View From The Couch - 01/Oct/2016

A Nation Of Cranks

I recently got back my copy of John Gardner's 'The Art of Fiction', and not having looked at it in a number of years I decided reread from the front. Interestingly enough the first big section covers why one must have a literary education in order to tackle being a writer and heroes through all the arguments in favour of having an education. If one had to distill it into a two sentence pitch, it boils down to this:

1. You need to have some kind of intellectual context and framework for doing your writing.
2. If you don't have any context you're very susceptible to being a crank. 

It's a little bit like how John Goodman's Walter thunders at Steve Buscemi's Donnie in 'The Big Lebowski', "you don't have the context Donnie!" The above two points would be John Gardner thundering at any novice writer attempting to write without a literary education of some description.

Which led me to ponder about pedagogy and why we insist - in general - on people getting any kind of education in anything, and it comes down to the fact that without it, your thinking could be that of a crank. When you look at the One Nation senators Hanson and Roberts, you take Gardner's point. If those people had an education worth spit, they wouldn't be saying the things they say. The fact that they don't possess the education to be Senators of this land, is betrayed by the very crank opinions they cast about.

That might sound like snobbery towards a woman whose main careers running a fish-and-chip shop and found her calling in politics relatively late. Back in 1996, she was the sort of talent the Queensland Liberal Party could find to run for them, and illustrates the low level education of that state. And while not everybody needs an education in order not to be a crank - as was the case with Paul Keating - most mortal minds cannot negotiate the path away from crank-dom without an education.

In fact, the path around crank-dom is so fraught, one can be susceptible to its gravitational pull, even with an education - as is the case with Malcolm Roberts. Roberts' case is more egregious because he had the opportunity of being educated as an engineer, which means he would have spent a minimum four years at a university, and for him to have formed the idiotic opinions he has formed and is trying to foist upon this very land, is nothing short of a tragedy; The 'reverse-miracle' whereby it is both unexpected, irrational, inexplicable, yet totally undesirable. The institution who conferred a degree upon Malcolm Roberts should be ashamed of itself for sending out into the world a mind so barren and misshapen.

As to the portion of the population to whom we apportion the blame of voting in this bunch, the same can be said. Back in the first incarnation of One Nation,the demographic support for the said party was always heavily distributed towards those with less or completely without an education, and least amongst those who could boast of an education. The fact that the nation could produce so many people who could be persuaded by such cranks, leads one to conclude that our education system has been subpar for quite a number of years. Funding Gonski isn't exactly going to fix this problem in a hurry. Worse still, if the conservatives of this land are a little taken aback by their brethren in rightwing politics, they only have themselves to blame for perpetuating the kind of class society that breeds such ignorance and cranks.

Cranks And Conservatism

On the Left, you used to have hard core Marxists. I don't know if they're still around rabbiting on about the eventual and imminent collapse of capitalism and citing page from 'Das Kapital'. They were cranks. Notably they went into hiding after the collapse the USSR. They're not coming back anytime soon, which is a kind of blessing. Of course, they've been replaced by the sort of Regressive Left social justice warrior types that make you cringe so maybe the Left is not freed from crank-dom either

Be that as it may, the Right had fewer cranks until relatively recent times. This was because they were cowed into hiding by the utter historic failure of Adolf Hitler who was chief amongst cranks to represent the right; it was Hitler who amassed a compendium of crank opinions and turned them into apolitical manifesto which resulted in catastrophic consequences. Citing right wing crank notions easily bought them comparisons to Hitler, which is about as favourable as being likened to shit on a stick.

The problem lately has been that the memory of Hitler is too far away and there are people with not-enough-education willing to try out some of these right-wing-crank opinions. Worse still, there are enough voters with not-enough-education to think these are somehow novel solutions to complicated problems with which they do not wish to entangle themselves, and this breeds the kind of crankiness we see in politics today. Any (pardon the pun) right thinking person would recoil at being compared to Hitler. Some of these people don't think it's such a bad thing.

Anyway. The point I want to make is that the Corgi Bernardis of this world might have an education, but are choosing to be wilfully ignorant when it comes to crucial issues such as climate change. it is then utterly unsurprising that he would like the Liberal Party to adopt some of One Nation's policies. He seems to have no idea how that reads on the headlines. The fact that he is oblivious to its impact tells you that his education, much like Malcolm Roberts' education was entirely faulty.

Similarly, the Prime Minister's desire to pin the event of the power outage in South Australia upon renewable energy illustrates the kind of wilful stupidity bolstered by crank opinions, shows just how far our nation has fallen in the intellectual stakes. It is hard to believe that at some point only half a decade ago, we viewed Malcolm Turnbull as a man of good sense and genuine advocate for having sensible climate policies. Now we can understand him as being no less a crank than Barnaby Joyce or Tony Abbott or worse still, Malcolm Roberts.

The take home message is this: a democracy is only as good as the education of its citizens, and judging from our politicians, we can see our education sector has failed us utterly.

On The Name Malcolm In Australian Politics

Just as an aside...
They say history repeats first as tragedy, then as comedy; thus, if Malcolm Fraser was the tragedy and Malcolm Turnbull the comedy, Malcolm Roberts must be the unwanted Hollywood sequel no one wants to see.

'11.22.63'

America Needs A Do-Over

It's probably easier to pitch a show set in the 1960s after the success of 'Mad Men'. It means that for better or for worse, the 1960s has passed from being a part of memory into being history. This show tries to bring forward the key polemic of the 1960s, the Kennedy Presidency and its aftermath. This is an altogether contemporary attempt to grapple wth the political climate of the 1960s in a way that elucidates the first cause that created our contemporary world.

The more interesting thing might be the motivation for doing such a show, in as much as we try to tussle with the logical train of historic events. Upstream to all of this is the notion that had Kennedy lived, the Vietnam War may have been avoided, and so our hero 'Jake Amberson' must take on the daunting task of trying to stop the assassination of JFK.

The show based on Stephen King's book, is an attempt to give America a do over from that terrible moment in Dallas. It means you get your spoiler alert right here. Don't read on if you hate spoilers.





What's Good About It

It alludes to many, many films of the last 30years. There are moments of 'Back to the Future', 'Terminator' and 'Peggy Sue Got Married', without actually stealing shots. It's quite exquisite how those moments come and go. In that sense it has a lot in common with 'Stranger Things' and its nostalgia for the 80s. This one has nostalgia for the time-travel-nostalgia movies of the 80s.

The performances are quite interesting in this series. James Franco, it turns out, is an excellent guide to thread us through the story points of the assassination as well as give us a sense of Texas in the 1960s. Affable yet sardonic, Franco has the rubber mask of the comedian as well as the right kind of intensity to be the leading man in a thriller. Because his track record of films is so diverse, recognising him isn't a hindrance to following him in the story. It's in stark contrast to a star like, say Tom Cruise, who keeps playing leading men who have a singular talent. You see Tom Cruise on screen, it's shorthand for Hollywood-Guff-to-follow.

The extraordinary performance of Daniel Webber as Lee Harvey Oswald is breathtaking. It is one of the more extraordinary performances of anything you will ever likely see. It evokes all the footage extant of Lee Harvey Oswald as well as the Gary Oldman performance from 'JFK'. It is as if Lee Harvey Oswald has become a character like Henry VIII or Hitler where actors compete to portray and show off their chops. If so, Daniel Webber's performance is one for the ages.

The production design is excellent as it goes through the styles and fashion beautifully. It's quite amazing how well they achieve the period look.

What's Bad About It

Maybe the conception of the JFK assassination is too steeped in the years of conspiracy theories. Every twist in the pot involving Lee Harvey Oswald seems like something we should know and control. Yet Lee Harvey Oswald is not a celebrity or even a fully fleshed out person we can know about in history - he is more a cryptic cipher for a terrible event we cannot comprehend or explain.

The whole series also trundles along without giving a thought to what the alternative might have been like had Kennedy not been assassinated, until very late in the piece. Considering saving President Kennedy is the big challenge of the story, you would think the characters would engage in thinking a bit more deeply about what the ramifications of such an act might be.

The series also makes a point of not submitting to a historic determinism, which is important so that Jake's mission is meaningful. At the same time, it is fatalistic about what the meaning might be. It doesn't address the conspiracy, having worked off the theories about the conspiracy, and then posits a rather bleak view about preserving the meaning of the Kennedy presidency. In that sense it's not logically or philosophically consistent within itself; Not that it detracts from the fun of the series.

What's Interesting About It

Nostalgia for the 1960s is one thing, but why do we want to go back there to change things? The John F. Kennedy Assassination marks a turning point in America that has left a scar on the public consciousness. Not for nothing did Oliver Stone's 'JFK' make the case for there being a deeper inspection of the evidence. This series might be the first since Stone's 'JFK' to dig around a bit deeper.

What it shows us is quite interesting.

