevailing ideology of the day to automatically view and assess women in terms of their appearance more than they do with men. The only way to wake people out of this ideology is to call it out when we see it, and we see it everywhere.
When the vacuous woman sitting next to me at the Stosur–Ivanovic match breezed into the arena four games into the first set, her first question to her companion was 'Who's that'?
'Ana Ivanovic', he answered.
'Ooh, she's really pretty', she cooed.
Moments later when Stosur appeared on the screen she laughed that the world number 17 looked 'like a man'. Former world number one Amélie Mauresmo was the target of similar criticism. In a habit that I'm sure would chasten her if I brought it up now, my best friend in high school would periodically proclaim with some vehemence her 'hatred' for Mauresmo. The reason? 'She looks like a man!'
Stosur (left) and Mauresmo (right)
As well as being too muscular or masculine, female tennis players can be too fat. When Dellacqua made her return to the Australian Open in 2009, she drew criticism from, among others, Roger Rasheed for being out of shape, a claim she and her trainers strongly repudiated. But that incident pales in comparison to the disgusting public reaction to Marion Bartoli's 2013 Wimbledon win, best summarised by the tweets collected in an article by Amanda Chatel.
Bartoli (left) and Dellacqua (right)
It's not enough, it seems, for a woman to be among the best tennis players in the world. She must also be born buxom and beautiful and maintain a slim, feminine figure.
It's not even safe in the sidelines. Lleyton Hewitt's wife Bec (nee Cartwright) was recently the target of an article by the ever-atrocious Daily Mail and others asking whether she'd 'overdone it on the tan'.
I'd say she looks completely fine …
On the other hand, 'Aussie Ana' Ivanovic (a Serb) has been claimed for Australia by Todd Woodbridge, and every commentator to have taken up the moniker since 2008 when she won the Australian Open, due to her overwhelming popularity in Australia. In a poll yesterday asking who was expected to win the tournament after Williams' departure that Sam Smith joked could've been rephrased as 'Who is your favourite female player?', popular Chinese player Li Na, number three seed Sharapova and the defending champion Azarenka each received circa 20% of the vote, while Ivanovic was assigned double that at approximately 40%. But what can Ivanovic possibly have done to earn this popularity, other than being young and beautiful? Can anyone honestly contend she has twice the personality of Li Na, twice the skill of Azarenka?
I myself am not immune to Ivanovic's charms, nor to subtle sexism. There's no doubt she's attractive; she's actually pretty much exactly my type. But that's separate to her skill as a tennis player. It doesn't have to be her defining attribute. It shouldn't be mentioned by commentators every time she's on court. And players who don't have her looks shouldn't suffer in popularity, or worse, be lambasted for it. A cursory consideration of the list of my other favourite female players doesn't seem to reveal that I favoured them especially for their looks: Elena Dementieva, Justine Henin, Li Na, Ai Sugiyama. In fact, if anything, I hold a strange contempt for the bevy of attractive young interchangeable, quadrisyllabically named female players who've come to my attention over the last couple years: Caroline Wozniacki, Danielá Hantuchova, Vera Zvonareva, Victoria Azarenka.
Female favourites (left to right): Dementieva, Henin, Li, Sugiyama.
Un-favourites (left to right): Wozniacki, Hantuchova, Zvonareva, Azarenka.
But then, on closer consideration, I think sexism might come into it at some level. Is my dismissal of this second group just another form of sexism? Do I think they're too pretty to be good players, to be memorable, to have personality? And even though my favourites aren't women I find especially attractive, they are all undoubtedly beautiful women, slender and graceful. There's no women among my favourites who are unattractive. Why is that?
And what about who's missing from my list? Notably absent is Serena Williams, though I can safely assign her exclusion to other factors than her looks. I do admire her skill in the game, but her ineloquence, her obnoxious, particularly American fervent Christianity, forever thanking God for her wins in her stumbling, graceless acceptance speeches, as though he has specifically chosen her, puts me off. But why not Clijsters? Why not Bartoli? If their slightly rounder features and thicker bodies were swapped for the slight frames of Dementieva and Henin, can I really pretend my preferences would be the same?
