Sunday 16 August 2015

CLARKSON Gwen Russell

CLARKSON: The Gloves Are Off
GWEN RUSSELL
John Blake Books, 2015, 285 pages

Review by Phil Shannon 

There are many more lowlights to the career of the car-obsessed television personality, Jeremy Clarkson, than his assault in March this year on the producer of his motoring show, Top Gear, in a row over the lack of a hot meal after a day’s filming, which put the BBC employee in hospital with a split lip.

Gwen Russell’s homage to Clarkson, although trying to show him as a “cultured and thoughtful” Renaissance Man, does concede that Clarkson, his brain stuck in reptilian gear, has offended women (with cheap sexual metaphors when describing cars), gays (homosexuality is ‘repulsive’, ‘grotesque’), a wide array of foreigners (Germans, for example, whom he is still fighting the last war against), environmentalists (he would only use an environmentally-friendly car ‘as an outside toilet’), New Zealand Maoris (threatening to drive over a sacred beach) and striking public sector workers (who should be executed in front of their families).

Clarkson hates speed limits, speed cameras, drink-driving laws, bus-lanes, cyclists, the science of global warming.  He likes smoking, hunting, the hairy-chested novels of Tom Clancy, and, above all, powerful and noisy engines.  He has a fully-fledged fighter jet as a garden ornament.

Lacking erudition (he is no Stephen Fry), Clarkson is a middling standard entertainer reliant on crude national stereotypes, ethnic prejudices and sexual innuendo, whose appeal is primarily to a narrow stratum of men - motoring enthusiasts, unreformed sexists, opponents of ‘political correctness’, conservative wailers against the ‘nanny state’ (he regards occupational health and safety regulations as ‘the cancer of a civilised society’). 

His banner-waving for this constituency moaning over their diminishing advantages has, however, made Clarkson wealthy.  He was pulling in £3 million a year from the BBC, ran a large fleet of expensive cars, and owned a six-acre estate in the country, a swish apartment in London and a £1.25 million holiday home in the tax-friendly, no-speed-limit Isle of Man.

Clarkson has returned the economic favours to his employer many times over, bringing in £50 million annually to the BBC’s commercial arm.  Right up until Clarkson’s violence against one of their employees, the BBC defended their money-dynamo.  Clarkson was just a jester, they said.  Those offended by Clarkson’s bigoted, racist, sexist and homophobic slurs that passed for wit simply couldn’t take a joke.  His critics are just po-faced purists getting the wrong angle on a ‘professional controversialist’ who doesn’t mean what he says.  Despite Russell joining this exculpatory chorus, her book-length fan letter, if handled with protective gloves, does enough to show, however, that the television clown’s utterances betray the values of the man.

The model for Clarkson’s animus towards the state and what he sees as its throttling of individual freedom and stifling of the entrepreneur was his self-employed family’s highly successful Paddington Bear toy business.  This upbringing predisposed Clarkson to worship Margaret Thatcher and her decade of economic opportunity, unfettered by state or unions, for the financial go-getter.  He is the full Tory ideological package.

Like the young, truculent schoolboy he was, the now tattered, middle-aged Clarkson is still taunting authority, says Russell, trying to portray him as a subversive wit.  Not all authority is jeered at, however.  Immune from Clarkson’s derision are the monarchy, the military, corporate titans and Empire (or what’s left of it - the Falklands).  He is utterly unthreatening to the powerful that matter under capitalism.  Clarkson has never really grown up – he still plays with (Big Boys’) Toys and he bullies, with verbal and physical abuse, the powerless and those he sees as inferiors.

Sunday 2 August 2015

THE COAL FACE Tom Doig

THE COAL FACE
TOM DOIG
Penguin, 2015, 121 pages (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon 

Coal burns, so it is no surprise that coalmines can catch fire in a spectacular, Hades kind of way.  The massive, open-cut coalmine next to Hazelwood Power Station in Morwell, Victoria, says the writer, Tom Doig, in The Coal Face, has around three hundred spot fires every year, punctuated by bigger blazes lasting days.

In 2014, on the extreme fire risk weekend of February 8th-9th, the mine caught dramatically alight (from either bushfires, or a pre-existing spot fire) and burned out of control for 45 days. The residents of Morwell, and the broader Latrobe Valley, breathed choking smoke and harmful chemicals in what was Victoria’s worst ever industrial disaster.  It had, however, been preventable, thus turning a public health emergency  into a corporate crime.

With Hazelwood’s shrinking coal reserves becoming increasingly uneconomic to mine, thus slating the mine and power plant for future closure, millions of dollars of fire-suppressant sprinklers and steel water pipes had been removed and sold for scrap.  Fire-preventing rehabilitation and in-fill of the worked-out but still coal-laden seams had not been done.  There had been no clearing of firebreaks.  All this saved money for the mine’s French multinational owner, GDF Suez, the largest power company in the world with annual profits of over $100 billion.

GDF Suez didn’t get this big by being ethical.  All the water and fire-fighting defences at Hazelwood had been concentrated on protecting the operational area of the mine and the power plant, not on protecting the community.  These priorities proved highly profitable – whilst 90% of electricity production was lost for the first 24 hours, it was money-making “business as usual” for the next 44 days of the fire.

