Songs About People: Love

The latest in a much-loved series (by me) is dedicated to former Australian cricket player Martin Love.

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(With apologies, again, to David Bowie)

I catch a paper boy

But things don't really change
I'm standing in the wind
But I never wave bye-bye
But I try, I try
There's no sign of life
It's just the power to charm
I'm lying in the rain
But I never wave bye-bye
But I try, I try
Never gonna fall for

Martin Love - walks beside me
Martin Love - walks on by
Martin Love - gets me to the church on time
Church on time - terrifies me
Church on time - makes me party
Church on time - puts my trust in god and man
God and man - no confessions
God and man - no religion
God and man - don't believe in Martin Love

It's not really work
It's just the power to charm
I'm still standing in the wind
But I never wave bye bye
But I try, I try

Martin Love - walks beside me
Martin Love - walks on by
Martin Love - gets me to the church on time
Church on time - terrifies me
Church on time - makes me party
Church on time - puts my trust in god and man
God and man - no confessions
God and man - no religion
God and man - don't believe in Martin Love

Martin Love - Martin Love (x12)
Martin Love - Martin Love, walks beside me
Martin Love - Martinn love, walks on by

Pinioned by Opinion: prologue

Following last week's pastiche of Gerard Henderson and Bob Ellis, the folk at Catalyst told me to re-tool slightly. Here follows a slighly broader version of that pastiche, titled Pinioned by Opinion, free with complimentary #hashtag, #sayyestoPBO

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The Farrow-Allen case is a sad private spectacle now playing out in the public sphere, and frankly I don’t want to hear any more about it. (John McQuaid, Forbes. 2/2)

So began the week when late Western capitalism (to use a favourite term of late) –or I—began cleaning long-abandoned cupboards—or re-reading half-remembered op-eds--where soused uncles—ah, I’m not going there—were found to speak truth to power about the ancient saying, ‘in vino veritas’, or, for those still not cognisant of English’s Latin roots, ‘in wine, there is truth’.

Welcome to Pinioned by Opinion, the weekly blog in which I’ll take a look at some of the most out-there comments and columns of the week (but probably not anything from the ‘Out There’ column, if it’s still running, by Baz Blakeney for the Herald Sun, which, as I recall, is actually mildly humourous and not at all ‘out there’).

Woody Allen has been the poster boy for psychotherapists for years, and when allegations emerged of Allen’s treatment towards family members—and let’s not kid ourselves by restricting the definition of family members to those with the same surname as a given person—views as large as the ‘Hollywood’ sign through which Allen has made his name surfaced. We’ll return to McQuaid shortly.

Everyone’s favourite executive director (and I speak of none other than Gerard Henderson of the Sydney Institute), got an article concerning (for the problem that it covers is concerning) the Allen affair published in the Australian. Mr Henderson (for a mister he is!) saw the matter face-to-face with allegations of child abuse in the Catholic Church. Whether abuse committed by organisations or individuals is worse is moot, but there seems to be a wider body of evidence about the Catholic Church’s activities than Allen’s. That is not to condone or exculpate the fact there is an allegation of such heinous activity, by the way.

McQuaid, who in his bio for Forbes says he writes about “dysfunctional America” (don’t we know a bit about that!), was the kind of article that pedants (no, pedants) prey on. Titled ‘No, You Don't Have To Have An Opinion About Woody Allen And Dylan Farrow’, McQuaid got nowhere fast with his argument that esteemed media organisations such as the one he is paid by shouldn’t be covering the story that he is being paid to cover. Or maybe he thinks Forbes should be the only esteemed media organisation to cover the story. Exclusivity, and all that.

(Nick Cater, eat your heart out.)

Certainly, we know Dylan Farrow wrote an open letter—the very nature of which is designed to be seen by as many people as humanly possible—in which she detailed her claims. Logically speaking, McQuaid is saying Farrow should have kept quiet. Blaming the alleged victim is such a fantastic way [sarcasm font] for a putatively impartial observer to make a point.

For those playing at home: the easiest and most effective way for McQuaid to make his point would have been to not make it at all. But, as McQuaid writes:

the toxic mix of celebrity and molestation charges is irresistible to the media. We can’t look away. Even if we do, the moment we look back there’s some new bit of news or commentary about the case.

