And it is about the return of empire and slavery under different, updated names, and the Big Lies that are told to us daily, like how foreign investment brings jobs, when it always historically loses jobs and takes in untaxed profit away from our gutted shores the billions that else would make our streets and hospitals clean, and our highways safe, our trains frequent, and our state schools places of honourable encouragement and local pride; and as well, the biggest lie of all, believed universally now, that the greed worldwide of a few hundred thousand shareholders will always, always outweigh on the scales of justice the need worldwide of four billion ordinary working people …
A short, sad example of the lunacy of this cost-saving tendency occurred at the end of World War I. The light horse brigades that had won Beersheba (in the last great cavalry charge of history) and taken Damascus ahead of Lawrence of Arabia, and had been, overall, the best and bravest soldiers in the Middle East, were told that, in view of the limited space on returning troopships, they would have to shoot their horses before sailing home.
These were horses from their own farms in Western Australia, horses they had trained with, sailed with, fought with, slept beside, and won their battles with. They had been their companions, fellow warriors and friends. And now they had to personally shoot them through the head. Just to avoid the expense of bringing to the Mediterranean another couple of troopships to take the horses home. The men complied, and some are still grieving for the friends they were told to kill …
And it is May Day once again, and it is good to remember, however dire the surrounding patch of history we are for the anguished moment in, what it stands for, and sings in our hearts of what is past, and passing, and to come; that belief in community, that anthem of mutual striving and help that is best evoked in Dennis Healey’s great definition of socialism, which I never tire of quoting: ‘An obstinate will to erode by inches the conditions which produce avoidable suffering.’ We should learn it by heart. Lift the scarlet banner high. I thank you.
Speech to a May Day rally in Newcastle, August 1999,
And So It Goes
THE LANGUAGE, A SPEECH, 2005
From Sir Winston Churchill’s great forebear Lady Sarah Churchill, wife and consort of the Duke of Marlborough, comes, from her diary, my initial quotation: ‘Last night my lord came home from the wars and pleasured me twice with his boots on.’
How good that is. In eighteen syllables we see portrayed a national crisis, a decisive leader, a joyous meeting, a glad relief, an untiring ardour, a long night and an undissembled conjugal happiness through the wonder, word by word, of our language, or what used to be our language.
For the language was in pretty good shape back then, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, able to add to the ordinary physical vulgarities the human spirit, the religious dismay, the soaring wonder at creation that enflamed and informed humankind, and the lecherous idealism which in that pre-Freudian moral universe was a mystery even to its possessors. Here, for instance, is Boswell’s brief account of Dr Johnson’s courtship of his already elderly wife:
In a man whom religious education has secured from licentious indulgences, the passion of love, when once it has seized him, is exceedingly strong; being unimpaired by dissipation and totally concentrated in one object. This was experienced by Johnson, when he became the fervent admirer of Mrs Porter, after her first husband’s death. Miss Porter told me that when he was first introduced to her mother, his appearance was very forbidding: he was then lean and lank, so that his immense structure of bones was hideously striking to the eye, and the scars of the scrofula were deeply visible. He also wore his hair, which was straight and stiff and separated, behind: and he often had, seemingly, convulsive starts and odd gesticulations, which tended to excite at once surprise and ridicule. Mrs Porter was so much engaged by his conversation that she overlooked all these external disadvantages, and said to her daughter, ‘This is the most sensible man that I ever saw in my life.’
Note how unselfconsciously and unabrasively the Latin, Saxon and Celtic words are here commingled. Note how many verbs there are. Note how the adjectives ‘viable’, ‘sustainable’, ‘consensual’, ‘compatible’, ‘communicable’, ‘accountable’, ‘arguable’, ‘optional’, ‘pro-active’, ‘embedded’ and ‘non-core’ do not occur, nor the nouns ‘paradigm’, ‘benchmark’, ‘key performance indicator’, ‘world’s best practice’, ‘bottom line’ and ‘leading edge’. Note how little it resembles, not even for a second, any of Don Watson’s nightmare examples of language strangulation in his fine book Death Sentence. This one for instance:
This requires a commitment to the provision of adequate data so that informed evaluation can occur. There must be a commitment to the provision of statistical information that will facilitate effective monitoring and evaluation strategies and a commitment to the implementation of changes that are identified as necessary following evaluation.
This is from the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission – champions of freedom and free speech – who should know better. Compare it with another passage, also from the seventeenth century, on the same theme of adequate informational processing of priorities from John Bunyan.
As I walked through the wilderness of this world I lighted on a certain place where was a den, and laid me down in that place to sleep; and, as I slept, I dreamed a dream. I dreamed, and behold I saw a man clothed with rags standing in a certain place, with his face from his own house, a book in his hand, and a great burden upon his back. I looked, and saw him open the book, and read therein; and, as he read, he wept and trembled; and, not being able longer to contain, he brake out with a lamentable cry, saying, ‘What shall I do?’
Or this passage in the fifteenth century, from one of the first books ever printed, in which Sir Ector finds at last, too late – after riding many weeks to meet him – the corpse of his brother Sir Lancelot.
