Me again

Sorry Geraldine, but I just can't let this one go (Short Story). Kenneth Slessor is not "one of Australia's first poets", or anything like it. It wouldn't matter if it was just a slip of the tongue, but you were reading from a script to introduce a book reading. You were introducing a reading related to WWII, so it's a wonder.

For the record, the famous Bulletin school of poetry reached its heyday some years before Kenneth was a glint in his father's eye, and there were many greats well before that, Adam Lindsay Gordon and Henry Kendall to name only two.

Train stations?

Personally, I don't mind 'Labor' for 'Labour' or even 'revolutionize' for 'revolutionise' and so on, and I'm almost prepared to accept 'midway' for 'halfway'. If ABC management have instructed staff to eradicate Australian English on pain of dismissal, one would not wish to appear curmudgeonly. We must, after all, never lose sight of the fact that our writers should cringe beneath the obviously superior culture of the USA.

Having said that, I do wish ABC News writers would give us back our railway stations. Railway stations are good places to eat chips beneath the Southern Cross. Train stations are where Americans would eat fries if they had a 'midway' decent public transport system.

Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Weet-Bix

Geraldine Doogue, Saturday Breakfast is a ripper, but when a social issue becomes an "artifact", I need some help to unpack the narrative so I can engage with my alterity.

Postmodernism Generator

Phillip, Phillip, Phillip

You haven't head a single word I've said!

Che Guevara's first position in the ruthless Communist Cuban dictatorship was that of comandante of La Cabana Fortress in Havana. There he had jurisdiction over the notorious 'war criminals' trials, which allegedly resulted in the execution of 600 civilian and military officials.

When I hear you talk like that, my thoughts are just like those of the handsome Stalinist himself (in Motorcycle Diaries)

Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls in my hands! My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl!

Listen Real Media Windows Media• Tariq Ali

On the plus side, your interview with Gillian Slovo, another who sounds quite unreconstructed, not to mention a tad loud, was fascinating.

I leave you, Mr Adams, with the words of one of Che and Castro's victims:

For me, it meant 8,000 days of hunger, of systematic beatings, of hard labor, of solitary confinement and solitude, 8,000 days of struggling to prove that I was a human being, 8,000 days of proving that my spirit could triumph over exhaustion and pain, 8,000 days of testing my religious convictions, my faith, of fighting the hate my atheist jailers were trying to instill in me with each bayonet thrust, fighting so that hate would not flourish in my heart, 8,000 days of struggling so that I would not become like them.
Armando Valladares

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Better four decades late than never

"At the recent ceremonies in Red Square to commemorate the Russian Army's defeat of Nazism, the Latvian President Ms Vike-Freiberga called it 'surreal', after not a single word of contrition was uttered by the Russian President Vladimir Putin, for the 'Stalinist terror' visted upon the Baltic states.

"In the aftermath of commemorating 60 years since the fall of Nazism, why has there never been a tribunal such as the Nuremburg Trials which has acknowledged the millions killed by Communism in the former Soviet Union and Cambodia?"

Who wrote this?! It sounds like me at any time since about 1966. But no, it's from Late Night Live.

I've given a lot of stick to Phillip Adams over many years (nowhere near as much as anti-communists copped for decades; certainly not as much as the victims), but I'll lay off for a little while now. Goodonya Mr Adams; I've heard a number of your mea culpas, and although not as impressive as if said through tears, they're getting better each year. And you do have the best radio program in Australia, if not the world.

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What we want from the ABC is an entire revision of its historical revisionism. When the darlings of the ABC are trotted out, it should be in the light of truth and historical evidence. When Frank Hardy is mentioned, let us hear "Hardy, who called Stalin the 'great helmsman', publicly debated Australians who accused the Soviet Union of unspeakable crimes against humanity". When it's Jessie Street, rather than lauding her, let the presenter say:

"A tireless propagandist for Stalin's Communist Russia, she refused to alter her contact with leading lights of the Soviet dictatorship during the years of widespread Soviet exterminations. Well into the 1960s, long after many had left the pro-Marxist-Leninist ranks, Street remained a prominent figure in such Communist front organisations as the World Peace Council."

When Hollywood in the 1950s is mentioned, let's hear the other side of the McCarthyist coin: the people in the movie industry who were in fact agants of Stalinism (check the KGB archives as some have done before). For 40 years the ABC has given us how much Communists suffered in Australia for being Communists. End of story. What about the anti-Communists whose careers were not advanced because they did not fit the dominant (ABC-led) paradigm?

