The year 2003 marked the end of professional politics and the return of the celebrity politician, the man or woman whose face is instantly recognisable because we’ve seen it on the TV or the cinema screen but whose policies we neither know nor care about.
The election of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Governor of California after a campaign in which he refused to define what he stood for, offer the slightest hint of what he planned to do about the state’s economic crisis, or debate anything at all with his political rivals, is bound to be copied and is another blow to democratic process.
Let me remind you what it was once like. Politicians joined the party they felt best represented their political principles. At election time they went around their electorate explaining to the voters what their party’s policies were and how they planned to implement them. The voters expected the candidates to turn up in a hall in their constituency or in the street--if they were brave enough--and submit themselves to questions.
Television took away some of that intimacy between voter and politician but in Australia, the United States and Britain there would be at least one major televised debate at which the issues would be discussed. The only issues discussed in the Schwartzenegger election campaign were whether he was a serial groper of women. The split went three ways: “Yes, he was”, “No, he wasn’t”, and “Why didn’t he grope ME?” What had happened to the politics?
In the new era which I believe 2003 has ushered in, celebrity status and presentation will replace politics. Advertising gurus, spin doctors, public relations advisers and those journalists who have taken the walk of shame to become government press officers, will be kings. First, as they did with George W. Bush, they will be the ones to find the candidate. After Swartzenegger’s success it was seriously suggested in America that Oprah Winfrey should stand for President against Bush. What next--a “Pop Idol” contest for political candidates?
Next, they will coach their man or woman in how to handle the people. You can already see their influence at work everywhere, and especially in Australia. If there’s a scandal and the media seeks information, refuse to answer. If forced to answer, deny everything. If the press persist with it, appoint a committee of inquiry and hope that by the time it reports the public will have forgotten what it was all about. (see: the Hutton Inquiry in Britain.)
Using these tactics, politicians can be so thickly coated in Teflon that no scandal will stick to them. Journalists and authors can uncover as much as they like, turn the searchlight, for example, on the waterside workers’ strike and the government’s plans to break it using troops, or on the behaviour of leaders before and after the Tampa affair, party slush funds, or the lies told to justify the war against Iraq. What happens? Nothing. Yes we know the public feels it has been misled because the polls tell us so, but where’s the outrage? The calling to account? The sackings? The criminal charges?
This year showed us that it is not apathy--look how many people turned up at the anti-war rallies--but despair, the feeling that nothing the public can do will really make any difference to governments who are confident that they have finally mastered the art of managing the electorate. Look at how cleverly President Bush is handling the growing American casualty rate in Iraq. Other presidents have turned up at the funerals of servicemen killed in wars like Vietnam and were filmed comforting the bereaved relatives.
“No, no, no,” said Bush’s advisors. “That links you with the casualties. The perception will grow that you have something to do with the soldiers’ deaths.” So the bodies and the wounded from Iraq are flown into US Air Force bases in the USA at night. Press and TV are banned. TV is discouraged from covering soldier’s funerals and Bush does not even talk about them. Iraq was a clean, surgical war and no one died.
There is a glimmer of hope. The American press, since 9/11 the most servile in the Western world, is at last asking some hard questions. But they are nowhere near as tough as those raised on the web, the people’s forum of 2003.
When Bush won the Senate’s approval to spend another $87.5 billion on Iraq, the mainstream media saw it as a victory for the White House over over Democratic and Republican senators who had baulked at saddling the American taxpayer with the costs of the war.
It took the website MoveOn.org to express what many American citizens felt. It noted that $87.5 billion could have paid for 10,0000 new schools or two million new teachers in the US. “If there is money for Iraq,” MoveOn asks, “Why isn’t there money for America.”
At least we began to calm down a little in 2003, to move away from the mistaken perception since 9/11 that we faced danger everywhere. The truth has always been, of course, that in the very aspects of our life that seemed to have caused us most unease, our safety has immeasurably improved. Most of our forebears did not live long enough to be worried about the things we have been worrying about this year because they died early from industrial accidents, poverty and disease.
Our problem has been that modern media tells us more than ever before about what is happening around us and does it in a manner that frightens us. Matthew Engel, a journalist himself, says newspaper distort the facts, TV news distorts the facts utterly, and 24-hour non-stop news distorts the facts utterly, totally and completely. “We don’t mean to do it, guv,” he says. “We don’t lie. But the parameters under which we operate just ensure that we mislead.”
It’s a dilemma for the media that is probably unsolvable. It can hardly ignore terrorist acts, even though to do so would defeat one of the terrorists’ main aims--publicity for their cause and an advertisement for new recruits. But the way terrorist acts are presented--a drama with each episode crafted like a thriller, with no proper assessment of the real risk--causes alarm, concern and faulty perceptions.