Kennedy Assassination As National Trauma

It goes without saying that the Kennedy Assassination is the biggest national trauma of the USA in the 20th Century. Pearl harbour comes close and 9/11 certainly marks the big trauma for the new millennium, but in terms of the inexplicable nature of the assassination as well as the character of Lee harvey Oswald, it has left a gaping wound that begs to be staunched or covered. There is no satisfactory 'why' as a way of explaining the event and the rest of it is the endless parsing of 'how' such a thing could happen. The lack of a satisfactory answer has bred the industry of conspiracy theories.

The problem with the Warren Commission is thus twofold - it is too banal an explanation, and it is therefore too short of meaningfulness that the nation can move on. Hence the open invitation to imagine what you could do go back in time to stop the assassination. Even if Stephen King rejects all the conspiracy theories surrounding the Kennedy Assassination and embraces the Warren Commission's report, he is at the coalface of all the people trying to parse meaning from the event. In that sense this story stands as a companion piece to Don DeLillo's book 'Libra' which sought to portray Lee Harvey Oswald as a character.

"I Believe Lee Harvey Oswald Acted Alone"

That would be a quote from Kevin Costner's character Crash Davis in 'Bull Durham'. I bring that up not because of the irony where Costner also played Jim Garrison who showed otherwise in Stone's 'JFK', but also because Oswald acting alone is the litmus test for whether one is a conspiracy theorist or not, when it comes to the Kennedy Assassination.

In a break from other works that would try and find the other parties, Stephen King has taken the high road and worked with the Warren Commission conclusion that Oswald acted alone. It makes for a simpler story sit defuses the need to go down all the rabbit holes, but it also means preventing Oswald from shooting saves JFK, and so the premise of the story is sustained. If the conspiracy stood - that is to say Oswald did not act alone as conspiracy theorists claim - then stopping Oswald means nothing. Somebody else takes the shot in his place, and then stopping Oswald solves nothing. Thus in a mirror image of the conspiracy theory, the story implicitly and explicitly rests on the conspiracy theory not being true.

It's kind of funny to be watching this in the wake of seeing 'Snowden' by Stone. I'd really like to read Stone's feedback on this series. He may actually be the person who enjoys it the most or hates it the most.

There is of course the scene in Woody Allen's 'Annie Hall' whereby Woody's character Alvy Singer is castigated by his second wife about using his suspicions of a conspiracy to avoid having sex with her. The entire series seems to be a great effort to prove Alvy Singer wrong.

Return Of The Repressed Anima

Science Fiction has a unique trope; it can be described as a mash up of a Freudian concept with a Jungian concept, and it is the return of the repressed who happens to be the anima. The psychological aspects of the series point to this notion whereby in his distress at his divorce, Jake regresses to a state which is served by a comforting nostalgia where he can indulge in fantasies that include saving the day and killing bad people. In that fantasy, the repressed figure returns to complicate the psyche's response, and this is the mother according to Freud. Except, a better way to understand it is that it is the anima who has been repressed who returns.

Sadie, like so may other science fiction female characters before her is the anima to Jake. What's interesting about Sadie is perhaps that she fits so well in the 1960 landscape with her platinum blonde hair and blue eyes, she looks like Eve Marie Saint in 'North by Northwest' as well as Kim Novak in 'Vertigo'. The Hitchcock vibe hits a fever pitch in the last episode when Jake and Sadie race against time to stop Lee Harvey Oswald. Hitchcock of course was very interested in the return of the repressed mother, and so took great pains to construct his plots around the Freudian concept.

In that Hitchcock-ian section, the characters killed by Jake also return to haunt him - there is Harry's evil dad, there is Sadie's evil ex-husband, and Bill from Kentucky, all the characters who died along the way and Jake essentially represses so he can continue on his quest to stop Lee Harvey Oswald.

The reason we can see the feminine as the anima as described by Jung, rather than mothers as proscribed by Freud is because they form a dynamic relationship with the protagonist. An early example might be Rotwang who creates the robot in 'Metropolis', in the image of his dead wife, but quickly shape shifts to look like Maria. Equally, Rachel in 'Blade Runner' is created in the image of a dead daughter to the tycoon Dr. Eldon Tyrell. As with these characters, Sadie steps in to fill the void not once, but thrice. First, as the new love Jake finds in 1960; second as the returned dead in the second 1960 Jake re-sets to; and third, as the woman who complements the dance of death, at the end of the series.

Sarah Gadon's performance as Sadie is one of the most haunting things you will see.

The Unspeakable Irony

Stephen King being the horror writer that he is, can't resist two bits of irony that are notable. The first is that the world the ensues a saved JFK, gives way to a disastrous George Wallace presidency which plunges the world into chaos and the post-apocalyptic world to which Jake returns. The other, is that in a bid to pin the whole blame of the assassination on Lee Harvey Oswald, he is forced to portray the FBI as largely incompetent. In real life, Lee Harvey Oswald claimed he was the patsy. In King's telling, it is the FBI who are the patsies, and necessarily so because it can't be the Secret Service or the CIA given that he is adhering to the Warren Commission.

King lays the blame at the feet of the FBI, for in his view expressed through Jake, it was the FBI's job to keep an eye on their target, Lee Harvey Oswald. It's an interesting telling because it echoes the terror stories we are seeing around the world today where suspects fall off the watch list and then go on to do terrible things. King may very well be right, in which case no amount of money or competence is going to solve the problem of lone nut gunmen, past present or future.

I guest it does bear asking, what good the FBI is if it can't follow up on a guy who puts it into writing and submits to them that he's going to shoot he President. At the end, the entire series posits that the Kennedy Assassination is not worth worrying over. That seems rather ironic at the end of 8 great episodes on the trail of the assassin.

'Silicon Valley' - Seasons 1-3

Comedy In The Tech Age

It is nice to see a punchy comedy and it comes courtesy of Mike Judge, creator of 'Beavis And Butthead' and 'King of the Hill'. Mike Judge is a polyglot. He's played in bas as a musician, he's created some of the iconic animated comedy of the 90s, and he's even given us superlative films in the 2000s. Turns out he even worked in Silicon Valley once upon a longtime ago, and so he conceived of this series based his observations from that time.

The show is a masterstroke.  It brings into light a world we only ever dream about, even if it's through a distorting mirror glass of comedy. The world of tech development is a funny strange paradise of ideas.




What's Good About It

As a comedy writer Mike Judge is unforgiving. I don't know where all the energy for furious satire comes from, but it is something fierce in his output. This is after all, the man who gave us the magic mushroom hell scene in 'Beavis and Butthead Do America' as well as Lesbian Seagull from the same movie. He is equally unforgiving with his satirisation of the tech billionaires as well as those who aspire to be one. Indeed, Silicon Valley and the tech sector has grown to rival Hollywood and the entertainment sector in America as being the most representative industries. There are a lot of people digging for gold in the world of tech. 'Silicon Valley' goes after everybody imaginable for their foibles as well as greed. And it is a delight to watch.

The characters are excellent. It finds a perfect balance between the apparent mundane-ness of being tech workers together with the absurdities that arise from the stupendous wealth that cane had. It depicts the gold rush of the Twentieth Century that is unfolding with tremendous satirical bite.

What's Bad About It

Look, there's not enough okay? There needs to be more. More episodes. Lots of them.

What's Interesting About It

The show has an interesting way of infecting your sensibility about money and the tech business. Without knowing, by relating to the characters, you are drawn into the fundamentally speculative nature of life. In wanting the characters to succeed, we are wanting what they want and with them, failing to understand its meaning.

Elon Musk apparently doesn't think the show is accurate, but TJ Miller who plays Erlich Bachman thinks it's because the joke is on Elon Musk and his fellow tech billionaires. Erich Bachman is the most interesting character in the ensemble of characters because he alone seems to understand how the worlds interrelate - that is to say he has perspective on what it means to be tech worker as well as a non tech worker, and aspires to be a tech billionaire specifically because the victory conditions are seemingly so attainable. The other characters are funny, but they have some part of the combination missing.

Richard and his programming cohorts, as well as Monica desire to be tech billionaires but they have no idea what it is to be a non tech worker any more. Jin Yang wants to be a tech worker, but he has no idea how to live a normal life in America. Gavin who runs Hoopli has no idea how the world looks outside theSilicon Valley any more and only seems to have tenuous grasp of the relative importance tech outside it, and Bighead singularly lacks the intelligence to understand the meaning of work or wealth.

As crazy as Erich seems to be, it's actually the other way around - everybody else is a little nutty because they're living and working in Silicon Valley, divorced from the world outside. Erlich is driven batty precisely because he understands all aspects of life and knows where he wants to be. He's not faulty because he's crazy. He's crazy because what he wants to be is essentially faulty and yet he is working very hard towards it. If you've ever wanted be a rock star, this is very easy to understand.

