Not Fade Away

Not Fade Away

Howard tries to remember something before it (or he) fades away….

 

Prime Minister John Howard will call the Federal Election this week¹, probably Wednesday, according to pundits, Canberra insiders and the entrails of the Apec monster which tragically died in such ludicrous circumstances in the last few days. The Apec monster was to be the Magic Steed which bore Mr Howard triumphantly to yet another glorious, fairytale election victory.

Yet sadly the monster has died, poisoned by the pretender, Rudd the Slayer, with Syrup of Mandarin.

Nevertheless, the Prime Minister is determined to make the victory charge on foot if necessary, pre-empting all challenges by calling the election immediately.

Already, Mr Howard has decided on a campaign message. He will complain to the electorate that his love for them is heartlessly unrequited. He will shame them into returning his love and returning him to office. He will tug at their heart strings. He will tug at their purse strings to spend their money on government “non-election” information advertising.

Howard is determined that he will not fade away into the night like a World Cup Cricket Final. And that is his campaign slogan and his campaign song, performed posthumously by Buddy Holly (of the Cricket ), the man from whom he borrowed his taste in eyewear. Mmm, bup, bup, a-bup-bup

Values Australia has scooped an advance copy of the song and the proposed lyrics. We believe such a message could be hard to beat.

 

NOT FADE AWAY

I’m gonna tell you how it’s gonna be
You’re gonna give your love to me
I wanna love you night and day
You know my love not fade away
Well, you know my love not fade away

My love bigger than a cadillac
I try to show it and you drive me back
Your love for me got to be real
For you to know just how I feel
A love for real not fade away

I’m gonna tell you how it’s gonna be
You’re gonna give your love to me
A love to last more than one day
A love that’s love – not fade away
A well, love that’s love – not fade away

¹ P.S. If you have not enrolled to vote already Wednesday may be the last chance you have.

A-Wishin’ an’ a-Hopin’

A-Wishin’ an’ a-Hopin’

Crowning Achievement

 

Climate change negotiations at the APEC conference in Sydney have been an enormous diplomatic breakthrough, acting as a catalyst for future action, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer says.

Enormous! And completely original! Un Tour de Force Diplomatique!

Good work, Bunter! Well done, that boy!

The Sydney Declaration on climate change was signed by the 21 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders on Saturday.

Predictably enough, John Howard referred to these people as the “leaders of 21 economies” – in clear contrast to leaders of “people” – human beings, you know?

Economies — as we have learnt from John over the last, long, 12 years of grey, Calvinistic drudgery — are much more important than people. If the economy is doing well, how people feel is irrelevant – except that they ought to feel pathetically grateful.

This breakthrough “in-principle” agreement which has sent the pulses of world economies racing with its audacity and originality commits the countries to working towards a long-term “aspirational” goal of reducing global greenhouse gas emissions after the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.

In principle.

The agreement which has been signed is an agreement – nonbinding – to consider taking some steps towards imagining what a – nonbinding – aspirational goal might be for a particular “economy”.

This is a cardboard box full of empty air.

Without the box.

What is this agreement on an “aspirational” goal? It is a commitment (in principle) to consider hoping that something good will happen.

What is a commitment to working towards hoping – at some unspecified time in the reasonably distant future – that some dream or other will come true?

It is nothing.

And what does it require?

Nothing. No action is called for or called forth.

So in a time when every month of the next ten years is said to be critical in terms of planning and action taken (in fact), Messrs Downer and Howard are pleased with themselves that they have come up with a plan, which everyone could agree on to, in principle, do nothing.

No wonder the Chinese and Americans were happy to sign such an agreement. A vacuum has more substance.

Or to unquote Dusty Springfield:

Wishin’ and hopin’ and thinkin’ and prayin’
Plannin’ and dreaming each night of his charms?
That won’t get you into his arms…

But doesn’t “aspirational goals” sound ever so positive? Why, it’s almost pretty enough to fool a nation full of stupid people. Unfortunately John has still to discover that Australians aren’t stupid.

