Hurrah!

Last night, the Australian Labor Party won the federal election. They have been out of power for 11 years, ever since I first voted at the tender age of 18. I've blamed myself ever since. I certainly intended to vote for them - I'm just not sure if in the confusion of all of those boxes to tick if I shouldn't instead have numbered them.

But it was a sweet victory, made even sweeter by the fact that John Howard looks like he might lose his seat.

Now I just have to come to terms with having a Prime Minister named Kevin. Whose campaign included ballroom dancing.

Live and die by the gun

From The Age, April 19 2007

The right to bear arms is enshrined in US politics and culture. The latest massacre will do nothing to change that, writes Gwynne Dyer.

YOU can imagine lots of countries where a candidate for the presidency might lie about owning a gun so as not to alienate the voters, but only in the United States would he lie and say he does own a gun when he doesn't.

That was Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's sin earlier this year — and he compounded it by claiming that he was a lifelong hunter. Diligent reporters checked and found that Romney had never taken out a hunting licence anywhere. (Where were they when President Bush claimed that Saddam Hussein had "weapons of mass destruction"?)

The notion that the voters might punish a candidate for not owning a gun would seem simply bizarre in most jurisdictions, but it is a serious political reality in the United States. That's why hardly anybody in the US is using the latest mass slaughter by some enraged loser (33 dead at Virginia Tech) to argue for more gun control. There's not even pressure to renew the federal law banning the sale of assault rifles, which was recently allowed to lapse.

Gun control is a dead issue in the US, and it isn't coming back. There is a sound political reason for this, and there is also a rational explanation for it (which isn't the same thing). The political reason was simplicity itself: the Democratic Party realised that it wasn't going to win back a majority in either house of Congress if it didn't stop talking about gun control. The party's leaders looked at the political map after the 2004 election, a sea of Republican red with a narrow strip of Democratic blue on either coast, and realised that their problem was more than just George Bush's fatal charm. They weren't winning in "heartland" states because they were seen as trying to take Americans' guns away.

There are other issues even in Montana, of course, but enough people care passionately about their guns in Montana that it's hard to get elected there if you are seen as anti-gun. So now the Democratic Party's national platform commits it to uphold the Second Amendment — the right to keep and bear arms — and in the 2006 election it won both the Senate seat that was being contested in Montana and the governorship of the state, for decades a Republican stronghold.

The campaign manifesto of the new Democratic senator from Montana, Jon Tester, claimed that he would "stand up to anyone — Republican or Democratic — who tries to take away Montanans' gun rights".

The new Democratic Governor of Montana, Brian Schweizer, says that he has "more guns than I need but not as many as I want … I guess I kind of believe in gun control: you control your gun, and I'll control mine." It's a whole new image for Democrats, and it won them control of both houses of Congress in 2006. (Yes, the war helped, too, but by itself it wouldn't have been enough.)

The Democrats were not going to lose the coastal states (where the effete intellectuals and most of the old urban working class live) even if they did drop gun control. They were not going to win in the heartland (where the born-agains and the Marlboro Men live) if they didn't drop gun control. So they dropped it, and now no large party supports it. That's the politics of it, and you can't argue with that.

There is another, quite rational reason why gun control doesn't get much traction in American politics any more. It's simply too late. This is a society that owns about equal numbers of wristwatches and guns: about a quarter-billion of each. There's no going back — and if practically everybody else has guns, maybe you should have one, too.

As various commentators will be pointing out soon, if just one of those 32 murdered students had been carrying a concealed handgun maybe the killer would have been stopped sooner. It's perfectly legal to carry concealed weapons with a permit in Virginia, but not on college campuses.

This loophole must be closed. At least, that is the way the argument is usually put in America, although the reality is not one gun per citizen over the age of 12, but some citizens with a great many guns and most citizens with none at all.

More fundamentally, the gun-control argument may be missing the cultural point. Most Swiss and Israeli households with a male between the ages of 18 and 45 also contain a fully automatic weapon, because the national military mobilisation model in those countries requires reservists to keep their weapons at home. Yet the Swiss and Israelis don't murder one another at a higher rate than people in countries such as Britain or Turkey, where there is relatively strict gun control.

"Guns don't kill people; people kill people" is the best-known slogan of the National Rifle Association, the most effective pro-gun lobbying organisation in the US. But it's really a cultural thing: the British have bad teeth, the French smell of garlic, Americans tend to have more bullet-holes in them than other people. The slogan should actually go: "Guns don't kill Americans; Americans kill Americans."

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And in a related article: Bush defends the right to bear arms

Creation Science 101

Great moments in Presidential Speeches

(Blog title borrowed from David Letterman)

North Country

For the first time, I went to see a movie by myself last night. That was a big step in itself. I felt pretty strongly that I wanted to see this movie regardless of whether anyone was available to see it with me.

I'm not going to write a review, but...North Country, starring Charlize Theron and the legendary Frances McDormand, is the (inspired by a true) story of women working in a Minnesota mine, sexually harrassed, even attacked, by their male co-workers on a daily basis. Only one of these women is willing to speak out, despite attempts by people at every level of the company to step on her. She eventually pulls enough people together to file a class action lawsuit against the company, which sets a precendent for legislation of sexual equality in the workplace everywhere.

