Michael Moore seems to be an American version of Philip Adams – loved by his fans on the left, loathed by the right, and also a trifle gravitationally challenged (an occupational hazard of punditry, as I’ve mentioned before). I’ve had mixed feelings about the limited amount of his stuff that I’ve seen. Some was very funny, and some seemed a bit laboured. But I was impressed by a piece of his doing the Internet rounds that my son Leigh passed on to me a few days ago. It starts

“Yesterday, Larry Bennett, a 16-year old, was shot in the head after he was involved in a minor traffic accident. You probably didn’t hear about it because, well, how could he be dead if he wasn’t shot by The Sniper?
Yesterday, an unidentified woman was shot to death in her car in Fenton, MI. You probably didn’t hear about it because she had the misfortune of not being shot by The Sniper.”

The whole article is here

While the consequences of the Monash shootings are still giving rise to near-daily news stories in Australia, the similar, but twice as deadly, shootings in Arizona have already been consigned to the archives in the US (so has Bali, but that’s another story). As this piece from Salon shows, even the sniper attacks have had no real impact on the US debate on gun policy.

I’m reading Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz. It’s the first in his Cairo trilogy, and contributed to his winning the Nobel Prize. I read it a few years back, and didn’t get around to the rest of the trilogy, but I think this is a good time to restart. The book is set during WWI, and the Australian occupying forces are presented very unfavorably, but I suspect accurately. If you remember the scene in Gallipoli where one of the Aussies smashes up the shop of a merchant he accuses of cheating him, then sheepishly realises he’s in the wrong shop, you’ll have the general picture. This book was first published in 1956, so it gives a very minor indication of the length of cultural memory in this part of the world. Of course, the Australians play only a minor and mainly offstage role – the book is basically about the life of a purdah-bound woman and her family.
I also went to see the Albert Namatjira exhibition at the National Gallery. I didn’t make it to the concurrent Blue Poles and Big Americans exhibitions – I’ve seen much more of the latter than of Namatjira, which says something. Namatjira and Jackson Pollock were almost exact contemporaries in both birth and death, and both were brought undone by alcohol, but there the similarities end. Pollock was the last gasp of modernism in art – he not only talked the talk of the tortured Romantic genius, but walked the walk as well. Of course, there are still ‘shocking’ and ‘confronting’ works like those in the Sensation exhibition that didn’t make it here, but this is just going through the motions. Most of the works were presold to the Saatchi and Saatchi advertising agency who then set about stirring up the obligatory furore in order to boost the sale prices for their clients/contract employees.
Namatjira is another story. He brought the 19th century obsession with light and form to Central Australia, and produced some startling insights, but by the 1950s no serious art critic wanted to know about applying old-style representational art to a new landscape. Now that modernism is finally past a joke, he may get some of the recognition he deserves. The same applies to botanical illustrator Ellis Rowan, on at the National Library.
Finally, on Friday, I went to the Merry Muse folk club to hear Tyneside singer Bob Fox with a mixture of modern and traditional folk – a great night with some excellent support acts. It’s one of the best clubs I’ve been to at a time when folk music is increasingly focused on mega-festivals like Woodford. Canberra readers who are interested can contact the organiser, Bill Arnett at bandb@effect.net.au.

Update Idly following the links on Jason’s blog, I came to 2blowhards.com which I imagined would be a particularly ranting warblog. Instead, it’s a feast of cultural comment, leading me to this story of British culture minister, Kim Howells, denouncing the entrants for the Turner Prize. He posted a note on the comments board “If this is the best British artists can produce then British art is lost,” the note read. “It is cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit.” Three cheers for Kim!
Revealingly as regards the current status of art, Reuters posted this story under the category “Oddly Enough – Weird, Funny and Strange News Stories”

I’ve added various bloggers and ploggers to the list on the left and created a new ‘cultural and satirical’ category. I’d particularly like to welcome Gary Sauer-Thompson. He has lengthy and interesting posts, including an application of deconstruction to one of my posts on postmodernism, but hasn’t yet learned to do permalinks, or even reliable hyperlinks. So you just have to check his page regularly.
If anyone has been misclassified, or missed out altogether, please get in touch. Broadly speaking, I try to link to any Australian blogger I’m willing to engage in discussion and debate, or who’s willing to engage me in a civilised fashion.

Only those (like me) with a close interest in the US economic scene will want to read all of this piece by Daniel Gross on the travails of SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt But this quote should interest everybody.

Pitt lacks the attribute most beneficial to a businessperson turned government official: go-to-hell money. In the private sector, having enough cash in the bank tends to liberate you to speak your mind. …. Sure, Pitt may have made $3 million a year as a partner at his old law firm. But that’s not big money. (Emphasis added)

A society where $3 million a year is ‘not big money’ is one where corruption among public officials is more-or-less inevitable.

