About 18 months ago, I admitted that watching The Australian edition of The Masked Singer was one of my more juvenile pleasures, and that I had speculated on whether embarrassed (rather than disgraced) former politician Sam Destyari had been the person inside the Wizard costume.
The Masked Singer is one of those shows which is so abysmally bad that it is good, the sort of crony TV where D-list celebrity has beens both ‘compete’ and ‘judge’. You can reflect on the desperation for cash and media attention which has caused some of these people to agree to inflict themselves upon the viewing audience once more.
In the USA, the current edition of this show is going to feature former New York mayor and trial attorney Rudy Giuliani. His reveal last week during filming caused ‘judges’ Ken Jeong and Robin Thicke to storm off the set – the type of free publicity which would have caused the producers to rub their hands together with glee.
This is just the latest stage in a very sad behavioural and reputational decline on the part of Mr Giuliani. His work as a legal representative of President Trump in seeking to get the 2020 election results overturned in court underlined the start of that decline.
As the porter in Macbeth (Act 2, Scene 3) put it when describing the legal profession:
Who’s there, in th’other devil’s name? Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven…
Lawyers sometimes get paid to argue that night is day and the like, but they do not get applauded when they do so, particularly where the impacts of such arguments could have serious far reaching consequences, and so it went for Giuliani.
At the time he was doing such laudable public lawyering, he also allowed himself to become the figure of ridicule when newly applied hair dye started to stream down the side of his face, and he engaged in some bizarre on camera behaviour with a young actress who was involved in the new Borat film.
So now, he appears on The Masked Singer and causes someone like Robin Thicke, whose most innocuous recent behaviour involved a public twerk with Miley Cyrus, to storm off the stage in indignation. What is going through Giuliani’s mind and why is he behaving so erratically?
His legacy as mayor of New York at the time of 9/11 and his previous prosecutions of mob figures is now buried by all the bizarre behaviour of his dotage.
Back when AM radio was still in existence, back in the 1980s, I used to regularly listen to 3XY, the predecessor to FOX FM, particularly whilst doing my home work in high school or writing my uni essays.
There was a vibe amongst the DJs which was good humoured and good natured. When they got callers online, and they clowned around with them, you got the general sense that they were laughing with them, rather than at them.
Fast forward to about 16-17 years ago, circa 2005. I had long gotten out of the habit of listening to radio, and happened to tune in to FOX FM sometime out of idle curiosity. There was some show on where people were being encouraged to call in and share some intimate personal problem with the radio host, in between the occasional song.
Something about the general tone and attitude of the radio hosts appalled me. They were taking advantage of some naive or misguided caller with a problem and generally making fun of them on air, subjecting them to a sardonic ridicule.
I switched it off, appalled. The general nastiness of that radio show and its host was something which I, as someone who had gotten out of the habit of listening to the radio routinely around 1990, was shocked by.
Which is a good way of segueing into the news about the temper tantrum thrown on live radio earlier this week by shock jock Kyle Sandilands, who, over a trivial matter (a discussion of a news story) engaged in a 12 minute expletive laden tirade at his co-workers, Jackie O (his regular on air partner in crime) and the newsreader.
I was not surprised about this. The general reputation of Mr Sandilands is that he and his side kick are shock jocks. His lack of on air empathy when interviewing a sexual assault survivor several years ago resulted in a minor career speed bump in that he was sacked from being a judge on Australian Idol – but this did not retard his general career trajectory for long.
But this does lead me to wonder why such people still get so much oxygen on the air waves? There obviously is a profitable market causing Kyle and Jackie O to be eagerly sought after media personalities, despite their nastiness. and general bitterness about the world (although lack of money is not a cause) and general toxicity Why is there such a market?
Obviously, and it is sad to say, that despite the general dislikability of these shock jocks, we love to hate them, and that people generally tune in to listen to them because they are rather nasty, and people relish their nastiness. As a result, they remain on air instead of staking supermarket shelves.
We are all familiar with the childhood tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes, where the Emperor so wants to believe that he is wearing a fine new material, and his subjects are too scared to speak truth to power, that it takes a child to point out that he is naked.