What scares me is that this did not happen very long ago. The lawsuit was won only in 1998, 10 years after it was filed and 23 years after the abuse began. Right up until the end the mining company (Eveleth Mines, in real life) was fighting the lawsuit, labelling the women as either "nuts or sluts". This makes me angry, but that is the main objective of the movie. In the end I was left with great respect for what this woman achieved, although there is still a long way to go before gender equality is truly reached...

I think back to my undergraduate days working in a grocery store for an Italian family, propositioned frequently by the boss' son and married brother-in-law, and slightly ostracised for telling them to piss off, as the boss and the other girls pretended not to notice. I wonder why I stayed there for 3 years, and put it down to needing money to get through university and there being very few other casual jobs available, but also knowing that I was better than that. And when I try to understand why they picked on me, I think it was because I was a university student with a lot more than a career in a grocery store ahead of me.

Anyway, I'm heading out now to buy the book.

No need for moral Oscars

I saw this on the Sydney Morning Herald Website:

No need for a moral Oscars

The timing is perfect to get attention. Just days before this year's Academy Award nominations, a conservative American movie producer has launched a rival cinema prize to honour American "moral" values.

Former dot-com entrepreneur Michael Class is calling on conservative media groups to support his American Values Awards for Movies and Television.

"I want media leaders with a sense of patriotism and respect for family to join with me to turn the American Values Awards into a high-profile event," he said.

Class is striking back at what he sees as a moral vacuum in Hollywood given that some leading Oscars contenders deal with homosexuality (Brokeback Mountain and Capote), transexuality (Transamerica), American oil interests in the Persian Gulf (Syriana), press freedom in an era of political witch-hunts (Good Night, And Good Luck) and the questions raised by nations responding to violence with violence (Munich).

"Skip Syriana, Munich, and Brokeback Mountain unless your only criterion for seeing a movie is aesthetic merit," said Class. "They are morally confused - I don't want my kids seeing them.

"Syriana blames America for terrorism. Munich confuses justice with vengeance. Brokeback Mountain? What's positive about a film whose main character's sexual behaviour destroys a family?"

Instead, Class wants to honour the values of such movies as Cinderella Man ("the story of a man who remains committed to his wife and children during the Great Depression"), The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe ("a fantastical morality play borrowing heavily from the New Testament of the Holy Bible"), Star Wars: Episode III and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire ("both stories of good versus evil").

While there's nothing wrong with any of these movies being honoured, Class has missed the point: just because movies deal with confronting, difficult and provocative subjects doesn't make them immoral.

The best film-makers, including the directors and writers behind many of the movies he opposes, are telling very moral stories.

Some of these movies have yet to open in Australia but let's take Brokeback Mountain as an example (see video review). It centres on a ranch-hand and a rodeo cowboy who start a sexual relationship one bleak winter that won't fade away once they get on with their lives, which include marriages and children. On one level, it's a gay story but - in a tribute to the artfulness of the film-makers - it's also a universal story.

Brokeback Mountain is about how intolerance - in the form of violent hatred - denies love and destroy lives. It's a romantic tragedy that can make a mainstream audience, even if confronted by gay cowboys, realise the depth of feeling in two characters who feel real and truthful.

The dangers of intolerance and violent hatred? I call that a moral movie.

As a movie lover, I want to see stories offering glimpses into all kinds of worlds. Stories of difference are as meaningful as stories re-inforcing what Class calls traditional American values.

Garry Maddox
January 25, 2006 08:24 PM

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Comments on the 'Moral Oscars' are shown in the original post - too many to list here.

Celebrating Vancouver's diversity

Bryan and I took in a little of the Pride week celebrations yesterday and watched the Pride Parade. I've watched the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras several times, but never the Vancouver Pride Parade. The major difference is that the Sydney Mardi Gras takes place at night, while the Vancouver Parade is on at lunch time.
Rather than stand on the street to watch we decided to go to Tanpopo sushi restaurant on Denman St, which overlooked the parade. Not only did we get a great vantage point next to the window of the restaurant, but we got all-you-can-eat Japanese food for $12.95 each.
I love things like this - people from all backgrounds out and about, being celebrated rather than tolerated, for who they are.
Oh I just realised the other difference between the Vancouver and Sydney parades. I did not see any instance of someone trying to interrup the parade or condemning the lifestyles of those who participated. In Sydney, the ever-homophobic Fred Nile and his cronies would have been out in force trying to put a dampener on things. All I saw in Vancouver yesterday was celebration. See the photos here.

Little things

Hooray for Canada! The world's third nation to legalise same-sex marriage. I love living in a progressive society.

I'm currently reading the Da Vinci Code (I know I'm the last person on Earth to read it, but I was waiting to steal a copy from my sister), and I seriously, seriously love it. I can't put it down. I can't wait for the movie. Audrey Tautou is playing Sophie Neveu!

My friend Rosei gave me a package of TimTams in Boston, one of Australia's finest chocolate products. I love TimTams and I love Rosei for bringing them!