verging_on_random

Honest work, fair reward, that’s the way to please the lord

I’ve written before I think about the poverty of Howard’s vision for Australia and indeed the world. He reminds me of the Health and Temperance Society that made kids’ lives a misery 50 years ago, or at least the kids who had to go to Sunday school in the Sydney Church of England diocese. The Health and Temperance Society’s mission was to brainwash kids against having fun when they grew up. I can still remember how they preached about the evils of alcohol. ‘Paralysis begins at the first drop,’ they warned. I won some sort of prize in one of their tests, so I’m living proof that their program didn’t work all that well.

Anyway the Health and Temperance Society - now apparently defunct, alas - had a motto that seemed to encapsulate the boring attitudes of the time: temperance in all things good and abstinence from all things bad. I suspect Howard would applaud, subject to being able to slip grog into the ‘good’ category and give ‘temperance’ a flexible interpretation. Another relic of the 1950s that I’m sure he treasures is a belief in the virtue of hard work.

The poor old bugger’s been under a bit of pressure lately and he’s responded in a way that he presumably thinks is admirable but which I find frankly puzzling. For example in response to Maxine McKew’s intention to stand for the ALP in his electorate, Howard said:

…when I get news like this it only steels my resolve to work even harder for the people I have had the privilege of representing for the last 30 years.

That was in February. Then a couple of weeks ago when the polls suggested that his government was in deep trouble, he was at it again:

Paul, in the past when I have confronted a bad poll, I have said that it only encourages me to work harder and walk faster in the interests of the Australian people and that is certainly my response in relation to this.

To be honest I never realised that he was walking in our interests and quite why walking faster will do us any good is beyond me. However his idea that in times of trouble you should just work harder was very 1950s. It provides the illusion of constructive action while avoiding the need for reflection.

Whether it’s a suitable response for the 2000s is a moot point. I rather think not. If we have to resort to trite cliches I think I’ll go with the ‘work smarter not harder’ one thanks. But it’s a revealing clue to the man’s basic conception of how the world functions, because when you think about it, that’s pretty much what his whole 11 years in office have been about. Making people work harder.

Howard and his business mates dress it up with euphemisms like flexibility and competitiveness and increasing productivity but what they really mean is work intensification. That’s what WorkChoices was all about. They spend virtually all their waking hours obsessing about their jobs and they don’t see why everyone else shouldn’t do the same. They rationalise this obsession with work and materialism as being necessary to stay ahead of the pack in the great global rat race - the interminable competition to see which country can have the highest economic growth, the lowest unemployment, the least government debt and so on. For Howard, that’s what life is all about. Oh, and cricket of course.

Unfortunately, I’ve yet to see any evidence that Kevin Rudd is any different. There are worrying signs that he’s also deeply committed to the uplifting value of work as an end in itself.

In the immortal words of Peggy Lee, ‘Is that all there is my friends?’ When she answered her own question in the affirmative, I recall she suggested that we should just keep on dancing. I don’t think either John or Kevin would approve.

Why I’m fatalistic about global warming

I’ve written before that I believe it’s beyond the capacity of human institutions to develop a managed response to global warming. Sure governments will do something but it will always be far too little and too late to make any real difference. So I’m a que sera sera kind of guy.

Here’s something that illustrates why I feel this way. It’s not from an alarmist ‘act now’ source; quite the opposite, it’s from an article suggesting that our response to global warming can be nicely incremental and not cause any real harm:

Just as conveniently, the most efficient way to get started is also the simplest, albeit not the easiest politically: tax carbon emissions. “At around $30 per ton of CO2 over a 25-year horizon, experts seem to think this is the kind of price that will encourage the kind of technologies that are necessary,” says Billy Pizer, an environmental economist at Resources for the Future, a Washington think tank. That would translate into an additional 27 cents or so on a gallon of gasoline and about a 20 percent increase in residential electricity bills (more like 34 percent for industrial users). Unpleasant, but hardly radical. Perfectly do-able, in fact.