Hoaxes are much like that. People really want to believe something, particularly if they are powerful in a particular context (usually wealth or academic prowess or political power), that they ignore the evidence to the contrary and engage in confirmation bias.
About 7 months ago I wrote in this blog about some of the biggest literary hoaxes in Australia, namely Ern Malley, Helen Demidenko, and Dark Emu:
These hoaxes pale in comparison to that of the 19 year old William-Henry Ireland, who, in 1795, had the audacity to impersonate William Shakespeare, to the extent of ‘discovering’ a long lost play by Shakespeare, Vortigern, which he had indeed written himself. The play was actually performed, once, in Drury Lane, starring the actress mistress of the future William IV (who was in the audience both to support his mistress and because he believed it to be a genuine Shakespearean discovery).
Whilst there were some very determined skeptics, including the one who published a rebuttal of the authenticity of the rediscovered documents, two days before the play was staged, there were even more people, including not only royalty, but most of the leading lights of the English intelligentsia of the era, who were willing to believe in it.
I have just finished reading The Boy Who Would Be Shakespeare, the most recent and possibly sympathetic of the three accounts about that affair which I possess (the other two being called The Great Shakespeare Fraud and TheGreat Shakespeare Hoax).
I find it an extremely amusing episode, the more so because I believe that the only real damage done may have been to the relationship between William-Henry Ireland and his emotionally distant and excessively credulous father, and even then, I think that the relationship was, from the context framed in this account, doomed to estrangement regardless of whether the son ‘discovered’ a magical trunk full of lost Shakespearean documents or not. No one seems to have been hurt by it, and five thousand ribald members of the opening night audience for Vortigern seem to have had a hilarious time watching the show.
Of course, the ‘bardolaters’ of the time would have taken great offence at the misguided hoax, more so given some of them had uncritically accepted the documents as real, and been taken for fools. But I think that anyone who is both pompous and that careless deserves that, just like the Emperor with his new clothes.
Over-credulity is not a new problem
That today, we get new hoaxes and are too eager to believe preposterous things, and to allow those who consider themselves cleverer than us to shut down or otherwise cancel discussion on the authenticity of such assertions is a sign that in about 225 years, we have not grown much wiser than William-Henry Ireland’s father and the others who so eagerly accepted a nineteen year old’s clever new forgeries as the real deal.
Just finished reading a book about Rockefeller associate and eventual Standard Oil Chairman Henry Clay Folger.
Whilst a lot of other industrial tycoons were putting their money into building giant palaces in New York City, or otherwise showing off their wealth in other ostentatious ways (Veblen’s phrase ‘conspicuous consumption’ was inspired by that era), Folger and his wife had a different interest in how they spent their wealth. They bought rare early copies of Shakespeare plays, particularly the First Folio and various of the early Quattro editions of some of the plays.
Until late in life, when he endowed the Folger Shakespeare Library, he kept his collection in crates in warehouses in New York.
When you look at that time, from around 1890 to 1920, when Folger was collecting so intensely, paying $100,000 for a particular rare book is rather impressive, and Folger ended up spending millions on rare Shakespeare editions.
For those who are not that knowledgable about Shakespeare, the First Folio, which was printed by his friends in the 1620s as a posthumous memorial to the Bard and which contains almost all of his acknowledged plays (except for Pericles) is the main reason that the works of Shakespeare have survived instead of mostly being forgotten.
Folger appreciated that, and in the course of his life he collected 82 copies of the First Folio, approximately 40% of the surviving number of those books.
They are now held in the library he endowed, in Washington DC.
I have a lot of books on Shakespeare, particularly as I find the Authorship question both amusing and fascinating, and three hard back copies of the Collected Works, as well as an RSC edition of the apocryphal plays, and various paperback editions of the plays for when I feel like reading them. However, Folger’s obsession with collecting the rare works makes my interest in Shakespeare seem quite mundane in comparison.
The current controversy at The Australian Open over the suppression of freedom of speech in the form of the ‘Where is Peng Shuai?’ t-shirts has got me and other people thinking.
Peng Shuai is only one of many possible topics which would offend the authorities in the PRC, and which they would like to keep from the attention of the Chinese public.