For the people of the Latrobe Valley, however, it meant a continual chemical soup of microscopic particulate matter, noxious gases, toxic heavy metals, and carcinogens and mutagens. “Already home to some of the least healthy people in Victoria” from the background air pollution from coal mining, many of the region’s residents were pushed closer to, and some over, the mortality edge with at least eleven immediate probable deaths and widespread short and long-term serious morbidity.

They weren’t content, however, to be just victims.  They organised, attracting over a thousand residents to Morwell’s “first ever mass community protest”, led, often enough, by people discovering their political voice for the very first time.  They ran a candidate in the state election, taking 11% of the vote away from the government incumbent and forcing the incoming Labor Premier to promise and deliver on a thorough scientific investigation of the fire’s health impact.

With the fire still smouldering and a future public health tragedy slowly brewing, with employees still banned from speaking out under threat of dismissal and a firefighting cost to the Victorian taxpayer of $32 million, Doig’s little book shows that, once again, coal has proven to be good, not for humanity, but only for corporate wealth and power.

THE DARK BOX John Cornwell

THE DARK BOX: A Secret History of Confession
JOHN CORNWELL
Profile Books, 2015, 288 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

Sceptics have, says the lay historian of Catholicism, John Cornwell, in The Dark Box, seen the ritual of Catholic confession as a convenient sin/confess/sin-again cycle allowing the faithful to continue, with a clear spiritual conscience, their secular transgressions of the flesh.  Cornwell’s  history of confession, focusing on its link with clerical sexual abuse of children, backs up this assessment.

Confession had its early origins in primitive Christianity as a theatrical manifestation of religious mania (sackcloth and ashes, self-flagellation, etc.).  Ensuing clerical power elites employed it as a political tool, backed when needed by force, to combat heresy by Catholic sects and Protestant dissenters.  Confession lives on as a means for the imposition of an antiquated morality on the Catholic population and as a handy keep-out-of-jail mechanism for felonious priests.

Over time, confession’s frequency increased from once-in-a-lifetime to annual to weekly, and its target audience widened from adults and post-pubescent youths to, in the twentieth century,  pre-pubescent children when the strategy of ‘getting them young’ was seen as crucial to repelling the challenges of secularism, materialism, science, atheism and socialism.

This expansion of confession significantly increased the opportunities for priest-confessors to materially prosper through selling absolution and to carnally revel through sex with penitent women and children who felt they could not refuse the desires of God’s representatives on Earth.

The effect of confession on children has been debilitating, “inculcating an oppressive sense of guilt and shame, especially for their bodies”.  Catholic moralists’ obsession with masturbation (‘every sperm is sacred’) soared to the top rungs of the elaborate hierarchies of sin, outranking even rape, in the Catholic seminary training manuals for priests.  The confessional procedure was baffling to the very young who had no understanding of sex and had to be instructed in its ways and means by often too-eager priests. 

Many children were exposed to desperate sexual predators whose sexuality had been suppressed and distorted by enforced priestly celibacy.  The unsupervised intimacy of confession gave Catholic priests access to a large pool of vulnerable, trusting, fearful young children.  Clerical paedophiles, perhaps four to ten per cent of priests (three times the rate amongst the general population), took advantage to groom young penitents for sexual abuse outside the confessional, and, often enough, during the act of confession itself.

The priests’ victims were terrified of reporting their experience because that would commit the further high-ranking sin of violating the ‘seal of the confessional’, whilst the perpetrators of sexual abuse could also use their own confessions to wipe their slates clean, either by linguistic dissimulation (‘I performed an impure act with another person’, not ‘I am a priest and I raped a nine year old boy’) or by absolution by a fellow member of the clerical club.  One Queensland priest, a sexual abuser of boys for over a quarter of a century, went to confession 1,500 times with thirty priests for which his only penance was prayer.  Each confession was a spiritual cleansing, ‘like a magic wand had been waved over me’, he said.

The practice of confession, notes Cornwell, is in decline, fuelled by the divergence between Church teaching and lay practice on sexual behaviour (particularly concerning contraception, abortion and homosexuality).  Cornwell, a cautious Catholic re-convert, is anxious to absolve the contemporary Church by stressing its newly-minted emphasis on ‘counselling’ over confession, and ‘wrongs’ over sin, but concepts central to confession (sin and absolution, and purgatory, heaven and hell), however, remain fundamental to Catholic theology, storing up a potentially potent mix of undemocratic clerical power, reactionary politics and the abuse of earthly passions in the Catholic Church.

HACK ATTACK Nick Davies

HACK ATTACK: How the Truth Caught up with Rupert Murdoch
NICK DAVIES
Vintage Books, 2015, 443 pages

Review by Phil Shannon 

At Britain’s annual press awards in London’s Savoy hotel in 2011, Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World accepted, with no hint of shame, the prize for ‘scoop of the year’ for its exposé of corruption in Pakistani cricket, beating the nomination of the freelance/Guardian journalist, Nick Davies, for his six-year investigation of the criminal phone-hacking scandal that was engulfing Murdoch’s flagship gutter-press rag.

