It was an ideal war ending, could almost have been made in Hollywood, starring Ronald Reagan [In fact it was, as it turned out, scripted, stage managed, directed, as if it was a Hollywood movie and the sailors mere extras]. But there we were, a lighting fast war, the leader of the Free World triumphant after a few short weeks, just as the neocon war chorus had promised. Boo sucks to those wishy washy liberals who had protested about the war. We showed those limp-wristed lady men French cheese-eating surrender monkeys etc. When America decides to conquer a country by god they conquer it, no messing around. And if our glorious leader, Emperor George, decides to conquer some more, well then, you feeling lucky, punks?

It was all dutifully filmed and reported by an unquestioning Press, flown out to the carrier for the purpose of recording George Bush’s date with destiny. It was a fake from start to finish, but no one thought to question the spectacle or the sentiments. Nor indeed to question whether the war was indeed “over”. It would be ten more years of mayhem before American troops began going home. And hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis were there to make a mockery of “mission accomplished” had anyone been counting.

But it was a while before people began to question the reality behind the illusion.

It turned out later, if I remember correctly, the aircraft carrier was anchored not far from California, not offshore from the Gulf. The sign had been made by the Bush PR team, not the sailors. And so on. The whole thing had been, a fiction movie. If Ronald Reagan thought that a movie he had once been in was real life, then so now did George.

But it worked for a while, this stunt. Worked well enough and long enough to form a model for conservative politicians everywhere I think. As long as it looks good and sounds vaguely plausible, the media will report the spectacle and message exactly as you want them to. And if anyone wants to ask questions later? Well, yesterday’s news, who cares?

It marked something of a rise in these kind of political stunts. Oh politicians of all persuasions had long kissed babies, launched ships, turned up at sporting events and the like. But the Mission Accomplished moment gave new impetus and ideas. There were a number of lessons to be learnt, and conservative politicians learnt them very quickly. First lesson was to actually take the trouble to make the event like, well, like a movie. Get the setting right, the props right, the clothing right, the extras right, the words right. The media will only need to set up the cameras in the spot marked x and the event will unfold before their lenses. Second, make the story simple, one event, one message, and make it fit the narrative the media are already familiar with, indeed have already been promoting. And third, if you do those things, the media will not investigate the reality behind the event. The illusion you have presented them, like a stage magician, will be presented as reality. In effect you will have turned the whole of the mainstream media into the promotion arm of your political party. And promotion you would once have paid a lot of money for now reaches the audience free of charge.

In the last couple of years in Australia the Liberal Party, under Tony Abbott, Australia’s GW Bush, have developed this process into the kind of mass production previously used only for consumer goods. Almost daily, as if in a continuous election campaign, Abbott’s spin doctors arrange a photo opportunity. He has decided that, having created the narrative, with the help of the MSM, involving a scare campaign over the looming price on carbon (or as he calls it, the great big unimaginably huge toxic carbon tax which will ruin us all and end Australian civilisation as we know it), the photo ops would be used to keep hammering away at this. So there we are, day after day – here a factory will close, there a cake shop, a fish shop, a mine, a whole city (about to be wiped off the map) – and there is Tony, wearing, as awkwardly as Bush in flight gear, a mining helmet, a white coat, goggles. There he is driving a truck (license specially obtained), eating a cake, gutting a fish. And then, as the cameras continue to roll on this made for tv movie, comes the speech when a sometimes sorrowful, sometimes angry, Mr Abbott will denounce the prospect of doing anything whatsoever about climate change, and fore-shadowing (sometimes, in a strange time warp, describing things that have apparently already happened under a carbon price yet to come into effect) the doom of the enterprise and the salt of the earth workers who work there, not to mention their Liberal-supporter boss standing at his side who may say a few additional words before filing for bankruptcy or leaping from a skyscraper.

And sure enough, night after night, grateful reporters, their work done for them, and grateful news bulletin producers, ditto, run this footage unchanged, unchecked, unchallenged on the nightly news and the following day’s breakfast shows.