Backstage To The World's Greatest Magic Show

Arthur C. Clarke of course said that high tech would be indiscernible from magic to a lower tech society. We're at the point in history where we don't quite get the tech we have running at our fingertips. In the Big Now, our technology has become divorced from our own understanding of the world unless one is firmly working within technology. That is to say the problem of car mechanics being the gatekeepers of car maintenance knowledge,is exacerbated by just howler down the road computers and technology have become.

Today, humanity can use this technology but it is very unlikely they understand how it is made. Nobody can fix this stuff - and the solution has been to make the tech disposable. In a sense, the whole technology industry is the industrial light and magic for all of us to keep playing and working in this brave new world.

The delightful thing about this show is how it gives us a snapshot of how precarious the magicians live and breathe as they try to carve out a niche. It is very much like the sorcerer's apprentices trying to animate the brooms. The topic of animated automata going out of control appears more than once in the three seasons so it is not like the show hasn't considered its own logic.

"Making The World A Better Place"

One of the funnier mantras of the show is how every tech startup entrepreneur sells their vision with the tag line, "making the world a better place". When you think about it, it's the kind of line that could apply to any piece invention in history, and yet the tech sector solemnly embraces the mantra. The mantra itself is rather Steve-Jobs-ian.

The co-founder of Apple who famously dropped acid and dropped out and meditated and went to India and thus drops a long shadow over this world, particularly so in the world of 'Silicon Valley'. The world of tech heroically (in its own eyes) tries to tug the future out from the unseen into our hands. To do this, the tech sector gives itself tremendous licence to explore our own desires. The unbounded funniness of 'Silicon Valley' rests in the fact that most of our desires that need serving are spurious, trivial and maybe a little deranged. It isn't a fine line between wanting to do some useful things with a computer like work, and wanting to animate a moustache on every video feed. The inability to discern that line can be very funny.

Is the world a better place if all of our trivial, spurious and little deranged needs are serviced by technological innovation? The show leaves it for us to laugh the notion out of the room. The answer to that rhetorical question, as Erich intimates is, who cares? The world can be a bacchanalia of technological innovation. Something is always better than nothing. Ultimately technological innovation which would make the world a better place - like the means to reverse Global Warming in an economically viable way - will come out of Silicon Valley. But until it actually does, it can be the butt of jokes in this series.

'Snowden'

The Secret History Of Today

The Guardian had an advance screening of Oliver Stone's new film 'Snowden' so I got to tag along. I was hoping for somebody from the Production to turn up and talk about the film but the Q&A apparently turned out to be about whistleblowing and journalism. I didn't stay for it as I headed to a pub for a feed.

Of course protecting whistleblowers is important, but nobody really steps up to protect those people because they are in a sense, enemy of the state when they do that. The state, has long arms, even longer than the ones it's supposed to have by its own laws. And that's enough of a topic for Oliver Stone to be making this film.

As Oliver Stone films go, it's not as didactic as his other historically inspired films. It feels much like a docudrama, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt's performance is a standout. Rhys Ifans turn as "O'Brien" was brought with accent issues. Nicolas Cage has an odd cameo-like role trying to restrain his Nicolas-Cage-Acting, and Zachary Quinto too is understated even by his standard of understated-ness.



What's Good About It

The film lays out who the guy was in the context of the US Security apparatus. We've been told by Barrack Obama he was a hacker. The Stone film begs to differ - and even subtracting from the myth-making for which Oliver Stone has a propensity - the man is not some low level hacker that glommed on to state secrets and absconded. No, he was implicitly and explicitly a careerist in the institutions of surveillance and espionage.

The film goes to great lengths to explain just how intrusive the government had gone through the use of its technology, and how enmeshed the military industrial complex has become in being able to prosecute a data wagon every individual on the planet. As an Oliver Stone film, it's relatively short on bombast and discursiveness, but the cerebral nature of the concern is undeniably Stone's work.

What's Bad About It

It's rather unclear about Snowden's own moral conversion to seeing the point of view where this kind of government surveillance was actually a public problem that had to be dealt with in the public sphere and debated. The motivation is weak - as far as cinematic and dramatic depictions are concerned. That being said, he might indeed have just had a eureka moment that made him do the whistle-blowing.

There's also a lot more to Ed Snowden getting to Russia on his way to Ecuador, which is glossed over with a montage towards the end. The film sort of starts telling that story but curtails that venture quickly and finishes off with a scene to do with Ed Snowden presenting his case in a public forum. The film was already long, but it could have done with the escape from Hong Kong.

What's Interesting About It

The rampant growth of the US Security apparatus came about in the wake of 9/11. It is often argued that the intelligence failure in preventing 9/11 led to this rampant growth, but the film argues that the terror threat is small potatoes next to the big issue of fighting a cyberspace war with China and Russia. Neither of those two states have any democratic shackles to put on their surveillance and espionage in cyberspace while American democracy affords itself restrictions, and thus you have agencies who lie to governments about what they do and how.

If this film were made prior to 9/11 describing an imaginary 2013, it would have been a science fiction-tinged action movie directed by the late great Tony Scott - probably starring Will Smith and Gene Hackman. Yeah Tony Scott sure had this story down even before 9/11. As things stand, Stone's film is a very sombre film after the fact, about just how much the US surveillance system has grown and how paranoia may indeed be the most appropriate response to the increased surveillance. Essentially it confirms all of the paranoia from 'Enemy the State'. The sombreness is to be expected given that when you find out all the fantastically wild paranoia is legitimate, your world grows that much colder.

It's Not A Conspiracy Theory If They're Really Watching You

Just how invasive is the surveillance? We've been told by Edward Snowden, just how much infiltration and malware distribution and cyberspace intrusion goes on with not only other nations' leaders but also just about any person on the planet with an internet connection. It's a strange feeling to come to the realisation that these organs have been listening in all the time to everything and have everything indexed ("Hey, including this blog! Somebody's reading this site! Hooray!") and the notion that the world is totally transparent to those who watch creeps you out.

This stuff used to be the provenance of conspiracy theorists. If you talked about stuff like this, people would joke and tell you to go get your tin foil hat. Well, let's look at that "tin foil hat" for a moment.

The reason "tin foil hats" is a thing is because the tin foil hat represents an attempt to place a Faraday cage around one's head to stop electromagnetic scanning of the brains and thus block agencies from scanning one's thoughts. This far fetched notion that a government might be interested in one's private thoughts is pretty much the crux of the issue, and there are no tin foil hats to help us from the prying government. The government, it turns out need not scan the inner workings of your brain, they merely need to parse the output of your mind - all of it - in order to figure out what you are thinking.

At this point in history, we had better accept that the surveillance state is fully in motion, fully in operation and minimally supervised with negligible oversight. It goes so deep and wide, a faraday cage won't protect you.

Oliver Stone's Getting Sad

There used to be an animal gusto to Stone's films. Whether it was the bombast of 'Platoon' and the slow motion as Sgt. Elias buys it in a hail of bullets, or Al Pacino's marvellous speech about life being about "a game of inches" in 'Any Given Sunday', which crescendoes like an emotional volcano. The best bits of Oliver Stone's films had a stink, a skunk musk of animal spirits. This film was surprisingly short of that kind of blood-guts-and-glory. It's probably a better film for not going to the emotional bombast but at the same time I just want to note just how conspicuous by its absence of bombast this film is, in the annals of Oliver Stone movies.

Maybe Oliver Stone was feeling very dry about the topic because the film has an emotional dry quality to it, even when it touches upon the passion Snowden has for his girlfriend, and the emotional turmoil that is central to Snowden's decision to go public with the secret. I don't know if a dried up desiccated Oliver Stone is all that fun in the movie house. I kind of missed the swagger and full-throated declarations. Maybe he's getting more circumspect. He may even be getting sad. It was weird because I felt sad for him, and he's a very successful film maker. He shouldn't need my sympathy, but watching it, I felt sympathetic for him.

View From The Couch - 14/Sep/2016

Speaking Of Walkouts...

Everyday brings more stupidity. Heck, not content with the abject Stupidity of an Abbott Government in 2013, we-the-people opted to vote back in the same bunch of stupid politicians from the Coalition but also three (not, one, not just the red-headed flaming political retard that is Pauline Hanson but THREE flaming political retards) OneNation senators.

Today was Pauline Hanson's maiden speech in the Senate which bore a striking similarity in tone and classlessness and crassness that marked her maiden speech in the Lower House twenty years ago. I guess the more things change, the more we find out they really don't.

Twenty years and four days after claiming the nation was in danger of being "swamped by Asians" in her maiden speech as the independent Member for Oxley, Senator Hanson revived and updated her original warning, telling her Senate colleagues she "was back", warmly thanking a packed public gallery, and claiming she was there to help a nation "in fear". 