Before the 2004 election Howard froze fuel excise rates as an opportunistic measure to curry political popularity. He openly justified it as ‘listening to the people’. Does anybody seriously think he (or any other politician who wants to get re-elected) is about to increase the price of petrol by 40 Australian cents a litre? Or jack up the price of power by 20%?

It’s all too hard, especially when the price of energy is going to be increasing anyway for other reasons. It will stay too hard because popular support for action will always lag about 20 or 30 years behind the time when that action could be effective.

Speaking passively

I sometimes think that the passive voice should be eliminated from the English language. It makes solving the world’s problems too easy. All you have to say is that such-and-such should happen, closely followed by so-and-so, and everything will be apples. Readers/listeners will usually nod in agreement, overlooking your convenient failure to mention who should do such-and-such and how and when they are supposed to do so-and-so.

Governments understand how to use active or passive voices to suit their political ends. I’m sure you’ve noticed that governments always create jobs - actively. Yet unemployment passively rises; it just happens, no government ever ‘destroyed 20,000 jobs last month’.

There’s a wonderful example of how to use the passive voice in today’s Sydney Morning Herald. The writer, Stephen Morris, is an academic, and unfortunately academics have a habit of using the passive voice when it comes to public policy. They seem to regard it as sufficient to propose a course of action that will resolve a question - the practical problems of implementation are beneath their dignity to discuss.

Morris begins by conceding that he was comprehensively wrong to support the invasion of Iraq. An increasing number of pundits are doing this as a way of avoiding having to defend the indefensible. It’s the intellectual equivalent of the ruse old fiction writers used to use: “With one bound James was free!” In the case of Iraq, the formula is (1) admit that the invasion was a mistake, (2) argue that unfortunately the damage is done so it’s time to (3) put the past behind us and develop a program to fix the place up again.

I can’t help wondering why I should take any notice of somebody who’s just admitted they made the most god-awful cock-up in supporting the original invasion. With a track record like that, why would anybody trust them to get anything else right? But these people never seem to think like that. Once a wise pundit always a wise pundit seems to be their attitude, even if your past punditry makes you look like a complete ass.

Anyway having done his mea culpa, Morris goes on without embarrassment to explain that we have no real choice now but to stay in Iraq and fix up the mess we’ve made. And surprise surprise, the way to do that is to support Teh Surge, the brilliant new strategy that President George ‘Decider’ Bush adopted in which he’s sending another 17,500 23,000 30,000 troops to Baghdad.

Now you’re probably familiar with the strategic genius of Teh Surge so I’ll only summarise it briefly, or rather let Morris do it. Here’s the crap old strategy:

The previous strategy involved US forces suppressing insurgents in their urban neighbourhoods, then retreating to fortified bases while leaving community protection to the inept Iraqi army.

Can you see the flaw in that? Me too … in fact I reckon an averagely intelligent 12 year old could. The description of the Iraqi army as ‘inept’ is a dead giveaway. Once the US forces retreated to their bases, the damned insurgents would come right back again.

How to solve this intractable difficulty? Fortunately the President turned to ‘the most gifted general in the US Army, David Petraeus’. No I don’t know why he wasn’t in charge from the start - something to do with liberals in the Pentagon I expect. Anyway here’s the new strategy, a work of staggering genius that only a gifted general or that averagely intelligent 12 year old could have come up with:

The Petraeus strategy involves committing more US troops (the so-called “surge”) to seize insurgent occupied areas, eliminating fighters found there, and then holding the area by establishing US-Iraqi military outposts in the community.

If you analyse the difference between this revolutionary new strategy and the old, discredited strategy, you’ll see that it lies in having US troops stay in the community to keep an eye on provide comradely support to the inept Iraqi army. So far so good.

I can see the merits of this strategy but I confess I’ve always had a niggling doubt in the back of my mind. Like if this is a ’surge’, won’t the extra US troops have to go home soon? And when they do, won’t the Iraqi army go back to being inept, thus leaving the insurgents to return and put the place pretty much back where it was before the whole exercise began?

