This was to be an Aegrotat issue (aegrotat: an exam pass awarded due to illness) because your correspondent’s late winter malaise has hit. But I appear to have banged on a bit anyway.
But it appears to have hit the culture too, as the mainspace of the news fills out with the squalid and marginal, here and across the world. In the UK and everywhere, the ghastly sad expose,hounding and suicide of Jacob Ardey, the engineered farce of ‘Melongate’, the week-long run of the Sydney Swans, and the last weeks of the RC on anti-semitism. Though one does not wish to concede on Anton Jager’s ‘Hyperpolitics’ thesis - that these skirmishes are displaced encounters arising from political stasis in the real arena - if any week were to evidence it, it was this one.
The Swans scandal dominated the week in Australia, because here, football is more real than politics. You can see this if you ever watch, on a Sunday, Insiders followed by Offsiders, the sports discussion show. Insiders, which last broke an inside news political story c.2017, consists of three press gallery lifers and drones dutifully saying nothing that could put them into any trouble with their contacts, in a tone that sounds like a meeting on resource allocation at a Uniting Church regional admin headquarters. But, bang, Outsiders! As soon as the thunderous 90s retro intro fades away, the energy and excitement only rises. The panelists, from sport, journalism and politics can hardly contain themselves. Games, kicks, drafts, management, personalities, it’s all so involving, so absorbing. Politics? Politics is just administration. But sport? Sport is real.
Given that our other main passion is gender relations, Swangate - there’s probably some old London street of that name - Swangate, for those who didn’t follow it, well you can probably fill it out yourself. Some players from said team hired some young ladies from an outfit called Party Girls Melbourne to join them at their suite in their hotel the, sigh, Pullman, and perform some artistic dancing. This may have involved unwanted touching. This may have involved cocaine being snorted off the ladies’ bodies, because the players have the imagination of 13 year olds and ok, you’ve got to do it at least once. And there were allegedly nine men in the room at the time. All is not good. How could it be worse? Catherine Lumby wrote an op-ed. ‘In the 2000s, I was a pro-bono advisor for the NRL’ she intoned. Well, look, we’re all pro-bono, it’s just a question of this joke being discontinued.
The squalid, pathetic, and possibly illegal encounter then became the arena of Australian politics for a week, at least in the mediasphere.. It followed the now common trajectory of Australian sport there, which is that the meaning of sport is no longer pleasure, entertainment, and the unique magic of sport, but moral argument over its administration. This is what the Outsiders really get excited about. The Age was full of disappointed fans, who were going to discontinue their direct debit, hoping the Swans would win, cheering etc etc. One player got the kids books he hadn’t written withdrawn from libraries. Our true passion, the urging of men to behave better, took over. Eventually, sport will be phased out of the AFL altogether, and ‘games’ will consist of generated moral dilemmas to be resolved. The ladder will register relative success or failure at resolving, drugs, sex, bribery, human cannibalism scandals. The grand final will be a moral symposium at the St James Ethics Centre. As always, what the 70% of people outside the elite circulation of the issue feel about it goes unrecorded.
That is not the case with Melongate, the almost wholly confected scandalette which evolved from the PM making a joke, on a podcast hosted by a rightwing influencer dressed like a Party Girl Melbourne girl, dressed like a colonial explorer - keep up - about a gift of melons given on behalf of the new female Japanese PM, and some Benny Hillish gag Albo did, along with a bunch of other minor transgressions. The working theory for a while has been that Albo does this deliberately; that his 23 year old advisors have worked out that he should be scolded by feminists, as a way of getting points from the masses. This has yielded to the supposition that he just says shit, unguarded, and mostly gets away with it. So it proved. As the Australian hilariously debased itself trying to turn this thing into a diplomatic scandal, the Coalition joined in the Senate, trying to get text emails etc around it all revealed. Could it get any worse? Yes, the Greens joined with the Coalition, and One Nation, giving them the numbers to ensure that this sad nothing continued, a measure of the disorientation that stasis is bringing on in them. Not that it mattered. No pseudo-scandal of recent years has produced so little interest in the wider world. No-one has spontaneously raised the topic, I have not heard anyone mention it anywhere. The attempt to make something of it appeared to mark a new degree of separation between the public and an increasingly desperate media.
Farce here, tragedy there. The case of Jason Arday dominated the British media and beyond, starting as a gleeful and seething pursuit of a professor of sociology accused of plagiarism, by a right-wing media, hunting ‘woke’, and turning very mordant indeed when the extraordinary volume of coverage - 250 stories in 10 days - created the conditions for Arday’s suicide. Arday was a 41 year old black man who had recently been appointed professor of sociology at Cambridge University, the latest achievement in a career risen from a deprived childhood marked by autism, and a host of subsequent life difficulties. In his passage to the professorship, he had worked on water charities in Brazil, been in a TV show Seven Up, and running thirty marathons in thirty-five days. Troubles emerged for Arday when an unappealing man named Damien Cofnas - an academic with a line in twentieth century pseudo-scientific racism - ran Arday’s work through AI plagiarism detection software and turned up plentiful examples. Arday had already been pinged for minor plagiarism in his PhD, but had been cleared of intentional malfeasance.
