Politics, Poetry and Reviews

Author: Catherine (Page 51 of 54)

Politics: Asylum Seekers – this is not what I had hoped for from the ALP

So, apparently our spineless excuse for a government has decided that we shouldn’t process applications for residency from Afghani and Sri Lankan refugees. Because clearly when we all voted against John Howard and he lost both the election and his seat in Parliemtn, what we really meant was that we wanted more of the same.

I am absolutely livid. Admittedly, I’ve been cranky all day, but this really infuriates me beyond belief.

Anyway, I’ve just channelled an entire day’s worth of bad temper into an email to Chris Evans, via Getup. If you’re an Australian resident and feel at all strongly about refugees, I urge you to do the same.

My (probably incoherent, since I was and still am furious) email is below. It doesn’t cover any of the suggested talking points. Sod the talking points. Our entire immigration policy is filled with racism, xenophobia and a complete lack of compassion and it’s an utter shame, which I, for one, have had enough of. Anyway, if you find anything in it useful, please feel free.

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Politics: Replies from MPs

In my inbox this morning, a brief email from one of the MPs I wrote to, thanking me for me email, and saying it meant a lot. I sent emails to 23 MPs, all of them brief (three sentences), and only a few of them individualised except by name, just saying thank you for their support of the bill. I didn’t expect a response from any of them, they were just quick emails to hopefully counteract some of the nasty ones that I hear were sent to the MPs voting in favour of decriminalisation.

I’ve checked, and Ms Coote got one of my very generic ones, so I’m doubly touched at her response.

(also, I think this is the first time I’ve ever got mail of any kind from someone in the Liberal Party (since the Liberals don’t even bother letterboxing in my electorate)! Soon, I shall collect the whole set!)

It’s really good to know that even a short, generic thank you email is something that will be read and will apparently make someone’s day a little better. I’m sort of feeling guilty that I didn’t write more individualised emails to everyone – but reading all that Hansard takes a long time, so I really only wrote more specific thanks to people whose speeches stood out for me.

Guilt aside though, it means that it *is* worth taking the time to write to politicians, even if I only have time to be brief. Which means I am more likely to do so.

(Do they know what they have started? Bwah ha ha ha!!)

It’s a time-consuming business, though. I want to do more of this, but I’m clearly going to have to choose my issues carefully. There must be a faster way to learn when legislation that I might be interested in is being discussed than going through Hansard page by page…

Politics: Decriminalisation! And why I think this is so important

I’m sorry to be so one-track minded at present, but it’s rare that something so interesting is happening in our local politics.

Oh and for those who don’t know, not only did the bill pass, but I’ve just had an email saying it passed without amendments, which is definitely a good thing. I’ll have another go-round with Hansard shortly and find out if I need to send any more appreciative emails. One should always encourage politicians who have done good things!

Given how I’ve been going on and on and on about this, it seems important to talk about why I feel so strongly about decriminalising abortion. Continue reading

Politics: Why we need more women in Parliament

I promise this is absolutely my last post about abortion decriminalisation. Promise.

But I just did the head count of who voted for what. I shouldn’t do this, because it always annoys me, but there you have it.

There are 16 women and 24 men in the Upper House. Of the women, 13 voted to decriminalise abortion. Of the men – 10 did.

I think the feminist rant about men who want to impose their morals on women in situations that they will never personally have to face is kind of implied. I’m not going there. You can take it as read that I am annoyed by this, however.

I will merely remark that this is precisely why we need more women in Parliament. There are certain issues in which women generally have a greater vested interest than men (paid maternity leave, childcare, child support etc), and the above figures suggest, at least to me, that if we want to do something about them, women will need to do it ourselves – because it seems that the majority of men will not.

As in the case of the RU 486 bill a couple of years back, women brought this bill to the table. Women were the first speakers on this bill. A majority of women from all sides of politics voted in favour of it.

We have some excellent women in politics in Australia (we have some excellent men, too, but they are not who I am currently talking about), and this is a good thing. But it seems to me that we need more – especially if so-called women’s issues are to be adequately addressed in legislation.

