Tomorrow, Melbourne time, is the third and final debate between Obama and McCain. I’d hoped a week ago that McCain would go into this one with his negative tactics having failed miserably and with the polls looking bad for him. It has come to pass. When last I checked he was trailing by more than 8 points in the RealClear poll averages and was five points down even in Florida and Virginia. The Democrats haven’t won Virginia in a Presidential election since 1964, and even that was an aberration. Even Missouri is now looking quite possible for Obama.
I am trying hard to think of other things and not succeeding. As I said to my brother the day Howard called the election and a poll had him 18 points down and looking likely to lose his own seat, “it’s too good to think about but I can’t think about anything else.”
What an extraordinary thing the American system is. It doesn’t matter who gets the most votes but which states they win since each state elects people to the Electoral College which then elects the president. And since each state’s electors all vote the way the majority of the state’s voters have voted it can – and does – result in the winner of the election actually getting fewer votes than the winner. This most recently happened when Bush beat Gore in 2000 despite winning half a million fewer votes. Now this is terribly unfair and undemocratic and outdated and all BUT…it is heaven on a stick for political junkies. How boring it is to follow a direct election which goes like this:
Oh yes, he’s in front in the polls, he’s still in front, I think he’ll win, oh the gap has narrowed a bit, now it’s dead even, now he’s back in front, now he’s in front by a lot, now I really think he’s going to win…
But the states-based system makes it more like a parliamentary election where you can follow each seat and wonder who’ll hang onto what and who will win Eden-Monaro. I say to hell with democracy, give me a system that’s interesting.
Anyway, the second bit of my fantasy about McCain going into the last debate 8 points down and trailing even in Virginia and Missouri was that he’d lose the plot and do something horrendous that resulted in “McCain Meltdown” headlines and handed Obama the election on a platter. Not that Obama needs such help, more that the party of Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld needs a good kicking and I hope they get one. Hell they might even end up with a government that believes we can do something about global warming.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Could the nightmare be over?
Today I feel that the nightmare might be over. When Palin was named as McCain’s running mate I was very happy because I thought it signaled surrender. McCain couldn’t have the moderate he wanted so he chose the extremist the Republican base wanted. I thought it was a passive-aggressive move, choosing someone so extreme he couldn’t possibly win.
That was what I thought and then it all went horribly right for McCain-Palin. She delivered her speech well – as if it’s hard to make a good speech with an autocue in front of an already adoring audience – and the polls got better and better for her and McCain.
Then the lies started. When “lipstick on a pig” was peaking last week I was sick to my stomach. Not just because it was crap but because it was crap that the mainstream media (known here on the internet as MSM) lapped it all up. I saw the Republican add replayed on the Australian ABC’s Lateline program and then, online, McCain’s response to the charge that the add was a lie because it suggested Obama had called Palin a pig, when he’d done no such thing.
McCain’s response was that Obama chooses his words carefully and he shouldn’t have said this. When it was put to him that he’d used that exact same expression he said he was talking about Hilary Clinton’s health plan, and that Obama should not have said this.
Am I the only one who reads it this way? It’s okay for McCain to use “lipstick on a pig” to describe the policies of a female opponent. It’s not okay for Obama to use “lipstick on a pig” to describe the policies of his male opponent. Indeed, because McCain is running with a woman Obama’s use of the phrase must apply to her and must, therefore be sexist.
Am I the only one who sees race as a factor here? It is okay for a white man to use the phrase concerning a white woman. It is not okay for a black man to use the phrase about anything or anyone.
But the lies continued and McCain-Palin pulled ahead in the polls. The MSM picked up on the lying trend. It got so bad that Karl Rove said it had gone too far. Karl Rove! That’s like a Labrador saying he’s eaten too much. I watched McCain on The View. Questioned on his lies and her lies he lied and lied again. Commentators, even in the MSM were despairing. Maybe it doesn’t matter if you lie, provided you lie well and often and distract people from the real issues.
Now today – or was it yesterday? – Wall Street has gone nuts and the economy is the big story again. The Daily Kos’s tracking poll has Obama four points up, after being three up yesterday and tied the day before that.
If Obama-Biden change the story from McCain-Palin’s pathetic victim-hood (a black man called me a pig!) to the story of their economic illiteracy and their vicious lies, all might be well. Please let it be so.
