language
Won't somebody think of the children?
One of the least commented upon rhetorical devices currently in vogue within the Rudd PR corps is the use of the phrase “the little one/s”, to refer to a child or children. It pops up everywhere, in every imaginable media or policy circumstance where children are even remotely involved, and is designed to make an emotional appeal in a way that talking about “family welfare”, “kids” and even “children” does not.
I first remarked on this phrase in Rudd’s speech to National Conference this year, but I took it to be merely an idiosyncracy of speech. My mistake. It’s since been seen floating around the kevin07 site, mostly in the get shirty section where True Believers can send in pictures of their “little ones” wearing the dedicated Kevin07 gear, which will then be posted on the site via the australianlabor flickr feed with sinister captions like “A shy smile from this little one in her KEVIN07 gear”.*
It popped up again today, predictably, in the childcare policy announcement, and got mega media hits:
Sending a little one to child care is one of the toughest decisions that parents have to make. When they do, they want to make sure child care is high quality and affordable.
I am suspicious of this kind of emotional use of language, as it’s often used to justify and persuade punters to jump on board bandwagons that have been less than savoury. Witness the “Children Overboard” affair. So I’m quite wary of the commodification of the little ones, which I actually thought was pretty sweet in my initial encounter with it. This phrase, along with the omnipresent “working families” that seem to have taken over the election process, are currently First on arleeshar’s List Of Annoying.
* disclaimer: I own a Kevin07 tshirt. Also, my parents took various pictures of myself wearing different contemporary unionist propaganda as a small child. I used to hand out how-to-votes, letterbox, and ride pillion in the Election Loudspeaker Car for various members of my family who were running for office, from the young age of two. When they won, I was encouraged to make precocious speeches from their shoulders at the victory party. This experience somewhat uniquely qualifies me to comment on the emotive exploitation of the concept of childhood in the political arena. I might write some more about it sometime.
In Which I Give Thanks To Beavis And Butthead, The Twin Gods Of Sub-Editing
The Defence Department is investigating another compromising photo, this time of a naked soldier mishandling a weapon.
From your ABC, inspiring smutty comments and innuendo nation-wide.
Conservative Racism: Guest Post by Felix
A couple of weeks ago the Prime Minister appeared on talkback radio and wrote two opinion pieces for Australian newspapers to spruik one message of importance to Australians. What issue deserved so much of our Prime Minister’s time?
There are a range of huge challenges facing the Australian people. Spiralling personal debt? Third world conditions in Indigenous Australia? A coherent and serious response to global warming?
The PM devoted his pen not to any of these, but to the fact that—by his numbers—less than 1% of Australian Muslims haven’t learnt English and ‘refuse to integrate’. That’s 2000 people.
Private Military Contractors
These, in the day when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth’s foundations fled,
Follow’d their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead.
Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood and earth’s foundations stay;
What God abandon’d, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.
–AE Housman, An Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries (1914)
Mercenaries are time-honoured part of human wars. They’re people who go about fighting as professionals, rather than loyal citizens, most often as involved participants in other people’s wars: from Sandline International, a company which shares its name with the 1994 scandal that brought down a PNG Government, to the Condottieri (french site) and long, long before. The British Expeditionary Force of 1914, the subject of Housman’s poem, fit into a strict definition of the word.
They’re also a growing industry in the sprawling clusterfuck that is post-invasion Iraq, where they’re known as ‘security contractors’, ‘private military companies’, and many other euphemisms. A pair of documentarists have added to the expanding recent genre of non-fiction film with Shadow Company, a movie I hope to see if it ever gets an Australian release.
Alternet has a long and very interesting interview with one of the documentarists, Nick Bicanic. It is this section of the interview, in which the interviewer asked about how the private contractors saw themselves, I found most interesting:
Initially, the companies themselves used the term “private military company.” But then they realized that, from a public relations point of view, calling yourselves a freelance military operator was a bad idea because it sounded too much like mercenary. So, they changed it to private security companies. It’s all one and the same thing.
I don’t necessarily think “mercenary” deserves the negative connotations that it has. Many of these guys call themselves mercenaries. They perhaps do it slightly as a joke, but they don’t consider it to be a priori a negative thing. They just think, this is what I do, and I do it for a living, and I’m not wearing the uniform of a nation. So, therefore, I am a mercenary.
I far prefer Hugh MacDiarmad’s lines on the moral worth of those people who cast off uniforms, and go about the business of war for money:
It is a God-damned lie to say that these
Saved, or knew, anything worth any man’s pride.
They were professional murderers and they took
Their blood money and impious risks and died.
In spite of all their kind, some elements of worth
With difficulty persist here and there on earth.
On your marks: steeeee-yoush!
The Prime Minister says the exchange between one of his MPs and the Opposition Leader Kim Beazley does not reflect well on either of them.
Bah! Let’s have a read of the language used.
Mr Beazley labelled Mr Tuckey as “weak” and the Liberal backbencher called the Labor leader a “fat so-and-so”.
“This is not about Liberals, this is about you mob,” Mr Tuckey said.
“Take your tablets mate,” Mr Beazley said.
Politics genuinely ought to be about a bit of tension and the lack of bipartisanship. Contest and inevitable conflict is the job we demand of our representatives.
(That’s why they’re so often so odd as human beings).
I’m proud, proud to see the word ‘stoush’ return to headlines and to the vocabularies of subeditors across the nation. Let’s all be part of the revival.
Amen, sing it ABC.
Outrage In Brief
Sure, Lebanon’s being invaded, Israel’s being bombarded, oil is running out and generally the world’s going to hell in an enormous fibreglass-and-steel stroller (one of those ones that take up the whole aisle and run over your toes on the bus). I’m still capable of working up outrage over totally wrong use of English and inability to count. As heard on triple J’s news this morning:
Floyd Landis has become the eighth American in a row to win the Tour de France.
Second!
[Sound of a choked scream]