Trevor Cook

Fox News should background check its 'experts'

Fox News trumped even that, trotting out retired Marine Col. Oliver North, the former Reagan security staffer who orchestrated the secret war in Nicaragua, to indict President Obama for — you can’t make this stuff up — failing to get a congressional resolution in support of the mission in Libya.

via www.washingtonpost.com

Fifth anniversary of John McGahern's death

John McGahern died in Dublin aged 71 on 30 March 2006. McGahern lived in border country, Co. Leitrim and Co. Roscommon, for much of his life. Although most of his published writing deals with this small (and poor) part of north-west rural Ireland, he was much more than a chronicler of a way of life that has now gone. His characters are ordinary people (not 'importances' in 'big shows' as the Irish slang would put it), but they are the essence of life in its all glory. McGahern said that "the ordinary is the most precious thing in life" and he wrote in his last novel: 'the best of life is lived quietly, where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious life is everything". This famous quote, with its attitude that is barely comprehensible in a world of Ipad excitements, adorns a commemorative bench in Ballinamore, across the road from his uncle's garage (Patrick McManus, or pat mac, but called, with gently mocking irony, the shah in the novel because of his attitude to the importance of his humble business). 

McGahern's childhood and early adulthood were filled with tumult. A beloved mother who died of breast cancer (the subject matter of his first novel - The Barracks), a difficult father, a disappointed former IRA man for whom, like many, the new Ireland did not fulfill its promise, the banning of his second novel - The Dark - which had focused attention on abuse in Irish institutions. 

McGahern saw post-independence Ireland as a theocracy, and blamed its strictures on sex for making a contribution to Ireland's cycle of misery - over-population, unhappy marriages, poverty, immigration. Although he lost his faith, a terrible wrench since he had promised his dying mother that he would become a priest, after being sacked from his teaching job for his book, The Dark, and for marrying a divorced woman, he was not hostile to the Church, indeed he was grateful to it for the sense of grace and transcendance he had given him.

For the last few decades of his life McGahern lived with his wife Madelaine on their farm near Laura Lake near Fenagh in Co. Leitrim. Here he wrote his greatest, and last, novel: That they may face the rising sun - in reference to the Irish practice of burying bodies facing east so that they will see the sun rise on the last day. It was published as By the Lake in the US, to prevent confusion with Japanese themes.Rising Sun is a long piece of poetry that explores the magic of ordinary life, the slow passage of time, with an emphasis on friendship, family and nature. Yet, it is no idyll. The difficulties of family relations are here, the disruption of immigration is here, the horrors of child institutions are here, the violence of the troubles is here. McGahern's portrayal of the land of his birth is frank, and pulls no punches. McGahern was influenced by Joyce's sense of the 'scupulous mean', an effort to get the words right without exaggerating one way or another. McGahern succeeds brilliantly in getting it just right - he neither exaggerates the horrors or the joys of Irish life.

Yet, there are moments, as the McGahern character, Joe Ruttledge, explains towards the end of the novel, when happiness unpursued just arrives and goes again. Several times in the novel Ruttledge, and his neighbour Jamesie Murphy, observe, in one form or another, that the local is the universal. Murphy says he has never left Leitrim but he knows all of life. Ruttledge ruminates on how the framework for his shed can also frame the whole sky.

McGahern means us to understand that his novel is not just about a small community in a poor part of Ireland, it is about how we all live our lives. 

"The Conversation" - academia meets journalism

The Conversation, terrible name, which launched last week, is a great idea. It aims to make academic research and expertise more accessible to the general public. Many academics are terrible communicators, but there are also some good ones. Many academics also give up trying to communicate through the media, because they hate having to fit in with the narrow, often distorted lens, that the media frequently insists on. The Conversation draws on the expertise of Australia's many academics with the assistance of a team of 12 editors with journalistic experience who can help inject that content into the news cycle in an appealing way. If it works we will all benefit from a better informed public debate.

One of the great disappointments of social media so far has been the huge explosion of opinion, but an actual decline in real, new content as the mainstream media has moved towards opinion and away from reporting. Hopefully, the conversation can add some valuable, and valued, content.

Comeback: What NSW Labor needs to do now

There will be plenty of analysis of what went wrong. The short answer is a lot. Much will be made of the 'worst result for NSW Labor since the 19th century ' line, but that is a statistic, it's not analysis. We have already heard a lot about fundamental re-alignments and structural change etc. The important point is that any realignment is between the LNP coalition and Labor. The Greens did not emerge as a third party. Disaffected ALP voters went overwhelmingly to the right not the left of the spectrum. The ALP will probably end up losing 28 seats, the Greens will be lucky to win one. In his victory speech, O'Farrell made much of "winning seats we never dreamed of winning". So did Labor under Wran. Wakehurst, for instance, on Sydney's northern beaches. Yesterday, the Libs got 70 per cent of the primary votes in Wakehurst and the ALP came third behind the Greens. Its a cyclical business.

