BULLSHIT INDICATORS

I wish to confess a favourite fantasy. I have always dreamed of having a huge wall-mounted neon sign that could be programmed to flash the word “Bullshit!” whenever it heard certain words or expressions. Naturally the triggers would be chosen and pre-loaded by me. I call them (unimaginatively) bullshit indicators.  No bullshit indicator is infallible but some go pretty close.

I first developed this fantasy in the late 1970s when I worked in the Victorian Public Service. It was the word “community” that first got my goat. It began appearing in the titles of lobby groups which exemplified what has been defined as the arrogance of the social worker: “I’m here on earth to help others. What the others are here for I don’t know.” Reflecting on the usages of “community” led me to generalise about language usage in public discourse and I concluded that to find the intention behind public language go first to its opposite. “Corrections” in the title of an institution means, inevitably, “punishing while making no effort to correct”. “Community” pretends to describe a grass roots movement. In fact it almost always refers to something imposed on the grass roots by elements of the half-educated middle class. My favourite American, HL Mencken, said  “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.”  

These days I think the most blatant and widespread bullshit indicator is “natural”. It is used to describe everything from laundry detergents, to quack remedies and is always a lie if only because it implies an absolutely false distinction between “things produced by human agency” and “things produced by non-human agency”. Thus today’s Greenshirts are guilty of the same anthropocentrism that they accuse everyone else of.  More guilty, in fact. Cholera is natural.  Leprosy, cancer, anencephaly, malaria, murder, rape, the Liberal Party, AIDS, Redcraze’s defeat in the 1956 Melbourne Cup - all occurred in nature. In fact nothing can occur out of nature. If it exists it is part of the natural world.

My own list of bullshit indicators, of course (I nearly wrote “naturally!”) reflects my own prejudices. I would be interested to know what words serve as similar triggers for other people.

BOOK REVIEW: Skagboys, by Irvine Welsh

Some years ago I saw the film of Trainspotting. Subsequently I read the novel and much preferred it to the film.  Now I've just finished reading Skagboys, a prequel to the earlier book.

These novels are written mostly in Scots dialect (a term that is probably ideologically unacceptable but who cares). One effect of this is to force an Antipodean reader like me to read slowly and carefully, almost sounding out the words in my head. Partly for that reason and partly because Irvine Welsh is a very fine writer the events of the novel are heard almost as much as read. The result is a vivid account of the lives of junkies - unjustified optimism, degradation, euphoria, false hope, disillusionment, betrayal and more degradation.

When I was young many of my friends and acquaintances were heroin users. I never tried it myself: whether that was from cowardice or good sense I no longer know. Perhaps I just preferred alcohol, a foible which was viewed with tolerant condescension in those circles. In any case, the memory of that time gives me an interesting perspective on Skagboys.  

I was always amused by the degree of snobbery that was characteristic of junkies.  Many heroin users looked down on people who restricted themselves to acid or dope.  “At least heroin’s a physical drug.  It only affects the body.  I’m not going to take something that stuffs up my mind.”  As Monty Python would have said, “It’s all this Cartesian dualism that’s to blame!” It was the same kind of snobbery that was apparent, in wider social circles,  in music styles or clothing brands. Interestingly, the junkies in Skagboys don’t mix with potheads or acid freaks so the phenomenon that I observed isn’t visible here. Neither is the unspoken degradation competition that resulted from junkies measuring themselves against famous musicians or, less commonly, writers.  “Great artists are tormented souls, alienated from conventional society. I’m tormented and alienated; therefore I’m a great artist. However I’m more degraded than you so I am the greater artist.” The closest to this in Welsh’s novel is that some of the characters fancy themselves as musicians, though their musical careers don’t amount to much. I must also say (to prove that junkies aren’t the only snobs) that the main character’s taste in music is deplorable.

One of the saddest things about junkies - in real life and in Skagboys - is the degree to which their moral sense becomes subordinate to their addiction. In life I knew one or two honourable exceptions, but the characters in the novel are more typical. They hold out on their colleagues, steal from their families and pimp out their girlfriends. And yet, both in life and in fiction, I never found myself able to condemn them totally. It’s as if we make two simultaneous moral estimates of them. “Nice bloke, bad junkie.”  “I like him, but I wouldn’t turn my back on him.“

Anyway, read the book. Some scenes will make you laugh aloud, though most will make you cringe. A lot like life, really.

My Dad's Army

Some years before my father died a document circulated among some of his friends from the Second World War. It was a transcript of a radio programme from early 1943, a series of interviews with members of his unit, including Dad himself, recorded after the horrendous Buna - Sananada fighting in which they had participated. Because of wartime secrecy, the unit - the 2/12 Australian Infantry Battalion - was not identified. For a link to the transcript scroll to the bottom of this post.

As well as  my father, some of the men interviewed here were intermittent characters in my childhood and youth. It’s a strange feeling to read this text and come across familiar names and idioms.  In a prefatory note to The Middle Parts of Fortune (the best novel of the First World War) the author, Frederic Manning wrote “...in recording the conversations of the men I seemed at times to hear the voices of ghosts.”

Leo Gardner (1918-2004)

There are army terms used in the transcript that might be unfamiliar to some readers. “MT” is “Motor Transport”, “sig” is “signaller”, “draw the crabs” means “attract enemy fire”, “C O” is “commanding officer”. If anybody has any questions on this or any other aspect of the transcript I will happily attempt to answer them.

Reflecting on these interviews leads me to try and clarify my thoughts about how we remember various wars and the men who fought in them. That is a matter for a later post. For now all I will say is that I am scornful of ill-informed and mawkish displays of public sentimentality. I can hardly do better than to quote Frederic Manning again.

“War is waged by men; not by beasts, or by gods. It is a peculiarly human activity. To call it a crime against mankind is to miss at least half of its significance; it is also the punishment of a crime.”

Link to transcript