History Wars: Onward and Forward
By: Michael Connors
Wednesday 30 August 2006
new Matilda
Education in New Australia is just getting back on its feet. Although there are few resources, no texts, and teachers rely on the memory of demented old Australians, the teaching profession is increasingly confident that New History can be written.
Serving a population of 20,000 children on this small island is a cohort of young post-mutant teachers. They are proving able to instil in the minds of our young a regard for narrative and facts. Still there are many gaps in our knowledge, signified by the question marks that appear throughout the following report.
After the Global Flood (which the Turnbull Government claimed was going to be like a swim in a toddler’s pool) and the Great Nuclear War (which the same Government claimed was the final strike against the Islamo-fashionist terror of Europe), much of the social, political and economic infrastructure of Old Australia was devastated.
The new digital city of Onward (?) — named in honour of the longest sitting Prime Minister in Old Australia’s history — was wiped out. It is said that when the first missile hit, John Onward, retired and approaching his 100th birthday, was re-learning how to count with his favourite Minister, Abbott Costello. Both were beneficiaries of the new stool-stem research of the time.
Grand Court Gerontocrat Kevin Rudd, appointed Governor of Australia by the Chinese Rehabilitation Forces (may we be thankful for their presence), has now forgotten how to speak English and through translation from the Mandarin we understand that he merely repeats, ‘No John, that is not a shooting star; that is not a shooting star.’ This will be the title of our Year Zero history book: Not a Shooting Star.
As for the cause of Old Australia’s destruction, no one is sure if New American Empire missiles mistakenly turned on Australia or if the crackpots in Europe decided that if they were going down, then so were we. The Chinese Rehabilitation Forces (may we be thankful for their presence) have instructed us to ignore Old Australia and to begin our history from Year Zero and then move quickly to the era of the Chinese Rehabilitation Forces (may we be thankful for their presence).
There are those of us who seek at least to remember some moments of Old Australia, as it existed to our North. Unfortunately, there was not a single library or digital database left standing after the Great Flood and War. Any carbon-based text found after the War was used to warm scarred bodies in winter. It is surprising, too, that not a single copy of the mass-produced compulsory high school text Advance Australia survives. Written by G Makawish (?), many of our demented elderly remember it fondly.
We understand that sometime early in the century, the Onward Government, on the advice of learned academics, required schools to teach a linear narrative — and the narrative was ‘onward and forward’ — a happy coincidence of name and policy. Makawish’s history served that purpose. Oral historians have made great efforts to commit to memory key aspects of the book by speaking to the less demented elderly among us.
Some of the fragments that we have established include:
How Australian Aborigines welcomed White Australians and then got drunk and needed a long period of guardianship. An eminent Australian historian by the name of John Hurt (?) reputedly sought a return to 19th century local governors to ensure the wellbeing of the Indigenous peoples. We are not sure of the veracity of this history, but we do know that Indigenous peoples are now key to the survival of de-electrified, non coal-fired New Australia. So we now have John Hurt Day to commemorate the Onward Government’s visionary thinking in maintaining Aboriginal heritage and local knowledge. The Chinese, for reasons we cannot ascertain, chuckle about this.
Old Australians fought in 15 wars against Islamo-fashion terrorists. The first, in the late 19th century led to the liberation of White people from Black Muslims who sought to enslave White pioneers. More recently, the Muslim fashion empire in Europe under Hirohito and Stalhit (?) was defeated by a grand coalition of freedom-loving Old Australians and Americans. It seems a donkey was central to the victory. Despite this, the Islamic worm turned and renewed its hold over Europe, despite calls by respectable Rotary-going members that Christians should breed, and a lot.
In the first decade of the new millennium, Australia petitioned for statehood with the New American Empire. President Clinton (?) — no one remembers if this was a man or a woman — accepted the petition and stationed strategic weapon systems here to defeat Islamo-fashionism in Europe and Iceland.
The Introductory Chapter to Advance Australia is said to have decried the standards of teaching in Old Australia, and called for abidance with the following principles:
Patriotism — love of place and nation
Datism — expression of that love by knowing when the good things happened
Matism — the good times
Onwardism — always thinking of the future, not backwards
We can report that the recent Onward History Summit made progress with rediscovering the pre-History of New Australia and we now feel confident that in so doing we will be in a better position to write our own future.