As George Bush once carefully explained, “Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”

Please may we now get on with replacing these people with people who have committed to actually setting targets inside an actual timeframe?

Oh, and by the way, “aspirational goals” for climate change measures was a Bush vision, as the amazing Steven Poole of Unspeak¹ discussed in June:

At the end of May, George W. Bush attempted to pre-empt the G8 on global warming with an alternative vision for reducing carbon emissions. Jim Connaughton, Chairman of the Council on ‘Environmental Quality’, was challenged by a sceptical reporter:

 

Q Now I’m confused. Does that mean there will be targets for greenhouse gas emission reductions and that everybody will be making binding commitments to each other about greenhouse gas reductions – or, at the end of the day, are those just voluntary commitments?

CHAIRMAN CONNAUGHTON: The commitment at the international level will be to a long-term aspirational goal –

Q Voluntary.

CHAIRMAN CONNAUGHTON: Well, I want to be careful about the word “voluntary,” because we do these kinds of goals all the time, international agreements. It’s the implementing mechanisms that become binding.

 

One should always be careful about the word ‘voluntary’, in case it gives the right impression. Still, aspirational goal is a lovely coinage. ‘Aspirational’ is a glossy-magazine lifestyle fantasy of fast cars, large houses and single-malt whiskies. And aspirations are always virtuous, even if they are – almost by definition – not actually going to be accomplished. As the poet said, a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?

¹ Unspeak.net is well worth a visit and adding to your list of favourites, not only for Steven’s clear, clever and entertaining writing but also for both his depth of analysis and his sense of fun. And the book is also very well worth reading – even purchasing. Or you can check out this helpful video

Clive of Kogarah

Clive of Kogarah

Clive James with Bill Moyers

 

Bill Moyers recently hosted Clive James on his show to talk about his new book, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts (not the 80s punk band).

Publishers Weekly  says:

  From Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, Tacitus to Margaret Thatcher, this scintillating compendium of 110 new biographical essays plumbs the responsibilities of artists, intellectuals and political leaders. British [sic] critic James…structures each entry as a brief life sketch followed by quotations that spark an appreciation, a condemnation or a tangent (a piece on filmmaker Terry Gilliam veers into a discussion of torturers’ pleasure in their work). Sometimes, as in his salute to Tony Curtis’s acting or his savage assault on bebop legend John Coltrane’s penchant for “subjecting some helpless standard to ritual murder,” James’s purpose is just bravura opinionating. But most articles are linked by a defense of liberal humanism against totalitarianisms of the left and right “and ideologues who champion them.”

Salon calls James “The greatest living critic”.

Clive’s approach in his book seems to be to help us to share his understanding of the value of culture and of humanity in all its variety, in all its forms and at all its levels. His is a passionately humanist, while healthily sceptical, world view (which is probably why we like him so much). And we like that while we don’t agree with him all the time we love that he gives us ideas to think about.

He talks about the way in which the understanding of cultures can come when they are torn apart,

  Everybody concerned with the whole business of culture is scattered to the winds and…you see how the society fits together. It’s extremely complex and impossible to reproduce through one person’s will.

To us it brings to mind the stump of a severed limb. Sure, you can see the bits of flapping muscle, blood vessels and bone, the shiny sinews and nerves, and you can see how they were all put together. But they don’t work any more.

There are interesting parallels with the blogging culture in the interview.

” The Jewish intellectuals in the Vienna cafes, they learned to write “the article”, what they called the feuilleton, the little leaf, the entertaining thousand-word piece which is the basis of the whole of modern culture that I find fascinating.

And one of the maniacs in the Vienna cafes was Adolf Hitler

But he is particularly passionate about the culture of liberal democracy.

” There’s something about the creative force of liberal democracy which gives you hope that it can overcome any challenge, including terrorism. I’m sure terrorism can punch very large holes in western civilisation, and probably will.

