Saturday, October 22, 2005

 

AN ELITIST SNEER AT ORDINARY AUSTRALIANS

Noted Australian playwright David Williamson recently went for a trip out of Australia aboard a cruise liner. He despised his fellow-passengers. Just one excerpt from his tirade:

"When we arrived at the huge white colossus and lined up for cabin allocation our fellow passengers gave us some misgivings. School holidays meant there were oodles of children, and the adults didn’t seem to be discussing Proust or George Eliot. But we were given a much better cabin than originally promised and all seemed set for a great holiday.

It soon became apparent, however, that all wasn’t to be plain sailing. The ship was stacked to the gunwales with John Howard’s beloved “aspirational Australians”. The dinner conversation made this plain. They aspired to all manner of things: to holidays like this, to new cars, to kitchen refits, to renovations, to private education for their children, and to practically anything made of plastic, wood or steel. The one surefire topic of conversation that connected erstwhile strangers was price comparisons.

It seems that the worst thing that can happen to an aspirational Australian is to hear that another aspirational Australian got a better price deal on their plasma TV. Value for money was the touchstone of everything, including standards of service. Any slight delay or perceived lack of utter servility by our hard-working Filipino and Indonesian cleaners or waiters was angrily pounced on and condemned. Any shore expedition that didn’t totally live up to expectations was subjected to withering criticism. Forget the fact that the rugged mountains and meandering streams of one of our ports of call were awesome; the coffee ashore was “ratshit” and the sandwiches “like cardboard”. Aspirational Australia really loves a whinge. It’s the glue of aspirational solidarity.

Not that our fellow passengers didn’t have their good points. Warmth and affection within families was genuine, and civility to other passengers was the norm. These were by and large affable people. And why wouldn’t they be? Not for them the grinding poverty of most of the world, or the devastation of tsunamis or hurricanes. The worst that seemed to have happened in most of their lives was the occasional rip-off involved in a shoddy car service.

It struck me that this cruise ship was a kind of metaphor for Australia. Cruise Ship Australia, all alone in the south seas sailing to God knows where. And in fact, like Australia, many of the passengers didn’t care where we were headed. The cruise itself was the thing. The sunbaking, the chatter, the eating, the very solid drinking, and the all-important on-board entertainment. And what entertainment: we had shuffleboard, Uno tournaments, jackpot bingo, trivia quizzes, funky jazz dance classes, quilting, scavenger hunts, and if none of these appealed you could retreat to the “legends” bar and watch replays of old rugby matches in which presumably Australia had triumphed. (They must have been old.)

At night there were island deck parties with giant conga lines shouting “Olé! Olé!” under the supervision of the lissom Shona, our activities Oberführer. There were also the nightly shows in which well-drilled Australian dancers did segments from American musicals. And if you wanted something after that, there was always a big-screen, feel-good American movie in which true love triumphed and gooiness flowed like treacle. Again, like Australia at large, no Australian song was ever played, no Australian movie ever shown, the trivia quizzes were all about American movie stars and we were offered stetsons and boot-scooting. The only thing Australian about aspirational Australia seems to be their accents.

Right-wing columnists and commentators have a habit of sneering at what they call “elites”. Elites are presumably those who are not aspirational Australians. We are urged by the columnists to accept that all wisdom resides in aspirational Australia and none in the ranks of the effete elites with their wanky interest in art, films and their bleeding-heart concern for the future of Australia and indeed the world. The pathetic “elites” should accept the ballot box wisdom of the aspirationals and stop their whining, say Paddy, Andrew, Piers and the boys. Perhaps if they spent time on a cruise ship they might start to question this belief.

When we docked at Noumeau, the one must-see item on our list was the marvellous Renzo Piano-designed Tjibaou Cultural Centre. It was offered as an alternative tour to the shopping expedition or to a day at Club Med. Not only is the building, with its soaring wood ellipses, one of the most dazzling pieces of architectural design in the world, but it was full to overflowing with the finest of Melanesian artwork. In one room alone, huge carved totems from all the Melanesian countries vied with each other, their styles wildly different and highly imaginative but stemming from obviously common cultural roots. The statement of the way art evolves and differentiates as the imagination flowers was striking.

Of the 2000 cruisers on board, barely 20 chose to see this magnificent structure and half of that number were recently settled Hong Kong Chinese. The rest were off lounging at Club Med with paper parasols in their cocktails or trying vainly to find a bargain amidst produce made in China, made overly expensive by the worst exchange rate in the South Pacific..."

Williamson then goes on to regurgitate all the usual Green/Left doom and gloom scares about the future of Australia -- showing in fact how unoriginal, ill-informed and unintellectual he is outside his own narrow world of storytelling. An excerpt:

"The problem is that the alternatives to oil just aren’t there, or even on the horizon. Wind, wave and solar energy can’t provide nearly enough, and even atomic energy can at best supply about 25% of the world’s current power needs."

That integrated technology as used in Brazil is already supplying ethanol as an alternative to gasoline at competitive prices is obviously unknown to him and I wonder from what fairy-tale he grabbed his knowledge that "atomic energy can at best supply about 25% of the world’s current power needs"?.

I could go on but what's the point? His arrogance will not be cured by facts. With my hundreds of academic journal articles in print, I think I have as good a claim as anybody to being thoroughly intellectual and I find the vast majority of my fellow Australians to be perfectly congenial people. My interests tend to be different from theirs but if that is anybody's problem I see it as mine, not theirs

Update

A reader comments:

"One comment from the Williamson piece sums it up I think - he is disgusted that only 20 out of 2000 go to the cultural centre. He seems oblivious to the fact that the Polynesian totems he so admires were constructed for practical purposes but have now been brought to a museum to be admired -- totally decontextualising them into sterile artworks. It reflects the Left's Disney-World approach to everything. They would be happy if everyone but a few them died out and left behind their artifacts to be gathered in a giant museum for the few who remained".

posted by JR 3:59 PM

Friday, September 02, 2005

 

THE "ART" ESTABLISMENT SPONGES OFF TAXPAYERS WHO DON'T GIVE A FIG FOR THEM

Their work isn't popular enough to earn them a living, so our artists grasp the taxpayer teat. It's not how we should be spending our money. When the Bracks [Victorian] Government spends $96,000 to paint trees blue, you see again why politicians and bureaucrats shouldn't be handing your money to artists. This is what you get when someone takes your taxes to buy art no one likes enough to buy themselves. Just ask yourself -- when you heard 40 elms at Yarra Park would be painted the colour of sad, didn't you instantly guess government money was involved? Who else would spend so much on something so unwanted?

But let's not miss the wood for the blue trees. The real worry isn't discoloured elms, but distracted artists -- artists who are paid by governments to ignore their true audience, the public. It's bizarre. In fact, our biggest arts grants are now going to middle-aged or elderly artists who -- even after decades of "success" -- still seem not to have found an audience big enough to pay them a living.

This month the arts and craft board of the Australia Council announced another round of grants worth more than $2 million. The biggest handouts were four fellowships each worth $80,000, given to arty-crafty people of "outstanding achievement . . . to create new work and further develop their practice". The winners all had decades of work behind them -- Klaus Moje (born in 1936), Jenny Watson (1951), Fiona Hall (1953) and Joyce Hinterding (1958). All had also had huge success, or as huge as it gets in art-crafts. Between them, they'd won countless awards, folders of fawning reviews and earlier grants and fellowships. The arts establishment had also variously given them jobs as lecturers, stints as artists-in-residence and hanging space in scores of public galleries, here and overseas.

Yet despite all that, they still need our money -- not freely given, but extracted through taxation -- to keep making what they make. Given that Moje, a glass-worker, is now 69, can we ever expect an artist to stand on his own two feet -- or try another line of work? As I said, these are artists much praised, but when you look at what they do, you might understand why they still need a grant. The Australia Council says Hinterding, for instance, will use her $80,000 to "create, exhibit and perform with a series of printed graphic antennae". The advertising for her works describes them best: "(They are) based on celestial site recordings of magnetic fields and weather satellites made with custom-built antennae . . . The result is a complex universe of mysterious interference, ghostly transmissions from unfathomable places, disembodied static, and failed communication."

It sounds kind of interesting for 30 seconds, but must taxpayers be forced to give Hinterding $80,000 to keep producing examples of this failed communication Would they even care if her antennae never again tuned in to mysterious interference? Perhaps not, because if they did, they'd support Hinterding in sales, not grants.

I should add that I don't dislike her art, or that of the others. I even like the way Fiona Hall carves flowers from sardine tins, knits baby clothes from Coca-Cola cans and builds bird nests out of shredded US dollar bills. I just doubt many people would buy it, which may be why she applied for this fellowship. But why must we be forced to pay for art that we do not choose to buy? Why must we pay all the other art and crafts people who got smaller grants to create "a new body of work in transparent rubber", or "photomedia works based on Prato in Tuscany" (Tuscany again!) or "a series of lighting pieces conceptually based on characteristics of a dysfunctional family"? Why pay for all this?

Writer Rodney Hall, former head of the Australia Council, tried to justify it in a paper written last month for the federal Labor Party. "The arts make us feel better," he declared. Like aspirin, I guess. Or beer. If that's so, I'm surprised so few artists seem all that happy. In fact, Hall seems especially unhappy, especially when contemplating the arts that are meant to make him "feel better". In his paper, he groans that our books have got worse, and so have our films. Indeed: "It is glaringly obvious that international distributors are not at all interested in Australia (sic) products because they are Australian." And at a recent Opera Australia performance he was horrified to find singers could "not even sing the notes".

All this has happened as our governments spend more than ever on artists. Yet Rodney Hall, and our politicians, just don't see the link -- that as the state spends more, our arts tend to get worse (or so Mr Hall says). Hall instead clings to the conceit that popular art is trash art -- the poisonous conceit that explains why we keep funding the unpopular stuff instead. "Especially if it has power and lasting value, it is seldom immediately assimilable and therefore seldom immediately popular," he claims. Well, you might want to believe this too, if you wrote books as ignored as the grant-fed Hall's.

