Over the next three days PCBYCP brings an extended article by Jonathon Freedland published in The New York Review of Books.  His article is a review of three new books on Israel.  It went to press on July 11, before the outbreak of fighting in Gaza. Jonathan Freedland’s subsequent post about the crisis in Gaza appears on the NYRblog.

The three books are:
My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel
by Ari Shavit.  Spiegel and Grau, 445 pp., $28.00

Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict
by John B. Judis.  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 432 pp., $30.00

Old Wine, Broken Bottle: Ari Shavit’s Promised Land
by Norman G. Finkelstein.  OR Books, 97 pp., $10.00 (paper)

Section 1.

In the toxic environment that characterizes much, if not most, debate on the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, a special poison is reserved for the liberal Zionist. Such a person, who stands by Israel even as he yearns for it to change, is fated to be hated by both camps: hawkish Zionists despise the liberal for going too far in his criticisms, accusing him of a hand-wringing betrayal of the cause that can only comfort the enemy, while anti-Zionists denounce the liberal for not going far enough, for failing to follow the logic of his position through to its conclusion and for thereby defending the indefensible. The liberal Zionist is branded either a hypocrite or an apologist or both.

The treatment meted out to My Promised Land, a personal history of Israel by Ari Shavit, a columnist for Israel’s left-leaning daily Haaretz, is a case in point. The laptop warriors on both sides donned their familiar armor and set about attacking the book from right and left. “Far from self-criticism, this is simply self-debasement,” wrote the former World Jewish Congress official Isi Leibler in The Jerusalem Post, suggesting that among Shavit’s motives was an ingratiating desire to win “endorsement from the liberal glitterati for whom debasement of the Jewish state has become a key component of their liberal DNA.” Meanwhile, the leftist academic Norman G. Finkelstein has devoted an entire, if short, book to taking down My Promised Land. In Old Wine, Broken Bottle he insists that Shavit’s insights “comprise a hardcore of hypocrisy and stupidity overlaid by a tinsel patina of arrogance and pomposity. He’s a know-nothing know-it-all who, if ever there were a contest for world’s biggest schmuck, would come in second.”

Which is not to say that My Promised Land has not won prominent admirers. It has, receiving praise from Thomas Friedman, Leon Wieseltier, Jeffrey Goldberg, David Remnick, and others. That fact is unlikely to trouble the critics. On the contrary, they will see praise for Shavit from that quarter as a simple act of group solidarity, the lions of liberal Zionism huddling together in a pride.

The squeezed nature of the liberal Zionist’s position is hardly new, but in recent years the predicament has become more pronounced. The decline of the peace movement in Israel, along with the serial failures of the Israeli Labor Party, has suggested a cause in retreat. In the United States, the liberal lions have also come to resemble an endangered species, for reasons that reflect those long-term shifts in Israel. As Peter Beinart explained in a much-discussed essay in these pages in 2010, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,” the leadership of US Jewry has adopted ever more hard-line, Likud-friendly positions on Israel, which leave cold the emerging generation of young American Jews, whose views, on domestic issues at least, tend toward the ultra-liberal. With a Netanyahu-ist AIPAC leadership to their right and a new generation increasingly disengaged from Israel to their left, the liberal Zionists can seem beached on a strip of land that is forever shrinking.

At least one aspect of this used to be very different. In Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict, John B. Judis notes that the founding fathers of American liberal Zionism—chief among them the Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis—seized on the nascent cause of a Jewish homeland in Palestine partly because it helped reconcile two aspects of their identity: their Jewishness and their liberal values. By supporting Zionism, they were not only supporting a beleaguered, oppressed people fleeing Europe, they were also backing an experiment in collectivist living. Brandeis was particularly impressed, as many would be for decades to come, by the then-embryonic kibbutz movement. As Judis writes of Brandeis in the second decade of the twentieth century, “Jews in Palestine were building the cooperative democracy that he wanted to create in the United States.” There is a sour irony to the notion that the cause of Zion once served as a bridge between Jews and the liberal left. These days it drives them apart.

Section 2.

If the luminaries of liberal Zionism have greeted My Promised Land with enthusiasm, it is hardly a surprise. It articulates their creed perfectly. For what characterizes the liberal Zionist, and what so infuriates opponents on left and right, is the insistence that two things, usually held to be in opposition, can both be true. So while, say, the left denounces settlements and the right highlights Israelis’ fears for their own security, the liberal Zionist wants to do both, often at the same time.

That this is Shavit’s intention is established early. His introduction warns the reader that “duality” will be his watchword, that he will be in the business of both/and rather than either/or:

On the one hand, Israel is the only nation in the West that is occupying another people. On the other hand, Israel is the only nation in the West that is existentially threatened. Both occupation and intimidation make the Israeli condition unique. Intimidation and occupation have become the two pillars of our condition.

One might dispute whether the sense of intimidation is justified, given Israel’s regional and local dominance militarily. But that is beside the point. That Israelis perceive themselves to be endangered, for obvious reasons of history and geography, is entirely clear and in this respect perceptions matter: national security does not exist if a nation feels insecure. Shavit is surely right to say that any account that fails to understand both that fact and the fact of a forty-seven-year occupation cannot hope to “get the Israel story right.”

