The face of debauched US capitalism was not some Machiavellian Ponzi schemer but Jim Cramer, a squealing celebrity investment adviser whose cable-television show uses ka-ching sound effects.

His relentless prosecutor was not a finance journo or government regulator but a greying comedian who claims he’s most comfortable throwing spitballs and making fart noises.

Yet despite the unlikely nature of the protagonists, last week’s epic media war between Cramer and The Daily Show host Jon Stewart provided more insight into the roots of the global economic meltdown than the sum of regular journalism on the subject.

What’s more, Stewart’s savage j’accuse has made him the champion of all bewildered workers who are watching their nest eggs, jobs and homes go up in pongy, panicky puffs and are wondering what the hell went wrong.

The Daily Show’s take on the financial crisis has been gold from the get-go. In January, Stewart — who is proving to be the smartest, funniest and most principled human being on telly today — marvelled at the waysupposedly respectable US financial institutions had been permitted to sell nothing more than the aroma of mortgages. Mortgage molecules, in fact.

“What do you need to do to go to jail for a financial crime?” he railed. “Do you need to do a financial crime and then punch a baby in the face?”

Now the award-winning comedian’s attacks on the influential CNBC business channel have gone viral on the internet and generated approving comments from as far up as the White House.

On March 4, Stewart crucified CNBC for bullishly talking up companies such as Bear Stearns days before they crashed and burned.

“If I had only taken CNBC’s advice, I would have a million dollars today,” Stewart said. “Provided I started with $100 million.”

Heated media back-and-forths followed, culminating in a Daily Show appearance by CNBC host Cramer last Thursday. In a riveting onslaught, Stewart accused CNBC in particular and the business media in general of sins of omission and commission when it came to honestly reporting on modern capitalism’s two markets.

“One [market] has been sold to us as long term,” he said to Cramer. “Put your money in pensions and just leave it there. Don’t worry about it. It’s all doing fine.

“Then, there’s this other market, this real market that is occurring in the back room, where giant piles of money are going in and out but it’s dangerous, it’s ethically dubious and it hurts that long-term market.

“So what it feels like to us — and I’m talking purely as a layman — it feels like we are capitalising your adventure by our pension and our hard-earned money.”

When a squirming Cramer tried to say it wasn’t him but some of the bigger boys, Stewart produced devastating internet interview footage of the former hedge-funder smirking as he encouraged short selling and manipulating the market with false rumours.

“I understand that you want to make finance entertaining,” the funny man saidwith icy seriousness. “But it’s not a f—ing game.”

And so say all of us who’ve lacked the pass code required for entry into this secret, second market, this gleaming executive bathroom where industrial strength deodorisers work overtime to disguise the smell.

In many ways Stewart’s fearlessness, pig-dogged determination and unwavering ethical drive is putting regular reporters to shame. What does it say about the health of the fourth estate when the hacks entertain and the harlequins newshound?

Yet it’s precisely Stewart’s outsider status as a lowly clown, as the follow-up act to a show starring crank-calling puppets, that leaves him free to call a spade a f—ing spade as he furiously patrols the grounds of what’s starting to look very much like a one-man fifth estate.

* To watch Stewart’s segments, go to thedailyshow.com. See YouTube for Stewart decimating the “partisan hackery” of the US media.

- originally published in The Australian on 08-05-2008.

They point out that parents who get on the piss tend to leave big, stubbie-shaped indents on the super-absorbent psyches of their sprogs (as well as highlighting that those 1970s porn-star moustaches really were an evolutionary dead end).

Thing is, not all kiddies of alcohol-abusing parents go on to drink too much themselves. Some develop the reverse problem.

A friend whose folks were miserable, probably irretrievable, drunks rang one night in an absolute state. Usually a strict teetotaller, he’d downed half a beer at a party after a crappy break-up. And he was convinced he was on the slippery slope to crusty suit-wearing, involuntary public urination and alcoholic itinerancy like his oldman.

“It’s all over,” sobbed Dave (not his real name) over the phone. “I’ve taken alcohol.”

The first striking thing about this depressing conversation was my mate’s odd use of the word taken, a term normally associated with evil, illicit drugs, as opposed towarm, friendly and totally harmless social lubricants.

To those of us who regard the phrase “drugs and alcohol” as tautology, however, such linguistic distinctions are self-serving chimeras. How convenient that we’ve come up with a wild and alarming set of verbs for illicit chemical consumption (toking, snorting, dropping, mainlining, Shatner’s Bassooning and so on) whereas alcohol is simply drunk because it’s, you know, not a drug but an innocent beverage.

Yet the only way we’re going to rein in our en masse alcohol abuse is to see booze for what it is: a mind-altering substance that can get us as high, stoned, freaked-out, trippy, spacey, ripped, toasted, smacked up, bombed, loaded, out of it and f—ed up as any other. And — once again, like the rest of the dope family — alcohol really does have the potential to liquidate our health, our lives and our pro footy careers if we don’t use responsibly.

This segues nicely into the second illuminating element of Dave’s story: namely, that imbibing in moderation may be a psychologically healthier alternative to arse-clenching abstinence.
In 1990, American psychologists Jonathan Shedler and Jack Block conducted a hefty, longitudinal study that concluded that adolescents who had engaged in some drug experimentation were much better adjusted than party animals or fanatical just-say-no-ers. Many years later, Block made the more general argument that people who are under-controlled tend to be rash and distractable, while those who are over-controlled are often compulsive and gloomy.

“Thus, although alcoholism, drug abuse and sexual promiscuity may all illustrate an insufficient self-control,” he wrote, “it is alsothe case that teetotallers of alcohol, absolute abstainers from all culturally available drugs, and individuals normatively very late or never to start their sexual lives appear to be rigid individuals leading relatively joyless existences.”

It would be rash, of course, to ignore the health repercussions associated with this honour roll of vices.

But what if the psychological stiffness required for ceaseless self-control extracts similarly insalubrious tolls?

