Seeing the future

Listening to first Tony Windsor and then Rob Oakeshott deliver their verdicts in this afternoon's press conference was a really interesting experience. I was driving home, so heard it on the radio rather than watching the teeve, of which I'm now glad, because I gather from various online commentary thus far that the media pack behaved like a bunch of hyenas: restless, noisy and disrespectful. And like them, and like, I'm sure, the rest of the country, I spent the first two or three minutes of Tony Windsor's speech champing at the bit thinking Oh for God's sake get on with it already.

Then it dawned on me slowly that this really was a fairly historic moment in the history of Australian parliamentary democracy; it deserved its little bit of theatre. More, the Independents deserved to be allowed to explain themselves in detail -- not least because they know they will be carved up by the Murdoch-dominated press and filleted by their own electorates.

Windsor probably drew the long straw; speaking first, he had the luxury of being able to announce his decision halfway through his speech, knowing the press and the country would have no choice but to keep listening. It was harder for Oakeshott, who knew that the minute he announced his decision they would all stop listening to him and he therefore had no real choice but to leave it till the end. Which was, anyway, the only possible choice, given the degree of theatre the occasion deserved and got.

In terms of one's own personal development (and the more I see of certain people in their 70s and 80s, the more determined I become never to abandon the effort to be Better), what I found very educational was my own childish impatience for instant gratification. As Windsor got into his stride, I began to ask myself exactly why I just wanted him to hurry up, when what he was saying was actually content-rich and very interesting. I seemed to myself to be a toddler squalling for her dummy. I began to be a bit ashamed, and switched to Mindfulness mode.

Which stood me in good stead when it came to Oakeshott, who set Mindfulness a bit of a test. But I don't know why a certain sort of commentator (on the Crikey liveblog, for a start) is whingeing about there being no substance to his speech. There appeared to me to be plenty.

My dad will be ropeable about this result, but then he is permanently ropeable about everything these days, so it would be hard to tell. It saddens me that I won't be able to make him see the single biggest miracle in all this, grounded in the fact that as time rolls itself out, things happen that you could never have seen coming, and sometimes they are things that change the shape of what you thought were life certainties.

Via him, I come from a family that farmed barley, wheat and sheep on South Australia's Yorke Peninsula for four generations, and lived on that farm myself till I was twelve. I was very moved by Tony Windsor's clear statement that the two things he thought would benefit rural and regional Australia most were advances with broadband and climate-change policy, because I could imagine the people I went to primary school with, and their children and grandchildren, living in that landscape I know so well, having the benefit -- not just with regard to business, but also with regard to education and health -- of the NBN, and living in a country not in denial about climate conditions under which they will be among the first to suffer ruinously.

Climate change and the internet are two things that my father's generation - indeed, my generation -- could never in a million years have seen coming. Action on both issues is currently down to the (comparatively speaking) progressives, who are, historically, anathema to the bush. But they are what will help to save it, if anything can, and Windsor and Oakeshott have had the vision to see that and the courage to act on it.

In which we use words to mean whatever we like

Anyone following the entertaining shemozzle that Australian federal politics has recently become (usually it's a fairly boring shemozzle) will have noticed in the last few days that Tony Abbott and his henchpersons, most recently Christopher Pearson (whom I know knows better; tch) in this morning's Australian, make reference as often as they can to Julia Gillard 'clinging on' to power.

Now call me a pedant but if anyone can show me any dictionary or lexicon in which 'clinging on' is listed as a synonym for 'following due process', I will give them $10,000. And if Tony Abbott does indeed end up Prime Minister, will they tolerate anyone talking about his having 'forcibly snatched power away from the incumbent Prime Minister'? Because forcibly snatching stuff away is what you have to do, when someone is clinging on. Live by the connotation, die by the connotation.

Why everyone loves Antony Green

Dude knows his stuff, is why.

I was directed to this magnificently clear and thorough explanation of the current and possible future Canberra scenarios by the equally excellent Bernice, who blogs here.

In the words of the First Dog on the Moon ...

Australia, what have you done?

Family: the weight

Never, ever underestimate how much it takes out of a person to endure protracted emotional strain, particularly if this involves self-restraint. Example: spending an entire afternoon with your family of origin, all of whom you love, and all of whom intend to vote for the Coalition even though Tony Abbott appalls at least two of them.

Especially if it's a birthday gathering and there's a lot of pressure to play nice.