In 1980 I was living in Warragul in West Gippsland. At the time it was a sleepy dairy-farming town and I’m quite sure that everyone in my Year 9 class was from a Liberal-voting family. Yet the day after Reagan got in there was widespread and deep despair. How could America elect a man who was so old and had such crazy ideas about the world? This was what a group of conservative, rural Australians thought of Reagan. Bush junior has made Reagan look like Lincoln and McCain-Palin will make Bush look like, well, almost as wise as his father.
It’s just unthinkable and yet in the past week US political junkies like me have had to consider it likely. An Obama win will restore my faith in humanity.
That was what I thought and then it all went horribly right for McCain-Palin. She delivered her speech well – as if it’s hard to make a good speech with an autocue in front of an already adoring audience – and the polls got better and better for her and McCain.
Then the lies started. When “lipstick on a pig” was peaking last week I was sick to my stomach. Not just because it was crap but because it was crap that the mainstream media (known here on the internet as MSM) lapped it all up. I saw the Republican add replayed on the Australian ABC’s Lateline program and then, online, McCain’s response to the charge that the add was a lie because it suggested Obama had called Palin a pig, when he’d done no such thing.
McCain’s response was that Obama chooses his words carefully and he shouldn’t have said this. When it was put to him that he’d used that exact same expression he said he was talking about Hilary Clinton’s health plan, and that Obama should not have said this.
Am I the only one who reads it this way? It’s okay for McCain to use “lipstick on a pig” to describe the policies of a female opponent. It’s not okay for Obama to use “lipstick on a pig” to describe the policies of his male opponent. Indeed, because McCain is running with a woman Obama’s use of the phrase must apply to her and must, therefore be sexist.
Am I the only one who sees race as a factor here? It is okay for a white man to use the phrase concerning a white woman. It is not okay for a black man to use the phrase about anything or anyone.
But the lies continued and McCain-Palin pulled ahead in the polls. The MSM picked up on the lying trend. It got so bad that Karl Rove said it had gone too far. Karl Rove! That’s like a Labrador saying he’s eaten too much. I watched McCain on The View. Questioned on his lies and her lies he lied and lied again. Commentators, even in the MSM were despairing. Maybe it doesn’t matter if you lie, provided you lie well and often and distract people from the real issues.
Now today – or was it yesterday? – Wall Street has gone nuts and the economy is the big story again. The Daily Kos’s tracking poll has Obama four points up, after being three up yesterday and tied the day before that.
If Obama-Biden change the story from McCain-Palin’s pathetic victim-hood (a black man called me a pig!) to the story of their economic illiteracy and their vicious lies, all might be well. Please let it be so.
In 1980 I was living in Warragul in West Gippsland. At the time it was a sleepy dairy-farming town and I’m quite sure that everyone in my Year 9 class was from a Liberal-voting family. Yet the day after Reagan got in there was widespread and deep despair. How could America elect a man who was so old and had such crazy ideas about the world? This was what a group of conservative, rural Australians thought of Reagan. Bush junior has made Reagan look like Lincoln and McCain-Palin will make Bush look like, well, almost as wise as his father.
It’s just unthinkable and yet in the past week US political junkies like me have had to consider it likely. An Obama win will restore my faith in humanity.
Monday, September 15, 2008
All it will cost us is money
When your house is burning down you don’t worry about saving water or what you are wearing. All that matters is getting out alive and saving what you can. A house fire is an emergency and our rules for everyday behaviour don’t apply.
We now live in a time of climate emergency. All the scientific evidence shows that the world is warming because we have put too much greenhouse gas into the air. The North Pole might be ice-free in summer in a few years. Arctic permafrost is already warming and may start to release masses of CO2. The problem could get away from us. Disappearing polar ice and thawing permafrost will cause further warming that might be unstoppable.
A new book, Climate Code Red: the case for emergency action was launched two months ago by the Governor of Victoria, Professor David de Kretser. Its authors argue that since the world is already too hot we have to cut greenhouse gas emissions to zero as quickly as possible. We also have to remove a lot of greenhouse gases from atmosphere and we have to cool the earth.