While the Chinese Rehabilitation Forces (may we be thankful for their presence) are firm that we should not return to Old Australian history — it is only on that basis that we can go ‘onward and forward.’
Showing posts with label History Wars. Show all posts
Showing posts with label History Wars. Show all posts
September 8, 2007
The Howard Generation?
Cartoon by http://www.fionakatauskas.com/
They get called the ‘Howard generation,’ not yet the Howard Youth. They are supposed to be materialistic, manic 20-somethings who grew up when globalisation was background muzak and Buffy the Vampire Slayer was cultural comment. They didn’t so much discuss postmodernism as live it, ironically under Howard’s modern gaze.
The generation is fictitious, of course. But generational fictions hint at the spirit of the age.
In a recently published book Please Just F* Off It’s Our Turn Now, Ryan Heath, a self-appointed Howard-generational spokesperson with a propensity to bombast and offence, gives us reason to reflect on this spirit, and on Howard’s success in shaping today’s youth.
I don’t know Heath’s age; he might be 16, he might be 34. Let’s say he belongs to the long-20s generation — which ranges from the fake ID-card set to the soon-to-use BOTOX set. Heath writes in New Matilda 77 (link here):
So, about us. We’re global, responsible and live 24/7 lives. We’re pro-capitalist because capitalism supports the opportunity and the lifestyle we are used to. We support social solidarity because we want a market economy without a market society. We are libertarian about personal behaviour because we believe everyone has the right to be happy. That makes us individual, not selfish. As Damian Barr, author of Get It Together: Surviving Your Quarterlife Crisis, argues: ‘The self is absolutely at the centre of the iGeneration [a reference to iPods] ... I like me. I just happen to like you too.’
This is nothing less than a testament to Howard’s failure, his missed opportunity to mould a generation in his image. Instead of polite conservatives we have brazen capitalist libertarians who read quarter-life crisis manuals. They go to IKEA more than they go to church, as Heath points out.
Assuming that Heath has identified a real sociological entity, let’s explicate it (if you are under 30 you may delete ‘explicate’ and insert ‘pontificate’).
Being politically correct is now a form of satire. This generation says ‘chick’ and ‘hunk’ with no self-consciousness, and with some lust. Their chat on radio consists of uninhibited sexual innuendo and fart and dildo gags. Instead of the arts, the Howard generation holds up the narcissist’s mirror and watches reality TV.
Howard has not reversed the sexual revolution. In the last decade there has been a generalised liberalisation of sexual attitudes such that holding to 1970s identity politics is as revealing about your age as a Starsky jacket or a foxy scarf: gay has morphed into queer, and young queers and straights (who have yet to redefine themselves) mix in post-metrosexual venues. Such frenetic, consumption-identity driven change is enough to leave the ‘oldies’ out of breath.
Even ‘metrosexual’ is so yesterday. The He-Man and Barbie doll — played ironically of course — are back, intercoursing on/in all sorts of positions. They have sex before marriage, before they know their partner’s real name, and even before they realise they have had sex. Often, after a property investors’ seminar. Howard is not pleased.
That sex has not gone away is a mark of the limits of the Howard Decade.
Ditto, the erosion of good manners. Howard’s generation do not apologise when, with eyes on the mobile phone and fingers texting hieroglyphic expletives about last night’s bunking gymnastics, they bump into elderly folk.
However, despite its libertarian strand, this generation, seeded from Howard’s political loins, does offer some hope for conservatives. Many of today’s youth value the fact that Howard has apparently looked after the economy and the country.
With Mummy and Daddy’s support, they can still enter the property market. And the IR laws are perfect for those who have no plan to be in the same company in six months time and who believe they can rise above the rest. Who, they ask, wants to carry lazy losers through collective agreements? Howard is delighted.
Some have found their way to singing songs on a hilltop. Some travel overseas in pilgrimage to those who died for empire and liberty, instead of rising up and setting up a soldier’s committee that might have turned its guns on the officer-class. They then get drunk. But Howard won’t have a word said against them.
