Sorry to hear she is just another Hollywierd flake.
And for my money I'll take good weather anytime.
Posted on 02/14/2006 12:49:04 PM PST by naturalman1975
PUBLIC wrist-slashing mixed with paranoia is a yawn. First it was diva Toni Collette suggesting "I think I'll slit my wrists if Howard gets in again". Collette is still alive. Last week, Cate Blanchett was making headlines at the latest angst-fest. She told a Sydney audience last week that she felt like "tearing my head off" if one more person told her what a beautiful day it was.
According to Blanchett, there is too much good weather and not enough culture in Australia.
What she means, of course, is that Australians lack culture. Or at least culture according to Cate and her friends. And guess whose fault it is?
While the artistic Left do a fine job of reminding us of their paranoia and, hence, their irrelevance, overblown performances from the losing team are nothing new. Back in 1964, Richard Hofstadter, writing in Harper's Magazine, documented the paranoid style of politics. Historically, politics has always been an arena for angry minds, he noted. In the 1950s it was the right-wingers, such as senator Joe McCarthy, who saw a red under every bed and a conspiracy around every corner. Hofstadter traced the lineage of paranoia back to the late 1820s and '30s, when Masons were seen as conspiring against republican government. Later, paranoid types were convinced that Catholics were plotting against American values. Throughout history, one meets "the same frame of mind, but a different villain", wrote Hofstadter.
The paranoia is a reaction to feeling dispossessed. In the 1950s and '60s, with the rise of American liberalism, conservatives believed that the US was under attack from cosmopolitans and intellectuals. Hence McCarthyism. As Hofstadter said, the paranoid style "has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content".
It was an astute observation in the aftermath of the landslide defeat of conservative presidential contender Barry Goldwater in 1964. But the paranoia of the dispossessed is an equally shrewd observation about the Left these days.
With conservatism on the rise because progressive policies have failed or are in the process of doing so, the reaction from the so-called intelligentsia is not looking so intelligent. Emotion reigns. Facts are sidelined.
Which brings us back to Blanchett and Australia's darkest cultural hour. David Throsby, professor of economics at Macquarie University, provided the academic gravitas for the evening by echoing Blanchett. His paper - Does Australia Need a Cultural Policy? - was merely a polite way of saying Australia had gone to the dogs under John Howard. The good professor said we were "culturally impoverished". How could it be otherwise, he said, under a Prime Minister who not only prefers sport to opera but is disconnected from mainstream Australians on issues such as immigration, the US alliance, Aboriginal reconciliation, Iraq and the privatisation of Telstra?
At this point, you might think that these people really should get out more. Four elections wins fought on these very issues mean Howard is out of step with the people? But then one is reminded of David Williamson - in the crowd that evening - who recently did decide to get out more. And when he ended up on a cruise ship full of "John Howard's aspirational Australians", he didn't much like what he saw. People not reading Proust. People happy with their material lot in life. Williamson's critique was code for a culturally bereft people not doing as progressive playwrights say they should.
The answer to Australia's cultural crisis under Howard, according to the artists and their academic handbags, is more money. Our money, of course, in the form of taxpayer-funded subsidies to the arts. But those calling for more money had better be careful what they wish for. By all means let's start a debate on this issue, but that means, as a starting point, following where the money has gone over the past few years.
And it's not a pretty picture. Taxpayer-subsidised theatre companies in Australia are finding it hard to survive because snuggled up in their taxpayer-funded cocoons, sheltered from the normal forces of creative competition, they're more likely to produce second-rate, self-indulgent gunk than work people watch. Taxpayer-funded bodies such as the Film Finance Corporation, the Australia Council and the Australian Research Council hand out grants - all within the rules, of course - to their own board members and bosses. And to other people to research "A cultural history of Australian motor travel overseas" ($243,000), "The Living Dead: witchcraft and apparition in European culture - 3rd to 18th century" ($232,000), not to mention "Teimu: aural and aesthetic attributes of Japanese gardens as models for spatial environments" ($298,621).
More than $600 million in grants handed out in the last financial year.
So by all means let the debate begin. And here's another flash. A claque of artists berating Australians as uncouth is no way to win new friends and influence people. Like much of today's art that tends to talk at us, not to us, it falls on deaf ears.
For tone-deaf art it's hard to go past a piece of political satire playing to audiences in Sydney.
According to the critics, playwright Stephen Sewell presents, in his play The United States of Nothing, a "spectacularly dysfunctional, thoroughly normal nuclear family" - a racist, authoritarian, homophobic father named Chip Norton, his vacuous, racist wife Jacky, their weed-smoking, obese daughter Ashley and their weed smoking, daft son Randy - decamping to the Superdome in the face of Hurricane Katrina.
Turning up to watch, the crowd was predictably 50-ish. A few boomers brought along their offspring to cure any lurking conservative tendencies. The critics in The Sydney Morning Herald had predictably gushed over the "pleasure" of watching a "clear-eyed and righteous swipe of rage at our great and powerful daddy". The playwright had predictably been featured in the same newspaper as a brave rebel testing our sedition laws.
But as the play unfolded with its overblown caricatures of Americana, something unpredictable happened. The audience didn't laugh. Even this mob of inner-city trendies spotted on stage the paranoia Hofstadter wrote about more than 40 years ago. With targets such as the American dream, guns, religion, Iraq, corporate America, global warming, George W. Bush, the pickings were rich. Certainly, Sewell, sitting in the front row, laughed and laughed at his own work. But the audience was strangely quiet. In the end, only a reference to oral sex and masturbation had the audience laughing louder than the playwright.
While one reviewer lamented "the activist playwright is almost becoming an endangered species", Sewell's play only managed to prove that the political artists on the Left risk being sidelined by their own irrelevance. Irrelevance spawned by paranoia.
Sounds a lot like the Hollyweirdos and RATS stomping their feet while ranting about moving to Canada if Bush won. Update? They're still here.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't really out to get you.
...and we've got a Conservative Prime Minister now, so it looks like you're stuck with them.
I know it - they're always making promises to us, but never keep them! Very little more than drama queens. They're still playing parts and the lines between fantasy and reality are completely removed.
But then who can resist laughing at Clinton.
Sorry to hear she is just another Hollywierd flake.
And for my money I'll take good weather anytime.
Don't fret Aussies. Stupid actors are the gift that keeps giving. We let them shout from the rooftops over here. Every time an airhead opens her mouth, another indpendent registers as a conservative.
There really must be a parallel universe from which these idiots spring "fully formed".
Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean there're no reds under the beds.
Good article. A change of names and locations and it could easily have been written about our own self-anointed elite and their superiority to we, the voters.
***In the 1950s it was the right-wingers, such as senator Joe McCarthy, who saw a red under every bed and a conspiracy around every corner. ***
McCarthy wasn't paranoid. That's a Hollywood myth. And they just can't stop spreading that lie.
Not to mention that he was also right.
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