The Art of The Acronym

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Strictly speaking it’s not an acronym, just three letters run together, but she would still be fascinated. According to DeutscheWelle TV this morning, M.S.G, or monosodium glutamate, also known as ‘flavour enhancer 621’ is in fact umami, the fifth flavour. MSG is recognised by special receptors on the tongue in exactly the same way as the other four flavours: sweet, salt, sour and bitter. My dear, departed Catherine was one of those rare people for whom smell and taste are their primary senses, the sort of person who could genuinely tell you how much rainfall the grapes in a particular vintage had by bouquet alone. So for her, discovering umami relatively late in life was like gaining an extra limb, although without the constant tripping and falling over.

But it got me thinking about two acronyms of my own invention. The first is B.O.F.S. It’s a shorthand my daughter and I developed in the last few years and it covers those situations when despicable people, en masse, behave in a particularly primitive, brutish manner, bringing the human race into disrepute (a charge for which there should be a custodial sentence). Typically it’s something you come across in the electronic media, about which you can do nothing but take immediate umbrage (a sovereign remedy), but which nonetheless drives you to a futile rage, inches you closer to despair about the human race, and adds just a little tarnish to your own soul merely by becoming aware of it.

BOFS! is the short form of
‘Bunch Of Fucking Savages!’

Whether it’s police brutalising a blameless Brisbanite; ‘happy slapping’ assaults on the homeless; Pakistani courts upholding the kidnap and rape of young girls or the replay of the Srebrenica massacres under the leadership of Radovan the Repulsive, it still rankles, leaving a gritty, grubby feeling on the skin, a greasy gnawing in the gut.

This is where BOFS! is useful. Saying “Bunch Of Fucking Savages” in a firm, decisive tone, usually with a slight shaking of the head, allows one to pack up the bitterness, the disgust, the impotent rage into a neat little throwaway phrase, sloughing off the guilt by common species association and clearing the mind to engage in more productive uses of one’s emotions. Exclaiming “BOFS!” does the same, but with even less wear and tear on the heart. It’s quick, brusque, and enables a pose of world weary ennui that prevents the corrosive formation of genuine cynicism. The important thing isn’t to blot out the news, merely to evade it's depressing effects and keep one’s critical faculties in play.

As professional scumbag Johnny Rotten once wrote, “Anger is an energy.” Personally I find it focuses the mind wonderfully, sharpening the wits and the quill. Bunbu ichi, as the Japanese say, pen and sword as one. The important thing is to avoid being drawn into hatred, which binds you to both victim and vile perp, feeding your own energy into a descending spiral that deadens the heart and diminishes the soul.

The use of the word ‘savages’ however does leave one open to a charge of cultural or racial bigotry if the target group involves persons of negritude or those for whom the wheel would be an advance (if that’s not too derogatory a term). Yet employed it must be if the situation demands. If white folk can behave like savages so too can those for whom the term has a historical significance that leaves the bourgeois feeling uncomfortable. “Monkey see, monkey do” insults only the ape-like among us. Or as my dear departed was wont to say, “Joke ‘em if they can’t take a fuck.”

This is where the second acronym comes into it’s own. OFFS!, or “Oh For Fuck’s Sake!” Deployed early it gives one time to pause, consider and reflect while hitting the offending image or footage straight back over the net at commensurate speed. Having disposed of the first serve one can decide whether this is indeed a bunch of f*cking savages, allowing a free upgrade to the commensurate term, or something lesser, stranger, or merely abstruse. Which brings me to the Prime Minister taking federal Cabinet to meet with aboriginal Australians at Arnhem Land, Northern Territory.

I had great sympathy for Aboriginal Australians (while it’s fair to say that none of my best friends could wear that rubric). And the killing of Cameron Doomadji by Queensland police brought an instantaneous cry of BOFS! to my lips, and left an enduring rage at a white political and judicial system that allows the quasi-legal killing of black men. Yet the sight of the PM talking to black elders elicited a brisk OFFS! almost before I knew it.

On reflection I realised that watching pompous white male politicians continuing to deal with a matriarchal society by talking to pompous black old men filled me with a familiar weariness. The demands for endless consultation that buried all previous efforts to improve health and life-expectancy were trotted out again. The sound-bite of the day was an old aboriginal man saying, “We want the Prime Minister to give us a future we want to live in.” The idea that the future is something you make for yourself seemed as alien as, well, something really alien.

Could I consign them all to BOFS-dom?

Was it racist to even think such heresy?

Would anyone, even me, really care?

I must admit to personal interest here. My dear Catherine became my dear departed while working her tail off to provide housing for Queensland’s aboriginal population. She literally dropped dead on the job from overwork. In her last year I became inured to endless examples of feckless black men preening their egos; endless demands for new houses in places where any property left vacant for more than a week was systematically destroyed; a right to welfare mentality that fed into habitual male arrogance, drunkenness and violence. And so on. So I’m fresh out of sympathy, or empathy, or even basic compassion.

But one thing I’m very clear about. An enormous amount of money, time, consultation and good will over decades has got damn near nowhere. White society and history, and successive governments have achieved little and often caused more damage than good. But it’s absolutely time that aboriginal culture was honestly appraised as at least half of the problem. Any culture that doesn’t change dies. That’s true of white, black, yellow or red cultures. The inability to adapt to changing circumstances is the only prerequisite for extinction. Species or culture, it’s adapt or die.