Fortunately Morris has answered my unspoken reservations, cleverly using the passive voice to do so. According to him:

Then economic reconstruction and community development can be undertaken. Training of Iraqi soldiers would continue. At some point the process of disarming the Shiite militias, if necessary by force, would begin.

Isn’t that great? So many admirable outcomes achieved at the stroke of a pen without having to grapple with tedious questions like who, or when, or how. I mean try to rephrase it in the active voice and see how you get on:

Then XXX can begin to reconstruct the economy while YYY develops a sense of community. ZZZ will continue to train Iraqi soldiers. AAA will begin to disarm the Shiite militias in ?, 200?, if necessary by force.

Fill in the real names and dates. Go on, try it and see how you get on. Remember when you get to the community development bit that the US is cordially loathed by virtually all Iraqis, and that hardly any Americans speak Arabic when you fix up the training issue. Oh and all the combat troops are committed already, so you’ll have to be creative when you suggest who’s going to disarm the Shiite militias. They’re the ones who haven’t started to kill occupying troops yet. There’s a lot more of them than there are Sunni insurgents, who are the ones who’ve caused most of the trouble so far. I’m sure you’ll figure something out.

I think Stephen Morris has used the simplest of linguistic devices to make the future problems in Iraq pfffttt!! Blow away in the passively voiced breeze. Hopefully he and others like him won’t get away with it any longer - the self-appointed Middle Eastern experts who blandly admit that they screwed things up in 2003, thereby causing untold death and suffering, but now have the unmitigated gall to offer their pious platitudes about what should be done to fix up their mess.

Take all the useless murdering arseholes to Baghdad, give them a rifle and an Arabic phrase book and tell them to go start implementing their strategy. Vague ‘this should be done’ bullshit doesn’t cut it any more - someone has to start getting active and since they caused the disaster, it might as well be them.

Bees are bastards

I don’t trust bees. Anything that wants to hurt me by killing itself makes me nervous; I don’t care if it’s an Islamo-fascist suicide bomber or a bee or a geriatric male driver wearing a hat.

A bee got me a beauty this morning. There are heaps of the bloody things on the beaches round here. They lie in a foetal position in the inter-tidal zone, waiting for innocent joggers like me.

Obviously they’re in their death throes so you’d think they’d close their eyes and try to make peace with their maker, but no. If you accidentally step on one they cling to the sole of your foot and sting til your eyes water.

Then of course you have to hop around on one leg looking for the sting to pull out which isn’t easy when you left your specs in the car, not wanting to spoil the youthful image that you’re trying to project which made you go for a jog in the first place.

I don’t understand WTF all these bees are doing on the beach anyway. It’s not like we have flowers on the beach in this neck of the woods. Something odd’s going on and I wish the government would come clean about it.

Thanks Shane … Hansie … Mark … Salim …

We should all be giggling about the wonderful unpredictability of sport with the news that Ireland has knocked Pakistan out of the cricket World Cup.

Instead, my reaction was to wonder what the bookies’ odds were on the upset and who had a lot of money on it.

I’m afraid that for me the joy of big time sport has gone forever.

Grasping at historical straws

I don’t take much interest in movies any more. There are exceptions, of course, but most of them are so obsessed with faux violence and special effects that they’re just boring.

So anyone reading probably knows more than I do about a movie called 300 that was released not long ago in the USA (and here for all I know). It sounds like another ridiculous distortion of history: an opportunity to dress up in period costumes and use stilted dialogue.

However, in the USA something decidely weird has happened. The remaining neo-cons have seized on 300 as a parable of US intervention in the Middle East and in a hilariously crazy way, used it to justify what passes for foreign policy in George W Bush’s America.