Lately I'm becoming increasingly alarmed about our society's attitudes towards physical appearances. We may try to hide it by using terms like 'marketable', but that only puts the problem at one further remove; what is marketable is determined by what people want, and what people want is to see attractive people and to judge ugly people, people they can safely designate 'uglier than me'. Ugliness now is treated like a fault, like something we have any power over. And deviating from the standard body form long ago became a crime worthy of opprobrium.
Recently I've had a number of windows into the world of acting and theatre, and have been disappointed to learn that even respectable institutions are primarily concerned with the 'marketability' of their auditionees, that it's 'unheard of' for people of certain looks and body shapes to be given places, regardless of acting talent. Meanwhile, inexperienced eighteen-year-olds who happen to have been born with 'the look' are raised up out of the masses clamouring for a place without any need to distinguish themselves theatrically.
And it's not just women. My sisters recently informed me that all their male friends are on steroids or growth hormones of some form or another. Normal, healthy-looking sixteen-year-olds dosing themselves with drugs to turn themselves into miniature 'Zyzz' effigies in under six months, the better to worship at the altar of the self in the temple of the gym.
I always knew we lived in a superficial world, but somehow I still believed that everyone knew that it was wrong. I thought everyone had learned in their childhood from fairy tales and cartoons that it was what was on the inside that counts, and not to judge a book by its cover and that, even if they still did so, they knew somewhere that it wasn't the right thing to do. But all I've seen lately is unabashed superficiality. It's why reality TV is still so popular – it's cheap hour after hour of unadulterated judgement, and we love to sit in judgement of one another. 'What is she wearing?' 'She's too ugly to be the next top model.' 'Why would he pick that song?' 'He looks gay in that.' 'How can they be so stupid?' 'I hope he gets voted out, he's annoying.'
If there's one cause for hope for me in the tennis world, it's Li Na. I was there for the 2013 women's final when Li faced Azarenka. From my friends who watched at home I've heard it was considered a boring match, but for those in the arena it was electric. Fresh from the controversy of the previous round where it was speculated Azarenka had taken a medical timeout purely to throw her winning opponent Sloane Stephens off rhythm, the crowd was entirely behind Li Na, to the point that Azarenka's winners were met with mere polite applause while her unforced errors, usually awkward to applaud, were met with impassioned cheers, and Li's two on-court collapses elicited immediate heart-wrenching sympathy. The fact that an Asian woman who speaks only broken English can through her charm, sense of humour and fighting spirit win over a public as racist as Australia's gives me hope where little else does.
EDIT: I received an email threatening me with a $1,350 (+GST) out of licence fee for using several NewsCorp front pages in the original version of this post, so I've now removed them. I thought they might be covered under the 'criticism and review' fair dealing exceptions, but wasn't in a position to look into it any further at that point. Wishing the guys at News Corp well in their continuing endeavour to pander to the masses, disregard all journalistic principle, capitalise on people's fears and erode democracy.
Saturday 10 August 2013
In a move that unexpectedly became the talk of Twitter this week, Wallabadah General Store owners Glen and Kim Sheluchin announced on Monday they would no longer stock News Corp papers, citing the company's 'blatant' and 'long-standing' political bias (Nickell 2013). Owned by Australian-born media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, the corporation's front pages have been devoid of any pretension to objectivity since Sunday's election date announcement, giving credence to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's claim that editors have been instructed: '[G]o hard on Rudd, start from Sunday and don't back off' (Grattan 2013).
(Refer, for example to the Daily Telegraph frontpage from the 2013 election reading 'Finally, you now have the chance to ... KICK THIS MOB OUT' and the other featuring Photoshopped images of Craig Thomson, Kevin Rudd and Anthony Albanese as characters from Hogan's Heroes, accompanied by the caption 'THOMMO'S HEROES' and the headline 'Albo's explanation for German beers with Thomson: I KNOW NUTHINK!')
As I've mentioned in the past, I believe along with many others that the two arms of a functioning democracy are a robust media and rigorous universal education, so watching the descent of Murdoch's tabloids, especially The Daily Telegraph and The Courier-Mail, from populist mouthpieces to full-blown propaganda over the past few years has been extremely disturbing. It was only in 2010 on my first trip to Britain when I encountered the shameless (and shamefully popular) likes of The Sun(News Corp) and The Daily Mail (DMGT) that I thanked heaven the media discourse in Australia was not so woeful,* that you'd never see such openly biased headlines here. It seems I was wrong to put it down to anything more than antipodean backwardness: we've finally caught up.