You’re inheriting civilisation. What you try to do is protect it and improve it, but get rid of the idea that it can all start again because a few men think it can.

And he doesn’t believe in an elitist view of culture (unlike some Australian journalists who hate bloggers)…

” My only originality when I started off as a journalist was I didn’t believe in these elites. I thought that intelligence was enough and if people were intelligent they’d hear what you had to say. I don’t believe that knowledge and understanding and wisdom are the property of a class at all. I believe they’re generally democratic things. That doesn’t mean that everyone will understand what anyone can, you know?

On the other hand, Clive comes to Australia so rarely, and is so busy, that he seems a little out of touch at times. He ascribes to the Leader of the National Party (and therefore Deputy Prime Minister) a statement made by Costello (Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party but not Deputy Prime Minister) and while he believes in the fair go, he is a little behind the times with one of its expressions (emphasis on the “ex”):

” In Australia we have a concept called the “fair go” which is built into the system. It’s built into the Basic Wage and so on.

In any case it is an interview very much worth watching  (if you don’t mind using Flash).

 

Which brings us to disclose that …

ValuesAustralia interviewed Clive James in London 32 years ago in the heat of the Whitlam debacle. We interviewed Clive in 1975 over a slab of Fosters about his “new” book, Felicity Fark in the Land of the Media, which is so out of print that it receives only the most fleeting of references, even on his own website.

Clive, to his great credit, has never lost or varied his Australian accent. We, on the other hand, are of the kind who tend to ‘merge’ into, or ‘immerse’ ourselves in, a new culture, to our somewhat amusement years later. We insist, however, that we have repatriated our accent.

‘My Culture the Bastard Child’

‘My Culture the Bastard Child’

This angry, loving, passionate, poetic piece from John White was a comment on the previous post but we love it so much we do not want it lost in the wastes of commentdom.

It deserves to be shared with you. So here it is:

 

Australian Values, Australian Gold
John White

I live in a nation of ghosts and spirits, of Anzac martyrs and rural massacres. The damp soil of Gippsland, the haze of her mountain ash – I was born here; but if you think that being Australian is a birthright, you do not understand my country.
My country is wattle and blood.

Melbourne is all around me, the ferns protecting William Ricketts, the river whose Yarra water draws up the clay, the bindi-i in the summer grass, and the two-dollar buskers and cafes edging the wide streets.

The magic of my land whispers deeper than prawns on barbies and bikinis in utes. I have lost patience with displays of bloody-minded jingoism. Posts are for football, not for displaying the flags of patriotic insecurity.

Leaving Bendigo in 1916, my great grandfather’s mining lungs could not contend with the poison air of the Somme fields. He died on a hospital ship, never to return. He had marched under the flag and sung the anthem; they were rags and noise compared to the children he left orphaned at home. The entrepreneurs of war lied to him, but his intention was true.

I am a part of the Australian community. Do not glibly say “one nation”: our country longs to be as one.

We slag on the vacuous slogans of politicians and the questionnaires of immigration bureaucrats. Our parliament mound infested with termites. They rejected our values when they took office shaking the hands of the perentie clans, their business mates. Leadership must be earned. Our Kelly sons went way too far in their war on the authorities, but we felt the injustice that took them to the edge.

Nor do we fear religion. We have been inside temples and churches, listened to humanists and prayed in mosques. Our feeble attempts to understand the transcendent only gives us affection for our fellow peoples, and a desire to depose the little kings of racism and fear that threaten their peace.

We celebrate our failures. Peter, Lalor’s wounding at Eureka stockade, the betrayal of Nancy Wake in resistance France, Albert Namatjira despondent in prison; these people are our characters. To be ‘true blue’ is not the ashes of success; it is to have integrity.