"…Australia is now seeing changes in suburbs predominantly Muslim," she said. "Tolerance towards other Australians is no longer the case. Our law courts are disrespected and our prisons have become breeding grounds for Muslims to radicalise inmates. 

"Muslims are imprisoned at almost three times the average rate. The rate of unemployed and public dependency is two to three times greater than the national average. 

"Muslims are prominent in organised crime with associated violence and drug dealing. 

"Anti-social behaviour is rampant, fuelled by hyper-masculine and misogynist culture. 

Multiple social surveys find that neighbours of Muslim settlement are suffering from collapsing social cohesion and fear of crime. 

"Australians in general are more fearful." 

It was then that the Greens Senators began leaving the chamber, but Senator Hanson, who had began her speech with a shaky voice, was undeterred. 

"Islam can not have a significant presence in Australia, if we are to live in an open, secular and cohesive society," she said. 

"Never before in Australia's history have we seen civil unrest and terror associated with a so-called religion and followers of that faith. 

"We have seen the destruction we have seen it is causing around the world. If we don't make changes now, there will be no hope in the future. 

"Have no doubt that we will be living under Sharia law and treated as second-class citizens with second-class rights, if we keep heading down the path with the attitude, 'She'll be right, mate'."

That the Green senators walked out is not surprising. I'm trying to imagine myself as a senator listening to this tripe, and I have to admit it would be hard not to walk out, but a rational side in me says you kind of have to stay in the ring for the good fight. Leaving the battlefield is defeat.

The SMH ran their little poll at the bottom of that article asking whether we think it was right for the Greens senators to do as they did. So far the response i split 52-48. It's a good question, one which I struggle to answer decisively. On the one hand I think a senator of the land deserves to be heard out, but on the other, there is a limit to the stupid prejudice one can lend one's credibility to, in listening (or even pretending to listen). It's an ethical dilemma.

One view is that by walking out, it gives validation to the undeserving Pauline Hanson. Yet sometimes there are showings so bad, you just have to walk out. Like Malcolm Roberts.

'Tis Spring, The Stupid Is In Full Bloom

I didn't blog this yesterday because well, where do you start with this massive tumult of stupid that has suddenly walked into our Senate. Not since Incitatus in ancient Rome's senate have we witnessed anything so spectacularly dumb as Malcolm Roberts.

Praising Britain's recent decision to leave the European Union, which had the power to set laws and regulations affecting domestic laws in member countries, Senator Roberts called on Australians to launch an "Aus-exit" from institutions including the UN and International Monetary Fund. "Australia's values and way of life are also at risk from insidious institutions such as the unelected swill that is the United Nations," he said. 

"The EU is a template for total socialist domination of Europe through unelected bodies, such as the IMF, forcing their frightening agenda on the people. It is also the UN's template, and Australia must leave the UN."

"We need an Aus-exit," he declared.
Senator Roberts profusely praised his mentor Pauline Hanson as "Our Pauline". Video footage shows the One Nation leader repeatedly shaking her head and rolling her eyes.

He might not be the full horse but he certainly is the horse's ass. Really, Malcolm Turnbull and the Coalition were so distraught with having to deal with Ricky Muir and Glenn Lazarus, they've fiddled the rules and thus allowed back in this spectre of idiocy we had hoped to consign to history. Truly, this is pathetic.

Jesus Fucking Christ what have we come to in this country?

Identity Politics

Subjectivity Is Bloated Self Importance By Any Other Name

Good God, there's a controversy in challenging identity politics. Challenging the legitimacy of identity politics has been the work of the Right for some time. Whether it be Andrew Bolt banging on about how somebody isn't completely indigenous and then getting caught up in 18C, or the George Brandis claiming people have a right to be bigots, it's usually the Right that pretends identity politics is all crap because when we talk about men, what we - allegedly - mean is everybody.  Thus according to the Right, we do not need to change our language or culture because women and minorities are covered by men in "all men are equal under the law."

Ah, would that were it so, because what the conservatives of this country then do is pretend the issue has been addressed and continue to discriminate against gender and ethnicity. Which is why it is apparent that the true purpose of the Law and conservative institutions of this land resent injustice but the perfectly pitched practice of hypocrisy.

Be that as it may, it's not like the Left doesn't have issues with identity politics either - and it comes down to a very simple thing. Identity politics goes nowhere. It doesn't lead to a liberation, it doesn't lead to freedom from the things which oppress us. Considerer a moment a black American writer like James Baldwin. Baldwin would say readily that acknowledging and establishing the black culture within the white American cultural hegemony doesn't in of it self liberate him or his people. If we are to properly look at it with the proper Marxist critique in a cultural studies sense, it should be obvious to anybody with any amount of objectivity that identity politics is in fact a cultural dead end. The logical end point of being that kind of writer or artist or musician or cultural practitioner wielding identity politicises that it places you in a ghetto with your fellow identity politics purveyors.

This is what I call the 'SBS Stratagem', whereby the state sanctions a special space - in the guise of affirmative action - which invites people on the basis of their identity politics, than then quarantines them away from the mainstream. The 'SBS Stratagem' is there to provide a vent for the identity politics to express itself in the media, but in away that does not endanger the hegemony that already exists. It's a bribe offered to the minorities so that they can have a say, but in a way that does not compromise the Anglo-Irish hegemony within Australian society. To prove this point, you only have to look a the the overwhelming white-ness of the commercial channels and their product.

The really strange thing is how many writers and artists are totally dependent on this bribe, and how they never challenge it. Instead they hold it up as a sacred absolute that the state should sponsor their brand on identity politics. Which brings us to the righteous indignation hurled at the American author Lionel Shriver for expressing disdain.

Shriver, who famously wrote the book We Need To Talk About Kevin, spoke of cultural appropriation and political correctness in her keynote address starting off the back of a story of a group of American college students who were criticised for wearing sombreros to a Mexican-themed party. 

She went on to lash out at critics of a white British author who wrote about the experience of a young Nigerian woman.

Critics of the speech said Ms Shriver's attitude and theories, which they accused her of hiding behind humour and under the guise of dangerous ideas, ignored issues of identity and culture. 

One of those who walked out of the speech was celebrated Australian writer Yassmin Abdel-Magied, who wrote a blog post about it, said the address harked back to colonial rule. 

"It's not always okay if a white guy writes the story of a Nigerian woman because the actual Nigerian woman can't get published or reviewed to begin with," she wrote.

*Groan*. Does it really? Does it really hark back to colonialism? Doesn't it hark back to colonialism much, much more to submit to the 'SBS Stratagem' where people allow their identity politics to not threaten the hegemony? I mean really... Cultural Appropriation? Have people thought through the idiocy of this problematic? 

It's hard to discern Shriver's political views in the conventional leftist-or-rightist sense. I've not read her books (barely watched the adaptation 'We Need To Talk About Kevin' and laughed at it) so I can't really be certain. I've read an essay written by her just to gauge where she sits, and it's really interesting. It's clear she's done a whole lot of her thinking about many issues involving gender and identity. She is very nuanced about her own gender to the point that she disowns the gender political position. 

As externals of identity like the shape of our ears and even our sex become medically malleable, we seem to be entering an era where everything about ourselves that we don’t like is subject to revision. I may have been born in North Carolina, but I feel like someone born in New York. I may have a father who was a seminary president, but I feel like the daughter of a coal miner. Can I expect my fellows to jolly along with this idea of myself, and inquire after my father the New York coal miner? The transgender reversal of pronouns has a disturbing quality of insisting that the outside world conform to subjective experience. Today’s widespread compliance on this point has the quality not only of “virtue signalling,” but of a creepy pandering, a condescending complicity. For women who transition to being male, having been born female is a fact, even if it’s a fact they’re not happy with. In actually changing birth certificates to identify babies as the sex this person came to feel like, we rewrite history. This way lies mass hypnosis—an Orwellian sense of truth. Because gender is not merely a social construct. It is a biological construct.

Clearly this isn't some right wing nut trying to deny people's identities exist. It's somebody who has reflected deeply on the nature of identity as a social construct (Hello Wittgenstein!) and therefore open to proceeding with the deconstruction - a legitimately 80s kind of leftist pinko philosophical move - and I emphasise that because whatever her political colours are, she's done her homework and has come to a conclusion that is unpopular but backed by a sinewy hard slog or logical reasoning. Her views on gender aren't a product of fashionable conceit. This is somebody saying your identity politics is "virtue signalling" that actually is creepy pandering and condescending complicity with the very thing that alienates you. She's dead bang on the problem of insisting the outside world conform to the subjective experience, leading to a slippery slope of fooling around with the legitimacy of truth and facts. 

So what do the idiots who walked out have to say further? 

"In making light of the need to hold onto any vestige of identity, Shriver completely disregards not only history, but current reality. 

"The reality is that those from marginalised groups, even today, do not get the luxury of defining their own place in a norm that is profoundly white, straight and, often, patriarchal. 