The truth is, of course, great artists must rarely wait to become popular. Beethoven, Dickens, Hemingway, Picasso, T.S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, Verdi -- all were celebrities in their day, and didn't need the state's help to create. It's state money, direct to artists, that corrupts them, in part by helping them to forget it takes two for art to succeed -- someone to create and someone to enjoy. Take the audience out of that marriage, and art withers, flowers fade and -- heavens! -- even the very trees turn blue


From Andrew Bolt

posted by JR 11:09 AM

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

 

LIKE ORWELL'S PIGS, THE BRITISH LEFTIST ELITE THINK THEY ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

Members of Britain’s elite have been selected as priority cases to receive scarce pills and vaccinations at the taxpayers’ expense if the country is hit by a deadly bird flu outbreak. Workers at the BBC and prominent politicians — such as cabinet ministers — would be offered protection from the virus. Ken Livingstone, the London mayor, has already spent £1m to make sure his personal office and employees have their own emergency supplies of 100,000 antiviral tablets.

If there is an avian flu pandemic in the coming months there would be enough drugs to protect less than 2% of the British population for a week. The Department of Health has drawn up a priority list of those who would be first to receive lifesaving drugs. Top of the list are health workers followed by those in key public sector jobs. Although senior government ministers would be among the high-priority cases, the department said this weekend that it had not decided whether to include opposition politicians. BBC employees would be protected because the corporation is required to broadcast vital information during a national disaster.

Politicians and the media have been placed before sick patients, heavily pregnant women and elderly people by government planners. .....

Fears that a “doomsday” virus may sweep the world have been heightened by the recent spread of the lethal strain of avian flu, H5N1. The death toll, estimated at 120, has been of people whose work brought them into close contact with infected birds. Scientists have warned that millions could die if H5N1 mutates. The Department of Health would not currently be able to cope with such an onslaught. Although it has ordered 14.6m doses of Tamiflu, an antiviral drug thought to be effective against the H5N1 strain, only 900,000 doses are in stock so far. The full supply will not be delivered until March 2007, at a total cost of about £100m.

Besides the NHS and BBC, firemen, police and the armed forces are among those listed in the two top-priority groups to receive the vaccine

More here

posted by JR 8:48 PM

Monday, August 29, 2005

 

AN ELITE LEFTIST INTELLECTUAL AT WORK:

With a typical disregard for facts and accuracy

No reputation in intellectual Australia stands higher at the moment than Robert Manne's. This year he was voted the country's leading intellectual (in a survey of 100 people by The Sydney Morning Herald); he has just published a mammoth collection of essays, Left Right Left; and for 20 years he seems never to have lost an argument in which he has participated.

Yet, as with so many of our celebrity intellectuals, to my (admittedly) jaundiced eyes, he doesn't measure up to his reputation.

For one thing, he handles facts and sources very loosely for a professor. In Left Right Left, he gets people's names wrong more than once, referring to "the Michael 'Greed is Good' Milliken Institute", for instance, when he means the Milken Institute, and to "Jerry Fleischmann" when he means Jeffrey Fleishman. When he says that Bill Clinton was impeached "over the relatively trivial question of [his] Monica Lewinsky lies" (Clinton was impeached on charges of having perjured himself in testimony to a grand jury and obstruction of justice), he again displays an unsettling lack of precision.

It would be easier to ignore his minor errors if Manne wasn't himself so quarrelsome on points of fact and didn't make so many mistakes of fact and method even in his I'm-right-and-you're-wrong corrections of others. In a letter he wrote to The Age in September 2003, for instance, he cited Alison Broinowski's popular book Howard's War - a secondary source at best - in triumphant demolition of a column by Gerard Henderson that had relied on Hansard.

In The Culture of Forgetting, he faulted Helen Demidenko/Darville for describing Lazar Kaganovich (a member of Stalin's inner circle) as having been shorter than Stalin, remarking that "Kaganovich was, according to the only biography in English of him, considerably taller than Stalin". Manne didn't even include this unnamed biography by an unnamed author in his list of sources and it turns out to be The Wolf of the Kremlin by Stuart Kahan, a dubious-looking book that reads like a novel, in which its American author recounts the life of his "uncle" Lazar Kaganovich, basing this account for the most part (it seems) on a 10-hour, untaped conversation he claims to have held with him, from which nothing is quoted directly. It's a book that the experts in its field dismiss entirely. Manne relies on this book as naively as a first-year undergraduate.

The most striking thing about Manne, though, is the ease with which he assumes us to be in agreement with him and his world-view generally. He writes of "the independence of the ABC", for example, as though referring to an objective fact.

Arguing that the notion of political correctness is itself devoid of content, he wrote: "If we believe the campaign against, say, Helen Garner [author of The First Stone, about a University of Melbourne sexual harassment case] to have been vicious or unbalanced or unjust, to have been driven by the force of 'political correctness' as some have said, we think these things only because we value her voice, or at least think of it as part of civilised conversation."

I don't value Garner's voice or consider it part of civilisation, and I don't believe there to have been any campaign against her, either. Manne takes it for granted that we all agree with him on such things.

Although no Pauline Hanson [an affirmative action critic] supporter myself, I can remember being astonished by the ease with which, speaking to Robert Dessaix on Radio National, Manne could claim sympathy for Hanson supporters as ordinary people who felt shut out of public debate and then shut them out of debate himself. Sympathy with Hanson supporters wasn't as important as being right on the issues, he concluded, taking it for granted that there was a right attitude to questions such as reconciliation and Asian immigration, and thereby failing to acknowledge their political character.

In the same broadcast Manne endorsed the Marxist theory that says political views follow self-interest by way of rationalisation, but he appears to think it couldn't possibly apply to him. He seems to see himself as being outside politics - he described his own book Whitewash as "non-polemical" - which for a professor of politics (of all people) is surely a remarkable position to claim for oneself.

Manne has an apparent reluctance to see any of his opinions as being a debatable point. He even took Steven Spielberg to task for having a view of the Holocaust different from his own. Having expressed a point of view different from Manne's, Spielberg didn't understand the Holocaust at all, it turns out, and that is why Schindler's List is a bad film. So much for Spielberg.

In addition to their dogmatism, there is frequently an element of sleight-of-hand to Manne's arguments as well: important points get dealt with quickly or shallowly to justify attacks that, in the end, don't seem justified after all.

The clearest examples of this occur in The Culture of Forgetting. Manne's main argument here is, essentially: first, Darville's The Hand That Signed The Paper [a book that won Australia's top literary award] revives the claim that Bolshevism was a Jewish conspiracy; second, this thesis is historically untrue; and third, it's a falsehood that the Nazis promoted vociferously. Propositions two and three are not in dispute by anybody; the key element in Manne's argument is the first one. It's this point, though, that he gives the least attention. He justifies points two and three by an eight-page discussion full of facts and figures, dazzling the reader with his historical expertise, having crammed the case against Darville's novel into less than two pages.

And when one checks the exhibits that Manne presents in these two pages against the novel itself, one finds that he has often misrepresented them. He writes, for instance, that in the novel "the father is arrested and killed by 'Jewish Bolsheviks"'. In the novel, the father is arrested by "SMERSH men and women". Nothing is said about their being Jewish or even Bolshevik (except much later in the novel by a character who wasn't in a position to know). It is true that as the father is dragged off, he shouts (among other things) "Fight Marx and the f---ing Jewish Bolsheviks!", but that only makes it as true to say that he is arrested and killed in the novel by "Jewish Bolsheviks" as it would be to say he is arrested and killed there by Karl Marx.

In addition to fudging evidence, Manne also leaves things out. In discussing the book's identification of Judaism and Bolshevism, for instance, he fails to mention this passage: "He [Evheny] noticed that the town's synagogue had been converted into a revolutionary museum, and that NKVD troops stood guard to keep the Orthodox Jews away from what had once been their place of worship. A red and black banner obscured the Star of David on the roof. 'Celebrate what Communism does to free the Jews!' it read."

Manne cites the actual, historical persecution of Jews by the Bolsheviks to show the absurdity of identifying Bolshevism and Judaism, failing to note that Darville, aware of this persecution herself, included it in the novel, a point that refutes the central thesis of his attack on her.

He leaves a great many things out of his arguments. In an attack on Keith Windschuttle, he made much of the fact Windschuttle had been awarded a Centenary Medal; this was evidence, apparently, of the Prime Minister's personal enthusiasm for Windschuttle's The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. What Manne failed to mention here was that he was awarded one of those medals himself, which detracts from his argument somewhat.

Another omission occurs when Manne claims that not only was he never a member of the New Right, he was among its earliest opponents. In his prize-winning Deakin Lecture, he said: "I was opposed to the New Right when it emerged throughout the English-speaking world in the 1980s."

More recently he wrote: "Even though I watched with fascination as the Hayekian idea took hold in Australia - through the combined work of journalists, academics, politicians, businessmen and private enterprise think tanks - I was never a supporter of what I must admit I spoke of as the New Right."

What he never adds is that when the New Right emerged in Australia in 1982, it was with The New Conservatism in Australia, a book edited by a thirty-something academic named Robert Manne.

Manne seems to me not so much a political commentator as a political activist, and a doctrinaire one at that. His farewell to Quadrant I find a wearisome expression of this side of Manne. He had wanted to move the magazine away from "the old polemical temptation", he said on resigning as its editor; he had wanted it "to shrug off its embattled mood". He had wanted an end to argument and contrary opinion, that was all, and when the contrarians objected, then that (of course) made them the baddies. It's the Bob Hawke "consensus" approach: let's all hold hands and be friends - on my terms. One can respect an avowed opponent, a "good hater", but it is hard to respect someone who cries foul simply for being disagreed with. It is this trait, finally, that makes Manne someone I have found it hard to admire even as a newspaper columnist.


Source

posted by JR 12:27 PM

Sunday, August 21, 2005

 

Chianti crusaders

What better place to condemn Western immorality than an Italian palace? Damn the war and pass the chianti, old chap.

The invitation to escape Melbourne and spend a few days at a palazzo near Florence worked its magic. Aha! The fog lifted. The mind cleared. Suddenly I began to understand the haughty group-think of our university Left.

The invitation wasn't for me, of course. I only get asked to visit places someone's first wrecked -- Cambodia, Rwanda and other wake-ups. Or joints facing the wreckers, such as Taiwan.