I come from a family of implacable ALP-haters who are quite happy to vote Green in the Senate and are all going to. They're all perfectly intelligent, though not what The Australian calls the 'tertiary left', and they all loathe the Shooters and Fishers and the Christian fundies and the climate flat-earthers skeptics and love Barack Obama as much as I do.

For them it's not about left and right as such: it's about teh unions and teh evil commies and teh Great Satan Whitlam and so on. Both sisters work in the health sector and have had their politics formed over decades by listening to male doctors, while my father has never forgiven the commies unions for the wartime strikes.

By the time I got home last night I could hardly walk from the exhaustion of the strain of refraining from shouting and throwing things. Fell into bed at 8.30 with my Ruth Rendell, which was as much as I could manage, lights out by nine and slept till 7.15.

The moral of this story is that the older you get, the more physically knackered you are rendered by stress. I would have been better off going for a long, long walk.

The brain, she do the work for you

One has been trying in these dark pre-election days to stay a bit cheerful and upbeat and not to visualise what the phrase 'Prime Minister Tony Abbott' might mean for oneself, one's loved ones, one's fellow Australians and, of course, Australia's image in the eyes of the world, considering the damage done there during the Howard years. Or to visualise it at all, if it comes to that.

Little about the campaign has helped with attempts at cheer and upbeat-ness. Julia Gillard has come good in her personal appearances, perhaps sufficiently so to win over a big enough fraction of the population for Labor to stagger over the line, but in terms of a high standard of policy innovations and solutions, or of an even barely adequate standard of public debate either in the meeja or from the leaders, it's been pretty consistently woeful.

But I didn't realise quite how woeful I'd thought it all was, deep down in the dark crevasses where no conscious thought can penetrate, until I saw this headline this morning in Campaign Crikey -- Morning Edition:

Election Tracker: Day 32 -- Julia's trip to the west ... Abbott tours QLD ... Election hangman: _ _ R _ I _ _ L

Turns out the Hangman word was, of course, M A R G I N A L, as in 'They're scuttling around the marginals in the home stretch.' But not at that point having yet read the piece to which it referred, I looked at the Hangman thingy and my eye, with no conscious thought going on behind it, sketched out F A R C I C A L.

How sad is that.

Quote of the day

This is an election where slogans are really wearing thin. Abbott today tried to start talk about Labor’s “Great Big New Filter”, after which most of the listeners went out and had a great big new chunder.

-- From Grog's Gamut.

When testosterone attacks

Everyone already knows that the judgement of former Labor leader Mark Latham isn't super flash (though it's better than that of the Labor blokes who put him in charge), but even Latham sank to new lows of error in choosing to confront Tony Abbott yesterday -- thereby hijacking a function for old soldiers; stay classy, Mark -- and ask him more stupid, irrelevant questions in his "job" as a "journalist" for the ever-reliably-scummy (speaking of sinking to new lows) Channel Nine, who seem to be doing an excellent job of keeping themselves in their own news. As you would, having had that amount of practice.

Because Latham may be a big hulking boofy bloke who can break cab drivers' arms and try to yank little old deaf dudes in glasses off their feet and rip their arms off while pretending to shake their hands, and he may be four years younger than Abbott,  but Abbott is a zillion degrees fitter, and he's a trained boxer with just as much, though far better controlled, natural aggression. And he would have known that had he lost his temper and beaten the bejesus out of Latham, at least three-quarters of the population would have cheered. And probably voted him in. Don't even think about it.

Not just rocky, but also horror

In which we ask ourselves what has happened to the profession of journalism in this country

Bernard Keane in today's Crikey Campaign bulletin:

Only in this bizarrely [sic] – and bizarrely uninteresting – campaign can Labor’s distribution of Tony Abbott’s comments on a variety of subjects be described by serious journalists as a “smear campaign” -- a term they so far haven’t used about the remorseless focus on Gillard’s marital and parental status.

The only bit of that I disagree with is the part about the campaign being boring, which as Mark suggested yesterday at Larvatus Prodeo is in itself a bizarre thing to say, what with roller-coaster polls every two minutes and superannuated pollies coming out of the woodwork to throw in their two cents' worth.

Still. While it is indeed ludicrous to call it a smear campaign, and I can imagine that seeking and finding words of Tony Abbott's to use against him must be a walk in the park, in the sense of being both easy and fun, I think they should stop it. It's a tiny bit grubby, but more to the point it makes Labor look desperate. I mean, they are desperate, but as almost every woman knows, advertising that fact only increases it threefold.

