gangland a Feature by Phip (Phip Murray) ëThe times they are aíchangin backí says Tim Robbins in Bob Roberts which is something affirmed in Mark Davisís book gangland. She wished John Laws was there to uphold the moral fibre of her society. (submitted by Phip.) Now that culture was dead she felt so bereft. (submitted by Phip.) GARY: Sexual harassment, land rights, affirmative action and multiculturalism. Our moral agenda is being dictated by Gay Armenians and Lesbian Turks. Itís been open season on Anglo Celtic males for the last 20 years . . . Itís Australia in the nineties. The thought police have won. You donít have to have evidence, you just have to be able to lie. Weíre white healthy males. Forget the fact that my parents were dirt poor, that I went to a lousy school, that I worked as a barman and studied until two oíclock in the morning to get my diploma. Forget all that. Iím a white middle-class male, so I had it easy, so Iím fair game. Itís Australia in the nineties. VINCE: Itís very, very sad. This used to be the greatest country in the world. What happened? GARY: We blinked, the trendies took over, and goodbye Australia David Williamson (aptly nicknamed 'Williamís son' in gangland) in Brilliant Lies. ëThe times they are aíchangin backí says Tim Robbins in Bob Roberts which is something affirmed in Mark Davisís book gangland: Australian political and cultural life is affected with a worrying idealising of all things past and the nostalgia industry is working overtime as the cultural and political elites of this country mourn the death of family values, anything Austen or Shakespeare, unpierced bodies and that long lost time when they knew their backyards were secure from marauding Koori tribes and their genders were neatly tucked away from harm from crazed lesbian feminazis. Itís been a busy few years for the boomers with the rights of the white middle-class male to uphold, young ëvictimí feministsí to give a wake-up call to and a Beatles re-release to boot. The baby-boomers are getting misty about their own wonder years and anything we young whippersnappers get up to just donít make their grade. gangland is a response to cultural elites who define political correctness as ëcensorshipí and who position the next generation as 'gangs of slothful youth, criminals [and] drug addicts . . .who have driven [them, read: fine upstanding hardworking citizens] out of the parks, the streets [and] the public transport'. Thanks John Laws. Gangland explores the simplistic divide constructed between the boomer generation in the red corner and gen-Xers in the blue which is engineered by ëcultural gatekeepersí to maintain their position as the cultural elites. It is played out with people like Ray Martin hitting on the Paxtons, Helen Garner banging on about gutless victim feminists and David Williamson writing paranoid spiels (as witnessed above) about ëdead white malesí. Cultural gatekeeping is a term coined by Davis to describe the 'behind the scenes organisation of cultural space' by the ëusual suspectsí (read: Helen Garner, David Williamson, John Laws, George Negus et al): 'Most of the people who are gatekeepers . . . are in a position with institutional power attached to it and they run their thing according to various prejudices. They command enormous power: Helen Garner ran a debate for six months in the pages of the broadsheet press ó that is cultural power. Having that sort of cultural power is what the cultural gatekeepers are all about, and they want to keep it. If you start looking out for indigenous people or loud women or younger women in most of those areas you just wonít see them in numbers that are representative of the community'. Young people can be added to the long list of people who canít get a word in mainstream press these days. Written off as ungracious, apathetic bludgers, we either get included in the Pepsi position (the token ëvoice of a new generationí translating for the folks at home) or are used as target practise, Paxton style (watch out, anyone with a basketball hat on backwards, for ACA members looking for a good story). Much of gangland is concerned with the way that young people are 'ghetto-ised'. As Davis says: 'In the mainstream media young people are constantly constructed as outsiders'. Furthermore, for all of our amusement, moral panic is getting a rerun: '. . . the stuff about Anna Woodsí death, about the Paxtons, about so-called youth gangs, itís all moral panic. So you get John Laws on 2UE saying: ìbe careful when you go out on the street because you know those groups of kids you see standing around, they are the ones you have to watchî ó moral panic. Itís extremely powerful rhetoric. People do become afraid and think ìfuck, there is someone with spiky hair and a couple of piercings I better cross the streetî. Davis doesnít buy into the whole generation divide but regards it as another useless and degrading ëus and themí divide: 'Some people seem to think that I argue for generationalism and I think I argue very strenuously against it. It is ridiculous to think that anything should happen according to someoneís age. The generationalism that I am critical of in this book is the generationalism that the cultural elites are practising: the ghetto-isation of young people and the stereotyping. What I argue is that this categorical opposition needs to be unstructured and deconstructed'. Whilst the cultural elite are clinging frantically