The book delivers on that promise of duality. It provides, for example, a chapter on the danger posed by Iranian nuclear ambitions, endorsing with a full throat Netanyahu’s talk of the existential threat to Israel. It is an argument that AIPAC could happily reproduce as a campaigning document (and one that, incidentally, has long separated Shavit from many of his more skeptical Haaretz colleagues). Curiously in a book that spans more than a century, it is this section on the current scene that comes across as one of the more dated in My Promised Land. In view of US–Iranian talks on the nuclear issue and, more recently, the tacit cooperation between the two countries over the threat posed by the Sunni organization ISIS in Iraq, such hard-line rhetoric on Iran sounds as lonely and out-of-step coming from Shavit as it does from Netanyahu.

Hawkishness of that kind will duly antagonize dovish readers. But then they will come across passages such as this, prompted by a visit to the West Bank settlement of Ofra:

The settlements have placed Israel’s neck in a noose. They created an untenable demographic, political, moral, and judicial reality. But now Ofra’s illegitimacy taints Israel itself. Like a cancer, it spreads from one organ to another, endangering the entire body. Ofra’s colonialism makes the world perceive Israel as a colonialist entity. But because in the twenty-first century there is no room for a colonialist entity, the West is gradually turning its back on Israel. That’s why enlightened Jews in America and Europe are ashamed of Israel. That’s why Israel is at odds with itself.

Shavit goes further, choosing to include in My Promised Land the account he wrote as a young reservist of his twelve-day stint as a jailer in a Gaza detention camp in 1991, originally published in Haaretz and later in The New York Review. Though the young Shavit writes that he has “always abhorred the analogy,” he quotes a fellow soldier who says “that the place resembles a concentration camp.” He uses the words “Aktion” and “Gestapo.” He says of the camp doctor, “He is no Mengele,” which of course invites a comparison to Mengele.

You might think this makes the Finkelstein view—that Shavit is engaged in sophisticated hasbara, propaganda for Israel—tricky to sustain. But critics of liberal Zionism have a ready reply. The Hebrew phrase of choice is yorim u’vochim, literally “shooting and crying,” used to deride the tendency of the Israeli left to lament the horror of killing Arabs or occupying Palestinians in eloquent prose, stirring poetry, and award-winning movies, while the killing and occupation continue. This way, runs the criticism, the Israeli dove gets to win the admiration of the outside world, Jew and non-Jew alike, for the beauty and sensitivity of his conscience even as the behavior of his country, and the army whose uniform he continues to wear, does not change. In this view, the liberal Zionist is more disreputable than his hard-line nationalist cousin because, unlike the latter, he insists on having his cake and eating it.

That charge can, and has been, leveled at Shavit. One could say that his chapter on Gaza meets the standard definition of “shooting and crying.” But that would be too flippant a response to the larger story My Promised Land is telling, a story in which the book itself may even come to play a part.

Tomorrow Part 2.

Poetry Editor Ira Maine submitted this “Poem”

A poem by EUSTON STATION

William and Rodney, their joy is all gone,
For William is no longer with us.
We scattered his ashes out there on the lawn,
When he walks there, Rod trembles and shivers.

When visitors nowadays drop by his place
They’re delighted right up to until he
Archly suggests, with an innocent face,
They all come and sit on his Willy.

Your publisher feared for the reputation of this blog when out of the ether this arrived from a certain  J. Albrechtson:

Dear Sirs, I wish to commend the editors of PCbyCP for publishng this most excellent poem. I feel at long last that it has measured up to its full potential and is no longer slavishly publishing dead poets in search of an audience that clearly does not exist anywhere in the southern hemisphere…

Though i haven’t heard of Euston Staton (sic) I am assured that he shall be the very next thing, and anticipate a Big Future for his bold and penetrating insights.
J. Albrechtson.

And then Sir Atney Emo contributed:

Fellow Aesthetes,
The sweeping majesty of the rhyme, the soul-stirring sentiments of Euston Station’s poem: these remind me of no-one more than the work of the immortal Scots bard, William McGonagall (1825 – 1902).

To prove my case, here are selections from his best-known elegy, ‘The Great Tay Bridge Disaster’.
It opens:

“Beautiful railway bridge of the silv’ry Tay
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last sabbath day of 1879
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.”

And it ends:
“Oh! Ill-fated bridge of the silv’ry Tay,
I now must conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.”

Billy Connolly delivers the entire poem at the site of the disaster:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xfjhpw_william-mcgonagall-tay-bridge-disaster-billy-connolly_creation
Sir Atney Emo

Then Ira returned to the fray with:

Gentilhommes,
Another tortured verse has arrived by anonymous cleft stick this very morn . It demonstrates convincingly what agonies the protagonist suffers in the wake of his awful loss.

Rodney trembles and cries, makes multiple sighs,
And feels, without Will he has got naught.
Yes, I believe that the boy wants simply to die,
And be buried up somebody’s what-not!