Hack Attack is Davies’ step-by-step account of how he unearthed the “dark arts” of snooping used by News of the World, in the process displaying the “secret world of the power elite and their discreet alliances”, the “casual arrogance” of press, police and politicians snubbing the law and covering up their wrongdoing.

What started as a minor skirmish which saw one private investigator and one journalist jailed in 2007 for hacking the mobile-phone voicemail of a few Buckingham Palace staff, ended in a major route and the ignominious closing by Murdoch of Britain’s biggest selling newspaper.

Guided by sleazy public voyeurism rather than legitimate ‘public interest’, and driven by a bullying managerial imperative to ‘just get the story’ regardless of ethics or legality, Murdoch’s stable of British tabloids had pioneered phone-tapping, email hacking and break-ins to dredge up the “most intimate, embarrassing and painful” secrets, usually involving sex and drugs, from the private lives of the famous and not-so-famous.  Confidential personal information was stolen from police and government databases using false pretences and deception (‘blagging’) and through cash bribes paid to corrupt employees.

News of the World  took the phone-hacking criminal enterprise to stellar heights, with thousands of victims spied on.  It was a practice deeply embedded in the paper, including amongst Murdoch’s editors who themselves directly commissioned dirt-bag private investigators or condoned their journalists’ use of them.

Yet, as the Guardian began to publish Davies’ revelations, there was a marked “shortage of people willing to get in a fight with Murdoch”.  The rest of the press (both tabloid and ‘quality’) were mute because they had their own dirty ‘dark arts’ linen to conceal.  The “senior ranks of the criminal justice system” (top cops, government prosecutors) waved everyone on.  The police were anxious to protect their own bent coppers who were on the take, were keen to butter-up a press to run only good police news stories, and were desperate to keep their own secret sexual affairs from the prying eyes of News of the World.

The then Labour Government (despite its own prominent targets of the phone-hacking) was inert.  Their politicians either ideologically embraced Murdoch’s neo-liberal values, or feared the Murdoch safes rumoured to contain dirt files on politicians, or cowered before Murdoch’s power to make and unmake governments - for the last 36 years, “no British government has been elected without the support of Rupert Murdoch”.  The incoming Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, appointed as his media and communications chief the Murdoch editor who had supervised the phone-hacking operation.

Both governments had invited Murdoch, his editors and his Chief Executive Officer into their inner sanctum where the price paid to keep Murdoch on side and stay his hand on mobilising News Corp readers as election-punishing “ballot fodder” was to soft-pedal on News Corp’s transgressions, to adjust media policy to promote the corporation’s business expansion, and to involve Murdoch in government appointments and Cabinet reshuffles.

Davies contrasts the elite’s kid-gloves view of the phone-hacking scandal with “the version that was being shown to me by a small collection of nervous off-the-record sources” – journalists, private investigators, the managers and lawyers of various celebrities, morally upright police detectives and government whistleblowers.

What brought the Murdoch fortress crashing down was the spread of the phone-hacking victims from the rarefied world of celebrities to common people whose targets included a murdered schoolgirl (Milly Dowler), the victims of the 2005 terrorist bombings in London, and, unforgivably to Establishment patriots, the families of British soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This development made the News of the World product-line toxic to the entire Murdoch brand, and threatened Murdoch's plans for government sanction for gaining sole control of the TV news channel, BSkyB.  Millions of pounds of revenue were also being lost as corporate Britain withdrew their advertising.  The Church of England disinvested its £3.7 million shareholding in News Corp.  Facing such business pressures, Murdoch cut his losses and closed the paper in 2011.

This outcome would not have been possible without Davies’ forensic skills of investigative journalism.  Not content to recycle press releases, or write “propaganda masquerading as journalism”, Davies demonstrates how “the best stories are the ones which someone somewhere doesn’t want you to know”.  His accomplishment is testament to his infinite patience and unwavering attention to detail (virtues which, be warned, the reader of his book must also possess – its focus is microscopic).

“Truth had won a battle with power”, writes Davies of the phone-hacking wash-up but, he adds ruefully, “very little has changed”.  “Some people resigned and Murdoch suffered a brief humbling” but the police strengthened their anti-whistle-blowing powers and politicians’ doors have remained open to Rupert and his clones.  News of the World was relaunched as the Sun on Sunday, whilst twelve months after the Dowler story, News Corp shares rose by 23%, the company’s value rose to $73 billion, and Murdoch’s personal annual income hit $30 million.  “The power of the elite” remains, concludes Davies.

As with many Murdoch-centric books on the media, Davies’ treatment of the non-Murdoch media elite is under-developed. Ungrounded in a critical analytical framework of the media under capitalism, the focus on the grubby excesses of Murdoch can make his more moderate corporate and state media rivals appear more meritorious than they warrant, including ‘lefty’ papers like Davies’ The Guardian.  The phone-hacking of people’s private lives should be exposed but so should capitalism’s destructive hacking of people’s economic and political lives.  This is rarely part of the job description of any media which is based on and respects the boundaries imposed by the profit principle.