Saturday, November 22, 2003

 
If you work for Fred Hilmer, the notion that the government can manage things better than the pribvate sector must be terribly appealing.

"... what we really need is a sort of government film studio, which produces ultra-low-budget films, with a greater emphasis on script development." -- Guy Rundle in today's Silly Moaning Hilmer

"We need some government intervention to make the housing market sensible and fair." -- A Dill Horin in today's Silly Moaning Hilmer


Well, that's settled then, at least as far as the Fairfax claque is concerned: Government is our friend. When there is a problem -- real or imagined -- remove responsibility for fixing it from those most directly affected and entrust its cure to politicians and, by extension, the desk johnnies of the Public Service, who the doddering Alan Ramsey believes would be the best sources of prudent and enlightened policy, if only they weren't so spineless. ("When, if ever, has a senior bureaucrat in this country publicly espoused that politicians act in the national interest by cutting spending and increasing taxes, instead of forever being influenced by electoral self-interest?" -- also in Saturday's Silly, under the headline "Who'll Tell MPs To Think Of Their Country")

So, government is the solution -- except we just can't trust it.

Fortunately, to lift the Professor's bleak mood as he drifts off to bed, there is one voice in today's dead-tree press that nails the hammer-and-sickle sensibility. It is that of Christopher Pearson in today's Australian:

"The division is between those who believe that the future lies in a combination of strong community values and a large measure of individual responsibility and those who see the bulk of the population as being incapable of managing their own problems, so that they need to be looked after by government."
posted by Stanley Saturday, November 22, 2003

Thursday, November 20, 2003

 
Here are some of those books mentioned in the previous post:

The Autobiography of a Seaman -- Admiral Lord Cochrane. As a writer, Cochrane made a better seaman. But it's his life in his words, and that is justification in itself for adding this volume to the reference shelf. A better and more readable biography is Christopher Lloyd's "Lord Cochrane, Seaman, Radical, Liberator: A Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, 10th Earl of Dundonald".

If you haven't had enough of Bernard Cornwell's now-interminable Sharpe series, the book that marks the author's decline into unabashed pulp, "Sharpe's Devil", also features an only slightly fictionalised Cochrane. Don't expect a waterborne "Sharpe's Waterloo", however. That book is as good a fictional telling of that confusing battle as you can find, defying Wellington's observation that anyone attempting to reconstruct his victory might just as undertake the history of a ball, the surging action and indivual enagements making it difficult for even the Iron Duke himself to be entirely sure how he came to emerge triumphant.

Before going back on the water, a word about two other Waterloo novels. Allan Mallinson's "A Close Run Thing" is worth picking up, although the writer gets a little too excited about horses and stables and describes the battle's unfolding with a disappointing, clinical competence. The surprise is Georgette Heyer's "An Infamous Army", which the Professor read only at Grandma Bunyip's repeated urging. Rather than a Regency petticoat-lifter, however, it turned out to be an exact account of the battle -- good enough, apparently, to have been on the reading list at Sandhurst. There's also an interesting confluence: the ball before the battle, where both Sharpe and Heyer's female lead, Barbara Childe, are sent by their authors. One wonders what each made of Vanity Fair's Becky Sharp (no relation, she no doubt hoped), for whom Thackeray also obtained an invitation. One is tempted to think his scheming heroine might have enjoyed improving the Rifleman's style in the saddle, but until Cornwell seizes upon Thackeray as a source of inspiration, as he did Elizabeth Longford's "Wellington: Years of the Sword", it is a dalliance that can exist only in the imagination. (The full text of Vanity Fair is available for free here, and well worth the expense.)

Moving from land back to water, ""Chronicles of the Macedonian" by James Tertius de Kay is a ripper. It's the true story of a British frigate captured by the Americans in the War of 1812, the colourful assortment of characters who served on her and, just as often, dined out on lies about their parts in her exploits. Interestingly, the ship finished life as a pub in the Bronx, where it was finally destroyed by fire in 1922.

