verging_on_random

Watching an industry die

It must be the weekend! How do I know? Because my newspaper is bigger than usual, with restaurant reviews, and feature stories about people of whom I have never heard but who are apparently celebrities, and columns that against all reason are meant to be taken seriously in which degenerate men recommend that you eat warm otters’ nose salad with the wine of the week, and the latest critics’ thoughts about music.

Thoughts in which the critics, for about the 344234th time this century, refer to The Go-Betweens with phrases such as ‘the musos’ musos’ … ‘criticially acclaimed by the media … but without the album sales to match’. No I won’t give you a link, if you want to read this tedious crap yet again go and find it yourself.

I’ll tell you why the Go-Betweens’ album sales were less than impressive: it’s because their music was shithouse. One of the album sales was mine unfortunately, conned by the avalanche of ‘critical acclaim’ into believing that if only I played the bloody thing often enough, I would recognise it for the masterpiece that it was.

Unfortunately it never happened. No matter how often I played the piece of shit plastic I heard the same thing: booooring songs. But still the up-themselves elitist critics keep congratulating themselves on their superior taste in being Go-Between Groupies while the other 99.99999% of the population ask “The Go-Whos?”

The Go-Betweens are of course just one in a long line of awful acts that got adopted by the critics for no reason that any normal person ever worked out, and that still get trotted out at regular intervals as acts that have been ‘influential’ on everyone who ever picked up a guitar since. If the critics are really pompous and writing in an adult publication, they’ll describe their fave act as ’seminal’.

Who are some of these grossly over-hyped acts? Here’s a list of the first ones that spring to mind:

• Bob Dylan - wrote some decent songs (and a bigger number of pretentious repetitive ooordinary songs) but as a performer would be booed off the stage of the local RSL club and rightly so … one of the most unattractice, whiny voices you would ever hear.
• Radiohead - did I just use ‘pretentious’? Who cares, I’ll use it again. Why did people treat these dudes as if they were the second coming? Tuneless songs and deeply meaningful (viz meaningless) lyrics don’t make a great band … oh wait, Thom Yorke went to university and used computers, that was enough to cause the British pop press to commit collective premature ejaculation.
• The Sex Pistols - only the Brits would be idiotic enough to wet themselves with excitement at the concept of a band that couldn’t sing or play instruments or even participate in normal social interaction. They were a comedy act who deserved 15 minutes of fame and not a second more - only deranged music critics could still be citing them as an important musical influence 20 years later.
• Nirvana - Kurt Cobain was a drug-fucked nut-case. If he hadn’t killed himself he would by now be enjoying deeply-deserved obscurity along with the even crazier Courtney Love. Come on, hands up if anybody’s played Nevermind in the last 5 years? Thought not. If anyone was an influence on other bands it was Pearl Jam but Eddie’s mob had the common sense to live reasonably sane lives so now they get dismissed as ‘rock dinosaurs’.
• The White Stripes - ummm Jack, other people own Led Zeppelin albums too you know.

Anyway time to see what else is being reviewed in today’s SMH … uh huh, there’s Nick Lowe, he’s about as cutting edge as pop could be … ooooo a feature article on Jeff Buckley, who’s only been dead for 10 fuckin’ years … and a review of another album by Richard Thonpson, now there’s another ’seminal artist’ who belongs in the list. Come on, name a single Richard or Linda Thompson track that you can hum … HA! Thought not.

Oh great goddlemighty here’s a review of a CD where people are singing Will the Circle Be Unbroken …. do these people live their entire lives in the 19 fucking 70s???

No wonder anybody interested in contemporary music has pretty much abandoned the ‘music industry’ in favour of the online scene. The problem is nothing to do with piracy, it’s all to do with the musical ideas of corporate executives, stuck in 20th century amber.

Paul McCartney, anybody? His latest exciting CD is reviewed on page 13 of the SMH Spectrum.

AAAARRGH!!!

Outsourcing government

I posted a while back about the Howard mob’s brazen cheek in claiming credit for managing the economy when they had outsourced most of the key economic decisions to independent bodies like the Reserve Bank and the Fair Pay Commission. Just this week two other bloggers have posted with variations on the same broad theme.

First Ken Parish at Club Troppo wrote a terrific piece about the way contemporary politics has degenerated into one continuous election campaign, while over at Blogocracy, Tim Dunlop noted the secret workings of a group that is trying to change the way pharmeceuticals are priced in Australia.