*Of course, at this time, I'd never yet seen an edition of the NT News (News Corp), which is known for its outrageous headlines (see the edition featuring an image of a shirtless man drinking a beer with a snake coiled around it accompanied by the headline 'WHY I STUCK A CRACKER UP MY CLACKER').
I first became alarmed in early 2012 while on a business trip in Brisbane. There the political temperature allowed The Courier-Mail to trumpet anti-Gillard sentiment in a way I suspect no other state (excepting perhaps Western Australia) would have tolerated at the time, stirring up even more of the public vitriol demonstrated when local colleagues would whip around in their chairs at the mere mention of the PM, ready to criticise the way she spoke or dressed at any opportunity.
The Sheluchins may have already overturned their ban after a smarmy diplomatic mission by the Tele (discussed in all its quease-making detail here), but hearteningly, not before they received a deluge of 'calls and messages of support' (Nickell 2013) and inspired other vendors to follow suit. The management of Brisbane's Slightly Twisted Refreshment Lounge, for example, which never sold the paper but had it available for customers to read, revealed on Twitter yesterday that they're now displaying this sign in-store:
But there have of course been negative responses to these small business boycotts, most of them bizarrely labelling them acts of 'censorship' (a term the Tele was more than happy to throw around in the gloating victory speech linked to above). For example:
This, of course, is nonsense. As I pointed out on Twitter, the argument is essentially that a newspaper's existence demands its supply or else it's censorship. The Sheluchins said themselves they don't stock Fairfax's The Financial Review. Presumably they don't sell Green-Left Weekly or Uganda's Daily Monitor, either. Censorship? Of course not. The difference, some might argue, is that there's an established demand for the Tele, but I'm afraid there's still that much-vaunted principle at the heart of capitalism to contend with: choice. There might also be a demand for child pornography or cocaine, or even cigarettes. That doesn't make it 'censorship' to refuse to sell them because of your 'own personal political views' that child pornography/cocaine/cigarettes are unethical.
Because unfortunately, that's what capitalism does to truth: commodifies it. The newspaper is a product like any other, and if the vendor of that product decides it is of substandard quality, they are free to cease selling it, and their customers are free to shop elsewhere if they don't like it.
It's curious the disproportionate amount of concern the objectors seem to have about this one supposed form of obfuscation of the truth through 'censorship' in comparison to the potential obfuscation of the truth Murdoch's papers might have through, say, shoddy journalism, lies, dubious ethics, bias, editorial influence, vested interests and market monopoly(as the management of the Slightly Twisted Refreshment Lounge noted, 'there are no local publications not controlled by Mr Murdoch' in their area; what does that say about the influence of one man over an entire community?)
Here is one of the multifarious failings of capitalism: it's as though in its animalistic mimicry of the system of evolution (competition, survival of the fittest, etc.), it has also taken on Freud's eros drive, that biological urge 'to combine organic substances into ever greater unities' (1920, page 50), realised in the inescapable corporate gravitation towards monopoly, the ineluctable upward accumulation of wealth and power. 'He's earned his influence', free marketeers, Libertarians and minarchists will protest. 'He's powerful and wealthy because his papers are popular!' Truth by popularity.
Which is what's so strange about these objections: they controvert the basis of the Right's usual disagreement with 'regulations' and 'red tape' and 'big government', that one golden principle I referred to earlier which it mistakenly apotheosises as the way to determine all truth and quality and morality: consumer choice. As far as I can see, these News Corp boycotts are one of the few examples of consumer choice actually working as it is supposed to. Every time the quality or ethics of a product is questioned and the suggestion of more regulation is proposed, the Right turns to the touchstone of consumer choice: 'We don't need big government interference – the consumers are our regulators. If consumers don't believe what Rupert Murdoch's papers say, they won't read them ... If consumers don't like the way cage eggs are produced, they won't buy them ... If consumers think reality television is vacuous fluff, they won't watch it.'