Once again, I can’t help but think of poor old Dave whose teetotalism is not the result of inner strength but of psychological frailty. He has opted out of alcohol not because he dislikes the taste, objects to the hangovers or has calmly considered the health implications but because he lives in mortal fear of becoming an addict. And while he did manage to haul himself back on to the wagon after that one, huge night on the half-a-beer, shrinks keep telling him his inflexible all-or-nothing approach leaves him at terrible risk of seesawing straight from absolute abnegation into utter abandon.

Do not pass go, do not collect the occasional girlie shandy or social snifter.

The morals of this story — that perhaps weneed to indulge in all sorts of things more,less and differently — won’t satisfy anyof the extremists in the drugahol and alcorug debates.

But, as with the ability to enjoy a couple of Cuba Libres before switching to mocktails, the capacity to inhabit an argument’s annoyingly nuanced middle ground also may be a mark of muscular mental health.

- originally published in The Australian on 26-03-2009.

When faced with shiny, happy hustles such as last weekend’s Hour of No Power, for example, it’s all too cinchy to accuse participants of self-righteous tokenism.

“Instead of sitting in the dark like a bunch of champagne-sipping peasants from the planet I Hate Progress, those candle-wielding slacktivists should be forced to spend some time contemplating the joys of human achievements,” we shout, deliberately chucking a plastic bottle in the non-recycling bin and releasing a sally of methane-laden flatus to underscore our point. “Human achievements like TVs the size of highway billboards, R2-D2-shaped novelty soy sauce dispensers and the ability — nay, the basic human right — to leave lights blazing in rooms we have no intention of ever returning to again.”

Obviously our credibility will weaken if we then begin cackling insanely and stroking invisible beards, but you get the general idea: populist initiatives such as Earth Hour, Dirt Minute and Permafrost Fortnight are easy to disparage on the grounds that they don’t do nearly enough.

But what of harder-nosed proposals such as emissions trading schemes? These are hardly exemplars of feel-good tokenism.

In fact advocates aren’t likely to feel very good at all once the costs of petrol, electricity and R2-D2-shaped novelty soy sauce dispensers soar.

Fortunately formulating a withering response is, once again, a walk in the industrial park.

“Instead of trying to gut the Australian economy with so-called science from the planet I Hate Fiscal Growth, these dark green eco-flakes should spend some time contemplating the joys of primary sector-led prosperity,” we shout, extracting energy from some coal as filthily as possible to underscore our point. “Joys of primary sector-led prosperity such as bulgiferous budget surpluses, freakishly expensive Perth houses and the ability — nay, the basic neo-liberal capitalistic right — to pretend the future does not extend beyond this financial year or the activation of one’s six-figure-hugging golden parachute.”

Obviously our credibility will weaken if we then begin feasting on baby whale fillets roasted on endangered rainforest orchids, but you get the general idea: calls to cut Australia’s carbon emissions by anything more than zero by any year other than 2000-and-never are easy to disparage on the grounds that they do far too much.

Once we’ve dismissed all Earth-saving suggestions as outrageously inadequate or unforgivable excessive, it’s common practice for the icecap-hugging neo-hippies to ask what we propose. At which point we simply cite what philosopher economists call the free-rider problem (and what spotty schoolyard dwellers refer to as “you go first”).

“Why should Australia go out of its way to reduce its greenhouse gaseousness if no one else does?” we shout (perhaps releasing a second round of exclamatory farts to distract from any blatant vested interest we may have in maintaining the “get oil riggy with it” status quo). “If we go it alone on climate change, we’ll simply become the whipping continent for the rest of the world, which will suck the guts out of our big-earning industries like some sort of gut-sucking, big-earning industry sucker.”

Under normal circumstances, suggesting that one’s sins don’t count if they have only negligible global impact or that one shouldn’t have to behave properly until everyone else does would raise all sorts of sticky ethical questions. (Is it OK for Australia to legalise homicide so long as our overall influence on international murder rates remains trifling? And would Jesus have received such kudos for the whole crucifixion gig if he’d said, “After you”?)

Fortunately, no one seems interested in the ethical cravenness of the you-go-first position when it comes to international pollution politics. Which means that so long as we all agree on the need for someone else to go first, no one will have to go at all. All the nations of the world can huddle indefinitely in a big, giggling group at the edge of the climate change policy cliff, digging each other in the ribs and saying, “You jump!”, “No, you!” as the glaciers melt, the reefs fade and the last one out of Tuvalu turns off the lights.

- originally published in The Australian on 02-04-2009.

THE critics have not always been kind to British pop philosopher Alain de Botton. In one review, Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker performed the literary equivalent of a high school head flushing, calling de Botton a slapheaded ponce and an “absolute pair-of-aching-balls of a man” whose books were the toast of aspirational tosspots.

Brooker followed this with a take-no-prisoners parsing of the author’s appearance, triumphantly revealing (as if on conclusion of months of investigative journalism) that his subject’s head was bald, his eyes were
slit-like and his ruby-red smacker was all wrong. “They really are dark,” Brooker wrote on his third, agitated return to the colour of de Botton’s lips, “like he’s been suckling cranberry juice from a teat.”

Ooo-er. The lady doth protest too much.

While recent reviews have focused less on de Botton’s (admittedly cardigan-ish) externals and more on the words he’s written in actual books, many critiques are equally slice and dice-like. This is because the author of How Proust Can Change Your Life and The Consolations of Philosophy has been outrageous enough to write about work, a subject celebrity book reviewers (none of whom would ever be members of the tosspotocracy) have decided he knows nothing about.

Fellow scribe Naomi Wolf became so enraged with de Botton’s latest offering, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, that she formally announced she could no longer bear to hold the turmoil decently within. Her complaint was that de Botton did not progress beyond poking at the idea of work with a gentlemanly stick or peering at it under a bell jar, a theme picked up by the British press which complained that, as the son of a deceased zillionaire, working, for de Botton, was very much a hobby.

While The Australian has on several occasions explained that the de Botton family millions actually inhabit a charitable trust fund, it is precisely the writer’s distance from his subjects that renders his wide-eyed reflections on the obscure life cycles of supermarket tuna and “me-time” chocolate biscuits so delightful.