Running in parallel, and from the same premise, has been a similar technique by lobby groups on the Right. This is the “petition” or press release from “expert group” approach. The notorious “Oregon Petition” by climate deniers seems to have been the first major example of this. Set up a phony “Institute” (this has also been a path frequently followed), set up a “petition” denying climate change is happening, and establish an apparently real “qualification” for those signing it. Publicise it in places where likely deniers will see it. In this case the signers were supposed to be “scientists”, which enabled the Oregon people to later say that thousands of “scientists” didn’t believe in global warming. The media, always out for controversy, and unable or unwilling to check such things, then simply provided an amplifier for the claims of the “petition”, and this established the proposition that the science of climate change was “unsettled” the “debate” still proceeding, “two sides” to the question.

If the media had done the most elementary checking they would have found that the “Institute” was a bit like the fake shopfronts in a western movie. And that the signatories were anyone who had done anything remotely like science at some kind of university level at some time. Even so, given the huge number of science graduates in America, this motley crew represented only a very tiny percentage of them. And in addition, few of them had done any kind of science related to climate, and none were active climate scientists. The whole petition was like a fake town in a cowboy movie. Yet on and on it went, demolished online by many people but not the MSM, and still quoted from time to time. And so a successful model for others.

One aspect of it has indeed been even more widely used – the shielding of the real identity, affiliation, ideology, and therefore motivation, of the people making the claim (eg in this case the headline “Libertarian, neoconservative, right wing Republican group opposes action on climate change” has less impact by far than the claim “Scientists oppose science of climate change”). Religious groups in particular have found that while the public will discount what they say if it is obviously religiously motivated, have become adept at not mentioning religion but of claiming some other identity such as “social researcher” when commenting on topics such as same sex marriage, stem cell research, or abortion. The media have been absolutely happy to accept such wolf in sheep’s clothing commenters.

Last week in Australia, both the political stunt and the false flag approaches to pushing politics further to the Right were in full view. But both for a change failed, not because the MSM saw through the fakery, but because the internet did and quickly reacted.

First the petition approach. Bursting on to the media was the announcement that “doctors” opposed same sex marriage because it would inevitably greatly damage any children being raised by a same sex couple and because of the enormous health risks in such a relationship. Wow, eh, DOCTORS are saying this. With evidence, obviously, must be. Not just the usual arguments by gay people, politicians, religious groups, this is DOCTORS. And so the media ran with the story, as usual, unchecked. Except that twitter started asking questions. Who were these doctors? And pretty quickly the thing unravelled. In the first place there were only 150 names, of some 70,000 GPs in Australia. Funny, very small number. Then it turned out the leader and organisers were based in a fundamentalist, evangelical church, and their “evidence” was quotes from evangelicals in America. And which had the usual anti-gay agenda of such groups. Next came the AMA, issuing a statement on behalf of the 70,000 GPs that this little group didn’t speak for anyone. So the whole facade crumbled, although our national broadcaster, ever eager to please, was still running it on a ticker the next day.

You’d think the media would check, wouldn’t you. But “Doctors oppose same sex marriage” has a more newsworthy sound than “Small group of religious fundamentalists, some of whom are doctors, oppose same sex marriage” does it not?

And shortly after came the second failure. Two of Abbott’s senior politicians, Eric Abetz (Libs leader in the Senate, a major party figure) and Kelly O’Dwyer decided to emulate their glorious leader. Couldn’t believe their luck I bet when a stunt fell ready made into their laps. Didn’t have to do anything, there it was, grass roots participation. See a shopkeeper in O’Dwyer’s electorate apparently told her that he was being forced to close his shop, was being ruined by this great big new tax from Julia Gillard, just as Abbott had said he would be. So the pair of pollies advised the media, and then turned up for the photo op. And even better, the poor shopkeeper, more in sorrow than in anger of course, had written on the shop window something like “Thanks a lot, Julia, closing down”. Time for the cameras, so the shopkeeper stood in front of his poor forlorn shop, flanked by the two pollies, guarding the bridge, shoulder to shoulder, against the red peril coming their way. MSM dutifully reported, unchecked, as they had reported all the other stunts.

But then a funny thing happened. People began asking (as Abetz and O’Dwyer should have done, but in their ideologically befuddled state did not), hang on Carbon Price hasn’t begun yet, and even when it does, how could it possibly affect an antiques dealer? Then someone who lived near the shop and knew it thought the story was a bit odd, and someone else checked out the web site of the business. It all unravelled, and this shopfront was revealed as yet another fake in a cowboy movie.

