This abridged article from The Guardian clearly defines many Australians as Passively Complicit (at best) in reinforcing our sexist society – “The behavior you walk past is the behavior you accept”.  

(Australian) Liberal Leader, Tony Abbott, displays his daughters
By Van Badham, The Guardian.  (Read the full article here)

Tony Abbott has a long and distinguished history of publicly reducing women to objects, but even I, who knows them all, spat my tea into my keyboard when he proudly paraded his daughters to the Big Brother housemates today.

The image of the man and two of his devoted family members is not offensive. In the context of a prime ministerial candidate offering up his own female children as an electoral treat, it is statesmanlike to the precise degree that greased-paper leaflets advertising a businessman’s nightclub in a suspiciously low-rent hotel are. Which is, not at all.

And yet, this is the standard commentary which Abbott has been able to set in his campaign. Commentators have written off the “sex appeal” comments and netballer flirting, just as they waved away his comments about “the housewives of Australia at home doing the ironing”.

As the admirable chief of the Australian army, lieutenant-general David Morrison said so unequivocally, “the standard you walk past is the standard you accept“. It is the standard accepted by the Australian commentariat as they walked past Abbott standing in front of the “ditch the witch” poster. It is the standard which is being accepted when MPs bully the first female prime minister, going as far as making jokes about her being barren.

It’s not Abbott’s Australian larrikinism which is on trial here. It’s not sauciness, or “blokeyness”, or anything else but contemptuous woman-hating that Gillard, the flame-haired Cassandra of our Australian political epic, so very rightly denounced when she declared that the definition of misogyny in modern Australia was Abbott himself.

Based on his behaviour in the campaign, I’m going to call it even more plainly: Abbott thinks women are ornaments. It’s a belief that extends to his colleagues, to women he meets on the campaign trail and – on goddamn national television – to his own daughters. And just what, if he becomes prime minister, do you think that will mean for you? On Saturday, Australia – what standard will you be walking past?

Read ‘Hot Air’
by Paddy 0′Cearmada  04 September 2013 in the Election 2013 tab
‘…… a Murdoch controlled press is unlikely to give much space to any criticism…….’

St Louis
By Quentin Cockburn

St Louis has a remarkable arch.  It is superb, it soars above the Mississippi and then performs the most graceful of curves, weightless, shining, rapier sharp, eternal.  Such a simple piece of sculpture, evocative.  In one act it expresses a weight of history and an unrestrained optimism for the future.  St Louis is like that.  There’s a sense, amid the fly-overs, and freeways that quarantine the city from the river, that, though second placed to Chicago, it may rise again.

Down by the river, under the arches of the  magnificent Victorian rail bridge, a figurative sculpture, captures the moment in 1805 when Lewis and Clark made landfall.  It’s high order kitsch.  It seems out of place with the river, the barges, the driftwood, and long lines of rail freight.  It captures a moment frozen in time, all the rest is timeless.

So much of what St Louis may have been has been hollowed out by carpark.  An alternate rhythm of street level hardstand and multi story blocks suggest the irrepressible march of commerce, ugly and unforgiving.  It reminds one of parts of ‘missing Melbourne’.  The missing pieces, the voided non spaces are ‘felt’ like an amputee ‘feels’ the limb that once was.  The loss defined by the ugliness and the incongruity of the leftovers.  Down the main drag, the long clanking freight trains, endlessly grind upon ugly concrete overpasses.  The Baseball stadium, bold and new, rises up from a sea of carpark and concrete pylon, a touch of Docklands.

Above it all, as evening draws, the methodical whirr of sirens, air horns and machinery competes with the few music clubs on the edge.  The clubs, like the rest of the city prevail in isolated buildings.  Leftovers, almost accidental.  We spent two evenings at one, BB’s, homage to the king, (BB KING), and through it all the music, like the Mississippi mud, creeps into your subconscious.