So McQuaid is simply compelled to use some of his ‘valuable editorial space’ to write about it, which over-rides any complaints he has about the whole affair. He’s just doing his job, I’m guessing.

From that we turn to testosterone in teenage boys. For The Daily Telegraph, Clare Masters, who would have so much first-hand experience about the topic, decides to lead with an anecdote about smashing a car—probably a worn-out bush basher—that, later on in the piece, Masters reckons doesn’t have to be that soul-destroying:the utter destruction of cars can be a positive exercise if the destroyers are then taught how to put the pieces back together.

Why Masters would think that teenage boys who have gone to the effort to destroy the car with ‘bats and concrete blocks’ would then go on to ‘put the pieces back together’ is beyond me. But then, I’m not a mother of two young boys, so I wouldn’t know about the psychology of teenage boys.

Masters gives us a clue as to what she thinks of the topic she’s writing about:

As the mother of two young boys I frequently come across the sympathetic eyebrow-raise of the 

stranger who usually spouts off the very unoriginal: "you've got your hands full don't you?”

Unoriginality is more honoured in the breach than in the observance, and the piece is riddled with more clichés than an exposition on lateral thinking by Edward de Bono. The article (which comes to the tame conclusion that parents are responsible for whether their young boys turn into malevolent, shiv-wielding gangsters in Kings Cross and King St) has no relevance and hardly any timeliness (Barry O’Farrell’s new pub laws are briefly mentioned). What have we learnt?

Lastly, in this first dispatch, I would like to address Helen Razer’s leggings.

That sounds incredibly creepy. Let me try again. Helen Razer took issue with an article on leggings as revolutionary object or something-or-other. To me, the article was extraneous guff but Razer decided to live-Tweet the thing. It was decent sport on Sunday evening now that the cricket’s finished, and definitely a better option than the Winter Olympics. Enjoy.

You can suggest op-eds for Cameron to cover, and/or abuse him, on Twitter at @Cameron_Magusic.     

Hellisian Fields: a Pastiche of Bob Ellis and Gerard Henderson

Happy New Year! (If the year starts in February.)

I proposed to the cool cats at Catalyst that I do a weekly pastiche of the comedic stylings earnest thoughts of two of Australia's most laughed at loved analysts of politics, Gerard Henderson and Bob Ellis.

They've responded by asking me to do something a bit broader, which in any case should be available at the Catalyst website each week.

The following is what I would have posted. Admire my PVO-like centrism! Laugh at my witty in-jokes!

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Welcome, inner-city sandalista comrades, to the first (and hopefully not the last) post of “Hellisian Fields”, a suppository of the wisdom that Gerard Henderson and Bob Ellis post each week, respectively, on “Media Watch Dog” (which, as the author Henderson reminds us in each edition, was begun one year before the ABC’s “Media Watch” program) and “Table Talk: Bob Ellis on Film and Theatre”, in which the eponymous author more often than not strays from his brief and instead gives us his, ah, unique (and probably defamatory) insights on politics, with more than a touch of reductio ad Hitlerum.

The week got off to a bang., Mr Ellis was fervently putting word to screen, in a screed that continued from previously on the theme of Adam Goodes’ worthiness as Australian of the Year. Wrote Mr Ellis:

It would be good to know how many Indigenous notables were offered the prize of Australian of the Year and, not wanting to be so acclaimed on what their people now know as Invasion Day, turned it down.

Notwithstanding his attempt at divisiveness, and he even refers to the selection of Goodes as ‘divisive’ on what should be a harmonious day, three of the five Indigenous notables he names as examples in the next paragraph have already won Australian of the Year.   

Is Adam Goodes the youngest recipient of the award, Mr Ellis asks? Nope, swimmer Shane Gould got the gong at 16 years of age, less than half the age Adam Goodes is now. Among sportspeople who won the award, of whom there are 14 awardees, Goodes is older than the average age of 31-and-a-bit-years-old.

Mr Henderson (for a mister he is!), meanwhile, was not as attentive towards Australia Day. His only concern was “The Lair of Liverpool” (Mark Latham) and an op-ed Latham apparently wrote for the Australian Financial Review titled “Why I back losers”. Mr Henderson (for a mister he is!) took this (I think) to be a subtle dig at what Mark Textor recently called “a fine publication”. Mr Henderson’s bon mot of choice was a sarcastic, “brilliant”.    