They value Howard’s ability to get away with things so that the greater good of Australia is protected. They’ve watched with amazement at his aplomb: he’s got us in with the US; taken us through the self-serving redemptive process of ‘liberating’ East Timor after abandoning it; he’s created a modern day ritualistic place for national identity in Bali; and he took us to war, and paid-off the enemy too. He is not so much self-centred as a centred-self of control and manipulation — the kind of person MBA students credit with ‘knowledge management.’ They think he is one funky nerd.
This is all to Howard’s credit — the shift from collective notions of good to individual ladders of opportunism, shaded by thin nationalism and religiosity. He has spawned a generation that missed the merry-go-round of the pointless 20s. Instead, they are on the I-can-do roller coaster. Risk is in.
But these value shifts, and the quasi-nationalism of self-centred Aussiedom, are not embedded, nor are they likely to be enduring. They’ve been built upon a more fundamental restructuring of Australia around self-consuming identity, where nation comes a distant second. Howard’s success lies not in furthering his own desire to refurbish Australianness, but in cutting the market loose, and in increasing that circle of self-regarding individuals driven by asset accumulation.
He has done little to foster the conservative social values that fit his vision, unless we are to regard racism, materialism, paranoia, the uttering of falsehoods, and the shrinking of the public sphere as germane to the conservative project. Howard’s Australia is a society of the centred self-centreds — and those who resist. And there are plenty who do the latter.
Howard has not won any culture war, despite the opining of columnists. The culture wars have slipped out of the clutches of the Left and the Right and gone down the road of capitalist gratification. This road sacrifices conservatism at the altar of a narrowly economist vision of the world. Howard’s failure is to have believed that economics, and a few sermons, would lead us back to white picket fences.
For desperate cynics, it would seem that the only way to get the Howard generation to read Australian history, as a form of civics, would be to restage it as reality TV show. They picture the youth of Australia through the caricatures that appear above, and they despair. For the hopeful, Howard’s failure makes the regeneration of progressive social values that much more possible, because there are many more people disillusioned than are enamoured with the marketing-self that neo-liberalism has conjured into being.
About the Author
Michael Connors teaches politics at La Trobe University. He does not believe that there are any meaningful generational categories in Howard's Australia. He uses them for purely heuristic purposes, just as the Government uses terms such as 'truth,' 'Australianness,' and 'achievement.'
New Matilda
They get called the ‘Howard generation,’ not yet the Howard Youth. They are supposed to be materialistic, manic 20-somethings who grew up when globalisation was background muzak and Buffy the Vampire Slayer was cultural comment. They didn’t so much discuss postmodernism as live it, ironically under Howard’s modern gaze.
The generation is fictitious, of course. But generational fictions hint at the spirit of the age.
In a recently published book Please Just F* Off It’s Our Turn Now, Ryan Heath, a self-appointed Howard-generational spokesperson with a propensity to bombast and offence, gives us reason to reflect on this spirit, and on Howard’s success in shaping today’s youth.
I don’t know Heath’s age; he might be 16, he might be 34. Let’s say he belongs to the long-20s generation — which ranges from the fake ID-card set to the soon-to-use BOTOX set. Heath writes in New Matilda 77 (link here):
So, about us. We’re global, responsible and live 24/7 lives. We’re pro-capitalist because capitalism supports the opportunity and the lifestyle we are used to. We support social solidarity because we want a market economy without a market society. We are libertarian about personal behaviour because we believe everyone has the right to be happy. That makes us individual, not selfish. As Damian Barr, author of Get It Together: Surviving Your Quarterlife Crisis, argues: ‘The self is absolutely at the centre of the iGeneration [a reference to iPods] ... I like me. I just happen to like you too.’
This is nothing less than a testament to Howard’s failure, his missed opportunity to mould a generation in his image. Instead of polite conservatives we have brazen capitalist libertarians who read quarter-life crisis manuals. They go to IKEA more than they go to church, as Heath points out.
Assuming that Heath has identified a real sociological entity, let’s explicate it (if you are under 30 you may delete ‘explicate’ and insert ‘pontificate’).
Being politically correct is now a form of satire. This generation says ‘chick’ and ‘hunk’ with no self-consciousness, and with some lust. Their chat on radio consists of uninhibited sexual innuendo and fart and dildo gags. Instead of the arts, the Howard generation holds up the narcissist’s mirror and watches reality TV.