The verse is presented precisely as it arrived here, and is unsigned.  However there is a marked resemblance to that which has gone before and been attributed to the mysterious ‘Euston Station’. 

The coarse vulgarity of the last line must be viewed in terms of agonies endured and must not be regarded as gratuitous flippancy. 

We here at the seminary await with trepidation the next instalment.

Theophilus Skulk,
Doctor of Divinity.

And now Sir Atney Emo offers a correction:

“these remind me of no-one more than the work of the immortal Scots bard, William McGonagall (1825 – 1902).”

Should have been

“these remind me of nothing more than the work of the immortal Scots bard, William McGonagall (1825 – 1902).”

E. Dante

Then From Here we have more:

Mes Enfants,
OMG! The wonder of it!  And how philosophically true!

‘For the stronger we our house do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.’

What style! What wit! What Jenny Say Kwah!

And, just by chance, through my open window, at this very moment, another cleft stick! With the following attached:

Int’ silv’ry Tay, where Tay Bridge sinks,
‘Tis enough to make us turn to drink,
And makes us think what loco motive
Turned the train into a boat. If
Falling down into the water,
Drowned some of Scotland’s sons and daughters,

‘Cos relaxing on the engine footrest,
The driver never saw the buttress
And this gets even much more weirder,
He didn’t even see the girder,
Go falling down into the briny
That wondrous train so smooth and shiny
Tumbling down, will-ee-nill-ee
And swallowed wholly by the sea.
Down there! Look here! and see the marks!
Was every bastard et by sharks?
Who came galumphing down the carriage,
And had their lunch well North of Harwich?
There’s little else, I’ll say it often,
‘Tis good Mc Gonagle’s in his coffin,
‘Cos listening to his awful bollix,
Will turn us all to alcoholics.

I leave this unsigned impenetrable mystery in your capable hands. Make of it what you will.
The very Reverend Dunsworth Froome, SJ.

And now from the other side:
From the Cleft Stick through the Window.

Oh see how the mighty now do fall…
I cannot spell Mc Gonagall!
With a pathetic, hopeless brainless wriggle.
I spelled Mc Gonag with an Iggle,
Which puts me on a par, it seems,
With Anthony Joseph Jesus Eames!
Who did, with perfect gallantry,
Confess his debt to pedantry!
Would I could but do the same
But my sin is from a lesser brain
That hardly ever learned to spell.
‘Spite all my work I spell like Hell.
If I’m to ‘fess in Tony’s manner.
I first must understand the grammar!

I don’t know where I get the time
To write this shit and make it rhyme,
Especially if your one desire’s
To use this shit to light your fires!

‘…was it for this I have thrown away mine ancient wisdom and become a stringed lute  upon which all winds must play…’

 Oscar Wilde.

Publisher’s Note: normal service will resume next week.

WARNING:  There is no music in this Musical Dispatch, therefore it is more correctly called an unmusical dispatch.  However the tune is similar to many preceding Dispatches; hum along if you know it.

Conservatives and ‘classical liberals’ use Indigenous Australia as a laboratory. Twiggy Forrest’s income management plan is just the latest example

by Jeff Sparrow, first published Monday 4 August 2014, The Guardian

Last month, Coalition backbenchers demanded the abolition of cigarette plain packaging laws, claiming the measures were symptomatic of Labor’s “addiction to nanny state policies”. Other nanny state policies that have drawn the Coalition’s ire in recent years include workplace bullying codes, mandatory poker machine pre-commitments, and bans on smacking children and smoking in cars.

Denouncing the nanny state is the irritable mental gesture of our time, the automatic conservative response to any state-backed project, which makes Tony Abbott’s response to Twiggy Forrest’s plan to quarantine welfare payments all the more remarkable.

In his report on indigenous welfare and employment, Forrest advocates placing 2.5m people on income management. He touts what he calls “healthy welfare cards”, a cashless system that disallows the purchase of certain items, such as alcohol and tobacco. His card will prevent welfare recipients from gambling; family tax benefits will be linked directly to child school attendance.

You might call this a Crocodile Dundee move: “That’s not a nanny state. This is a nanny state.”

By abolishing smacking, Abbott said, Australia would be taking a big step down the Road to Nannydom. Yet he’s declared Forrest’s scheme – a plan that dramatically removes individual agency in order to instil particular social norms – to be “bold, ambitious and brave”.

There’s more going on here than another spectacular Abbott zigzag. These days, most right-wingers in Australia identify themselves not as conservatives but as “classical liberals” – a term that you’ll hear from an IPA representative just about every time you turn on the ABC. Freedom Commissioner Tim Wilson, for instance, attributes his hostility to nannying governments to the liberal philosophers in whose liberty-loving footsteps he follows.

That’s why denunciations of the nanny state so often cite John Stuart Mill, who famously proclaimed the sovereignty of the individual, warning that “the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of any of their number is self-protection [and] the only purpose for which Power can rightfully be exercised over any Member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others”.

Big government, then, should leave us alone if we chug alcohol or puff tobacco or eat trans fat-saturated lardburgers. That’s our business, not the government’s. Cry freedom! Don’t tread on me! You’ll prise my durry out of my cold, dead, cancerous fingers – and so on and so forth.