Here are some gems from one of the USA’s foremost neo-con blogs:

The problem isn’t that 300 offers too few theories of Spartan greatness, it is that, behind all the stylized blood spatter, it offers so many. Not the least of which is that that a people that honors its artists and scholars above its warriors eventually becomes a weak, effeminate people.

Who could she mean? (Yes it’s a woman, Megan somebody … Ann Coulter’s inspired a whole generation of American Madame Defarges whose knickers are permanently wet at the thought of Men Fighting and Dying for Freedom.) Anyway you whistle and I’ll point, I reckon she’s having a go at those Olde European countries like France and Germany. The ones who honour their artists and scholars above their warriors. Or maybe she means the Chinese, who knows? Certainly not Australia, anyway, we only honour our sporting gods.

Megan’s an old-fashioned militarist. I’m sure she would just love to be a North Korean, where you can hardly move without tripping over a parade full of grimly efficient soldiers. For instance:

The grim efficiency of the Spartan career soldiers stands in stark contrast to the brave but incompetent Athenians who hack away at the enemy like, well, like a bunch of actors and craftsmen.

Just to allow a tiny bit of historical perspective into Megan’s fantasies, the Sparta she so admires was a totalitarian oligarchy and Athens, which she clearly despises, was the original democracy. I remember when Americans prided themselves on being citizens of a democracy but obviously people like Megan no longer feel that way. They just want to kill people.

Is it also relevant that the Battle of Thermopylae was what we historians call a ‘defeat’? It’s the ancient equivalent of the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava: c’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre. Oops, my Olde European bias is showing. Anyway the ‘grim efficient’ Spartans were comprehensively beaten. The war against Persia was actually won by those effete Athenians who won a naval battle a few months afterwards, which threatened the Persian lines of supply and sent it scurrying for home.

BTW did you pick up on the key word in that last paragraph? Yes it was ‘Persia‘, aka Iran. Now you can see where Megan’s coming from. In her fevered imagination the Battle of Thermopylae is a splendid example of how Teh West should stand up to the Beast from the East.

[The Spartans’] unwillingness to become slaves to an ideology from the East helped preserve the tenets of Western Civilization for generations.

Which of course is the purest horseshit, revealing the depths of Megan’s ignorance, or maybe her dishonesty. The Peloponnesian Wars were about ideology? Come off it Megan, next thing you’ll be telling us the Persians were Islamo-Fascists.

Someone should explain to Megs that at the time of the Greco-Persian wars Persia was immeasurably more civilised than the Greek city-states, which were little more than fortified tribal encampments. Megan would have run screaming if she’d encountered a Spartan in a dark alley. She would have found the Persians much more her kind of people. In fact if anyone wants to play one of those silly parallel history games on a wet afternoon, they could easily run a persuasive argument that Europe would have turned out a whole lot better if the Persians had won.

But Megan’s not going to be deterred by a few inconvenient historical realities. She’s going to use this film to glorify the Bush Administration no matter what anyone says:

The filmmakers didn’t have to impose parallels with today’s geo-political reality; history had already done it for them.

Cue helpless mirth.

If you can be bothered going and reading the whole childish ‘film review’ you’ll see how Good Brave Spartan King Leonidas is George W Bush, the gutless Council is the Democrat Congress, the priests are the liberal traitors of their day and so on. Megan frames the whole film as a moral fable in which the Brave and the Good go forth to fight the enemy because it’s the Right Thing To Do.

I don’t know, however, if Dubya will altogether appreciate Megan’s historical analogy. You see every Spartan soldier at Thermopylae was slaughtered and George W Leonidas was decapitated by the Persians. So if Megan’s suggesting that 300 is a fable for our times and Thermopylae was the Iraq War of its day, then the portents for the occupation ain’t looking good.

After all her blather, Megan closes with this ringing peroration:

Their very discomfort reveals the most significant key to the greatness of the men who died at Thermopylae. Those with the will to win carry the day.

Except Megs that’s totally illogical. They didn’t carry the day at all. They lost. They all got killed. ‘Those with the will to win’ … got beaten.