At one point, de Botton, a neurotic double PhD dropout, compares the gaze of a recreational cargo ship watcher to that of a small child “who comes to a halt in the centre of a crowded shopping street and, while passers-by swerve to avoid her, bends down to examine, with the care of a biblical scholar poring over the pages of a vellum-bound book, a piece of chewing gum impressed on the pavement, or the closing mechanism of her coat pocket”.

His fascination with industrial minutia is the same. Whimsical and apologetically self-obsessed, he marvels at the hidden lubricants that ensure the smooth functioning of a utilitarian civilisation: the citric acids stabilising laundry detergent and the xanthan gums safeguarding the viscosity of gravy.

The furious passers-by who must swerve to avoid this squatting scholar are those convinced that labour, manufacturing and voracious consumption should be viewed only through the ideological equivalent of clunky 3-D eyewear.

De Botton, you see, flagrantly ignores the agendas of the Right and the Left, dismissing as a sadistic hoax the meritocracy’s passing off of self-made commercial success as the rule rather than the freakish exception, yet showing no interest in banging on about oppressed proletariats, either.

Also missing are the hectoring lectures of the affluenza crowd and — much to Wolf’s chagrin — the news-driven focus of the journalist. De Botton overlooks, for instance, the unexpected detention of an Iranian interviewee on suspicion of importing bomb-making equipment, in favour of chatting with a young mum who has invented a way to compress potato chips into an oleaginous ingot so they can be more easily ingested.

What the critics should remember is that we are in no danger of running out of worthy texts analysing the ideological implications of industry or tracking the fates of detained immigrants.
Compassionate, literary meanders which expose and elevate the quotidian surreality of the human condition remain, however, a precious commodity (especially ones which also reveal that the mysterious world of power pylons contains a 150-kilovolt Finnish model with a coquettish sexuality).

The odd, endearing and electrophilic de Botton begins a speaking tour of Australia next week.

- originally published in The Australian on 09-04-2009.

KARL Marx bombed as a soothsayer. The workers’ revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the grand victory of whatsit over the other thing … at the time of going to press, none looked imminent. In fact, instead of producing its own gravediggers, the bourgeoisie has just produced more and more of itself. 

The extent to which Marxism has eaten itself is revealed on the internet, where enterprising e-merchants are doing a brisk trade in communist kitsch. RadicalJack.com invites fashion-conscious revolutionaries to purchase a range of funky T-shirts featuring the big man’s beardy visage (only $US15.99, or $17.77, plus postage and handling). On sale elsewhere are “Karl Marx is my homeboy” tote bags, “Religion is the opium of the masses” maternity wear, “Comrade” barbecue aprons, pop-art Marxist baby bibs and, my favourite, the classic commie G-string with saucy hammer-and-sickle motif. 

Like Beta video players, hypercolour leisurewear and flat-earth theories, communism and its rabble of illegitimate offspring are widely regarded as evolutionary dead ends. Yet books critiquing materialism are doing a brisk trade, even if their vibe isn’t blatantly Marxist so much as nostalgically Marx-esque. At the heart of 21st-century anti-consumerism is the explosion of choice stemming from what Queensland-based cultural studies scholar Alan McKee tells me is the democratisation of the aristocracy. “Aristocratic culture has always been characterised by cultural choice,” McKee says. “Choice has now become levelled down. The common person has a choice in terms of what to eat and drink, wear, look at, do for entertainment, arrange around their domestic space, that is similar to that of aristocrats of previous centuries.”

 The trouble is that, like Marx and a whole bunch of thinkers on Left and Right, there’s a tendency to infantilise the new working class of nouveau capitalists. At best, they are naive and vulnerable; at worst, they are foolish and undiscerning. If an attractive celebrity tells these impressionable automatons to buy a shiny new iPod Shuffle Bottle-Opener Keychain, they will buy a shiny iPod Shuffle Bottle-Opener Keychain. It’s a simple case of monkey see, monkey do. Except, of course, that it isn’t.

The capacity to shop used to be very handy for distinguishing the elite from the rabble. But as the leisure class has expanded to include just about everyone, conspicuous consumption alone is no longer useful for making vertical social distinctions. Hence the need for particularity when it comes to passing judgment on the purchase.

 Anti-materialists usually begin their arguments by dividing goods into things people need and things they merely want. They assume this schism is self-evident and universal. But this isn’t the case. In 2004, McKee asked 40 middle-class academics to categorise the following goods into needs and wants: washing machines, books, bathroom cleansers, cars, breakfast cereals, shaving products, televisions, children’s toys, lipsticks and CDs. Interestingly enough, there wasn’t a single item with a universally agreed-upon status. The closest was the washing machine, but even here six people said it wasn’t a real need. Almost half said cars weren’t real needs. Most said lipstick wasn’t a real need but six thought it was. 

“The simplistic binary nature of need versus want is a spurious distinction,” McKee says. “Beyond oxygen, water, basic nutrients and shelter, we need nothing for physical survival. But there is more to being human than that. It’s reasonable to argue that we also need human interaction and companionship to be mentally healthy. And then, in order fully to belong to and enjoy a society, who decides what we need then? Of course, what you find is that people tend to see their own wants as needs — and other people’s needs as wants.”

 This explains why anti-materialists rarely call for an end to books (even though these are a staggeringly inefficient means of transmitting information), yet routinely lambaste the internet (a lean, green informing machine that leaves only the most petite of electronic footprints). It’s also revealing that the most despised consumer items are often those that allow the newly moneyed to approximate the trappings of their betters, such as the McMansion.

 Wide-screen TV sets are another much-maligned folk devil in modern anti-materialism moral panics. As with McMansions, they have become shorthand for the evil excesses of consumption. As with McMansions, their dimensions are tastelessly sprawly. And, as with McMansions, their gigantic carbon footprint makes it possible to sniff at the Kath and Kims of the world while insisting one’s sole concern is for the planet. This is not to say the Big Macs of TV screens and housing are not environmental liabilities. Just that anti-materialism discourses often come with a patronising, class-related subtext. 