The creators of this slogan are particularly clever in that they picked a tennis related topic to raise when making their statement at the Open.
But there are other topics which might be less relevant to the tennis world, but even more unpalatable.
The following easily come to mind:
. Free Tibet
. Falun Gong is harmless
. End Uighur Genocide
. Mao murdered sixty million
. Remember Tiananmen Square
Just thinking about the context behind the above five bullet points is quite sobering. Communist China is and has been over the 70 plus years of its regime a menace to its own people in particular, as well as conquering a near neighbour. It is a tyrannical dictatorship, whose idea of soft power is to get controllable Chinese corporations to sprinkle millions of dollars on sporting sponsorships as a form of sports washing.
Queensland student activist Drew Pavlou has been an articulate critic of the PRC regime and its influence on our nation. Here is a link to his page on this topic:
For the sake of balance, I will include a link to a piece recently republished by the CCP mouthpiece the Global Times, which was written by a retired Australian diplomat with definite opinions on our China relationship:
Tennis Australia’s latest overreach has been to ban people at The Australian Open from wearing T-Shirts asking ‘Where is Peng Shuai?’
The resulting publicity and unanimous criticism about the heavy handed action by tournament security – including claiming that they have the legal authority to permanently confiscate banners with this burning question – has backfired to the detriment of Tennis Australia.
The justification for this action is that a condition of entry is that people do not wear apparel with commercial or political messages on them. I suppose that people wearing hats with beer logos on them (I personally own and wear a lot of those) would not be able to wear those hats.
And what about Peng Shuai? Would her own appearance at the Open, aside from answering this question, constitute a political message unacceptable to the organisers of the tournament?
I strongly suspect that The Australian Open’s zeal for suppressing freedom of political expression amongst those Australian citizens who are currently attending a tennis facility owned by the State of Victoria, whose taxpayers support the tournament, has got something to do with the fact that there are several very lucrative sponsorship deals involving Chinese companies. Those sponsors want their signage to be displayed prominently on TV to Chinese tennis fans back home – and the appearance of embarrassing questions amongst the live crowd could prove awkward.
So Tennis Australia is happy to spout empty platitudes about the welfare of Peng Shuai being their top priority, provided that it does not impact on the sponsorship dollars coming from communist China. It is probably not 30 pieces of silver but rather $30 million (my guess) which is the price for Tennis Australia’s commitment to the values which Australians value.
And in its own not-so subtle way, Tennis Australia is now Finlandizing, self-censoring itself and tennis fans so as to placate a communist tyranny. This is a serious matter, as this sort of behaviour, this sort of self-limitation on freedom of expression, is exactly what Communist China wants Australia to engage in as a price of trading with the PRC.
We need to call this behaviour out as soon as it occurs. It is both un-Australian and an insidious threat to our freedoms.
Let me start by saying that some of my best friends are Sandgropers. There is Michael who lives in Williamstown, and Jeff who lives in Niddrie, and Bill who lives in Hong Kong.
What do they all have in common? They were mostly born and raised in Western Australia, but decided to make their lives elsewhere in the Commonwealth.
Indeed, most of my friends from WA have spent a large part of their lives outside WA.
This does say something about Australia as a Federation. People from each state, especially from the peripheral states, gain greatly from the existence of the Commonwealth of Australia, It broadens their horizons, whether they like it or not, and gives them greater opportunities.
My friend Jeff even still supports Carlton, the VFL team he adopted before the AFL (and West Coast) came into existence. Supporting your team is a seriously emotionally intense matter, and it does transcend state boundaries. [Happily two of his kids support the Bulldogs – even though he warned them in the 1990s that they would not see any success – haha!]
So the issue of the extension of the hard border closure between WA and the rest of Australia by the expatriate Queenslander who is now WA premier, McGowan, is something which we do need to look at more closely.
Does this create a crisis in Federation? Why are the rest of us forcibly separated from our Sandgroper (and all Western Australians are Sandgropers, if you look back a couple of generations, even the truly rich ones) friends?
I like to think that whilst Sandgropers (as we like to call Western Australians, and it is a shorter term) like to express a chip on their shoulder about their separateness, it is mostly rhetoric. They gain much from being united with the eastern part of the continent, which has, for many years, subsidised them whilst their mineral wealth was unrealised.