Howard has not reversed the sexual revolution. In the last decade there has been a generalised liberalisation of sexual attitudes such that holding to 1970s identity politics is as revealing about your age as a Starsky jacket or a foxy scarf: gay has morphed into queer, and young queers and straights (who have yet to redefine themselves) mix in post-metrosexual venues. Such frenetic, consumption-identity driven change is enough to leave the ‘oldies’ out of breath.
Even ‘metrosexual’ is so yesterday. The He-Man and Barbie doll — played ironically of course — are back, intercoursing on/in all sorts of positions. They have sex before marriage, before they know their partner’s real name, and even before they realise they have had sex. Often, after a property investors’ seminar. Howard is not pleased.
That sex has not gone away is a mark of the limits of the Howard Decade.
Ditto, the erosion of good manners. Howard’s generation do not apologise when, with eyes on the mobile phone and fingers texting hieroglyphic expletives about last night’s bunking gymnastics, they bump into elderly folk.
However, despite its libertarian strand, this generation, seeded from Howard’s political loins, does offer some hope for conservatives. Many of today’s youth value the fact that Howard has apparently looked after the economy and the country.
With Mummy and Daddy’s support, they can still enter the property market. And the IR laws are perfect for those who have no plan to be in the same company in six months time and who believe they can rise above the rest. Who, they ask, wants to carry lazy losers through collective agreements? Howard is delighted.
Some have found their way to singing songs on a hilltop. Some travel overseas in pilgrimage to those who died for empire and liberty, instead of rising up and setting up a soldier’s committee that might have turned its guns on the officer-class. They then get drunk. But Howard won’t have a word said against them.
They value Howard’s ability to get away with things so that the greater good of Australia is protected. They’ve watched with amazement at his aplomb: he’s got us in with the US; taken us through the self-serving redemptive process of ‘liberating’ East Timor after abandoning it; he’s created a modern day ritualistic place for national identity in Bali; and he took us to war, and paid-off the enemy too. He is not so much self-centred as a centred-self of control and manipulation — the kind of person MBA students credit with ‘knowledge management.’ They think he is one funky nerd.
This is all to Howard’s credit — the shift from collective notions of good to individual ladders of opportunism, shaded by thin nationalism and religiosity. He has spawned a generation that missed the merry-go-round of the pointless 20s. Instead, they are on the I-can-do roller coaster. Risk is in.
But these value shifts, and the quasi-nationalism of self-centred Aussiedom, are not embedded, nor are they likely to be enduring. They’ve been built upon a more fundamental restructuring of Australia around self-consuming identity, where nation comes a distant second. Howard’s success lies not in furthering his own desire to refurbish Australianness, but in cutting the market loose, and in increasing that circle of self-regarding individuals driven by asset accumulation.
He has done little to foster the conservative social values that fit his vision, unless we are to regard racism, materialism, paranoia, the uttering of falsehoods, and the shrinking of the public sphere as germane to the conservative project. Howard’s Australia is a society of the centred self-centreds — and those who resist. And there are plenty who do the latter.
Howard has not won any culture war, despite the opining of columnists. The culture wars have slipped out of the clutches of the Left and the Right and gone down the road of capitalist gratification. This road sacrifices conservatism at the altar of a narrowly economist vision of the world. Howard’s failure is to have believed that economics, and a few sermons, would lead us back to white picket fences.
For desperate cynics, it would seem that the only way to get the Howard generation to read Australian history, as a form of civics, would be to restage it as reality TV show. They picture the youth of Australia through the caricatures that appear above, and they despair. For the hopeful, Howard’s failure makes the regeneration of progressive social values that much more possible, because there are many more people disillusioned than are enamoured with the marketing-self that neo-liberalism has conjured into being.
About the Author
Michael Connors teaches politics at La Trobe University. He does not believe that there are any meaningful generational categories in Howard's Australia. He uses them for purely heuristic purposes, just as the Government uses terms such as 'truth,' 'Australianness,' and 'achievement.'