The real story went something like this. The Antiques dealer had two shops, close together. His main business was just down the road and was going strong. This shop had just been rented temporarily by him, and had been used to have a sale of excess stock from the business. That sale had been so successful that the shop was now empty and he no longer needed to rent it. The gig being up he then made a statement to the effect that yes indeed, that was the true situation, and he had set up this stunt just for a bit of a laugh, just for fun, nothing serious, can take a joke can’t you Julia? Etc.

Abetz and O’Dwyer were very quiet in the afternoon, and the story vanished. But without the internet and twitter the MSM would have simply taken this at face value, and left the public, yet again, with the vague feeling that the “carbon tax” was ruining people. Saw it, in the news, must be true, poor fellow.

Look, they were caught out on these occasions, the doctors and the politicians. But that won’t be the end of these stunts, and tricks, and, well, lies. They work too well, in the absence of real journalism, and indeed in the presence of a media that is happy to run with neo-conservative narratives.

So be aware, as you walk down the street, seeing the latest political stunt, or reading the latest press release, that you are walking down a street in a wild west movie, and nothing you are seeing is real. Stay alert.

“The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

which I guess he applied in GW Bush’s time to the war, and economics, and law, and politics, and social matters, also applies to climate change denial.

The Heartland group and their Australian equivalents could say exactly what Rove said. They have absolutely no interest in the data on climate change. They simply ignore it or invent their own. Instead they create “new realities” through such activities as stealing and lying about emails, inventing fake petitions, or comparing climate scientists to mass murderers.

On the other hand, excellent sites like Skeptical Science and Real Climate scrupulously stay away from “politics”, deleting comments or parts of comments that make remarks about the politics or ideology of denialists. Or make rude remarks. They believe that they should stick purely to the science and nothing but the science, and the other side can do what they like, scientists will neither get down in the gutter nor fight politically. Eventually, they believe, reality will prevail. In the meantime the deniers are winning the battle by inventing their own reality and pursuing it relentlessly. Rather like “weapons of mass destruction” and the invasion of Iraq.

All of us will be left, in the ruins of a planet, to study what they have done.

Note – in case you couldn’t read it the lower line in the graphic is “A peer reviewed study by Swift (1729) found that only Irish climate scientists might have eaten babies and then only in times of famine or other incidents of a similar nature. Possibly (Climate scientist 2012)”

Half a century on, I feel very differently of course. Want to have stern words with that young whippersnapper. It wasn’t the things so much that were important but the whole structure of family life I was leaving behind. And the psychological and emotional effects of twenty years a-growing (title of a book about an Irish childhood I’d been given). Without a backward glance, totally unaware that my much older self would look back with regret on what I was leaving behind – the comfort of familiar voices, shared history, common values, comfortable chairs, surroundings I could navigate with eyes shut. A stability which was going to be absent for quite a while as I tried to find my way bravely in a new world, where nothing was familiar. Oh, it hadn’t all been great, back home, we were a family with problems, and ups and downs like any other, but it was home, and it would take a while to find a new one.

Not unique? Of course not. We all go through this transition from youth to adult, one way and another. We all leave stuff behind. But looking around me now it seems far too many of us leave all behind. Every day there is news of bad behaviour by politicians, business leaders, unionists, sportsmen, of a kind that makes you want to have stern words, say “what would your parents think about this behaviour?”, “what would your grandparents think?”, “where did you leave the values you grew up with?”

But more than that. The country, Australia, I grew up in all those years ago, has itself changed immeasurably. The young Australia seems to have packed its bags, walked out the door of the old Australia (200 years a-growing), grabbing at a brave new world, leaving behind the baggage of fairness, equality, caring, mateship, anti-authoritarianism, mutual respect, honesty. Of course it hadn’t been perfect in the past, the treatment of women, indigenous people, migrants and the environment, were nothing to write home about. But we have lost more than we have gained. Think again, old country, look homeward.

Note – have told much of my story under “Dream” tab above. My family stuff starts about half way (say at “Leaving from Liverpool”).