Violence, drunkenness, and systemic abuse of women and children, generation after generation, are vile, destructive and signs of near-terminal cultural decay. Does that make them a Bunch Of Fucking Savages? Probably. Probably no more than the rest of us. But I’m an equal opportunity misanthrope. I don't like most people. Why should they be any difference.

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Populate or Parish

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So the Holy High-Roller has jetted off into the sunset and 430,000 young acolytes have had their spiritual yearnings extorted, their idealism manipulated, and their naive altruism affirmed by the shared experience of sleeping on artificial grass at a commandeered and temporarily renamed race course. Predictably, the Prime Minister in his best, shallow spiritual shirt and altar-boy smile has deemed it a success not only for the Church, but also for the nation, conferring on the Pope the status of ‘honorary Aussie’.

He must be thrilled. I know I am.

The Church has triumphed, bringing it the status of international top brand once again. While the Anglicans squabble over gay priests and women bishops the Church of Rome has displayed it’s gorgeous apparel, it’s peerless theatrical ritual and it’s ability to bring sufficient of the numinous to public drama while maintaining the position of it’s priests as the only bridge to God, however you may experience Him. Or Her. Or It. You have to hand it to them, they know their stuff. And they ride the bumps of temporary criticism secure in the knowledge that the Church endures no matter what.

Woy Woy - so good they named it twice.

A of M was in Woy Woy, NSW over the weekend (for his sins) and took the opportunity to visit a spanking new Catholic Church for Saturday’s evening mass. The handsome interior is circular, eschewing the traditional cruciform. The ghastly aluminium exterior looks like a beer can savaged by artistic tin-snips to make a rudimentary UFO.

It could be the home of any millennial cargo-cult, waiting for their spaceship to come and take them away. But in fact it’s a statement of absolute faith in their future by the Catholic Church. Saturday's 5pm mass filled all the seats and all the alcoves set into the walls. Over 200 attended, by my count, with 90% over 60 years of age. But the Church spent millions to build this church, absolutely certain that this tiny parish will grow. For the Catholic Church thinks in terms of hundreds, even thousands of years when it plans for the future. Can any other organisation claim this degree of foresight?

For those of an inquiring bent: Yes, A of M did take communion. Feeling certain of the state of his soul, he accepted the biscuit from the priest, but on the advice of his affianced he didn’t sup the wine.

“All those lips - very unhygenic.”

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Populate or Parish.

The resident priest was one of the most monumentally dull speakers I’ve ever wasted 20 minutes on, rambling on about bugger all, sharing his personal experience of World Youth Day: He went. He got lost. He didn’t see anything. Yet the Church can’t afford to lose him. One of the three major themes of the Papal lectures at WYD was the ‘lack of vocations’. That’s Catholic-speak for not enough men wanting to become priests. Given the other career opportunities available for sexually confused lads who like frocking up in sumptuous robes this isn’t surprising. You only have to attend Sydney’s Gay Mardi-Gras to see some of the other options.

The second Papal pre-occupation was the waning of the West through declining Christian numbers. As Cardinal Pell put it, no Western country is producing enough babies to maintain current population levels. Which is fine talk coming from someone doing nothing to pass on good Catholic genes. Would he be interested in being a sperm donor do you think? Does the Church have a position on this? Or will they stick to the old method of naughty priests having sex with the lay flock?

What the Church really worries about is the rise in Islamic numbers in the West. Aging Christian baby-boomers are being replaced by young Muslims, many of them immigrants, who are taking up the lesser places in society once filled by itinerant ‘pig-in-the-parlour’ Irish Catholics. This Islam-isation of the West – particularly in Europe – is a genuine problem for Catholicism. The success of this World Youth Day will be very encouraging, as it’s the appeal of single-minded, angry young-turk Islam to disaffected youth that’s the big threat. No doubt the choice of Madrid for WYD 2011 is in part due to this, and the hope that dreamy-eyed, ‘kumbaya’ chanting, beardless Catholicism can save the West from weirdy-beardy, radical bomb-throwing that once was the province of atheistic left-wing extremism .

- Ah, those were the days!

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Take your hand off my knee, Vicar!

Which brings us to the dirty dog in the manger, the un-trousered elephant on the carpet: Priests who rape and abuse children (and adults) and the Church’s dismal record of dealing with this problem honestly and openly. There are two things to address here: the nature of the problem itself, and the Papal response.

The Pope made a formal apology, including the word ‘sorry’ for the sad history of priests abusing. This in itself is remarkable and historic. It’s only in recent years that the principle of Papal infallibility was dropped, and for the global head of the largest Christian Church to (a) acknowledge the problem, and (b) apologise in person, is remarkable. That it came while the host Cardinal, George Pell, was downplaying, obfuscating and hair-splitting on specifics significantly undercuts it’s effect. A blanket apology from the distant, hallowed father-figure makes good press but cuts little ice outside the hail-Mary media and Catholic apologists. The Church is still fighting secretly and fighting dirty behind the scenes.