And there is much fine reading, too, in "Every Man Will Do His Duty" an anthology of memoirs and diary excerpts from the Napoleonic Wars. Just as one can discern Cornwall's sources, so will the O'Brian reader note one of the fountainheads from which many plots and subplots arise -- the recollections of William Henry Dillon, for example, prompt thoughts of Jack's incarceration in France. Unlike Jack, however, Dillon did not need to leave France disguised as a bear.

Finally, there is "Fisher's Face" by Jan Morris. There is no reason for including the title in this list -- Fisher is a man of a later age -- other than that it is terrific, the best work Morris has done. Short and deftly painted, it's Morris' girlish romance with Jackie Fisher, First Lord of the Admiralty and father of the Dreadnought. You can read John Keegan's "The Price of Admiralty" or Robert K. Massie's "Dreadnought" and get a fair picture of Fisher's drive and sparrow-like energy. But it has taken Morris to bring the man genuinely to life, and to do so by writing him what amounts to a love letter disquised as biography.

Any one of the above is well worth taking to the beach.
posted by Stanley Thursday, November 20, 2003

Wednesday, November 19, 2003

 
Tony the Teacher has been a king-size distraction of late. There's still work to be moved from one side of the Professor's desk to the other, with time for just a few cursory squiggles on the way, but the Billabong's proto Univac keeps nosing back to After Grog for the latest in a steaming stream of red hot blogs. There has been Sir's coverage of the Shakedown State's escalating speed camera scandals, including his prescient speculation that fleeced citizens will soon be hounding Bracks and his gang for money (as the Premier and his contracted thieves have done them), and Tony's expert explanation of what it takes to calibrate an accurate money trap. His has been coverage that should be read in conjunction with the news stories in the Hun, which exposed the scandal, and should certainly be studied before the Age gets around to mounting an inevitable Opinion page defence of the notion that governments know what's best and even if the cameras are inaccurate, it doesn't matter anyway because, well, governments know best, especially those nice Labor ones. And anyway, if Bracks didn't have access to that extra $400 million, where would he find the money to support a Sri Lankan mountainside's worth of tea leaves in the building unions?

And if that effort wasn't enough, Teacher Tony has now blessed us with an engrossing post on Master & Commander, naval novels and novelists, his reaction to news of Patrick O'Brian's death and the widespread fear amongst the author's admirers that Peter Weir's film might not live up to its literary inspiration. There's a Bunyip in that anxious boat, too, because the novels occupy a special place on the Billabong's book shelf -- and also in the small and atrophied organ that passes for the heart of a Right Wing Death Beast.

How to explain the books' appeal? The simple response is to counsel the curious to pick up the first -- "Master and Commander," from which the film borrows only its title, apparently -- and start reading. It should become rapidly clear that this is historical fiction very much in a class by itself. Tony says he admires Hornblower, but while those novels are enjoyable, their amusements in this reader's opinion don't begin to compare. Instead, thanks to O'Brian's puckish sense of humour, they contrast. Read a few novels and there can be no doubt that when O'Brian sat down to create Jack Aubrey at his publisher's suggestion, he quite deliberately made his hero Hornblower's antithesis in everything but wiles and courage.

Horatio sports a fancy name, Jack a simple one. Horatio is of Maturin-esque dimensions, Jack a big fellow. Horatio is tone deaf, while Jack delights in music. Horatio gets seasick, Jack does not. Horatio is abstemious, Jack loves a tipple. O'Brian relishes a pun; whatever Forester's other strengths -- and they are many, including, as Tony notes, his battle scenes -- the Hornblower books bring weak smiles at best. Where in Forester, for example, is there a line to compare with Maturin's groan-inducing jest: "Why is the dog watch so named? Because it is cur-tailed." (The quote is from memory, so O'Brian admirers should stay their displeasure at the infelicitous rendering, instead perhaps providing a reference, which the Professor can't find, so the record can be corrected in a subsequent post.)

