arleeshar's blog
Limned
cross posted at Terrible Fabulous
This is what passes for political debate in Australia; I’m actually okay with that. Engaging with Tony Abbott’s policies would just give them air. So long as I don’t have to take his statements on sex and climate change seriously, I’m happy to join the rest of Australia in marvelling at the outline of his penis. Here now are some of the key political debate points pertaining to this important issue, as raised by the commenters to this article:
Julie Bishop #3
Thankyou Annabel Crabb for this article, which contains a fantastic description of Bishop frantically hunting down her supposedly secret ballot paper to prove that she didn’t vote for the man she’s now standing behind, and also this:
“People are calling her The Cockroach,” one MP told ABC Online.
“She’d survive anything.”
Mr Abbott defended his new deputy during their joint press conference on Tuesday, declaring “She’s a loyal girl!” and patting her.
Dark times
I am so concerned by this Tony Abbott thing. I mean, who are they kidding? This is the institutionalisation of the right in Australia. Sophie Mirabella, who has always been my nemesis (and she knows it; I sent her an email once late at night telling her so), is now in a position of raised influence and must be stopped. Minchin the Foul is kingmaker. This is absurd. Surely there will be either a split or an assassination. We enter dark times.
Bishop, I note, is still entrenched as deputy, serving her leader, whoever that may be. Perhaps I was wrong; this may prove to be a very smart move on her part, enabling her to step forward as the consensus candidate at some point in the future when the Liberal party has so terribly damaged its relationship with the female half of the Australian population through the excesses of Abbott and co. that the only possible way of maintaining some kind of electoral significance is to propel Julie Bishop into the spotlight, I was going to say blinking like a possum but as she is renowned for her blue steel gaze, I would imagine she would probably instead try to stare down said spotlight.
The spotlight would win. That is all.
Liberal Stoush: Bishop Fail
I like the Liberal rumble that’s going on at the moment; I enjoy the thought of Malcolm Turnbull privately comparing himself to Alexander the Great as he tackles the Gordian Knot (“familiar as his garter”).
A generally problematic aspect of the Liberal leadership issue, however, is Julie Bishop. Where is she in all this? I mean, supposedly she’s the deputy leader of the Opposition, which believe it or not could be quite a powerful position. Not so powerful as if Bishop had actually stood up and taken the shadow treasury portfolio as was her right, but certainly, on paper, the deputy should be regarded as a natural contender for succession in such a situation as the Opposition currently finds itself. And so I ask, where is she?
It always seemed clear that Bishop’s inclusion in the Opposition lineup was sadly a token gesture, designed to mirror the Labor situation and spin spin spin to counter the clear fact that the Liberal party is a dinosaur of the patriarchy. But I have some sympathy with opinion that regardless of how you get somewhere, what you do when you get there is the important thing. I mean, ideally one would get to the deputy leadership of a major political party on merit alone, but this has never ever been the case in tweedy Liberal land – witness the career trajectory of Alexander Downer - and when you’re contending with a patriarchal right-wing structure operating mostly through cronyism, you surely take your token appointment as part of that structure and run with it as best you can.
Sadly it seems clear that the Liberals have promoted somebody who is apparently unable to take advantage of the current chaos to announce a leadership bid or at least to make some undergroundy rumbling noises of interest in pursuing the leadership in the future. I mean, if Bishop didn’t have leadership ambitions, surely she wouldn’t have accepted a leadership role in the first place? And given this, now is the time to do something with that ambition, surely?
This is mildly unfair to Bishop, of course; given how awful the Liberal party really is, it may be impossible for any woman to ever be the leader. But that’s no reason not to try. The fact that she’s not indicated any wish to do anything but use her potentially key position to be a kind of helpmeet to the prating GPS-inbred leader of the day, melding effortlessly into the patriarchal narrative, makes me wonder what on earth she’s doing in politics and why on earth she accepted the position in the first place.
Naturally, given the circumstance of Bishop’s election to the role of deputy, there’s this inherent comparison with Julia Gillard, who, despite the apparent solidity of the Rudd leadership, is constantly being touted as the next Prime Minister. This is a shocking commentary on the Liberal party as an institution that is a) poison to women of talent and b) more willing to promote a person of apparently little talent to what should be a key leadership role than to make a genuine effort to actually recruit women of talent to its ranks.
