I love Andrew Bolt as though he were my own father (he's not, by the way - in spite of several remarkable similarities). Yes, you heard right - love. Alan Jones too for that matter. Miranda, Imre come collectively to my open arms! Symbolically only of course - I'm pretty sure you're all disease bearing.
While I'm at it, I love the bedraggled flanellette sporting revolutionaries with their Green Left Weekly and their daily changing roster of petitions. State smashers, anarchists, seperatists and revolutionaries of every hue, you too are loved from the safest of distances (ie more than an outstretched arm and pamphlet away).
My point being that I've always conceived of political debate as a kind of rugby scrum contested by those at the fringes, with the midpoint of political debate represented by the placid, inert ovoid of inflated pigskin. This sits aptly in my inept metaphor representing the middle ground of society - the unblushingly apolitical who in our sad, uninflamed, self-absorbed two party democracies are the ones who perversely have the ultimate sway on seemingly every issue. Proper debate in these circumstances involves a massing of effective forces at either end, and the struggle will then be decided on strength and ability.
I love the extremes of any given debate, because they allow the median so much more scope to shift either way. They enable possibilities and solutions for the midpoint that wouldn't otherwise exist. I'm suggesting the extremes of political debate are necessary to shift the consensus position by anything more than a fractional degree. And if you're a believer in change, a dreamer of a radically better world, you have to accept those who deal in the extremes to give us a chance of moving beyond the mire of the present.
But we don't have proper debate, do we? Notice how those on the Right all have names, and those on the Left are generic charicatures. Surely the Left has some names of note that could be placed at fly half or some other starring position? (nb I know nothing whatsoever about rugby, and have probably just demonstrated it.) Think about it - sure we have John Pilger and Michael Moore, but you don't hear either of those prosetylising daily in our newspapers or on the airwaves on any and every topic of the day. The truth is that those leftist commentators that we do hear from are rolled out usually to discuss their own particular area of expertise - people like Waleed Aly or Antony Leowenstein (on whom more in a minute) are permitted to discuss issues in their capacity only as specialists on issues such as muslim culture or Israel-Palestine. In this country, where is the space given to the Leftist demagogues spitting forth fire and brimstone on the issues of the day? Philip Adams has his spot on Radio National, but his brief is really broader affairs of the mind rather than current affairs (and forgive me, journalism for saying this, but it IS only Radio National).
John Faine might come across as a leftie some of the time, but you're left with an overwhelming sense that the only ultimate cause he has any faith at all in is John Faine-ism.
So what about Michael Moore, then? I find the rise of this hairy behemoth fascinating. Let's face it, he is first and foremost an entertainer. The real distinctive merit in his films lies in my opinion mostly in their humour, and through their resultant popularity he plays an immensely valuable role as cheer squad leader for the left. He is no sort of journalist whatsoever, and only really half pretends to be. If you strip all the gags and stunts out of his films what you're basically left with is a thoroughly incoherent mess in journalistic terms.
But here I think we're getting close to the heart of the problem, for Moore appears to have understood instinctively what most right-wing commentators woke up to decades ago - that the easiest means to popularise political diatribe is to present it as entertainment.
The Independent ran a fascinating article yesterday on the topic of American shock-jocks, in which they spoke with Dennis Prager, a syndicated conservative host based in Los Angeles. Prager put it quite succinctly in stating "there's really only one rule in talk radio, and that is that, whether you're on the left or the right, you can never be uninteresting. You can be an idiot. You can be a moral fool. You can be primitive. But you cannot be boring. Every sentence must hold the attention."
The Independent have also put together a fascinating selection of videos of US right wing media cadres (mostly from Fox News), which illustrates this point perfectly, and is well worth a look. CLICK HERE
With their props and their stunts, their wacky overblown voices, their Letterman style asides to floor staff off camera, there's no disguising which business these people realise they are in.
So why does the left not embrace this culture? Why can't we at least give as good as we get? Why should I be hard pressed to look beyond Mike Moore or Al Franken in terms of leftists who have worked this out. Why, when you realise how spectacularly successful these two have become have other figures not rushed to crowd the marketplace?
I think this says a lot about both the culture of the left and the culture of the mediascape more broadly. Firstly, there is a distinct po-facedness and a snobbery ingrained in leftist culture, which sets up an artificial and in my view extremely unhelpful dialectic between a moral, community-minded, caring-for-fellow-beings left and an amoral, uncaring, selfish, indiviualist right. The left time and again cloaks itself in the trappings of moral superiority, as though that in and of itself should be enough to make the truth of its arguments self-evident or self-fulfilling. There is so much wrong with the way so many on the left present themselves - they come across as arrogant, presumptive and self-absorbed. They're often having a conversation with themselves in terms that are significant to them alone. They're not trying to sell their message in terms remotely relevant to the very people they want to adhere to it, and in doing so they're almost saying "I assume you will gravitate to me by force of my moral superiority", and when an audience develops a sense that you are making assumptions about them, their beliefs, attitudes, values and feelings they don't just become unreceptive to it, they become offended by it, they feel morally pushed around, they'll ultimately actually react AGAINST it.
But the left so frequently maintains this self-righteousness, this seriousness, this smugness, this aloofness. It modes and mores are still more rooted in the nineteenth century than the twentieth - street demonstrations, petitions and pamphleting are still prevalent modes of "action", yet it could be argued that those that have been the Left's most successful advocates have sought to develop a mastery of more twenty-first century media - bloggers, viral campaigners and entertainers to the fore.