But Florence! In an 18th-century palace! And bills paid for by grants or tax write-offs! What could be more refined or flattering? So, no, this invitation was not for me, but for Australia's academics to come and discuss, after a cocktail reception on an elegant terrace in northern Italy, how uncouth Australia is in defending itself in this "war on terror". And, please, only the like-minded need attend. It's Monash University's National Centre for Australia Studies that will next month hold a two-day conference at its wing of Prato's Palazzo Vaj. The topic: Democracy at the Crossroads?

Actually, that question mark is redundant, because the organisers -- who have form -- invited a cacophony of like-minded speakers who don't just agree our democracy is at the crossroads in our war against Islamist terrorism, but that it's shot off the road and over the cliff. The real enemy, some even add, is us. Just ask them. Ask Australian "journalist" John Pilger, who so rejects what Australia has done that he says our troops in Iraq are "legitimate targets" of terrorists and "we have no choice now but to support the (Iraqi) resistance". Pilger is clear where the true evil squats: "Consumerism and 'globalisation' is a vicious war against the poorest, a form of terrorism," he wrote in June. In fact, so much does this blow-wave radical hate globalisation and poverty that he's willing to be flown to an Italian palace to say so.

Or ask the keynote speaker, British Trotskyist Tariq Ali, who has decreed that the people who actually need shooting are the Iraqis working with the American "imperialists" to bring democracy to Iraq. And, indeed, terrorists have since killed many such Iraqis, including female MP Lamia Abed Khadouri, shot dead in her home.

Joining these two apologists for terrorists will be other critics of this war, including Stephen Kenny, the former lawyer of accused al-Qaida trainee David Hicks and Lex Lasry, QC, who says a fair trial of David Hicks at Guantanamo Bay is almost impossible. Also listed to speak, but now ill, is former British minister "Mo" Mowlam, who has said we must stop fighting al-Qaida and start negotiating. Oh, and there's writer Tony Bunyan, who claims "the 'war on terrorism' has turned into an ongoing 'war on freedom and democracy' . . . where accountability, scrutiny and human rights protections are luxuries to be curtailed or discarded".

So the organisers seem to think, too, devoting their final session to discussing how "the democratic state has been compromised by the developments auspiced by the 'war on terror' ". Note all the scare quotes around words such as "democracy" and "war on terror". It's a tic of the radical chic. By now you'll have figured the conference isn't actually scheduled to discuss the threat from terrorists themselves -- only the threat from our politicians. It's as if suicide bombers are just scare-figures dreamed up by power-crazed Right-wing leaders. Such fantasies come easily when you hold your conference in a palace in Italy, rather than, say, a madrassa in Pakistan.

So why Italy, you may interrupt to ask. The official reason is that if you held an academic conference anywhere less nice -- like Melbourne -- your overseas talent wouldn't bother turning up to enlighten you. But seeing Pilger, Ali and Mowlam all visited Australia over the past year, might not the real reason be a common human weakness for subsidised travel to lovely places?

But more troubling than the venue is that universities can so cheerfully promote a Leftist agenda, no matter how surreal. How was this managed? Give credit to associate professors Jenny Hocking and Colleen Lewis, who earlier collaborated on It's Time Again: Whitlam and Modern Labor, their fawning book on Labor's hero. Three years ago they were also co-convenors of a conference to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the election of Whitlam's government. You won't be surprised to learn the speakers were again almost exclusively from the Left, including Whitlam himself, and his former speechwriter and colleagues. Labor women such as Carmen Lawrence and Julia Gillard also spoke, as did admiring academics. And no one, naturally, attacked Whitlam for actually having left behind busted budgets, political scandals, soaring unemployment and the contempt of voters.

Heavens, no. For Hocking, the Whitlam period "defined modern Australia". Then again, Hocking could also write a hagiography of former High Court judge Lionel Murphy, suspected of trying to pervert the course of justice. She now has a grant to write on another Leftist hero, communist author Frank Hardy.

Of course, none of us is free from political bias. It's just a shame to see universities again promote the Left agenda so exclusively and with such tempting prizes for the right-thinking. It's an odd replay of failings of doomed aristocrats of past times. Here is our cultural elite, up in the palace, sipping champagne and talking idly of war, while the peasants who must pay them try to work out how best to stay alive.

From Andrew Bolt

posted by JR 11:54 AM

Sunday, August 07, 2005

 

THE ARROGANT BUT HOLLOW ELITISM OF THE ART WORLD

Not coincidentally, the Art world is heavily Leftist. Excerpts from an article by John Carey, The Sunday Times’s chief literary critic

People in the West have been saying extravagant things about the arts for two and a half centuries. The arts, it is claimed, are “sacred”, they “unite us with the Supreme Being”, they are “the visible appearance of God’s kingdom on earth”, they “breathe spiritual dispositions” into us, they “inspire love in the highest part of the soul”, they have “a higher reality and more veritable existence” than ordinary life, they express the “eternal” and “infinite”, and they “reveal the innermost nature of the world”.

This random clutch of tributes reflects the views of authorities ranging chronologically from the German idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Hegel to the contemporary American critic Geoffrey Hartman, and they could be multiplied ad infinitum. Even those who would hesitate to classify the arts as holy often feel that they form a kind of sanctified enclave from which certain contaminating influences should be excluded — notably money and sex. The Australian critic Robert Hughes voices a general disquiet when he says that the idea of a Van Gogh landscape, the anguished testament of an artist maddened by inequality and social injustice, hanging in a millionaire’s drawing room is difficult to contemplate without nausea.

The arts have traditionally excluded certain kinds of people as well as certain kinds of experience. Writers on the arts have emphasised that their spiritual benefits, though highly desirable, are not available to everyone. For some art enthusiasts, indeed, it is this very exclusiveness that makes the arts attractive. “Equality is slavery,” writes the French novelist Gustave Flaubert. “That is why I love art.”

It is often said (by art-lovers) that art-lovers have more “refined sensibilities” than others. But this is a difficult thing to measure. Whereas there are tests for assessing intelligence, no objective computation of refinement is available, and partly for that reason, claims and counterclaims in this area arouse passionate indignation.

The sacred aura that surrounds art objects makes imputations about superior or inferior artistic refinement particularly hurtful and disconcerting. The situation has been aggravated by the eclipse of painting in the 1960s and its replacement by various kinds of conceptual art, performance art, body art, installations, happenings, videos and computer programmes. These arouse fury in many because they seem to be deliberate insults to people of conventional taste (as, indeed, they often are).
By implication, such artworks categorise those who fail to appreciate them as a lesser kind of human being, lacking the special faculties that art requires and fosters in its adherents. In retaliation, those who dislike the new art forms denounce them not just as inauthentic but dishonest, false claimants seeking to enter the sacred portals of true art.....

That art is somehow sacred, that it is “deeper” or “higher” than science and reveals “truths” beyond science’s scope, that it refines our sensibilities and makes us better people, that it is produced by geniuses who must not be expected to obey the same moral codes as the rest of us, that it should not arouse sexual desire, or it will become “pornography”, which is bad — these and other superstitions belong to the Kantian inheritance. For Kantians, the question “What is a work of art?” makes sense and is answerable. Works of art belong to a separate category of things, recognised and attested by certain highly gifted individuals who view them in a state of pure contemplation, and their status as works of art is absolute, universal and eternal.

WHEN CHAMPIONS of high art dismiss or devalue the pleasures people get from so-called low art, the argument will be reducible to something like this: “The experience I get when I look at a Rembrandt or listen to Mozart is more valuable than the experience you get when you look at or listen to whatever kitsch or sentimental outpourings you get pleasure from.”

The logical objection to this argument is that we have no means of knowing the inner experience of other people, and therefore no means of judging the kind of pleasure they get from whatever happens to give them pleasure.

When Dorothy Hobson researched audience response to the critically condemned but long-running 1970s ITV soap Crossroads, set in a motel near Birmingham, she found that viewers had a high level of critical awareness, based on a close knowledge of story lines and rooted in their experience of everyday life. They had a creative input, added their own interpretation and understanding, and involved their own feelings and thoughts about how situations should be coped with. In this sense, Crossroads was “popular art”, with communal participation. The fact that it was not high art, that it was “unassuming”, was a strong element in its appeal and could be seen as a moral as well as an aesthetic strength, for it implied a rejection of self- aggrandisement and pretentiousness.

Crossroads, Hobson believes, provoked a straightforward clash of cultures. What the critics were saying was “This programme offends me and my cultural values”, but they operated from a position of ignorance because they made no effort to discover what its viewers thought. “It is,” she concluded, “false and elitist criticism to ignore what any member of the audience thinks or feels about a programme.” But prejudices in these matters are hard to shift. Taste is so bound up with self-esteem, particularly among devotees of high art, that a sense of superiority to those with “lower” tastes is almost impossible to relinquish without risk of identity crisis.

False and elitist criticism has, of course, carried on regardless. The Yale literary theorist Geoffrey Hartman’s high-minded jeremiad, Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against Inauthenticity (2002), drags up the charge that popular culture “promotes the passivity of mere consumption”. Drawing on the speculations of the fashionable French critic Jean Baudrillard, Hartman’s case is that modern life lacks authenticity. Bombarded with images by the media, we are unsure of our own existence. The cure for our malaise is, according to Hartman, high art. We crave authenticity, which is related to the “sacred” and the “spiritual”, and high art supplies this. It can save us from the shallow worldliness of our western lifestyle and re-engage us with the real.

While he was in the later stages of writing his book, the terrorist attack on New York’s twin towers took place. It was an event that raised serious problems for Hartman’s argument. For the terrorists could be seen as reacting against just those aspects of contemporary culture that Hartman had been denouncing and as seeking the spiritual authenticity that he prized. In a postscript, he acknowledges this. The hijackers, he speculates, may have been driven by radical Muslim contempt for western materialism and a yearning for purity and dedication. They may indeed, he thinks, bear out his theory, in that their quest for authenticity may show the strain of living with a sense of “the unreality of society, self and world”.

Perhaps. The hijackers’ motives are undiscoverable. But if, as Hartman supposes, they were driven by a quest for authenticity, for the spiritual and sacred, akin to that which he associates with high art, then they could also illustrate the disregard or contempt for other and “lower” people, for their lives and meanings, that high art fosters.

Of course, the differences between advocacy of high art and terrorism are multiple. I am not suggesting an equivalence. But the assumption that high art puts you in touch with the “sacred” — that is, with something unassailably valuable that surmounts human concerns — carries with it a belittling of the merely human which, when transposed to the realm of international terrorism, promotes massacre.