Yet, in a less familiar passage, Mill qualifies his position rather significantly – and in ways particularly relevant to the current debate. He writes:

It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to say that this doctrine is meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties. We are not speaking of children, or of young persons below the age which the law may fix as that of manhood or womanhood. Those who are still in a state to require being taken care of by others, must be protected against their own actions as well as against external injury. For the same reason, we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage. […] Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end.

So, happily for Abbott, parents do have a right to clip their kids over the ear since, for Mill, children do not possess individual rights – and neither do “barbarians”.

It’s not, as they say, a coincidence that Forrest’s plan to impose unprecedented stipulations on welfare has emerged from an inquiry about Indigenous people. The rehabilitation of income management for the modern age took place as part of the Northern Territory intervention into Aboriginal communities back in 2007. At the time, the overt restrictions of liberty represented by welfare quarantining were justified in precisely Mills’ terms: measures intended to “improve” Indigenous people, were backed by force (the Intervention involved, let us not forget, the deployment of the army). It was on that basis that so many liberals supported John Howard.

Naomi Klein has written about what she calls “The Shock Doctrine”: the way states exploit natural or manmade disasters to impose free market economic reforms on a still-reeling populace. She gives the example of Hurricane Katrina, a catastrophe the Bush administration capitalised on to complete a long-planned privatisation of the New Orleans school system.

The NT Intervention represented something similar. The revelations about sexual abuse in the NT (many of which turned out to be fraudulent) created an understandable desire for immediate action. Howard and his minister Mal Brough seized the opportunity to introduce measures bearing no relation to the recommendations of the Little Children are Sacred report, the document to which they were supposedly responding.

The NT became, in other words, a laboratory for experimental social policies that would never have been accepted anywhere else, such as the draconian ban on porn and the introduction of an internet filter on most computers in remote communities. Alcohol and X-rated DVDs are not exactly unknown in Canberra – but it’s impossible to imagine any government insisting on erecting big blue signs outside houses in Deakin or Barton warning that the inhabitants were prohibited from consuming pornography and alcohol.

Income management, of a kind that seems mild compared to Twiggy Forrest’s proposals, was one of those experiments born during the Intervention, but it wasn’t exactly new. Rich people have always thought that they could do a better job being poor than those currently in the role.

In her famous 1913 pamphlet, Round about a pound a week, Maud Pember Reeves wrote contemptuously about “the gospel of porridge” – the idea, still common among the wealthy, that the destitute wouldn’t be so wretched if only they invested their money wisely.

Orwell, too, knew something of the logic behind “healthy welfare cards”, a phrase that might have come straight from 1984. “A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits,” he wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier, “but an unemployed man doesn’t … When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food … Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated.”

That’s why the poor have always hated the management of benefits. Barbara Shaw, the Alice Springs-based anti-Intervention campaigner, speaks of how welfare quarantining particularly rankles with Indigenous people who remembered the not-so-distant past: “There are a lot of people out there who, when they were young fellas, they only got paid rations. … When we go shopping with our BasicsCard, it’s, “Oh, can you hurry up!” They talk to us like we’re deaf.’

In Australia, activism by the jobless during the Great Depression won a general acceptance that the dole should be paid in cash, precisely so that those who received it could exercise some agency in their expenditure. The Intervention eroded that consensus, at least when it came to Indigenous Australia – and paved the way for Labor to trial welfare quarantining in the outer suburbs of Sydney and Adelaide in 2012, a scheme soon to be expanded under the Coalition.

None of this is to say Forrest’s scheme will get up in its entirety, because it almost certainly won’t. Nevertheless, in the Australian last week, Dennis Shanahan assured us that Twiggy is “a compassionate and visionary billionaire” whose “strengths and insights” have “translated into some fine and viable policy options”. Unfortunately, he writes, Forrest’s new wheeze is “socially and politically unacceptable”, since there are “too many scenarios where the action would seem draconian, unsupportable and even demeaning”.

Shanahan’s probably right. But let’s think about what he’s saying. As Abbott reminded us, welfare quarantining has been around for many years, but it’s still mostly applied to Indigenous people. Everyone knows that no government could get away with subjecting millions of white people to the treatment routinely dished out to Indigenous Australia – at least, not yet. It’s only despotic nanny statism when applied to civilised white men.

Abbott might have been knocked somewhat off balance by Forrest (rather as he was in the Senate by another “visionary billionaire”) but one doubts that he’s too upset about it. The Liberals might not be about to implement the Twiggy plan but the general thrust of Forrest’s argument is not that far from what Abbott’s been saying: welfare recipients have had it too easy for too long, and they’re about to get some stick. That general message is probably more important than the fine details.

Tony Eames drew our attention to the major piece today, an interview ….  about which Tarquin O’Flaherty had this to say:
“A hugely perceptive piece on the Israel / Gaza situation. And of course Eva Illouz is right, We don’t protest  to the same degree when the US  butcher people outside their own borders. In fact we hardly protest at all. 