Therefore on Megan’s reading of the historical tea leaves Iraq’s looking like a bit of a disaster. Maybe the ‘anemic intellectual types [who] tend to feel a bit defensive (and perhaps inadequate?) in the face of such traditionally masculine sentiments as honor and country’ might have to save the day after all.

I wonder what the effeminate French Navy’s doing next month?

Chalk up another win for the baby Jesus

Slowly, without dramatics, East Timor degenerates into ‘failed statehood’ – the expression we use for people and places that can’t cut it in today’s hi-tech, über-wealthy, information-rich global community. The UN has become a kind of permanent East Timorese mentor and back-up administrator as the old freedom warriors, Gusmao, Alkatiri, Ramos Horta and the rest, when they’re not squabbling over who fills which office, gaze around them and wonder WTF to do next. Perhaps they could begin with the country’s web site, which still names Alkatiri as prime minister. The Australian consultant probably quit when he didn’t get paid.

There are no jobs for many East Timorese and little prospect that the place will develop a cohesive sense of purpose any time soon. After the first flush of excitement that accompanied ‘independence’ the old animosities have returned, with political instability the order of the day.

Street violence has evolved into something more dangerous and the dreaded ‘civil war’ phrase is creeping into discussions of what the future holds. Australians are being conditioned to accept that our troops and police will be required to serve in East Timor more or less forever.

East Timor, in other words, is our very own micro-Iraq.

But it doesn’t matter brothers and sisters, the material problems that afflict East Timor are very sad but let’s not lose sight of our objectives here, the main thing is that 700,000 souls have been saved from the dreaded heathen hordes of the Prophet; they’ve been saved for the one true god by saintly bishop Belo and his holy Roman church. Praise the lord, hallelujah!

…

I remember teaching a basic course in industrial relations back in the time before Indonesia agreed to the East Timor plebiscite. One week the topic was the role of trade unions in Australia and a couple of tutors were feverishly keen that we use an exercise they’d designed in all our classes (this was a course with about 1,000 students). When I looked at the exercise it was all about a ‘Free East Timor’ campaign that a few unionists were running.

I ventured a suggestion that this was hardly typical of the routine activities that occupy trade unions day-in-day-out and copped a savaging for not taking the opportunity to strike an ideological blow for freedom. Shortly afterwards, by accident, I discovered that these two tutors were both leading lay members of the local Roman Catholic diocese. Thus was I introduced to the blurring of church and state that has been such a feature of East Timorese history and Australia’s involvement in it.

The only arguments in favour of recognising East Timor as a separate nation state are religious. It is based on a theocratic foundation just as much as any Muslim nation. On any economic or geographic or ethnic logic, Timor is either one country or a collection of small communities. There is no basis for drawing an arbitrary line between east and west except for one thing: the Portuguese got to the eastern bit first and brought the Roman Catholic missionaries with them.

When the Portuguese finally acknowledged the stupidity of holding on to a colony halfway across the world, it was the church that vigorously promoted the idea of independence from Indonesia. After the act of incorporation into Indonesia it was the church that fanned the flames of independence, getting into an unholy alliance with the far left Fretilin movement (who in other circumstances might have been labelled terrorists) while they madly baptised people into the one true faith.

Well they’ve got what they wished for. It doesn’t seem to have done them much good. Church attendances in East Timor are declining once again and sooner or later they’ll either be held accountable for the unsolvable mess they’ve done so much to create or they’ll be rendered irrelevant.

But in the mean time, other meddlesome god-botherers continue to cause problems in Indonesia. From Australian and American bases they smile bland missionary or assistance worker smiles while they encourage the locals to reject Muslim rule and embrace the one true god. In Aceh and other provinces and most of all in West Papua, the activities of these zealots present a serious threat to our relationship with Indonesia – a relationship which is the single most important factor in preserving Australia’s long-term national security.