Politics: More on Legalisation and Letter-Writing

One really delightful result of sending my letter to senators is that Greens Senator, Colleen Hartland, sends us daily updates on the debate in the Senate, with links to speeches by other MPs that she thinks we will find of interest.

And, I’m delighted to say, she doesn’t care which party they come from.

So. Here are two speeches from Labor Senators in favour of this Bill. I haven’t had a chance to read them yet, but I’ll be going through Hansard in detail later.

Jenny Mikakos

Shaune Leane, I think. This one is confusing me, because his name does not come up at the start.

And, for those who are interested, here is the email, with a few more details about what is going on.

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Politics: And this is why writing to politicians can actually be important…

I just received an email from the Greens Upper House MP for my electorate. The email was sent to all the people who had sent letters of support for the decriminalisation of abortion bill. In it, she included a link to her speech

http://www.electedgreensvictoria.org.au/speech.php?speech=495&filter=CH

Either she read my letter and actually used some of what I said (a couple of sentences are almost word for word) or we agree so entirely that… well that I don’t know what. I don’t think I’ve ever read a political speech on any subject where I can agree with absolutely every nuance of what she says. My faith in the Greens is much revived…

Whichever it is, I am so very happy. All that remains now is for the bill to get passed in the Upper House… The temptation to go and sit in the visitors’ gallery this week is strong. I think I’m about to become a Hansard addict again…

I’m sure there was something else I wanted to post about, but I’m just so excited by the notion that perhaps my letter actually got used by someone that I can’t think straight about anything else. I am part of the political process!

Politics: Decriminalising Abortion in Victoria – time to bother some politicians!

So, here in Victoria we are currently trying to decriminalise abortion. And about time too – we’ve had a silly criminal law on the books that nobody has been prosecuted under for over 20 years, so it’s certainly time we got sensible about it.

Anyway, it’s before the Upper House at the moment, having barely passed the lower house, so now is a good opportunity to email your favourite member of parliament about it.

My personal irritant is people who keep trying to amend it to make things harder or more embarrassing or require ‘anonymous review panels’ for abortions, or, in particular, bring forward the gestational time at which abortion is legal. Having trained as a genetic counsellor, this particularly gets my goat, as the people most affected by this law would be women who either have serious medical issues themselves or who have just had a very nasty prenatal diagnosis.

Here’s the letter I’m sending to basically everyone in parliament this week.

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Book review: Too Late to Die Young: Nearly True Tales from a Life, by Harriet McBryde Johnson

Too Late to Die Young: Nearly True Tales from a life
Harriet McBryde Johnson
2005 Picador, New York NY

“I used to try to explain that in fact I enjoy my life, that it’s a great sensual pleasure to zoom by power chair on these delicious muggy streets. But it gets tedious. God didn’t put me on this street to provide disability awareness training to everyone who happens by…

“For me, living a real life has meant resisting these formulaic narratives. Instead of letting the world turn me into a disability object, I have insisted on being a subject in the grammatical sense: not the passive “me” who is acted upon, but the active “I” who does things. I practice law and politics in Charleston… I travel. I find various odd adventures. I do my bit to help the disability rights movement change the world in fundamental ways.

“And I tell stories.”

And she does. Magnificent stories. Stories that had me glued to the computer screen for an entire weekend after discovering her published essays online, then resolving to find a copy of her book and devouring it in the space of one day when it finally arrived.

Harriet McBryde Johnson’s memoirs begin with her realisation at age three or four that – according to popular telethon wisdom – she will die young. But at the same time, life is not over – “When I die, I might as well die a kindergartener,” she reflects. This experience will help inspire her later protests against telethons which are “all about stirring up pity when we don’t want pity”. She recounts her teenage fascination with Dracula, whose story shows that ‘death is not only for people like me’, and her surprise that others appear unaware of this.

This probably makes the essay sound morbid. It isn’t. Like all the essays in this book, it is thought-provoking, fascinating and often hilarious.

The essay which riveted my attention when I found it online appears in this book as “Unspeakable Conversations”. It recounts Harriet McBryde Johnson’s conversations and email exchanges with Professor Peter Singer, an Australian-born ethicist who “insists he doesn’t want to kill me. He simply thinks it would have been better, all things considered, to have given my parents the option of killing the baby I once was…”.