It has not recognised that it’s self-appointed holy status does not and cannot be accepted unquestioningly by broader society. Calling yourself pure, ‘a special case of God’ and entitled to special treatment does not work anymore. Any evidence of legal sin, ie: a crime, demands open, public and equal treatment before the law, and the world (and the world’s media). The Church’s motives have time and again been shown to be self-righteous, self-serving and squalid. It constantly and consistently hides the truth, protects and hides the perpetrators and reserves to itself the right to forgive and forget. This is not holy, Christian or righteous among the faithful. It is a long-term pattern of sins of omission, commission and conspiracy.

- J’accuse, Cardinal Pell.
- J’accuse, Church of Rome.

Before the Pope left the country he met with four victims of raping priests. They prayed together and celebrated mass together. The victims spoke privately with the Pope. Two of the victims released a carefully worded public statement. That they celebrated mass together is the key point here. It indicates that the victims were reconciled to the Church and it’s authority. They were willing to kneel before a priest once more.

While I do not begrudge them this, or wish to detract from their choices they are not representative of the wider population of victims of rapist-priests. They are, however, entirely convenient for the Church.

That the Pope can publicly restore the Church’s public good-name with an apology, and then follow up with an example of ‘all’s well that ends well’ is a slimy stratagem. And it’s been used before, notably in the USA. The publicly stated concern for the privacy of the four ‘victims’ involved neatly hides the identity of the guilty priests, obscures the specifics of the crimes, and relegates all to a sad history from which we can all now move on. The victims may be healed, reconciled, have closure, or whatever else they can quietly have. But the Church has used them, exploited their pain, capitalised on their weaknesses, and absolved itself of sin and guilt. The Church has washed itself in the blood of these lambs, and restored itself by swallowing up their souls.

It is highly unlikely that the true numbers of crimes, victims and predatory priests will ever be publicly known. The Church will do everything in it’s power to prevent it. What is certain is that the majority of priests who abuse will go unknown, unchallenged and unpunished. The Church does not have the right to protect them, but it will do so anyway. What it fails to see is that all priests will be suspect if the guilty are allowed to hide behind the dog-collar. Of course, a Church that thinks in terms of hundreds, even thousands of years knows that the more it hides, the more it downplays, the more it minimises the easier it will be to slip everything into a neat file marked ‘History – Restoration of the Church’s good name’.

.o0o.

PS: A news snippet just in from the Central Coast's journal of record, The Woy Woy Times Courier Tribune Herald:

The Gosford City Council has announced plans to move one of it's major waste-recycling and garbage collection areas to the Woy Woy Municipality. Apparently the first move will be a public awareness campaign built around the following slogan:

"Woy Woy- A great place to take a dump!"

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It's the Real Thing.

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When the German Army faced it’s first crushing defeat at Stalingrad in 1943, with over half a million men trapped in a ring of Soviet troops and tanks, supplies ran so low that starvation was a major factor in the decision to surrender. One of the many home comforts that the troops missed was an ice-cold Coca-Cola. The ‘ice-cold’ part of the equation was readily available in the snows of southern Russia. Coca-Cola was a little harder to get, but not entirely impossible. It will no doubt come as a surprise to most people that Hitler’s Wehrmacht shared a fondness for this particular beverage the same way that American GIs did. But they did, and they drank Coke throughout the war.

Or at least they thought they did.

Coca-Cola had a successful branch in Germany well before the outbreak of World War II, sponsoring the 1936 Berlin Olympics and financially supporting the Nazi Party by advertising in it’s propaganda sheets. And, like it’s American parent, it was able to establish itself as a part of the military supply chain, providing refreshment to hard-pressed panzer-grenadiers, Luftwaffe fighter pilots, and tank crews throughout the conflict. Coke was also very popular with young Germans and many a Hitler Youth quenched his thirst with it after a day’s hiking, parade-ground marching and stiff-armed saluting.

But there was a problem. Once the war ended trade wiith the USA in 1941 it became impossible to supply the ingredients needed for the black beverage’s signature syrup. So what were they to do? Close the factory and pass up the opportunity to supply the boys-in-grey? Stop trading and pass up the profits still to be made? Gott-in-himmel, Nein!

What Coca-Cola Germany did was invent a new product using the ingredients they could still get. Such as apple-fibre left over from cider making and whey from cheese making. After much trial and error they came up with a sweet, fizzy, orange-flavoured drink, which they shipped in the same trademark bottles as before, still labelled Coca-Cola. So while Coke was drunk by German soldiers throughout the war it wasn’t quite the real thing.

When the war ended and the Americans returned they found that not only had the German Coca-Cola Gmbh survived it had even made a profit to be handed back to it’s American owners. Which caused no end of embarrassment, as making a profit from supplying the enemy’s armies was on dubious ground to say the least. And let’s not even think about raising the issue of slave labour maybe being used by Coke’s efficient German subsidiary. But business is business, and money is money, and so they picked up where they’d left off, and kept quiet about the financial windfall.

They also found that the fizzy, orange, ersatz Coke was still very popular. So they sold the original Coke in the old, familiar Coke bottles, and put the fizzy orange drink in a distinctive new bottle of it’s own, and kept shipping it to thirsty Germans, now labelled with it’s own name - Fanta. It’s since gone on to be a world brand, particularly popular in South America for some reason.