Out there in the rest of the world there has been a perception--over the past, say, 25 years--that the British, who have had more experience of terrorism than just about anyone else, went around in fear of IRA bombs. In fact most of them were getting on with the reality of their everyday lives. The fact is that more people died on British roads each year than were killed in the entire history of the Irish troubles. As the Qantas pilot told his passengers as he approached Sydney airport, “Folks, the safest part of your journey is over. The most dangerous is about to begin, so drive carefully.”
I see 2003 as the year when we realised that if, in the end, to defend ourselves against terrorism we had to change our way of life so radically that it became unrecognisable from what it once was, then the terrorists would have won. Yes, we continued to take care but we got on with our lives while recognising what the real risks were, and reassured by the fact that if we didn’t smoke, didn’t get involved in a road accident and were not murdered by someone we knew, then we’d probably make it to a happy old age.
It was a year of strange alliances, none quite so strange as that between Zionists and Christian fundamentalist groups, some from the extreme right. In France French Zionists formed an alliance with some neo-Nazi groups to confront the Muslim community of France. There were similar unions in Holland, and in Britain right-winger Martin Webster warned against what he termed the “pro-Zionist turn of the British extreme right.” In October 3,000 Christian Zionists from all over the world celebrated the Feast of the Tabernacle in the streets of Jerusalem as a show of solidarity with Israel.
What’s going on? There is a religious explanation and a political one. Christian Zionists oppose any territorial concessions at all to Palestinians because they believe that Jewish settlements built on Palestinian territory in the Holy Land will bring about the Second Coming of Christ. Politically, the extreme right believes that Israel is a key country in the on-going war against Islam. An American extreme right website, http://sm.org/exegesis, preaches, “Saving Israel is even more crucial than defeating the Left. We should not relax in the battle against cultural Marxism, but even more urgent than waging war on Marxism is the need to save Israel from its own leaders and from total destruction.”
It is certainly true that Israel had a lot to worry about in 2003. International reporting concentrated on the military struggle with the Palestinians and overlooked Israel’s economic situation, which in the long run may prove more important. Strikes were widespread, unemployment high and rising. Deflation--as per the Consumer Price Index--was running at the crippling minus 4.6 per cent and there were no obvious remedies in sight.
This gloomy outlook in Israel, with no sign of any let-up in suicide bomber attacks, could explain the deepening divisions in the Australian Jewish community--as witnessed in the controversy over the award of the 2003 Sydney Peace Prize to Palestinian scholar Dr Hanan Ashrawi. The attempts at silencing debate and the level of abuse in website exchanges over the issue marked a sad moment for a community previously renowned in Australia for its tolerance.
At least one American commentator, historian George Feifer, was concerned that even the American military establishment was forming strange alliances. “The military’s scorn for constitutional principles, its growing conviction that it is morally superior to the civilians it supposedly serves, its turning into an agent of the far religious right, is scarier than most people imagine.” British critic Hugh Brogan went further. “Today the thoroughgoing militarisation of the US foreign policy is the most worrying of all the worrying portents of the 21st century.”
Perhaps a better contender was an event that took place on 15 October--China became the third state on the planet (after the former Soviet Union and the United States) to launch a manned spacecraft. The Pentagon saw this as further evidence of a “China threat”, more proof that China’s huge population and booming economy was providing it with the potential to challenge America. It looked as if the now infamous neo-Conservative document, “Project for the New American Century”, was proving prophetic--”The focus of strategic competition has shifted from Europe to East Asia.”
But have the Washington think-tanks missed the real thrust of China’s strategy? What if instead of trying to confront the military might of the United States, Confucian Asia began in 2003 the process of “buying” the United States. Over the year China bought $43 billion of Treasury Bonds and $35 billion in agency bonds, worth about 20% and 16% respectively of its total overseas purchases. This means that China was helping finance the Bush administration’s enormous budget deficit, one which US Treasury officials keep telling us is “manageable”. If so, why do they look shifty when they say it?
Washington and the International Monetary Fund complained bitterly that China was deliberately keeping the exchange rate low and called for China to let market forces determine the value of its currency. This is a bit rich when it is clear that neither the IMF or the Bush administration really believes in free markets. They interfere with markets whenever it suits them. As Joseph Stiglitz, professor of economics at Columbia University and a Nobel prize winner, points out, “Bush supported bailouts for the airlines, unprecedented subsidies for agriculture and [illegal] tariff protections for steel.”
China is lucky that its huge foreign currency reserves give it the freedom to ignore the US and and IMF because once again it has shown its mastery of basic economic principles. Is it really possible that the US does not realise that every time an American company chooses to cut its costs by ordering from China, it effectively exports American know-how and brings closer the day when American manufacturing skills are lost forever? Or is it that short-term profit now so dominates the American business mentality that no one cares about the future?
In the absence of a sensible China policy from Washington, China’s other trading partners--Australia, the UK, Europe--need to engage in direct talks with the Chinese. This year has shown that to stand by and watch the growing tension between China and the US is no longer an option.
