Sunday, 14 August 2011

It's 'Prog Rock Sunday' here at Exile Towers. Not 'arf...

James Franco

Alykassem Aly Kassem

People used to take LSD to make the world look weird. Now the world is weird and they take Prozac to make it look normal. Bangstrom #2011

Penny Wong: Australia's non-story of the week

Imagine the outcry in America if a senior cabinet member in the Obama administration had announced she was about to have a baby with her gay partner.

I'm thinking protests from the Christian Right outside the Treasury Department. Fiery on-screen denunciations from some leading television evangelists. Perhaps one or two preachers might even have blamed America's demotion from AAA to AA+ status on the moral impoverishment of its financial officials. The unborn baby would have quickly become the latest proxy in America's ongoing culture wars.
In Australia, however, the news that Finance Minister Penny Wong and her partner, Sophie Allouache, are expecting a child has generated a minimum of fuss. Indeed, I can report that it has been the non-story of the week.
They conceived using IVF with the help of an anonymous sperm donor. They underwent the procedure outside of their home state of South Australia because IVF for gay couples there is illegal.
Isolated criticism Ms Wong decided to announce the news earlier this week because she acknowledged there would be interest from the public as a result of her high-ranking position within the government and because she wanted to protect her pregnant partner from any undue publicity.
Though a strong advocate of same-sex marriage - a stance that puts her at odds with Prime Minister Julia Gillard - Ms Wong said she was not making a political point.
''You have a child because you want a family and you want to have the opportunity of raising a child together," she told Phillip Coorey of the Sydney Morning Herald.
"You don't have a child to make a political statement."
Julia Gillard publicly congratulated her friend and trusted colleague, as did Julie Bishop, the acting opposition leader.
The only politician I have seen publicly criticise Ms Wong is the Reverend Fred Nile of the Christian Democratic Party, a member of the New South Wales Legislative Council and a self-styled protecter of public morals. In the upper house of the New South Wales parliament, for instance, he claims to hold what he calls "the balance of prayer".
"I'm totally against a baby being brought up by two mothers - the baby has human rights," said Rev Nile. "It's a very poor example for the rest of the Australian population."
He also criticised Penny Wong's decision to make public the news. "It just promotes their lesbian lifestyle and trying to make it natural where it's unnatural," he said.
But his has been a fairly isolated public voice.
A host of firsts What can we draw from all this? The first point to make is that Australia's culture wars are very different from America's culture wars.
On the other side of the Pacific, the battles tend to focus on moral and faith-based issues, like abortion, creationism and same sex marriage. In Australia, the battleground is history, the related issue of indigenous rights, art and the environment. True, the question of same-sex marriage is starting to loom larger as an issue - the Labor Party national conference will debate it in December, and the emboldened Australian Greens are pressing for reform.
But it generates nowhere near the same passion as it does in the US.
When it comes to personal morality, Australia has moved away from the prudish censoriousness that was such a strong feature of national life until the early 1970s, and perhaps beyond. And though it remains a fairly socially conservative country - the continued influence of the Catholic Church is a key factor - it is also a socially tolerant country.
Again, this explains why Ms Wong's announcement has generated so little controversy.
Finally, Ms Wong is yet another reminder of the changing face of Australia. She is not only the first openly gay federal cabinet minister, but the first Asian-born minister. She came to Australia from Malaysia.
To these firsts, I dare say she would like another: that of being the first Australian politician to take part in a same-sex marriage.
Nick Bryant @'BBC'

David Starkey claims 'the whites have become black'

The historian and broadcaster David Starkey has provoked a storm of criticism after claiming during a televised discussion about the riots that "the problem is that the whites have become black".
In an appearance on BBC2's Newsnight, Starkey spoke of "a profound cultural change" and said he had been re-reading Enoch Powell's rivers of blood speech.
"His prophesy was absolutely right in one sense. The Tiber did not foam with blood but flames lambent, they wrapped around Tottenham and wrapped around Clapham," he said.
"But it wasn't inter-community violence. This is where he was absolutely wrong." Gesturing towards one of the other guests, Owen Jones, who wrote Chavs: the Demonisation of the Working Classes, Starkey said: "What has happened is that a substantial section of the chavs that you wrote about have become black."
An outcry on Twitter began with the Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn asking the BBC: "Why was racist analysis of Starkey unchallenged? What exactly are you trying to prove?" A spokesman for Newsnight said: "I think that [presenter] Emily Maitlis very robustly challenged David Starkey.
"The two guests [Jones and the writer and education adviser Dreda Say Mitchell] that we had also quite clearly took issue with his comments."
Jones told the Guardian he believed Starkey's comments were "a career-ending moment". He said: "He tapped into racial prejudice at a time of national crisis. At other times, those comments would be inflammatory but they are downright dangerous in the current climate.
"I fear that some people will now say that David Starkey is right, and you could already see some of them on Twitter. I am worried about a backlash from the right and he will give legitimacy to those views in the minds of some." On the programme, Starkey said: "The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion and black and white boys and girls operate in this language together.
"This language which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has been intruded in England and that is why so many of us have this sense of literally of a foreign country."
The historian and broadcaster, whose historical documentaries on Channel 4 about the Tudors established him as a household name, went on to name-check Tottenham's Labour MP: "Listen to David Lammy, an archetypal successful black man. If you turn the screen off so that you are listening to him on radio you would think he was white."
He was challenged by Mitchell, who ridiculed his theories about the speech patterns of young people.
"You keep talking David about black culture. Black communities are not homogenous. So there are black cultures. Lots of different black cultures. What we need to be doing is ... thinking about ourselves not as individual communities ... as one community. We need to stop talking about them and us."
Ben Quinn @'The Guardian'
I still can't believe this guy!