The fatal element in both is the ability to persuade yourself that other people — because of their low tastes or their lack of education or their racial or religious origins or their transformation into androids by the mass media — are not fully human, or not in the elevated sense that you are human yourself. Of course, it is just this fatal element that makes the viewpoint so attractive. For it brings with it a wonderful sense of security. It assures you of your specialness. It inscribes you in the book of life, from which the nameless masses are excluded.

Perhaps I could risk another analogy here. During the second world war, elaborate precautions were taken to protect the national art collections from enemy bombing. The trustees of the National Gallery decided that the whole collection should be sent to Canada. On Churchill’s intervention, the plan was modified and the pictures were moved to slate mines in Wales. Civilian populations could not, of course, be provided with comparable protection and were killed in large numbers.

Art-lovers would presumably defend this procedure on the grounds that people are replaceable whereas artworks are not. However, that is not true. People are not replaceable. They are individuals, as unique as artworks. Further, people can create artworks, though artworks cannot create people.

An alternative view of how threatened artworks should be treated was supplied in 1857 during a debate about whether the National Gallery collection should be moved to Kensington from Trafalgar Square to avoid damage from air pollution. Mr Justice Coleridge pointed out that this would make the pictures less accessible to the public. The purpose of the collection was to be seen by the nation, he argued, not simply to exist. So even if “a great picture perished” as a result of being kept on display in the polluted National Gallery, its purpose would have been fulfilled. The 1939 trustees took a different view. For them the artworks were precious and sacred, and more worth preserving, when it came to the crunch, than human life. This exemplifies a relative disregard for the human that is always inherent in art-worship.

Of course, preserving artworks for posterity can be made to appear simply prudent and responsible. But the prioritising of art over people that it implies is identical with, though less obviously horrifying than, the example of concentration-camp commandants who enjoyed string quartets played by Jewish prisoners before executing them.

posted by JR 6:57 PM

Thursday, August 04, 2005

 

HIATUS

I originally intended this blog to be one that I posted to only intermittently -- as suitable material became available. As it happened, however, lots of relevant stories became available and daily posting became possible. The stories I am finding lately, however, overlap a lot with what has already appeared so I am going to revert to my original intention of posting here from time to time only. I will note on Dissecting Leftism when there is something new here.

posted by JR 1:01 AM

Wednesday, August 03, 2005

 

SOME COMMENTS ON THE LEFTIST ELITE BY BERNARD GOLDBERG, AUTHOR OF "100 People Who Are Screwing Up America"


I want to make a distinction between your run-of-the-mill liberals and the cultural elite liberals, who really speak for liberalism in America today. Most liberals obviously are decent people. They go to work every day, they care about their families, maybe they give money to charity. Fine. I have no problem whatsoever with anybody in that group. But the people who are speaking for liberals in the world of politics, the chairman of the Democratic Party, Howard Dean; or the cultural liberals, like Michael Moore; the Hollywood elites who confuse intelligence with celebrity—they think because they’re famous, they’re also smart. I listen to them and I say, I don’t want to be part of that group anymore. Even when I agree with them, which is more often than you would think, I no longer want to be seen as being part of that group. It isn’t because of their politics, which I think are misguided; it’s because they come off as snobby and elitest. I think they look down their nose at ordinary Americans.

I really think that there are a lot of people out there, liberals as well as conservatives, Democrats as well as Republicans, who say that this country has just gotten too angry in recent years, too nasty and certainly too vulgar. There’s this tendency to believe that this stuff just happens in societies—societies just evolve; nobody’s to blame. I don’t believe that. I think people are to blame. These aren’t the 100 worst people in America; they’re 100 people who in my view are screwing things up.

I write about race in this book with a great deal of sadness. When I was in high school and college in the ‘60s, the civil rights movement was the most important movement and the most moral movement of my time, and of the 20th century, for that matter. Martin Luther King, in my opinion, was one of the five most important, decent Americans since our founding as a nation. What happens after Martin Luther King gets assassinated? We get Jesse Jackson, we get Al Sharpton. If the implication is that you can’t write about Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton without worrying about being called a racist, well, we’ve got a big problem in this country.

Source

posted by JR 1:03 AM

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

 

BRITISH ELITISM MARCHES UNDER FALSE COLOURS

The leftist mania about abolishing the "elitist" Grammar schools in the UK (which selected on academic merit) means that only rich parents (including the "do-gooding" elite Leftists) can now afford a good education for their kids -- thus increasing elitism, not diminishing it

Radical slogans don't often stir the blood when delivered in a voice trained at a private school and polished at an elite university. But Sarah Montague (Blanchelande Girls' College and the University of Bristol) did her best when she confronted a teacher who was arguing for the restoration of the grammar schools. 'But,' spluttered the Today programme presenter, 'we don't want elitism.'

Heaven's forefend! Elitism? In England? All but a few of the grammar schools have gone. John Major (Rutlish Grammar School) declared Britain a 'classless society'. Tony Blair (Fettes and St John's College, Oxford) fought the 2005 election on behalf of 'hard-working families', while Michael Howard (Llanelli Grammar School and Peterhouse, Cambridge) spoke for the 'forgotten majority' - who responded by forgetting to vote for him. It's not only the BBC which has raised the scarlet banner high. All public cultural institutions from the Royal Opera House to the National Parks announce their distaste for the white middle class and their commitment to egalitarianism. A foreigner might be forgiven for thinking that Britain was in the grip of red revolution.

Yet as Ruth Kelly (Westminster School and Queen's College, Oxford) has noticed, 40 years of comprehensives have left Britain a sclerotic society where parents' money matters more than a child's talent. Perhaps she'll twig that the anti-elitist harangues from the upper middle class are the perfect cover for a system which suits it to a tee.

That Britain is becoming an aristocracy of wealth is undeniable. The simplest measure was devised by Jo Blandon and her colleagues at the London School of Economics. You might assume that a child born in 1958, when Harold Macmillan ran the country and stuffed his cabinet with dukes, would have been far more hamstrung by his class origins than a child born at the end of the swinging Sixties in 1970. Not a bit of it. The LSE found that on average a boy born to a well-to-do family in 1958 earned 17.5 per cent more than a boy born to a family on half the income. The son of an equivalent Mr and Mrs Moneybags born 1970 will be earning today 25 per cent more than his contemporary from the wrong side of the tracks. Far from decreasing, class advantage has grown.

All the efforts by New Labour to redistribute wealth, all the Sure Start schemes and working families' tax credits, have merely slowed the process, while the great expansion of the universities has left the gap between working- and middle-class participation in higher education wider than ever.

Economists produce thousands of papers on the reasons why. The education system has to be high among them, unless you believe education doesn't matter. The liberal-left never has believed that since the Enlightenment, although I do hear rather a lot of liberals dismissing education today.

Their denial is an excuse for a failure of idealism which has left education as the largest cause of hypocrisy and mystification for my class and my generation. In public we deplore elitism. In practice everyone knows that the grammar schools, which at least selected by ability, have been replaced with private and comprehensive schools which select by parental wealth. If you are rich and have a bright child, he will go private and although he will have to pass exams, he won't face competition from children whose parents can't afford the fees. If you are rich and have a dunce, you select by house price and move into the catchment area of a good school or get your nanny to drive your child to a good school in another borough or lie to vicars and send your child to a good church school. Again, you know your child won't face competition from brighter children whose parents can't afford to buy houses in the right area or don't have the knowledge to play the system. The result is that in the inner cities we don't have comprehensives but a universal system of secondary moderns.

The refusal to be honest about money makes serious debate impossible. The children of the rich stay rich. The children of graduates graduate. The children of the working and lower-middle classes sink into financial and cultural impoverishment. Yet most of the time when education is discussed the speakers refuse to admit that, uniquely in Europe, Britain has private schools with higher intellectual standards than their state rivals.

If they did, conventional political certainties would evaporate. Before he left the education department, Charles Clarke (Highgate School and Kings College, Cambridge) wanted to force successful schools to take disruptive pupils, even though the teaching would inevitably suffer. It sounded like a tough socialist measure which promised equality of misery. Yet Clarke couldn't force the private schools to take excluded pupils, so you could look at him another way and say here was a public school boy stopping the best state schools competing with his alma mater. Clarke didn't mean that, anymore than another public school Labour minister, Tony Crosland (Highgate School, and Trinity College, Oxford) meant to give the private schools their greatest boost ever when he began the civil war in state education with the promise to 'destroy every fucking grammar school in England, Wales and Northern Ireland'. None the less, both Crosland and Clarke were the objective friends of the children of the wealthy because they handicapped the competition.

posted by JR 10:16 AM

Monday, August 01, 2005

 

ARROGANT ACADEMIC ELITISM ON DISPLAY

For certain enlightened liberals on university faculties, the lesser intellectual stature of Christians and conservatives is so much taken for granted that they do not hesitate to write about them in terms dripping with condescension and contempt. An example I encountered this week is especially odious, and I am happy to bring it to the attention of a wider, non-academic audience. The authors are four political scientists at the University of Pittsburgh - Barry Ames, David Barker, Chris Bonneau and Christopher Carman. Their paper is a critique of a study, published earlier this year, examining the statistical evidence that not only Christians and conservatives but also women in higher education tend to teach at less prestigious institutions than their scholarly qualifications would suggest

The original paper, "Politics and Professional Advancement Among College Faculty," was by Stanley Rothman, S. Robert Lichter and Neil Nevitte; it appeared in Vol. 3, No. 1 of an online journal called The Forum, published by the Berkeley Electronic Press. The critique, plus a response by the original authors, is in Vol. 3, No. 2. They're all at www.bepress.com/forum- tiresome but free registration required.

The critique authors, who titled their paper, "Hide the Republicans, the Christians, and the Women," refer to the first study by its authors' initials, RLN, and RLN return the favor by referring to the critique as ABBC. This is not a courtesy, but it is a convenience. ABBC say "It is difficult even to imagine ideological discrimination occurring at the point of hiring. . . . \[A department] has no idea about ideological affiliation unless the candidate deliberately brings it up in conversation."