None of the books under review is concerned solely with materialism but all give it a serve at some point. The first accuses consumerism of failing to deliver the happiness it promises, the second claims it is corrupting children, the third argues it is destroying the planet and the fourth blames it for making us rude. Each author makes strong points, but each also engages in unhelpful classism.

 Happy? by Tony Wellington, an Australian painter and jack of all media trades, is an earnest book, written plainly and bristling with statistics. Pursuing happiness has become a Western obsession and Wellington’s criticisms of the quick fixes pushed by the rapture pimps (fame, self-esteem, romance, religion and shopping) are timely. He notes that increased prosperity within developed industrial nations has little impact on wellbeing. When people are on the breadline, income counts. But once a nation’s average per capita income is more than $US15,000, higher incomes do not correlate with higher levels of happiness.

 Similar findings have resulted in a rash of self-reflection, along with calls for non-economic measures of national success, the rise of guerilla anti-consumerism movements such as Buy Nothing Day and a market for books against markets such as Clive Hamilton’s Affluenza. Hamilton has also suggested a new organisation, Overconsumers Anonymous, “to provide us all with a 12-step plan in which we first must admit we have lost control and then submit ourselves to a higher power”.

 When considering the link (or lack of a link) between buying stuff and being happy, it’s worth remembering that it is very new to think everyone in society has the right to be happy and materially comfortable. In the past, only the crustiest members of the upper realms were in a position to wonder whether too much spending power was problematic. Wellington’s harking back to some glowing, non-consuming golden age is therefore rather whiffy. He writes:

 Gone are many of the prescriptive constraints of heritage and tradition that provided reliability and comfort to earlier communities. Our forebears of centuries ago did not have to concern themselves with so many decisions about where to go, what to do and how to behave. They didn’t have to choose between hundreds of breakfast cereals, various modes of dress, or what style of music to listen to. They weren’t cut adrift in a sea of choices …

 Call me new-fashioned, but I’d rather deal with the trauma of choosing between a zillion muesli brands than returning to prescriptive, traditional constraints such as working seven days a week for a subsistence income or being viewed as nothing more than a husband-owned uterus. 

Another common complaint about consumerism is that people are more interested in the process of purchasing than in the purchase itself. “Where possible,” Wellington urges, “avoid shopping as a form of entertainment.”

 The immediate question that comes to mind is why? Why should the joy of owning transcend the joy of purchasing, particularly if the buyer comes from a background where purchasing is a novel experience?

 Suggestions that one should shop infrequently, seriously and only from an approved list before sitting at home in quiet contemplation of the product are linked to a new middle-class obsession with things that are slow. Witness the so-called slow movement encompassing slow food, slow travel, slow design and slow sex.

 ”By contrast,” McKee says, “working-class culture favours the fast. Fast food, fast women, roller-coasters, shouting back at the performers, moshing, talking over the film. So there’s a real middle-class aesthetic to these complaints, a real desire in the anti-materialist writing to impose alien middle-class values on to working-class consumers.” 

Wellington is unconvinced. He is appalled at racy new contraptions such as mobile phones, the internet and TV, accusing the latter of reducing our productivity, interfering with relationships, damaging family ties and making us fat and unhealthy. “Are today’s young people learning to observe and appreciate nature,” he asks, “to pause for reflection, to cope with solitude, to use their imaginations?”

 Concern about the moral fibre of the young and the malignant influence of their newfangled playthings has a long history. Consider the following warning about the emergence of a dire new threat:

 Many young girls, from morning to night, hang over this to the neglect of industry, health, proper exercise, and to the ruin both of body and of soul … The increase of (this) will help to account for the increase of prostitution and for the numerous adulteries and elopements that we hear of in the different parts of the kingdom.

 That warning, from the 1792 publication Evils of Adultery and Prostitution, is about the moral dangers of reading novels. In Why TV Is Good for Kids (2006), a more recent book, Catharine Lumby and Duncan Fine note that similar panics have emerged over pre-modern feasts and festivals, 18th-century theatre, 1890s music halls, Elvis Presley and comic books. Indeed, Lumby and Fine say it is difficult to find an era when yoof culcha ever received a clean bill of moral health. One thing that is relatively new, however, is childhood:

 Go back to the Middle Ages and after the age of seven, children belonged to adult society. And they were exposed to all aspects of adult life in a way we would find shocking today … a very large body of literature on the cultural history of childhood shows that the construction of children as innocent of the adult worlds of work, sex and violence only dates back to the 19th century.

 Despite the endless “Won’t somebody think of the children?” headlines, most children are far better off when it comes to health, education and recreation. This is why it’s hard to keep a straight face when confronted by the alarmist subtitle of Buy, Buy Baby: The Devastating Impact of Marketing to 0-3s by American journalist Susan Gregory Thomas.

 In the late 1990s, American research showed that babies’ brains develop and make more significant connections between the ages of zero to three than at any other point in their lives. These findings triggered a billion-dollar market of baby products billed as having educational benefit, such as the Baby Einstein range of DVDs, books and activity widgets.

 Thomas suggests the latter is a shocking new development, yet, as American academic Ellen Seiter points out, grandiose claims about the educational benefits of toys have been around since the 19th century. What is new is mass access to products promoting the high culture ideal that a child’s every waking moment is an opportunity for cognitive and educational advancement.

 Thomas is strongest when she reveals that, despite the over-the-top marketing claims, baby and toddler products promoted as educational offer no special benefits. She also deserves commendation for taking on the sacred middle-class cows of classic children’s books and “quality” TV programs such as Sesame Street. But while parents may be wasting money buying products under false pretences, Thomas’s contention that their offspring are being devastated is unconvincing.

