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July 17, 2003
I see that Tim Blair has had another sneer at the masses at Adelaide's Festival of Ideas. The image he constructs is one of ideas festering. It seems that the smell from the putrid ideas offends him. No attempt is made to sift the ideas. What is putrid is the festival.
Tim Blair reminds me of the story of madman who runs into the marketplace with a fully lit lantern shouting, "have you heard, have you heard, the gravedigging masses are discussing ideas. Be warned, be warned, we will lose our culture."
The people stop their shopping for a moment, look around, pause, see the madman, then wonder what is going on. "Who is this madman?", they ask? "Why is he stirring things up?" Is he a fly of the marketplace?"
"Be warned", says the madman. "Darkness will soon fall. Space will bcome empty again. It will become colder. Can you not hear the noise of the gravdiggers in Adelaide burying our culture?"
The crowd laugh. "Have your lost your way, they ask? The asylum is that way. And they point to the disused abbatoirs called the Dollar Sweet.
The right wingers who read Tim Blair's weblog mutter amongst themselves as they huddle together away from the bright summer sun.
One says, "He's right. Where the unclean rabble drinks all the wells are posioned.
Another mumbles, "The rabble have damp hearts and dirty delights."
Another, who wears a white hood, says, "Their filthy words choke me. And I have to hold my nose when they pass me by."
Another says, "The wind from Sydney will blow the filthy rabble on the Adelaide plain away. Lets all spit into the wind."
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I saw with some amusement that they don't want a Royal Commission into all the tax breaks for people who they support and love (ie. corporations, right-wing poets and newspaper publishers, etc.). I'm sure Tim happily supports the Clipsal 500.
I don't particularly like Monbiot, he's frequently a sanctimonious celebrity activist (esp. with his responses to actual activists who don't have book deals and mainstream respectability) of the type that we don't particularly need.
My biggest beef with Adelaide's festivals is that they assumed that 'the masses' aren't interested in thinking or talking about our world and plonk all of the events in the CBD. Well, perhaps this has something to do with the centralisation of these events and the way that they can become hero-worshipping talkfests that are dislocated from the real dissatisfaction, social dislocation and hurt that can be found in suburbia.
My feeling on these things is that there is a lot of lip-service given to inclusion and democracy but it often remains as empty as the supposedly 'conservative' words written in broadsheets by over-paid commentators who wouldn't know a hard days work if it bit them on the arse.