As Rothman et al. comment, "If we try to surmount the difficulty of imagining how a candidate's ideology can sometimes be discerned, we might examine her CV \[curriculum vitae], her publications, the reputations of her advisers, references, and granting agencies. Increasingly, personal information can also be gleaned by examining her blog or personal Web sites and by Googling her to pick up any stray comment that wandered into the Internet." Lifestyle stuff too.

ABBC say that some of RLN's findings "contradict their inference that the correlation between certain political identifications and the quality of institutional affiliation is a function of discrimination." They apparently overlooked the fact that RLN's paper made no such inference (or implication either) and indeed, specifically disavowed it. They offer self-selection as an alternative mechanism - though in the best tradition of academic neutrality, they describe it as "the likely culprit." Actually, self-selection is a likely factor. Any conservative smart enough to be a college professor is going to self-select out of a career where his colleagues think as little of him as ABBC do of people like him. However, it's their explanation of how self-selection works that is so revealing.

There may be an urban/rural divide, they say. "Conservatives may want to live in communities whose ideological climate is more consistent with their own belief structure. . . . it would not be surprising if conservatives, academic or otherwise, prefer to work in smaller, more rural areas." Also, lots of small, "lower-tier" liberal-arts colleges are located in those rural areas. Moreover, they're too poor to fly in faculty job applicants, so Midwesterners and Southerners, who are "more conservative, more religious, and less Jewish than Northeasterners" tend to stay put in places where there are "proportionately fewer elite universities and colleges."

With their third point, they take aim at religion: "many conservatives may deliberately choose not to seek employment at top-tier research universities because they object, on philosophical grounds, to one of the fundamental tenets undergirding such institutions: the scientific method." Look, I lived in Northfield, Minn., home of St. Olaf and Carleton colleges for 27 years. I knew scores of faculty members there, and I never met anybody who objected to "the scientific method," not even in church. St. Olaf in particular is among the nation's leading producers of Ph.D.s in mathematics and science.

In their rebuttal, RLN also point out that nowadays, objections to the scientific method are far more likely to be found on the left, not the right. ABBC go on digging themselves in deeper. "Furthermore, cultural conservatism, as revealed in antipathy toward gay rights, the women's movement, and abortion rights (among other things), has been shown to stem in large part from an embrace of Christian fundamentalism as a dominant worldview." Could be, but who brought up "fundamentalism"? These are college professors we're talking about. RLN went back to their data, and estimate that the term might apply to somewhere between 1 percent and 2 percent of their sample, not enough to alter their results significantly.

But ABBC explain that there's no difference. "In other words, the faith-based reasoning of Christian fundamentalism (and by extension, of most socio-cultural conservatives) is essentially incompatible with the mission of contemporary research universities." The footnote to that remarkably sweeping statement reads, "It should be noted that we are not suggesting that fundamentalist Christians have less intellectual acumen than nonfundamentalist Christians or non-Christians. We merely note that fundamentalism is, by definition, anti-intellectual in the scientific sense."

Yeah, right. You have to wonder whether these people actually know any "socio-cultural conservatives" who aren't Christian fundamentalists. Come to think of it, you don't have to wonder at all.

Source

posted by JR 8:18 AM

Sunday, July 31, 2005

 

Israel's Leftist elite now struggling

Peretz, who was one of the few political leaders from the Moroccan immigration of the 1950s to tie his destiny to the Labor Party and the peace camp long after that community had given up on a Labor Party and peace camp perceived to be elitist, is currently mounting a strong campaign for leadership of the Labor Party. Were he to win, he would be Labor's candidate for Prime Minister in the next election (assumed to be sometime in early 2006) against either Ariel Sharon or perhaps Benjamin Netanyahu. He is the only political figure in Israel today who is seriously trying to address the issues of peace and national security from an economic perspective--and he is the only one raising concerns about increasing poverty in the country, and extreme differences between rich and poor.

With polls showing him gaining support, forces inside his own Labor Party wanted to stop him--the opposition is not only from the right wing Likud. Just as in the U.S. Democratic Party, the liberal-left is divided about economic liberalization. But, in Israel's case, the divide has added to a bizarre situation that has also caused the peace camp to become the minority camp in Israeli society. Workers don't vote for Labor. They vote for the right wing Likud, even when it's not in their economic interest. Much of this is based on historic anger toward the old elites, but much of it, too, comes from a sense that on economic (and sometimes on peace issues) there is little difference between the camps. Peretz is trying to change all that.

I had lunch with him in his Histadrut office just a day before the Knesset vote. Staring down at his, next to his desk, was a bust of David Ben Gurion. Ben Gurion would never recognize today's Israeli economy or political scene. Israeli politics has been stuck in a pattern from Rabin onwards of only electing military men. Peretz, for his part, says that he thinks Israel needs a "social issues" general, not just a general who hails from the military.

The changes in Israeli society have all been imported from the U.S., the newest being the "Wisconsin Plan," based on a crude version of welfare-to-work. This plan is now being rolled out in poor towns throughout Israel, without the necessary back-up for job training, education, and childcare. Minimum wage is low in Israel and all of the arguments against raising it are imported from the U.S. Additionally, the largest employer in the country is Manpower Inc. Until Amir Peretz managed to pass a law in the Knesset that forced employers to hire their Manpower temporary workers after 9 months of temporary work, employers across the sectors were using this temporary job agency as a way to hire and fire without any job protection or benefits.

More here

posted by JR 12:49 AM

Saturday, July 30, 2005

 

A FRENCH ELITIST

Until last week it seemed Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe could do no wrong. During his four years in office, he has launched a series of wildly popular projects, from Paris Plage, a faux Seine-side summer beach, to an all-night fall arts celebration and urban renovation efforts to make Paris a more attractive, fun and environmentally friendly city to live in.

Cinching the 2012 Olympics seemed the ultimate feather on Delanoe's chapeau. But since rival London stole the chance to host the games from under France's outraged nose last week, Delanoe has stumbled seriously and surprisingly. In unusually blunt remarks Monday, Delanoe suggested that British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the head of the London bid, Sebastien Coe, had crossed the line" of fair play and Olympic rules with their overly aggressive bid. "I don't say they flirted with the line, they crossed right over," Delanoe told municipal politicians at a city council meeting Monday, in remarks that have since boomeranged in France and in Britain....

But that was before London was hit by its worst terrorist attack since World War II. Now the perception is that Delanoe's latest barrage against the rival British city was badly timed at best, and that Delanoe was a sore and unfeeling loser at worst. "When one looses, one must play fair as well," former French foreign Minister Michel Barnier told Le Figaro newspaper, in a less-than-subtle dig at Paris' mayor echoed by other French politicians. "This loss is first of all our own. If Paris had won their bid by four points, we wouldn't have accepted it if someone accused us of winning badly," added Barnier, a conservative politician who was involved in another unsuccessful Paris bid to host the games, in 1992. In a withering editorial Tuesday, the southern French newspaper Nice Matin described Delanoe's remarks as "childish." ...

Some observers suggest Delanoe's Olympic dreams for Paris couched far more ambitious dreams for himself. One of France's only openly gay politicians, 55 year-old Delanoe has been floated as a possible leftist candidate for the 2007 presidential elections. In a recent poll, he tied with a handful of other Socialist heavyweights, including former finance minister Dominique Strauss Kahn, as the leftist politician French would most like to see run for president...

Delanoe has proved a popular mayor. In his four years in office, he has improved bus and bike lanes in an effort to coax Parisians to use mass and nonpolluting transportation alternatives. Conservative politicians complain, however, that he has simply increased Paris' congestion problems. Delanoe has also launched an architectural project to revamp Paris' old Les Halles market area in the city's center. And he increased the numbers of sorely lacking nursery school slots. Still critics say he has failed to address another serious crunch: Paris' endemic housing shortage.

During a citywide arts celebration in 2002, Delanoe was stabbed by an assailant who later confessed to disliking politicians and homosexuals. Still, Delanoe is discrete about his private life, and some analysts suggest his sexual preferences would not pose a problem for many French should he run for the presidency. A bigger problem is the perception that Delanoe represents an elitist, citified, minority slice of the French population -- the bohemian-bourgeois, or "bobos" -- who have little in common with millions of working class French living outside the city's limits.

More here

posted by JR 2:05 AM

Friday, July 29, 2005

 

A SAVAGE CRITIQUE OF THE HOLLYWOOD ELITE

Under the heading "Widely Red" this essay appeared in the online edition ONLY of "The New Republic". Apparently it was too "hot" for the print edition. TNR is centre-Left so I guess the article would be too Rightist for most of the magazine's readers. The article was actually written by Martin Peretz, editor of TNR so I have gained a new respect for him and his magazine. Apparently there still are some Left-leaning intellectuals who are not apologists for the beasts of this world. The article is basically a book review -- of "Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony's Long Romance With The Left" by Ronald Radosh and Allis Radosh (Encounter Books, 292 pp., $25.95)

Books don't easily change bad habits. Which is why there are so many diet books: The Rosedale Diet, The Mediterranean Diet, Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution, The South Beach Diet, French Women Don't Get Fat, The Abs Diet, The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating, The Fast Track One-Day Detox Diet, and on and on ad nauseum [ad nauseam, for crying out loud!], so to speak. There are many millions of copies of more or less easy diets out there; and still the American people eats badly and too much, especially folk who buy and, in fact, may even read these cheerily frightening guides to healthy feeding.

Bad habits in sloppy thinking and in ideas about history are even more difficult to dislodge with books. Nonetheless, the historian Ronald Radosh has made it his mission to try. Not as a general proposition, of course. But in a specific historical area. There is common in America an explanation of why an aggressive left liberalism, or socialism for that matter, petered out in the two decades after the Second World War, and the explanation is very simple. The blame is laid on what is clumsily called "McCarthyism," although the drift of what is meant by the term both predated and postdated the short, ugly, and dismal career of Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin. As it happens, this conventional reading also puts mainstream Democrats in the dock and the Truman administration, in particular, for building the "national security state" in opposition to the--of course, exaggerated--foreign threat of Soviet Russia and the harmless--and, no doubt about it, idealistic--domestic enlistees of the armed doctrine of communism.