The theme that runs through these and other pieces is that governments are no longer governing - they are devoting all their energies to getting re-elected. Politics has become one more reality TV show, with the endless polls the public’s way of voting for their favourite candidates. I suggested in jest recently that someone should set up an electoral worm that continuously monitors voting sentiments amongst the population but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before it happens.

The inevitable outcome of this of course is that governments no longer have time left to worry about governing. This is obvious in the states where public administration has gone from bad to dreadful over the last few decades. Whether it’s public transport in Sydney or public hospitals in Queensland or water supply practically anywhere, state governments have proven to be incompetent at basic public administration. The same thing is apparent in the USA, where all levels of government are still struggling to work out how to sort out the mess in New Orleans from two years ago.

In federal politics the managerial catatonia of the Howard Government is evident in its record since gaining control of both houses in June, 2005. With the exception of WorkChoices, which was basically a political act aimed at destroying trade unions and thereby the whole Australian labour movement, the government has done bugger-all with its power. Indeed it continues its relentless election campaign as if it was the opposition, trying manfully to discredit the policies of the Rudd Government.

Even politicians, however, are smart enough to know that public administration still has to be done. That’s why we have seen the steady growth of inquiries and commissions and all manner of other institutions that are taking over what used to be the core business of government. And far and away the biggest beneficiary of this outsourcing of public administration has been the private sector.

The privatisation of administration could be justified in the beginning on grounds of better service and lower costs. Competition drives efficiency improvements in the way public service never can etcetera. This rhetoric, soundly-based as far as it went, disguised the fact that you can’t outsource administration without simultaneously outsourcing policy. Talk of service obligations and so on is all very fine but it soon becomes obvious that these are empty words. What’s going to happen if Telstra lets regional services decline … is the government going to re-nationalise it? Deport Sol Trujillo?

The same kind of emerging problem is evident in Iraq, where there are nearly as many quasi-military contractor staff as there are US troops. These private armies are not subject to military oversight or command and have become a factor greatly complicating the Bush Administration’s attempts to manage a coherent occupation policy.

Fortunately, within Australia, empowering independent bodies to carry out government tasks has produced pretty good results so far. That’s probably because once you appoint people to things like courts and commissions you largely insulate them from the public backlash if their actions cause some pain in the community. That’s why pollies like using them of course: they can tell people to direct their anger at the Reserve Bank if interest rates go up, nothing to do with us mate. At the same time the public can’t do anything worth a damn to punish the independent body apart from whining on talk-back radio, so everyone involved in public administration is happy and the technocrats can make decisions that are in the best interests of the whole community.

The trouble is that there are limits to the extent to which the business of government can be outsourced without changing the whole nature of our society. The Fair Pay Commission, for example, is now authorised to make decisions affecting millions of workers but it’s literally a law unto itself; its decisions are made in secret and are subject to no oversight by anyone whatsoever. It is quite literally unaccountable. Should we ever get another Clyde Cameron as Minister for Labour, he could quite easily stack the FPC with those dreaded union bosses and smile while they forced minimum wages up to unprecedented levels.

Issues like the minimum wage, which have strong party-political overtones, also greatly outnumber those like interest rates where the public policy objective of containing inflation has broad community support. The greater the number of contentious matters sent off to ‘independent’ bodies to run, the less influence do ordinary citizens have over things that concern them and the less democratic our system of government becomes.

Even worse, the practice of outsourcing everything becomes an ingrained habit so that governments refuse to act unless they can do it. This mentality has been evident in public discussions of the water crisis, with Steve Bracks suggesting that instead of governments overseeing a $10 billion program it should be gifted to a ‘Reserve Bank style’ body. Anything, in other words, but accept responsibility for administration. We saw where this ends with the AWB fiasco, where people allegedly acted corruptly and against Australian national interests and nobody in government was prepared to accept that it had anything to do with them.

If this tendency continues, governments will eventually become like the Board of Directors of a sprawling conglomerate; the only function of politicians will be to appoint the members of the various institutions that actually run the place. Everything else will be one endless grubby struggle for the perks of office. Some might think that might lead to better outcomes than the model of ministerial accountability that we’ve had for so long.

Me, I think it’s a recipe for Australia to become like the larger South American nations, where politics is a corrupt joke and nobody is accountable for anything.

Fighting the unseen foe

Australians and North Americans are amongst the few peoples of the world that have never suffered invasion by foreigners. While other nations celebrate or memorialise titanic wars of conquest or liberation, the best the yanks can come up with is the Boston tea Party and that insane Civil War. We haven’t even got that much … we have to settle for State of Origin football.