And in demanding that the right to identity should be given up, Shriver epitomised the kind of attitude that led to the normalisation of imperialist, colonial rule: 'I want this, and therefore I shall take it.'." 

A festival volunteer Yen-Rong Wong, also responded to the speech in a blog post.
"As a semi-aspiring writer myself, and one who has sunk a significant amount of time and brain power to discussing subversive women and Othered characters in non-Western societies, Shriver's address was alarming, to say the least," she wrote. 

"The publishing industry is chock full of white men, and advocating for their 'right' to write from the perspective of someone in a marginalised position takes opportunities away from those with authentic experiences to share. In other words, the subaltern continue to be silenced, and still cannot speak." 

As a result of the backlash, Brisbane Writers Festival organised a "right of reply" event, giving writers like Ms Abdel-Magied, Rajith Savanadasa and Suki Kim the opportunity to continue the conversation.

I need a face-palm icon. Talk about the Regressive Left. 

It's only earlier this year that there was a report saying the publishing industry in America at least, was predominantly white but female. It would surprise me none to find the same in Australia and the UK ("not that there's anything wrong with that, Jerry"). Cultural studies likes to rail against the patriarchy and white men holding all the positions of power and all that, even when the localised reality is really quite different. It's idiotic to put the theoretical orthodoxies ahead of facts on the ground. Lionel Shriver's obviously burst a lot of people's bubbles but she's right. Identity politics is borne of the bloated subjective and the demand for a personal exceptionalism, when in fact nobody's really interested in the stupid subjectivity of stupid people. 

You can just imagine what the "right of reply" event is going to be like. A two hour session of people insisting on and legitimating their bloated subjective positions, which, ironically would prove Ms Shriver's point as to why it's so moronic and unproductive. Look, don't take my word for it; Helen Razer is bound to comment on this walkout and she won't be kind on these idiots. 

Politcal Donations Are The New Inefficiency

The Best Democracy Money Can Buy

It's kind of laughable that the first casualty of this Parliament is an ALP Senator, but that's what we've got with Sam Dastyari stepping down as manager Opposition business in the Senate and shadow spokesperson for consumer affairs - and, really, rightfully so.

"In the past week, it's clear that the ongoing examination of my behaviour is taking attention away from bigger issues facing Australia and Australians. Yesterday, I called a press conference and answered questions. Today, I have reflected on that and decided that wasn't enough. It's clear to me now that this has become a distraction. 

"I made a mistake and I'm paying the price. For that mistake...I will continue to serve with pride as a senator for New South Wales and I look forward to serving a Labor Party government in the near future in whatever capacity I can."

...and so that went. To be frank about it, I'd say Senator Dastyari fucked it up well and good, and looked terrible when he went and defended the Chinese position in the South China Sea even before it was evident that he was on the take from the Chinese. The moment you end up mouthing propaganda for another sovereign government, you disqualify yourself from your own. The bit where you took money for it only lessens your character. The propagandising for others is a form of treason.

Political donations will continue to be a topic that never gets fixed; a little like Negative Gearing and Asylum Seekers stuck in off shore detention centres. It's an issue but our government has no spine to fix it. Really, Sam Dastyari's case is being looked at in the wrong way. It's not just that he peddled influence for another government for a measly sum of $1600-odd. It's that other entities can buy influence of MPs for the same measly amount of money and it passes their own scrutiny. That is to say, it's okay for Barnaby Joyce to court the donations from Gina Rinehart, because she's an Australian citizen and hat she wants is conservative policy - according to Barnaby. Make no mistake, our politicians are for sale.

The truth is, there's a whole, bunch of people with way too much lobbying power through the weight of money, and so if it's not straight out corruption of access through money or policy formation through lobbying with money, it's going to be junkets an trinkets and wining and dining to put a point across forcefully. Otherwise, how does one explain the extraordinary influence of the mining lobby in Canberra? The Coalition obsess over the relationship between the unions and the ALP, but equally suspect is the relationship between the business lobby and the Liberal Party. That being the case, it's no surprise John Howard doesn't want the donations rules to be changed.

It's a bit of a joke because Mr. Huang who has donated over a million for both sides of politics thinks the Chinese get a bum deal because for all the money they've donated, the politicians of this country simply don't do as Mr. Huang says. If that bit of mumbling doesn't tell you what the expectation is for those who donate money, you'd be sticking your head in the sand, ostrich-wise. I guess the good news is that the needs of Australia still outweigh the needs of China in the eyes of our politicians, but even so the Sam Dastrayi thing together with Barnaby Joyce' contention reveals just how blasé these politicians have become about these donations. It certainly explains NSW politics, it would be a fool to think it's not affecting national politics.

I've mentioned before how vested interests ate out the prosperity of Japan. The same thing is happening here, but nobody is doing anything about it.

Embrace Of The Serpent

Up The Creek Without Colours

We are at the point of cinema history where each and every great film is inevitably built on top of the legacy of other great films, and that their discursive nature rests upon the evocation of the earlier films. In most part it takes the form of homages, but in other instances they are outright thefts. The interesting thing about this film is that you can't quite tell what is being quoted, what is an homage and what is simply duplicated out of the diminishing options of the setting.

The great predecessors to this film peep through ever so often and it makes you wonder.
Here's the obligatory spoiler alert, but in many ways you might have seen this film before, just in pieces contained another films.




What's Good About It

It's not as if the world has resolved any of the complex problems of civilisation and its conflicts with nature. Nor can we say that the colonial conquest of the new world has exactly ended or that the world is better placed to resolve these conflicts and contradictions of humanity's place on this planet. All of these themes are compressed into this film, which ultimately is a journey up the river much like 'Heart of Darkness'. Instead of the Congo River, we are treated to the journey up the Amazon River by two men, across two different times, but with the same guide. It is no less disturbing than Joseph Conrad's novel.

What is intriguing is that the two men are in search of a flower, which immediately casts the two men as Gilgamesh an the guide as Utnapishtem. Even in the most exotic of settings, the story echoes back to the origins of human civilisation. The quest for the flower is the quest for immortality in 'The Epic of Gilgamesh' - this in turn is the great quest of modern civilisation itself as it reaches deep into the junglier search of esoteric knowledge. The image of the ever present water invokes within us the deepest, archetypal stories of civilisation - except it turns it on the head as a story of moral failure.

The performances are interesting because they seem stilted, yet natural. The veil of the foreign language obscures from us the nuance of the language and so we rely heavily trying to read the expressions of the actors, but the actors give up so little. It's is very engrossing and challenging to watch at the same time.

What's Bad About It

It's a shame the film is too reverential about the history of cinema itself. There are moments where you can spot the shots that were re-framed form films as diverse as 'Andrei Rubylev', 'Apocalypse Now', 'Aguirre, Wrath of God', 'Baraka and even '2001: A Space Odyssey''.  There are moments that derive their roots from the same intellectual concerns as 'Koyanisqaatsi'. There even moments that might be a riff on 'Empire Strikes Back' where Luke dos to train with Yoda in the jungles of Dagobah - not because Dagobah was a jungle planet, but because the passing of wisdom to the younger man on the quest is structurally the same.

It's very post-modern and interesting to setup these games with the audience, but you wonder if the film really needed those moments.

What's Interesting About It

Joseph Conrad really was on to something with his book because we keep coming back to the image of some person from the heart of civilisation going up the river. With the earlier iteration of 'Apocalypse Now', it was ironic because by casting it in the Vietnam War, the protagonist was bringing the American madness of civilisation with him as he went into the jungle in search of the rogue colonel Kurtz. The journey of Willard in 'Apocalypse Now' inevitably leads to a bloody and confused combat wherein Kurtz is killed like the sacrificial bull.

This film cleverly posits two possibilities through two different journeys, tied together by the same guide. In the first arrival at the destination, the younger guide destroys the flower in a bid to protect the pristine jungle and its sacred knowledge, denying civilisation. It is a moment filled with the tragic failure of the enterprise, much in line with Willard killing Kurtz. Yet in the second trip with the older guide, it is the older guide who changes his mind about the meaning of the journey up the river.

The older guide urges the young explorer to change, to transform his consciousness and see what the jungle people have seen. And so the sacred flower is consumed, revealing it self to be a consciousness expanding hallucinogen. The film reaches a different conclusion to the arc started by Joseph Conrad, and that may be the most interesting insight offered by the film.

The Transformed Man

Back in the 1960s, there was a lot of transcendentalism. This isn't just the Beatles with the Maharishi but also the emerging counterculture which involved drug taking and basically stepping out of family narrow social strictures. Indeed, the world of the 1960s is strangle alien to us, so much so that a show like 'Mad Men' can run that alienating effect out for 7 seasons - with themes important aspect being the transformation of the main character through transcendentalism. Now, that might all be hippy BS and a lot of poppycock for those of us who grew upon the emotionally spare and sentimentally austere 1980s under economic rationalism where such notions were consigned to history quite willingly and hurriedly as the world transformed itself into a globalised melting pot of corporate interests and Reaganomic Thatcherite profiteering.