This sounds extreme yet most governments around the world have accepted the science on which it is based. But they underestimate their citizenry and water down their response. They are bogged down with dialogue and time-lines that stretch uselessly into the future. But this isn’t a pay-rise or used car we’re talking about, it’s the world. You can’t negotiate with physics.
The fact is that humans have a great capacity to respond to emergency. We are hard-wired to act quickly and tirelessly – even selflessly – when the situation demands it. Polls show that we are very worried about the problem and are happy to pay money to fix it. Nobody wants a ruined planet.
Reducing global greenhouse emissions to zero in 10 years or less will not be easy but it can be done. The obstacles are not technical, but political. We can be inspired by the way the Allies mobilized in World War 2 or how the Americans landed a man on the moon just eight years after getting a man into earth orbit.
At the current price for renewable electricity Australia could make all of its power without burning fossil fuels for a total cost of around $12 billion a year. This is just a bit more than we got in our latest tax cut, which I’m sure most of us have forgotten about already.
Making electricity causes 34.7% of Australia’s greenhouse emissions. So for the cost of that forgotten tax cut we could cut our total emissions by over one third. Surely cutting the lot to zero wouldn’t cost more than $50 billion or so. This is five per cent of our Gross Domestic Product. By contrast, during World War 2 Australia spent 30% of its GDP on the war effort.
But it’s also a bit harder than it looks. Australia has grown rich by burning fossil fuels. If we want poorer countries to stop using them we’ll have to make it worth their while. Since we use about five times our share of global emissions we should pay for the renewable energy transition of at least 100 million people in the developing world. This might double our transition budget, bringing it all the way up to 10% of our GDP.
Now that we are approaching the scale of the economic transformation that was needed to defeat fascism in the 1940s we should remember something: this time nobody has to get killed. We can have a planet with a safe climate and more justice and equality than we’ve ever had before and all it will cost us is money.
We now live in a time of climate emergency. All the scientific evidence shows that the world is warming because we have put too much greenhouse gas into the air. The North Pole might be ice-free in summer in a few years. Arctic permafrost is already warming and may start to release masses of CO2. The problem could get away from us. Disappearing polar ice and thawing permafrost will cause further warming that might be unstoppable.
A new book, Climate Code Red: the case for emergency action was launched two months ago by the Governor of Victoria, Professor David de Kretser. Its authors argue that since the world is already too hot we have to cut greenhouse gas emissions to zero as quickly as possible. We also have to remove a lot of greenhouse gases from atmosphere and we have to cool the earth.
This sounds extreme yet most governments around the world have accepted the science on which it is based. But they underestimate their citizenry and water down their response. They are bogged down with dialogue and time-lines that stretch uselessly into the future. But this isn’t a pay-rise or used car we’re talking about, it’s the world. You can’t negotiate with physics.
The fact is that humans have a great capacity to respond to emergency. We are hard-wired to act quickly and tirelessly – even selflessly – when the situation demands it. Polls show that we are very worried about the problem and are happy to pay money to fix it. Nobody wants a ruined planet.
Reducing global greenhouse emissions to zero in 10 years or less will not be easy but it can be done. The obstacles are not technical, but political. We can be inspired by the way the Allies mobilized in World War 2 or how the Americans landed a man on the moon just eight years after getting a man into earth orbit.
At the current price for renewable electricity Australia could make all of its power without burning fossil fuels for a total cost of around $12 billion a year. This is just a bit more than we got in our latest tax cut, which I’m sure most of us have forgotten about already.
Making electricity causes 34.7% of Australia’s greenhouse emissions. So for the cost of that forgotten tax cut we could cut our total emissions by over one third. Surely cutting the lot to zero wouldn’t cost more than $50 billion or so. This is five per cent of our Gross Domestic Product. By contrast, during World War 2 Australia spent 30% of its GDP on the war effort.
But it’s also a bit harder than it looks. Australia has grown rich by burning fossil fuels. If we want poorer countries to stop using them we’ll have to make it worth their while. Since we use about five times our share of global emissions we should pay for the renewable energy transition of at least 100 million people in the developing world. This might double our transition budget, bringing it all the way up to 10% of our GDP.
Now that we are approaching the scale of the economic transformation that was needed to defeat fascism in the 1940s we should remember something: this time nobody has to get killed. We can have a planet with a safe climate and more justice and equality than we’ve ever had before and all it will cost us is money.