Perhaps the only thing that will change the status quo now is revolution. Whitlam tried having a political revolution and the contemptible Fraser had him slung out.  Perhaps the West needs a Castro or two. Or a Chavez. Or JD.

By Andrew McConnell

The lemon tart has been considered a classic for 20 years – which is not really long enough to be properly called a classic, except in cafes. The lemon tart we now know is more often a set custard than a curd, although originally it would have been curd. Those lemon curd bases are pretty much a single texture – a soft, one-dimensional sensation. What I like about the texture of this lime and vanilla bean tart is it is firm but also soft and giving.

But I don’t want to beat up on lemon curd. It has a place in most pantries, as a spread or something to serve with a dessert. But it should never be the hero. It’s too rich.

The curd is not a preserve as such. It doesn’t keep as well as jams, for example. It evolved in the 19th century as a simple mix of lemon juice, sugar, butter and eggs. It was English to begin with, and also called lemon cheese.

The first time I had lemon curd was in the country. It was put in the middle of the table after dinner and eaten on bread. A great use for it, and the correct one. It’s not for tarts.

What I consider most attractive about the custard for this recipe is that while the lime is an important element, it just supports the purity of the vanilla flavour. The vanilla is quite pronounced, where elsewhere it is usually the supporting act. The lime is sharp but it opens up for the vanilla, which has great “length” – more of a wine term, to be honest, but it has crossed over with some chefs.

After whisking together all the ingredients, I let the custard sit for half an hour to let any bubbles or foam come to the surface, which I skim off before pouring it into the tart. This ensures a smooth and glimmering surface. Otherwise it can end up pockmarked.

I believe in pouring the custard into the warm tart form, which continues the cooking, but there are cooks who say the tart base should cool first.

After the custard, the base is pivotal to the success of the tart. If it’s not cooked enough it will be sodden and contribute nothing. The biggest mistake is a pastry that is not cooked enough. I suggest that, when you think the pastry is cooked, cook it a little further. It should be beyond golden, more a dark golden brown.

Taking the pastry that far ensures that even after it has been filled with the custard it will maintain a crisp biscuit finish. Cracks and holes can be plugged with more pastry. And some people go as far as to whisk an egg and brush the inside of the hot tart crust to create a sealed membrane.

Lime and vanilla bean tart

This tart is best served at room temperature on the day it’s made. The pastry recipe will make enough for two 25-centimetre shells. Any excess can be frozen for later use.

Pastry
– 180g butter, softened
– 75g icing sugar
– 2 egg yolks
– 1 tbsp cold water
– 250g plain flour

Filling
– 6 eggs
– 200g sugar
– finely grated zest of 2 limes
– 1 vanilla bean, seeds scraped
– 200ml lime juice (about 3 limes)
– 200ml thickened cream

For the pastry
Place the butter in an electric mixer and beat it until smooth but not aerated. Add the icing sugar and mix until it is just combined.
In a separate bowl, mix the egg yolks and water, then pour this bit by bit into the butter mixture. Add the flour and mix until everything is just combined and crumbly.
Turn the pastry onto the bench. Using the heel of your hand, knead just enough to bring it together into a cohesive mass.
Form this pastry into two discs, wrap each in cling film and refrigerate until thoroughly chilled.
Roll the pastry out to five millimetres thick and line a greased tart tin.
Blind bake the tart shell at 180ºC for about 20 minutes, until it’s golden and cooked through.

For the filling

Set your oven temperature to 120ºC.
In a bowl, whisk together the eggs, sugar, zest and vanilla seeds. Stir in the lime juice, then the cream. Strain the filling into a jug through a fine sieve.
Place the cooked tart base in the oven, then pour the custard in, filling the case to the brim.

Cook for about 20 minutes, checking from time to time by gently knocking or shaking the tray to assess if the filling has set. Be vigilant, for once it sets it will very quickly overcook and curdle if not removed from the oven.

Wine pairing:
2011 Domaine Plageoles Loin de L’Oeil, Gaillac, France ($35) – Campbell Burton, sommelier, Builders Arms Hotel

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on Aug 2, 2014 as “All tarted up”

Unchallenged by craven Labour, Britain (and Australia) slides towards ever more selfishness

by George Monbiot  (first published Tuesday 10 June 2014 in The Guardian)

Any political movement that fails to understand two basic psychological traits will, before long, fizzle out. The first is shifting baseline syndrome. Coined by the biologist Daniel Pauly, it originally described our relationship to ecosystems, but it’s just as relevant to politics. We perceive the circumstances of our youth as normal and unexceptional, however sparse or cruel they may be. By this means, over generations we adjust to almost any degree of deprivation or oppression, imagining it to be natural and immutable.

The second is the values ratchet (also known as policy feedback). If, for example, your country has a public health system that ensures that everyone who needs treatment receives it, without payment, it helps instil the belief that it is normal to care for strangers, and abnormal and wrong to neglect them. If you live in a country where people are left to die, this embeds the idea that you have no responsibility towards the poor and weak. The existence of these traits is supported by a vast body of experimental and observational research, of which Labour and the US Democrats appear determined to know nothing.