The result is that while most every other country in the world has good reason to worry about external threats, Australians and North Americans don’t. Europeans came to those parts of the world, brushed aside the indigenous inhabitants with little thought for the practical or moral implications, and settled in comfortably to this day.

Nevertheless the human species must be genetically programmed to create external threats because we and the yanks have made a habit of inventing dark forces that imperil our very existence (though ironically, we were slow to recognise the only really serious external threat we ever faced, namely Japan in 1941).

In Australia the external threat has generally been based on race. At least as far back as the Lambing Flat riot in 1861, white Australians tended to fear the ‘Yellow Peril’. More recently it’s been a more diffused fear of Asians and Muslims and any version of ‘The Other’ who are perceived to want to destroy our way of life. It’s a low-level paranoia that sputters into life every now and then but thankfully it’s become increasingly disorganised and fragmented.

It’s a different story in the USA. There, fear and loathing during the 20th century was inclined to be directed at nameless global enemies and the daddy of them all was Communism. Communism was reviled as some kind of dreadful force that was trying to take over the world. From the late 1940s until the collapse of the Soviet Empire, many Americans sincerely believed that they were engaged in some kind of real war, although they would have struggled to tell you who they were fighting against or what weapons were being used. They were just Fighting Communism.

This childishly simplistic view of history is apparently alive and well. Just a few days ago, a ‘Victims of Communism Memorial’ was opened in Washington, DC.

To be located at the busy intersection of Massachusetts and New Jersey Avenues (and ‘G’ Street), NW, in Washington, D.C., the Memorial will feature a statue modeled on the “Goddess of Democracy” used by the Chinese students in Tiananmen Square in 1989, that statue itself deliberately reminiscent of our own Statue of Liberty. Its inscriptions, front and back, will read as follows: “To the more than 100 million victims of Communism and to those who love liberty,” and “To the freedom and independence of all captive nations and peoples.”

What’s wrong with this? Well it simply glosses over the complex nature of human history. The memorial claims that ‘some 100 million victims have died from Communist terror’. Who were they? They ranged from those who died during Mao’s efforts to drag China into the 20th century, through Stalin’s purges of the Kulaks, Pol Pot’s atrocities and even Cubans allegedly killed by Castro. The memorial’s designers don’t acknowledge that these were all quite separate phases in the respective countries’ development, explicable only by a deep understanding of complex national circumstances; no, they were all caused by this faceless beast ‘Communism’.

It’s as meaningless as saying all the people who died in the Indian partition in 1947, or in East Timor 1975-2002, or in Sri Lanka to this day, were killed by ‘Imperialism’. Or that the victims of the two European wars 1914-18 and 1939-45 were killed by capitalism. Or, for that matter, that the half million Americans killed in the Civil War were the victims of federalism.

There was no global monolithic ‘Communism’ that caused any deaths. There were just the sad violent forces that have been building nations for as long as people have been keeping records of human history. Yes some of the national leaders called themselves communists but that’s about as significant as Adolf Hitler and Francois Mitterand both calling themselves socialists.

The reason this matters is that many Americans still see the world through child-like eyes. The memorial to the victims of communism wasn’t some minor affair supported by a few ageing cold war obsessives; it was built by an act of Congress and the opening was attended by sundry notables including President George W himself … all celebrating their role in defeating the evil force that claimed 100 million fellow human beings.

You can see this urge to reduce complex issues to a simple ‘pin the label on the bad guys’ question in the response of the USA to the events of September 11, 2001. Terrorists were to blame so now they’re fighting a war on terror, which is every bit as meaningless and misleading as the war on communism was. The troubling thing is that this tendency to paint enemies as a faceless ‘ism’ is scarily reminiscent of the wars against Zionism (or ‘international Jewry’) that some Europeans felt compelled to fight in the last century.

Communism doesn’t kill people, people kill people, for their own unique and particular reasons. You’d think the gun-toting Americans of all people would understand that.

Roadkill

I live about three km out of town and when I moved in, I thought it would be a good morning walk. I still think so but I find myself more and more reluctant to do it. The reason? The cumulative impact of the daily road toll on native wildlife is too depressing.

Today’s specimen was a mountain brushtail possum - magnificent animals, with thick black coats, pink noses and an impressively loud unearthly cry that must have struck terror into the hearts of early European settlers. This one was squashed flat. I smelt it before I saw it; it’s a frequent experience, the stench of a rotting animal corpse. Some days there might be three or four in the three km stretch.