When Dad walked into the night
When Dad stayed with me before his 60th birthday he couldn’t find the toilet in my one-bedroom flat. I would show him where it was and half an hour later he would be looking for it again and heading out the front door. When I told him what music we were listening to, he would pause and then ask again, “So, what music are we listening to?” The information literally went in one ear and then out the other.
This was in 1996. But it was not until Christmas the following year when he went missing and then was found by the police and taken to the Korumburra police station in the back of a divvy van that I accepted that something was wrong. Until that time I managed to ignore every bit of evidence that he was losing his mind.
But trying to answer the question “when did it start?” is impossible. According to Alzheimer’s Australia “memory loss, confusion, personality change, apathy and withdrawal and the loss of ability to perform everyday tasks…are common symptoms of dementia…” (“Diagnosing Dementia” Help Sheet at http://www.alzheimers.org.au/content.cfm?infopageid=326#sis) If a sharp and cheerful person suddenly becomes a confused grump we know something is up. But my Dad was not the happiest of people. His glass was often half-empty. He also put himself – and others – down a lot, and he’d complained about memory loss for years. When his memory loss and grumpiness became real problems I dismissed it. I thought he was forgetting things and turning on those around him because it suited him to do so, not because there was something really wrong with him.
Others, especially my mum, were wiser. There had been signs eight years earlier that Dad was losing it. When he and Mum went overseas for three months, just before he retired, she was struck at how he seemed to have lost his initiative. From being the planner and the leader he was suddenly a bewildered man who said “what do we do now?” Mum took up the reins, as she had to. She made plans and read timetables and booked tickets and accommodation.
Upon their return the bad signs continued. They bought a small farm in North East Victoria. Dad had always been very practical and able to make and fix things but now he started to slip. He tried to build a bird bath but it remained nothing more than a cylinder of rocks and cement. He got terribly confused with electrical fencing so that it never worked. He got lost on the country roads. Mum wrote to me and said his memory loss was getting bad and she was worried but he wouldn’t talk to anyone about it. I refused to believe anything was wrong.
At my brother’s wedding he froze in the middle of his speech and said “this is not nerves, it’s just something that happens to me nowadays.” Again my Mum saved the day with a dazzling speech, the sort of thing she wouldn’t have dreamed of doing five years earlier. She was doing a lot of stuff she wouldn’t have dreamed of doing before.
And then there was the visit to my flat where he couldn’t find the toilet. Clearly his short-term memory was gone and his behaviour had changed. I had to look after him as if he were a small child. Yet I enjoyed this. My often-grumpy Dad was now very amiable. We chatted a lot and went to the pub and the pictures as a loving father and son. Only I was now the grown up and he’d become a little boy. I ought to have realized that he was ill, but instead I just marveled at the novelty of having to look after him.
These years were terrible for Mum. She watched the man she loved changing completely. Routine tasks confounded him and he would cry out “why can’t I do this?” His skills were disappearing but he was still mindful enough to know they were disappearing. For the sufferer of dementia this is surely the worst phase.
He was sleeping badly and would wake in the middle of the night and wonder where he was. Mum had become a 24-hour carer and Dad had not even been diagnosed yet. Eventually, after the police had picked him up at Christmas in 1997, he got to a doctor and received a blunt diagnosis. He had Alzheimer’s disease, which accounts for over half the cases of dementia. There was little anyone could do but manage his decline.
Mum was now doing everything that had been Dad’s job. She had to manage their money and their farm. She had to scrape the money together to buy a new, second-hand car. She wrote to us that Dad had said the new car did not concern him because “I’m only fit for the scrapheap.”
Mum made some tough decisions. She sold their livestock. She leased most of the farm to a neighbour. She arranged for some respite for Dad. At first this was for a few hours, then a whole day, then overnight care. Later he would go into care for a week or more at a time. This was a great relief for Mum because when Dad was at home there was no rest. He was up and down all night and then up for good very early in the morning. He was usually anxious and it was very had to reassure him.
Mum had a car crash at the start of 2000. With a cracked sternum and broken ribs she and Dad were discharged from hospital the same day. Now she was a full-time carer with a fractured rib cage! The children rallied and Dad went into respite again. He barely knew what was going on. He asked Mum once how long she had been doing this job – of looking after him – and how much she was paid for it. But he was alarmingly fit. I walked with him over the paddocks and there was no hill too steep for him.