There’s an old, sorta joke, which says “Want to invest in a sure thing? Buy land, they’re not making it any more”. It’s a message that should have been given to every citizen of Australia to use as a reminder that resources are limited. Instead we have behaved for two and a quarter centuries as Australia Unlimited. Big country, plenty of soil, plenty of trees, plenty of mineral resources. Now the crunch is coming, and there are a couple of urgent responses we need to make. We need to ensure that a good proportion of the staggeringly huge profits being made from digging up those made-once-only mineral resources come back to benefit the 21,999,997 of us who are not mining billionaires. That they are used to create a stronger better Australia as a solid home for us when resources start to dwindle or the demand for them disappears. One of the things we could do with it is sort out infrastructure needs as the climate changes – infrastructure like efficient irrigation, like decent efficient transport, like support for large scale renewable energy projects. And support for individuals in education, health, aged care and so on. The recent budget, trying to balance all those needs, pulling up the blanket to cover the head only to expose the toes, is a classic example of failure to use the mining resources wisely.

And the other response is to stop destroying remaining forests and to start restoring soils to good health. Not least because we need the environment as healthy as it can be to meet the changing climate.

What’s that other saying? Oh yes,”A stitch in time saves nine. Time we started urgent stitching.

But let’s leave that aside. I’m guessing that a twenty year sentence for Breivik will see Norwegians marching in the streets, but that is their business. Instead I wanted to consider the broader question of sane/insane irrespective of the law. At one level the question itself is insane. Here is a creature who blows up innocent passers-by on a city street; then goes to island and shoots dead dozens of innocent young people one after the other, hunting them down without mercy, in a scene too horrible to think about for long; then pleads “self-defence” in court! Stark raving mad, just on the evidence of those three broad facts.

But that doesn’t take us very far, really. Think about it. There are plenty of insane people who commit murder, no question. All kinds of childhood circumstances, sexual aberration, brain malfunction or injury, bullying or other personal negative interaction, can lead to single or serial or mass murders. No problem recognising, say, the Moors murders, or the House of Horrors, or Jeffrey Dahmer, or indeed the man who suddenly kills his aged parents, or his children, as being the results of all kinds of mental problems. But that’s not what we have here, nothing like it, so do we need some other concept of “insane”?

At least since around 1900, when the very nasty Anarchists were in full flight, there have been small groups of people all over the world, fanatical light gleaming in eyes, so utterly convinced of the rightness of ideology or religion that they were happy, more than happy, to kill any who disagreed with them, or who merely didn’t recognise their Truth. Worse, their hatreds were so strong as to include those of a different ethnic group (to their own tightly defined one), a different skin colour, different language, different political sympathy. All helps to fuel the urge to kill these people who are different, who are, must be, less than you, less, indeed, than human. So shoot them, blow them up with bombs, crash planes full of them, fly planes indeed into tall buildings full of them. Kill them, men, women, children, kill them all. It is an ethnic cleansing in reverse, where a small group of believers would happily, if they could, cleanse the rest of the world of those different to themselves.

These groups arise like poisonous mushrooms on a dung heap. They may spend some years whipping up each other’s hatreds, they may launch straight into bomb making. Some, like the Anarchists, eventually, fade away, but there will always be another take their place. You know them. Oh they may wear different badges, espouse different causes, claim different outrageous provocations, but they are all one, brothers in arms. They are the IRA (and still, heaven help us, the “Real IRA”) and the UDA, ETA, Bader-Meinhof, Al-Quaeda, American Militias, the MNLF, the LeT, Taliban, Ustashi, elements of the Tea Party, Shining Path, the Neo-Nazis in so many countries, Nepalese Maoists, anti-abortionists, the KKK, and so on. And beyond them are the apparently non-ideological killing-spree people. I used to think people like Martin Bryant and the Columbine killers were different to the terrorists. Descriptions of the killers at the Bombay train station, smiling as they hunted down and killed innocent people sound no different to the murderers roaming the school halls at Columbine (and many others) or picking off tourists at Port Arthur. The common thread is the love of killing, and a fake sense of grievance (“bullying” in school, or being sacked from a workplace, or receiving “poor” service, are no different to excuses related to religion, or migrants “stealing jobs”, or some distant historical claim to land).