In six months I’ve counted eight dead wallabies, today’s possum, plus several pigeons, a kookaburra, a noisy mynah (no big loss), a couple of young magpies, a galah, plus countless lizards and snakes. They’re just what I’ve seen walking one or two days a week, on a road without much traffic. Lots more are in the bush where I can smell but not see them and presumably even more crawl away injured to die somewhere else.

Multiply that experience by the thousands of km of rural roads in Australia and the carnage must be frightful. Yet we all just shrug our shoulders and resign ourselves to it as an inevitable price to be paid to gratify our own selfish wish to be able to drive wherever we want whenever we want at a terrific speed.

I am as guilty of this as anyone, of course, but I think that when the planet finally decides to rub us out, the remaining species (if there are any left) can be forgiven if they give three loud cheers.

Criminologist:

And crawling on the planet’s face
Some insects called the human race
Lost in time, and lost in space
And meaning.

(The Rocky Horror Picture Show)

I better STFU or I’ll be accused of leftist self-loathing .

The Hicks Fix

The deal under which David Hicks copped a plea bargain and was sent back home is starting to stink to high heaven.

Throughout the whole episode, we have been assured over and over that Hicks’ fate was nothing whatsoever to do with the Australian government. Purely a matter for the Americans, huffed Ruddock, he hadn’t even read the prosecution brief. Howard stamped his little foot and said how angry he was that it was all taking so long and how by golly he’d said as much to his bff The President but he also stressed that he had no influence at all over the way the military commission process worked. None.

Nevertheless the way events have developed suggest that Howard and company were anything but detached observers. Consider that:

• Out of all the hundreds of concentration camp inmates at Guantanamo Bay, Hicks was the very first to be put on trial under the military commission process approved by Congress last year
• Hicks’ plea bargain deal was finalised in extraordinary fashion, with the tribunal reconvening after everybody thought proceedings had finished for the day and his parents had even left the island because they thought nothing would happen for a while
• The sentence subsequently handed down outraged many staunch Bush supporters for its perceived leniency.

Now, the next two inmates have been brought before the commission and have successfully challenged the lawfulness of the process:

Congress is taking a second look at guidelines hastily enacted last year for trying detainees in places such as the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Just three of its nearly 400 detainees have been brought to trial under the so-called Military Commissions Act.

Earlier this week, military judges threw out two of those cases. And other provisions in the law are also raising red flags. The White House got the Military Commissions Act it wanted last year from a Republican-run Congress. Since then, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) has been pushing to revise it.

Leahy chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee; he says the military judges who dismissed the two Guantanamo cases Monday did the right thing, because the defendants were not classified as “unlawful enemy combatants,” as the law requires.

Legislation restoring the rights of those held to challenge their detention in civilian courts is set to be passed out of Leahy’s committee Thursday.

At a recent hearing, ranking Judiciary Republican Arlen Specter called the absence of habeas corpus guarantees “atrocious,” noting that his own push to restore them last year in the GOP-run Senate lost by only three votes.

Why didn’t Hicks’ defence team raise the same objections as those successfully used by these inmates? They don’t seem to have required any especially abstruse legal training, just a straightforward examination of the words in the law. Well perhaps he just wanted to come home but if Congress is about to change the rules (and this was foreshadowed last November), wouldn’t it have been worth hanging on for another few months for the chance of being acquitted, or released without charge?

Imagine how embarrassing that would have been for Howard, Ruddock and the rest of them. Embarrassing enough for them to have begged Washington to sort out the Hicks matter by giving him a token sentence … just until the next election was out of the way. Embarrassing enough for a drastic change in the tone of their rhetoric about Hicks … suddenly he’s no longer about as dangerous as a man can be in modern times and of course he and his family don’t have to obey that silly condition about not talking to the media.

The whole episode smacks of an expedient fix to accommodate Howard’s local political objective to neutralise Hicks as an election issue. What remains unknown is the price that Howard agreed to pay for the Americans’ co-operation, because the way they handled Hicks as a special case must have put a lot of noses out of joint amongst the Rumsfeld/Cheney faction. So what could Howard do to seal the deal? More troops for Iraq? Some public criticism of Barack Obama and the Democrats? More troops for Afghanistan?

American public figures seem incapable of keeping anything secret for long so one day soon, the truth will hopefully be known.