Normally the Xmas-New Year period is dominated by a series of wacky stories as the normal political and economic news stories peter out over the holidays. This year the Andaman Sea earthquake/tsunami broke the mold and little else made the newspapers for a couple of weeks. Some extra levity was added by the ABC announcing the results of its reader/viewer poll for favorite books.
Silly season
In the light of those events, I find it incumbent on me to look at the silly season items which might not have impinged on your consciousness.
- The great headline of the summer was a report on the ABC news website: Court rules whales, dolphins can't sue Bush. The learned judges of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that whales, dolphins and porpoises have no standing to sue Dubya over the US navy's use of sonar equipment. A self-appointed lawyer was a marine mammal activist yclept Lanny Sinkin whose assertion was that long-range low-frequency sonar causes tissue damage and other injuries. (Although the story doesn't say so, sonar is the current culprit of choice as to why whales beach themselves with such regularity: it causes their own natural sounding systems to malfunction, some theories assert.) So now we have the ridiculous situation where corporations are recognised as entities capable of suing or being sued, even though their behavior is largely sociopathic; and that ambulance chasers can bring causes on behalf of the halt, the lame and the inept even though their clients are incapable of giving proper instructions; but no-one can bring suit on behalf of animals because, as the court concluded with the usual incisive legal analysis, if Congress had intended to authorise animals to sue, they could and should have said so plainly.
- The news over the summer break was good for local teachers. In a world-wide comparison of results, local kiddies finished third in the literacy stakes, behind two non-Anglophone nations but ahead of all English-speaking nations, and in the top half dozen in numeracy and scientific skills. For all the whinging from the usual (conservative) suspects about the failure of public schooling, these results indicate that, far from creating a generation of illiterate dullards, Australian education is performing better than ever and the current crop of adolescents will be better educated and better able to cope with the world than their predecessors. Two interesting asides: the results indicate that the country that is sliding into illiterate, innumerate ignorance is the USofA, which performed disgracefully in the comparative tests; and the real trouble may be with the commentators and experts, like local literacy expert Dr Ken Rowe who states: "Some children are not getting onto a growth trajectory as early as they should in terms of literacy". With literary role models like that, we should be surprised?
- Mamdour Habib is home, having been released from Guantanamo Bay three years after he was kidnapped by forces under the command of George W Bush in Pakistan, flown to Egypt, tortured, flown back to Afghanistan, sent to Cuba and incarcerated, without access to counsel and without charge, and subjected to further torture, all with the seeming complicity of the Australian government. Neither the Americans nor the Australians have found a single crime which they can charge him with, even in the military kangaroo courts which the US are setting up in defiance of their own, and international, law. On Habib's return, the Australian Attorney-General is exploring ways in which he can limit the man's ability to earn income from the retelling of his story, by evoking laws aimed at stopping criminals selling their stories. Mamdour Habib is not a criminal: he has neither been charged with, nor convicted of, any crime. Yet here is the government trying to cut him off at the financial knees. The hypocrites.
- For all that hypocrisy and cant, Mamdour Habib is free. At least for the nonce. Not so Peter Qasim. He's been in nick for six years, even though he's committed no crime, faces no charges, is not considered a terrorist, an enemy combatant or a danger to Australia. From Kashmir where his dad was a separatist leader, he came to Australia as an asylum seeker. You'd think as a Kashmiri separatist he might have reasonable fears for his safety in Indian-occupied Kashmir. But he was refused asylum. He then agreed to return to Kashmir (rather than rot in perpetual incarceration) but the Indians refused to take him. He has no papers and now he has no state; so there he languishes, in the Baxter detention centre. And with the complicity of the High Court (by 4 votes to 3), the government is empowered to detain him indefinitely. Amanda Vanstone has the discretion to release him; the government might exercise some clemency and offer him residency, or at the least freedom. But there he sits, behind razor wire, a victim of the flint-hearted philosophy of government which asserts that the slightest show of mercy to the merest subject of its inhumane immigration policy will be the thin end of the wedge leading to a flood of asylum seekers. And where is the public outcry about these actions?