She talks about the surreal experience of speaking to his Practical Ethics seminar class about infanticide and ethics, and recounts how, during dinner, her elbow slips, and she requests Singer to assist her by replacing it on her knee. Friends in the disability rights movement are appalled that she would allow him to provide even minor physical assistance. But “I didn’t feel disempowered; quite the contrary, it seemed a good thing to make him do some useful work. And then, the hard part: I’ve come to believe that Singer actually is human, even kind in his way…”. One does not have to be a monster to believe monstrous things.

On a lighter note, McBryde Johnson describes her trip to Cuba to attend a disability rights convention, and her experience with a different political system and approach to disability rights – as well as her ironic reflections on visiting a special school similar to the one she attended as a child. “We, too, used to act cute and engage visiting dignitaries in conversation. But when the visitors left, we had a contest among ourselves: Who’d met the stupidest visitor? Bonus points for a pat on the head!”. She hopes that she “will not be named the Stupidest Visitor when the kids run their contest”.

I could go on. And on. Because I enjoyed these memoirs immensely – they made me laugh and they made me think, and they gave me an insight into the everyday aspects of living with a disability. The last essay in the book is lyrical and sensual – a poem on the pleasures of life, both those of the non-disabled world and those “that are so bound up with our disabilities that we wouldn’t experience them… without our disabilities”. This celebration is a fitting end to a book that is in many ways a celebration of the richness of life.

Harriet McBryde Johnson died on June 4th of this year, aged fifty. For a taste of her writing, you can visit http://www.cripcommentary.com/harriet/, a memorial site which, among other things, contains links to many of her essays online. But I suggest you read the book. You won’t regret it.

Addendum: I wrote this review for a newsletter, but in the course of writing it, I also went to McBryde Johnson’s website and read a *lot* of her essays, and blogged briefly about them:

I’m now obsessively reading everything of hers that I can find. But this article is completely absorbing – it’s about conversations and email discussions and meetings she has had over the years with Peter Singer – a rather notorious Australian ethicist who argues that since we allow termination of pregnancy for fetuses with disabilities, and since we allow newborns with serious disability to be ‘allowed to die’ by not giving them lifesaving medical assistance, we should also, logically and ethically, allow parents the choice of ending the lives of disabled newborns. I shall not go into his arguments for this. I had to read one of his books on the subject for a genetic counselling essay, and that was quite enough (I should note that the previous reader appeared to have been a fundamentalist christian with no inhibitions about writing in library books, which added a certain something to my reading experience). McBryde Johnson, as a person with MD, was once one of the very babies whose euthanasia Singer would advocate, on the basis of quality of life. As you can imagine, they don’t see eye to eye – but her description of their interactions is fascinating.

The other thing that struck me (in a separate article) was her description of visiting an exhibition at a Holocaust museum and seeing a really, really fantastic wheelchair:

Then I see the wheelchair. It’s similar to other prewar wheelchairs I’ve seen, but there’s something unusual about the frame. Is this a tilting mechanism? A fancy suspension system? Looks like fine German engineering. I like vintage wheelchairs. An obsolete Everest & Jennings drive belt hangs in my office as a bit of nostalgia, like an old wagon wheel in a barbecue shack. I have an urge to jostle the chair, to see what that frame does. The sign mentions a German institution. So, no single owner. But even in institutions, people manage to bond with chairs. A state-owned chair may be occupied by the same person every day, parked beside that person’s bed at night. Maybe the chair was used by someone with cerebral palsy until he died, then someone with a stroke until he died, and on down the line, until.. . .until they all died?

The people who used this wood-and-metal survivor probably loved it, liked to move about even as they were sucked into the nightmare. The nightmare began when the state removed them from their families, concentrated them in institutions. The same state provided them with beautifully engineered chairs and then killed them for eating up the resources of the “fit.” (full article here)

It’s the last line which is the kicker – that the same, really state-of-the-art, science that could so perfectly design this wheelchair could also decide that those who need it were not worthy to live is, to me, both chilling and paradoxical. Presumably, the minds designing and the minds making this decision were not the same – but the culture was. And let’s not forget that pretty much every western country was into eugenics before the Nazis took it to its ‘logical’ conclusion…