To be sure, Radosh grasps that greater forces have been at play in the disintegration of the left in the United States and in the world. There are the basic facts that socialism doesn't explain intrinsic social and economic behavior and that, as a blueprint for the organization of polity and society, it has literally everywhere been a dismal failure and, in many of these places, unbelievably cruel besides. Alas, one cannot argue with much of this. Still, there remains the bitterness of the liberal and not-so-liberal left, its vindictiveness, its sense of itself as victim.

In their new book, Red Star Over Hollywood, Radosh and his historian wife Allis examine this sensibility in the film industry, focusing on the blacklist, its perpetrators and their targets. The moral high ground has usually gone to the latter, the self-styled martyrs for progress. The Radoshes examine this case in all its complications. And let's make one thing clear: They have contempt for those who banished and ostracized anyone for his or her political views. In that sense, they are true liberals: Even communists need to feed their families. What they do not countenance is the behavior of the fellow travelers, the true believers, the party apparatchiks, those who knew all too well that, by joining the Communist Party or its multitude of front groups, they had enrolled in defending ruthless dogma and more ruthless regimes.

For Radosh, this is part of an ongoing project of two decades about the distorted ethical universe inhabited by communists and their comrades. Among a half dozen volumes examining the subject, in The Rosenberg File, he (and Joyce Milton) produced the first scholarly (and readable) text to prove with newly discovered evidence the guilt of Julius Rosenberg as an atomic spy for Moscow, to demonstrate that the evidence against Ethel was not credible and certainly not beyond a reasonable doubt, to examine the dishonest and counterproductive hysteria mustered by the hapless couple's supporters, to show that their innocence was deduced by their defenders from the sheer but counterintuitive fact that they were loyal to Josef Stalin. Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War, a book Radosh co-edited, overturns conventional history that portrays the communist apparatus as an ally of Republican Spain rather than its ruthless manipulator. This apparatus also murdered many faithful sons and daughters of democratic Spain and from among the International Brigades--socialists and anarchists, especially. Of course, this is not exactly news. It is the message of George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia. Which brings us to the most disgraceful blacklist of all: the systematic and, for a long-time, successful effort by "progressive" cadres in top literary circles to keep Animal Farm and 1984 from being published in America. Now, Orwell was a literary genius. His sin was that, though a man of the left, he was anti-Stalinist. That was enough to justify boycotting his writings.

The era of the blacklist and of inquests by legislative and congressional committees into thousands of people's politics left many victims, maybe two handfuls of suicides, wrecked careers, many lives destroyed in other ways. None of this has any claim to being just. And filmtown's executives turn out to be craven and cowardly. But what about the moral lives of the victims, the Hollywood victims, in particular? They have built a legend of virtue, and this virtue is contrary to the truth. Some of those who were blacklisted actually did treasonous deeds for the Soviet Union. They certainly were traitors to their friends, even to their families, to both of which they lied routinely. All of this is documented in Red Star, and documented meticulously.

There is a predictable irony in the initial origins of government investigative committees gone haywire, like the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and of repressive legislation like the Smith Act, later smothered by the Supreme Court. The very idea for HUAC began with Samuel Dickstein, a hack Democratic congressman who happened to be a Communist Party agent and was paid for his chores. But, then, the committee was investigating local bully Nazis who also thought history was on their side and--most important to the Soviet Union--also making trouble for the tiny cohort of Trotskyites who had made some pathetic headway in the trade unions. When the Smith Act came up for renewal, the Communists mobilized their Democratic allies in Congress and the party faithful to assure that the statute would survive so that the Trotskyite enemy might continue to be harassed by the feds.

The myth of the valorous victims is one of those lies that is unaffected by facts. It is, in many ways, a glitzy product of Hollywood in its mawkish moods. Guilty by Suspicion (with Robert De Niro and directed by Irwin Winkler), The Way We Were (with Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford, directed by Sidney Pollack), and The Front (with Woody Allen and Zero Mostel, directed by former blacklistee Martin Ritt) retell the clich‚d story of straightforward idealism betrayed by fabrication and fear. But the tale is much more complicated than that, and it is much more complicated and textured than the semi-official legend, Naming Names, by Victor Navasky, the long-time former editor of The Nation, who has made a career of absolving the American left of any culpability for its embrace of Stalinism.

This is, as the Radoshes show, the burden of the argument. Imagine that there were now to be in the elites and among the aspiring elites millions of people who burnished the wisdom and political fortitude of, say, Charles Lindbergh and Ezra Pound. As it happens, these two individuals were truly great men in their ways, Lindbergh as an aviator and Pound as a poet. But they suffered the reasonable public ignominy of being sympathetic to fascism, Pound to the point of treason. Lindbergh did his penance as a combat flyer in the Pacific during World War II, but he was a hero no more. Yes, there is now an adoring Lindbergh website but that is the full of it. And, here and there, some crank clings not to the Cantos but to the curdled confusions of a crazed writer. Pound was truly punished for his war-time fascist heresies on the radio: From 1945 to 1958, he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the Insane, now inhabited by John Hinckley Jr. Nothing to compare to the lighting of candles for those who were on the blacklist.

The blacklisted were mostly, though not all, hack writers and directors. But producing mediocre work is no crime. In Hollywood, it was usually richly rewarded. So what did they do wrong? They were enthusiasts for Stalin, certainly a moral offense equal to being an enthusiast for Hitler and Mussolini. This fidelity to Stalinism ran deep, and in behalf of Stalinism the comrades deceived, conspired, plotted. The Radoshes tell us who in Hollywood had had enough and saved their own souls, if not always their jobs. And they also tell us who in filmland perverted and fabricated on behalf of the communist design. It is hard to reconstruct a world in which so many intelligent people lived the ethical life of cosmic cheats.

Here is what Stalinists (no, a Leninist was no better) lied about: the police state, the show trials, the deliberate famines, the repression of the peasantry, the massive ethnic transfers, the executions, the great terror, the Gulag, the systematic and murderous anti-Semitism, the squelching of free thought, the Trotsky plot against the revolution (no, a Trotskyite was no better, either), the perversion of the judiciary, the Hitler-Stalin pact. According to them there were no "widows of the revolution," in David Remnick's affecting phrase. And, if circumstance happened to catch them in flagrante, they would lapse into that hoariest of justifications, "historical necessity." These are the atrocities which the blacklisted denied or defended or asserted were forced on the Kremlin by the West, the flabbiest of excuses. These men and women lived by a tissue of fabrication, and they passed that tissue--like a genotype--on to their children. Instead of being an apologist for Stalin, Richard Dreyfuss shilled for Arafat.

This is not just a book about the Hollywood Ten. In any case, there are differences among these ten. It is about a whole leftish culture in the film colony. Still, the playwright Lillian Hellman, though not really a Hollywood figure but a Broadway personage, was, as Red Star shows, the paradigm of the confirmed film industry Stalinist, its grand exemplar. Although she was the screenwriter for The North Star, a shabby hit of a pro-Soviet movie, she never suffered for her sins. She lived a life among the rich and powerful. She "wintered" in the Caribbean with the Alsops and the Bundys. She "summered" in her grand house on Martha's Vineyard. Still, she was always ready to defend Soviet Russia. This made her an intellectual swindler, a moral contortionist. In my presence, she even seemed to justify the execution of an ex-lover, Otto Katz, the model for the hero in her play Watch on the Rhine, who was caught up in the 1952 Czech political trials against "Titoists" and "Zionists." One section of Hellman's utterly false autobiographical work Pentimento was made into a film called Julia, starring Jane Fonda as Hellman and Vanessa Redgrave as Julia. Maybe, dear reader, you will recall Julia, the fascinating American heroine of the pre-war anti-fascist resistance in Vienna. Julia was an intimate friend of Hellman's, at least according to the book and the movie. But, as soon as Pentimento appeared, rumblings erupted in New York that were only intensified by the first showings of Julia on screen. Julia's was a life stolen from someone else, someone who had never known Hellman.

It turned out that Julia's story was Muriel Gardiner's, an eminent psychiatrist and heiress to the Swift meat fortune who was married to an Austrian exile Socialist intellectual, Joseph Buttinger, no communist sympathizer, he or she, no friend of Hellman, to be sure. (In fact, Buttinger was chairman of the American Friends of Vietnam during the Vietnamese war and a contributor to Dissent magazine.) Hellman had poached on the wrong folks' lives. Hellman's intimates were embarrassed for her and by her; they began to press her for an explanation: Who really was Julia? A lawsuit by Gardiner was in the offing, and a Gardiner memoir, Code Name Mary (Yale University Press). As Joan Mellen tells it in her engrossing double biography Hellman and Hammett (Harper Collins), Hellman confided to her lawyer Ephraim London (and then to many others) that Julia was my wife's mother, deceased now more than 60 years. This flimsy improvisation persuaded no one, and Hellman died soon thereafter with her most desperate lie.

So what has all this to do with the fate of the American left or American liberalism? Any movement that does not own up to its past hobbles its future. These flanks are still enchanted with the suicidal heroism of the self-deluded Hollywood communists. This twisted syndrome did not stop with apologetics and excuses for Stalinism. It continues with the tortured explanations and barely disguised extenuations for the Muslim terror war against democratic and civil society. The Radoshes have written a wise, honest, and perceptive book.

posted by JR 2:49 AM

Thursday, July 28, 2005

 

CONSISTENT LIBERAL ELITISM

When I read the first paragraph of ("A world turned upside down," Voice of the Editor, June 29) regarding the Supreme Court's decision on eminent domain, I thought he was attempting humor. After reading further, I realized he was serious. I remember being taught the same thing in public school and from the evening news - Democrats are for the people; Republicans are for big business. Right.

To conservatives, this court decision is no surprise. One of the hallmarks of modern liberalism is the dogged belief that people are not smart enough to take care of themselves, this is best left to government. The bigger the government, the better. This is why some view liberals as being essentially elitist at heart, believing that they know what's best for everyone. Hence, higher taxes and more entitlements because highly educated liberals know better how to spend our money than we do.

The editor couldn't get through a commentary without talking about big, bad Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is one of the best things to happen to the average American family. How do I know? We continue to support it. We vote our approval though our wallets. Wal-Mart isn't one of the most successful businesses in history because it ripped off the consumer, but because Sam Walton gave us what we wanted - reasonable quality at low prices.

Yes, love of money does occasionally get out of control, which is why we elect public officials to rein in this behavior. In New London, Conn., the town council forgot this.