There have been many tax subsidies, as well as the benefit to them from the unified defence of the entire continent.
The existence of a unified nation has also enabled them to both benefit from and contribute to greater leadership in Australia.
John Curtin, who was originally a Victorian, is revered (probably excessively) as a great wartime prime minister, and who lived in and represented WA in the federal parliament for many years.
Bob Hawke, who definitely was one of the three best peacetime prime ministers of Australia, was born in South Australia, grew up in Western Australia, spent most of his working life in Canberra, and represented (without actually living there) a Victorian seat, before retiring to a happy dotage in Sydney. Whilst he belongs, across his entire life, to most of Australia, he has more claim to being a Sandgroper than most do.
We have a hard border with WA now – a COVID proof fence if you will – but the reality is that over the long term for the past 121 years of Federation, both Western Australia and the eastern states in general have benefited greatly from the unity of the nation which has existed over most of that period, both in terms of the movement of people, and the shared values. That benefit is much greater than would have occurred, to the detriment of both sides of the continent, if there had been a permanent hard border.
Having said that, I am not going to drink any Western Australian wines (even the ones I love like Peel Estate) until the border is open again. McGowan makes Dictator Dan look like a democrat.
Oh for the good old days when we were part of the Empire, not the Commonwealth
Let me start by reminding you, Gentle Reader, that I dislike the current name for what originated as the British Empire Games. I do not think there was any good reason to change the name to Commonwealth Games, and I would be much more enthused about the whole show if it were still called the Empire Games.
British Imperialist (and yes, you can think it strange that an Italo-Australian is so anglomorphic as to be so enthused about the British Empire, but that’s me) tirade aside, let’s move on to the current issue.
Yesterday news broke that the Commonwealth Games Federation has approached Melbourne to bid for the right to host the 2026 Commonwealth Games. Apparently no cities elsewhere in the Commonwealth have indicated any interest in hosting it.
Melbourne is the obvious choice to host the Commonwealth Games, and in fact any other major sporting event, including the Soccer World Cup (God Forbid!) and the Olympic Games.
After all, we are the sporting capital of the world, hosting major events like one of those F1 GPs, one of the four tennis Grand Slams, the AFL Grand Final (except in Covid, and it still is the largest crowd for any domestic sporting final in the world), the Boxing Day Test, the 1956 Olympics, and the 2006 Commonwealth Games (yawn!).
No other city in the world loves its sport as much as Melbourne, and has as many world class venues already built to host major sporting events.
And therein lies the problem. The main excuse to host a major event like the Commonwealth Games is to have sufficient lead time to knock down some tired older venues and to replace them with shiny new venues with larger capacity, like what Brisbane is going to do to the Gabba for the 2032 Olympics.
The MCG (hallowed birthplace of Test Cricket and cradle of Australian Rules Football) is not sufficiently tired and old as to warrant a demolition and rebuild just yet. The Northern Stand (ie my name for the stand which replaced the Members, Ponsford and Olympic Stands and which wraps around half the ground) was only built in time for the 2006 Commonwealth Games. The Great Southern Stand, opened in 1991, replaced another stand which was built in the 1930s. Neither stand is particularly old.
I would dearly love to see a uniform wrap around stadium at the MCG in my lifetime. And I would like to see it much bigger, with a 120,000 seat capacity so that more members of AFL clubs could get tickets to see their teams when they play in the AFL Grand Final, or so that we can host a big enough crowd to greet Dictator Kim if he ever visits Australia (North Korea has some huge stadia for that sole purpose).
But I am realistic. Building such a stadium would be really expensive, and for the time being, having two large stands which each cover half the ground is almost as good. I do not see that we could justify bulldozing the current MCG until at least 2036, when the newest of the grand stands is 30 years old and the Great Southern Stand is 45.
The only real building project that would need to be done for the Commonwealth Games is to build an Athletes’ Village. We have done this twice in Melbourne’s history – for the 1956 Olympics and for the 2006 Commonwealth Games. Olympic Village is now a very feral suburb in Heidelberg West – one of the worst places in Melbourne to live (and remember that I am a Footscray boy!). I am not sure about the 2006 village on the southern edge of Travancore, except that I hope that we learned our mistakes from 1956.
