Painting Fakes

I read American Psycho  so you don't have to.  It's a harrowing read and I don't recommend it unless you have a strong stomach. Bret Easton Ellis's 1991 novel is narrated by Pat Bateman, a young man who does something or other on Wall Street.  He seems to have an unlimited amount of money which he spends on designer clothes, gym and health club memberships, high end sound gear and eye-wateringly expensive dinners at exclusive restaurants.  Much of the novel consists of Bateman's descriptions of his dinners and socialising with various companions (you couldn't really call them friends) in which he describes in great detail what they are wearing, the appearance and sexual desirability of the women, the food they order and their absurd, inconsequential conversations.  This is not the harrowing bit. Amidst all the tedium of his day-to-day life Bateman also describes, in the same matter-of-fact tone, a series of gruesome murders which he commits.  The violence i...

Last weekend we went to a wedding.  The children of two sets of long-term friends were getting married, and the church was full of people we know and love.   As so many do, the couple had chosen 1 Corinthians 13, Paul's 'love chapter', as the Bible reading for the event. Many of my readers will be able to recite it, or at least parts of it. If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.  If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.  If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.  It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not deli...

Back in 1904, Peter Kropotkin published the anarchist classic Mutual Aid.   He wrote it as a response to the prevailing pseudo-Darwinian notion that life, both animal and human, was defined by a perpetual struggle for survival - a view that drove the ravages of colonialism, the exploitation of labour by capital, and the wars which engulfed Europe in the years after its publication.   For Kropotkin, this view is a mistake.  He starts in the animal kingdom, going through ants and bees forming huge cooperative colonies, birds forming flocks for food gathering, protection and navigation across migrations, mammals forming packs for cooperative hunting and herds for mutual protection.  Throughout the animal kingdom, he says cooperation is the norm.  For mammals and birds, certainly, it is solitary competition which is the exception.   He then moves on to spend most of the book talking about cooperation and mutual aid as a driver of human history, from p...

"Who is Edward Bellamy?", I hear you ask.  I would have asked the same until a few weeks ago, when I saw his book, Looking Backward: 2000-1887,  in one of our suburb's little street libraries .  I was intrigued and brought it home, and I thought I would share it with you before I put it back. Bellamy was born in Massachusetts in 1850 and came from a well-off family, going to university and eventually qualifying as a barrister.  He soon quit the law, convinced it was just there to uphold the plutocracy.  He could have been a classic 1960's 'angry young man', but born out of time.  From early in his life he was appalled at the slums just a short walk from his own well-off neighbourhood, and after quitting the law he worked as a writer and journalist, criticising child labour and labour laws that allowed prices to rise but wages to stagnate.  He was appalled by poverty and suffering, and was convinced there must be a better way. Looking Backward was the c...

I keep stumbling across something I find really perplexing, a vision of Australian unity which sounds innocuous, but is not. Because it's summer, let's start with a cricket tale.  You have probably heard of Usman Khawaja, a Pakistani-born Australian cricketer who has just announced his retirement at the age of 39 after a long, successful career playing Test cricket for Australia.  He is the first Pakistani-born player, and the first Muslim, to play cricket for Australia.  He is devoted to his Islamic faith, not in the sense of thinking everyone else should be a Muslim, but in the way it orders his life - he reads the Koran and prays every day, attends Friday prayers and fasts during Ramadan when cricket schedules permit, refrains from alcohol, is devoted to his family and generally tries to live by the tenets of his faith.  As he's got older he's also been more prepared to speak out on wider issues - combating racism in sport and elsewhere, calling out racist abuse i...

Back when I worked in Brisbane City Council I worked with a very clever man called Frank.  Frank was the Manager of City Assets, responsible for overseeing management of Council's  vast portfolio of land, buildings, infrastructure, equipment and so forth.  I was responsible for housing and homelessness initiatives and Frank organised for Council to donate some fabulous parcels of land for the Brisbane Housing Company , a new affordable housing company we were kicking off alongside the State Government.  He also handed over a small stock of spare houses to homelessness organisations to use for short-term housing until they were needed for their original purpose. I really appreciated his support, but the thing he did that impressed me most had nothing to do with me.  It was about cars.  For most of my time in Council, cars were a source of frustration.  Each of Council's hundreds of small teams had its own allocated vehicles, with their numbers vary...

 In my last post I reviewed Mark Considine's assessment of the results of neoliberal policy reform in Australia's social services.  In each case, the results have been bad for service users and governments, who get poorer quality, more expensive services.  However, they have been very good for the entrepreneurs who get into this market, who have been able to get rich on government money. This is pretty much the story of the whole neoliberal project.  Ordinary punters are promised that if we reduce workers rights, the rights of indigenous people and pesky environmental regulations and provide government 'incentives' to business, this will turbo-charge economic growth and everyone will benefit.  Turns out that this isn't true.  Rich people keep on getting richer, while the rest of us stay about the same or even get poorer.  Meanwhile, we are crossing various ecological boundaries, threatening our futures in the name of 'economic growth' now. One answer ...