Once, and still in most cases, formal terrorist groups were close knit cells or network of cells in one part of a country, and shared a common specific aim of gaining some territory, say. These days with internet communications, individuals who share an ideology of hatred and a love of killing, can get in contact with like minded individuals and groups all over the world. The hatred can ferment in the suburban bedroom to the glow of the computer screen, and ideas can be gained about killing methods and tactics.

Which brings us back to Breivik. He fits comfortably into this framework, does he not? Is he insane? Of course he is, but then the members of all these groups are insane. I guess the only question would be whether he was more insane than the people blowing up a nightclub in Bali, or an office building in Oklahoma, or a shop in Belfast, or a school in Afghanistan. No, still not seeing it.

An uncomfortable fact to ponder. All of those groups and individuals (with the possible exception of the school shooters) have been, are, supported by some, often many other people (even, astonishingly, Martin Bryant, defended as a victim by the gun lobby, pretending he was set up in order to bring in more gun control). However bad the massacres, however many innocent people die horribly, supporters will argue the cause is just, the “war” must be fought.

Which brings us back to Breivik again. Desperately arguing he is not insane, that he was at war with these children, that he was at war with “multiculturalism”, that he acted in self-defence and so on. That is, pretending that he was some kind of “soldier” in a legitimate cause, although, when he stopped hunting down screaming, crying, terrified, unarmed children and shooting them dead, he quickly demanded to surrender to the armed policemen who were finally arriving. No gunfight with armed men for Mr Breivik.

He needs to be declared for what he is, insane, and locked up, incommunicado, to rot in prison until he dies a forgotten old man. So do they all. There needs to be a clear statement from the civilised people of the world that these murderous thugs are all psychopaths, sociopaths, whatever, but mad. No glorious causes, no pretend flags and uniforms, no war language, just insane. And each one in turn, locked up like Breivik for ever. No noble speeches, no martyrdom, no communication with deluded followers and supporters. Just a declaration of insanity. A clear message to supporters – you are following madmen.

Might help, a bit.

Milton “Comus”

he that hides a dark soul, and foul thoughts benighted, walks under the midday sun; Himself in his own dungeon

Oh, and poor old Clive and Gina? Well, they would still have the option of buying television networks or full page ads in newspapers. If they could see a message that would get across.

Might need a bit of tinkering and fine tuning, a bit of adjustment of precise numbers of votes per individual, but generally speaking I think it would have to be a considerable improvement on the present arrangement which is effectively the reverse.

Oh and a gentle reminder:
If you would like to see your favourite blog recognised in the big wide world of the Best Blogs 2012, voting for the People’s Choice Award is still open (just)!
You can vote here. Just click on the button on the right (then go alphabetically to find THE Watermelon Blog, ie under T not W). Voting will close Wednesday 9 May at 5.00 pm. All winners will be announced on Thursday 10 May at 10.00 am by the Sydney Writers Centre. Come on now, pretty please?

PS The title, rather cheekily comes from a somewhat different, and reverse, context- Paul Samuelson 1970:

The consumer, so it is said, is the king … each is a voter who uses his money as votes to get the things done that he wants done.

Not, I hasten to add, crossness merely with the Catholic “educators”. For all I know there is also a “Jewish Education Week”, a ”Muslim Education Week”, a ”Evangelical Education Week”, and a ”Scientology Education Week”, all of whom could use exactly the same slogan.

Instilling “faith” in children is indeed what religion is about, but is precisely the opposite of what education is (or should be) about. Here are some alternative education slogans for you:
“Curiosity in every child”
“Inquiry in every child”
“Confidence in every child”
“Ambition in every child”
“Caring in every child”
“Achievement in every child”
“Balance in every child”
“Happiness in every child”

I invite you to add some more.

Tell you what, keep “faith” away from a child until it is seven, and I’ll give you an educated and rational adult.