And when Sir Ector heard such noise and light in the choir of Joyous Guard, he alit and put his horse from him, and came into the choir, and there he saw men sing, weep, and all they knew Sir Ector, but he knew not them.
Then went Sir Bors unto Sir Ector, and told him how there lay his brother, Sir Lancelot, dead; and then Sir Ector threw his shield, sword and helm from him. And when he beheld Sir Lancelot’s visage, he fell down in a swoon. And when he waked it were hard for any tongue to tell the doleful complaints that he made for his brother.
‘Ah Lancelot,’ he said, ‘thou were head of all Christian knights, and now I dare say that thou were never matched of earthly knight’s hand. And thou were the courteoust knight that ever bear shield. And thou were the truest friend to thy lover that ever bestrad horse. And thou were the truest lover of a sinful man that ever loved woman. And thou were the kindest man that ever struck with sword. And thou were the goodliest person that ever came among press of knights. And thou were the meekest man and the gentlest that ever ate in hall among ladies. And thou were the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.’
Then there was weeping and dolour out of measure. Thus they kept Sir Lancelot’s corpse aloft fifteen days, and then they buried it with great devotion.
To which Don Watson genially ripostes with advice from the Victorian state government:
In defining our values, we have formed a range of acceptable and non-acceptable behaviours, which contribute to the success of implementation. Behaviours which indicate that we are complying with values and contra which indicate that we are not. For example, a key contra behaviour, that we are currently focusing on that was identified through our values, is employees displaying disrespectful behaviour towards clients and/or other staff members …
And on and on. How did our language get in this fix? What happened to verbs? What happened to clarity of utterance and vigour of thought? How did it happen that the language of Shakespeare and Milton and Tolkien, able to conjure a battle in Heaven, or Middle Earth, or Agincourt, is now reduced to the insipidity and vapidity
and dishonesty of ‘minimising civilian casualties’ and ‘collateral damage’, and ‘friendly fire’ and, oh yes, ‘weapons of mass destruction’, something I gather we are supposed not to have. For a weapon of mass destruction, I ask you to see Hotel Rwanda, and note how the ordinary, unassuming machete can in five weeks kill eight times as many people as the bomb on Hiroshima. We all of us therefore have a weapon of mass destruction somewhere in our tool shed. Should we give it up? Should we be bombed by helicopter gunships if we do not?
How did our language get in this fix? And how will it get out? Of our imminent escape from the verbal quagmire I am much less confident now than I was in 2002 when I wrote:
The first big task of the ruler, Confucius said, is the rectification of the language. Words are what, among the Great Apes, make us the smartest. Words are either our friends or our destroyers; they cannot be fairweather friends, they are one or the other. It would be nice to get words back where they should be, in bed, as it were, with their meanings, and I’m sure we’ll get them there some day.
I am not that cocky, comrades, anymore. For a heinous machine, the word processor – a sworn enemy of accurate spelling and consecutive thought – has replaced the Olivetti typewriter, typing paper and liquid paper, and the fountain pen and notebook and rubber, and the chalk and the slate, and pencil and schoolbook that made us physically engage with our thoughts in their new formation, our beliefs in their new apparitions, our memories in their new colorations, that made us take care before we set words down. These fearsome Kafkaesque contraptions – so difficult to persuade to show you a blank page and allow you to put words on it, and so eager to offer you criticism of even the spelling of your own name – have led to an alienation from meaning that well suits the world’s bureaucracies …
But as to the larger question here at issue today – whether paintings and sculptures in exhibition should be augmented, uplifted, decoded, deciphered, explained, by whirlwinds or tornadoes or willy-willys of words, swirled round with airy, impudent translation, decryption, deconstruction – well, of course they should. Without such verbal up-flurries the Mona Lisa would be a small green object of no account on sale at St Vincent de Paul’s for five or fifteen dollars, and without the concurrent majesty of the King James Bible, Gustave Doré would not have had an engraving career, and nor, without Dickens, would Phiz. And nor, without journalistic attention, would Picasso’s painting Guernica been spoken of much at all. For it is in the contemplation of objects moulded and printed and carved that some of our greatest writing has come to be. Keats’s poem on reading Chapman’s Homer, Robert Hughes’ book on Barcelona, Nabokov’s great page on Dutch painting, Lord Clark’s commentaries on civilisation, Ingmar Bergman’s response to a medieval painting on wood of the Black Plague, which was his film The Seventh Seal. It is in these interweavings of thing and word that we come with wild surmise upon thoughts we did not, until that moment, suspect were in the universe at all.
I thank you.
A speech to members of Sydney Art Gallery, March 2005
THE FREE MARKET
TUESDAY, 20 MAY 2008, 5.10 A.M.
Awesome images from China and Burma of storm, flood and earthquake, tens of thousands killed and millions displaced, government officials thieving aid parcels from starving Burmans and the US, as usual these days, impotent and barely raising the energy to shake its fist.
Worse were the fallen schoolhouses among adjacent buildings that did not fall. Each was built with a cheap material that buckled when the earth shook and so it was, and so it went, that in one-child China many thousands of irreplaceable children died at their desks in a fever of learning, killed in a second and gone for ever. Government permission was quickly given for mothers thus bereaved to attempt other children, but the many vasectomised husbands may be a problem. It would have been better to have spent more money on building materials that did not yield to the smallest earth-movement, the lightest puff of wind.