When the Petrov Affair comes up (as it inevitably does with a snigger about how Menzies manufactured it in order to win an election), let the ABC researchers earn their salt and actually discover what really happened (another trip to the KGB files will help).

When some old codger is interviewed in Street Stories, let the producers not sweep past the said codger's 30 years in the Communist Party as though it were a badge of honour, but treat it as they most certainly would if he were three decades a Nazi activist in our midst. Let the codger be challenged as one would challenge a Nazi: "Mr Codger, how does it feel to know you defended and supported -- morally and even materially -- regimes in various countries that massacred scores of millions of workers?" Here's a story for the ABC History Department: how much money was sent from Australia to the USSR, and how many torturers and executioners did those Aussie pounds and dollars pay for? Will the ABC do it? In three words, "not bloody likely".

Phillip Adams is getting warm, but nowhere near hot. He admits to having been mistaken. Culpability, responsibility and amends are further steps for the Aussie Left whose second main aim was to pillory Australian anti-authoritarians. What we need to hear endlessly from the ABC is a whole new perspective in accord with the facts of the 20th century reality. What a history the national broadcaster could tell; what listeners they might gain!

Returns of the Jedda

Now that I've heard AWAYE's program on the 1950s movie, Jedda, five times, three of them this week, I'm no longer pointing a finger at this program, I'm pointing the bone.

Bouquet to Satdy Brekky

Waking up to the new Saturday Breakfast ABCRN program is the best way I know.

I like this, too: "Subscribe to our weekly mailing list and receive a weekly email alert telling you what's coming up on the program. "

Sharp as a box of rocks

There are many ways Awaye (ABCRN) this week could have handled its documentary on the Tiwi islands. Following from the people they interviewed and the data they uncovered, we could narrow Awaye's choice of how to cover the story down to two main angles. These would be:

1) The Tiwi islands are poised to gain increasing international capital investment in industries that will bring prosperity to the people, God's in his heaven and all is well.

2) The Tiwi islands have been targeted by big, absentee, white capital and the indigenous people are being fitted up for globalization and environment- and community-rooting industrialisation.

D'oh!

More from the Kremlin

See what I mean? (That is, what I was talking about on Tuesday.) Now Fran Kelly (Breakfast, ABCRN; yesterday; Listen [requires RealAudio]) says Stalin killed "tens of thousands of his own countrymen".

Then Hitler must have killed fives of thousands.

A gong to Spirit of Things

I'm very partial to Rachael Kohn's interviews. The ones regarding Falun Gong ('What's Wrong with Falun Gong'; Sunday plus interminable repeats like most ABCRN programs) are captivating listening. Jennifer Zeng, who has suffered like so many for her faith in China, was a most impressive guest. Maria Hsia Chang, a political scientist, has interesting perspectives too, oppositional to the Falun Gong religion. On the whole, the program is very well balanced. Can we have more of this? Whenever a religion is the topic on Ms Kohn's program, may we also hear from its opponents, or was this just reserved for Falun Gong?

The Revisionist World Today

"Twenty-seven million soldiers and citizens died during the war [WWII], many of them fighting what turned out to be some of the most decisive battles." So says Eleanor Hall (The World Today; ABCRN, today).

Then Emma Griffith says, "Twenty seven million people – soldiers and civilians – died fighting Hitler's army."

Shit of the horse.

Of course, for decades it has been known that Stalin and his murdering henchmen pumped up the figures (more like 11 million -- that's less than half the ABC's figure, which was the Communist Party's propaganda figure) to cover up the missing millions of their own citizens that they had murdered. Then in the 1960s, '70s and '80s, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Robert Conquest made the reality clearer, to which Auntie constantly and shamefully turned a blind eye.

Would Eleanor Hall and Emma Griffiths say "Hitler killed three million Jews"? Of course not. It really is not good enough that the ABC is so slack with history -- time, and time again when it comes to this subject (of which, more in the Book of Days). It's almost as though the ABC, unlike the rest of the world, has never heard of what really happened.

I note, too, that the Governor-General repeats the lie. Why not, he probably learned it from Auntie, as our kiddies do.

Today's is a righteous anger turtle on behalf of 16 million people missing from Auntie's persistent creative arithmetic.