We are not born with our core values: they are strongly shaped by our social environment. These values can be placed on a spectrum between extrinsic and intrinsic. People towards the intrinsic end have high levels of self-acceptance, strong bonds of intimacy and a powerful desire to help others. People at the other end are drawn to external signifiers, such as fame, financial success and attractiveness. They seek praise and rewards from others.

Research across 70 countries suggests that intrinsic values are strongly associated with an understanding of others, tolerance, appreciation, cooperation and empathy. Those with strong extrinsic values tend to have lower empathy, a stronger attraction towards power, hierarchy and inequality, greater prejudice towards outsiders, and less concern for global justice and the natural world. These clusters exist in opposition to each other: as one set of values strengthens, the other weakens.

They tend to report higher levels of stress, anxiety, anger, envy, dissatisfaction and depression than those at the intrinsic end. Societies in which extrinsic goals are widely adopted are more unequal and uncooperative than those with deep intrinsic values. In one experiment, people with strong extrinsic values who were given a resource to share soon exhausted it (unlike a group with strong intrinsic values), as they all sought to take more than their due.

As extrinsic values are strongly associated with conservative politics, it’s in the interests of conservative parties and conservative media to cultivate these values. There are three basic methods. The first is to generate a sense of threat. Experiments reported in the journal Motivation and Emotion suggest that when people feel threatened or insecure, they gravitate towards extrinsic goals. Perceived dangers – such as the threat of crime, terrorism, deficits, inflation or immigration – trigger a short-term survival response, in which you protect your own interests and forget other people’s.

Second is the creation of new frames, structures of thought through which we perceive the world. For example, if tax is repeatedly cast as a burden, and less tax is described as relief, people come to see taxation as a bad thing that must be remedied. The third method is to invoke the values ratchet: when you change the way society works, our values shift in response. Privatisation, marketisation, austerity for the poor, inequality: they all shift baselines, alter the social cues we receive and generate insecurity and a sense of threat.

Margaret Thatcher’s political genius arose from her instinctive understanding of these traits, long before they were described by psychologists and cognitive linguists: “Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.” But Labour and the US Democrats no longer have objects, only methods. Their political philosophy is simply stated: if at first you don’t succeed, flinch, flinch and flinch again. They seem to believe that if they simply fall into line with prevailing values, people will vote for them by default. But those values and baselines keep shifting, and what seemed intolerable before becomes unremarkable today. Instead of challenging the new values, these parties adjusting. This is why they always look like their opponents, with a five-year lag.

There is no better political passion killer than Labour’s Zero-Based Review. Its cover is Tory blue. So are the contents. It promises to sustain the coalition’s programme of cuts and even threatens to apply them to the health service. But, though it treats the deficit as a threat that must be countered at any cost, it says not a word about plugging the gap with innovative measures such as a Robin Hood tax on financial transactions, a land value tax, a progressively banded council tax or a windfall tax on extreme wealth. Nor does it mention tax avoidance and evasion. The poor must bear the pain through spending cuts, sustaining a cruel and wildly unequal social settlement.

Last month Chris Leslie, Labour’s shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, promised, like George Osborne, that the cuts would be sustained for “decades ahead”. He asserted that Labour’s purpose in government would be to “finish that task on which [the chancellor] has failed”: namely “to eradicate the deficit”. The following day the shadow business secretary, Chuka Umunna, sought to explain why Labour had joined the political arms race on immigration. In doing so, he revealed that his party will be “radical in reforming our economy” in support of “a determinedly pro-business agenda”. They appear to believe that success depends on becoming indistinguishable from their opponents.

It’s not quite as mad as the old tactic among some Marxist groups of promoting inequality and injustice in the hope that popular fury would lead to revolution, but it’s not far off. Quite aside from the obvious flaw (what’s the sodding point of voting for a party that offers no substantial change in policy?), it evinces a near-perfect psychological illiteracy. When a party reinforces conservative values and conservative ideas, when it fails clearly to expound any countervailing values, when it refuses to reverse the direction of the values ratchet, what outcome does it expect, other than a shift towards conservatism?

 A fully referenced version of this article can be found at Monbiot.com

I have been asked before why I ‘choose’ to identify as Aboriginal. For me, it’s about three things: conviction, commitment and connection

by Callum Clayton-Dixon First published in The Guardian, Tuesday 29 July 2014

My grandfather died a black man in exile, and this is his story.

Norman was born in Walcha, New South Wales, in1933. He and his two younger sisters Patsy and Joan were stolen from their Aboriginal mother, Clara Dixon, in 1941 while their white father Edward Schmutter was in Libya fighting the Afrika Korps. The three children were separated, sent to Sydney, and spent the next few years between state institutions and foster families.

Coming out of the homes, each sibling reacted differently. Patsy, the youngest, embraced her Aboriginality. “My spirit just wanted to be back with my people,” she told me. Joan denied it completely, saying she wanted nothing to do with her Aboriginal family. “I’m not Aboriginal,” she insisted. Joan ended up joining the Australian army, but died at 19 from meningitis. Then there’s my grandfather. Patsy believes her brother “was one of those blackfellas who was on the fence and didn’t know which way to go”.