It’s time people stopped uncritically accepting the fable that East Timor represents some kind of diplomatic and moral triumph for Australia. On the contrary, it represents a gormless capitulation to the power of the church in defiance of common sense, and the outcome is an intractable problem that is likely to get worse over time.

Fortunately the current government seem to have awakened to the danger – better late than never – and after their mishandling of the Papuan ‘refugee’ matter last year they’ve made it very clear there will be no repeat. Hopefully a future Labor government will be equally determined in its attitude. Christian activists who stir up separatist sentiments in the name of saving souls for the lord deserve neither sympathy nor support.

If the Indonesians want to lock a few of them up for breaching internal security laws, I’ll be the first to applaud.

Pandering to the subhumans

On 3 March an Australian named Vic Darchinyan beat a Mexican man so severely that he’s in a medically-induced coma as a result of a blood clot on the brain. In any other circumstances Darchinyan would be in gaol facing charges of assault and, if the Mexican dies, manslaughter. Instead, he returned home to Australia with one of the seemingly endless number of ‘world championship’ titles available in the subterranean world of boxing.

In an act of breathtaking hypocrisy that would shame a politician, the promoter of the fight urged everyone to pray for the Mexican’s recovery.

Meanwhile on Wednesday night another Australian, Anthony Mundine, who seems determined to single-handedly reinforce every negative stereotype held about both indigenous Australians and Muslims, beat up another man so viciously that it’s pure luck he isn’t also in hospital fighting for his life. Mundine was also rewarded with some meaningless world title or other.

Pointing up the double standards that afflict our society, there was great tut-tutting on Monday about a high school brawl which caused three kids to attend hospital out-patients. None needed to be placed in a medically-induced coma. To a large extent of course the extensive coverage of this minor incident was simply due to the media’s determination to push the Sydney Over-run by Middle Eastern Thugs Scary Story that it’s been running since the Cronulla riot. However, to the extent that it reflected genuine community concern, it demonstrated a laudable repugnance at using physical violence to settle disagreements.

Boxing is a legacy of a bygone age, one marked by other diversions like cock-fighting and public executions. It reminds us of an era when people were exposed to the threat or reality of violent personal conflict as a routine occurrence. Unfortunately it hasn’t morphed into a harmless sport like fencing, indulged in by a tiny minority of enthusiasts. On the contrary, it’s become a sick, bizarre form of entertainment in which men are encouraged to revert to the status of unthinking animal for 45 minutes.

Boxing is run by cynical promoters whose sole interest is to make money, aided and abetted by embarrassing clowns like Arthur Tunstall, to amuse a motley bunch of racists, ‘celebrities’ and sado-masochists who get so horny from watching 15 three minute rounds that they race home to watch a few good snuff movies.

I’ve read the self-justifying defences of boxing that its supporters fall back on. Stripped of all their ‘noble art of self-defence’ bullshit, they can be summarised as this: teaching disadvantaged and/or alienated kids to adopt people like Jeff Fenech, Anthony Mundine and Mike Tyson as role models is a terrific helping strategy. Brilliant guys, thanks for your insights.

There are no arguments justifying boxing. None. It should be banned immediately.

Pollies meeting crims

Sometimes I wonder if some members of the general public understand how politicians spend their time. Maybe they imagine that your typical pollie wakes up and goes to parliament house where they devote the day to reading draft bills, making representations on behalf of constituents, writing speeches, participating in debates and so on.

Someone should tell these innocent souls that pollies now have paid staff to do all these things for them, well except for the debates bit and not many of them bother to sit there while anyone else is talking. No, pollies spend hours and hours every day doing one thing:

Meeting people.

They have one-on-one meetings in their offices. The receive delegations of voters who want to whine about something or other. If they’re ministers or even shadow ministers, they could probably eat six or seven times a day if they accepted all the invitations they get to breakfasts, lunches and dinners. Actually if you look at some of them they accept a few too many invitations like that. Plus cocktail parties of course … if you like a drink, politics is one of the best occupations to aim for.