Still, the man whose work comes to mind when watching this movie is Carlos Castaneda. The new worlds fecund with moments of transformation through drug-taking. The drug-taking has its origins in indigenous cultures and those cultures are deeply interested in the kind of knowledge the drug experience provides. It's interesting how 'Embrace of the Serpent' treats all of this aspect of the drug culture as a given, as well as affirming the meaning of existence. If we didn't have the signposts of other accounts, this would have seemed oddly out of place. Instead we understand it as implicit in the experience of living in the jungle. The meaning seems to fold in on itself as both narrative strands end up at the flower and the knowledge revealed is a bit like the the slit-scan sequence in '2001: A Space Odyssey'.

The question is whether modernity has transformed us at all. It appears the moment of transcendence can only be understood in the past tense, as something that happened in history. We are not moving towards it; if anything we are speeding away.

A Long Way Since Gilgamesh

In the old epic, Gilgamesh gets to the flower at the bottom of the sea but during the night a serpent comes along and steals it. There is an overlap between the sacred anaconda and the serpent that steals Gilgamesh's flower. Gilgamesh of course was transformed by his adventure to seek the flower of immortality, but not in the way he desired. In any case his quests an utter failure, just as the first quest
in this film which ends with the destruction of the cultivated flowers.

Thus, it is very interesting to see that in the second trek up the river, the explorer gets to the flower, and is then transformed. The film hints at the great distance of time from the first understanding of the world to a modern understanding of the world. We are still with great possibility, even as we speed away from the transcendent.

The older guide changes his mind about civilisation. He says that it is his job not to keep the sacred knowledge away from the civilised but to use it to transform civilisation. It's a big call and maybe a little too optimistic about civilisation. The civilisation which started with Gilgamesh's people turned a verdant forest land into the desert of northern Iraq today by chopping down the tree to bake the bricks. Is there any way to really transform civilisation when it is built on cities reaching out into the hinterlands and consuming the resources to extinction?  It's hard to share in the oblique optimism of the film.

View From The Couch - 02/Sep/2016

The Shoe On The Other Foot

There's this old story in Japan called 'Rakuda' - which I've made into a little video you can look up on YouTube. It's about a polite guy who happens to come across the corpse of a gangster, and the gangster's 'Bro' is there to make his day miserable. The Bro sends the mild mannered guy on errands to organise a little wake for the dead gangster, while holdings work tools hostage. Later that night, the two men drink to the dead man. The polite man undertake influence of alcohol turns into a massive bully who returns the bullying spades. Trust me, it's very black but very funny.

Right now, Bill Shorten is that mild mannered man, sticking to the Bro, Malcolm Turnbull. Maybe it's broader, the whole ALP is the polite dude turned drunk and ornery and angry, while the Coalition is the guy who is suddenly on the receiving end of the exact same bullying he dished out.

It's quite the spectacle really, to see a
Government lose a vote in the Lower House. It hasn't happened since 1962 when Menzies had a one set majority, so it's rather telling.

Peter Hartcher has called for Christopher Pyne to get the boot. Pyne has denied it was his fault, which is like the biggest "who farted?" moment in politics I ca remember since... well, I don't know. It is a rather large fart. You'd think the Whip would be in for a bit of whipping from the PM. Even the missing Justice Minister Michael Keenan is trying to dodge blame. Much as I despise Christopher Pyne, I don't think it's on him - it's surely on the Chief Whip for the Liberals. The difficult bit is that it's a woman. Lose her and the Coalition would be told they're dumping the blame on a woman. You can just see it now.

Anyway, it's all come to pass that in the first week the new Parliament sitting, the one seat majority government has already run into an all too predictable ambush. This may be the bit where we're all forced to remember just how well Julia Gillard's government did with two seats. Of course 2 is mathematically 100% better than 1 so this is going to get very interesting very soon.

Or as the raging drunk nice guy says in 'Rakuda', "One thing I learnt is that if you put your mind to it, you can achieve anything!"

What's In A Name?

I've been re-reading Bill James' Historical Baseball Abstract since I dug up that section on A-Rod, Jeter and Nomar. The most interesting things in life are in the marginalia. There are two MLB baseball players with the name Billy Hamilton. the one I was familiar with was this guy:

Billy R. Hamilton (born September 9, 1990) is an American professional baseball center fielder for the Cincinnati Reds of Major League Baseball. Hamilton holds the Minor League Baseball single-season stolen base record with 155 steals — 10 higher than the previous Minor League record set by Vince Coleman and 25 more than Rickey Henderson's record set on the Major League level. He also holds the Cincinnati Reds record for most stolen bases by a rookie in a season.[1]

The thing to know about this Billy Hamilton is that he's very fast on the base paths.Now, in the 1890s section of Bill james' big book is a name Billy Hamilton  describing him as the best all round player of 1891, but also, the man with the most steals in the 1890s.The earlier Hamilton it turns out, was just as much a speed demon around the bases as the modern Billy Hamilton.

Hamilton broke into the major leagues in the American Association with the Kansas City Cowboys in 1888. He established himself as a star the following season by batting .301 with 144 runs and 111 stolen bases. In 1890, the Cowboys, who were ceasing operations, sold Hamilton to the Philadelphia Phillies. The next year he led the NL in batting average (.340), runs scored (141) and hits (179). For a third consecutive season, Hamilton led the NL in stolen bases. 

In 1892, Hamilton hit both a leadoff and game-ending home run in the same game. Only Vic Power (1957), Darin Erstad (2000), Reed Johnson (2003) and Ian Kinsler (2009) have accomplished the same feat.[4] He hit .380 in 1893, which led the major leagues.
Philadelphia outfielders Hamilton, Sam Thompson, Ed Delahanty and Tuck Turner all hit over .400 in 1894. That year Hamilton set the all-time standard for most runs scored in a season (198); since then, Babe Ruth has come closest to Hamilton in runs scored, with 177 in 1921, setting the American League and modern MLB record. Hamilton also set the record for most stolen bases in one game, with seven on August 31, 1894. He set the record for most consecutive games scoring one or more runs, with 35 runs in 24 games in July–August 1894.[5] 

Hamilton led the league in steals for a fifth time in 1895. In 1896, Hamilton moved to Boston, for whom he played his final six seasons. Although his numbers declined, Hamilton still scored over 100 runs in all but two of those seasons. 

Hamilton retired after the 1901 season. Over his career he compiled 912 (or 937; see Career total discrepancy) stolen bases, a .344 batting average and 1690 runs in 1591 games; he is one of only three players to average more than one run per game played. His .455 career on-base percentage ranks fourth all-time behind Ted Williams, Babe Ruth and John McGraw, and his 912 stolen bases ranks third behind Rickey Henderson and Lou Brock. 

He is the Philadelphia Phillies career leader in batting average (.361), on-base percentage (.468) and stolen bases (508). He holds Phillies single-season records for on-base percentage (.523 in 1894), runs (196 in 1894), stolen bases (111 in 1891) and times on base (355 in 1894).

I know, it's utter trivia. The two men are not immediately related. It's coincidence - if you have 100,000 names, you will get doubles like any set of baseball cards.

Economic Growth, They Say

They're Doing It Wrong

Nick Xenophon made an interesting remark last week that the RBA should shift its focus from inflation and on to nominal GDP growth. This is one of those interesting shifts worth considering because which ever way you look at it, inflation isn't the problem it used to be when Keating cut the RBA independent of government, so that it could independently set rates with the ai of controlling inflation. We're at a far cry from the era when Paul Volcker tamed inflation in America through jacking up interest rates. That world seems quaint, for we haven't been in that environment sense before the Dotcom Bubble burst at the turn of the Millennium.

Anyway, here's something interesting by Greg Jericho, going into the rationale for why Nick Xenophon might push for that change:

With the current policy, the worry is always that were inflation to rise due to fiscal policies, then the RBA would raise interest rates.

Thus we had the absurd situation last year where then Treasurer Joe Hockey was claiming the RBA had “room” to cut interest rates because the Abbott government’s spending cuts meant it “had been able to control the inflation genie”.
He said this at a point when underlying inflation hadn’t been above 3% for five years and nominal GDP was growing by just 1.3%.

Targeting nominal GDP resets the conversation.

Rather than having the government cutting spending (which reduces growth) in order to allow the RBA to cut interest rates to stimulate growth, both the fiscal and monetary arms could focus on improving growth – and it would put more pressure on the government rather than the current situation where it is leaving most of the work up to the RBA. 

Given government revenue has been hit due to the decline in nominal GDP growth, making that a focus would also assist with improving the budget balance.

Yes, it would make too much sense but of course the system isn't built for quick handbrake turns of policy like that, no, no.