We demand a fair go for all humans, for family and friends and especially strangers. We barrack for the underdog (even at times for Collingwood!). We want to hear the stories of the refugee children, to decide for ourselves. And we know that it is never too late to engrave a treaty, to admit our past failures.

For I am an Australian, my culture the bastard child of indigenous and intruder civilisations. Not until I acknowledge our rainbow heritage can I know who I am. Only when I understand that this ground cannot be bought and sold am I truly at home. The home that I love.

 Coburg, June 2007

Grey Cardigans at 20 Paces

Grey Cardigans at 20 Paces

 

The greater triumphs and achievements

 

Today in 3QuarksDaily Abbas Raza quotes Nehru:

   We end today a period of ill fortune and India discovers herself again. The achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an opening of opportunity, to the greater triumphs and achievements that await us.

Are we brave enough and wise enough to grasp this opportunity and accept the challenge of the future?

This is precisely the opportunity, we thought, that Australia faces right now and seems, world-wearily, to be about to decline.

Thirty-five years ago Australians were excited at the prospect of throwing off the shackles of 25 years of boring, po-faced, arrogantly self-righteous, calvinoid/augustinoid coalition rule. And how we did throw them off!

Australia experienced a cultural excitement and energy and a social flowering unseen in decades. If ever. And brief though it was it changed our social landscape and our cultural and creative self-confidence for decades to come.

It took a man who was a visionary – an arrogant visionary, for sure (a justifiably arrogant visionary, perhaps) – with almost unlimited willingness to nurture his vision, to release us from the shackles of a most unpopular war and to have the confidence in Australians to encourage us to be ourselves, and to grow into whoever we would turn out to be.

And then before too long the lights dimmed.

The grey sludge of coalition rule crept up over our boots and then our hearts and we were once again forced by lies into the ugly, unpopular, insane, illegal horror of another war we didn’t want and didn’t understand.

And we have once again learnt obediently

to trudge daily to the foundry to collect our stale daily crumbs,

knowing that it is more than we deserve,

tugging our forelocks at the mill owners who have never had it so good,

being pathetically grateful for our good fortune,

and being expected to vote loyally yet again for our masters and betters

and the yoke of an only-mildly-despotic regime.

So now here we are again, just as we were in ’72 with the opportunity to overthrow the tyrants, to end our part in a horrible war and to flourish enthusiastically again as a nation of creators and experimenters and revellers in Life.

And we know, or we feel in our bones, that it is about to happen.

But where is the excitement?

Where is our sense of “the greater triumphs and achievements that await us”? What has happened to our courage and wisdom “to grasp this opportunity and accept the challenge of the future”?

There is none.

We are resigned.

We have on the one side the hand of living death and on the other a candidate who promises to be no different.

There is no vision, no promise.

No brave new morality,

no freshly-polished values,

no curtains opened to let the sunshine into our souls,

no outraged insistence on our birthright as free, imaginative and resourceful Australians.

Just more of the boring, left-brain, repetitive, cardiganed, conventional, calvinistic, po-faced, minutely-regulated, micro-managed, soup-kitchen-slop, soul-destroying same.

Two leaders: both of whom will send you into an instant coma, if they breathe on you,.

We do not deserve such alternatives.

We are better than that.

We ought not accept such a choice.

We are better than both of them.

Dis-Honoris Causa

Dis-Honoris Causa

 

In all its splendor and majesty

In September 2006 the US right pushed the country “a step toward totalitarianism” when the Republican Senate majority passed a bill which essentially stripped the US Constitution of the protection of habeas corpus, one of the foundational guarantees against executive injustice and abuse of power which has been an essential part the British legal tradition for hundreds and hundreds of years.

As Chicago Tribune columnist Garrison Keillor said at the time:

  Last week, we suspended human rights in America, and what goes around comes around. Ixnay habeas corpus.

The U.S. Senate, in all its splendor and majesty, decided that an “enemy combatant” is any non-citizen whom the president says is an enemy combatant, including your Korean greengrocer or your Swedish grandmother or your Czech au pair, and can be arrested and held for as long as authorities wish without any right of appeal to a court of law to examine the matter.