The sums of money now spent to hold an Olympic Games are obscene. Huge stadia are built, transport reorganised, media outlets pay for exclusive rights, gimcrackery souvenirs are produced in landfill quantities. Most facilities continue in use for a short time, then fall into disuse, then get demolished. Rarely do facilities built for the specific conditions of the games suit what an individual city may later need. The result of all that is that the major criterion used to evaluate Games “Bids” (and that is a whole other topic) are whether a city and country can afford them. No poor country could hold a modern games, and that in itself is a damning inditement of the loss of the “Olympic Spirit”. As is the tendency for winning cities (most notably China) to bulldoze poor housing and move beggars off the streets, so as not to detract from the glossiness.

And if poor countries can’t afford to hold the Games, athletes from poor countries can’t afford to hold Olympic medals. Once upon a time the Olympic mythology echoed “it doesn’t matter if you win or lose, it’s how you play the game” credo. Not any more. It has long been known that the number of medals a country wins (and the Olympics was supposed not to be a competition between countries but athletes) is directly proportional to how much money a country spends (so much so that Australian Olympic officials keep demanding more and more money otherwise our “medal count” will go down). These days sports training is a science, and equipment is also very important (the Australian bobsled team was complaining the other day they had a $5000 dollar sled and needed a $25,000 one to be competitive. I hate to think how much things like cycles and rowing boats cost). Athletes from the great majority of countries in the world have no chance of winning a medal, no matter how much natural talent a swimmer from, say, Guinea-Bissau might have.

Look if the Games were like those of 1908, where Australians with a bit of natural swimming or running talent paid their own way to Britain to chance their arm (and legs) against the best other amateurs who turned up, I would be happy to wave a little Australian flag and cheer them along. But Olympics 2012? I doubt I’ll bother watching.

What about you?

One major political event during my absence has been the announcement by Bob Brown that he was resigning as leader of the Greens and would not contest the next election for the Senate. A great deal has been written about Bob in his role not only in Australia but worldwide in establishing both conservation movements and Greens political parties, but I thought I would add a couple of observations of my own.

I met Bob some years ago, and was immediately struck by the fact that his private persona was exactly like his public one. You will often hear it said about politicians, carefully guarding, on the advice of image makers, their public persona, that either they are much more unpleasant in real life than on tv, or they are much nicer in private than they appear to the public. Bob Brown was a classic case of what you saw was what there was – image and reality were the same.

The second unusual thing about him politically was that he answered questions honestly and thoughtfully and individually. He didn’t go out to the press pack with his prepared slogans and practiced one phrase answers. but dealt with each question on its merits. I was struck this week how rare this was, in listening to the Victorian Attorney General, quizzed on his setting up a parliamentary query on child abuse by the churches, answering every question with the same carefully memorised three sentence “reply”. This essentially said he was setting up a parliamentary enquiry because he was setting up a parliamentary enquiry because … well you get the idea. But they almost all do it these days, to the extent that it comes as a shock to hear a politician answering a question directly.

As I write this I am struck by a thought. Being the same person in public and private, and answering questions in a rational way, are both features of our everyday lives. Do any of you not behave like that to family, friends and colleagues? And yet we have come to accept, to our detriment, that politicians live in some other world in which that behaviour is not normal.

Bob Brown showed that it doesn’t have to be like that, and he will be missed.

Note – It is time to vote for your favourite blog (you will find this one alphabetically under THE Watermelon Blog) at the Sydney Writer’s Centre Awards. I will try to incorporate the voting button on this post so subscribers will get it in their feed, but if I fail, could you visit the blog please, admire the new design if you haven’t yet seen it, and click on the voting button on the right. You can vote for more than one blog (there are 900 nominated) but you can only vote in one session. It would be good to feel I was getting things right for you

Anyway, will try to get back into regular posting (and tweeting), health permitting. See you again soon.

Should be adding all kinds of new pithy, witty and wise observations of the passing parade for your delectation and that of the judges of Best Blogs 2012 who will be culling hundreds of blogs this week. But they will just have to be content with 8 years of accumulated blog posts, here I stand I can do no other.

I will write again as soon as I am able. If you follow the blog, or follow me on Twitter you will know instantly I have emerged from my den. But do keep calling on, browsing around, sure there is plenty to keep you entertained. I will try to respond to comments on any older posts or other pieces of writing.

Keep safe and well, see you again soon.