The museum in Missouri is placed under the arch.  Seamlessly, down ramps, we walked and marveled at the depth of American History on offer. Tellingly, an entire wall, Christo-sized, described the simple narrative of Loyalty medallions.  Above the medallions stood the portraits stern and resigned of great indian chiefs.  Each medallion, beautifully presented, stood alone in a separate display case, the text simple and emphatic listing the promise, the bondage, and betrayal over the course of a century.  Each a talisman of another broken promise.  The sequence of glass display cases and the rich gold medallions glittered enticingly.  The early ones, decorated by the relief portrait, (beautifully engraved) of a Bourbon or Hanoverian, the later ones a Jefferson and Washington, until in sync with the doomed race, their use had faded into oblivion.

This is what The Museum of the Native American* should have.  A complete socio/political statement that suggested once and for all, the poignant “what if’?  And above it all the understated maturity bestowed upon us by allowing ‘we the public’ to draw our own conclusions.  There is nobility and respect in that.  Another section dealt with the Indian Wars, and the eradication of the remaining native inhabitants.  Cold, clinical, didactic, emphatic in its simplicity. The rest of the museum devoted its message to Missouri and St Louis, ‘gateway to the west’ of Bison and prairie. The enigmatic interior.

The bookshop proclaimed its maturity, entire shelves devoted to the native american and the story of dispossession and hope of recovery and respect.  We made eager purchases.

St Louis has a soul.

* The Museum of the Native American, situated in the Mall in Washington DC.  PCBYCP will report on our visit there soon.

And three more Arch photos

“I want to be taken seriously.  I feel I am inwardly serious, thoughtful, even tormented, but in practice I yield to the fatuous, the nonsensical.  I allow myself to be understood abroad as a colourful fragment in a drab world.” Errol Flynn, from “My Wicked Wicked Ways” 1959
You’ll be pleased to know that Cecil had a weigh in the other day.  The generous helpings of food and drink he has consumed appear to be countered by worry, stress and a fine exercise plan.

The redoubtable Ira Maine brought two parts of his in-depth report on impact of the Film Industry at Endette Hall.  Applications to be part of this cutting edge community have soared since the writing and the growing appreciation of “The Beaver Thieves”.  Read his reports here and here.

Our Australian Election Coverage continued with Paddy 0′Cearmada giving us a further three insightful articles ‘Suspended hostilities’ (19 August 2013),  ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ (28 August 2013), and  ‘Reassurance’ (30 August 2013).  They can be read in the Election 2013 tab, along with today’s offering ‘Suspended Hostilities’  (Many of us Bomber supporters are grateful Paddy has managed a post without mentioning that fine upstanding family football club.)

Quentin Cockburn regaled us with three fine pieces this week.  Ira Maine had this to say about the first piece, “On entering the United States”: ‘Splendid piece on the terrors involved in entering America for the first time.  I very much enjoyed it. There was a great sense of being ‘a stranger in a strange land’ in your piece and it also cofirms that all the horrible paranoid things you’ve ever read about America are actually true! That the Yankee obsession with security is a cross between a Lewis Carroll fantasy and the stupefying witless insanity of Franz Kafka.’

Quentin’s second piece imaginatively titled “A Letter from America” discussed jalapeño poppers, Richard Nixon and Southern Hospitality.  A provocative post.

His third post unloaded on modern Museums, by contrasting the intimacy and wonder provided at the small Stromness Museum with the “blockbuster”  approach of the majors.  He argues that modern museums tend to be deterministic whilst Stromness allows visitors to ponder, wonder, and make their own conclusions.

As promised the Musical Dispatch from the Front featured this Saturday, with the first part of  a discussion of stereotyping and the nefarious results visited upon the stereotyped.  Read it here

Ira Maine, Poetry Editor has given us a tribute to the great Seamus Heaney this week.  Read the tributes and some of his poetry here.  Be sure to look for the comments below.