The purpose of all these gatherings is for the pollie to meet people. The people usually have something they want to tell him or her, often they have a pet project they want to promote or a strong view they want to get off their chests. Pollies have to put up with it because the cumulative impact of all the tiny individual impressions that they make when dealing with groups becomes the public image that determines whether or not they get re-elected, promoted, appointed to high office. They also value the chance to make potentially helpful contacts, gather useful information, and get a feel for the mood of the masses.

Lobbyists are good at arranging opportunities for groups to meet pollies. I know, I used to be one. In a previous life in Sydney I’ve organised breakfasts with Bob Carr, dinners with Laurie Brereton, lunches with John Howard, chats in his office with Andrew Peacock … I’ve arranged dozens of the things. They served a useful purpose for everyone involved at the time. I can’t remember now what most of them were about and I’m sure most of the pollies involved couldn’t either.

That’s the business of politics … meeting and greeting and listening, and trying to gather a handful of wheat every day from the bales of chaff. The notion that pollies use these occasions to ‘do deals’ is pure fantasy. Sheer delusion, probably the result of watching too much television.

Needless to say this little reflection was prompted by the hilarious uproar about Kevin Rudd attending the same function as Brian Burke on three occasions in 2005. Most attention seems to be on a dinner attended by about 30 business people and apparently organised by Burke. I can readily visualise it. Burke would have used it to entice a few business people who didn’t especially want anything to do with him but were interested in meeting Rudd. Burke would have spent the night working on them to get whatever he wanted in the way of information or a closer relationship or whatever.

The rest of the people there would have been attracted by vague curiousity to meet Rudd, or a particular wish to forge a relationship with someone who might be Foreign Minister one day … a few probably just wanted to have a night out on the piss with the boys and Rudd was a convenient excuse. But if you’re running a resources company exporting into China, it’s handy if the next Foreign Minister can put a face to your name when you need to talk to the government about something. People mightn’t like the fact that the system works that way but tough, it does. Any pollie who doesn’t want to play the game should migrate to a one party state, or join Family First.

The idea that Rudd would have sat down with Burke at a dinner of business people and canvassed support for a leadership challenge against Beazley is not just silly, it also betrays rank ignorance about how these affairs work in practice. The whole evening would have been at a very light and general level of discussion, especially as the night wore on because in my experience most of these functions feature a lot of booze on the part of most attending apart from the guest of honour*. After dinner Rudd would have been invited to say a few words, he would have given a version of the standard informal talk that he used for these occasions, he would have invited a few people with specific issues to write to him or contact his office later and that would have been it. When he says he doesn’t recall what was discussed I bet he’s telling the truth. It would be remarkable if he could.

I’m sure there was a lot of heavy wheeling and dealing within the Labor Party to get the Rudd/Gillard team elected, just like you see in the Penrith Panthers or the local church tennis club or any other organisation where people covet an office that can only be obtained by means of an election. But if people think these kinds of things are sorted out in public, with the participants making explicit deals, they’re very naive.

…

*There are exceptions. I remember one night a pollie cancelled out as a dinner guest at the last moment (always a risk at these affairs - anybody who had Ian Campbell lined up as an official dinner guest this week will probably be spewing) and I got Norman ‘Nugget’ May, the sports commentator, as a substitute from one of those agencies that hire speakers out. Nugget was a bit cranky during the meal because the waiter wasn’t quick enough to fill his glass up. Eventually he demanded that the waiter leave the bottle, followed not long after by another bottle. Then he got up and delivered a most polished, amusing talk about his life in sport, after which he sat down and got stuck into another bottle.

I’m not bad on the red myself, but not in the same class as Nugget. Not even close.

Hats off to Hatto

I take childish pleasure in seeing self-proclaimed experts being made to look foolish. For some reason I feel this way especially about the pretentious snobs who have been retained as ‘critics’ in what you might call the finer things in life.