True Blue
I love this story: outnumbered 17 to 1 by camels whose sole goal is breaking into the pipes to slurp their crapwater, the townsfolk shelter quiver in their fibro demountables, their children cheering every time a long-lashed eye peers menacingly through the window.
I say, this is a job for the NSW Shooters Party – a timely deal with the NT Government would see that pesky railways sell-off legislation passed without resort to more bastardisation of the planning system, with the confusingly named Robert Brown now able to revel in camel gore to his heart’s content. I’m less enamoured by the public health implications of a pile of 6000 camel corpses gently rotting in the desert sun for several months; however, as with all things in Australia,this guy has the solution:
“The way I see it, there is a billion dollars in camel meat wandering around the central desert,” says Harvey Douglas, who owns a mobile abattoir.
I wonder what a mobile abattoir looks like? I’m thinking it’s an open-tray ute with two men in blue singlets and a bar-fridge hooked up to the cigarette lighter. I’m thinking there might be some scale issues with harvesting One Billion Dollars’ worth of camel meat using such a set-up, but what do I know? I’m not an economist.
"Do not be deceived by my peaceful face. I have a heart of stone."
Interview with an interesting woman.
It’s nothing new, but I observe that the reason certain segments of the western media are fascinated by the idea of a female suicide bomber is because there is this feeling that blowing oneself up in furtherance of a cause is an ultra-rational activity, overcoming the ‘natural’ or feminine human inclination to self-preservation, and thus according to the law of oppositions and what have you is a hyper-masculine act. Conversely this is twinned with the feeling that young men, the celebrated pinnacle of rude and unbridled animalistic masculinity, are dangerous because of their ‘irrational’ hot-headedness; that suicide bombing is overwhelmingly a young man’s response to the hopelessness of injustice. Suicide bombers, in our western imaginary, are young and fiery (men) and really scared but determined to revenge/avenge/kill/maim etc, overcoming their fear in furtherance of their cause.
Naturally a young female suicide bomber is a problem to be investigated and probed, because young women are suppose to be, you know, the curb on young men’s violence and misdirected sexual energy and a symbol of the home and hearth or something, and not supposed to be encouraging or participating in this hyper-rational irrationality. Hence this article and others like it.
Journalists are lazy. In times of national crisis when the cultural values or vital life of the patria itself are threatened, one heavily-subscribed-to western narrative is the rise of a particular matriarchal archetype, the female warrior who spurs on male warriors to resistance and victory against the invaders; think Boadiccea, or Malalai Joya, or Pauline Hanson. When western journalists investigate the female suicide bomber, there is a tendancy to frame these women through this narrative because otherwise it’s too puzzling. I can’t be bothered to examine whether this cultural lens is positive or negative or even what those terms might mean in the context of writing about people blowing themselves up in a war. I will say, that this stuff gives me the heebie jeebies, because if my nation were the invaded rather than the aggressor in this situation, I could certainly see myself going down this path.
At last
My two favourite parts of this video are at 00:50, when he says to her, “I practised”, and she grins like an idiot.
And then again at about 02.05, when he’s trying to convince her to do a dip or some other kind of fancy dance move at the climax of the song, and she’s just like, NO WAY, and we’re all kind of happy because despite being the most powerful man in the world it’s fairly clear that despite the extra practising he cannot dance and would probably have dropped her.
The Obamas are the hott secks and I can’t believe it took me so long to figure this out. I think I was still bitter about Hillary.
Summer of '69
American Life Magazine’s vast photo archives, spanning 150 years in the life of the US, are now searchable by google even though the magazine is no more. Very interesting, particularly the series on poverty during the Great Depression. It’s also full of hidden gems like this:
OMG fugly mandals and hideously unflattering pants on a young Hillary Rodham. What a square.
I’d seen a cropped version of this image before, but never the full-length horror. And no, it’s not just the time period; rather, a reminder that these are the people who run our lives - the people who spend their youth in fuglypants with an earnest expression, pursuing noble goals, only to emerge from their chrysalis of foul twenty-five years later, pristine style icons, with the aid of a herd of professional stylists. Here’s what the cool kids were doing in 1969. Warning: none of these people are famous, but they look like they’re having a freakin’ good time.
Do Not Get Married II
I just can’t see how these people are in fact alive.
The more I learn about how weddings are apparently conducted in this country, the more fearful I become of my own approaching nuptials. They all seem very happy however, so that’s something.
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