In any case, the mortgage must paid and work's obligations waded through, so readers dismayed by the spectacle of a Bunyip getting gushy as teenage girl going on about unicorns need suffer no more. If, on the other hand, visitors are now reading the Aubrey-Maturin cannon, have finished it, or simply wish to expand their horizons, a subsequent post will suggest a few other books worth ordering. Teacher Tony has mentioned some of his other favourites, and the Professor will shortly put a few more for consideration. Many have to do with period, others are simply good reads -- the sort followers of the Surprise (and the Sophie, and the Leopard, and the Diane, and the fragrant Nutmeg of Consolation) may enjoy, even though some are flecked with horse sweat rather than salt.

That will come a little later. Now, having wasted more time than intended, it's back to work.
posted by Stanley Wednesday, November 19, 2003

Tuesday, November 18, 2003

 
A blurb on Noam Chomsky's new book, "Hegemony or Survival?: America's Quest for Global Dominance" hails the author thus:

"Arguably the most important intellectual alive" - The New York Times.

The actual quote, as revealed by blogger Oliver Kamm and amplified by Andrew Sullivan is a little different:

Arguably the most important intellectual alive, how can he write such nonsense about international affairs and foreign policy? - The New York Times.

Paul Sheehan should take leaf from Chomsky's tome and add the following endorsement to the second edition of "The Electronic Whorehouse": "Polemical excitement" -- Robert Manne
posted by Stanley Tuesday, November 18, 2003

 
This story on the Silly Moaning Hilmer alerts readers to the fact that it was put together from dispatches provided by "Agence France-Press, The New York Times, AAP", so it seems reasonable to assume that some minor celebrant in the Fairfax chapel brought his or her perspective to the task of stitching those sources together. That might explain this sentence, which begins the report: "Australia has been singled out for bombing threats by a group linked to al-Qaeda as it claimed responsibility for attacks on two Istanbul synagogues."

"Singled out", see. As in Australia on its ownsome. Get the message? Of course you do. By throwing in our lot with countries where the Enlightenment is generally thought to have been a pretty good idea, we've made a pariah of our sweet brown land. Oh, the shame! To be held in low regard by advocates of female circumcision and folks who regard any home with a dog as a waiting room for an eternal appointment with Shaytan. The sort of people, in other words, that the Hilmerites like to patronise in their relativist, non-judgmental way, just so long as they don't move into the home next door. (Not that such a thing is likely; no Hilmerite ever ventures further west than Newtown)

But back to the Silly's choice of that particular term "singled out." As the Professor knew all too well in the lonely days before Mrs. Bunyip filled his life with love, "single" means on your own, by your self, devoid of company. Alone, in other words.

Is that what the story actually says? Not quite. Apparently we have been "singled out" with "Britain, Italy, Australia and Japan," along with "Bush and his valets among the Arabs and foreigners." Not so lonely anymore, is it?

Still, the Silly got to convey just the right message: We'll pay for doing the right thing.
posted by Stanley Tuesday, November 18, 2003

Monday, November 17, 2003

 
Here's a puzzler. In Robert Manne's column today in the Silly and the Age, La Trobe's sharpest thinker (well, we are talking La Trobe here) quotes a recent poll that charted the weight and leaning of Iraqi sentiment on various subjects. Here's how Manne described one of its findings:

Two-thirds want US and British troops to leave within the year.

The man whose company conducted the poll, John Zogby, phrased it this way. Notice the subtle difference with the change of just one word:

Two out of three Iraqis — and seven in 10 Sunnis — want U.S. and British forces out of Iraq in a year.

Now let's hear from Karl Zinsmeister of the American Enterprise Institute, which commissioned the poll about which he wrote in the Wall Street Journal:

Perhaps the ultimate indication of how comfortable Iraqis are with America's aims in their region came when we asked how long they would like to see American and British forces remain in their country: Six months? One year? Two years or more? Two thirds of those with an opinion urged that the coalition troops should stick around for at least another year.