The Intellectual Hard On
The intellectual hard-on: it's more common than you think
By: Michael ConnorsWednesday 27 July 2005
New Matilda
Being near power, we all know, is an aphrodisiac. When [prime minister] John Howard parades the streets of Australian cities, there is a sensory shift as hormonal overload affects the assembled masses. The effect is reciprocal. The Prime Minister often tongue-wipes his lips to control saliva output. This is all science, just the birds and bees of life, and should not be hidden from children.
To avoid such stressful scenes in the US, president George W. Bush entered a pact with the silencing-minority of pastors and reformed evil-doers (the born again crowd). He agreed to surround himself with dour, sexless men who sublimate their sexual desire to the greater cause of global conquest. With Wolfowitz, Bolt, Rumsfeld and Cheney behind the Presidency, the devilish hormones of the masses were curbed, and their hormonal power directed to the greater good of world order.
In grateful thanksgiving, the silencing-minority of the Christian Right instructed their assembled brethren to vote for Bush as President. The repression and redirection of desire may explain the permanently quizzical look that defines his Presidency. Metaphorically, his nuts are being squeezed. Freud taught us that repressed desire will lead to all sorts of deviant manifestations. He did not, however, to my knowledge, anticipate a lustful yearning for oil and a desire to remake the world in the image of an American town-hall.
Now, what happens when some vulnerable people get close to power and get turned on, such as columnists in important newspapers who tell us about their matey chats with world leaders? Or academics who attend conferences and, in cliquey circles, name drop: "Oh, well John suggested..."; "Gareth [Evans] was back recently, looking good". Or, when the said academics are desperate for material: "...Alexander [foreign minister] came to the party without his stockings, most disappointing". How does this close association with power affect clear thinking?
We can safely make a few assumptions. Sexual desire (even sublimated) is not known for facilitating careful thought. It has an inverse relationship to one's capacity for careful, impartial and considered thought. If you doubt this, when did you last work out your mortgage plan or ruminate on the meaning of life when you were in the throes of bliss?
The simple answer to what happens when certain people get to rub close to those in power is that they get intellectual hard-ons (what I call the IH syndrome). IH, I suppose, is analogous to Viagra induced erectile function. It appears to be substantial, is mostly linear, but it lacks internal consistency. To the afflicted, an intellectual hard-on provides them with the bravado to say anything that ingratiates them to the object of their affection. The words simply flow. I hope the analogy is clear.
To observers, the intellectual hard-on is actually a form of intellectual impotency. Government press releases become journalistic copy, or the basis of positive appraisal in academic papers. The critical faculties that might attend any endeavour to understand what is going on in the world are held in suspension (suspenders even). Impotency is a private matter, so I will refrain from naming. However, there is sufficient public case data to illustrate IH syndrome pathology in our broadsheets and tabloids. I will leave it for readers to determine who is so afflicted, but below I offer a few examples of the form IH syndrome takes ( I trust in the interests of patient confidentially, that readers will not Google these quotations).
Symptoms of IH Syndrome
A) When confronted with powerful arguments contrary to your worldview, draw ridiculous analogies. For example: "Pilgerist Chomskyism is ideologically fuelling the followers of Osama Bin Lenin, sorry, Laden..."
B) When in the company of the object of affection, the afflicted will pig-swill in the delusion of success. For example: "There is a core of faith in the Bush administration...that the US-led coalition will prevail in Iraq. And I am sitting in the office of Optimism Central, here in the Pentagon where Paul Wolfowitz, the US Deputy Secretary of Defense, chief intellectual architect of the Iraq invasion and high priest of the neo-conservatives, sits."
C) When everything suggests otherwise, trumpet the veracity of the loved one(s). For example: "On the big things - such as Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction -Bush, Blair and Howard have told us the truth."
D) And when finally the world has been screwed - forget moral codes, international law - all that matters is, 'was it good for you, too?'. For example" "The Iraq invasion is going to be judged on its results. Only specialists will worry about its legitimacy if the outcome is a stable Iraq that represents its citizens' human rights much better than Saddam did."
Admittedly, these are sharp examples. But as the morass that is the occupation of Iraq continues can we expect the end of the honeymoon between news and power? Unfortunately, patients do exhibit endless affection for their objects of power. The prognosis of those afflicted with IH syndrome is not good.