Under capitalism, your dollar is your vote, and (in the fantasies of Randists) the market is supposed to adjust itself to align with consumer opinion as businesses consumers like succeed while businesses they don't fail. As though we are all moral philosophers, thoroughly conscious of the ethical ramifications of our every purchase. As though we have the time in our busy lives to research whether every product we buy is tested on animals or contributes to the deforestation of the Amazon or is made by third-world child sweatshop labourers working eighteen hour days for infinitesimal pay. As though in the moments before we put each item into our trolleys, bombarded by psychologically manipulative advertising and marketing and packaging designed to conceal anything untoward, dogged by a hundred other disparate velleities and cravings and distractions and concerns, we are our best rational and ethical decision-making selves. As though the majority of us are even concerned with right and wrong when we are shopping. As though we haven't been taught that the only value worth considering is monetary value. As though most of us even have the ethical fortitude to resist purchasing products we know involve unethical practices. This system is demonstrably flawed.
So here, in the form of a few small business owners rejecting the low-quality products of a powerful multinational corporation which will probably get its own chapter when historians write about the downfall of the United States (notoriously evil American television network Fox News, panderer to climate change deniers, Creationists, second-amendment nutjobs, Tea Partiers, Republicans and other fundamentalists, is also Murdoch's handiwork), we have one rare instance of an actual deployment of consumer choice for a reason other than price, one time where the consumer has looked at a substandard product and said, 'No, this isn't good enough; I refuse to sell this', and the internet commenters of the Right denounce it.
Jeff Sparrow, editor of left-wing literary journal Overland, is optimistic about the recent slew of rubbish front pages from The Daily Telegraph, and claims the reaction to them online is a signal that 'Murdoch's spell is breaking' (2013). But it's easy to convince yourself you're in the majority when you're surrounded by sympathisers, when you're caught up in the outrage of the Twitter intelligentsia. Growing up in the safe Labor seat of Throsby I'd never met anyone who voted Liberal and couldn't even imagine anyone voting for Howard, and yet he'd won every election in my lifetime until '07. I'm sure Sparrow has the deductive powers to see past those in his immediate political surrounds; I just can't share his optimism in this.
Besides, it's not the engaged people I'm worried about. Not the ones who spend time reflecting on these issues, reading political articles, tweeting their outrage, and slowly constructing a worldview from a number of sources like world news from other countries, independent media, books, discussion, Q&A and Lateline. It's the ones who can't be bothered with politics most of the time, the reluctant voters, the uninformed but stubbornly opinionated who concern me. The ones who glean their political views incidentally from here and there: the mainstream news, the Sunday paper, what other people seem to be saying, a bit of Alan Jones here, a bit of The Bolt Report there. Because when you don't seize control of the discourse, when you just cruise through your intellectual life on autopilot receiving whatever comes your way, the vested interests take control for you, and you've got nothing against which to contextualise your information. The chances are that the vast majority of news these 'uninformed opinionated' come into contact with is produced by the Murdoch media and they don't even know.
So I think Sparrow might be giving people a little too much credit. People don't want facts and truth and expert opinions from people smarter or more specialised than them. They don't want hard questions about right and wrong that might require them to change their behaviour. They want entertainment. They want fluff. And 'consumer choice' on its own without any other barometers of quality or truth usually ensures they get it. Consumer choice alone results in pandering, like a divorced glory parent who only takes their child on weekends and spoils them with gifts and sweets and amusement parks instead of necessities and vegetables and homework, making the other parent seem boring. Given the choice, who might the child prefer to live with? What lifestyle would they choose to adopt? Do they want to watch Big Brother or Lateline? Do they want to read celebrity gossip or serious policy discussion?
This is why it would've been useful to have a real media inquiry in this country. But the howls of 'freedom of the press' that issued from the papers, accompanied dutifully by the Coalition, saw the death of that. You might disagree it was needed, but let's just imagine that it was. One wonders how we would ever get such an inquiry given the corrupt media would use its opinion-forming power to turn public sentiment in its favour with whichever party was in opposition to give it credibility.