to their pedestals and booking extra time with their therapists to go over scrapheap phobias, Davisís idea of culture is, ironically, about wider inclusion: 'The way I think about culture and the way things are structured is more to do with layers: things overlap, they intermeld and there are all sorts of complicated things going on, always. I think that is a much more realistic way of talking about how cultures work. The idea that a lot of the 70ís era have is very classical, narrative model where one thing replaces another which replaces another. They have this timeline in their heads which is to do with them being in their prime, then someone coming in and attacking them and the apocalypse looms just around the corner. A lot of them would be a lot better off if they just stopped looking over their shoulder and just got on with what they do, because a lot of the people that I have a go at in the book nevertheless are doing good work and there is no reason why they shouldnít keep on doing good work. I mean, it is not to my taste, but I donít care, they have their place as well. Itís pathetic: stop writing about scrapheaps and just get on and write your next book for Christís sake. We donít care.' So why the moral panic? Why canít the generation who grew up singing communal gems like 'We all live in a yellow submarine' and 'Live and let live' include us in the love in? 'Economics' says Davis, 'To put it in a nutshell, in economic rationalist societies you need rhetorics that promote a sense of community and the easiest way to promote a sense of community where there is otherwise no real sense of community is to set up groups of outsiders. You create a sense of fear about the one of them in order to have a sense of community about the one of us. I donít think anyone is actually setting out to do this as some kind of planned orchestrated thing but in effect that is how it works: John Laws does builds a sense of community among his listenership because he can create common enemies amongst a listenership that is otherwise highly divided. This is because over the last 10-15 years they have all started competing with each other for short term contract jobs - or for a job at all ó for user-pays education or for user-pays hospitals. Those senses of community have broken down and the user-pays ethic has dissolved them into a sense of everyone is an individual competing with lots of other individuals for the same goods and services and jobs. So itís like ìfuck it, letís create a common enemy, weíll feel good even if itís just for half an hour while John Laws in on the radioî. Although the hyterical and paranoid language used to describe young people can be good for a chuckle, the outcome ainít anything to smile about. Government policy for young people is draconian to say the least which is the conclusion of Davisís argument: 'The final part of the book talks about youth policy and the way in which under representation in traditional public spaces perhaps translates into under representation or downright pillorying of young people in legislation: anti-gang stuff, higher education fees, the prosecution of the Rabelais students, the introduction of voluntary censorship codes on CDs, the whole range of things that have happened over the last few years, that are legislative or legal, rally against what younger people are doingî. Young peopleís efforts are continually discredited, with their efforts described using a language of loss that makes Kurt Cobain look hopeful. Adding to nose piercing, the crimes of todayís youth include the loss of history, the death of culture, the trashing of morality and the end of real feminism. Grunge fiction signals the loss of real literature, pastiche is making the market price of their 70's minimalist artworks fall and to top it all off, Christmas just wonít be the same if Santa Klaus is Koori and a woman. Davis refuses to engage in this requiem, maintaining and describes it as: 'utter crap. In my own day to day life and the people I know there is no talk of loss whatsoever . . . ìculture has exhausted itself?î ó excuse me? ó get outside have a look around. Itís a stupid, stupid thing to say. There is this whole myth, this ëfantasy of exhaustioní which basically involves closing your eyes to the huge amount that is going on'. What seems to be the case is that youth are being punished for going AWOL from the cultural elites institutions. Put simply, the cultural elite just donít ëgetí young 'uns and they wonít forgive us for that. As Davis says 'a lot of [cultural elites] stopped thinking in 1978 . . .What you get is a failure to recognise. What a lot of people are looking for is for someone to come up and do exactly what they did at that same age. Things happen differently now. I had a run in with George Negus on his radio show because he reckons he ìcanít feel the hot breath on his backî, that there is no one there and that he and his generation are the true radicals. When there are real radicals again then George will shift over. To which you can only say, "well, what are you asking here? You are asking for someone to be exactly like yourself and you are taking for granted the social context in which your so-called radicalism developed". I mean, there is no Vietnam War at the moment, there is no single unifying cause needing to be shoved aside which is what Negus and his cohorts did. That was important but I think he takes all that for