Now the floodgates opened. Arday’s work, in the sociology of teaching, especially black mentoring, was found to be both extremely low in content, even for the contemporary social sciences, but also plagiarised at key points. His appointment at Cambridge, the youngest ever black professor, with a very thin publication record, came under heat. And then his life claims, which were soon to be published in a much publicised memoir. He had not spoken till he was 11 years old, he had run some of those marathons with a broken leg bone. That he could not read and write when he began his undergraduate degree. An academic who had written to him questioning him, in academic form, about possible plagiarism, he had reported them to the police for racial harassment - and in the fevered atmosphere of contemporary UK, they had been investigated.
The wave of media attention towered. It was impossible to explain some mitigation - unconscious plagiarism is not unknown in PhDs - against the onslaught of discovery. It was clear that Arday was one of those people who, with some energy, fight hard against the world’s attempt to relegate them. But they do so by developing the capacity for exaggeration sliding into fantasy. In the current period, Arday’s capacity for, and temptation to, such coincided with the period of affirmative action DEI in the UK, and perhaps more importantly, by the valorisation of narrative and ‘non-academic’ knowledge along lines of race,gender, etc in the academy. Finally, the business of the social sciences now demanded such a manic useless overproduction of articles, that any demand for synthesis, or even interpretive analysis, had gone by the board. Papers published in endlessly more-specialised journals , with readers in two figures, say almost nothing, and in a conspiracy of silence, no-one really minds. This is in part because, in the social sciences, the application of standards has come to be defined as oppressive in itself. The critical political standards that have come from within the discipline have been misapplied, and large parts of it have seen their legitimacy collapse.
Arday was revealed as less than attractive himself; the police reports for academic contestation had been followed by complaints against students who questioned his teaching and marking standards and diligence. Photos of him, it was hard not to feel, showed a young man with a narcissistic jag, marked by a self-regarding painted-on smile, a barrier against real world engagement. He is a type one finds in academe; people who can thus float through it for decades, because much of academia is now a zombie institution, in which not much real ever happens.
But the onslaught against him went well beyond any possible public interest. It was foaming, furious, relentless. Arday was obviously in the most existentially difficult of positions. He was not a solid academic who had got caught playing fast and loose, and could retreat to his solid work. Nor was he a cheerful chancer, seeing how much he could get away with, and claiming the role of caught trickster. He had pursued establishment position, while also wanting celebrity fame. Exposed on both, he was, at the age of forty-one, reduced to being literally nothing at all.. He would have felt surely, that he had not only been exposed, but that he had gone from black champion, to exhibit against woke. The sheer volume of the onslaught did the rest. Even when you haven’t been utterly humiliated, this sort of surrounding public attack can channel atavistic levels of small-group shame, the sort you feel when you’re a kid, and you just want to disappear. Suicide, in adulthood, is the hole you crawl into, to hide both from others, and from part of yourself, the superego, representing the others. ‘You’, your ego is surrounded from within and without.
The British and Australian tabloid press have wanted a suicide like this for some time. Not consciously of course. Not to admit to oneself. But it is the ultimate consequence of what they do, in these sort of pursuits, and the refusal to admit it, counts as wilful negligence. In can’t be ignored that it is often non-whites who are most enthusiastically targeted. In Australia, the pursuit of Larissa Behrendt, for a joke tweet, led by a vengeful Patricia Karvelas, was one such case. This was followed by the attack on Yassmin Abdel-Magied. That was probably the ‘golden’ age of it. By the time they got round to Randa Abdel-Fattah, the power of the old media to wield that sort of power had started to fade through their growing irrelevance - evidenced by the casual way that Anthony Albanese batted off the pseudo-scandal of Melongate. Was it a mistake? He was asked ‘I reckon’ he said or something like it, making it into a joke. That will double the fury of News Corp. And it is the fury that lies at the root of the absolutely excessive pursuit of Arday. At its root is the anger of old media at being part of a world passing out of existence, and at the people they are being replaced by. Hyperpolitics? Perhaps, on the surface. But the depth of this political contestation is around knowledge, education and power. The scandal revealed was less about Jason Arday than the revelation that the tertiary education system - which the knowledge group use to claim high salaries, prestige and rank - is now a racket, and a con, and a lot of people know it, guiltily or otherwise. It is the fury at being taken for a mug that are driving people to the right, to the right, to the right, and to anyone who will call out the emperor’s crimson robes. Swangate, melongate…they’re attempts to carry on a dying business as usual. Beneath that moves an energy that scares the right trying to ride it, as much as it does the establishments that are its target.