- Every year the committee for the scientific investigation of claims of the paranormal reviews that year's prophecies to see how well they went. In 2004, not only did they miss the Iraq prison torture scandal and the breaking of the Red Sox hoodoo after 90 years, there was no prediction remotely resembling the Andaman Sea earthquake and tsunamis. Self-proclaimed 'psychics', however, told us that in 2004 Osama bin Laden would die of kidney disease, Saddam Hussein would be shot, Fidel Castro would die, a live dinosaur will be captured, Hoover Dam would collapse and that Rosie O'Donnell would have Siamese twins. Year after year the predictions from the alleged psychics are published; they miss the mark usually by a long distance, yet claim (falsely) to have predicted everything from 11/9/2001 to the Kennedy assassination. The annual review of such prophecies helps throw some light on this rort but it won't stop it.
- Press lobby wins reforms to national security crime bill, said the headline on another good news story. The Australian Press Council and John Fairfax Publications had made strong representations to the federal government on the definition of 'national security information' in the National Security Information (Criminal Proceedings) Bill. The bill, which sought to restrict the publication of sensitive information which might be adduced during criminal trials for terrorists or similar suspects. In our view the definition was far too wide, especially as it included reference to Australia's 'national interests' as well as 'national security' per se. Despite the recent election win, and the prospect of a Senate majority in the near future, we were able to convince Phillip Ruddock of the concerns that arose from an overly-wide definition and he deleted all references in the Bill to national interests. I am very happy with this outcome: I wrote the submission and was a part of the delegation to Attorney-General Ruddock to press the matter.
- Jacques Derrida died recently after 74 years. He was the progenitor of a theory known as 'deconstruction'. This argued that, given the complexity of language, the author's intention could never properly be carried through and that no text therefore had any permanence, truthfulness or absolute meaning. This theory has sidetracked intellectual discourse for a generation and led to some of the least comprehensible criticism ever written. The silly man who started this movement is now dead. Hopefully his ideas will soon meet the same fate. The words written by authors (or filmed by directors) are inevitably tied to his/her life and experience and the change of times does not change the essential contemporary truths of a work. To understand Hamlet you need to place it in the continuum of Jacobean revenge tragedies, not to isolate the 'text' from its context in time, place and authorship.
- The retirement of the fundamentalist US Attorney-General John Ashcroft promised some improvement in the law'n'order agenda of the USofA. Perhaps even a return to the recognition of the Bill of Rights. Who could have guessed that things would get worse rather than better? 'Anyone who knew the Bush administration' is the obvious answer. The obvious answer for the Shrub was Alberto Gonzales, who has been his Counsel for some time, earlier when he was Governor of Texas and recently as president. Gonzales record is exemplary: in 57 recommendations on capital punishment appeals for clemency to the Governor of Texas, he found not one single case where clemency might be applied. That included cases where the defence counsel slept through the trial to cases of even more obvious incompetence in defence to cases where the convicted was mentally (or emotionally) incompetent. Every one of them deserved to swing. As Counsel to the President, Gonzales proffered the opinion which justified the deprivation of Geneva Convention rights to 'enemy combatants' from Afghanistan and which legitimised torture (in various forms) for those in this category or those held in Iraq. Just the sort of qualifications for being first law officer of the land. And, if I know Dubya, Gonzales will fill the next vacancy on the Supreme Court. After all, such unmitigated sycophancy needs reward. These developments throw into stark relief the Bush call, at his inauguration, for the spread of freedom and democracy worldwide: "America will not prefer that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies." Except of course those kidnapped in Afghanistan and environs and flown to Guantanamo Bay to be held incommunicado, without charge, for three years and there be subject to 'interrogation' by all means necessary - including the means currently being exposed in the US press.
- On average, Bob Menzies collected federal taxes the equivalent of 18.4 percent of GDP; Holt, Gorton and McMahon averaged 18 percent; the 'big spending' Whitlam government 20.3 percent; and under Hawke and Keating it rose to 22.8 percent. John Howard oversees a government that collects taxes equal to an average over eight years of 24.5 percent of GDP. Given that capital gains and company taxes have been reduced proportionately, this, the highest taxing government in Australian history, is increasingly relying on personal income tax as a way of rasing money. Since 2001, taxes have risen above 25 percent of GDP, low by world standards but way above what we've ever paid to government. And this government still claims to be fiscally responsible and better managers than their predecessors.