It may take a decade, but the ALP will eventually win back most of the seats it lost yesterday. It won't happen because of some "searingly honest" (as Luke Foley described it) internal navel gazing. It'll happen when the ALP get's on with the business of winning seats. ALP reviews by party elders are a waste of time. Here's what I think the ALP needs to do to win them back sooner rather than later:

1) Pre-select 40 or 50 good candidates as quickly as possible. Labor needs new candidates in the seats it lost, and in others, as soon as possible. It needs people on the ground, with connections to local communities, who are willing to do the hard grind of doorknocking every weekend, running local issue campaigns, representing voters with a grievance against the O'Farrell governmen etc. This won't be easy. Pre-selections should cover two terms so that those who are willing to put in the work starting this year have a realistic chance of getting into Parliament, rather than just warming the audience for some factional trustie down the track. If the ALP can't build an army of enthusuastic candidates anything else it does will be a waste of time.

2) Campaign everywhere. Follow the lead of the Democrats and republicans in recent presidential campaigns with their 50 state campaigns.  The marginal seats strategy, conducted at the expense of safe ALP and LNP seats, has to be moved away from. It's outlived its usefulness, as most political strateges ultimately do. We live in an era of demographic shifts and decreasing party alignment.Labor should consider every seat winnable given the right candidate and the right policies. Focusing on marginal seats creates resentment and disillusionment among your supporters in non-targeted seats, it also lets your opponents target their resources on your marginals. For instance, the Liberals were able to bus supporters from the northern beaches to the western suburbs to staff booths etc because they faced no opposition north of the harbour.

3) It's the substance, stupid. Labor leaders like Carr and Rudd became obssessed with the 24 hour media cycle. There's nothing wrong with polishing the silver, but there were so many promises made (complete with media stunt and glossy brochure) in NSW and broken, and re-announced again that in the end nothing the government said was believed by anybody. Political campaigners often view the long-term as a string of 24-hour news cycles, like points played in a tennis match, the side winning the highest number of points wins. But voters just don't see it this way. If you promise a hospital and don't build it, no amount of clever PR will remove the fact that the voters feels betrayed. Media management works on journalists, for a while, but not so easily on voters.

4) Forget the Greens. Recently, there has been talk about the need for the ALP to reach out to Greens voters to rebuild its primary vote. Nonsense. The Greens would like to become a third force, but they are a small left-wing party reliant on Bob Brown's popularity and mostly confined to Tasmania, and the inner-city areas of Melbourne and Sydney. To rebuild its primary vote the ALP needs to win people off the LNP. Moving towards the Greens makes that harder not easier. Labor should co-operate with the Greens on issues where it is in Labor's interests to do so, and on Labor's terms. In those ALP heartland seats in western sydney and the Hunter, cost of living trumps carbon pricing. I can't see that changing.

5) Don't blame the unions. Another misunderstanding is the idea that Labor would have greater electoral appeal without unions. There is scant evidence for this idea. Unions provide significant resources, especially in campaigning personnel and they provide the ALP with a distinctive identity. The problem lies in relationships between the party organisation and the parliamentary party. Where the organisation tries to dominate the parliamentary leadership (blocking privatisation, engineering leadership coups) the electoral consequences are invariably disastrous. As galling as it might be for the egos of those in the organisation, the best option is always to support the parliamentary leadership team. Disunity never works, and the parliamentary leader is ultimately the person responsible for winning elections and governing. The party organisation has a lot of influence through pre-selections, but once those candidates have been pre-selected its role is, or should be, purely supportive.

Gillard: a religiously conservative atheist

She is an atheist who likes the Bible.

She said: "I think it's important for people to understand their Bible stories, not because I'm an advocate of religion - clearly, I'm not - but once again, what comes from the Bible has formed such an important part of our culture.

"It's impossible to understand Western literature without having that key of understanding the Bible stories and how Western literature builds on them and reflects them and deconstructs them and brings them back together." The Prime Minister was happy to accept the brand of "traditionalist".

