Andrew Bolt is having deep thoughts about Julia Gillard’s emotional response during the condolence motion for the victims of the Queensland floods.
Firstly on his blog yesterday:
I do not say Julia Gillard’s tears in Parliament today, in talking about the Queensland floods and Cyclone Yasi, were anything but genuine.
But I do say the tears follow much damaging criticism about Gillard being ”wooden” in responding to the disasters.
I do fear that to suddenly go from one extreme to the other will jar with many.
Again, I do not conclude that Gillard is insincere. I just suspect that they will not do Gillard the good they may have done had she cried in front of the victims instead.
Be very clear. I do not accuse Gillard of staging her tears. Indeed, I suspect they were genuine. Certainly, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott told Parliament: “She has shown a decent heart.”
But that was too perfect, too, and timed too well…
If only she’d cried in front of the victims instead of Parliament’s cameras. But which of us can control our tears?
I do not say that Andrew Bolt is trying to make his readers believe that Julia Gillard is a deceptive harpy. But I do say it’s unfortunate that his readers seem to believe that anyway.
Again, I do not conclude that Andrew is insincere. I just suspect that his readers will see this as a wink and a nudge confirming their pre-existing hatred of Julia Gillard.
Be very clear. I do not accuse Bolt of speaking out of both sides of his mouth. Indeed I expect his concerns are genuine. But why do so many of the people who normally slavishly agree with him on his blog differ so far on this issue?
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WS pioneered this form of innuendo through ironic repetition of the opposite.
“When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.”
“O judgement! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason….”
I do not say that Andrew Bolt’s climate denialism is connected in any way to any type of alliance with corporate entities that have a vested interest in maintaining the carbon status quo.
However, I do note that he has never confirmed this one way or the other. And Andrew is an honourable man.
And as we all know, Brutus was right, and Octavian was a serpent in the bosom of Rome. Beware the rhetoricians…
Sam is not saying that Andrew is a fruity nut, either. Because the coconut fruit is a drupe, not a true nut and like other fruits it has three layers, exocarp, mesocarp and endocarp. Nor is Sam implying that a person is more likely to be killed by a falling Andrew than they are by a shark.
There is no evidence of anyone being killed by a falling Andrew.
The Abbottariat sprung into Tone’s defence last night with Paul Murray and panel on Sky. All very predictable this would happen. Now, imagine if it was Gillard, Rudd or even Bob Brown who’d made such comments or reacted the way Tone did…..
Next thread, Confessions…
I do not comment on the tears .. they have a way of coming at unexpected times.
I am truly offended by the flag prop! What claptrap to assign to the blue ensign any qualities and meaning as she did.
As a 60 year old Australian I ask where does this jingoism and flag fetish come from?
Cross posting here in case it doesn’t make it pass Bolt moderation:
Andrew, don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that you’re a coward for couching your “controversial” opinion in merely mouthed weasel words. In fact, I suspect that your suspicion that Julia Gillard’s tears were genuine is genuine as well.
Unfortunately, there are those, determined to find fault, who will misinterpret your column and seek to damn you with your own words. Some may even misread your intent and conclude that you’re really just providing a thinly veiled cover for your readers to attack the Prime Minister. Not me, though.
Indeed, some have suggested that you’re just revelling “in filth”. Be very clear, I disagree. I think you’re right to elevate this issue to one of national significance. I agree that it would have been better for the Prime Minister to cry while she informed the nation of such prosaic matters like emergency disaster funding and ADF search and rescue operations. The time for an overt display of emotion was during the height of the emergency when her stoicism seemed out of place, not weeks later during a condolence motion after the sheer enormity of the tragedy had sunk in. But as you rightly ask, which of us can control our tears?
So he’s not saying that the tears were for political gain, but he’s giving advice assuming that her intention was political gain?
Well said Alan , it won’t get past the Liberal filter . Bolt’s crowd would not understand and it would go over their heads. Good luck.
Paraphrasing from a comment that I just contributed at Bolt’s blog (which probably won’t get published), I find it utterly sickening that people could stoop so low as to contend – even imply, using cowardly weasel words – that our Prime Minister might fake tears at a national tragedy in order to score a political point. Any person that would stoop that low is more black-hearted than the worst of the Howard-haters. Nobody hated Howard more than me, but I would never accuse him of faking tears in Parliament to improve his image.
and further on kevrenor point which grub of a staffer gathered up that flag and put it to this use.
Dave, good post and well written. Nice piece of rhetoric.
Is AB a literature scholar? He seems genuinely to be a master of the written word and giving a message without actually writing it. Even writing the opposite some times. Remarkable.
Once doesn’t need to be a literary scholar to give a message without writing it. Mothers have been doing it from the dawn of time and “reading between the lines” is common enough phrase that my ten year old understands the meaning.
In fact, due to it’s common use, I would think that anyone could do it… after all, there are many examples in the comments here
On a side note, did anyone see our clog-loving friend on The 7PM Project last night? He is becoming as ubiquitous as Eddie McGuire, and his unctious smiling persona clearly a fabrication. I detect a push for mainstream popularity; the poison dwarf within will be increasingly covered over , much as the Liberals are attempting with Abbott.
You might say that. I couldn’t possibly comment.