Later that year Dad was in respite again and a permanent place came up. Mum rang around and we all agreed. It was time for full-time care. Mum knew plenty of people – mostly women – who would never do this. While they drew breath they would care for their partners at home, through violent mood swings, complete helplessness and incontinence. To what end? we wondered. We wanted our Mum alive and enjoying life.
Dad was in care for seven years before he died. He was very well looked after. For his last five years he couldn’t walk and could only say the odd word or two. He seemed well beyond the agonizing phase of being aware that something terrible had happened to him.
Doctors say that keeping physically fit may be one way to lessen the risk of Alzheimer’s Disease. They also recommend a low-cholesterol diet with plenty of anti-oxidants. On this score my Dad had done everything by the book. He was very fit and ate very well. Another risk factor though, is being socially isolated. Dad was never very social and he became more withdrawn as he approached retirement. But nobody knows whether this withdrawal was a symptom or a cause of his illness.
The one thing we know is that we should look after ourselves and each other. We should keep in touch with friends and family. We should eat well and do crosswords and try and remember things – like phone numbers – even if we don’t need to. If the worst thing happens and we get dementia we will know we did all we could to prevent it. And we’ll have friends along for the journey.
This was in 1996. But it was not until Christmas the following year when he went missing and then was found by the police and taken to the Korumburra police station in the back of a divvy van that I accepted that something was wrong. Until that time I managed to ignore every bit of evidence that he was losing his mind.
But trying to answer the question “when did it start?” is impossible. According to Alzheimer’s Australia “memory loss, confusion, personality change, apathy and withdrawal and the loss of ability to perform everyday tasks…are common symptoms of dementia…” (“Diagnosing Dementia” Help Sheet at http://www.alzheimers.org.au/content.cfm?infopageid=326#sis) If a sharp and cheerful person suddenly becomes a confused grump we know something is up. But my Dad was not the happiest of people. His glass was often half-empty. He also put himself – and others – down a lot, and he’d complained about memory loss for years. When his memory loss and grumpiness became real problems I dismissed it. I thought he was forgetting things and turning on those around him because it suited him to do so, not because there was something really wrong with him.
Others, especially my mum, were wiser. There had been signs eight years earlier that Dad was losing it. When he and Mum went overseas for three months, just before he retired, she was struck at how he seemed to have lost his initiative. From being the planner and the leader he was suddenly a bewildered man who said “what do we do now?” Mum took up the reins, as she had to. She made plans and read timetables and booked tickets and accommodation.
Upon their return the bad signs continued. They bought a small farm in North East Victoria. Dad had always been very practical and able to make and fix things but now he started to slip. He tried to build a bird bath but it remained nothing more than a cylinder of rocks and cement. He got terribly confused with electrical fencing so that it never worked. He got lost on the country roads. Mum wrote to me and said his memory loss was getting bad and she was worried but he wouldn’t talk to anyone about it. I refused to believe anything was wrong.
At my brother’s wedding he froze in the middle of his speech and said “this is not nerves, it’s just something that happens to me nowadays.” Again my Mum saved the day with a dazzling speech, the sort of thing she wouldn’t have dreamed of doing five years earlier. She was doing a lot of stuff she wouldn’t have dreamed of doing before.
And then there was the visit to my flat where he couldn’t find the toilet. Clearly his short-term memory was gone and his behaviour had changed. I had to look after him as if he were a small child. Yet I enjoyed this. My often-grumpy Dad was now very amiable. We chatted a lot and went to the pub and the pictures as a loving father and son. Only I was now the grown up and he’d become a little boy. I ought to have realized that he was ill, but instead I just marveled at the novelty of having to look after him.
These years were terrible for Mum. She watched the man she loved changing completely. Routine tasks confounded him and he would cry out “why can’t I do this?” His skills were disappearing but he was still mindful enough to know they were disappearing. For the sufferer of dementia this is surely the worst phase.
He was sleeping badly and would wake in the middle of the night and wonder where he was. Mum had become a 24-hour carer and Dad had not even been diagnosed yet. Eventually, after the police had picked him up at Christmas in 1997, he got to a doctor and received a blunt diagnosis. He had Alzheimer’s disease, which accounts for over half the cases of dementia. There was little anyone could do but manage his decline.