Years ago you would read stories occasionally about wine experts wrongly identifying Riverland flagon wine as a French burgundy in a blind tasting or something similar, and it always gave me a good laugh, specially if they were the same experts who habitually bagged the kind of wines I liked to drink. Same with food - you know, you just think you’ve discovered a really tasty new line in frozen vanilla yoghurt until some dick comes along and writes a column about how inferior the taste of artificial vanilla is compared to the real thing ($5 a bean at specialty food stores called trendy names like arsewipe_the_grocer of Double Bay).

Anyway one of my pet hates is the critic who deflates your enjoyment of a concert or recording by telling you you it failed to get to the core of the music, or lacked the insights and drama and excitement or whatever of the legendary recording made by the Kracow Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Georg von Richthofen in his last appearance on the podium before he was called to the front in 1939. It’s a real downer to find a piece of music that I really like and then read that my version is total crap.

So the Joyce Hatto affair has had me chuckling something fierce. You see this Joyce Hatto was a promising classical pianist who unfortunately got sick with cancer years and years ago and could no longer appear in public. Nevertheless gallant Joyce (she was English BTW, I doubt if this could have happened in any other country) continued to record in the studio. Under the guidance of her husband she fought through the pain to make CDs of many of her favourite works, which were duly released for public sale.

The critics loved her. They’ve been raving about her for ages. Just like snobs everywhere they’ve seized on this obscure artist and made her their own … so superior to those well-known names that the unwashed masses think are wonderful. Take for example a review in the December, 2006 edition of Gramophone magazine, perhaps the most respected classical music publication in the world (and they would be the first to acknowledge the fact). It’s a review of some releases by Earl Wild, a very popular pianist who’s widely admired but he is, well you know, American:

… he does not combine textual observations with musical poetry as effectively as Perahia, Lugansky or above all, Joyce Hatto.

Get it? Joyce is not just good in this repertoire, she’s the best.

Then in the same publication there’s a review by a dude called Bryce Morrison. Bryce may well be a terrific bloke for all I know but he writes a monthly column in The Gramophone and I have to say he comes across as a patronising prat. Quite full of himself, to use our prime minister’s turn of phrase. Here’s what Bryce has to say about a recent release of Joyce’s:

… you can only marvel at the glory of Hatto’s reading. Her playing recreates Messiaen’s vision with a fervour and generosity unknown to even her finest competitors (Peter Serkin, Steven Osborne).

You’ll notice that once again, Joyce is not just great but the greatest. And critics would know, they sometimes write long ‘building a library’ articles when they tell you not to waste your money on this or that or the other version of a work (mine usually get knocked out in the qualifying rounds) but to make sure you get this one (sample prose … ‘a self-sufficient, thrilling Seventh that renders classical-modernist dialectic temporarily irrelevant’ … and to think I bought an inferior version just cos I had a positive emotional response to the music).

Anyway you get the picture, Joyce is just brilliant and not to be compared with any other pianist. Except it turns out that she actually was another pianist . Several other pianists in fact.

Yep, Joyce died not long ago (she was 77, so the cancer couldn’t have been all that serious I guess) and now the scandal has broken. It turns out that an unknown number of Joyce’s alleged recordings were actually pinched from records released by other pianists, which makes the critics who purported to evaluate her work compared to others and rate it superior … well the word ‘goose’ springs to mind.

The really funny thing is the way someone cottoned on to the scam. They whacked one of ‘her’ CDs into a PC and when it started to play, the correct original track information came up on the screen . I guess the $15,000 Krell CD players that the critics use don’t have enough useful facilities after all … no doubt they would say that displaying the track info detracts from the sound quality.

I think the whole affair is a hoot. Apparently it was Mr Hatto who was responsible for the scam and they’re busy trying to work out what, if anything, they can actually charge him with. I hope he gets away with it. It’s kind of a classical music version of the Ern O’Malley thing, and it might teach the critics a bit of humility, well for a month or two at least.

Enjoy the weekend all