Poor old Gordon Brown

So since when was calling a bigot a bigot a gaffe?

Askin'.

The curriculum, again

In the days following the US election there's been considerable discussion both online and IRL about how bad Barack Obama's inspired victory speech made our own Prime Minister's style (and content) of public speech look by comparison.

I thought this was a little harsh, particularly in the light of the Apology to the Stolen Generations speech and the sincerity and passion with which Rudd delivered it. I also think we are suffering from short-memory syndrome, considering the much starker contrast between Obama's public presence and performance and that of our own former Prime Minister.

It can't be denied, however, that the contrast was a little painful. The last PM this country has had -- and indeed the only PM it has had in my lifetime -- who like Obama combined charismatic physical elegance with powerful oratory and highly-developed on-his-feet verbal skills was Paul Keating, and even Keating spoiled it: the public speaking skills were habitually undermined by the coarseness and cruelty he was capable of (and really enjoyed) when speaking on his feet, and his considerable physical elegance was likewise marred by the great big chips on both shoulders, which completely spoiled his line. At his best, however, he was mesmerising.

I don't know who wrote Obama's speech, but had Keating made a comparable one it would have been written, or at the very least shaped, by Don Watson, a man who has written history, biography, lectures, essays, comedy and screenplays, and who therefore understands better than most the importance of structure as the starting point for most kinds of writing. Rhetorical skills are not just about word choice; they are also about understanding exactly what you're saying, why you're saying it, and what you hope to achieve by it -- and then by very carefully structuring your essay or speech to create the audience effect that you want.

During my years as an academic I learned just how much ferocious resistance there is among people who are passionate readers but not writers to the idea that a rousingly emotive piece of writing might actually have any kind of cool thought behind it, much less any close attention paid to writing technique. As with feminism, people who know little or nothing about rhetoric tend to use the word as a term of abuse, giving it connotations of insincerity, as in 'empty rhetoric'. This mistrust of rhetorical skills is reinforced by such events as the savagely moving and, for the British royal family, utterly humiliating eulogy given at his sister's funeral by Charles Spencer, who appears to have barely seen his nephews since.

There's a strong capital-R Romantic desire for moving words to have been spontaneously generated, a desire that probably has something to do with the notion that the only authentic utterance is that produced by spur-of-the-moment gut-spilling. But genuine gut-spilling is, as Fran Lebovitz once remarked, just exactly as charming as it sounds, and is very unlikely to produce either an exquisite and heartbreaking lyric poem in complex metre or the speech that Obama gave on the day of his victory.

I think the point I'm struggling towards here is that rhetorical skill, as with so many other kinds of skill, is a neutral entity that can be used for purposes either noble or nefarious, but given that a large part of rhetorical skill involves persuading other people to your point of view, it deserves to be looked on with some degree of suspicion even when you are on the practitioner's side.

Or perhaps especially when you are on the practitioner's side. Obama's speech was carefully calculated to produce that Evangelical call-and-response effect -- and it was the one thing about his speech that made me very, very uneasy. I am a child of the twentieth century, and the sight and sound of fifty thousand people in one place chanting the same thing -- even when it's 'Yes we can' -- is always going to chill me to the marrow. Perhaps the mistrust of rhetorical technique is grounded in a well-founded fear of being manipulated. Some of us really, really hate having our tears jerked.

These are deep waters, Watson, and any minute now I'm going to start wittering on about art and affect and the fact that the word 'aesthetic' is the opposite of the word 'anaesthetic', words to do with feeling and not-feeling. In the meantime the subject of Kevin Rudd coming a bad second to Barack Obama came up again yesterday over lunch, and my friend R, who spent six years living in New York, had a very simple diagnosis. 'The Americans teach Civics and Rhetoric as a matter of course,' she said. 'And we don't.'

Champagne if he wins, battery acid if he loses

Around 9 am, certain hardy persons, clearly well young enough to be my children, were asking on one of the LP election threads what people are drinking. That is my answer.

It's now 10.46 am and I am still in my dressing gown (hooray for being one's own boss, etc), glued to the computer. The admirable and ever-reliable Possum is liveblogging the election for crikey and has made this truly remarkable observation there:

With an estimated 75% turn out in Virginia, the down ballot Senate race already being called for Dem Mark Warner, the first handful of results in Republic districts in Virginia will tell us if Obama has won the election. If they are close or even leaning Obama then Virginia goes Democrat and the election is effectively over.