It's worth going back to Glenn Stevens' last speech as Governor of the Reserve Bank.

Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens has used his farewell speech to implore the Turnbull government to take on more debt, saying that rate cuts alone can no longer "dial up the growth we need". 

Although interest rate cuts still had some effect, they worked through encouraging private borrowers to borrow more and had "possibly less" effect than in the past.

"The problem now is that there is a limit to how much we can expect to achieve by relying on already indebted entities taking on more debt," he said.
The government had far more room to borrow and spend than the private sector – owing only 40 per cent of GDP instead of 125 per cent.

"Let me be clear that I am not advocating an increase in deficit financing of day-to-day government spending," he said. "The case for governments being prepared to borrow for the right investment assets – long-lived assets that yield an economic return – does not extend to borrowing to pay pensions, welfare and routine government expenses, other than under the most exceptional circumstances. 

"The point I am trying to inject here is simply that popular debate in Australia about government debt and how we limit or reduce it seems so often to be conducted while largely ignoring the size of private debt. Foreign visitors to the Bank over the years have tended to raise questions about household debt much more frequently than they have raised questions about government debt."

So it's one thing for Nick Xenophon to say we need the RBA to prioritise growth rather than whacking signs of inflation. Given the toolset available to the Reserve Bank, which is basically raising or lowering the interest rates, there's really not much more the RBA can do to help growth.

That is to say, the limits of RBA policy - any Central Bank policy - resides at the zero-bound where Zero-Interest-Rate Policy lives. Glen Stevens may well retort to Nick Xenophon, "what the hell do you think we've been doing for the last 8years since the GFC, with historically low interest rates?"

Indeed, that's exactly where the Bank of Japan is at, trying to get economic growth to happen. It's trying massive "trans-dimensional" quantitative easing and yet there are minimal signs that the Japanese economy is coming out of its long slump. The conservative Prime Minster of Japan is telling the heads of the major corporations to raise wages instead of sitting on hoarded profits. It's a wild frontier of Central Banking experiments over in Japan, and really, I'm sure they wouldn't care which came good first, growth figures or inflation figures.

I'm going to go out on climb and say something that would scare fiscal conservatives and hawkish bankers. What Australia needs is a kind of debt forgiveness. So if the economy ends up at the Zero-bound with ZIRP, the RBA needs to forgive the private sector debt and helicopter that printed money into banks. People are going to hate that because basically they'll scream "moral hazard",   except when the economy has flatlined at the zero-bound, then the whole show needs a complete re-boot; and if there's one thing that keeps any economy from re-booting, it's debt.

Ben Bernanke's 'Helicopter Money', Applied

The logic for doing Helicopter money in Australia is pretty simple. People are not spending money because they're busy paying down mortgages as fast as they can. This isn't doing much good because it means the money goes from the bank to employer to employee and back to the bank without going through the economy. So you alleviate the mortgage stress, and the people will be inclined to spend their money. The government hands the printed money to the banks, buying out the debt on paper. Immediately there should be inflation because people now have money to go spend it on the next asset, That's when the Central Bank can re-set the interest rates at a more historic normal level.

Of course, it won't go that way because the bankers would lose out on long term money, but that would be the point. Somebody has to take a loss and the bank would have to get its money while losing out on future profit based on the booked loans. It hasn't happened because ultimately the economy is owned by the 1% and the 1% stands to make nothing out of "helicopter money". But the alternative is the current, comatose, low-growth low-inflation state in which we find ourselves.

The problem with QE as it's been carried out to date, and lots of it, they're finding in Japan, is that the money simply doesn't go to where it's supposed to go. The BOJ stuff the banks full of money, but the banks don't lend to sell businesses and entrepreneur. The lending practices still tend to lead the banks towards lending for fixed assets like property - and even then there's just not as much of that going around. The big companies of Japan's old industrial growth era are still profitable but they don't pay out dividends, and they don't give out pay-rises. They tend to sit on the big piles of cash and say they see nothing in which they want to invest.

The only way to make sure the money gets out an about in the economy is to hand it to the consumer and have them spend. In other words, it's like Capillarity Up economics. They cam very close to pulling the trigger on 'Helicopter money' this year in Japan, but at the last minute they held back. I guess there is something fundamentally weird for government stop simply be giving people money. Be that as it may, the Japanese may eventually have to do it; and if the precedent is set, other countries will do it. It's not like it's a new idea.

The Wisdom Of Solon And All That

It doesn't get discussed a whole lot unless you read a bit of ancient history. Solon, famously forgave debts. He also forbade the export foods except olives. He encouraged the cultivation of olives specifically as en export commodity. Meanwhile he forbade the export of foods because if staples got sent away, the poor would starve and that had terrible consequences for society. If you asked Solon, he'd object to 'Helicopter Money' as a policy but his big thing was debt forgiveness.

The ancient world is full of instances of debt forgiveness. The people in power in the ancient world probably looked at debt as something that becomes intractable and kills the economy. The Romans famously refuse to forgive debt and of course the aftermath of the Roman civilisation were the Dark Ages. So it is worth pondering what the hell we're going to do with a financial system that has created so much debt the world's GDP cannot begin to repay it. It's not likest's a problem that's going to go away. The more it sits there, it's going to chew away at the future, just as it is doing right now, only worse.

That's the historic context of all this bickering about debt. Something tells me the debt won't be forgiven, there won't be Helicopter Money, it's all going to crack up and turn to shit right before our very eyes. So much for civilisation.

Quick Shots - 27/Aug/2016

Balancing Books On The Backs Of The Poor

Scott Morrison is an ideologue, even under the heavy makeup he wears pretending to be pragmatic. Otherwise it's hard to understand the meaning of his speeches and how they connect to what he does as the Treasurer.

Heading into its fourth year in office, the Coalition government is again warning of a complacency in Australian politico-economic discourse, which blithely accepts rolling budget deficits as normal. 

Tilling the soil for a looming budget savings battle when Parliament resumes, Scott Morrison notes that most Australians have not experienced a recession in their adult lives and thus don't appreciate how terrible they can be. 

This insouciance has allowed for long-run operating shortfalls, and worse, an electorate-wide failure to realise that being structurally in the red is no way to go into a sharp global downturn, even if deficit financing is the obvious response once one occurs. 

Reworking Joe Hockey's infamous age of entitlement message with its notorious "lifters and leaners" dichotomy, Morrison believes too many people pay no tax effectively, and that the country is in danger of sleep-walking into economic distress because of a lack of imagination. And past political will.

And to that extent what he will do is start by cutting the dole. This is while the rich end o town still get to keep their superannuation perks. In other words, he is putting the poorest of Australians first into the firing line in a bid to fix the bottom line of the government. It's a novel idea if you don't really understand what that would mean, and it's an absurd idea if you do understand the ramification of such a course of action. Yet, this is the man.

Just as a contrast, the previous Conservative PM of Britain David Cameron - he of the Brexit vote and other calamities such as austerity - once said during the GFC that one thing his government would not do would be to balance the books of the government on the backs of the poor. Whether he meant it or not, or was able to do as he stated or not, I do not know. However, as positioning statements go, it's a lot better than "lifters and leaners" or "Taxed and Taxed-nots". I guess if you're the party that insists on conserving the class system, it pays to show some class sometimes. Seeing that we live in a class-less society according to the blue bloods, it is not that surprising to find conservatives in this country show no class whatsoever.

For whatever it's worth, this pic was doing the rounds from Get Up!:

He Doesn't Understand The Problem

On a related topic, there's this interesting defence of the Prime Minister's $5 for the homeless person.

This week the Prime Minister spoke with a homeless guy in Melbourne and put $5 in his begging cup. Our mainstream media followed accusations that the PM was "stingy". This story – and picture of the Malcolm and the man with his cup – was reported around the country and was even reported in the New York Times. Now I never tell anyone to vote for any political party and I don't mind when people criticise government policy or lack thereof, but to call Malcolm Turnbull "stingy" is an outrage.

I don't know if it is an outrage. His government just cut $4.00 per week of dole money. If you looked at the $5 charity, it's like he's giving one person a one-off compensation for a shitty cut to benefits while he gives the middle finger to the rest. It's not that the Prime Minister is stingy so much as he doesn't understand that he's part of the problem that keeps the man homeless and on the street.

Malcolm has been here many times, sometimes with cameras and many times without. As the Bible says, good deeds should be in secret. 

He's put on an apron or sometimes just sat and spoken with homeless people in our community. Many times since those days when we were on the brink, the Turnbulls have helped us with breathtaking generosity. 

I happen to know that the help we've received is just the tip of their charitable iceberg. "Stingy" is not a word I'd ever use to describe our PM. 

Imagine the story in the media if the PM had put $100 in the cup? Our culture will be crippled and miserable when we become incapable of seeing an act of compassion.