Many kids of the Hitler Youth generation still have an enduring affection for Fanta, among them Pope Benedict, the former PanzerKardinal Ratzinger, once unkindly known as Pope John Paul II’s Rottweiler. It was included, by special request, with the meals that the pontiff is being served in his temporary Sydney residence while he recovers from the long flight to Oz. He was also provided with a kitten for companionship, being known as a cat lover. We can only hope that His Holiness is truly refreshed by his childhood favourite, and made ready for the vast crowds of young people eager for the torchlight rallies to come. And that the Papal Rottweiler doesn’t injure himself chasing after the cat.

Heil Fanta!

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Sin and Synchronicity

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He called it a co-incidence, but that’s not what he meant.

The Cardinal was interviewed by a journalist on SBS television news last week, the day after the story of his “honest mistake” came to light. And he mentioned, in passing, that he thought it was an “extraordinary coincidence” that the story came to public attention, and media scrutiny, as World Youth Day was preparing for the arrival of Pope Benedict. The journalist didn’t pick up on it, but then her attention was on the details of the mishap, and on waiting for the opportunity to blind-side the Cardinal with a recording of the perp-priest admitting that the act of buggery was non-consensual.

He clearly didn’t mean it. To believe coincidence to be the case would be ridiculously naive, and lacking the most basic awareness of cause, effect and consequence. No. The Cardinal was being coy. He was trailing a purple cape to allow others to publicly infer what he wouldn’t imply. That this was an anti-Catholic agenda by sections of the media, or simple greed and opportunism on the part of the rapee, or merely an attempt to embarrass him personally while he plays host to his most senior supervisor.

It could be seen as a skilful gambit in the rough and tumble of the debate, as a neatly executed parsing of events that cloaks wounded pride in aggrieved innocence, a soft comment that accompanies a meek turning of another cheek. But it isn’t.

It’s disingenuous. It’s the kind of verbal skill that the Catholic Church (alongside many Protestant ones) has displayed with dexterity in deflecting, denying, evading and avoiding every charge of rape, sexual assault and paedophilic abuse that has been brought in the last thirty odd years. It’s the kind of comment that raises the hackles of every outraged victim, advocate and concerned Christian who feels:

A. The Church doesn’t take the issue seriously until it’s proven, against the Church’s determined resistance, to be a massive institutional problem.

B. The Church will close ranks and protect priests at all costs, seeing priests as inherently more valuable than laypeople, particularly children.

C. The Church feels entitled to use any tactic, from private coercion and deliberate misuse of the truth to legal intimidation and public vilification to protect it’s interests, which are not those of it’s lay members.

D. The Church believes it can employ any or all of these means without compromising it’s moral authority, and that the public ‘good-name’ of the Church is more important than it’s actual good faith and good graces.

The mistake made by Cardinal Pell, as he defined it, was in putting in writing that there were no other accusations levelled against the troublesome priest, when what he meant was that there were no other accusations of rape – non-consenting buggery – against said cleric. That there were other accusations he already knew. He signed a letter the same day apologising for an assault on a choirboy. But his nit-picking about the issue of consent was where he erred, apparently. And presumably in signing two letters inconveniently adjacent in time and subject matter, not to mention this having come inconveniently to light, at an inconvenient time. Hence the co-incidence.

It's this kind of hair-splitting that so enrages people. We know and expect priests to be highly literate, capable of verbal subtlety and sophistication of meaning. That’s what’s required if you are going to try and explicate the word of God as part of your daily job-description. But it doesn’t mean we can’t spot casuistry, skilful double-tonguing, and sheer humbug when we see it. Or at least smell a large and less than saintly rat when we can’t always pinpoint the linguistic trickery.

His Holiness Pope Benedict will make a speech this week, apologising for the long, sad history of abuse by priests of those within their pastoral care. There is no reason to believe that the Catholic Church has any more or less of a problem in this regard than many other Christian churches. But the Catholic Church is the biggest, and proclaims it’s universality still, after 2000 years.

What follows this speech will determine the fate of the Church’s good name, and quite possibly the future strength of the Church in the West. After all, there are plenty of other churches, and plenty of lesser organisations willing to take up the issue of contemporary spirituality. If there were any hint of something better to come, now would be the time. And I don’t mean the ‘jam tomorrow’ of heaven.

• A Children’s Crusade that laid out a set of rights for all children.
• An Inquisition to root out the abusers and those who shield them.
• A new Covenant between the Church and it’s members that set power and privilege at the bottom of the pecking order.
• A determination to renew faith in the Church, not just faith in God.
• An honest examination of the doctrine of celibacy, it’s dubious relationship to priesthood and the problems that ensue from that, the possibility of marriage and priesthood, of women priests.

Any of these would be a good start. if the Church wants to do more than epitomise the problems of male, conservative, aging authoritarian social structures who cannot claim a central relevance to people’s lives.

If God is real, and is truly at the heart of all things, then why is it so hard to get that across to people? Why does the Church not epitomise that fact, and speak in ways that connect the majority of people with their God?

Perhaps it’s they who need to examine who and what they truly represent.

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Sins of the Cardinal

Sins of the Cardinal

We do not like you Doctor Pell.
We think you’d rather reign in hell,
Than ever choose to bend the knee,
Before the world and humbled be.

Your neck is stiff, your breast puffed up,
With pride and pomp, and righteous guff,
You spout with casuistic glee,
Unlike the man from Galilee.