- Is it only me or have some laws on racial/religious vilification started to get out of hand? A tribunal in Victoria has found that the Catch the Fire Ministries have incited hatred and severe ridicule of Muslims by calling them demons, liars and terrorists. The evangelicals are undoubtedly way off line in their characterisation of Muslims but don't they have the right to say something critical of another religion? It's not as if they were calling for violence against Islam or a Crusade; they were speaking their mind. Amazing!
Tsunami
Given the scale of destruction wrought by the Andaman Sea earthquake and tsunami, it is hard to imagine anything more likely to bring people together. Certainly the fact that its effects were felt in areas where western tourists and travellers were replete made it far more likely to elicit the response it has in Europe and Australia than, say, the recent earthquake in Iran or the continued tragedy in Darfur. But the response, worldwide, has been spontaneous among the people, and has caused governments to follow suit with an increasing commitment to recovery and reconstruction. The disaster has seen the best, and some of the worst, of humanity. It took a few days for the enormity of the tragedy to sink in. The local television at first concentrated on the affect of the waves on the tourist enclaves in Thailand, which is where the vast majority of Australian missing and dead were located, but they soon realised the need to have reporters in other areas and the coverage over the two weeks when their attention was centred on the area was effective and moving. (I was first alerted to the fact that something really nasty had happened by the fact that SBS had switched to a live feed from BBC World late on Boxing Day. Those first images - and the first estimates of the death toll - didn't quite convey the magnitude of the disaster. It built slowly over the next few days and the numbers of dead and missing rose alarmingly. My one less than noble thought was to feel sorrow for the people of Aceh who, in the midst of the disaster, had Ray Martin thrust upon them; at least they avoided Richard Carleton.) The Australian government may have reacted a little more slowly than I'd have liked in dispatching the appropriate assistance but that was balanced by the immediate medical aid and water purification facilities sent by NGOs like Care and World Vision. Howard and his government took a while to catch up with the fact that something more than missing tourists was involved - the early days of the disaster were handled by a junior parliamentary secretary before Downer and Howard got more directly involved - but once they grokked the nature of disaster, the government reacted far more humanely than I'd have thought possible for them. The offers of assistance of medical, military and forensic help were in place within days, monetary aid promised quite soon, ramped up almost immediately and than increased to the crisis level required at the Indonesian summit. Hopefully the Australian effort - both government and privately through donations - will encourager les autres, particularly the USA which has been spectacularly niggardly in its offers. In fact, at a time when demonstrable aid in kind, in place, was needed, Bush was sending brother Jeb to "assess" the needs. Surely the governments in situ had a reasonable idea of what was needed, not to mention the UN, the NGOs and the US personnel already there. The sending of Jeb read more like a first step in making him a credible candidate in 2008 than a response to the crisis.
My faith in humanity and its ability to hear cries from help from its fellows was boosted by the response to tsunami disaster.
- It has been heartening to see cooperation between the US military and elements of Muslim 'fundamentalists' including those nominally supporting JI in Aceh; not to mention the co-operation between the Indonesian government and Aceh separatists. All sides seem to have put aside differences in the face of the crisis. Elements of the Indonesian government have suggested a time limit on foreigners in Aceh (which has been an area of concern for the government for some time) but then seemed to back away from those comments.
- Both secular and religious groups have been working hand-in-glove to respond to the crisis. Despite the actions of a very small minority of crazy Christian evangelicals who have seen the crisis as an opportunity to spread their faith by virtually kidnapping orphans from Aceh and dragooning them into Homes where they can be indoctrinated, the vast majority of religious NGOs, like World Vision, see their mission as the saving of human life, not their conversion. I have had no difficulty in supporting such organisations in their effort.
- In previous crises, governments like that of the Islamic Republic of Iran have rejected the assistance of the most qualified forensic identification units - those specifically trained to identify bodies from the most unhelpful of remains. Those most qualified are, of course, Israeli units which have for obvious reasons had the most practice. Unlike the Iranians (who would apparently prefer death of their citizens before the 'dishonor' of having to cooperate with the 'Zionist entity'), the Sri Lankans and Indians have been more than willing to accept all assistance offered.
There have been the inevitable downsides of course.