The questionaire and tabulated results are available here. Those with computers up to the task of downloading the .pdf file (it gave the Billabong's steam-powered model some grief, so be warned) will find the actual results even more interesting. Asked if the U.S. should withdraw its troops in (a) six months, (b) 12 months or (c)two-plus years, just 31.6 per cent want the earliest possible exit. Taken together, however, those who wish Americans to remain for at least a year total 34 percent (12 months) + 25 percent (two-plus years).

In other words, Manne's assertion that "two-thirds want US and British troops to leave within the year" is not merely wrong, it directly contradicts the poll on which he claims to base his Yankees-Go-Home assertion.

The Professor can't speak for other parents, but he knows Young Master Bunyip will be attending La Trobe only if there are no places available in schools that teach dog grooming or air conditioner maintenance.
posted by Stanley Monday, November 17, 2003

 
An American reader, JQC, writes:

No need to worry about Master and Commander. Terrific movie. Saw it Friday night in New York and the audience applauded when the lights came up. More true to the books than any dramatization I've ever seen. Full of little delights like Jack's mutilated ear lobe, torn up by a bullet in one of the first books. In the movie you see Crowe's ear for a split second and it's chewed up too. The movie doesn't explain how he got it, so the detail is in there just to make the movie resonate with O'Brian readers. There are dozens of other details like that. You won't be disappointed.
posted by Stanley Monday, November 17, 2003

Friday, November 14, 2003

 
When Tim Dunlop hailed "Master and Commander" as a fine flick, there was grief at the Billabong, and the mood grew worse when the clew-less Mike Carlton let it be known that he also had seen a preview and thought it first rate. Couldn't possibly be any good, that was the glum surmise, not if those two were rattling their Twisties with excitement. Another "A Good Man in Africa", no doubt -- terrific book, wretched movie. Now Charles Krauthammer gives reason to hope that Midshipman Dunlop is right about something for once. Krauthammer writes:

Even better is the fact that the hero in his little British frigate is up against a larger, more powerful French warship. That allows American audiences the particular satisfaction of seeing Anglo-Saxon cannonballs puncturing the Tricolor. My favorite part was Aubrey rallying the troops with a Henry V, St. Crispin's Day speech featuring: ``Do you want your children growing up and singing the Marseillaise?'' It was met by a chorus of deafening ``Noes.'' Maybe they should have put that in the trailer too.

While Krauthammer hails M&C; for its relentless authenticity, the Professor is betting that it neglects to mention this handy splice, the one to which the bosun refers in the second paragraph.
posted by Stanley Friday, November 14, 2003

Wednesday, November 12, 2003

 
All this work, but finally, a light at the end of the tunnel -- one just sufficent to see the way clear for a break from paid employment and permit a very quick perusal of Paul Sheehan's "The Electronic Whorehouse." The verdict: readable, at times engrossing and, quite often, immensely satisfying to see the bias and ideological loading that passes for reporting being exposed in explicit detail. And there's the novelty of the exercise, too. How many places outside the blogosphere are you going to see the likes of Atom Bum Adams, Mike Carlton and David Marr lined up for sequential whacks?

Yes, indeed, Sheehan's effort is well worth reading, and everyone who would like to see Australia's publishers take more chances with books that break the mould should go out and buy a copy or two. Apparently that is happening. Reader M.R. writes: "As soon as I saw your quote from Gastropod I called Borders. The South Yarra branch has sold out so I had to drive to Chadstone. And I have recommended it to all my friends!" Several other visitors to the Billabong have done likewise, so Sheehan would appear to have a nice little money-spinner on the shelves.

A word of caution, however, one directed at blog buffs in particular. While the book is good, there isn't much here you won't already have known. More to the point, Max Suich, who reviewed it in Saturday's Silly, is also right in pointing out one of its flaws: It is the victim of its publisher's unfortunate packaging. The weasel on the front is a nice touch, but a mangy cur would have been a better image. For all the human failings we project upon them, weasels are at least good at worming into dark spots (which Australia's press is not) and are relentlessly curious (if they are at all like ferrets, with which the Professor is more familiar, that is). A snarling, treacherous, back-biting mongrel, perhaps hunched protectively over its own vomit, would have been a much better metaphor for the top dogs of Australia's correct-thinking media Establishment.