Your church has princes far too proud.
Who trumpet it’s good graces loud.
Yet smothers those who’s tears it caused,
And wriggles loose with slippery fraud
From ever dealing simple truth
To those it preyed on ‘neath it’s roof.

Honest mistakes are made by those
Who’s interests everybody knows
And sees put truth and lessons hard
‘Fore money, pride, and self-regard.

Do you believe, dear Doctor Pell,
That mealy-mouths can make all well?
That subtle prince with cunning word
Can pull the wool o’er dimwit herd?
That Cardinal’s sin of haughty pride
From the Lord your God can hide?

Can cleric’s guilt absolve-ed be
By you, when vile complicity
Hides in plain sight of everyone
Who ever hears your double-tongue?

So bend the knee and kiss the ring
Of Benedict, your earthly king,
And smile at vast assembled youth.
But do not claim to speak the truth.
The hand that writes moves on it’s true
But we’ll remember what you do.

Luke chapter twelve, verse number one.
Will brand you for your clever tongue.
Hypocrisy is what I see,
And name you as the Pharisee.

Children, Art and Pornography

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The Melbourne Age newspaper reported today on a renewed brouhaha over the depiction of naked children in art. This follows the prosecution of photographer Bill Henson for allegedly producing kiddie porn recently (he was acquitted).

This issue always makes me angry, and for a variety of reasons. First and foremost is because there are people taking positions that have nothing to do with the issue and everything to do with ego. The second is that the media always add hype and hysteria, and sell more of their product because of it. They profit from child pornography because of the way they report it. The first sentence of the article includes: “latest furore”, “naked children” and “pitted Prime Minister .. against one of Australia's leading art critics”. The Age is a relatively sober newspaper. Other papers will be far more inflammatory.

This particular fuss is over the July issue of Art Monthly Australia, a publicly subsidised journal of almost complete insignificance outside it’s tiny readership. On the cover is a detail from 2003 photo-work depicting 6-year old Olympia Nelson, nude, on a painted backdrop. The work is titled “Olympia as Lewis Carroll’s Beatrice Hatch before White Cliffs”. It was produced by Polixeni Papapetrou, the child’s mother. Her father is the Age’s own art critic Monash University Associate Professor Robert Nelson. The child, now 11, poses often for her mother and (apparently) says this work is one of her favourites.

A number of points need to be made here:

The picture on the cover is NOT a work of art. It is a detail from an artwork, deliberately taken out of it’s original context to make a strident political point. It is polemic, not art. In this it deliberately seeks to exploit both the image and the child to push a political barrow for the industry that's the major source of income for BOTH of the child’s parents.

The original artwork is a collage that deliberately mixes photo-realism (the picture of Olympia) with relatively primitive painting of a background that is clearly NOT real. It takes a real child, posed artificially in a manner typical of adult models, and projects her into a fantasy world, specifically referring to that of Lewis Carroll. Thus it invites the viewer to manipulate the image in terms of their own fantasies of childhood, innocence, false-innocence because of the pose, and the ambiguous nature of the sexuality of children. This last point is a not-so-subtle subtext of many of Carroll’s works, a fact known and debated for decades.

In the Age article Nelson says "Olympia thinks it's ridiculous that the Prime Minister is talking about it, and even my nine-year-old son said: 'Don't people understand that photography is acting?"'

To quote from children in this debate is morally and intellectually bankrupt. But if even the child can see that photography of this sort isn’t realism, but acting, can there be any doubt that it invites the viewer to engage in fantasies with the images?

So we have: Invitation to fantasy, blurring of distinctions between fantasy and reality, image manipulation in the mind’s eye of the beholder, innocence and false innocence, precocious sexuality and ambiguous poses.

Paedophiles will masturbate over the pictures of children in children’s clothing catalogues, the stuff from K-Mart or Woolworth’s that comes unasked for thorough your mailbox. Can anyone honestly believe that they wont masturbate over this? Have Papapetrou and Nelson considered that this might be the case? Do they have an opinion on the fact that their daughter is now known by name to people who will masturbate to orgasm over these naked pictures of her? Do they think that the art-world they inhabit is free from paedophiles?

Nelson also says "This was a photo taken not by a middle-aged man but the mother of the child. It seemed quite a responsible thing to do." Most paedophiles are parents. ‘Middle-aged man as child molester’ is itself a fantasy, comforting no doubt to those who think in those terms, but so far from reality as to be utterly absurd.

There are other nude photographs of 6-year old Olympia in the magazine. One of her reclining with her arms behind her head, her legs drawn up and crossed at the knees. (I’ve seen the blurred images of them on TV news). Her gaze is frank, direct, confident. While it may be entirely healthy for a 6-year old to be confident of her own body, and to be capable of a frank, open gaze to her mother when nude, it is entirely another thing to photograph that and publish it.

The child’s honesty before the camera, and her willingness to pose in ways that ape adult behaviour and even adult sexuality CANNOT be divorced from the fact that she is doing this with her mother. What she does with her mother is entirely different from what is appropriate or safe in public. And publishing these photographs DOES divorce them from the ‘mother and child’ context. It gives the adult anonymous viewer absolute discretion to decide on their meaning, and to select the emotions and intent in Olympia’s mind as she gazes up at them.