But the whole risk of creating a village for several thousand athletes and then having that village become a festering social problem of a suburb for generations to come is a serious one.
For that reason, and in the absence of any legitimate excuse to rebuild the MCG, I am inclined to oppose the Commonwealth Games coming to Melbourne. The only solution I can see is for our Dictator Dan to sequester or confiscate several Docklands apartment towers under eminent domain and make those into the Athletes Village. No one will complain as no one lives there anyway.
We all are familiar with the stereotype of the angry leftist would-be revolutionary who wants to line the bourgeoisie and capitalists against the wall and shoot them. Or who, in a cuter and more harmless form, simply indulges their immature views by wearing t-shirts with slogans like ‘Eat The Rich’.
A lot of those are just angry or envious of others, whilst the rest probably just feel guilty about their own white privilege. Few actually have read Karl Marx to understand where these ideas actually come from. On the other hand, I have read Marx.
Whilst I am a regular supporter of worthy causes, I have tended to be a bit skeptical of Oxfam. They have tended away from helping the poor and into the realm of pursuing political agendas, including those with some serious ideologically driven themes.
That is clearly shown in their new report, Inequality Kills, which has just been released. It does rightly point out that the richest people in the world have doubled their wealth during the pandemic, and that they own far more than two thirds of humanity.
Where it becomes problematic is in the prescriptions Oxfam have for dealing with this situation.
I believe in ‘free market’ capitalism, which possibly is an ideal rather than an easily realisable reality. I fear that what we really see in much of the world is crony capitalism and kleptocracy. These are matters which do need to be addressed, by such policy measures perhaps as limiting the amount of benefit which private individuals and companies can derive from exclusive licenses (eg in relation to mining rights) or exploitation of public resources or government subsidies; or by measured and carefully considered structural changes to taxation laws so as to prevent the growth of further wealth inequality.
Oxfam however, believe in a more direct and ideological approach, similar perhaps to the Russian revolutionaries of 1917 or other similar zealots. They call for a 99 per cent one off windfall tax on recent wealth gains, which strikes me as both rather drastic and an oversimplification of the issues behind the acquisition of all this wealth.
Moreover, to justify this, they describe this inequality as a form of ‘economic violence’.
This is where Oxfam loses all credibility. No violence has occurred – there has simply been, through the legitimate marketplace as framed by governments around the world, a lawful flow of wealth to certain people. No force nor fraud has occurred. When lawful activities have occurred and get described as ‘economic violence’, it is an ideologically polemic attack on the existing system, and the first step in describing law abiding (albeit rich) people as criminals or worse.
This is where they, whether they have read Marx or not, start to show an abandonment of the values which underpin democratic capitalism and liberal democracy, the economic and political systems which have made our world more civilised, prosperous and law abiding than throughout most of history, and start to flirt with the radical ideological ideas of Marx, which have been for the most part quite discredited.
I think that people should donate to charity. I personally donate on a monthly basis to four different charities. Oxfam is not one of them. I suggest that you should do likewise, and that if you choose to donate to a foreign aid charity, choose some other one (eg Fred Hollows Foundation) rather than Oxfam.
On Thursday I was discussing over text with a colleague the latest episode of the new Book of Boba Fett series on Disney+, when he said he could not wait for the Obi Wan series and season 3 of the Mandalorian.
He then said: “So many Star Warses.”
I had a lightbulb moment of mischievousness and replied: “But would it not have been better if the Sith did not exist so we would just have Star Peace in that galaxy far far away.“
The reply to that was a face palm emoticon. Haha.
But this does get me thinking. After all, we are not going to pay for movie tickets or Disney subscriptions to watch Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru happily petitioning the Emperor for child support payments from Darth Vader so that Luke can drive around in his land speeder and stay another couple of harvests whilst they talk him out of going to Space Academy off world. Star Wars sells tickets and Star Peace is, well, boring.
Ever since the mythically blind poet Homer composed The Illiad 2800 years ago, our culture has been hardwired to appreciate what we now call ‘Space Opera’.