This court decision is only the tip of the liberal's well-intentioned, but dangerous agenda. Remember who dissented: the conservative Justices Thomas, Rehnquist, Scalia, and O'Connor. The smarter (aka liberal) justices say we just aren't smart enough to know what is best for us.

Source

posted by JR 8:57 AM

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

 

THE ACADEMIC ELITE SEEN CLOSE-UP

I’m not an academic — though I played one for much of the past eight years. I taught magazine sequences at Indiana University’s school of journalism and, more recently, nonfiction writing at a pair of smaller Pennsylvania liberal-arts colleges. My academic station has ranged from that of lowly adjunct to visiting professor to writer-in-residence. In theory, the latter two titles made me a full-fledged (albeit temporary) member of faculty, entitled to full faculty privileges. In practice, the one privilege those jobs gave me was watching my more highly credentialed peers go through their academic paces while I wondered why I’d been left off the e-mail distribution lists for important meetings.

Actually, I needn’t have wondered all that much. For one thing, I came from a nontraditional background. I lacked the usual alphabet soup of honorifics at the end of my name, having arrived at the academy not after a lifetime of Thoreauvian reflection and perpetual studentism, but fresh from a lengthy career as an honest-to-goodness practitioner. I’d even been paid decent wages for my work, which ran in glossy publications that appeared on predictable schedules, and were read by people other than academics. It followed that my new colleagues — who normally published in journals of somewhat mysterious origin, with names like Tradewinds of the Marxist Metaphysic — viewed me with suspicion. Anyway, in college one encounters an inverted scale of professional prestige, wherein being a doer is adjudged a less weighty accomplishment than merely contemplating doing, or critiquing what the doers do.

But there’s a more trenchant reason why the academy never embraced me to its ivy-covered bosom. During my stint on America’s campuses I developed a reputation as a heretic, a raving right-winger, though outsiders who weren’t well versed in the subtle rhythms and protocols of academia would have had a hard time understanding just how and why this happened, since my crimes were of omission, not commission. Because I never believed in injecting my own political agenda into classroom discussions; because I didn’t litter my office doors with “Anyone But Bush!” posters, or photos that caught the president in some unflattering facial expression; because I failed to attend rallies led by people screaming “regime change begins at home!”, because I was never the one applauding at faculty functions that stressed the need to “bring more minority voices!” like Cornel West or Amiri Baraka (but never Ward Connerly or Thomas Sowell) to campus . . . All of these sins proclaimed my estrangement from my peers, and my unfitness for membership in the Community of Ideas. In short, I was not someone to be trusted, and certainly not someone to be shown any secret handshakes.

Still, I kept my eyes and ears open. And if my experiences of academe were many and varied, it occurs to me now that they can all be boiled down to three, related impressions:

* Contrary to popular opinion, a surprising degree of free speech flourishes on today’s campuses. Trouble is, it flourishes mostly among faculty, and then only when one is willing to toe the party line, which is drawn somewhere to the left of Che Guevara. Faculty have few qualms about socio-political evangelism — which, put more bluntly, means they’re not sheepish about bullying any skeptical students into submission. I met a number of professors in political science, history, and the so-called “diversity disciplines” who upheld their private beliefs as empirical truths. Therefore, they felt entitled to grade based at least in part on the degree to which a given student accepted their wisdom. (After all, students who oppose affirmative action or U.S. “imperialism” can’t be thinking very clearly, can they?) The spirit of open inquiry that scholars like to tout in their self-congratulatory journals simply did not exist on the campuses where I worked. A student who tilted right, or failed to tilt visibly left, invited academic reprisals.

This climate of enforced homogeneity produces a striking intellectual torpor that’s most unbecoming in a supposed place of higher learning. It also produces grotesque intellectual defects akin to the physical defects one often finds among the chronically inbred. After decades of hearing nothing but their own ideas echoing back at them — of seldom having their logic challenged — many of my tenured colleagues had come to believe some pretty strange things: Suffice it to say that almost everything in American affairs was linked to some conspiracy theory, most of which were linked to the Oval Office (but only during Republican administrations).

* There’s a certain emperor’s-new-ideology phenomenon in play in academia. The gassy rhetoric serves as a private code between the chosen ones who claim to “get” all that drivel, which presumably is far beyond the ken of the rest of us. In their collective heart of hearts, academics live in terror that some clear-eyed outlander will stumble in and reveal them as philosophically naked, so they go to remarkable lengths to bar the door to people lacking the proper family crest. In making hiring decisions, they’ll insist on Ph.Ds and other “terminal degrees,” justifying those criteria on the basis of state funding mandates (but knowing also that the Ph.D process, like a finishing school for good little academics, indoctrinates candidates in the rules of the faculty lounge). They’ll reserve tenure to those who have “significant track records of publication” in elitist, determinedly non-mainstream publications (like those where members of the tenure committee itself publish). The incestuous cycle goes on and on.

Of course, academia has the power to change all this. Colleges could create tenure-track programs specifically designed to attract talented real-world practitioners. To their credit, a handful of institutions, like the University of Iowa and New York University, already have done so. But the general disinclination to take such steps robs students of the cutting-edge tactical expertise of folks who have battled it out in the trenches, successfully doing things that most college professors can talk about only in the abstract.

This estrangement from the real world explains why, in the end,

* Academia, at least in the liberal arts, stands for devolution, not revolution; stasis, not progress. More often than not, educators who describe themselves as “progressives” (one of those code words) are really stuck in New Deal liberalism. They haven’t even made it as far as a Clintonesque co-opting of GOP-inspired social reforms.

To be fair, this sociological stagnation doesn’t always show up in the actual curricula, especially the hard sciences. The intellectual aggressiveness at the nation’s esteemed research universities is beyond question (even if one does wonder why we continue to score less well than we ought to in international tests). But in the humanities — English, the arts as a whole, philosophy, political science, and the rest of the disciplines that emphasize critical thinking about the human condition — academics seem to think society should have stood pat with FDR, or maybe LBJ. When my IU peers taught out of magazines, they tended to work from the New Yorker of the Algonquin period or Beat-era issues of Rolling Stone, not from The New Yorker or the Rolling Stone of today. (Such predilections are worse than just silly, because it’s the student who suffers. Of what use is a curriculum that devotes its energy to preparing people for the magazine world of a half-century ago?) Further, in part because of that nostalgic longing for the days of muckraking, domestic Marxism, and the “awakening American social conscience,” the skew in the politics of chosen class materials is palpable — if not darkly hilarious. Professors make required reading of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle or, for that matter, Hillary Clinton’s It Takes a Village. You will never see professors teaching out of Newt Gingrich. Not unless they’re setting Gingrich up for a fall.

I’ve now left the academy, and I don’t expect to be invited back anytime soon. Still, I’m grateful for the experience. At least now I know the answer to questions like, “What’s the opposite of higher education?”


Source

posted by JR 5:53 AM

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

 

THABO MBEKI: SOUTH AFRICA'S ELITE LEFTIST

Though he's not Leftist enough for his old Communist buddies

"An elitist, surrounded by an appointed elite with groups of advisors, who are equally elitist, even in their opportunistic analytical advice to the president," one senior ANC official highlights. A "centralist one-man dictamocrat (description of a dictator and de-mocrat in one), who has established many enemies on his way to the top", another observes. "He could be described as a conspiring megalomaniac, stopping at almost nothing to entrench his vice grip on power, serving the foreign interests of British, Americans and Europeans," a third insider remarks.

The ANC's former secretary for information in exile, Thabo Mbeki, enjoyed a close working relationship with the late ANC president, Oliver R. Tambo. The late ANC president had two protégés - Thabo Mbeki and Chris Hani - there-by covering the political spectrum as best he understood. Tambo also had two close friends - Zambia's former pre-sident Kenneth Kaunda and London/Rhodesia Mining & Trading Company's (Lonrho, today's Lonmin) founding executive chairman, Tiny Row-land.

It was thus made possible for Tambo's wife, Adelaide, and their three children to live in London, where it was openly said that Adelaide Tambo enjoyed the international diplomatic cocktail circuit. Their children went to school in England and did a short stint at a university in Paris, France.

The friendship with Kaunda and Rowland remained close. Even after the ANC president's passing at the inauguration of Nelson Mande-la as president of South Africa, Tambo's widow, Mrs Adelai-de, was seated at the same table as the late Tiny Rowland and retired Kenneth Kaunda.

Whilst in exile, Thabo Mbeki was able to study in Sussex, England, where he also became married to his wife, Zanele. He completed his studies at the London School of Economics. Mbeki was always seen as pro-West, whereas Hani as pro-East.

Today his long-standing, high-ranking party colleagues caution, "Thabo Mbeki's most dangerous weakness is, he is faced with governing South Africa without a mandate of the masses. But, he actually does not care." They explain, the populists represent his fear for the masses, hence his intense dislike of them. His supporters in cabinet and government, in the parastatals and the private sector back his abhorrence of 'common populism'. Senior party colleagues however motivate their support of the president's dislikes by saying that he is "paying their salaries".

Another top ANC party official made it clear, insisting: "The President has long lost the confidence of the masses. In fact, the poor masses of South Africa, never really knew Thabo Mbeki. After eleven years in government, the President has lost it, as his grip on the ANC slipped away. He'll now need (fired deputy president) Zuma, to help him gain the confidence of the body of the ANC."

Analysts observed that the majority of South Africans voted for "their struggle movement", the ANC. Their hearts were filled with Afro-centric, Pan-Africanist ideals and hopes for a better future with obvious participation in the economy of their land. They did not vote for a western, capitalist, neo-liberal system.

Senior party insiders, analysts, local and foreign observers, political scientists, authors and media commentators seem to have a common view on South Africa's president - he is smart, intelligent; and the local, as well as the international business community claim, he is doing a good job - but where is his constituency? Is the ANC and its base actually part of his thinking and subsequent strategies? Has Mbeki pushed his envelope too far this time?

Mbeki is by no means viewed as "a people's president" ANC party insiders and analysts concur. His thrust to appease the international West and its business interests in South Africa has not changed. This however, would not be acceptable to the policies of Cosatu and the SACP in the Tri-Partite alliance and was no part of the noble and humane Freedom Charter.....