The photograph may be entirely artistic in intent, and may in fact have artistic merit, but that does not mean it can’t be pornographic at the same time. The erotic art of Ancient Greece and Rome, and the blatantly sexual art of some Hindu temples springs to mind without much effort. To deny this, as an artist or as an art critic, is either blatantly stupid or intellectually dishonest.

Meaning is context and perspective. To put a child’s openness with a parent into an artistic context changes it’s meaning. To publish it in a magazine to make a political statement changes it’s meaning again, and puts into the internet ether where meaning is entirely the prerogative of the disembodied voyeur. Olympia is now 11 years old, but her naked 6 year-old self is now alive in the ether, alone and unaccompanied by her parents, their intentions and their meanings.

.o0o.

It's not a bad thing to take a picture of your child without clothing. Most parents have done so since the camera was first invented. I have an old black and white photo, taken by my mother. It shows my father at 25, holding up a naked infant (me), silhouetted by the sun coming through the curtains. His face is filled with joy and tenderness and love. I look like a stereotypical cherub, chubby, gurgling, smiling, white hair shot through with sunlight. It’s an image I treasure now, though when I was younger it embarrassed me.

I have a photograph of my youngest daughter too. It shows her sitting, from behind, at about six-months, wearing just a nappy. Her golden hair swirls around her head, resting on the folded tops of her pixyish ears. Her shoulders are rounded as she leans forward, playing with her toes. It may not be high art, but again, I treasure it. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. And I wouldn’t publish it, in any form, ever.

The hysteria over child-pornography should not prevent or inhibit parents, uncles, aunts, and grandparents in delighting over pictures of innocent children, un-self-consciously nude. But to imagine that the world and his camera see things the same way we do is naïve at best, and unsafe at any speed. Paedophilia isn’t something that was invented with the camera. It’s been around since the beginnings of humanity. Where there is sexuality there is aberrant sexuality. Pornography has been around since humans first learned to draw and paint and tell stories. Only the technology has changed.

It’s the duty of every parent to protect their child from harm, from within the family and without. The world of digital cameras and online global access has freed paedophiles from printing photographs the old-fashioned (and public) way, just as it has enabled us all to send candid snaps to each other via phone and login point. The duty of parents to protect their children has become harder, that’s all.

If we deceive ourselves by hanging on to private distinctions about art and politics in the face of public access we only harm ourselves and our own children. Your own illusions are far more dangerous to you than me. And my children will never be used as props in public debate.

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TV or not TV, there is no question.

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I've been reading a book called: How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World by Francis Wheen. His thesis, captured in the title, is neatly summed up on page 193:

"the new irrationalism is an expression of despair by people who feel impotent to improve their lives and suspect that they are at the mercy of secretive, impersonal forces.."

This got me thinking.
Always a dangerous thing.

The new irrationalism is a result of the infantilising of public discourse by television advertising, and the careful tailoring of TV programming to match the key values extolled by television advertising. These are infantile narcissism, infantile greed, and hunger for an endless maternal supply of stimulation and sustenance, and the atomisation of social structures that inhibit the dominance of these values.

Television advertising, and the associated infantile narcissistic culture it projects, extols and aggressively enforces, is the single most powerful force in western society. Nothing is allowed to stand in it’s way. Not politics, not religion, not family, clan or culture beyond national ‘branding’. That Christian religious fundamentalism is on the rise again in the USA is a tribute to the primitivist thinking that swirls in it’s wake.

The “despair (of) people who feel impotent to improve their lives and suspect that they are at the mercy of secretive, impersonal forces..” is a product of two real factors.

• The first is genuine impotence: Powerlessness against a mass culture built solely around the most effective way of demanding and ensuring mass consumerism.

• The second is a genuine if inchoate understanding that people really are at the mercy of exploitation by factors beyond their control. This prompts an ignorant thrashing about for shibboleths and answers simple enough to be easily packaged and marketed. And what creates and renews a market for a range of phantoms sufficiently opaque enough to pin our fears on, yet vague or silly enough to be easily set aside in favour of pap nostrums and plangent bullshit. Genuine unease is both exploited and dissipated by the constant throwing up of paper tigers, straw spacemen, false prophets and fakirs.

This powerlessness is in part caused by post-modernism, a nihilistic, infantile intellectual fad that attracted those unable to become famous, lauded, or celebrated in a highly competitive, sophisticated, and mature intellectual culture.

Post-modernist deconstuctionism is a way of destroying the game by undermining the validity of the games parameters. A way of smashing the chess-board and it’s pieces in the face of a superior opponent. That a mature culture could contribute to it’s own demise by allowing post-modernist jihadists to gain the ‘bubble reputation’ by destroying it’s intellectual sophistication with nihilist sophistry must be extraordinarily pleasing to those who gained fame by doing so. It also suggests that the culture has passed beyond maturity into (possibly terminal) decay.

It at the very least suggests that public discourse has been debased by the puerile concept of the “free-market place of ideas” to the advertisers perfect fantasy – a world where nothing means anything more than anything else. Where no opinion, however well-qualified or credentialed, is more valuable than that of a twelve-year old couch potato with unlimited credit and the most banal of tastes. A world where the process of communication trumps content entirely, and anything can be sold to anyone without reference to logic, facts, morality or rational thought.