 First, research into babies’ and toddlers’ perception of TV, toys and advertising continues to produce results that are either neutral or ambivalent. Second, like Wellington, Thomas fails to engage with the enormous amount of academic work challenging the notion that consumers — even those in nappies — are passive, naive and easily duped. Seiter puts a strong case in her 1995 book, Sold Separately: Parents and Children in Consumer Culture: 

The (toy and TV industries’) characterisation of the children’s audience as fickle and discriminating must be taken seriously. We know that children make meanings out of toys that are unanticipated by — perhaps indecipherable to — their adult designers, who are often baffled by the success of toys like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

 Thomas, in contrast, sees the mere existence of multinational toy empires as proof of damage. Consider her grave quotation of an anonymous health professional who has a hunch that babies riveted by Baby Einstein DVDs are slipping into a “low-level seizure state”. She also makes dark references to marketers being child experts “just like pedophiles” and takes potshots at working mothers who leave their children “unchaperoned” with strangers on TV.

 The irony is that her misreading of the evidence means she is open to accusations of misleading parents and exploiting their anxieties in order to move units, just like those behind the products she condemns. Also ironic is the fact that, of the four books under review, the two that are the most blatantly la-di-da are the two that approach the whole class and consumption issue with nuance and originality. Elizabeth Farrelly in Blubberland and Lucinda Holdforth in Why Manners Matter are such exquisite writers it’s all too easy to forget that they have just called you a visually illiterate, ill-mannered, future-eating bogan. There’s just something about the camped-up, self-consciousness nature of their snobbery that makes it far less offensive than it should be.

 Farrelly begins Blubberland with this endearing mea culpa:

 I, like you, drive too much. I buy too much — of which I keep too much and also throw too much away … For my own future, as well as my children’s, I must change. And yet — this is what’s weird — I, like you, can’t … That’s what drove this book into being. A craving, at the very least, to see what the f..k is going on with this crazy species.

 This chummy, conspiratorial use of the second person is a chimera. Farrelly, a Sydney newspaper columnist and academic with a PhD in architecture, soon makes it clear that the red-carpet entry to her particular species is patrolled by a snooty door bitch. Defining blubber as the brimming superfluity born of an excess of wilful wanting (as distinct from wilful needing), Farrelly says good blubber is the “edicule, gazebo or porch that add to a building nothing but graciousness”.

 Bad blubber is “the track-suited, mind-numbed couch potato, the quadruple-garaged McMansion, the vast glittering malls and dreary look-at-me suburbs interspersed with limitless acreage of concrete, asphalt and billboards”.

 Farrelly’s horror of the asphalt class is palpable. She believes in the healing power of art, creativity, truth and beauty. For her, McMansionland is a form of living death:

 For your standard sensitive architect type a half-day in (the Sydney suburb of) Kellyville can cause deep existential despair. Not just depression. Despair. Despair of the go-on-without-me type. It’s not just the vast McPalaces themselves, set bloatedly cheap-by-jowl along what passes for street. It’s the heartbreakingly, wrist-slittingly obvious fact that this — this — is what people like.

 These expressions of distaste are so over the top it’s hard to rise up in anything but mirth. Also, Farrelly is clearly suffering so much at the hands of track-suited she-hos and he-skanks that she seems far more victim than oppressor. 

And she is a joy to read. Her imagery and references are brilliant and hallucinogenic. She leaps between eras, genres and media; between pre-Socratic philosophy and Doctor Who; between Friedrich Nietzsche and Ian Thorpe; between vagina dentatas and America’s first fully enclosed shopping mall. And most of the time it all makes perfect sense. Particularly powerful is her argument that if a green settlement pattern was designed from scratch, “the product would not be suburbia, or urban villages, or Greek fishing towns or even, say, Barcelona. It would be Manhattan … the greenest city on earth.”

 In the final chapter, Farrelly outlines her green dream of a sustainable, semi-edible cityscape with no height restrictions and lots of lifts, the most energy-efficient passenger vehicle. It’s a place where even a bogan reviewer who had to pull the tracksuit out of her bum to go and look up edicule in the dictionary would be thrilled to live.

 Lucinda Holdforth shares Farrelly’s use of expletives, self-deprecating confessions, droll wit and unapologetic snobbery. “Nothing erodes manners like the common ownership of the means of production,” she says of the then communist city of Belgrade.

 Yet, like Farrelly’s unorthodox take on green cities, Holdforth reinvents manners and applies them eccentrically. Laws against euthanasia, for instance, are rude because they force one to overstay one’s welcome at the dinner party of life. Her concise, eight-point template for modern manners is brilliant: “Point four — look after the weak; point five — obey the laws and regulations, unless you are mounting a campaign of civil disobedience.”

 The section of the book dealing with consumerism bemoans corporate society’s tolerance of workplace bullies and pigs, and promulgation of mock manners of the “Your call is important to us” variety. Holdforth claims the extreme levels of emotional engagement required of staff, who must be pumped up all the time, make workers too tired to be well-mannered in their downtime. This is why the two balding briefcasers sardining her on a Friday night commuter flight don’t speak, even though it’s “almost certainly the nearest any of us have ever come to a threesome”.

 Why Manners Matter sets out a powerful case for a new set of subversive rather than conservative manners that are flexible enough to accommodate a variety of classes and cultures, and which may be essential to sharing an increasingly crowded space.

 To understand the potential of such a philosophy, you only have to imagine what would happen if, instead of lobbing missiles at each other, the Israelis and the Palestinians took to saying, “No, please, after you … “

 Reflecting on the elitist sub and supratexts of these books, it is easy to think: So what? So what if up-market commentators think it’s OK to have a swollen library, six versions of a famous symphony and a painting in every room, yet condemn collections of sports shoes, Kylie Minogue CDs and comic books? So what if they think decisions to buy the former are rational while decisions to buy the latter aren’t?

 Well, for starters, it’s bad manners. “I immediately think of the advertising campaign for one Sydney newspaper’s latest (TV) listings guide,” McKee says. “‘Never watch rubbish again,’ it says, showing a picture of a young woman sitting in front of a pile of garbage bags. That’s how they describe the programs that I love: Big Brother, Australian Idol, The Simpsons. How rude.”