That consists of what existentially is epic theatre, with spectacular grand scale battle scenes and an agonistic (to borrow from Nietzsche – you can tell from a lot that I am writing here that I have read a lot of him) struggle between two opposing sides.
Homer and the later Athenian tragedians did not really think of good versus evil in those struggles – it was a struggle between opposing heroes fighting in circumstances that had been decreed by the Gods. The Greeks could appreciate that just because someone was their enemy, that did not diminish their Arete (warrior excellence) and worthiness to be considered a hero.
Most early kingdoms and city states saw matters in terms of a primeval struggle for success against their neighbours and rivals – a struggle for land, slaves, resources. Their enemies in war were not particularly different from them, Greek city states being frequently fratricidal for example, but they were not evil.
I believe that the idea of good versus evil is one which comes to us from Judeo-Christianity, and which itself was significantly influenced by the moral dualism of Zoroastrianism, that Judaism was significantly exposed to when the Persians defeated the Babylonians and ended the Jewish captivity in Babylon.
When you read the Old Testament, much of it is interpreted through a Zoroastrian lens of good versus evil (ie the people chosen by God versus the enemies of God). When you take away that lens, such as when you read Josepheus’s Jewish Antiquities, it reverts back to a historical record of the struggle of a particular people with no special claim to righteousness successfully defeating their local rivals.
The destruction of Carthage by Rome at the end of the third Punic War was not seen by the Romans as a particularly just cause, and their general, Scipio Amelianus, wept as the city burned.
Compare that to the Biblical account of the destruction of Jericho. We get the same total annihilation (except for the city’s traitors who are rewarded for seeing the justness of the Israelite cause), but Joshua does not seem to have any moral reservations. He is, after all, when we see him through this Zoroastrian lens, on a mission from God.
So when the Emperor Constantine adopted Christianity and the later Emperor Theodosius made it mandatory throughout the Roman Empire, we all became Christians and our hard wiring changed somewhat. We not only wanted our stories to be epic and heroic, but we wanted them to feature great eschatological conflicts between good and evil.
We have had some great epic predecessors to Space Opera since then. Le Mort D’Arthur springs to mind, and The Song Of Roland. In more recent times, the masterpiece by Tolkien. Or even perhaps Tolstoy’s nationalistic interpretation of the Napoleonic Wars, War and Peace?
What they have in common is that there are epic grand scale battles, and there is a clash between good and evil, which mostly ends with good triumphant.
Living in this modern age of rocket ships and nuclear power, the sky is no longer the limit for our imaginations. We want our epic stories to involve space battles on a huger scale than those terrestrial ones our ancestors enjoyed. Hence Space Opera.
Star Wars is the best example of Space Opera. Another great example is Battlestar Galactica, which (particularly in its 1970s version) could be considered a retelling of Xenophon’s memoir Anabasis.
We enjoy these stories, because we are hard wired to try and make sense of conflict, which has been part of the human condition since we came down from the trees (or left Eden – you decide), in terms of good versus evil.
The gaping problem with this is that history, and warfare, is rarely in reality a case of good versus evil.
In early times it was a case of the struggle for dominance and control of resources between neighbouring peoples and political units.
In recent history, it is usually a case of ambitious and greedy men with the levers of power trying to either line their pockets at the expense of others, such as in the colonisation of large parts of the world, or to extend their own dominion for the sake of power. The whole idea of good versus evil is frequently used to justify such aggressiveness, whether it is to spread their religion to non-believers to ‘save’ them, or because of the more modern religion – political ideology.
[As a side note, remember poor Finland in WW2 – lumped in with the Axis Powers even though all it wanted to do was to mostly successfully defend itself against an aggressive totalitarian state led by a murderous tyrant who had used the cover of war to occupy and conquer several of its own near neighbours. Finland was not a country of evil aggressors, and Stalin was not one of the good guys, despite eventually being forced to oppose Hitler.]
I will enjoy all the various new Star Wars series that are about to be on offer. But the whole idea behind our enjoyment of Space Opera relates to a part of our human nature that is not exactly reassuring, that we are somehow morally better than some of our fellow humans for some reason, and that our aggression against them is justified.
Lost For Words! 