Evidence of this includes:

• The faddist superficiality of Oprah-level spirituality. Where genuine mysticism, with it’s qualifying rigour, application and discipline [equally important factors in genuine mysticism as they are to genuine rationalism] is dismissed in favour of non-judgemental, absolutely uncritical, feel-good wish-fulfilment. A naïve pandering to the precise conditions required to sell shiny new rubbish to the idiot consumer.

• Psychotherapy as a tool for self-discovery and self-development has been subverted, simplified and debased to the level of a tool for, and a right to, public displays of narcissistic ‘wanking off’ on emotion. Even the pretexts of personal tragedy and the potential for wider application of individually applied truths and life-lessons have been abandoned. Now Big Brother reduces human interaction to live-action manga comics, and a completely arbitrary morality imposed by a pseudo-rational disembodied manipulator of events. The only purpose is the most crass form of goldfish bowl voyeurism and the extraction of money in the form of phone-in polls of popularity and candidate extinction.

• The great geniuses of applied psychotherapeutic rigour and skill, such as Jacob Moreno, Carl Rogers and others have had their work reduced to providing a vocabulary for self-aggrandising exhibitionism, and cultic mass hysteria interspersed with advertising breaks at regular intervals. The wealth of archetypes in story and myth have become simplistic narratives around which entirely predictable episodes are played out on television, in movies and in sad, uninspired lives aspired to by those without the imagination to consider, reject and rebel.

The failure of mass education to maintain standards in the face of the onslaught of TV as a competing paradigm and social reality is both evidence and a significant contributing factor. Standards of literacy in particular have declined in the USA, Britain and Australia as English-language television has become more powerful, and more powerfully aligned to mass-market consumerism. That non-English speaking western countries have superior levels of literacy and general education, while English has become the most common international language is a testament to this. It’s not the language that’s the problem.

TV reality has replaced social reality as the common shared experience at all levels. Age groups have become market segments. Social cohorts have become fan-bases. Real school became Play School. A local community of ideas and conversation became Sesame Street or Coronation Street. Society becomes ‘Friends’ and ‘Neighbours’.

The once dominant elites who feel that they have fit their children to become winners in life through Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Yale, become anachronisms in a world where their intellectual and knowledge based power is useless. Knowledge is power only if you can communicate it. Where the idiots have the purchasing power, ideas take second place to sensation and feelings (which drive buyer behaviour). And any idea that can be reduced to a sound-bite will never have the sophistication to deal with complex problems. The knowledge and intellectual ability that gave elites control of the levers of power now only isolates them as a small sub-culture in a sea of mediocrity that believes itself to be the pinnacle of a free society. A society that is free of thought, values, and the bonds forged through shared personal experience that generate real community. Where what counts in politics is feel-good electioneering funded by vested interest that pays for TV advertising, not rational planning, coherent political philosophy or economic management.

In the mid 1990’s Actors Equity and the Australian Journalists Association merged to become the Arts and Media Entertainment Alliance. This new union acknowledged and accepted that journalism and entertainment were now one and the same thing; that no objective standard for truth existed or mattered. I attended an Ethics Conference at which the committee appointed to review the Journalist's Code of Ethics reported. When I pointed out that they had simply taken the old code and watered down it’s principles to the point where there was nothing concrete or meaningful they simply agreed, without concern, embarrassment or even any comprehension that this was not a good thing. Whatever ‘good’ means.

Reality Television is the key proof here. The adulation of narcissistic self regard, and vapid, uncritical self love reached it’s apogee when it became accepted that any life was worthy of the same degree of regard as any other. When talent, artistic skill, intellect, achievement or any other attribute became an irrelevance in the right to, struggle for, and reward of recognition and celebrity. Thus the most boorish cretin can be regarded uncritically and with the same regard as the most profound life of selflessness, effort and achievement. The only modifying values that influence the base universalism of ‘15 minutes of fame’ as of right are wealth and conspicuous consumption. The more the better. Both entirely and iconically emblematic of the consumerism that TV culture lives to promote and enforce.

Intangible information products are the ideal. Music, film and video, particularly those focussed around the same values as TV advertising (brevity, direct appeal to emotion, hunger and manufactured desire - particularly desire for celebrity and social status based on ownership of iconic brands) epitomise the culture. They are endlessly derivative, endlessly reproducible from a single act of creation (or imitation) and therefore a source of potentially endless revenue with zero costs for reproduction and distribution. Intellectual property rights are the only rights corporate capitalism believes in and defends.

In music, TV, video and film, quality (however defined) has become irrelevant. The repetitive and derivative is the norm. Rap music being the most obvious, monotonous, and rhythmically asinine form. Which, not un-coincidentally, emphasises aggressive tribalism defined through primitivist behaviour, conspicuous consumption and ‘bling’. The mass availability of the means of production has debased not democratised production. It has become entirely secondary to ownership of the means of distribution and profit-making. The technology both connects, exploits and depersonalises users. Only sensation and fad-currency matters. YouTube, for example, exploits every possible source of content, all without having to find, produce or pay for it, while reserving control of distribution and revenue for itself. Conservative governments routinely privatise profit, while retaining the expense of infrastructure and supply.