 This type of hoity-toity hypocrisy is also unfashionable (control fantasies about benevolent states dictating what can and can’t be purchased are so pre-Berlin Wall fall), uneducated (there are more books on mass cultural nuances than you can point a turkey twizzler at) and crass (the anti-materialist who attacks mass consumption yet excuses her own purchasing is like the barbecue pig who begins an anti-Aboriginal tirade with “I’m not racist but …”).

 Most worrying, however, is the way biases driven by, as Seiter puts it, “the aesthetic norms of high culture” obscure and confuse the issues that count.

 Community happiness, babies’ innocence, environmental degradation and, yes, even being nicer to pregnant women on buses are all worthy concerns. But solutions will always be elusive so long as rational consideration is hijacked by blind panic and pleb bashing.

 BOOKS REVIEWED

Happy? Exposing the Cultural Myths About Happiness

By Tony Wellington

Beaut Books, 354pp, $24.95

Blubberland: The Dangers of Happiness

By Elizabeth Farrelly

New South, 224pp, $29.95

Buy, Buy Baby: The Devastating Impact of Marketing to 0-3s

By Susan Gregory Thomas

HarperCollins, 272pp, $32.99

Why Manners Matter: The Case for Civilised Behaviour in a Barbarous World

By Lucinda Holdforth

Random House, 175pp, $29.95

- originally published in The Australian Literary Review in The Australian on 05-12-2007.

“Hmmm. Friday night again. It’s tempting to try ice, but picking imaginary scabs in nightclub toilets doesn’t really go with my new flamingo zippered leggings (heroin chic is so last century). I know, I’ll go bowling and have a couple of shandies instead.”

In the real world, or at least the world depicted in an extraordinary new documentary, The Oasis, suggesting it’s simple to just say no to drugs is a joke.

“Hmmm. Tuesday morning again. It’s tempting to spend a couple of hours straight, but that’ll mean dwelling on the fact that Mum was a junkie hooker, Dad flogged me to a pulp and now I sleep on a vomit and faeces-smeared footpath. I know: I’ll inject some more heroin into what’s left of my 17-year-old veins in the hope that for a few lousy hours I’ll get to feel like I’m dead.”

There are no justs when it comes to saying no to numbing substances under these circumstances. There are rock bottoms so far down they’d give you vertigo. There are deprivations we in zippered legging land couldn’t possibly imagine. There is Everest upon Everest upon Everest.

Just say no? Just say no? Yeah, right. And all we need for peace in the Middle East is for the Arabs and the Israelis to just get along.

The Oasis, which charts two terrible years in the life of a Salvation Army youth refuge in inner Sydney, should be mandatory viewing for anyone who thinks youth homelessness and drug addiction are the results of stupid choices made by the weak-willed and overindulged. These kids’ earliest memories are of beatings and brutalisations, of watching their parents shoot smack or do strangers for drug money.

Sure, they have choices about the way they live their lives. But to suggest these choices are the same as those available to kiddies who don’t spend their formative years sleeping on alleyway mattresses is bullshit. Offensive, patronising, cop-out bullshit.

The other people who should have their eyelids pinned back Clockwork Orange-style in front of The Oasis are those moral campaigners who rail about the wickedness du jour while Australia’s 22,000 homeless teens burn.

As Sydney’s religious elite bicker about whether God hates homosexual High Court judge Michael Kirby, Paul Moulds of the Oasis Youth Support Network is bringing recovering drug addicts and their newborn babies into his home while he tries to find places with roofs for these terribly vulnerable new families to live.
He’s sending cleaning crews to young people’s flats so that when they get out of jail, detox or the asylum they don’t walk straight back into the abyss.

He’s attending junkie births and speaking at junkie funerals and buying street kids breakfast and driving them to court and deflecting psychotic rages and serving fried rice from the back of vans and never, ever giving up on anyone.

Moulds, an exemplar of the true Christian spirit, knows how ugly his abused and abusive charges look from the outside.

But he doesn’t withdraw his support or compassion when yet again they fail to turn up for rehab or tell him they’ve finally found a quality boyfriend because this one smokes rather than injects ice.

“Every kid deserves a 13th chance,” he shrugs with that gentle, generous smile. He sees potential in the people polite society dismisses as human detritus, accepting that salvation for these souls is simply doing a little better. And he steadfastly refuses to preach or judge: “We can throw our hands up in moral outrage and say this shouldn’t be, this is wrong or else we can …”

Ah yes, this magnificent man is king of the “or else we cans”. If only more people would just say no to the lazy stereotypes and puffed-up indignation and join him in the church of actually making a difference.

The Oasis screened on ABC 1 last week. Visit http://www.abc.net.au/tv/oasis/ to buy a copy of the DVD, download the film for free or attend a community screening.

- originally published in The Australian on 17-04-2008.

Questioning is good. Questioning is Socratic. Everyone should question everything all the time, don’t you think?

No, the thing that’s so irksome about hardline climate change sceptics is that the planet will need to be twitching and coughing up blood before they’ll agree to do anything. And while it’s always enormously gratifying to be proved right, even the narkiest greenie is unlikely to gain much pleasure from screeching “I told you so” as the last of the polar ice caps fizzes sadly into the sea like a stale Berocca.

The real inconvenient truth about truly apocalyptic environmental devastation (as opposed to the mildly inconvenient environmental devastation occurring now) is that we won’t know with 100 per cent certainty it’s going to happen until it does.

But maintaining a healthy scepticism about dire planetary predictions doesn’t mean we should kick back on our sprawling McArses doing nothing. Especially when you consider the over-the-top precautions we take in preparation for other risks.

Terrorism is the obvious example. Do we know for sure that a virgin-loving extremist packing explosive Nikes will bomb the holy living jihads out of one of our jets any time soon? No, we do not. Yet our response to this possibility has been extreme. Legislation. War. Weird “survive a terrorist attack” courses in which vigilante commuters learn how to poke the eyes out of suspicious fellow passengers with biros.

We may be more likely to die from a lightning strike or (if we live in the US of A) a legal execution. But when it comes to terrorism, we’re not taking any chances. It’s fridge magnets all around.