Mum was now doing everything that had been Dad’s job. She had to manage their money and their farm. She had to scrape the money together to buy a new, second-hand car. She wrote to us that Dad had said the new car did not concern him because “I’m only fit for the scrapheap.”
Mum made some tough decisions. She sold their livestock. She leased most of the farm to a neighbour. She arranged for some respite for Dad. At first this was for a few hours, then a whole day, then overnight care. Later he would go into care for a week or more at a time. This was a great relief for Mum because when Dad was at home there was no rest. He was up and down all night and then up for good very early in the morning. He was usually anxious and it was very had to reassure him.
Mum had a car crash at the start of 2000. With a cracked sternum and broken ribs she and Dad were discharged from hospital the same day. Now she was a full-time carer with a fractured rib cage! The children rallied and Dad went into respite again. He barely knew what was going on. He asked Mum once how long she had been doing this job – of looking after him – and how much she was paid for it. But he was alarmingly fit. I walked with him over the paddocks and there was no hill too steep for him.
Later that year Dad was in respite again and a permanent place came up. Mum rang around and we all agreed. It was time for full-time care. Mum knew plenty of people – mostly women – who would never do this. While they drew breath they would care for their partners at home, through violent mood swings, complete helplessness and incontinence. To what end? we wondered. We wanted our Mum alive and enjoying life.
Dad was in care for seven years before he died. He was very well looked after. For his last five years he couldn’t walk and could only say the odd word or two. He seemed well beyond the agonizing phase of being aware that something terrible had happened to him.
Doctors say that keeping physically fit may be one way to lessen the risk of Alzheimer’s Disease. They also recommend a low-cholesterol diet with plenty of anti-oxidants. On this score my Dad had done everything by the book. He was very fit and ate very well. Another risk factor though, is being socially isolated. Dad was never very social and he became more withdrawn as he approached retirement. But nobody knows whether this withdrawal was a symptom or a cause of his illness.
The one thing we know is that we should look after ourselves and each other. We should keep in touch with friends and family. We should eat well and do crosswords and try and remember things – like phone numbers – even if we don’t need to. If the worst thing happens and we get dementia we will know we did all we could to prevent it. And we’ll have friends along for the journey.
Singing and football
“The birds sang, the Proles sang, the Party did not sing.”
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four. (p.176)
There is a bit of a myth that football is all about the players, especially the great ones. Or that it’s all about the high mark or the bone-crunching shirtfronts or the long kicking. This is all wrong. Football is about the crowd. And more than that it’s about the noise which only a huge crowd can make. At the footy it’s acceptable to shout and scream and pour scorn on people as it is not elsewhere. And, apart from “happy birthday,” the footy is almost the only place where people gather together and sing.
It is very disturbing then that the AFL wants to silence the crowd. I mean the use of very, very loud sound systems to blast out commercials, inane announcements or pop music whenever the game is not actually in progress (or maybe I speak to soon, and in a few weeks they’ll be filling this “dead air” as well.) I noticed this eight years ago at the new Docklands Stadium. Richmond was in with a chance against St Kilda at three quarter time and the Tiger Army had started their chanting. For a moment I had a tingle down my spine but in seconds the chanting was blasted out by commercials played over the PA at 100 decibels. I had to lip read to get what they were saying.
It used to be that one of the great things about going to a game live, as against watching it on TV, was that there were no ads. Well, now there are and the supporters who have paid to get in are not equipped with a mute button. It’s not just annoying, the way ads on TV might be. It’s much sadder than that, it’s a crushing of the timeless human urge to get together and make a noise. We hardly do this anymore and when we do some corporate tyrant drowns it out.
It would be bad enough if this tendency was merely about making money. But even when nobody is paying them their noise continues in the form of very loud music or moronic announcements, as if the crowd could not possibly entertain itself for five minutes.
And it’s not just the AFL. I saw the Poms win a test at the MCG a few years ago (as I write that I feel like the last man to have seen a Tasmanian tiger) and the Barmy Army sang them home like a choir of drunken angels. But during the most recent Ashes tour the Barmy Army was deliberately split up inside the grounds through the allocation of seating. The singing and chanting were subdued and sometimes barely-audible. The authorities’ claims that supporters were split up to avoid trouble were rubbish. The truth is that the corporate mindset which governs professional sport hates authentic crowd atmosphere because it can’t be controlled and it doesn’t provide a revenue stream.