Mumbo-jumbo hasn’t conquered the world. Idiot consumerism has, and it’s mastery of information technology to promote it’s core values, and atomise social measurement and value, and individual enfranchisement, has been the means. The glib intellectualism of post-modernism, entirely nihilistic in process and effect, has provided the last victory required to complete the conquest: the destruction of the means of intellectual analysis and critique required to refute and rebuild. That post-modernism has now fallen foul of it’s own intellectual destructiveness (in a tellingly short period of time) is a final proof, if of little comfort.

That the west, consuming most of the world’s resources, has been unable to defeat Islamist terrorism, which is essentially primitivist (except in technology that enables killing), nihilist and based on the cultic and hysteric for support, is a tribute to the enfeeblement of western culture by similar forces in aggressive, advertising driven, mass-consumerism. Keynesian demand-driven economies have been replaced by media-driven demand that ignores rationality, interest rates, inflation and even income.

The infantilising of the audience for the purposes of selling has enfeebled public debate. Over time it has repeatedly reduced complex, multi-layered issues to simplistic morality plays of good versus evil, where ‘we’ are always the good guys. It has dulled the public taste for facts, preferring only knee-jerk emotional opinion polling to considered rational analysis and the necessarily slow development of plans and solutions. Political figures play to the cheap seats, undermining government as a credible source of leadership. In all this America has led the way, and with a 24-hour global news cycle dominated by American networks the rest of the west is reduced to the role of satellites and local ‘deputies’. The military blunderings of the Bush government now has the entire world mired in the US political system and it’s posturing, meaningless rhetoric and corrupt military-industrial-congressional complex.

TV advertising decides US elections. Money buys the advertising. Ruthless, heedless corporate capital funds (and owns) the candidates and the advertising. We all live with the globalised economic and political consequences. Yet we have no vote. We are taxed by the economic fallout without representation in the forums that decide the issues. The cry of ‘taxation without representation’ that launched the United States is no longer heard, in part because it’s too unwieldy to fit into a sound-bite, in part because it is a heresy against the global dominance of American style freebooting capitalism.

Democracy is a complex process. It requires a set of skills that take time to develop. The struggle of countries where totalitarianism has fallen provides ample proof of this. The temptation to turn back the clock and vote for authoritarian paternalism in place of the uncertainties of economic change and social upheaval has been a hallmark of post-Soviet nations. It also is a feature of every country where democracy has been imposed by miliary conquest, Iraq being only the latest example. Democracy requires a mature and intelligent free press, free from ties to political sides. It requires an informed population with the skills necessary for debate that doesn’t descend into conflict. Which in turn demands an education system free from religious or political bigotry, capable of turning out mature, reasoning members of society with tolerance for ambiguity and flux, who are willing to engage in the process of social debate and development and shoulder social responsibility.

The process of dumbing down that mass-consumption driven television has achieved works directly against all of these requirements. And democracy has suffered as a result, as has it’s ability to defend it’s core values of plurality, tolerance and enfranchisement. Both against external enemies such as militant fundamentalist Islam, and against internal forces of bigotry, sectional hatred, and rampant special-interest groups. The simplistic hate-filled slogans of the Islamist terrorists have drawn a response just as ugly, unthinking and hate-filled from large sections of the American audience in response. Much of it positively gleeful at the chance to be as satisfyingly mindless in response to a genuine threat from a real enemy. And much of it emanating from the White House.

Those elements of the mass media that were an essential part of the democratic process have been weakened, trivialised and warped into infotainment. The free press institutions that questioned in the sixties were bought out in the seventies and eighties, and merged into entertainment corporations in the eighties and nineties. The ‘serious’ press that raised the big issues and galvanised informed opinion and debate have been marginalised and isolated by the dumbing down of audiences who have simultaneously been convinced of their absolute entitlement to easy answers and slogans-as-solutions, and the equal value of their uninformed opinions to those of experts, professionals and intellectuals. To equate every voice, no matter how bigoted, ill-informed, misled, manipulated or stripped of reasoning ability is to value all voices as equally worthless. And the lowest common consumer is the common denominator and exemplar of the preferred voice. The false logic of the “free market of ideas” is that it judges ideas on whether they sell, for how much, and in what quantity. It has pitted every voice against every other, while reducing every statement to the level of opinion. And opinions, as the saying goes, are like assholes: everyone has one, and everyone thinks that theirs doesn’t stink, and everyone else’s does.

All of which has effectively atomised the means of mobilising sufficient resources, social coherence and effective government to sustain the effort required to deal with serious threats that aren’t the product of demonising politically convenient bogeymen. The war in Iraq has led to the entirely predictable quagmire that those who remember Vietnam predicted. While this has suited the US military and the corporations that feed on it, it has diverted the effort and swallowed the resources necessary to defeat Al-Qaeda et al. Not to mention squandering the political capital, and reducing the popular will needed to continue a fight no longer seen as a guaranteed victory.

Unfortunately, unlike Vietnam, this is not America’s problem alone. We are all paying the price for the Iraq disaster. And we will all be relying on the same system for answers to global warming, with every likelihood that facts will be distorted and abandoned, corporate polluters will buy immunity at our expense, debate will descend into a shouting match that makes good television, (hysteria drives buyer behaviour in satisfyingly predictable ways) and resources will be swallowed up by vested interest and unenlightened self-interest.

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