And, dear reader, please feel free to add comments about this and any of our postings.

Regards
Cecil Poole

Less good if you have children, ever get ill, or (and this may come as a blow) you are not actually a “creative” but a worker. A middle-class one with a salary, but a worker nonetheless.

Workers should be able to save but are finding it impossible. The squeezed middle yelps. Indeed, on the latest statistics, it is gasping for air.

A sign of its distress is surely seeing Marx quoted in everything from the Daily Mail to the Spectator, publications not adverse to class war themselves. Now their fight is plaintive. It is for the middle class, which Marx said would be crushed by the logic of late capitalism. He spoke specifically about how the small shopkeepers and tradespeople would fail. There would be left the great mass of poor people and a tiny minority of the ultra-rich, and then of course violent revolution.

The diminishing middle class is not only a British phenomenon. Both America and Europe have shrinking middles. Average incomes in real terms have not risen over the past 30 years. It is perhaps easier to see the downward spiral of the American middle classes as we gaze on the “ruin porn” of Detroit. Simply put, their share in the income pie has dropped, while that of the top 7% grows.

The same shifts have happened here alongside the same confusion about what class “is” (46% of Americans believe themselves to be middle class). Remember how, during the boom years of New Labour, John Prescott, of all people, said: “We are all middle class now.” This was the aspiration. True and bleak.

Now class is often recast as generational division. Anyone born after 1985 does not have access to what their parents had: the traditional tools of social mobility – education, housing, steady income. We can follow the Jaron Lanier argument that suggests a combination of software and globalisation has taken away jobs from the middle class and therefore dispensed with the need for such a class to exist. It would then be possible to see the dismembering of the bourgeoisie as inherently radical but Lanier, like many, sees it as fundamentally detrimental to democracy.

We already see this disengagement from politics occurring. If the canaries in the mine are “the creatives” – writers, musicians and website designers who now work for free – what happens when this hits a whole class head-on?

We can see the ideologies that underpin middle–classness self-consciously working overtime. They are trotted out with dull Protestant regularity: sobriety, deferred gratification, self-restraint, patriotism. Work hard, save, get married, buy a house. But the values that have actually enriched the wealthy, the bankers and the baronets, appear almost as opposites: greed, lust, ostentatious consumption, arrogance, dishonesty.

Seamus Heaney has died.  Our Poetry Editor, Ira Maine had this to say:
I woke this morning and …. Seamus Heaney had died. I’ve been reading the obits quietly and getting used to the idea, Still it’s a bit of a shock. Life insists on reminding us that however much we attempt to convince ourselves to the contrary, decay keeps nibbling away.
Death, unfortunately, is not intimidated by reputation. Cool as a cucumber, unflinching, without discrimination, it  wipes us all off the face of the earth. Luckily, Heaney’s left us something that Death can’t kill; his splendid poetry. I am very grateful to him for this gift.

When asked to put forward a poem by which we can celebrate Heaney, Ira had no hesitation in saying “Death of a Naturalist”, of which he had this to say:
This was the first Heaney poem I ever encountered.  It was in London in the 1960’s. This was the title of both the poem and his first book of poetry.
I felt an immediate affinity with the poet.  It is difficult to put a finger on quite why I felt this affinity but the fact that he was talking about wet drainage ditches, dripping branches and frogspawn, things I understood, rather than beaten gold and Byzantium, might furnish a clue.
And the child-like fright on discovering that lovely, lovely frogspawn and tadpoles turn horrifyingly into great green and croaking, pulsating bullfrogs is quite enough to put anyone off a career as a Naturalist!

What a fine beginning, what an auspicious start!

Death Of A Naturalist

All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
There were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied
Specks to range on window-sills at home,
On shelves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst into nimble-
Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.
Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

Seamus Heaney

And this is Alan Kohler’s pick

Blackberry-Picking

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard’s.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn’t fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.

Seamus Heaney