More here

posted by JR 9:00 AM

Monday, July 25, 2005

 

ARROGANT ELITISM IN THE ARTS

This year's edition of one of Europe's top summer arts events was described as a pretentious catastrophe Thursday after angry audiences booed or walked out of a series of performances. Critics attending the three-week Avignon theatre festival in southern France said it had plumbed new depths of intellectual obscurity and warned that a contempt for the mainstream public was placing the future of a prestigious national institution in jeopardy. "What purgatory!" headlined the news magazine Le Point on its culture pages, "Loyal spectators are sad, disorientated and haggard," while a commentator for the Communist newspaper L'Humanite said this year's offerings were marked by "a triumphant sense of masturbatory autism."

But the most searing attack on Europe's most important drama venue after Edinburgh came from the conservative newspaper Le Figaro, which devoted its daily editorial to "the festival's worst crisis since 1968." "It is chic, it is hip, it is conceptual. And it is totally cut off from the real country," the paper thundered. "Prototypes are being launched for the public to test, but the real audience is a tiny in-crowd, drunk on its own pathetic audacity .... Most spectators are not totally new to the world of the arts and can make up their own minds. Every evening they come out revolted. "Does the festival have the right to survive this artistic and moral disaster?" it concluded.

Founded in 1947 by theatre director Jean Vilar, the Avignon festival played a huge role in rebuilding France's cultural self-confidence after World War II and today has a long-established reputation for showcasing drama -- both traditional and experimental works -- from across the continent. Since 2003 the festival's artistic team has been led by two young administrators Hortense Archambault, 35, and Vincent Baudriller, 37, who this year stand accused of deviating into non-dramatic performance art and an unhealthy emphasis on violence and nihilism.

On Tuesday there were shouts of abuse during a show -- part dance, part installation -- by choreographer Christain Rizzo. "Either the well was deep" -- a reference from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland -- was accompanied by a cacophony of electronic noise that the audience found unbearable.

A two-part work entitled "A lovely blonde child" and "I apologise" in which actors draped life-style dolls of young girls in lascivious postures over coffins also drew boos of derision and was accused of being an incitement to paedophilia. "You think you've reached the last point in mediocrity, pretentiousness and confusion. But no. There is always something worse," said Le Figaro's drama critic.

Belgian visual artist Jan Lauwers prompted another commentator to ask, "Are the gods of theatre taking their revenge?" Lauwers announces that "Needlab 10" is "not a show or a work of creativity but a mental space, an experiment." It ends with a 15 minute film of waves and a solitary man on a beach.

On Sunday much of the audience walked out of "After/Before," described as a piece of "theatre-dance-music-video" by director Pascal Rambert. The first 40 minutes are taken up by a film of interviewees answering the question, "If there were a huge catastrophe, a new flood, what would you bring with you from this world to the next?" In the second half 21 actors reproduce word for word the quotes from the film, and then having stripped off perform them a third time in song and dance. "What have you got against us?" a spectator was heard to shout as he walked out in exasperation.

Press attacks have come not just from right-wing papers like Le Figaro for which the festival is a "place for official art to offer a little bit of scandal with a lot of subsidies." France's left-wing standard bearer Le Monde described a monologue in which Belgian visual artist Jan Fabre -- this year's guest of honour -- ruminates on the fate of a failed clown as "very vague and very pretentious and very lazy." "We have seen a lot of feeble and problematic shows in this Avignon festival. But this is sheer imposture, bloated by its own importance and of unfathomable tedium," Le Monde said.

The Avignon festival was cancelled in 2003 because of a strike by workers in the entertainment industry, but 2004 was seen as a success and advance ticket-sales for this year's event -- which ends on July 27 -- were strong. In an interview with Le Monde, Baudriller said he had no regrets about the programme.

Source

posted by JR 8:21 AM

Sunday, July 24, 2005

 

AN ANGER-DRIVEN ELITE LEFTIST

Ronald Wilson was a judge of the High Court of Australia who fostered the myth of the non-existent "stolen generation"

There are two versions of the convention on discussing the recently departed. The older of them is de mortuis nil nisi bonum; speak nothing but good of the dead. Gore Vidal has made the case for a sterner maxim: nil nisi verum, or nothing but the truth. During the course of the past week there have been a great many kind things said and written about the late Ronald Wilson. Readers who admired him should read no further because I mean to talk about the darker angels of his nature.

Much has been made of his mildness, modesty and unassuming ways, and his habit of saying: "Just call me Ron." But, for all the self-effacing gestures, there was also a persistent monomaniacal streak. As a young prosecutor, he was nicknamed the Avenging Angel. Even former Liberal minister Fred Chaney, who admires him, says that in court he was fearsome. Estelle Blackburn wrote a book, Broken Lives, chronicling two cases where he prosecuted innocent men who were convicted of murders and imprisoned for years despite a known serial killer confessing to both crimes. She describes Wilson as "a very ambitious and overzealous prosecutor at the time".

The tendency to righteous indignation was curbed through most of his years on the High Court bench but came to characterise his term as president of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. He described it in the following terms: "I have never felt better. It has something to do with getting angry. Friends say: 'You never used to be so angry.' I can't help it. Sometimes I have difficulty signing my name because my hand shakes so much."

It was an artless admission; the sort of thing you would expect only from someone with quite limited self-understanding. Plainly the burdens of judicial office and the presidency of the Assembly of the Uniting Church had taken their toll. What was keeping him going was afflatus and his regular fix of Old Testamental prophetic wrath. What routinely overwhelmed his judgment, in the HREOC years and afterwards, was seeing indigenous issues through a prism of rage.

Peter Ryan, the former publisher of Melbourne University Press, wrote a piece for the May edition of Quadrant that cast new light on Wilson's character. In it he reminisced about the Darryl Beamish case, one of the murder trials I noted in which Wilson prosecuted, where an innocent man narrowly avoided the hangman's noose and was wrongly imprisoned for 15 years. Ryan had been approached by Peter Brett, a professor of jurisprudence, who had written a book on the case and wanted MUP to publish it. Ryan read it, then asked for an opinion from Owen Dixon, the retired chief justice of the High Court. Dixon urged publication, saying that it was a matter of public duty and that he "didn't think this sort of thing could happen in Australia".

Brett described the case as "a monstrous miscarriage of criminal justice", as bad as anything he had been able to "discover in recent times in the common-law world". He concluded his book by saying: "The judges, Crown law officers and police who participated in the sorry proceedings which I have described can be left to live with their own consciences." What prompted Ryan's column was that last April Fool's Day the West Australian Court of Criminal Appeal finally exonerated Beamish and found that he had suffered "a substantial miscarriage of justice".

The next day The Weekend Australian reported that the chief investigating police officer, George Owen Leitch, and the president of his police union had described themselves as being "deeply disappointed" at the court's decision. Wilson, the former Crown prosecutor, was reported as saying, first up, that he wished to make no comment. There then followed, as Ryan notes, "his apparent comments that he had expected the court's decision [how?] and that he does not believe that he has been at fault". My guess is that, since Brett's book came out in 1966, Wilson was in a state of denial about the irreparable wrong done to poor Beamish. His sermons and denunciations of whited sepulchres in the meantime were probably all the more passionate because, in his lucider moments, he knew that he was one himself.

When the opportunity finally came, the natural time for him to say something graceful to his victim and to acknowledge his part in that miscarriage of justice, he squibbed it and retreated into blanket denial. I rang Ryan on Thursday, the eve of Wilson's funeral, to ask what he thought of the hypothesis. "Yes, that'd be right," he said. "Insofar as he had an intact conscience, it would have been eating away at him all along."

By the time he came to inquire into the so-called stolen generations and to contribute to the Bringing Them Home Report in the mid-1990s, Wilson was consumed by what Melbourne commentator Michael Warby calls "moral vanity". The most obvious sign was his willingness to accuse Australian governments and their public servants of deliberate policies of genocide. Apart from its injustice, it was as ill-considered and counterproductive an accusation as I can remember anyone in public life making during the past 30years.

The frisson this self-described "voice of the voiceless" so obviously derived from reiterating the charge was sickening to watch. The report itself is a disgrace. Wilson abandoned the habits of a lifetime of careful weighing and testing of evidence in favour of the most shameless, partisan kind of advocacy research. His use of sources was extremely loose and he repeatedly refused to hear evidence that ran counter to his prejudices, including testimony from people who believed that separation policies had worked to their advantage. Not surprisingly, the test cases based on the report's findings have collapsed under the weight of their implausibility when tried in court.

The criticism of Wilson's contribution to the debate about the separation of part-Aboriginal children from their mothers does not end there. First of all, there can be no doubt that he managed to trivialise a serious and complicated debate that deserved judicious handling. Second, he played along with the black activists who, for ideological reasons of their own, wanted to recruit everyone of mixed descent into a kind of indelible Aboriginality, which somehow took priority over all other ties of blood and trumped all other cultural affinities. There was, for example, no recognition that even those who had deliberately embraced cultural assimilation were making a legitimate choice. Another outcome is that for many, especially in the fourth estate, it is still unimaginable that being institutionalised and given a basic education might have been the best available option.

Last and worst of all, it seems certain that Bringing Them Home has had the effect of dissuading many social workers and government departments from intervening in cases where removing abused part-Aboriginal children from dysfunctional communities was necessary, sometimes leaving them in mortal peril. Actual deaths became a secondary consideration, compared with accusations of cultural genocide.

Source

FOOTNOTE:

One of the great triumphs of the Australian Left has been to convict white Australians of the "stolen generation" crime -- the alleged forcible removal of 100,000 black children from their families so they could be brought up by white foster-parents instead. There has even been a film made about the subject -- Rabbit-proof fence -- which claims to be a documentary. The whole story is however just another Leftist lie -- as Andrew Bolt sets out at length here and here. The slender basis of fact that the story relies on is that some 1930s official do-gooders -- predecessors of the modern LEFT -- did place a few mixed-race children in white foster homes to give them a better chance in life -- but the placement was always made with written parental consent. There was NO forced removal. Nobody and nothing was "stolen". And that's not just Andrew Bolt's opinion. It is the finding of a year-long $10 million Australian court case about the claim. Officialdom acted only when the parents either did not want the children or felt that they could not care for them adequately. Tim Blair has some amusing comments on Leftist attempts to wriggle out of admitting the facts concerned.

posted by JR 2:57 AM