It was clearly unfair that business could move freely around the world looking for the cheapest labour but workers could not freely move to countries paying the highest wages. Their attempts to do so were met with punitive immigration restrictions, detention camps, and deportation. But 2003 will go down in the history of labour relations when the workers, helped by technology, struck back.
It began in Britain. A whole swathe of companies whose businesses involved telephone calls and computer operations decided to move their call centres to India--HSBC, British Airways, British Telecom, Lloyds TSB, Prudential, Standard Chartered, Norwich Union, Bupa, Reuters, Abbey National, Powergen and--wait for it--even British Rail timetable inquiries. You want to know the last train from London Paddington to Oxford, how much is the off-peak fare, and is there a buffet car? You telephone British Rail and a young Indian woman sitting in an air-conditioned office in Bangalore will be happy to tell you.
Since she will be paid about one fifth what her counterpart in Britain was getting, at first sight this is business seeking the cheapest labour. But her wage will be far more than she could earn in India, she didn’t have to emigrate to get the job, and there is a certain historical justice to the deal. Britain got rich during the industrial revolution by destroying the manufacturing capacity of India. It forced India to supply cotton for British mills and banned it from producing finished cotton goods itself. Now the jobs Britain stole two hundred years ago are going back to India.
It is wishful thinking to believe that something similar is not going to happen in Australia. Standards of education in India are as high as in Australia, and in some sectors higher. Almost all educated Indians speak English and are computer literate. As the process of transferring lowly call centre jobs accelerates, higher-paid jobs in the First World will be threatened--managers, accountants, computer programmers, IT consultants, biotechnicians, designers--even lawyers.
Britain expects to lose to India some 30,000 executive positions in the finance and insurance industries between 2003 and 2010. The United States expects to lose 3.3 million by 2015. Why should Australia be immune from this trend? As the Oxford academic George Monbiot says, “For the first time in history the professional classes of Britain and America [and Australia] will find themselves in direct competition with the professional classes of another nation.”
In mid-summer came a traumatic reminder that women’s rights still have a long way to go. Dozing in front of the TV set I was jerked awake by the most horrendous, heart-rending screams of pain. On the screen was a documentary called “The Day I Will Never Forget.” It was a graphic account of female circumcision. The screams were coming from a thirteen year-old girl being held down in her family home in Kenya and having her clitoris removed by an old woman with a needle and a knife.
The sub-titles told the viewers that the girl was screaming “Mama! Mama! She’s killing me.” But, of course, Mama was not going to help her because Mama was one of the people holding her down. The next day the TV critic of the Evening Standard said that in many years of watching all sorts of television for a living, no programme had ever made him actually vomit before. “Watching ‘The Day I Will Never Forget’ was like the very worst sort of nightmare, the one from which you can’t wake up”. He said it was not the gore or the screams--he had seen that on TV hospital drama series. It was the insane enthusiasm of a culture whole-heartedly in the grip of madness.
Not that dreadful things do not happen to children in Western cultures. A young couple appeared in a British court in October because either the father or the mother had punched in the face of their nineteen-months-old son so viciously that he died from brain damage. They weren’t charged with murder because each blamed the other and there was no independent evidence as to who had done it. The father was sentenced to two years jail for cruelty--the autopsy showed that the toddler had broken bones from earlier assaults. The mother was given a conditional release.
But altruism is alive and well. Christian Smith (24) heard a disturbance in the street outside his house in Oldham last August. He went out to investigate and found four schoolgirls being harassed by a gang of teenage bullies. Smith, who was 6ft 4in tall, remonstrated with the youths and drove them off. They returned soon afterwards with a larger group and beat and stabbed Smith to death. The mother of one of the fifteen year-old girls he tried to protect said, “I owe my child’s life to him. He did what he felt he had to do. He died in doing it but he died a hero.”
It was a year in which we all increased our use of the new international language--numbers. I swear that I overheard one side of a telephone conversation which went as follows:
Caller: Do you have FS8842571 slash 9607? No. 65973821? (Pause) 97535701 dash 83762. (Pause) 0603. 9471. (Pause) W25BS. 4. (Pause) 6824KK.
As you might have guessed the caller was ordering an item from a mail order catalogue, paying for it by credit card, providing his post code and taking down his order reference number. But a visitor from outer space overhearing conversations like this--and they are becoming more frequent-- would think that we converse largely in numbers.
If a look around the world in 2003 upsets you, if war, famine, man’s inhumanity to man, political skullduggery, the lies of our leaders and their minions, the rape of the environment, the greed of individuals and corporations--in short, our failure to be able to organize things so that we all benefit from our short time on this planet--fills you with despair, then I suppose there are really only two things to do.
You can take Voltaire’s advice and concentrate on cultivating your garden. Or you can listen to Alasdair Gray, the Scottish novelist and science fiction writer. He says, “Work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation.” Australia is still in its early days and still has a chance to be that better nation.
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