Another problem is that the Left is a fractious beast, and there is this continuous desire (again rooted in a much older political tradition) to recruit, to convert people to their own vision of the grand narrative amongst the tribes of the Left that works so severely against the body of Leftism as a whole, which is almost entirely absent in Rightist politics. I recently attended a lecture by Antony Loewenstein at Melbourne University, hosted by the good folk at Australians for Palestine. In order to make my way into the lecture theatre I, and every other interested party had to make my way past no less than five stalls, staffed by pamphlet-waiving recruiters, trying to get me to attend "Marxism 2009", or to sign on to one or another various causes, only one of which directly concerned itself with Palestine. Can you imagine ever attending a lecture by, say, PJ O'Rourke and being asked to come along to a One Nation meeting afterwards? The Right is happy enough to be spreading the word, and making it easy for people to do so. The Left in contrast is ever on the lookout to recruit, recruit, convert - partly perhaps from a culture of internal competition with so many varied, almost tribal movements at the vanguard.
And the existence of those fractious tribes highlights a further problem the left has in terms of being able to act as a united movement and get behind a particular individual and cheer them, advocate on their behalf, propel them to prominence. The Left in my experience (and it may be clouded somewhat by excessive exposure to the student political arena) is perpetually on the lookout for heresies and heretics. The various tribes have their own unitary, almost biblical "truth" - a set of values that bind its adherents together and separate them from the other respective movements. There is a sense in which elements of the Left appear at times more in competition with one another, more disdainful of those whose vision seems like a perverted or heretical version of their own, and thus more distasteful to them than the diametrically opposed views of the Right.
I haven't read Charles Firth's book American Hoax, and I don't need to, having heard him talk about it in person. Whatever you may make of Firth, the experiment itself is an infinitely fascinating one, and goes to the heart of what the real problem is here. In it, Firth sets out to establish a number of fake characters for himself via the internet, with the aim of trying to get them all fame. The conclusion is that the right-wing pundit was by far the winner in the exercise, to the point where it led to a series of uncomfortable situations for Firth whereby he was basically needing to reproduce the character in the flesh. Firth's inescapable conclusion was that the Right invariably acted like a cheer-squad to his views, they were friendly and supportive and glad to have a like-minded soul amongst them.
The response from the Left to Firth's leftist character could not possibly have been starker. They were distrustful, suspicious, unwelcoming of this newcomer to their rarified world. Who was this person? What credentials did they have? What was their specific views on X,Y, or Z? And as soon as any remotely divergeent view was found on any topic, it became a reason to tear them down, to dismiss them as impure, heretical, not truly left, or at least not a particular enough version of leftism to get behind. Firth concluded that while the Right offered a real sense of an open community, the Left (and when you put it in these terms it really highlights the ideological inversion) had a much more gated community, much more suspicious and fractured.
I fear for the future of the left if it cannot find a way to move beyond the culture it's become mired in. I despaired during Antony Loewenstein's excellent lecture. The key point for me wat when he revealed from discussions he's had with very senior journalists that the pressure applied to them by the pro-Israel lobby does work, and that several journalists themselves as good as said as much. The sad reality, Loewenstein asserts, is that every time they write anything remotely critical of Israel, they are bombarded with up to 500 emails and letters decrying their "imbalance". When they do the same vis a vis the Palestinians, they may receive one or two bits of correspondence, or more usually none. This, Loewenstein says, leads to an inevitable and often subconscious culture of self-censorship amongst reporters. What is clearly needed is a sense of community amongst those opposed to Israel's actions. It requires the left end of the scrum pushing hard, together and with a sense of purpose.
Yet at this very same meeting, discussion became hijacked by ideologues. One woman in particular felt the need to remind the meeting of the primacy of direct actions and protests to build the "movement". She saw the need for an "activist" agenda to alert people to the tragedy of the Palestinian people.
Well, no, people actually do know quite a bit about the plight of the Palestinians. People do care and sympathise with them. There are plenty of opinion polls to show that. The problem is that they're put off doing anything actively about it by precisely the kind of thing that these people presenting - a politics that tries to pitch everything in terms of a "movement". A politics that asks participants in this cause to yoke themselves to something bigger, more over-arching, and ultimately almost not at all in keeping with a concern for the Palestinians themselves, who care by and large not one whit for Marx, for the role of class or imperialism or whatever broader discourses shape their plight. They'd sooner have 500 people poised, pens at the ready to counter the Israeli lobbyists, to ensure their story is told in a balanced way by the media, to tilt the playing field of public opinion back in their favour where it rightly belongs.
It breaks my heart the way leftist objectives are continually usurped by ideology, the way an opportunity to pursue a common good - a meeting which could have been talking about how we can start organising a grouping to petition the media with the fervour the Zionists so readily muster, gets bogged down in discussion of modes of political activity rather than practical concerns.
I can't really see how to move beyond this though. I started out by saying I love those on the fringes for the possibilities they enable, but the reality is that those on the Right have a mode of political engagement which at present enables the fulcrum to shift more readily to their end - as though the rugby field has a natural lean that way. As though the inevitable force of political gravity on pigskin has it seeing an easier and clearer route trundling their way of its own accord. The problems of the Left are so deeply ingrained, so cultural that it's impossible from where I sit to see a way forward - confront them directly and you just get shouted at, and the divisions get worse. To shut those voices out altogether is impossible and counter-productive. But so's tolerating them and the damage they do, so I guess my answer is to blog about it and hope. Blog, and hope, blog and ...
Next Week: Part Two, the problem with media culture - stay tuned (nb I now have an RSS link, get your fill of bloodied marsupial in a heartbeat!)
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