via www.theaustralian.com.au

Fascinating political positioning.
But does her proposition - western literature is a rewriting of Bible stories (such a protestant sunday school idea) - really stand up.
Of course, our cultural heritage has many pre- and non- Christian roots.
Homer and Virgil. Bewoulf. Irish sagas, myths, legends - much loved and used by Yeats and the Celtic twilight movement.
Of course, Milton and Dante are probably a bit tricky without some knowledge of christianity. Less so, Shakespeare. You can probably get through Hamlet, Lear, MacBeth etc without being able to recite slabs of the Bible. Joyce, Eliot many other moderns write within a Christian tradition but they draw on much more than the Bible. And besides in Joyce's Ulysses you've got Bloom, the secular Jew, giving a useful commentary on some puzzling aspects of the catholic liturgy.
Oh yes. Do Julia's bible stories help us understand Jewish novelists: Bellow, Salinger, Roth (Henry and Phillip) and so on? Perhaps the kiddies need a quick heads-up on the torah before diving into Catcher in the Rye.
And why the focus on western traditions. Why not background the kids in indigenous cultures, and major religions like Buddhism, Islam and so on.
I've got no problem with students reading the Bible, but let's not kid ourselves about it's centrality nor forget the Greek and Roman classics or the texts of other religions.
It is a bit concerning that the PM seems to have a narrow 'what I learned in sunday school' view of our cultural heritage.
In Parliament today she boasted that she could recite more of the Bible than Tony Abbott.
Welcome to our secular, multi-cultural age.

Special: A history of St. Patrick and Ireland’s conversion to Christianity « Irish History Podcast

Around the world on March 17^th, millions of people will attend St Patrick’s day parades in memory of the man who supposedly “converted the Irish to Christianity”. He is a figure shrouded in mystery and myth but in this podcast we examine the truth behind the one time slave and famous bishop Patrick. Tune in to hear the real history behind Ireland’s conversion, who St. Patrick really was and how he become associated with snakes and shamrocks….

via irishhistorypodcast.ie

Frenchs Forest - some interesting responses to the Government's proposal

The public submissions on this daft proposal have been posted on the Government's website,(including mine), and there's some interesting stuff in there.

One of my favourites is from a planning consultancy on behalf of retail interests in Chatswood, Belrose and Balgowlah. It's delightfully unambiguous:

•  The proposal is inconsistent with sound planning policies aimed at revitalising and strengthening existing strategic centres and their role in metropolitan Sydney
•  The role of Chatswood CBD as the pre-eminent trading centre and job creator adjacent to established public infrastructure is at risk
• The proposed establishment of a major new retail destination within Frenchs Forest has never been proposed as part of any strategic planning undertaken for  the Sydney metropolitan region.  It is indeed inconsistent with the planning strategies and plans that have been developed over the last decade
• Indeed Frenchs Forest is identified as a Small Village and Neighbourhood Centre within the Draft North East Subregional Strategy
• There has been is no nexus demonstrated of how or why the proposed new hospital will generate the need for the extent and magnitude of the mix of land uses proposed. 
• In regard to infrastructure, the proposal is entirely inconsistent with the principles of integrating land use and transport by proposing a major new car-orientated retail destination at the expense of the rail and established bus infrastructure
• The proposed Draft Zoning Map illustrates the loss of around 11 hectares of existing light industrial land to B3 Commercial Core without any appropriate justification
• There is nothing within the planning policies and strategies of the Department of Planning that could be used to justify the adoption of draft Frenchs Forest zoning and allow for the establishment of a new major retail destination of potentially 90,000m² at this point on Warringah Road
• The primary purpose of a Specialised Centre is a focus on employment, health related infrastructure and associated increased residential densities.  The extent of retail development should be a minor component designed to service the needs of the local resident

Sounds like some pretty serious people (Westfield, Colional State, Stockland), with lots of 'pull' in the big end of town aren't happy about this left field threat to their megabucks investments.

Woolworths, on the other hand, wants more retail space allocated

• While Woolworths does not currently have a specific landholding in the study area,it has beeninvestigating opportunities within the Rodborough Road precinct to establish a home improvementstore. Given the significant strategic planning being undertaken for the long term development of theSpecialised Centre overthe next 20−30 years, it is imperative that the Study consider and provideopportunities for large format retailing opportunities in the precinct for the benefit of the broader sub−region.
• Woolworths asks for "Increasing the zoning flexibility of the B7 Business Park Zone in order to permit largeformat retail uses such as timber and building supplies, landscape and garden suppliesand associated bulky goods"

The Woolworths proposal does raise again the question of what all this has to do with the hospital.

A concerned resident respectfully submitted the following:

• My biggest concern, which is shared by many in the community, is whether NSW planning has the intelectual horsepower to do this properly. This is not a critism, rather a concern based on historical facts 

Please, no nit-picking about spelling.

I guess we will now get to see how seriously the bureaucrats take all this public consultation.

Eamon Maher: The Church and its Spire: John McGahern and the Catholic Question

A new study just published examines the complex relationship the writer had with Catholicism.

via www.irishtimes.com

So many politicians are just like this ...

Take Andrew Lansley, the secretary of state for health and once the principal private secretary to Norman Tebbit. Like so many of his cabinet colleagues, and so many of those student politicians in the shadow cabinet, he appears to grasp the bullet points of an argument without ever grasping the argument.

via www.lrb.co.uk