- noted above the activities of some Christian 'missionaries' who seem intent more on conversion than assistance and some stupid comments from the Indonesian Vice President. US 'leaders' have also had a tendency towards the usual loopiness in their 'diplomacy'. Rumsfeld thought it necessary to let the world know that the best reason for US aid to the affected regions was the need to demonstrate the generosity of the US as a way of continuing the 'war on terrorism', as if the tragic remnants of the tsunami-affected areas would be thinking "I don't see no US soldiers, I think I'll join JI". In her evidence before the Senate, Secretary of State-designate Condi Rice told us what a 'great opportunity' the tsunami presented. I think I know what she meant but the way she expressed it is indicative of the thought processes at the highest levels in Washington.
- When I was in Sri Lanka the government of the then Prime Minister Ranil Wickramsinge, was part way towards restoring relations with the Tamil Tigers. But the country's president, who was from a different political party and was not of the same compromising nature towards the Tigers, manufactured a confrontation, fired the PM, leading to new elections which Wickramsighe lost. That means that the current government has not been of a mind to assist the Tigers in recovery work on the north-east coast, sending the majority of their aid to the south and south-west, where the Sinhalese majority has suffered. They have also been keeping reporters, and even the UN, out of the Tamil north-east. This appears to be the only case of race or caste determining priorities in the crisis and the Sri Lankan government is again demonstrating how small and narrow-minded it is. Almost the south Asian equivalent of our very own leadership.
- The worst part of the story was what happened in Australia as fresh angles on the tsunami story petered out and the press needed to look elsewhere for 'news'. Aided by a series of comments from the second-raters who infest the state and territory leadership, particularly to their shame Peter Beattie, Geoff Gallop and Mike Rann, elements of the media decided to stick the knife into Mark Latham. I am not sure of the extent of Latham's current illness, whether it is 'merely' a recurrence of the pancreatitis or whether he has suffered a further bout of cancer (he had testicular cancer some years ago and the disease may have returned in the pancreas), but the confected furore was completely unnecessary and has seen a good (and perhaps great) man sacrificed. Comment from Latham on the tsunami would have added nothing to the totality of human knowledge, his deputies had said all the right things and Kevin Rudd was pencilled in for a visit to Aceh in any case, so why was there this sudden agreement among the usual suspects in the press gallery that Latham had erred not making public comment on the matter. The hyenas were quickly baying, then attacking the leader who was cut down without qualm by lesser people. The ALP deserves to sink into federal obscurity - but it means that the Prime Miniature will remain in unchallenged control of the federal agenda. More's the pity.
100 Books
The ABC listeners and viewers voted recently for their favorite books. It was no surprise that The Lord of the Rings topped the poll. It was voted the favorite book of the twentieth century by readers in the UK, the US and Australia a few years ago. (Admittedly a list of 'best books' put together by 'authors' and 'critics' didn't even have it in the top 100 but those voters were lit types so no great shock that a readable book didn't make the list.) Pride and Prejudice was second and the Bible third. (There should have been a protest to the judges on this as the Bible is, at least, two books, perhaps more. But what the hey, it's lasted a while so it must have some merits.) The list had a number of other interesting features, including that fact that there were, in fact, 104 books on the list of 100 books - ties being ignored. It shone a light on changes in taste: who could have predicted that, of nineteenth century literature, there would be 2 Dickens and 3 Austen but no Thackeray; no Moby Dick, no Twain or Cooper or Hawthorne or any of the other greats of early American literature. There was one Fitzgerald but not much more to represent the early twentieth century.
The treatment of genre fiction was also fascinating: no detective/mystery novels, no romance, no westerns and only one historical romancer - and that was Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth (which is deserving of the honor, being a great account of the building of a medieval cathedral set against the backdrop of the Stephen-Maud civil war and which had finished among the top few in a similar poll of radio listeners in Germany). However, including kids' titles, there were 23 fantasy works, including 2 Tolkien and 5 Rowling, and 5 SF books.
It was also of note that even the ABC audience didn't vote strongly for the books that were supposed to be good for them (the Booker Prize listees) but for books that are largely narrative-driven. And I would never have predicted that Raymond E Feist would finish ahead of AS Byatt on such a list. It wasn't a great shock that The Da Vinci Code made the list (and made the top ten). It is after all the fad book of the moment. It was illuminating to see that previous fad novels, like The Dice Man and The World According to Garp failed to make the list, even though some, like the more recent Wild Swans, did.
Twenty years ago, I nominated the four works I would have at the top of my list, The Lord of the Rings, Catch-22, Dune and Moby Dick. Three finished in the top third of the list and the Melville novel seems to be out of favor for the nonce.
First written: February 2005
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