[…]

The Senate also decided it’s up to the president to decide whether it’s OK to make these enemies stand naked in cold rooms for a couple of days in blinding light and be beaten by interrogators….[T]hey have no right to see the evidence against them, and there is no appeal.

[…]

None of the men and women who voted for this bill has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Ideal. Mark their names. Any institution of higher learning that grants honorary degrees to these people forfeits its honor.

[…]

To paraphrase Sir Walter Scott: ‘Mark their names and mark them well. For them, no minstrel raptures swell. High though their titles, proud their name, boundless their wealth as wish can claim, these wretched figures shall go down to the vile dust from whence they sprung, unwept, unhonored and unsung.’

 

Three Republican senators made a show of opposing the bill and after they’d collected all the praise they could get, they quickly folded. Why be a hero when you can be fairly sure that the court will dispose of this piece of garbage.

 

If, however, the court does not, then our country has taken a step toward totalitarianism. If the government can round up someone and never be required to explain why, then it’s no longer the United States as you and I always understood it. Our enemies have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They have made us become like them.”

There were 65 Senators who voted in favour of the stripping of habeas corpus.

Three of them are now Republican Presidential candidates (none are Democrat candidates).

They were Brownback, Hagel and McCain. None of them now, as Keillor says, “has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Ideal.

Indeed, such “wretched figures” surely agree with the American military that the question of whether the Guantánamo prisoners – whose Military Tribunal cases were recently dismissed – were “Enemy Combatants” or “Illegal Enemy Combatants” is mere semantics. Of course. It is merely the law, and — as we know from the way that John Yoo, Alberto Gonzalez, Andrew Card, George Bush and Dick Cheney (not to mention McCain, Brownback and Hagel) view the law in general — when it gets in the way of their own agenda the rule of law and basic democratic principles are of small importance and the law itself (even though passed by the same vile and obsequious Senate) merely a minor hindrance when it comes to the Machtergreifung ¹.

But the law is not nothing, and the difference between an “illegal” and an ordinary “enemy combatant” is neither trivial nor semantic, as “rmj” clearly explains at Adventus [and also here].

(These are the people and the sort of people, by the way, whom John Howard’s government – especially Billy Bunter Downer, Darth Ruddock and the man who has lost any idea of morality or democratic principles, Michael Joseph Keelty – uses as its moral, legal and ethical benchmarks.)

Garrison Keillor went on to say, “Any institution of higher learning that grants honorary degrees to these people forfeits its honor.

So, speaking of universities granting honorary degrees to dishonourable people…

One-time Acting-Attorney-General James Comey “testified before both the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, and the House Judiciary subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law on the U.S. Attorney dismissal scandal…In early January 2006, the New York Times…reported that Comey, who was Acting Attorney General during the March 2004 surgical hospitalization of John Ashcroft, refused to “certify” the legality of central aspects of the NSA program at that time…After Comey’s refusal, the newspaper reported, Andrew H. Card Jr., White House Chief of Staff, and Alberto R. Gonzales, then White House counsel and now Attorney General, made an emergency visit to the George Washington University Hospital, to attempt to win approval directly from Ashcroft for the program”.

(Ashcroft refused. See Comey’s description here).

Nevertheless, about three weeks ago, “Andy” Card got his reward from – to its eternal shame and disgrace – the University of Massachusetts. But not without the almost universal condemnation of students and faculty in perhaps the most astonishing display of opposition and dissent ever, certainly recently, in a formal academic ritual.

[See the video above]

 

 

¹ Machtergreifung is a German word meaning “seizure of power”. It is normally used specifically to refer to the Nazi takeover of power in Weimar Germany on January 30, 1933.

The term Machtergreifung was first coined by the Nazis themselves in order to portray their accession to power as an active seizure”