Once you look at environmental issues through this lens, setting a 2020 greenhouse emissions target of a paltry 5 to 15 per cent becomes the equivalent of only conducting airport security checks on Mondays and Wednesdays.

Contrary to the smug rhetoric of the deniers, taking out expensive or inconvenient insurance policies against tiny risks is not irrational or even that uncommon.

Consider pregnant ladies. In Australia, only about six up-the-duffsters get listeriosis every year. Yet women who are even thinking about conceiving are ordered to take pre-emptive strikes against this potentially fatal illness by only eating foods that have been laundered at home, hermetically sealed or heated to incineration levels.

In addition to a zillion other exclusions, this means no sushi, no pate, no feta cheese, no soft-serve ice-cream, no googy-eggs and no restaurant dishes outrageous enough to come with a parsley or gourmet sprout garnish.

Not all pregnant women abide by these incommodious and antisocial instructions but — given the tragic impact listeriosis can have on unborn infants — many do. For months and sometimes even years, if it takes them yonks to conceive.

Like terrorism, the main motivation here is an awareness of the enormity of the potential damage. “The worse-case scenario is highly unlikely,” these women tell themselves as they hack resolutely through yet another charcoaled steak, “but why risk it?”

Environmental devastation, in comparison, isn’t highly unlikely at all. Sure there’s disagreement about the small details: who started it and whether or not it’s better to take temperature readings up the earth’s bum or under its armpit and so on.

But you don’t need a degree in ozone-ology to realise that — like a house party crashed by Facebookers — the planet is straining to cope with the influx of ragers and the keg won’t last forever. Why, then, do we insist on treating the global warming debate like a murder trial and demanding proof beyond reasonable doubt that X will happen to our habitat on Y date? Shouldn’t the presence of a reasonable risk be motivator enough?

We take out insurance to protect our cars, our mobile phones and (if we live in the US of A) our celebrity boobs. Let’s not leave ourselves hideously underinsured when it comes to our primary residence.

- originally published in The Australian on 11-12-2008.

One urban myth that is in desperate need of a good, hard discreditation, however, is the “too posh to push” line about women and birth.

Last week a stack of new statistics came out about Australian caesarean rates and — as usual — many media outlets took the opportunity to flog women for being overly precious about their privates.

“The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare says 2500 women opted for [caesareans] last year for `psycho-social’ reasons,” howled the ABC radio program AM. “Obstetricians say the big increase has a lot to do with vanity.”

Complete and utter claptrap. Obstetricians are saying nothing of the sort, especially not to AM.
In stark contrast to the segment’s aggressive opener, David O’Callaghan, chairman of the obstetrics committee at the St Vincents & Mercy Private Hospital in Melbourne, told the ABC that women requesting caesareans because they were too posh to push were rare.

Instead, he credited the rise of psycho-social caesareans to older in-vitro fertilisation mothers (who he said had a significant risk of ending up with a c-section anyway), women who had a family history of incontinence or good old-fashioned fear. Absolutely nothing about vanity.

Apparently the ABC did not feel it necessary to adhere to the usual standards of accuracy and sobriety because the subject was only women and their vaginas.

Other media outlets — also struggling to find professionals prepared to call their patients pink-bit prima donnas — had to resort to quotes from new mums who knew someone who knew someone who’d opted to become a c-sectionette to remain “honeymoon fresh” (which is the revolting term du jour).

Hardline critics of Australia’s caesarean rates have much in common with anti-abortion rights proponents in their framing of women as hopelessly irresponsible and shallow when it comes to reproduction.

“Tra la la la la,” the nation’s lady folk are supposedly trilling as one. “We’re such feckless floozies, we can’t wait to accidentally conceive so we can join feminism’s secret campaign to scourge the world of all unborn babies. And when we do get pregnant on purpose, we can’t wait to endanger our infants’ lives with flamboyant abdominal surgery because all we care about is keeping our treasure boxes teeny-bopper taut.”

Well, having recently interviewed hundreds of oven bunners for a book on the subject, I’m in a position to reveal that the vast majority of women (a) realise reproduction isn’t the best path to virginal nymphyness and (b) have a concern for their unborn babies that transcends just about everything (and this includes entirely understandable apprehensions about the prospect of introducing something as large and unruly as a new human to something as precious and pregnable as their private passages).

* Fact: Recent Queensland research shows that 93.5 per cent of pregnant women want to give birth the ye olde vaginal way.

* Fact: Most caesareans are performed on women who have serious medical complications or have had a previous caesarean.

* Fact: Many activists claim that the people being gung-ho about c-sections are overcautious, ill-informed or under-insured medics.

That said, anecdotal reports of great swaths of obstetricians slicing into pregnant sheilas to avoid running late for golf games should also be filed under urban mythology until harder evidence is unearthed.
Skyrocketing rates of medically assisted childbirth are definitely cause for concern, debate and further investigation. But they should not be used as an excuse to hound women for being bad birthers. (Apart from anything else, there’ll be plenty of time for sledging once these women make the inevitable transition to bad motherhood.)

- originally published in The Australian on 18-12-2008.

Even beautiful people aren’t permitted to be celebrities unless they strive to look more beautiful than they already are. Plastic inserts, trowel-strength make-up, towering hair that’s bouffed and burned.

All these interventions are required, not so Hollywood hot-shots look their best but so they look their usual.

Thanks to the popularity of stars-caught-without-make-up magazine spreads, fans do know these incandescent celebrity Jekylls have dark sides: spotty, blotchy and cellulite-y Hyde sides.

But such is the supremacy of the manufactured celebrity image that the usual order of things has been inverted: the painted, spritzed and surgically lifted has become the norm while the untouched celebrity face is now the perversion. These developments put the average (and average-looking) politician in an extremely awkward position.

In an ideal world, the mechanisms of governance would be immune to the spectacular opportunities and crushing tyrannies of glamour.

In an ideal world, we’d vote for candidates because they had substance rather than Angelina’s pout or Brad’s outrageously geometric jaw line.