The last weeks of the Anti-semitism Royal Commission have continued as it started - with the suspicion that it may have been something of an own goal for the actual Australian-Jewish community, pushed by a zionist lobby whose first imperative is Israel. With the huge gap between the terrible lethal attack that prompted it, and the orientation towards feelings and emotions, at the mix of politics and prejudice post October 7, the event seems to have drained some sympathy from the Jewish community, in a multicultural country, where multiple racisms must be negotiated through by many every day. What did honest people want from it? The identification of a single element causing anti-semitism, that could be removed from social life. Ironically, that was the dream of Jewish assimilation throughout the twentieth century. It was one the zionist movement argued could never be removed. Anti-semitism is essential to the structure of non-Jewish Abrahamic cultures. Zionists, by this argument, are morally licensed by that fact to ruthless action in pursuit of a nation. It is by far the strongest argument, in moral-realpolitik terms, that zionism has. Without it, how could the state of Israel’s actions, over decades, possibly be defended by anyone? That tension has played throughout. Inevitably then, the Royal Commission was dissatisfying to both parties. It raised the implicit paradox: there are no zionists, or very few, outside of Israel. There are zionist sympathisers, supporters, passionate advocates, but, I mean, a zionist is a Jew who thinks one should establish the state of Israel. There are some who, for family or other reasons, practically cannot move to Israel now, but would want to when they can. They’re zionists. But when many Jews call themselves zionists, it is necessarily a self-designation of a political position.
Perhaps that lies at the heart of the anger directed at people like Randa Abdel-Fattah, and others, above and beyond a certain modishly cool take on very brutal atrocities. This culminated this week in a call for them to be summoned to the Royal Commission to explain their remarks in various places. Liberal MP Julian Leeser, was most prominent in this, wanting public commentators to be summoned to a star chamber, to justify their own detailed arguments made in the public sphere. This is a funny idea of public life for a L/liberal to have. But zionism these days, is never having to say you’re sorry.
All change at the Guardian Australia, with new London-sent editor/viceroy, David Munk firmly affixing his pith helmet, and getting the colonials in order. Rebecca Costello, managing director of Guardian Oz, has ‘departed suddenly’. Costello might have thought she had won a Baby Jane style struggle with Lenore Taylor, when the latter was more or less carried out catatonic five months ago. But Munk was on team Taylor, and his victory was Costello’s loss.
More interestingly is whether the Weekly Beast - the Guardian’s rather lame media column - has seen the removal of Amanda Meade, the former News Corp columnist who got a Grauniad gig through her mates in the Taylor massive. Other hands have fed the Beast the past three weeks, though it still barely breaks a story (yeah, yeah, one of the few it did was moi). ‘Amanda Meade making a phone call, that’d be a story for Weekly Beast’ one Crikey/Guardian veteran once remarked. Has Munk done a Da Vinci code defenestration on her, as an attempt to torque up the column? Possibly. Or maybe she’s just on holiday. We shall find out.
Karl Stefanovic amused this week with the shamelessness of his new right wing grift, in a reference to the Fabian Society, an ancient cooker obsession, whose worldwide command is news to the half-dozen cardigan types who keep it going. It reminds Spec of another story concerning the late great Race Mathews, who kept the Fabians going for decades, especially during slumps. A right wing League of Rights had become so obsessed with the Fabians and the sinister control of Mathews, that he determined to ring this vast sinister organisation up, on their number listed in the Yellow Pages . ‘Race Mathews!’ Race answered the phone. The obvious reason - that Race was the Fabian Society at that point - was rejected in favour of the conclusion that the Fabians had arranged for Race to answer that precise call, by that precise cooker. The League redoubled their efforts. Spectral power, the kids call it. Now pretty much standard Australian politics…
Fernando Pessoa
Pessoa, who became known to most of us through Harold Bloom’s new canon, barely left Lisbon for the thirty years of his adulthood in the early twentieth century, dying at 50 of cirrhosis. No-one captured the strange deliquescence and absence of life during life; he makes Beckett read like Nancy Mitford. In a slim volume of poems named Mensagem, he used Portugal’s melancholic history of thwarted empire as a distorting mirror of reflection on doing, not much at all. Dom Sebastian was an Aguirre type figure, who dreamed of imperial revival, but died on foreign sands. Existing translations err on the side of the glutinous. My minimal crack at it, is as much a guide to reading its compressed baroque as actual stand alone version. Kinda…
Dom Sebastian
Fernando Pessoa
Louco, sim, louco, porque quis grandeza
Qual a Sorte a não dá.
Não coube em mim minha certeza;
Por isso onde o areal está
Ficou meu ser que houve, não o que há.
*
Minha loucura, outros que me a tomem
Com o que nela ia.
Sem a loucura que é o homem
Mais que a besta sadia,
Cadáver adiado que procria?
Fernando Pessoa
Mad yes mad, because I wanted
Glory, that fate does not give
I was sure; the world less
Where the sand stopped
That man did. But not this
*
My being mad, let others take it
With all that it is
For what is a man without madness,
But an animal feeding,
A body breeding?
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2027 Logies to be hosted by the stingray that killed Steve Irwin
‘Swans have a Leda, but no leaders’ only man with an arts degree at AFL HQ intones to himself as someone says stfu Mike
Royal Commission into anti-Semitism is Brit Mihale’d of Josh Frydenburg
Nick Kyrgios announces he is stepping back from competition tennis to spend more time with his cocaine
Following searing speech on injuries to female veterans, Jacquie Lambie.-becomes ‘Senator for Vaginal Prolapse’, replacing Eric Abetz
Hayden Panettiere dead at ripe old child star age of 36
Till next week…
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