Friday, December 10, 2010

Maddern, Penbo, Bono, McClelland and other punch drunk contributions to the body politic ...


Today, as in the old days of the real Punch, it's time for charivari, a discordant mock serenade to newlyweds to some, and to others just a confused noise and din (more on The Punch here, more on the folk custom here).

Yep the media is full yet again with lip smacking revelations of the bleeding obvious - yes, Australian politicians talk to US diplomats and Afghanistan is a tad worrisome - and so we hungered for much more deep insights into the world.

Where better to start than with Matthew Maddern's stout hearted insights into the world of Bono, offered up by his piece In defence of Bono and U2.

It seems all of Bono's songs are full of deeply pertinent points about political issues, and never mind that the cost of any one international tour adds roughly half a degree to global warming.

It is difficult to be a fan of U2 and not have some social and political awareness: it lies at the heart of the band’s philosophy. Rather than adhere to some dogmatic message, U2 espouse political consciousness itself as an ideology: at least just be aware of issues; be interested in the world.

By asking ‘What time is it in the world?’, U2 are encouraging you to occupy other perspectives, to orientate yourself in a different political and social time-zone, to question your socio-economic fortune.

This notion echoes an earlier lyric from their 2005 song “Crumbs From Your Table”: Where you live should not decide/Whether you live or whether you die. Sadly, it does.

Indeed. I myself regularly question my socio-economic fortune - as did Bono when the struggling Irish government introduced a tax-free income cap for artists of 250,000 euros back in 2006, and like any canny businessman, Bono and the band moved their accounts to the Netherlands, rather than face unseemly taxes on sales and royalties.

Meanwhile, Ireland continues on its way down the gurgler, suggesting not enough of the Irish have questioned their socio-economic fortune ... (see Bono, Tax Avoider, The hypocrisy of U2 in Slate in 2006 for a little fun, as Bono urged the Irish government to do more about Africa and Third World debt, all the funnier and resonant these days, now that it turns out Ireland actually is a remote part of Africa, with a grand level of third world debt).

During the bridge of “In a Little While”, a pre-recorded video U2 complied in association with NASA*, sees an astronaut living on a space station reflecting on the beauty of earth from afar, and how small but radiant it is amongst the wider galaxy.

U2’s question forces you to consider the fact that your tiny piece of the world is not the whole world.

To have this relativity simple yet touching notion confront you during a display of rock grandeur can disorientate you if only for a second, but a second’s reflection is all that U2 are looking to achieve.


Yes indeed, whenever I think of Bono, I get disorientated, no more so than in the grand tale of Bono's hat. Back in 2003, Bono splashed out a thousand pounds to have his favourite trilby hate flown first class to Italy for a charity gig with Luciano Pavarotti. Cab fare for hat a hundred quid and tip, first class seat to Italy on British Airways £442, including upgrade to cockpit seat next to the captain, a hundred fifty quid on touch down to get it to Modena. Throw in a a couple of hundred quid for insurance and tips, and it's on with the charity do ... (Bono's £1k jet bill for hat).

Yes, it was only a relatively simple yet touching notion of rock grandeur, and it disorientated me for just a second, but a second's reflection is all I ever need when I look on the inspired works of Peter Garrett ...

Oh okay Bono's a rock star, and so contemplating his contradictions and hypocrisies is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. If you like U2's music, away you go ... it's no better or worse than liking Bob Dylan's music during his Christian phase ...

But it reminded me that by not attending to the punch drunk ravings in The Punch, you can miss out on the very best in gonzo journalism, which might explain why the Duke, Hunter S. Thompson is still rolling in his grave, never having found the time to write Fear and Loathing in Australia.

Why there's head honcho David Penberthy scribbling About time us smokers got some tax money back, wherein he berates the government for being addicted to taxing cigarettes:

The extent of the price increases has been so massive that Australia may well have smoked itself out of the global financial crisis. It often feels that way at the end of a boozy evening when those filthy social smokers have crawled out of the woodwork and cleaned you out, prompting you to buy another packet and go without food for the next two days.

Uh huh, but thin is the new black, so the government's just wanting to help Penbo on his starvation diet. He's decided to give up his addiction - though perhaps he's not in the tax bracket to be helped by the government's decision to include nicotine patches in the PBS.

Penbo was mourning a headline in the Daily Terror about this, Our taxes go up in smoke - you pay for quit-smoking aids, and naturally the firmly free market readership of the Terror voted 52.4% against taxpayers funding nicotine patches to help smokers kick the habit ... which perhaps explains why the Terror runs helpful stories about the Kings Cross injecting centre ...

