Some of the Substacks I read do semi-regular posts in the form of quick takes on various topics: five-to-ten matters covered succinctly and often ranging over subjects more varied than the usual things a given newsletter writes about. I like reading them and they have made me nostalgic for blogging days when it was much easier to mix longer essays with shorter comments. So, I’ve decided to have a go at it myself. Welcome to Ghost Notes. Let’s see how we go.
Please keep quiet: You see this complaint a lot around social media, and I even hear it during in-person discussions, professional and casual. It goes something like this: Sure, Labor are doing some bad things and Anthony Albanese is proving to be a pretty ineffective leader, at least to the extent that he was ever considered a part of the progressive left, but hey, if you go around criticising Labor and the prime minister you are paving the way for a Dutton government.
I understand the concern, but this is an unhealthy way to look at politics. It is also relying on out-of-date presumptions about how our political system works, presuming that Labor and the LNP are a zero-sum game and that if you don’t get one you inevitably get the other. That is no longer true in our three-party system.1
The key point to make is that we aren’t all strategists for the Labor Party. We certainly shouldn’t be a cheer squad. We are citizens living in a country with a government and we are all entitled to express our pleasure or dissatisfaction with how we are being governed. Human nature being what it is, the criticisms are likely to be more common, but that is how it should be. Governments have to be pushed to do things outside a comfort zone that is defined by the wishes and demands of an elite, of vested interests, and we will never change political conversations if we aren’t willing to articulate our views. And that includes, on occasion, criticising “your own side”. It is one of the ways you make space for those views in the first place. To shut up for fear of “getting Dutton” is to fail to understand how political majorities are constructed.
No mistake, a Dutton government would be a disaster, as his anti-worker, anti-immigrant, anti-decency Budget reply made clear. But if Dutton and the LNP win the next election—still a pretty remote prospect—Labor and Albanese will have no-one to blame but themselves.
Plans For Your Good: A Prime Minister's Testimony of God's Faithfulness: Oh, Scotty, your wife and daughters, not to mention Jesus, must be so proud.
#notalljournalists: In a recent podcast discussion, I was taken to task—in a gentle and civil manner—by a journalist reminding me that, although my criticism of media practices sometimes hit the mark, I needed to be careful not to suggest that all journalism, or all media outlets, were at fault.
I hear this a lot, and yes, sure, though I am pretty careful about it to be honest. And look, I mightn’t get as many emails and DMs thanking me for what I have said as I do from journalists pushing back or outright attacking something I’ve said or written—I’ve certainly never had a two-and-a-half-thousand-word thankyou note from a journalist—but I do get the occasional message appreciative of what I have said about the industry or from a journalist whose work I have noted.
The correct response to such praise and criticism is, of course, to treat those two imposters the same and get on with the work of criticism because the idea isn’t to tally up slaps and kisses but to make journalism better.
The not-all-journalists argument is weak, as are most not-all arguments. Whatever arithmetical truth they contain, the complaint only serves as a distraction from actual problems. Sure, not all journalists, not all men, not all cops, not all magpies or whatever else, but so what? The problems within journalism are so gigantic—as everything from the coverage of Trump to the way in which Scott Morrison’s office seeded anti-welfare recipient stories with News Corp, as revealed by the RoboDebt Royal Commission, to the recent revelations of chequebook journalism in regard to the rapist Bruce Lehrmann—that complaining about generalised uses of the term media or journalist doesn’t really cut it.2
Lucius: About two years ago I got a bit3 obsessed with a band called Lucius, who, apart from being a band in their own right, consist of the core vocalist duo of Jesse Wolfe and Holly Laessig who have worked with—on tour and in the studio—everyone from Joni Mitchell to Roger Waters, touring as back-up singers with the latter on his last world tour. (You can see them onstage with Joni at her various recent revivals at the Newport Folk Festival and the Grammys.) Most recently they have worked with master producer and aggregator of Americana folk, T-Bone Burnett, and in an interview with Variety, Burnett gave what I think is the best account of their skills. High professional praise indeed:
They’re extraordinary orchestrators with their voice and take that music someplace else.
Lucius elevate everything they appear on. And their voices are distinctive, but very malleable, so they don’t sound the same very often on any two songs, even though you can tell it’s them. They have the ability to sound grand without sounding corny in the way that grandiose female backing vocals could.
They’re advanced. In fact, the things they sang, no one’s ever sung before. They’re not doing background parts. The overtones created by the two of them singing together are thrilling. I’ve never heard that sort of blend between two voices before. And then, their arrangements, their orchestrations of the parts are complex and inventive and, you know, I have no idea where they’re coming from.
This was your first time working with Lucius, right?
