Painting Fakes

You may think we are in the midst of an election campaign, but actually we're having two.  One is being fought across the airwaves in the various forms of national media,  The other is being fought in local communities. The first campaign is between the two leaders, Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott, with their support crews assisting and others like Christine Milne, Clive Palmer and Bob Katter trying to muscle in as best they can.  We see this campaign on our TVs every night, we read about it in the papers, we hear it on the radio.  This campaign appears to be pretty even.  Rudd is a lot smarter than Abbott and knows how to work the media, but neither leader is that popular really.  In the thrust and parry of debate very little of substance is discussed, and who "wins" is as much a matter of debate as the actual issues being discussed or avoided. Despite this contest appearing to be fairly even, all the polling information seems to be saying that the Coalition is gaining

Intrigued by a reference in Merold Westphal's Suspicion and Faith, I've just finished reading Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood is a prolific Canadian novelist, poet and essayist, critically lauded and much decorated.  This is my first encounter with her writing but I don't think it will be long before I read more. The Handmaid's Tale is a work of social satire.  Satire operates by highlighting and exaggerating absurd or problematic aspects of an idea, worldview or public personality in order to debunk it or turn it into an object of ridicule.  By far the most common application of this technique is to make us laugh, but laughter is never the main aim.  The main aim is to deflate pretensions, to open up the space for criticism, to bring the powerful or popular down a peg or two. Less commonly, because it takes much more skill, satire can aim to horrify, to make us weep.  The classic example is George Orwell's 1984, a grim comment on th

So, the first week of the election campaign has gone pretty much to plan.  We've had a debate in which both sides mouthed platitudes.  The leaders are flying frantically from place to place across the country and vying for air time in both senses of the word.  The Murdoch press has amplified its long campaign to get an Abbott government elected to the point where it is a tortured scream.  As expected, the initial enthusiasm for Kevin Rudd has worn off and the polls are suggesting a big Coalition win.  Even the recruitment of former premier Peter Beattie as Labor candidate for the Queensland marginal seat of Forde seems to have backfired. If my place is any indication, perhaps one reason the election is tilting towards the Coalition is that they are the only ones doing any campaigning.  I live in the marginal Labor seat of Moreton, and have yet to see any material from sitting member Graham Perrett.  Not even via e-mail.  I know his office has my e-mail address because he replied

Recently I acted on a whim and bought myself Peter Gabriel's first three solo albums on CD.  In his enigmatic style each of them is simply titled Peter Gabriel so they have, by default, taken on various names: either simply "1, 2 and 3" or, for those in the know, names drawn from the pictures on their covers - "Car" for the first, "Scratch" for the second and "Melt" for the third. I first heard Gabriel via Brisbane student radio 4ZZZ when I was at high school in the late 1970s.  One evening they played the entire The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway,  the last album Genesis made with Gabriel as singer.  I was hooked at first listen.  I loved the passionate, energetic music, the constant experimentation with sounds and voices and the bizarre fractured fairy tale that ran through the album.  It's still one of my favourites 35 years later. My love of this album put me in a distinct minority that didn't necessarily include all the members

I know you're all hanging out for a bit more election commentary, given there hasn't been much of it lately.  The truth is, I'm a bit gun-shy after the shock of the last Queensland Election and not quite sure if I should put my toe back in the water in case the sharks rip my foot off.  Still, here goes... The Australian Electoral Commission has been running these ads, encouraging you to get on the electoral roll. Your vote, they say, is a precious thing which you keep hidden somewhere safe and then pull out every three years and use, before putting it safely back in its box. What the ad doesn't show is the next scene in each of these little cameos in which the actors recoil, gagging and gasping as they race to open the window and dispel the stench.  If you leave things unattended for three years, they tend to rot.  We all know that the only things you hide under the floorboards are dead bodies.  This ad goes some way to explaining the stench which currentl

Thanks to a recommendation from my cousin Luke I've just finished reading a book by Merold Westphal called Suspicion and Faith.   It's the most refreshing and challenging Christian analysis of atheism I've read for some time. The hinge on which the book hangs is the idea that there are two sources of atheism, and that they require two radically different approaches from Christians.  The first he calls "evidential atheism" and is based on a sceptical approach to religion.  When Richard Dawkins asserts that the theory of evolution removes any need for a creator, he is engaging in evidential atheism.  The second is what he describes as the "atheism of suspicion".  This atheism does not arise from doubts about the evidence for belief, but from doubts about the motivation of religious believers and the function religion plays in our societies and our individual psyches. Scepticism is directed towards the elusiveness of things, while suspicion is di

Finkelstein and Silberman suggest that the glories of the Israelite kingdom of David and Solomon are greatly exaggerated.  They say the archaeological evidence points to a small territory with a tiny population of limited literacy, and that the united kingdom of Israel and Judah is unlikely to be historical. They may or may not be right.  I'm hardly qualified to judge.  However, even if the biblical accounts are scrupulously accurate, they were of little help to the Jews who wrote the books of the Apocrypha .  For them these kingdoms were so long ago, and so far from the realities of their lives, that all they provided was a memory of past greatness and a dream of a possible future. The big problem they faced in their day was this: How do you survive a dominant and often hostile empire?  For most of Israel's ancient history, including the period of the later kings and prophets and the period of the Apocrypha, the Middle East was dominated by a succession of powerful, ag