Yet all the evidence suggests that the spheres of political celebrity and pop cultural celebrity have overlapped to the point where aspiring statesfolk who opt out of the glamour paradigm may be kissing their careers as baby kissers goodbye. When Angela Merkel was campaigning for Germany’s chancellorship, the 50-something “iron frau” gave short shrift to those who dissed her ye olde apparatchik appearance. “Anyone who really has something to say doesn’t need make-up,” she snorted.

But the onslaught of abuse about her pudding-bowl hair-do and frumpy pants-suits grew too great and eventually she relented, feathering her hair, painting her face and hiring a stylist. According to The Times, she even received television training which taught her to smile in a way that revealed her dimples.

In Brazil, looking comely on camera is especially important for politicians because of low literacy rates and the supremacy of television over newspapers. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is reported to have undergone botox treatments and a chemical peel, while another of his peers, Roberto Jefferson, had surgery to staple his stomach and remove excess skin. Jefferson told colleagues that: “The return a good appearance brings in terms of votes is incredible.”

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is also notorious for embracing the growing trend for voters to view au naturel as ewww naturel. The media mogul, who once accused left-wing female politicians of being less foxy than those on the Right, has had a facelift and hair transplants. “It’s a way of showing respect to those who expect you to represent them on an international and national stage,” he’s said.

In other words, rectifying ugliness — or even bog standard ordinariness — isn’t just a campaign strategy, it’s a political responsibility.

So much for the old saying about politics being show business for the unsightly.

All this, of course, is the context that must be considered before condemning the Republican Party’s decision to spend $US150,000 ($234,000) on Sarah Palin’s clothing and pit-bull lippy.

For starters, Palin is hardly the only contender in the American presidential race who’s paid top dollar to tart themselves up. John Edwards spent $US400 on a hair cut and Hillary Clinton paid $US3000 for two. John “How Many Houses Do I Own Again” McCain is campaigning in a $US520 pair of imported calf-skin Ferragamo loafers with silver-tone Gancini-brand buckles.

The ugly truth is that it is we the punters who are pressuring pollies to look as uber human as our other celebrity pin-ups. According to recent Australian research, we’re far more likely to elect beautiful men and women than candidates donged by the ugly stick. This sort of lookism may even swing results in marginal seats.

Once we get to know politicians, the eye candy factor fades in importance. In the interim, however, it is the height of hypocrisy to castigate our flesh-pressers simply for supplying what too many of us weren’t careful enough about wishing for.

- originally published in The Australian on 30-10-2008.

They are the scam-baiters and their ruthless modus operandi reveals how easily the good fight can become an ugly one.

If you use email, chances are you’ve received one or two squillion poorly punctuated offers of abandoned fortunes that can be provided AT NO RISKS TO YOU TRUSTED GENTLEMANLADY WHATSOEVERS. All you have to do is send a substantial advance fee to a suspicious bank account and voila, Bob (well, actually Prince Fayad Bolkiah, eldest son of the former finance minister of Brunei) is your uncle.

If you think no one would be silly enough to be sucked in by such shamfulness, you are sadly mistaken. In 2006, it was estimated that this sort of hustle was costing the British economy pound stg. 150 million a year. According to the US Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, unwitting victims have even been kidnapped and murdered.

Enter the digilante.

Beginner or “straight baiters” usually just waste scammers’ time by engaging in long and surreal correspondences in which money is promised but never materialises.

One baiter featured on the www.scamorama.com website chats at length with 22-year-old Queen Amina from the Congo who, as is so often the case these days, is at a complete loss about what to do with her $US10.5 million inheritance. Using the nom de scam Lady Fapina Tyuksar (apparently this almost means something rude in Hungarian), the scam-baiter eventually directs Amina’s “barrister” to her receptionist, Donna Nytrocks, whose number is actually an S&M phone sex hotline.

The correspondence survives this outrageous development but tails off shortly after Lady Tyuksar sends a photo of herself that bears an uncanny resemblance to Lwaxana Troi, Daughter of the Fifth House, Holder of the Sacred Chalice of Rixx and Heir to the Holy Rings of Betazed from Star Trek.

Straight-baiters rarely get any nastier than childish sneering in their final “ha ha, I tricked you” message. But elite practitioners (or master baiters, as they like to call themselves) treat scam-baiting as an out and out blood sport.

They boast of “safaris” (trips they’ve tricked scammers into making to remote banks to collect nonexistent advance fees) and “trophies” (photos scammers take of themselves doing stupid things or holding obscene signs in desperate attempts to prove their credentials).

English computer engineer Mike Berry, the founder of www.419eater.com, is the dark prince of baiting. He has duped scammers into writing out Harry Potter books by hand, carving computers from wood and falling in love with him pretending to be Gillian Anderson from The X Files. Apparently he and his geeky cohorts have also succeeded in getting more than 50 scammers arrested.

The trophy room for contributors to Berry’s site includes photos of scammers in suggestive poses and bearing signs with slogans such as “I love cocky sucky”. Most of the subjects are black, grim-looking and situated in dusty village tableaus that are a far cry from the spectacular fortunes discussed in their emails. One woman seems to be missing an eye.

This, of course, is where scam-baiting starts to look crass, cold-blooded and possibly even homophobic and racist.

“The scam-baiters seem almost like a spontaneous evolutionary response to a threatening predatory species … the T cells of the internet’s immune system,” Ron Rosenbaum writes in The Atlantic. But “what started out as a good-natured form of rough justice has become, in some respects, a theatre of cruelty”.
It’s an intriguing, quintessentially 21st-century ethical dilemma that brings to mind far more serious war-related debates about ends, means and justifications.

Perhaps, like non-cyber soldiers, spam-baiters should agree to treat their PoWs more humanely.

Persuading Prince Joe Eboh of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation to convert to the Order of the Red Breast and paint a red No9 over his nipple is one thing. But conning what looks like an entire village into posing with “arse bandit” signs seems to be taking things an Abu Ghraib too far.

- originally published in The Australian on 13-11-2008.