Gummo Trotsky reports that, in addition to her previous achievements in the field of misquotation and distortion, Janet Albrechtsen has achieved Internet fame as a purveyor of urban myth, with a listing on the famous snopes.com website. Why do Australian bloggers compulsively link to Mark Steyn when we have Janet right here at home?

Until I wrote my piece on Janet Albrechtsen and Campus Watch, I didn’t know anything about Daniel Pipes beyond the fact that he was a hawkish US academic who’d visited Australia on a speaking tour recently. But now his name seems to be coming up everywhere. Both Jason Soon and Tim Dunlop mention him in recent posts.
So I thought I’d find out a bit more about him. Until recently, it appears, he was prominent primarily as Jewish-American supporter of Israel, sympathetic to the Likud party and hostile to the Oslo peace process. I haven’t been able to determine his exact views on the Israel-Palestine question, but he’s published irredentist historical arguments claiming Jerusalem as ‘holier to Jews than to Muslims’, and he uses the terminology (Eretz Israel, Judea and Samaria) normally associated with claims that Israel is entitled to the entire West Bank.
Since I’m mainly concerned with the war on terrorism, I was more interested to pursue the question of Pipes’ views on the terrorist activities of Jewish groups such as Irgun and LEHI (also called the ‘Stern gang’) during the struggle to establish Israel in the 1940s. I found this interview between Pipes and former Israeli PM and LEHI leader Yitzhak Shamir, published by his Middle East Forum of which Campus Watch is a subsidiary. The most relevant piece is:

MEQ: How do you reply to those who accuse you, on account of your role in LEHI, of being a terrorist?
Shamir: My reply is that had I not acted as I did, it is doubtful that we would have been able to create an independent Jewish State of our own.

Shamir offers the standard defence of terrorism – that, for a national group under military occupation, it’s the only route to achieve political goals. Pipes, as interviewer, offers no comment of his own, but in the context, is clearly sympathetic. He doesn’t, here or elsewhere that I could find, draw distinctions between civilian and military targets. (LEHI attacked both Briitsh occupying forces and Palestinian civilians).
The distinction between terrorism and guerilla warfare is not sharp, and there’s no moral distinction between a truck bomb and one dropped from a plane. Nevertheless, I think the crimes against humanity committed both by LEHI and Palestinian groups like Hamas were and are not just morally wrong but counterproductive. Since terrorism, including ‘state terrorism’ such as bombing of civilian targets in war, is usually countrproductive, the moral burden on those who would seek to claim that it is justified in a particular case is very heavy.
Pipes doesn’t appear to agree in the case of LEHI. He must therefore be regarded as sympathetic to the general claim that terrorist methods are morally justified to advance a good cause.
More importantly, this evidence confirms my view that what Pipes and Campus Watch are doing is advocating the suppression of free speech, not as an emergency measure against the terrorist threat, but in order to silence opponents of their own political views.

I guess the trick to interesting search engine queries is posting lots of things with lots of different words in them. I used to get very dull queries, but on Friday I got the bizarre “opinion Poles in race for california state treasurer phil angelides” and the scary “how to deliver death threat “. Those Poles are pretty opinionated, I guess. And I’ve just discovered that this blog is Google’s number 1 source for ‘goldbricking’

Paul Kelly in the Weekend Oz, is a must-read, both for the points on which he’s right and for those on which he’s wrong. Kelly presents a strong case that we should focus on our own region, rather than alienating potential allies in the war on terror by joining a US attack on Iraq (although he doesn’t clarify this, the point is much stronger in the case of a unilateral attack by the US and a handful of allies than in the case of an operation with broad international backing.
But when he comes to Indonesia, Kelly illustrates everything that’s wrong with the Australian debate on this topic. He says:

Unless Australia changes its cultural outlook towards Indonesia, it will fail this security challenge. As a nation we can no longer afford the insidious delusions that have been incorporated into our national mind-set ? that it was morally wrong to deal with a military autocracy; that East Timor’s liberation was a triumph of our values; that a weak Indonesia was less important to Australia; and that those Australians who sought to bridge the divide were either appeasers or betrayers of Australia’s own honour.