Well once you've smoked a couple of Punch columns, you always feel the need to smoke a couple more, and it was time to admit it, there was no way around Julian Assange being the flavour of the month for the chattering commentariat class, and so I unwisely took a toke of Chris Deal's attempt at comedy stylings in We can handle the truth Jules, we just don't want it.

Anyway sod it, I’m off to Kanye’s house. We’re having a Victoria Secrets sex party tonight and I want to get there before Motley Crue finish up. Plus Steve Jobs said that if I didn’t blog about it he’d stop giving me free iMacs for the rest of my life.

Have fun drinking non-alcoholic cider at your lamer truth party, losers.

Dear sweet gods and goddesses, is this the swill they serve up daily at The Punch? Well you know what they say about the hair of the dog, so I was tempted by the serious tone of Daniela Elser's Assange has prompted a troubling double standard.

It turns out that Elser is entertainment editor for news.com.au, and really has nothing to say and no insights to offer, except chew over her regurgitated versions of recent actions by Jemima Khan (who offered bail) and Naomi Wolf, who got agitated about the case in Julian Assange Captured by World's Dating Police, and then is left to offer up rehashed tidbits from other sources about Assange as mythologised figure, unlikely Lothario, and victim of tweets:

In the Assange case, the “he said, she said” has become the “she said, they said, the CIA said, and Twitter said, and Daniela Elser said".

Oh okay I added that last bit about Elser to her epic punch line to her piece, but when you plunge from secondary through tertiary to twittery sources, you're back in la la entertainment land with Bono.

Which is where we came in, and a troubling thought struck me, as all these Murdoch minions tirelessly hacked away to keep The Punch afloat, what does it all mean and where is this wretched blog heading?

Seeing as how News Corp locally is intending to go behind a paywall next year, will chairman Rupert keep these gems, these pearls of columns free, or will they pull the plug on the venture, like a failed digital Mx - though to be fair Mx is often deep and penetrating when it comes to key matters like Kanye.

Or do they expect the average Punch reader will stump up for this tosh, like addicts in search of a nicotine fix?

Who knows, but moving along, it's left to the pond to point out that the paywall surrounding The Times is porous, and there's only one source leaking its contents.

The Australian.

Yep, David Aaronovitch offered up his thoughts to The Times on Julian Assange - a standard conservative rant with the beguiling Oz summary Freedom of information is not a right - which we all know is exceptionally true in Murdoch land, you have to pay and pay - and the next thing you know, the damned thing has been leaked in The Australian under the header They're our secrets too, Mr Assange ...

The use of the law to judge whistleblowers and info-knights must be pre-emptive if it's to be effective, and that means governments acting to prevent unauthorised publication pending judgment. Quite apart from Jemiman howls of outrage, it is increasingly hard to imagine how that can be achieved in the Web 2.0 era. In information, in free societies, the individual now has the whip hand over the community. That may not be a cause for celebration.

Yes, dammit, there's a simple way to stop this kind of breaching of the paywall. Send Chris Mitchell before a judge, and see how he likes it when they send him down for ruining western civilisation ...

Meanwhile, to end on a serious note, that goose Robert McClelland, the man responsible for No Minister: 90% of web snoop document censored to stop 'premature unnecessary debate continues to set the tone for the government's response to Assange, as reported in WikiLeaks acts 'illegal': Gillard government, and in his usual way, full of pieties and hypocrisies worthy of McClelland's stand on gay marriage (have a union but keep it private, so we can all not ask and not tell).

McClelland continues to insist that whistle blowing of a Wikileaks kind is illegal:

Mr McClelland's spokesman said later there was a distinction between WikiLeaks, which obtained and distributed the information, and media outlets that then reported the material.

"Publishers are not under investigation," the Attorney-General's spokesman said.


Yep, there's a clear distinction, and it's called political hypocrisy and specious claptrap.

Well at least Laurie Oakes - a man who's made a career out of leaks, and scored a Gold Walkley for an epic leak, knows otherwise, as explained in Oakes labels Gillard and Abbott 'political pygmies'.

Too kind Laurie, and we know what that goose McClelland would like to see go up on the internet. Here's his idea of a document worth leaking while he explores the notion ISPs should hand over intimate details of private uers' online searches to the government because they might come in handy in criminal investigations, and never mind the double standards:



Which raises the question - in terms of political hypocrisy, is McClelland the Bono of Australia? Yes, yes, we know we're being really unkind to Bono ...

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