I walk by a Pittwater not yet risen to engulf my house, a Pittwater with few fish in it. I watch my dogs whiffle round a dead pelican, his beak askew, his beautiful feathers still intact. I pace and ponder, and soon I am writing in my notebook, seated on a rock, a piece for Unleashed:
The Chinese earthquake? Don’t worry about it. Let the free market sort it out. The Burmese cyclone? No problem. The Unseen Hand will fix it. No need to do a thing. Global warming? It’s a cyclical process. Our species will adapt to new conditions, or go under. Two kinds of thinking simultaneously rule our world. One of them says everything should be deregulated, freed up, let rip. The other says the planet’s in big trouble, and rigorous discipline is required to save it, shore it up, beat back the worst; or, in other words, regulation.
New Orleans showed how many people deregulation can kill, impoverish, humiliate, drive to suicide. Under ‘freed up’ capitalism, emergency services were downsized, dykes and levees not repaired, a great city swamped, weeping multitudes made to wait in mounting excrement for buses that never came; or, when they did come, old women boarding them had to leave their beloved pets behind and their ancestral homes to be looted; and young black hungry men were shot dead for raiding butchers’ shops to feed their mothers. Yet deregulation is good, we are told; the unfettered market will supply us with all we need. If people want to buy cluster bombs, let them. If they want to buy cigarettes, let them. The market will sort it out. Somehow it all shakes down. And the market will rebuild the wrecked hill villages in China and get the stricken survivors buying school uniforms again though all the schoolchildren are dead, the children of one-child families who can now according to free market principles be replaced, if their mothers are young enough and their fathers in the mood. The market, trust us, will sort it out.
In China, though, the market, or the market ethic, was the problem. The cheapest available concrete was used to build the schools that then fell down killing all the children, though the surrounding buildings stayed upright and nobody died in them. The concrete-buying process was deregulated, the cheapest concrete bought; there was no choice. The market ruled, and what a good thing that was. One of the arguments for socialism is it saves lives by regulation, by making sure the hospitals are well-equipped, the trains are safe, the food unpoisoned, the streets policed. One of the characteristics of capitalism if it’s unregulated is that nine-year-olds can buy cigarettes and offer their bodies up to prostitution if there’s a market for young firm flesh and a shortage of money in their family situation.
So do we need more regulation, or less? Do we let any farmer who wants to steal water from the Snowy or the Murray or do we regulate him? Do we need in the present world crisis a rule of law that benefits the whole community, or an unfettered freedom to operate that benefits the striving, roving, pioneering individual? It’s interesting how long this Doublethink has continued, the idea that freedom to pillage the planet is congruent with the need to save it. The Indonesian and Amazonian forests cut down. The oil sold to the billion motorists of China. The cluster-bombs that kill children and feed the terrorism that will one day nuke New York, or poison the tap water of London. The truth of it is that capitalism shares the ethic of the jackal, it feeds off corpses as readily as home-grown food, and socialism shares the ethic of the St Bernard dog, of helping stricken people when it can. Halliburton feeds off corpses felled in battle, while Great Britain’s National Health saves lives free of charge, or tries to. The money-or-your-life ethic of the American capitalist ‘managed’ health funds is the ethic of the highway robber, the mugger, the marauding pirate in the Caribbean in the seventeenth century: pay up, give us your treasure or you die.
Socialism has a bad name, bloodily earned by a tyrant or two, until you think what capitalism finally means in its heart of hearts. Moneyism. Darwinism. Devil-take-the-hindmost-ism. The freedom to gouge, exploit, enslave. The dollar rules, the people weep, and the body parts of executed prisoners and clubbed tourists we should be free to sell. There’s a need, there’s a customer, there’s a
resource, there’s a method, there’s a price. It makes perfect market sense.
‘Freedom is freedom,’ Abe Lincoln once said, ‘and it cannot be extended to include the freedom to exploit, or the freedom to enslave. For then it is not freedom, but oppression. For then it is not freedom, but tyranny.’
And the forests fall and the seas grow filthy and the ice-sheets slide into the ocean while we cry freedom for these our oppressors, our tyrants. And the world’s end nears. And Alan Moss is awarded ninety million dollars, the market rate, for assisting this deregulated, freed-up catastrophe. Deregulation? Let’s have more of it. You know it makes sense.
And So It Went
THE NATIONAL ANTHEM
We choose as our friends those we feel we don’t have to lie to, those who share with us a common set of assumptions on music, morals, reading, sport and entertainment options. We choose as our philosophy or our religion or our creed a set of rules that makes us comfortable, that doesn’t when it’s articulated make us cringe.
And it’s for similar reasons we all hate, I think, we all inwardly hate the Australian national anthem. We give way to untruth every time we stand for it. We give way to untruth every time we sing it. We are not stirred when we hear it at the Olympic Games. We feel vaguely shamed by it, as the Canadians, French and Finnish are not by theirs.
Bob Ellis Page 18