Does Kelly really think that our dealings with Suharto were both moral and sensible or that it’s a ‘delusion’ to say that East Timor’s liberation was a triumph of our values?
The problem is that Kelly’s uncritical support for friendly relations with ‘Indonesia’ (that is, whoever happens to be in power in Indonesia) is mirrored by the unalloyed hostility to all things Indonesian of those whose views were formed by the struggle over Timor. The most influential example is Scott Burchill, who refer to Indonesia as the Javanese empire.
While Suharto was in power, the appeasement policy advocated by Kelly and pursued with sickening fulsomeness by Keating was unchallenged within the establishment. The East Timor episode and the complete failure of the ties we had so carefully cultivated with the likes of General Wiranto and the Kopassus security forces discredited the Keating-Kelly policy and swung influence to the anti-Indonesians.
This shift in the debate combined with very poor policy on the part of the Howard government on a number of fronts (general disdain for Asia, the ‘deputy sheriff’ fiasco and the bullying chauvinism of ‘border protection’ and the ‘Pacific solution’) have produced the paradoxical outcome that, having followed a policy of sycophantic support for the dictator Suharto, we have had steadily worse relations with his successors, even as they have become steadily more representative of the Indonesian people.
The Howard government has done an excellent short-term job in the wake of the Bali bombings. But we will be paying the price for the mistakes (and worse) of the past for a long time to come. I don’t know how we are going to fix these problems, but generous aid to the Balinese could scarcely hurt.

Update Another lengthy and erudite comments thread clarifies the central role of Java and the Javanese (not the same thing) in Indonesia’s state and society. Nearly all posters are agreed on the failure of the Keating-Kelly policy, but there is a lot of disagreement over what should replace it. And there’s plenty of criticism for past and present governments of all political colours.
And if the prospect of comments many times as long as the original (lengthy by blog standards) post deters you, there’s a string of other great posts just waiting for comments. So jump in!

Further updateRoss Gittins, who is sensible here as usually, argues that “Good relations with Indonesia are vital”. This does not mean ‘kowtowing”. As Gittins points out, our problem is the opposite – Howard and others playing to the Australian gallery by ostentatiously not kowtowing.

Since Alex Robson introduced the economic haiku, and Ken Parish has a joke section, I thought I might as well reveal my hidden past as a folk singer/songwriter (with that Ned Kelly beard, who would have guessed it?).
Here’s a song I wrote in the 80s. Then as now, a lot of sharp operators in business were finding ways to dodge taxes and other debts. The lurk du jour was the ‘bottom of the harbour’ scheme, an asset-stripping operation in which debts were dumped into a bogus company with ‘straw man’ directors. The company records were then literally dumped, most famously at the bottom of Sydney Harbour. It’s to the tune of “Fiddler’s Green”, one of a large family of folk songs of which Australia’s favorite example is ‘The Dying Stockman’. In the original, Fiddler’s Green is where fishermen go if they don’t go to hell.

Bottom of the Harbour

As I was a-walking by the stock exchange door
I heared the rich businessmen all crying poor
My taxes are high and I can’t bear to pay
So it’s time to go cruising on Botany Bay

Chorus:
Take me down to the bottom of the harbour
No more on the board I’ll be seen
I’m going to relax, mates, and live off your backs, mates
And I’ll see you someday on Fiddlers Green

Now Fiddlers Green is a place I’ve heard tell
Where businessmen go if they don’t go to jail
There’s no tax to pay and there’s no work to do
Cos you’re bludging off people much worse off than you

Chorus

You lie round the pool and you sit in the sun
Then sip on your port when the long day is done
The company cars and the meals are all free
And the workers are down just where they ought to be

Chorus

I don’t want to work for a living, not me
So I’ll just go out cruising the wide open sea
My files and records to the bottom I’ll tip
Then claim a deduction for the cost of this trip

Chorus

Tune: Fiddlers’ Green

Tim Cavanaugh at Reason takes a ‘moral equivalence’ line on Campus Watch. He admits that Daniel Pipes (the leading figure behind Campus Watch) wants to suppress free speech on campus, but then quotes some overheated rhetoric from the other side about McCarthyism as being equally bad. Cavanaugh pretends to take a balanced ‘plague on both your houses’ line, but obviously his sympathies lie with Pipes, and, I suspect, McCarthy. This is another instance of my general observation that, among the inheritors of the classical liberal tradition, ideological libertarians are the group least supportive of freedom of political speech. (link via Bargarz)
Update Don Arthur has more on this. He notes “The trouble is Daniel Pipes and Campus Watch are not trying to promote informed debate – they’re trying to intimidate people who express views they don’t approve of.”
Further update Another great comments thread (an all-time record of 22 comments and counting), with informed discussion on the distinction between individual and collective defamation from Ken Parish and “Simon”. Jason Soon defends Reason and CW vigorously, but, I think, unsuccessfully. And the inimitable Jack Strocchi introduces what I believe to be a new move in blogging, using one comments thread to advertise comments posted in another. Everyone, including me, has told Jack he should start his own blog, but perhaps his unique style is better suited to a comments thread, and no blog I know of has better comments than this one.
Further updateComment 23, from Ken Parish brings in flag-burning which seems to a guaranteed firestarter in the Us, but not so much here. Prove me wrong and keep those comments coming!