granted. As far as he is concerned ó looking back with rose-coloured glasses ó it was all an act of individual volition. They have forgotten, just how there were those single causes which were rallying points. Identity politics have taken over that sort of blanket issue radicalism, global issue radicalism: so they donít recognise the forms. They donít realise that it is all out there in all sorts of different ways, they are looking for the sameness again'. The thing that freaks the boomers out is that the ëpeace love and mung bean babyí 60's ethos did not bring on a free-luurve revolution but in fact ushered in economic rationalism. Furthermore the reaffirmation of the rights of middle-class Australia, the whingeing about the fascism of political correctness and the disgust at victim feminism aligns them with Pauline Hanson. As Davis says: 'It horrified Philip Adams when I said that Pauline Hanson and the cultural gatekeepers go together: It is a crude equation but I think it can be demonstrated. He was absolutely horrified. But if you look at all the sort of libertarianism which was the guiding ethos of the 70's, it is a highly refined form of selfishness: It is all about freedom from outsiders, freedom from institutions, freedom from the establishment, freedom from Governmentís. Then you look at Pauline Hanson and you get the same rhetoric: freedom from big Governmentís, freedom from institutions, freedom from people telling us what to do, freedom from minority groups pushing and so on. There are a lot of differences, but there are a lot of similarities as well. If you go to any gathering ó any middle-brow book launch or opening at some gallery down in Prahran ó there theyíll be in the droves sipping Chardonnay and where are the wogs, where are the women? At the end of 20 years of the 70ís bourgeoisie bohemian set with all their fuzzy liberal ideas like truth and beauty aesthetics in writing, and search for social justice, what do you end up with? Pauline Hanson. All the time they are claiming that they are setting the moral agenda for the country, well, Iím sorry, the outcome does not justify the tenure of the people that class themselves as public intellectuals and as ethical and moral guardians of this society.' The boomers want to go back to the land of the free: where they were uninhibited by the censorship imposed by the politically correct thought police and unencumbered by endless narratives of difference which cramp their white style. John Laws, Helen Garner and Ray Martin all occupy nice, warm positions of power and they are not about to give it up. Their narratives of freedom can roughly be translated as freedom to go on cherishing their perceived roles as moral guardians of our community and getting big heads and big wallets in the process. Much of the cultural elites arrogance comes from a blind spot regarding difference. John Howardís mass appropriation with the slogan 'for all of us' could be used to summarise who the cultural elite perceive they are the moral crusaders for: 'By and large the people I talk about grew up in a very white country, or at least a country that at least liked to pretend that it was very white when in fact it wasnít. I donít think it is part of their natural reflex to think about what difference might actually mean. What they like to think is that difference can be dissolved into sameness, but they never think about what difference might actually mean. They never really make the step of questioning their own position in order to be able to ask what difference might mean for someone else, what it might actually mean for someone else to be from a different background: class background, ethnic background, and what it might mean for them to sort of try and negotiate a position in what is basically still a very white culture. Their reflex is to say ìoh you can join us, you can be the sameî but it is never that simple is it?'. 'I am the worlds leading writer on P.P.MacGuiness, I reckon. Thatís the torture of writing a book like this.' Aside from torturous hours of Ray Martin-101, Davis has also made life uncomfortable by initiating his own gangland: the cultural bigwigs have not taken kindly to young upstarts questioning their authority. The response to gangland perfectly illustrates Davisís point: 'In a way it has been really tragic. People seem to have fallen over themselves to parody themselves basically. A lot of people have accused me of just attacking the big names but Iím not, the book talks about structural things ó for example, it might be a question about the rise of economic rationalism ó that is what I am interested in. I couldnít give a toss about whoís who'. The bottom line is that weíre all a bit sick of the 'itís-all-truth-and-beauty- and-letís-go-and-feel-nice-and-sit-under -a-wattle-tree-and-paint-watercolour' mode of Australian culture. Like Davis, let's hope the dead white males are turning in their graves: 'My notion of a public space is not one where you have the same people all the time talking about different issues. My notion of a public space is where you have lots and lots of people talking occasionally about what they think is important and for them to be a forum for them to do that.' gangland: cultural elites and the new generationalism by Mark Davis is out now through Allen & Unwin. Created on Fri, 31 Oct 1997 and last modified on Thu, 6 Nov 1997.

LOUDonline - http://www.loud.net.au - Fri, 10 Apr 1998