Film review: Laurence Olivier’s Henry V

I watched the Olivier Henry V for the first time on Sunday. I intended to follow this immediately with the Branagh version for comparison’s sake, but it was getting late, and it didn’t happen. I’ll be watching it this week though. In any case, I first saw the Branagh Henry V when I was 17, and saw it more recently last year. For me, therefore, it was the definitive version, so what I primarily noticed about Olivier’s version was the bits that were missing. Well, and the radically different style of filming and acting, and the awful French accents, but that’s another matter. I had been told that Olivier’s version, being filmed in 1944, was very pro-war, whereas Branagh’s was very anti-war. Perhaps Branagh was more subtle, or perhaps his view resembles my own too strongly, but it still seems to me that his version is closer to Shakespeare’s original.

Olivier presents a very unified vision, and to this end, he takes out a lot of the ambiguities in Henry V’s character, and in the war itself. The hanging of Bardolph is lost; the threats to Harfleur omitted; the three treasonous nobles never appear, and Williams never finds out who he spoke to and challenged on the night before Agincourt. There were other omissions, I’m sure, but these were the ones that I particularly noticed. (He also omitted the lines where Harry tells Kate that he is so ugly that he’ll only improve with age – a rather endearing instance of vanity, I thought). In terms of things that Branagh didn’t show, we had the slaughter of the boys and the destruction of the campsite (though not Henry’s reciprocal slaughter, now I think about it, though Branagh didn’t show that one either. Maybe I imagined it?); we also got a much more distant and triumphal view of the battle – the glory of war, rather than the gritty reality. I don’t think Branagh showed the scene with all the French nobles expounding on their own shame after the battle, either. Olivier’s actors played that with rather a lot of enjoyment, I felt…

I also noticed that Henry did not admit to Montjoy that he still didn’t know who had won the battle – but after what we had seen, it would have been an unconvincing denial. Branagh’s Henry V, surrounded by the noise of the battle and the bodies of his soldiers could deliver that line with conviction, and did.

I should add that I have not read Henry V recently, so I’m working from memory here. Still, it seems to me that Branagh omitted less from the text, which one would think would bring him closer to Shakespeare’s original conception; and in terms of Henry’s characterisation, I think it does. On the other hand, his vision of Agincourt as completely chaotic and close fighting, and his apparent uncertainty over who had won are probably further from Shakespeare’s view – that whole tally of how many thousands of French have been killed versus the tiny number of Englishmen suggests a Glorious and Overwhelming Victory, which was certainly what Olivier portrayed; it seems to me that Shakespeare, while enjoying the not-always-noble nuances of Henry’s character, saw Agincourt as a Glorious English Victory over the Arrogant and Perfidious French (the characterisation of the French lends credence to this view), and that’s what Olivier showed. Branagh gave Agincourt a much greater ambiguity, I think more than Shakespeare intended. That said, I still prefer his version.

There were some interesting choices of characterisation and setting in Olivier’s Henry V; I loved the interactions with the audience in the early part of the play, and I rather wish he had continued doing the film that way. His characterisation of the French King as rather senile and doddering was also interesting, and has the advantage of explaining why the Dauphin seems to be running things as much as he does. I was less convinced by the Katherine, and of course the chemistry between her and Henry did not compare well to that of Branagh and Thompson (but how could it?). I rather liked the Dauphin, too – he was utterly arrogant and irritating, but a rather convincing character.

Altogether very interesting – I think this is the first time I’ve really understood just how much a director’s vision of a play can change it’s meaning. I’m really looking forward to watching the Branagh version again, and to our reading of the play itself, to see what other angles I’ve missed.

Politics: We Are Sorry

My workplace actually broadcast the apology, both in the Lecture Theatre and on the big screen above reception. Unfortunately, due to a slow start this morning, I still managed to miss most of it. I did get to watch the last five minutes of Rudd’s speech, and then the first five minutes of Nelson’s, before I couldn’t stand it any longer and had to leave.

I’m sure all the Australians reading this have seen the text of the Apology far too often today, but I’m posting it anyway. It deserves wide coverage, and it’s nice for my overseas readers to see that the Australian government is actually capable of getting things right occasionally. This has been a long time coming.

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