The NSW Aborigines welfare board returned Norman to his family in 1945. He lived in a tin shack by the river at Inglebah Aboriginal reserve until the age of 16, and then went to work on the railway at Uralla. After he left Inglebah, Patsy saw very little of her older brother. His first son Wayne was born in 1955 to an Aboriginal woman named June Snow.

Sometime in the early 1960s, Norman ended up in New Zealand. He married a Pākehā woman, Shirley Hemmingway, in 1967. My father Shane was born a year later.

In 1969 Patsy, who was living in Redfern at the time, ran into her brother at the Empress Hotel. Their mother was living in Surry Hills, so Patsy persuaded Norman to visit her. When they arrived, she was nowhere to be found. My grandfather took a piece of charcoal from the fireplace and left a note on a piece of cardboard. The note read “Norman was here”. He left for New Zealand the next morning, never again to contact his Aboriginal family, cutting ties with them forever. “I’m not going to be a black man in this country,” he said.

Norman’s nephew William Widders, a member of the first Aboriginal rugby team to play internationally, searched for him when his team toured New Zealand in 1973. He had no luck, scouring local telephone books for Norman Schmutter. Patsy also contacted the Salvation Army’s family tracing service in the hope of finding her brother. But these efforts were fruitless: my grandfather had changed his surname to Dixon, his mother’s maiden name. Along with a collection of old letters, he kept his name change papers under lock and key in a wooden box sealed with packing tape, tucked into the back of a wardrobe.

Norman had two more children, Vanessa and Angela. My grandfather never told his new family about his black history. Trying to shut it all out, to forget it all, Norman kept it buried for more than 30 years.

Teenage Shane teased his father, joking that he was Aboriginal, oblivious to the truth about his identity and history.“When are we getting our land back dad?” he’d ask. My grandfather would get angry and upset. Shirley remembers:

He would sometimes talk about his grandmother in a big apron, making blackberry pies, jam and scones, but this was the most he ever told me about his family. When I’d ask him why he had darker skin, he claimed it was because he was French. He’d say he hated blacks. Sometimes he’d go upstairs and bury his face in his hands.

Three days before Norman died, Shane called and told me he thought his father might have been part of the stolen generations. He asked his father. Norman went dead white and quivered at the mouth. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he replied.

I was born in 1994 in Takapuna, and lived the first five years of my life with this black man in exile. My grandfather and I were very close. Mum, dad, my younger brother and I left for Australia in 2000. My grandfather passed away three years later, laid to rest across thousands of miles away from his Nganyaywana country, the river at Inglebah. Norman suppressed his black identity and history for over 30 years. Just like that river, he’d been running ever since.

After poring through phonebooks, and thanks to the few clues my grandfather left behind, we found his black family – our black family – a few weeks later. The next thing we knew, we were in Armidale meeting all the relatives.

Fast forward a decade. I’m 19 now. It’s 26 December 2013 and we’ve stopped on the side of the road on our way to Walcha. I’ve got yellow ochre all over my face. My grandfather’s sister looks out the car window at me. “What would he say if he could see you right now?” she chuckles. Six months later, I’m with uncle Bim and cousin Bailey huddled around the fireplace in a hut out on the reserve, eating mpunya kara (kangaroo meat). As aripana (hail) beat down upon the tin roof, we practice Nganyaywana language and carve clapsticks.

Our nationalism as Aboriginal people is inextricably linked to our identity, and place is a fundamental part of it. For instance, the Malarinti rata (McDonald River) and Inglebah (whirlpools of crayfish) and are key to my identity as a Nganyaywana man.

Jamaican political leader Marcus Garvey was one of the most influential black men of the 20th century. Garvey’s Back to Africa movement encouraged the descendants of African slaves to return to the homelands of their ancestors. We must go back to country, a physical and spiritual return to our respective tribal lands.

I have been asked before why I “choose” to identify. For me, it’s about three things: conviction, commitment and connection. Our bloodline connections to country, our histories and our experiences give us the inherent right to our identity. But with this right comes responsibility. I am obliged to reclaim that which was stolen, and to mend the transgenerational disconnect.

Strand Walk
By Pilkington Oblomov.

I go to the sea now first of all,
Where the blind dead drowned men lie,
With  salt water to lend a pall,
Where their bones shift, settle and sigh…

The work of the sea is the slow rolled  toil
Of a millstone grinding granite,
The Bone though deep in the sea’s soft soil,
This sea will split and span it.

Down amongst the grinding rocks
Where the sea splits bones, and weds
Bone to sand then coldly mocks
My walk amongst the dead.

Beneath your feet, who knows what woes,
In every nook and cranny,
Tread softly Sir, with those big toes
You’re treading on your Granny!

Pilkington Oblomov

Oblomov is from Southern Victoria and Tasmania, He was born in Poland and came here after the Solidarnosc troubles as a kid. He has been published irregularly in small magazines but has yet to achieve a wider recognition.