It would still be myopic of the prime Minister tithing he's doing any good. It's pretty simple. He's the Prime Minister - he should be able to devise policy so there is minimal level housing available to the homeless, if people's homelessness really worried him. And if he can't it can only because he's too stupid or too incompetent or too unwilling to do just that; honestly the problem isn't whether the Prime Minister is stingy or not.

Gosh you know what? You never used to see homeless people in Sydney before '96. Certainly not in the numbers we're seeing today. People could be down and out and downright unemployable but the dole was there to make sure they could afford a place to live. It's not surprising that since John Howard won in 1996, Australia has somehow managed to create a class of misery out there all the while enjoying 20-odd years of economic growth. It just doesn't make sense that this is what has become of our nation. This is all a product of Neo-Liberalism. 

'Stranger Things'

80's Nostalgia

You know, it is really strange that I spent the 80's waiting for it to be over. I had a good time, and I was still this miserable son--of-a-so-and-so because the things that were happening didn't seem all that exciting. Maybe it was because on some level the 70's NYC experience was so much more formative than the 80's Sydney experience. All I know is that I've had this feeling of trying to find my way back to a feeling I had when I was younger. A fleeting moment here, a remembered emotion there. We all grow up even when we resist it as hard as us Gen-X have tried; time marches on inexorably and the inevitable crust and barnacle forms on your soul. You forget who you were a long time ago, even when you feel like you haven't changed all that much.

And then you discover other people are trapped by the past as well. The past is haunting. It's never what you remember it to be, and it's even weirder when you see somebody else's fiction about it. 'Stranger Things' is exactly that kind of TV series that evokes a lot and makes you remember the things you once yearned for, but it also reminds you of what is no longer there. It's funny, but it's also deeply tragic.

Spoiler alert, because it would be unfair if I didn't tell you now.


What's Good About It

It's like watching a mash-up of 80s movies. There are moments that come straight out of things like 'Stand By Me' and 'E.T.', while other moments are snatched from 'The Thing' and 'Gremlins' with a deep nod to 'Alien'. The whole thing is made up of fiction piled one on top of the other. The references in the dialogue echo 'Star Wars' and 'The Empire Strikes Back' while the tropes of a sleepy town Sheriff going on a search in to the woods is Stephen King. Somehow it all stays together without spinning out of control.

Indeed, the series is full of homages to films long past. Even 'The Wizard of Oz'. Eleven is Dorothy in a strange Oz and the boys are respectively Tin Man, Scarecrow and the Lion. When they walk along the train tracks in search of the Gate to theVale of Shadows, the quartet echo the quartet of 'Stand By Me', who walked along the rail tracks. When the kids are on the run from government agents' cars, as they ride their bicycles, they are Elliot and E.T. - but instead of them flying over blockades, Eleven flips a government van instead. At one point Sheriff Hopper finds himself in the Vale of Shadows, looking into a going husk of a large egg, a clear visual homage to 'Alien' - and he should know better than to peer in because Alien came out in 1979.

The kid actors are great in this series. There is nothing to top the sense of adventure in adolescence and the domain of the mind. It is a potent combination of intuition and imagination. The entire series of events hinges on the understanding the kids have of otherworldliness. Much like 'Stand By Me' and 'E.T.' before it, the adventure centre around the concept of the world as seen from kids. They're very well cast, not for them are the good looking boys of Will Wheaton, River Phoenix, of 'Stand By Me'. This bunch looks more likely as future candidates of Frank Zappa's band where ugly was not a problem.

David Harbour's Sheriff Hooper is strongly reminiscent of Jack Nicholson's look in 'The Shining', which adds to to the Stephen King thing going on. There are plenty of 80s tropes to pick at and laugh about so it's generally mirthful.

What's Bad About It

I wouldn't say it's bad, but I did wonder about Winona Ryder's performance. She's the lone actor in this series that comes with a high profile even though she's been out of the headlines since her days as the 90s It Girl for creepy movies. You take one look at her and you know it's all a certain kind of fiction, and it makes harder the wilful suspension of disbelief.

I waster so I can spot the anachronism well enough. Most of the production design is spot on but the wardrobe and makeup lapse into problems. Just because it's satin 1983 doesn't mean everything is from 1983, at the same time, the most likely things to be up to date are teen fashion and makeup, and there are some clunkers there. The blue eyeshadow here, the wrong kind of hairdo there, it's the little  things that occasionally poke out as being not quite right.

What's Interesting About It

It's actually quite Proust-ian with a Gen-X makeover. Instead of a madeira cake that evokes a lifetime of memories, it's a lifetime of memories tugged at through the idiosyncratic counterculture of kids. Instead of the whole story strung along on great themes of literature, it's strung up along Dungeons and Dragons. The monster in question comes straight out of the pages of 'the Monster Manual', it is the Demogorgon - and I must add it is one of my favourite monsters in the Manual:

Yes, that's him the Prince of Demons, and while the monster doesn't look like that in this series, it is unmistakably of Dungeons and Dragons. Why does one like certain monsters in the Monster Manual? I know my DM loved Owlbears, the "product of cruel genetic experiments" as per the Monster Manual. The rich Gary Gygax text provides hours of interesting meditation on civilisation. Somehow it is informing the abstract in this series.

This isn't 'Hook' where Spielberg condescends to understanding the culture of Gen-X kids - this is how the other kids not Elliott were living 1983.

Government Conspiracies

The show leans heavily on the conspiracy theories, and giving them more credence than one normally would. But here's the thing: Conspiracy Theorists rightly or wrongly get ridiculed. The problem with that is ridiculing Conspiracy Theorists is exactly what the CIA want you to do. The truth is, whether you believe it or not, the US government has always been doing things in secret involving lots of people. That, is the working definition of conspiracy so, it's not surprising it spawns speculation.

One of the more out-there bits of conspiracy theory way back when was that the US Government was secretly manufacturing the LSD that found its way into the West Coast counterculture. This is a claim that was documented at the time, and even Philip K. Dick uses it in 'A Scanner Darkly' as the central plot problem that gets uncovered by protagonist Bob Actor. Of course, it turned out MKULTRA was real, and the CIA were experimenting with LSD on people for purposes mind control.

This a certainly level of discomfort watching the bits to do with the Government agency running crackpot experiments on kids, but at the same time what would the world fiction be without governments doing nefarious experience on people? Information was hard to come by in the 1980s. It was easy for governments to keep people in the dark. The discomfort of watching it was a reminder that when sitcoms to the flow of information, maybe the 80s were closer to the dark ages than the current internet age.

The character of Eleven is far-fetched, but not as far fetched as we might have believed 1983.

Paranoia Has A Name And It Is Lando Calrissian

At the business end of the story when the boys go in hiding from government agents and they are contacted by Sherif Hopper, they immediately suspect the Sheriff has been compromised. They base this on the part of 'The Empire Strikes Back', where Lando Calrissian betrays his friends Han and Leia to Darth Vader. It's an interesting construction because the kids are right to suspect. They quote the Star Wars mantra "I have a bad feeling about this", and then make a leap of faith to trust Sheriff Hopper.

The world around the boys is filled with ambiguity in a way that Dungeons and Dragons eschews. In D&D, the world is divided into alignments, and the alignments dictate one's actions. The strange blurring of Government into what can only be described evil affects not only the boys but even the adults around them. The reference Lando Calrissian then is not just about betrayal, but the undecidability in the face of ambiguity.

The Rule Of Law And The Adventurer's Code

At one point the gang falls apart in dissension. It is the toothless boy Dustin who re-asembles the group by the dint of the adventurer's code and the strict adherence to the code, stating it is the Rule of Law. It's actually a strangely moving moment. Dustin cites the times the party is preyed upon by monsters simply because they did not stick together. Sticking together a the party is how to survive adventures. Splitters perish. The lessons of the game inform Dustin's forceful argument that Mike offer the hand of peace to Lucas. When Mike refuses to countenance, Dustin thunders it is the Rule of Law, that he who draws first blood in conflict must atone for the act first.

What's interesting is that Dungeons of Dragons does provide players with this insight. Carnies should stick together for the same reason parties should stick together. Disunity is, as the ALP found out, death. Certainly Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard and Bill Shorten et al. would have benefited greatly from this wisdom, and tarred and feathered Tony Burke.

If there are two observations to be made about what Dungeons and Dragons offers players is the insight that life is speculative and statistical, while our response to it needs to be tempered impartial as the law dictates. Sticking to party its rules saves lives in the game. Sticking to the impartiality of the rule before law renders possible all the things we hold dear.

It is therefore the crowning moment of the series when the three boys reconcile themselves and with Eleven. It is about as profound as anything in the annals of literature. The party should always stick together.

The Music

Gee y'know? That's exactly the music that made the 80s musically unbearable. Little did I know back then that things were only going to get worse. :)

The faux John Carpenter synth music as the theme however, is nothing but unmitigated coolness.


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