The canning of SPC Ardmona was an issue (sorry, “problem” as the esteemed Dr Castillo, formerly of RMIT, would want me to say) that grabbed the attention of both subjects of this blog. Mr Henderson (for a mister he is!) highlighted its importance in relation to a critique of a critique by Erik Jensen, editor of the nascent Saturday Paper. Mr Henderson (for a mister he is!), as expert as he is on the antagonistic Democratic Labor Party of Bob Santamaria’s era, believed Jensen had made a mistake of how the DLP would have responded to the whole iss… sorry, problem. Wrote Mr Henderson:

Erik Jensen, following David Marr, uses the term “DLP” as a soft way of alleging improper and irrational Catholic influence and reminding an audience of Tony Abbott’s social conservatism which apparently so upsets him.

The whole Henderson-Marr argument is as messy as the canned produce that SPC will produce for not that much longer, but suffice to say Mr Henderson knows more about Catholic influence in Australian politics than anyone else will care to admit, or to admit caring about.  

Mr Ellis devoted significantly more copy to the SPC problem. Using the same analogy he did when the vexed Holden affair came up late last year, Ellis suggested that for the price of a drink that Helen Razer believes is no longer an indicator of the middle class anyway (i.e. the latte, or the cappuccino, according to Mr Ellis), taxpayers could prevent both Shepparton from ‘going to the wall’ and Victorian Premier Denis Napthine losing power in November. The inability to take action and instead stick to ‘fundamentalist lunacy’ by ‘purblind fanatics’ is termed the ‘Abbott-Friedman-Hayek’ doctrine by Mr Ellis.

Mr Ellis proposes, then, that a ‘government of all the talents’–a reference either to William Grenville or Gordon Brown–be formed by Bill Shorten, Bob Katter, Ian Macfarlane, Malcolm Turnbull and Adam Bandt “and test its numbers on the floor of the House”. Given that the acronym for Mr Ellis’ formulation is GOAT, Internet slang for “greatest of all time”, then surely those names provide a clue to Mr Ellis’ faves in the House. 

Asylum seekers were also at the forefront, or the coalface, or something, of the minds of both Mr Ellis and Mr Henderson (for a mister he is!). The scuttlebutt that Navy officers maltreated asylum seekers moved Mr Ellis to call last week the worst in Tony Abbott’s prime ministership. Abbott has a long way to go yet, indeed. Mr Ellis goes on to lambast the Foreign Minister and call the Immigration Minister’s intelligence and/or sanity into question. This leads into a discussion (a separate article, would you believe) of how Minister Morrison is a “Christian terrorist”, even though, by Mr Ellis’ own admission, the word “terrorist” has no meaning. In an Orwellian masterstroke, he then calls for ‘terrorist’ to be ‘expunged from the language’.   

Mr Ellis’ inspiration for this think piece was, by the way, the films ‘Olympus Has Fallen’ and ‘White House Down’. Discuss.

Mr Ellis thought to come up with a neologism, ‘scottmobbledigook’, which came to his mind after listening to Tony Eastley interview Morrison (which Mr Ellis helpfully transcribes) on AM. Evidently ‘stonewalling’ is not sufficiently a new enough term to denote exactly what Morrison can apparently do pretty well: give as little specific information as possible so that none apart from the Government is kept in the loop.   

Mr Henderson (for a mister he is!) was more, ah, direct with his take on the affair. Responding to Jenna Price in The Canberra Times, who threatened to send tampons to Scott Morrison, he asked whether she had sent tampons to the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd governments. Public disclosure, you know. 

Most memorably, Mr Ellis launches on what is, apparently, his 79^th iteration of a defence of Craig Thomson. Even though Thomson and his legal team might have responded with “Thanks, but no thanks”, Mr Ellis gives us an informative insight into the record-keeping methods of brothels–following which is a non sequitur directed at Christopher Pyne.

“It isn’t Dreyfus”, Mr Ellis admits, but it sure beats ‘Leave Britney alone’. Either way, Craig Thomson will continue to provide plenty of copy, and not just for Mr Ellis. 

And so it goes. Keep morale high, comrades.