“Look here in the sand beneath your feet”

The publishers hope that last Saturday’s MDFF gave cause for thought.  Read it again here
Our Dispatch today was first published on 15 February 2011.  The racist Intervention continues with white Australia’s complicity.

नमस्ते मेरे मित्र
When I wrote:
“…… Many societies would not be so tolerant and forgiving and lacking in bitterness….”
in my last Dispatch, I was unaware that I was paraphrasing John Pilger.

A dispatchee sent me a link to John Pilcher’s  acceptance speech for the 2009 Sydney Peace Prize:  “…until we look for those whose Australian civilisation has seldom been acknowledged, whose genius for survival and generosity and forgiving have rarely been a source of pride…”
http://www.serendipity.li/cda/breaking_the_australian_silence.htm

The destruction of a society is a complex matter.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Akoukq5DvAE

This morning at 2:30a.m. we received a phone call.  Napangardi told Wendy that a group of kids were “running riot”, and that several people had chased them to no avail. “we called the police but it stopped”, and could Wendy please call the police.

So she did: “this call is being diverted”, “is this Yuendumu Police?”, “No it’s Darwin police”, so she told them what was happening and she was told to hang on, which she did.  Eventually “beep beep beep beep” it had stopped, as it had for Napangardi.  We went back to sleep.

Last Thursday the Bush Bus to Alice Springs was fully booked, yesterday again a full load got on. In Alice Springs hearings are being held related to the charges arising out of the tragedy that happened last year in the Alice Springs “town camps”.  People on both sides of the rift caused by the death feel it is important to attend these hearings, that is how Warlpiri society functions.  We are all in this together, even if on opposite sides.   An exodus of adults took place, resulting in many unsupervised children roaming the streets at night.

Whatever you think about “tribal punishment” in the 21^st. Century, the fact remains that the authorities are determined that the situation should be dealt with according to “the law”. One result of this is that a respected non-drinker Elder that tried to “take the law in his own hands”, spent time in gaol, was admonished by the magistrate that he was a “bad role model” and quit his job as the School’s community liaison officer.  His wife quit as a TA (teaching assistant).

Last week I attended an informal meeting at the Central Land Council office in Yuendumu. The main grievance was that people felt disempowered “no one is listening to us” and “we have nowhere to turn to”.  The CLC was asked to assist.  Not a single person at this “forum” suggested we should communicate to the authorities through the Government Business Manager (GBM), or the Shire Services Manager (SSM), or even the Indigenous Engagement Officer (IEO) that was at the meeting, not in his IEO role, but as a respected and concerned community member.  Both the Ginger Bread Man and the SSM are ex-policemen.  Coincidentally the SSM quit on the day of the “forum”.  Recruitment of the SSM’s replacement has no community input that I’m aware of.

Another grievance raised at the forum was from the Womens Night Patrol: “if we need help, we can’t call Yuendumu Police, we have to ring 000”.  At the time, and to my subsequent shame, I privately doubted the veracity of this assertion.  I thought it was beyond belief.

One of Yuendumu’s proud achievements was the creation of the Womens Night Patrol.  A highly respected member of our community was awarded the OA for this pioneering initiative.  Napaljarri sadly is no longer with us, her medals are being held at the Yuendumu Womens Centre (YWC).  The night patrol initially was a voluntary effort, and was highly successful in reducing anti-social behaviour.  Subsequently it was brought under the YWC and some funding was made available.  In 2008 “ownership” of the night patrol was transferred to the Central Desert Shire (CDS).   CDS is effectively run from Alice Springs. Minister Macklin (MM) has quoted statistics “ xxx number of Night Patrols are now operating in Prescribed communities”, implying that the Intervention can somehow claim credit for this.

MM is a master of spin. Shame shame shame on you Jenny Macklin.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoyuNZEG5cY
(In 1965 I saw the Spinning wheels performing at the Wild Colonial in Lorne and also at Wendy’s residential college, Janet Clarke Hall).

CDS also took over “ownership” of the Yuendumu Community Government Council, which for better or for worse was the “forum” to which we could turn to. Our present IEO was one of the Council Presidents and on one glorious “self determination” moment presided over a Naturalisation ceremony where a number of white people were accepted as citizens of Australia. These “new” citizens now have more rights than the person that presided over their ceremony.

As I talk to people I hear of more and more examples of Warlpiri people being made irrelevant within their own community, but I won’t bore you with these.

Yet Prime Minister Guillard followed her “flag and onion” performance (as Jack Waterford called it in an article in the Canberra Times) in the Parliament about the victims of the floods with a serious “tough love talking to” to Aboriginal Australia. Indigenous Australians have to “change their behaviour” if the Closing the Gap initiative is to succeed. Never mind that perhaps the Authorities need to “change their behaviour”. Never mind that the “Closing the Gap” initiative is a construct of  Australian non-Indigenous society… You done me wrong, you dropped a bomb on me….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17lkdqoLt44

Too much ugliness, so here a bit of beauty… enjoy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5QRTZN4Q4

अगली बार जब तक
फ्रैंक
(decode Google translate from Hindi)