On good authority for ABCRN News

Etymologists are in general agreement that the words 'authority' and 'authoridy' share a common derivation; the main difference, of course, being that 'authoridy' is not a word.

It's time

Robyn Archer is one of that select band of baby boomers who have always had a gold key to the ABC. It must be Old Mates Week because I've heard her on RN either sing or be interviewed about 6 times in the past 36 hours. Must have a new book out or something. Auntie should either give these Whitlam-era true believers a wage or charge them rent.

Beats the hell out of me

Sound Quality. I admit that I must be missing something here.

Dangerous seas around the Horne

I do some radio and it's fraught with dangers. Just Wednesday, I recorded 16 Almanac programs in the studio at 2BBB Bellingen and yesterday they emailed to say that the disk was blank. It will be a lost day to go and do it again, and $8 in petrol. Lucky I got my dole yesterday.

Like I said, radio is fraught. Yesterday's Late Night Live was good, and it was interesting to hear Mr Adams interview 83-year-old Donald Horne.

Philip was going great guns until he told Mr Horne that he had been among the best Australian writers of autobiography until Clive James came along. Was that a backhanded compliment, a forehanded double whammy, or just a serve? I felt, or hope I felt, the host bite blood from his wrist a moment after he said it, but live radio is as unforgiving as the live journal. j/k ... blogs forgive because we can correct ourselves.

A more important turtle: the link I've given above to Donald Horne has a precis of the interview, but you have to click back to the LNL link, also above, before you can hear the audio, which won't be there in a week but archived. It's great that we can listen in Windows Media or unReal Media, but the audio link really should be on the precis page and it would only take the webmaster a minute. Quite obviously, if people send a link to friends or post a linkback on their sites, they will want to post the precis page, not the LNL page, and it should have the interview on it. I frequently tell Blogmanac readers about something hot on LNL, and it's been a problem for me as I know that the edition will be hard for my readers to find and enjoy. Auntie, this turtle is a must.

Philip Adams is a ledge, and of course, so is Donald Horne. I sat next to him once at those huge tables in the Mitchell Library . When he left I snagged one of his signed Stack slips. It's yours to frame if you have a lazy fifty.

Life matters, you know

I thought that Julie McCrossin's interview with Robyn Archer on Wednesday's Life Matters showed Julie at her best. She was in her element as revealed by a scintillating combination of enthusiasm, knowledge and sympatico.

It's none of my business what she does with her career, but I have a hunch she'd be better off in an arts program, and that she feels about as engaged discussing children's sleeping patterns as I would discussing the Gay Mardi Gras. As a parent I sense the floundering. It's like when you see an actor in a movie hammering a nail or sawing a 4X2; if you've ever done carpentry you just know if he's acting.

Ms McCrossin is a clever woman and sounds a warm one, and does quite an admirable job on her program considering what I sense to be her distance from its demographic. However, in my opinion her confidence, radio presence and authoritativeness went up 1,000 points simply by doing a segment on arts festivals vis a vis the family circle. Life's too short to miss out on your true demographic.

Hadn't have, or hadn't of?

As a father of three, and grandfather of four, I can't really help it when the parent in me comes to the fore.

As any parent knows, when one of the children does something naughty, we often appeal to their sense of duty, if not superiority, in respect of their younger siblings. "Don't run with that knife, Bubby will copy you." Or, when Bubby stabs herself, "Billy, Bubby copied you! Go to your hole" ... and so on.

My turtle today is of that nature. Yesterday's statement by the Treasurer, viz, "I wish it hadn't have happened", requires that I reprimand not Peter Costello but his betters. If he hadn't heard "hadn't have" (or is it "hadn't of"?) on ABC (because so many 'Auntie' presenters say that), he wouldn't of said it. He's learned it by listening, as we all do; as my grandchildren do.

If I had thought of it, I would've said as well that if his ABC elders and betters hadn't so often said "hadn't have", Petie would not have passed it on to Little Johnny. However, John Howard has been saying "hadn't have" for so long I'm beginning to wonder if it's he who is the elder and better, not just of Peter but also of Auntie.

Note to the Treasurer: Perhaps the Commonwealth monies saved by the ravaging of all those essential services to the poor could be spent on grammar coaching for the national broadcaster. This I ask, because my grandchildren might become listeners. You see, once, in my old-fashioned, quaint, paternal manner, I used to advise my children to use the English language "as they do on the ABC".