There are some fantastic other links from that, erm, link, including to the wonderful US map with closing times for each State and the Australian EST equivalents. If I have done my Adelaide time zone arithmetic correctly, voting closed in Virginia about 25 minutes ago, so there's not that long to wait.

There will be a major moment about five minutes from now when voting closes in 21 states, strung out all the way along the political spectrum. Somewhere between now and the champagne/battery acid I'm going to have to get out the Scotch and have what my friend Steve used to call a teensy triple. Possibly in my dressing gown.

We should just pack up and move to the US so we can vote for him

We have always been at war with [insert name of country here]

Many people will have seen this footage on TV but I've not yet seen anyone blogging about it (probably because I tend to confine myself to the Ozblogosphere) and it seems worth making a note of. In a clip I saw last night of one of the Republican rallies where McCain was obliged to go into hosing-down mode against his own rabidly racist and moronic supporters, who were explicitly calling for Barack Obama to be murdered, one woman who had the microphone and was speaking directly to McCain, who appeared to be wandering around freely in the crowd answering questions, said of Obama 'And ... and ... he's an Arab!'

The split-second expression on McCain's face was indescribable. You have to wonder whether whether he can think much faster than he looks as if he can and was merely deciding how to play it, or whether his answer was actually based on a sincere belief. 'No,' he said, biting the bullet. 'No, no. He's ... a decent family man.'

Got that? The opposite of "Arab" = "decent family man".

AFTERTHOUGHT: In a way this is even worse, but has anyone else noticed that apart from a few true diehards (and I use the word advisedly), people seem to have been genuinely not noticing that Obama is, in fact, black? The race anxiety appears to have been displaced onto the evil Ay-rabs. My dad, who is 81 and has therefore seen a fair amount of recent world history played out (and spent most of 1944 and 1945 on a corvette in the Pacific), is barracking (sorry) for Obama but says he simply can't see America voting in a black president when it comes right down to it. But I'm getting the impression that in putting pressure on the running 'Ay-rab terrist' sore, the Republicans have -- quite accidentally, I'm sure -- taken the racist focus off its other obvious target.

But his middle name is Hussein!

By this logic, I myself share the beliefs, professions and/or ethnicity of, or have otherwise sinister connections to, all of the following: Ben Lee, Brenda Lee, Bruce Lee, Harper Lee, Peggy Lee, Robert E. Lee, Sara Lee, Spike Lee, Rickie Lee Jones, Tommy Lee Jones, Jerry Lee Lewis, David Lee Roth, Lee Child, Lee Kernaghan and Lee Harvey Oswald.

So you'd better not vote for me.

Loud Denunciation of Sandra Bernhard, wherein recent vows are broken almost at once

Regular readers around the Ozblogosphere will have noticed a certain amount of concern trolling about how shocking it is that 'the feminists' (because as you know we are a mob, all the same, and immediately identifiable) have not Loudly Denounced Sandra Bernhard's reported remarks about Sarah Palin, as discussed here.

As a matter of fact I have seen Bernhard Loudly Denounced by a number of feminist bloggers and commenters, but a concern troll will never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Nonetheless, I feel the need to make the gesture. So here you go.

If she said what she is alleged to have said, and it seems that she probably did, in no matter what context, Bernhard was totally out of order. Her 'joke' was offensive and the charity was right to drop her.

Nothing about rape is funny.

Besides, if you're a comedian and Palin is your target, Tina Fey is the way to go. Because a dead straight impersonation is funnier than anything else you could possibly do.

So here you go, Sistahs, here's some handy proof to link to next time you see a complaint about what hypocrites feminists are for not Loudly Denouncing Sandra Bernhard, and crowing about how 'silent' we have all been. I, for one, hereby Loudly Denounce her.

Have I said it often enough yet? Will the bold be easy enough to read, do you think, or would big-print capitals in primary colours be better?

It's not what you said, it's the way that you said it

A question for people who know more about the US than I do, ie pretty much everyone on the planet. (Looking at you, T.)

Someone over at Larvatus Prodeo has just commented that he will not be watching the Palin/Biden debate because 'her accent makes Baby Jesus cry'. Now while this seemed partly a reference to Palin's regrettable religious convictions, he also obviously really meant it, and it recalled several other attack-doggy things I've heard said about Palin's accent.