By: Michael ConnorsWednesday 27 July 2005
New Matilda
Being near power, we all know, is an aphrodisiac. When [prime minister] John Howard parades the streets of Australian cities, there is a sensory shift as hormonal overload affects the assembled masses. The effect is reciprocal. The Prime Minister often tongue-wipes his lips to control saliva output. This is all science, just the birds and bees of life, and should not be hidden from children.
To avoid such stressful scenes in the US, president George W. Bush entered a pact with the silencing-minority of pastors and reformed evil-doers (the born again crowd). He agreed to surround himself with dour, sexless men who sublimate their sexual desire to the greater cause of global conquest. With Wolfowitz, Bolt, Rumsfeld and Cheney behind the Presidency, the devilish hormones of the masses were curbed, and their hormonal power directed to the greater good of world order.
In grateful thanksgiving, the silencing-minority of the Christian Right instructed their assembled brethren to vote for Bush as President. The repression and redirection of desire may explain the permanently quizzical look that defines his Presidency. Metaphorically, his nuts are being squeezed. Freud taught us that repressed desire will lead to all sorts of deviant manifestations. He did not, however, to my knowledge, anticipate a lustful yearning for oil and a desire to remake the world in the image of an American town-hall.
Now, what happens when some vulnerable people get close to power and get turned on, such as columnists in important newspapers who tell us about their matey chats with world leaders? Or academics who attend conferences and, in cliquey circles, name drop: "Oh, well John suggested..."; "Gareth [Evans] was back recently, looking good". Or, when the said academics are desperate for material: "...Alexander [foreign minister] came to the party without his stockings, most disappointing". How does this close association with power affect clear thinking?
We can safely make a few assumptions. Sexual desire (even sublimated) is not known for facilitating careful thought. It has an inverse relationship to one's capacity for careful, impartial and considered thought. If you doubt this, when did you last work out your mortgage plan or ruminate on the meaning of life when you were in the throes of bliss?
The simple answer to what happens when certain people get to rub close to those in power is that they get intellectual hard-ons (what I call the IH syndrome). IH, I suppose, is analogous to Viagra induced erectile function. It appears to be substantial, is mostly linear, but it lacks internal consistency. To the afflicted, an intellectual hard-on provides them with the bravado to say anything that ingratiates them to the object of their affection. The words simply flow. I hope the analogy is clear.
To observers, the intellectual hard-on is actually a form of intellectual impotency. Government press releases become journalistic copy, or the basis of positive appraisal in academic papers. The critical faculties that might attend any endeavour to understand what is going on in the world are held in suspension (suspenders even). Impotency is a private matter, so I will refrain from naming. However, there is sufficient public case data to illustrate IH syndrome pathology in our broadsheets and tabloids. I will leave it for readers to determine who is so afflicted, but below I offer a few examples of the form IH syndrome takes ( I trust in the interests of patient confidentially, that readers will not Google these quotations).
Symptoms of IH Syndrome
A) When confronted with powerful arguments contrary to your worldview, draw ridiculous analogies. For example: "Pilgerist Chomskyism is ideologically fuelling the followers of Osama Bin Lenin, sorry, Laden..."
B) When in the company of the object of affection, the afflicted will pig-swill in the delusion of success. For example: "There is a core of faith in the Bush administration...that the US-led coalition will prevail in Iraq. And I am sitting in the office of Optimism Central, here in the Pentagon where Paul Wolfowitz, the US Deputy Secretary of Defense, chief intellectual architect of the Iraq invasion and high priest of the neo-conservatives, sits."
C) When everything suggests otherwise, trumpet the veracity of the loved one(s). For example: "On the big things - such as Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction -Bush, Blair and Howard have told us the truth."
D) And when finally the world has been screwed - forget moral codes, international law - all that matters is, 'was it good for you, too?'. For example" "The Iraq invasion is going to be judged on its results. Only specialists will worry about its legitimacy if the outcome is a stable Iraq that represents its citizens' human rights much better than Saddam did."
Admittedly, these are sharp examples. But as the morass that is the occupation of Iraq continues can we expect the end of the honeymoon between news and power? Unfortunately, patients do exhibit endless affection for their objects of power. The prognosis of those afflicted with IH syndrome is not good.
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