No, my feeling is that we're stuck with tabloids that will become ever more like Britain's now, at least as long as the newspaper format survives. All we can do is try to avoid ending up with the Australian equivalent of Fox News that we already know prominent conservatives and conservative organisations like 'Lord' Monckton and the IPA are gunning for. And, of course, to save the ABC from privatisation or, in other words, dumbing it down as much as the commercial networks. I only pray it doesn't come to that.
Sigmund Freud's 1920 book Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Volume 18 of James Strachey's 1953 –1974 series The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, published by Hogarth Press, London.
On Monday 23 July 2012, my article 'The Unvenerable Bede' about the perils of social media for politicians and local Wollongong Councillor Bede Crasnich in particular was published in Tertangala: The Environment Issue. Bede issued a response in the subsequent September Gender and Sexuality Issue, and for five years a slightly altered version of the article has been available here. After discussion with Bede in light of the recent announcement of his retirement from politics, I have agreed to remove the article from my blog. If you have any questions, or would like to request a copy of the article, my details are listed on my contact page.
Cover photography by Wilfred Russel-Smith, design by Lisa Diebold.
I'm quite short of time at the moment (one assessment due tomorrow, one on Thursday, three books to read this week, editing work needed for Wednesday, going to Melbourne for the comedy festival from Thursday to Monday, with a presentation on a book I haven't started reading due two days after I get back), so in lieu of a real post, here's something I've been meaning to put up here for a while that won't eat too much into my time.
A while ago, while Til and I were travelling around Italy and Greece, I read a wonderful book by David Mitchell called Cloud Atlas, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2004 and which was recommended to me by one of my lecturers, the excellent Dr Joshua Lobb.
I'm increasingly interested at the moment in tracing back the texts and ideas I encountered that led me to certain conclusions, because sometimes my conclusions (eg socialism, vegetarianism) seem so radical when just looked at bare. But if I could present people with a more manageable sequence of ideas that, once accepted, lead to that conclusion, it might be more understandable.
The book is full of beauty and poignancy, but in particular the passage I want to quote below, the ending of the book, when read after undertaking the journey of the entire novel, was one of the first things I encountered that led me to start thinking about why a progressive, leftist, socialist (look it up if that sounds alarming; it might not mean what you think it means) approach to world governance is a better one than a conservative, capitalist, individualist one. I now see the divide between left and right as largely one of cooperative socialism and competitive individualism. It even had a part to play in the development of my ideas about vegetarianism (note the 'weaselly word' the narrator identifies, and possibly see my post ''Naturalness', semantic decay and veg(etari)anism (part two of three)').
And don't worry, it doesn't have much in the way of spoilers, although being the final passage there are a few references you obviously won't understand if you haven't read the book:
Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules; only outcomes. What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts.
What precipitates acts? Belief.
Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & in the mind's mirror, the world. If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation & beastiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being, & history's Horroxes, Boerhaaves & Gooses shall prevail. You & I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds. What of it if our consciences itch? Why underminde the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage & our legacy? Why fight the 'natural' (oh, weaselly word!) order of things?
Why? Because of this: – one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.
Is this the entropy written within our nature?
If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe divers races & creeds can share this world as peacably as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth and its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass. I am not deceived. It is the hardest of worlds to make real. Tortuous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president's pen or a vainglorious general's sword.
A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living. Upon my return to San Francisco, I shall pledge myself to the Abolitionist cause, because I owe my life to a self-freed slave & because I must begin somewhere.
I hear my father-in-law's response. 'Oho, fine, Whiggish sentiments, Adam. But don't tell me about justice! Ride to Tennessee on an ass & convince the red-necks that they are merely white-washed negroes & their negroes are black-washed Whites! Sail to the Old World, tell 'em their imperial slaves' rights are as inalienable as the Queen of Belgium's! Oh, you'll grow hoarse, poor & grey in caucuses! You'll be spat on, shot at, lynched, pacified with medals, spurned by backwoodsmen! Crucified! Naïve, dreaming Adam. He who would do battle with the many-headed Hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!'
Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops? (527–529)
Incidentally, there's a film adaptation of Cloud Atlas coming out late this year with Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugo Weaving, Susan Sarandon, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant and Jim Sturgess, so get your hands on a copy and read it beforehand!
LPL
References
David Mitchell's novel Cloud Atlas, published in 2003.