It also happened in the Rugby World Cup in 2003. Again the English supporters sang the house down wherever their team played. But when their team won the final the ground’s PA system blasted out one pop song after another. These were songs which crowds of people simply cannot sing in the way they can sing “Swing Low Sweet Chariot.” The supporters were being forced to sing songs selected by the sporting authorities. This sort of tyranny goes way beyond commercial concerns. It reveals a pathological urge to control others, particularly crowds. Why is this? Is the crowd which sings “Jerusalem” or “Tigerland” this evening going to be singing the “Red Flag” tomorrow?
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four. (p.176)
There is a bit of a myth that football is all about the players, especially the great ones. Or that it’s all about the high mark or the bone-crunching shirtfronts or the long kicking. This is all wrong. Football is about the crowd. And more than that it’s about the noise which only a huge crowd can make. At the footy it’s acceptable to shout and scream and pour scorn on people as it is not elsewhere. And, apart from “happy birthday,” the footy is almost the only place where people gather together and sing.
It is very disturbing then that the AFL wants to silence the crowd. I mean the use of very, very loud sound systems to blast out commercials, inane announcements or pop music whenever the game is not actually in progress (or maybe I speak to soon, and in a few weeks they’ll be filling this “dead air” as well.) I noticed this eight years ago at the new Docklands Stadium. Richmond was in with a chance against St Kilda at three quarter time and the Tiger Army had started their chanting. For a moment I had a tingle down my spine but in seconds the chanting was blasted out by commercials played over the PA at 100 decibels. I had to lip read to get what they were saying.
It used to be that one of the great things about going to a game live, as against watching it on TV, was that there were no ads. Well, now there are and the supporters who have paid to get in are not equipped with a mute button. It’s not just annoying, the way ads on TV might be. It’s much sadder than that, it’s a crushing of the timeless human urge to get together and make a noise. We hardly do this anymore and when we do some corporate tyrant drowns it out.
It would be bad enough if this tendency was merely about making money. But even when nobody is paying them their noise continues in the form of very loud music or moronic announcements, as if the crowd could not possibly entertain itself for five minutes.
And it’s not just the AFL. I saw the Poms win a test at the MCG a few years ago (as I write that I feel like the last man to have seen a Tasmanian tiger) and the Barmy Army sang them home like a choir of drunken angels. But during the most recent Ashes tour the Barmy Army was deliberately split up inside the grounds through the allocation of seating. The singing and chanting were subdued and sometimes barely-audible. The authorities’ claims that supporters were split up to avoid trouble were rubbish. The truth is that the corporate mindset which governs professional sport hates authentic crowd atmosphere because it can’t be controlled and it doesn’t provide a revenue stream.
It also happened in the Rugby World Cup in 2003. Again the English supporters sang the house down wherever their team played. But when their team won the final the ground’s PA system blasted out one pop song after another. These were songs which crowds of people simply cannot sing in the way they can sing “Swing Low Sweet Chariot.” The supporters were being forced to sing songs selected by the sporting authorities. This sort of tyranny goes way beyond commercial concerns. It reveals a pathological urge to control others, particularly crowds. Why is this? Is the crowd which sings “Jerusalem” or “Tigerland” this evening going to be singing the “Red Flag” tomorrow?
Hello to the world
I am a writer and this is my first blog. Apparently the internet has been around for a while and is not going to go away any time soon. So here I am online. I do hope that this blog has a better life than my last one, which I started a few weeks ago and which disappeared without trace. I want to thank my friend Brendan Ryan, the journalist not the poet, who suggested I name my new blog accordingly - hence The Internet Ate My Blog.
I shall keep this introduction brief. Gray said that full many a flower is born to blush unseen and no doubt he would have written something equally beautiful to describe blog postings that are never seen again once posted.
Brendan O'Reilly
I shall keep this introduction brief. Gray said that full many a flower is born to blush unseen and no doubt he would have written something equally beautiful to describe blog postings that are never seen again once posted.
Brendan O'Reilly
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