This puzzles me a bit because to me she just sounds more or less generically American, like the cowboys of my TV childhood. (Perhaps that's exactly what the problem is.) Perhaps those Australians I've heard mocking her voice have been watching too much West Wing and automatically associate the way they all talk with the good guys, to which I can only reply that at least one can hear what Sarah Palin is actually saying.

Also a bit puzzlingly, to me, I've heard Palin's referred to as 'midwestern' in a way clearly intended as a nasty insult. I've read and seen enough to know that Americans mock and deride each other's regional accents very much in the way that Australians do only much more so and with, it has to be said, a nastier edge, and that (less like the way Australians do it) there seems to be a definite class-based (though it's disguised as something other than class) pecking order attached to this. The midwest and the deep south in particular seem to come in for a lot of bashing on the site of this accent/class/mysterious-third-category nexus, but then places as different as the Bronx and Minnesota seem get a lot of stick as well.

I'm guessing that in the case of the South and the Midwest this is partly just ideological animus rather than outright class hatred, much in the way that a bohemian denizen of deepest Fitzroy might mock the vowels of a well-heeled croc-huntin' Nationals-votin' Far North Queenslander, but in the US it seems to go deeper than that.

So here's my question: is Sarah Palin's accent really 'midwest', and if so is the term 'midwest' then not really a geographic indicator at all? (Alaska being, like, close enough to see Russia from one's house.) And does that classification, or something else, really identify her as a rube, and is that what this stuff about her accent is all about? It doesn't sound like that to me. It's a bit twangy, but as far as twang goes I would a million times rather listen to her than to a certain kind of New Yorker. Except, of course, for what she actually says.

I would welcome any enlightenment that anyone can provide.

But I'm fairly sure you couldn't achieve something this good on purpose

Regular readers of this blog will by now be aware that I am a devoted fan of Guy Rundle's daily reports back to crikey.com.au on the progress of the US election campaign and today is no exception. But today there has also been a magnificent bonus. Either Guy was typing too fast, and/or the spell-checker did its evil thing, and/or someone at crikey missed it, and/or it is a genuine error on someone's part, but whatever it is it has cheered me up mightily. 'But man,' says Guy this afternoon,

the McCain/Palin thing is now officially in deep sh-t. The conservatives who have now come out against her include Charles Krauthammer (uber neocon), David Frum (Bush speechwriter), most of the National Review, and most recently George Will, a true conservative elder. But the death-blow went to middle-of-the-road, okay liberal, Fareed Zakharia, who pointed out that it was not that Palin couldn't answer very well in interviews, it was that "she clearly didn't understand the questions. This is a level of incompetence we have not seen before".

Indeed, and that all makes Thursday's VP debate just about the most important in history. If Palin can somehow hold her own and be effective, then it will be one of the most stunning turnarounds in history, and the whole anti-elitist thing will be retched up, like, a billion notches.

I think he meant 'ratcheted'.

Or maybe not.

Bring back Hillary: Rundle

Guy Rundle writes for crikey.com.au today from Alaska and appears to be in a state of despair not entirely induced by the cold:

Would like to stay and not only because the beauty is so eerie that you could almost believe -- along with Sarah Palin's loopy church -- that Alaska is the promised land ... But also because here it's slightly easier to ignore the stunning, endless, utter ineptitude of the Obama campaign, their determination to lose under any circumstances.

... How has this come about? Simple. From day one the Obama campaign has refused to attack the Republicans for one very central failing -- that they're Republicans. That they represent the rich. That they have impoverished large sections of middle America. That there is such a thing as class. ... Their thought has always been that American politics will not bear class warfare, that you have to talk in the language of false univeralism -- we're all in this together, we've got to find consensus. To quote Kirk Douglas from Billy Wilder's great satire The Big Carnival: "We're not all in the same boat -- I'm in the boat, you're in the water."

... Really, it's a retroactive judgment on Obama. ... There is something vacant, absent about Obama, some sort of lack of understanding about what is required -- in terms of message, in terms of soundbites, in terms of sheer fight.

Hell, what would Hillary be making of this? McCain and the Republicans would be sashimi.

This is a very Rundle-esque analysis and I don't necessarily concur, lover of consensus that I am. But the metaphor about the boat and the water is pretty compelling in this case. And he is almost certainly right about Hillary.