Intellectual dishonesty is pure poison. No wonder this blog is so obsessed with one man. He is the finest exponent of the genre I have ever seen.
Prime Minister: Heads I win, tails you lose.
@kevrenor, as a 70 year old Australian I too wonder about the flag fetish. I think it is a recent invention along with the conversion of a public holiday that had no reason except to signify the end of the Xmas holiday period into Australia Day (which I think might have been invented by John Newcombe). I am also mystified at the invention of the traditional Australian barbecue, which I think was invented by Paul Hogan – never heard of them and certainly never attended one until my mid-life. I know about camp fires, Sunday dinner (at lunch time) with roast meat and three vegs followed by a long afternoon sleep.
Maybe the blue part of the flag should be changed to white as a symbol of certain previous national government policies.
This discussion about Gillard’s lacrimal glands, and the anxiety over her hoped-for authenticity, fascinate me. I think the anxiety stems from a couple of underlying issues.
Of course, misogyny is in the mix. How could it not be? The forensic, obsessive focus on Gillard’s behaviour, looks, clothes style, voice, reproductive choices and so on reveals great anxiety about her right to be in the top job and her ability to do it. Male commentators such as Bolt may as well be yelling ‘She’s got a vagina!’ when they make these kinds of comments.
Part of the sexism arises from the irrational demand patriarchy makes on all women: to be the feelers and the nurturers of the human race; to represent and act out the ideals of compassion, self-sacrifice, and care. (If they drop that role, the unconscious thinking of such unreconstructed men as Bolt is, who will do it? Not we men, who are busy pillaging the earth, doing power deals in backrooms and killing each other.) At the same time women in power must show that they are capable of wielding power and willing to do it ruthlessly, and there is a contradiction between these two demands. Thus, Thatcher was labelled the iron lady because she refused to play the traditionally female, compassionate role; we don’t call Cameron the iron man even though he’s clearly an a–h–le.
Yet the doubt about female capability in the wielding of power does not occur in a vacuum; it has real effects on the kind of women who gain power and their behaviour when they do so. It’s fair to surmise that Thatcher’s exaggeratedly macho style could have arisen at least in part as a proleptic defence against accusations of feminine weakness; perhaps she felt the need to pound her chest and display more extreme hardheadness than the men just to show she measured up. If she hadn’t done that, she risked not being taken seriously. However, she also lost out; her intransigence, while it caused widespread suffering, also ultimately turned her into a figure of fun. Like Gillard, she became famous for her hairstyle.
Yet the search for authenticity and the fear of crocodile tears also reflects a much more legitimate anxiety. Australia is sliding into oligarchy: the process started under Keating, developed in leaps and bounds under Howard and continued under Rudd, as the ETS debacle demonstrated. But Gillard’s abrupt ascension to power following the shameless takeover of the air waves by the coal barons over the mining tax represented a further, very disturbing shift. It is this further shift, and its implications for democracy, not to mention social justice and the most basic notions of equity, that is really at stake here.
When we doubt Julia Gillard’s tears, our limbic brains are no doubt condemning her as an inadequate mother figure; perhaps if were were a tiny baby, our primeval minds tell us, and we had such a mother, we might fear our chances of survival; on that account, without quite knowing why, we fear. On another level, we know that the media management of Gillard reveals something deeply rotten.
It is the system that produces the Gillards of politics we need to question. It’s the corruption of the Laboral party, their toadying to and dependence on their mercenary financial masters, the bovva boys of big coal and oil and retail and GM food, the lack of any vision for the country, the distorting of priorities and values so that staying in power for its own sake is all that counts, that is the real worry.
This is why the recent Four Corners report on Gillard was so interesting. It sought to probe the so-called woodenness of Gillard and to link it to a disturbing pragmatism devoid of all values. But Gillard wasn’t wooden at all before the spin doctors got to her; she was personable, down to earth, emotionally balanced and no more ambitious than any of her male counterparts.
It’s not her personality but her dangerous and wasteful policies that I railed against before she came to power, and that I continue to rail against now she’s in power. The millions she threw at wasteful, misleading, time-consuming NAPLAN tests and a MySchool website that entrenches inequality; the money she continues to throw at obscenely wealthy private schools while public school toilets leak, and disabled kids can’t get adequate schooling. It’s the billions in regressive tax breaks she continues to give to the wealthy while making the poor shiver in their shoes as she makes dark, US-inspired references to ‘welfarism’. Instead she should be increasing the pathetic level of unemployment benefits that even the conservative OECD is criticising Australia for. I won’t even start on her government’s lack of any real commitment to combatting climate change; this was equally evident under Rudd, and is a sure sign of incipient oligarchy.
Instead of questioning whether Gillard took acting lessons before her condolence speech, we should be asking: what is the extent of the underlying rot that this woman presides over? And why are Australia’s journalists far too timid and self-interested to point it out?
Amazing. I guess he’s not agreeing, not disagreeing, just noting …
AB:
Alan RM Jones was not impressed by Julia Gillard’s tears in Parliament:
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2011/02/gone-with-the-wind
I’ll declare my interests – I was most unconvinced by the tears thing. I kept chortling when I watched it. I nearly fell of the couch laughing when she whipped out the flag.
“I nearly fell of the couch laughing when she whipped out the flag.”
I nearly lost my lunch.