It is. I met them up at Joni Mitchell’s house at one of the rehearsals for the Joni Nights that they do, and they sang a new song they had written, and it was otherworldly. I thought voices were coming out of the walls. Or I couldn’t tell what was happening, but it was an amazing sound. And there were some of these songs that just seemed to lend themselves to their tones, so I called them. As I always do, I just turned them loose and said, “Do whatever you want to do.” And they did several tracks on every one of these songs, and then they said, “Well, just use whatever you want.” And we used every note that they sang because it all added up into what I think of as a magnificent orchestration.
Never again. Anywhere: I started working on a review of the film The Zone of Interest, but then I read the Martin Amis novel on which it was based, including the end-essay in which he collects a lot of the research he did for the novel, and then I started reading the books from that research, and then I read Amis’s autobiographical novel-thing, Inside Story, and then the movie review turned into a longer essay about the books and Amis—including a realisation that I didn’t dislike him as much as I thought I did—and about the state of the world, including what is happening in Gaza, and who knows when that will be finished. Anyway…
The Zone of Interest, book and film, both inevitably conjure the idea of the banality of evil, Hannah Arendt’s famous term for the nature of bureaucratic evil that allowed something like the Holocaust to happen. Amis, in fact, dismisses Arendt’s theory in a footnote in Inside Story saying:
Although there are many hyper-intelligent pages in Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1962), her central conceit – ‘the banality of evil’ – has over the years been steadily debunked. Artur Sammler, the hero of the Bellow novel of 1970, Mr Sammler’s Planet, played his part: ‘The idea of making the century’s great crime look dull is not banal,’ says Sammler on page 20. ‘Politically, psychologically, the Germans had an idea of genius. The banality was only camouflage. What better way to get the curse out of murder than to make it look ordinary, boring, or trite? … [D]o you think the Nazis didn’t know what murder was? Everybody (except certain bluestockings) knows what murder is. That is very old human knowledge’ … And consider Eichmann’s statement in 1945 (quoted at the trial): ‘I will leap into my grave laughing because the feeling that I have five million human beings on my conscience is for me a source of extraordinary satisfaction.’ What is banal, what is tediously commonplace, about that?
Amis, Martin. Inside Story (p. 538). Random House. Kindle Edition.
The movie is much more enamoured with the idea, which might be why the novel is a more compelling and complex document than the movie. Hopefully I’ll get that essay done sometime soon.
In the midst of the slaughter happening in Gaza, it is compelling to go back over the history of the Holocaust, and I am always moved beyond expression by those Survivors we see on social media (sometimes in mainstream media) who attend protests about what Israel is currently doing and who insist, “Never Again. Anywhere.”
Where our third “party” is the floating thirty-odd percent of voters who no longer reliably vote Labor or LNP and are looking for somewhere to land, election to election.
The Burning Platforms podcast is excellent, and the team of Peter Lewis from Essential Media, Lizzie O’Shea, the chair of Digital Rights Watch, and Health Engine CEO Dan Stinton, are a great trio of expertise and insight. I was very happy to join them for this episode, and I think the section on media towards the end of the show is particularly worthwhile, even if I disagreed with Dan’s concerns about not all journalists.
A bit, he says. I have t-shirts. At my age.
Great read Tim.
The idea amongst the upper centrist political and media class, that we can’t criticise Labor because it might lead to Liberals returning reeks of delusion and Pearl clutching. They still fetishise the Keating and Howard years and think that the country of the 90s and 00s are the same now.
No one is above criticism and there is a lot to be critical of the current Government. The Opposition is in its weakest position for a long time and both parties are likely to have similarly low primary votes next election. The best way to protect ourselves from both is a balanced parliament where neither has majority to prevent them from hurting us any more.
Excellent - and more, please! On all five pieces - ticks of approval!
I was at a recent Rally/March in Hyde Park/city of Sydney - and noted the brave and courageous presence of a Holocaust Survivor. I'd have gone up to speak with her but there were others already engaging her attention. There is a recent documentary film based on the Conference at Wannsee (Austrian director - subtitled) based exactly on the transcripts of all the conference participants that was recorded - in which details of the Final Solution were hammered out (as it were). All in euphemistic terms until it had to made explicitly clear for some what was actually being proposed. There's the banality - though as regards Eichmann and Hannah Arendt - I always assumed that the banality lay in his unprepossessing appearance and in the fact that it was all a logistics matter - that banality did not specifically refer to the slaughter. I found The Zone of Interest disturbing (of course) and thought of my uncle's mother who was at that very time just nearby being slave-labourer worked to death. Not Jewish - but taken by the Gestapo in 1937 for assisting those marked Jewish to escape Germany - her death certificate - recorded on Feb 16, 1944 - stated (in translation) that she had died of exhaustion. There is banality in that. My uncle is still living - nearly 95. Jim K.