Then there's the cover subtitle, "This time it's the media." It's as if the contents aren't quite as important as the book itself -- the implication being that the mere act of scraping muck from under rugs is so daring that nothing more need to be said about how it got there. Much better would have been to see something like: "How a small group of bitchy, insecure, second-rate minds have been allowed to peddle lies as truth, and why all of us are poorer for that indulgence." A professional writer could probably say it in fewer words, but you get the idea.

They are the first objections. The next is of much more consequence: While Sheehan does a very workmanlike job of handling specific incidents -- Marr's mugging of Janet Albrechtsen, silly buggers at the edit consoles of Four Corners, misrepresentations on the front page of the Silly -- he treats them as case studies suffient in themselves. He hints repeatedly that something wider and even nastier is at work in Australia's newsrooms, but for some reason allows that broader point to shuffle along three steps behind his major point, which is to expose his particular bete noirs.

Perhaps it's unfair to criticise a book for being other than the one the reader would like to have seen written, but on page 194, Sheehan makes that regret worse by tantalising us with just a fleeting taste of what might have been. "The Herald's coverage was a low point in the venerable newspaper's long history and raised the obvious question, what were the editors thinking?" he says, having just laid out the Silly's reaction to the Cubillo decision." The case hadn't been resolved as the Hilmerites would have liked, so they put the paper at the disposal of their frustrations and pretended the verdict was of little consequence. Did Silly editors, he asks, think their "readers were too stupid to notice?"

He doesn't answer that question before skating off to further examine the particulars of the credulous victimology that passes for the reporting of indigenous affairs. But he should have.

And that's the point -- if not of this book, perhaps of some later effort. The senior competitors in Australia's all-star soggy biscuit circuit really do believe that reality has no right to intrude on their biases, and that anyone who dares to point out that children were indeed thrown overboard, that illegal aliens are not "asylum seekers", or that genocide was not an official policy must be so far beyond the pale of decency as to deserve nothing more than rudeness and a shrieked dismissal.

Bias. Adams' feud with Carlton. Marr's arrogant dishonesty. The spittle-flecked smears of Bobby the Bundoora Carbuncle. They're all very interesting, and those antics would be appalling if familiarity hadn't bred a weary contempt. But the ultimate questions -- why our newspapers and national broadcaster treat us as fools, and who allows them to continue doing so? -- are neither explicitly posed nor answered. One day they will be -- but not yet.
posted by Stanley Wednesday, November 12, 2003

Friday, November 07, 2003

 
"I'm told it will sell about four copies," says Phillip Adams of Paul Sheehan's new book, "The Electronic Whorehouse." Wrong again. The Professor bought a copy earlier today, then went back for four more to make sure that the Paddington Pharoah's record of inaccuracy remains intact. The extra ones will be donated to the ABC where they can be kept handy for hitting Margo on the side of the head when she next goes mad as a meat axe on the telly. The great Steve Edwards has a partial transcript punctuated by his droll observations, and a link to the Lateline video clip of the Diarist in full flight. Even if you saw it live, this is a species of dementia worth preserving on the hard drive. At one stage, before being dragged back to the subject, she even begins a tantalising tale of her days in prison. Personally, the Professor thinks she's a little confused. Well she's always confused, but more than usual this time. What she mistakes for jail is probably the little room under the eaves where Fred keeps her locked up with Alan Ramsey, Wet Fart FitzSimons and Kenneth Davidson until Fairfax stock grows abnormally high. Then he lets her to go on national TV and remind shareholders what sort of a company he really runs. And if readers and investors needed further reminding, there's Sheehan's book. Can you imagine what a fly on the wall above an unflushed toilet in Hilmer World Headquarters must be overhearing? What must the inmates be saying about one columnist who writes a book exposing his colleagues are fools and frauds -- and another one who goes on the telly straight away to prove it. Even more amusing to ponder: What must Murdoch and Packer be saying (between guffaws)?
posted by Stanley Friday, November 07, 2003