Trouble: The Art of Sticking Your Head Above the Parapet – Shelley Gare

Shelley Gare is a well-respected editor and author and has been editor of The Good Weekend and Sunday Life, consultant editor of WHO magazine, deputy editor of The Australian and writes regularly for The Weekend Australian. She has also authored a number of books her most recent being The Triumph of the Airheads (2006). As founding editor of The Australian’s Review of Books, Shelley Gare won a Walkley award (1997). Shelley Gare joined Kate Jennings to address The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 3 August 2010.

TROUBLE – THE ART OF STICKING YOUR HEAD ABOVE THE PARAPET

SHELLEY GARE

Trouble: it’s a good word that too often gets a bad press. Kate and I took about three minutes over the internet deciding the title and subject of this talk. “Trouble” was a natural given the title of her new book. (Trouble – Evolution of a Radical, Selected Writings: 1970 – 2010, Black Inc)  And “the art of sticking your head above the parapet” was easy because that was probably the first thing that bonded Kate and me: a respect for people who have the guts to speak out, who don’t toe the accepted line.

Kate writes in her preface to Trouble: “It was said of George Orwell who irritated the heck out of his comrades on the left … that he was skilful at rubbing the fur of his own cat backward.”

Precisely.

Kate and I also discovered we shared a profound distaste for post-modernism, for tosh and nonsense. But before we head down that merry path, here’s the first dilemma. The real trouble with trouble-making is that you never know how much trouble you’re going to get into. When I was six, I was one of 16 little ballerinas performing in the end of year Christmas gala in the town hall of Geraldton (which is on the central coast of WA, about 600kms above Perth). We all danced onto the stage, in a very strict formation – two lines of eight, dancing arm in arm in a polka, down towards the front of the stage – whereupon the littlies up the front saw the audience and then freaked.

Instead of turning right, they turned left. I was third back from the front. I Immediately stopped everything and barked: “We’re going the wrong way!”

At which point, ALL the ballerinas panicked. There were little girls in pink scattering all over the stage. Chaos. The audience loved it. In retrospect though, it might have been better if I’d kept my mouth shut. Did it matter if we went right instead of left? But, I know that, the six year old Shelley Gare could no more NOT have cried out – “we’re going the wrong way!” – than a 21 year old Kate Jennings could not have given the excellent and provocative speech she gave in 1970 at an anti-Vietnam demonstration.

Instead of preaching peace, Kate Jennings turned a caustic rage on the men in the protest movement. She’d realised, as had many other young women at the time, that while the freedom loving guys were fighting for civil rights, peace in Vietnam, justice … they mostly thought of women as being good for just two things – typing and screwing. Kate ended her speech with a rousing: “All Power to Women!” There was ugly heckling. She was told, “You belong on your back!” Nice. And so much more fun was ahead of Kate Jennings.

I want to say early that by trouble-making and sticking your head above the parapet, I’m not talking about people who stir for no other reason than maybe malice, or boredom, or jealousy or cruelty. Or self-interest.  I’m talking about people who see that something is out of whack; that the emperor is wearing no clothes. And I’m also going to call them, in this talk for the sake of brevity and clarity, “trouble-makers”. I’m sure there’s a much less aggressive way of describing them … but life is short. It is also full of folly; I think now more than ever.

Peace and prosperity seem to bring that out in humans, more’s the pity. Bring on the trouble-makers. They are the safety valve of society. We need them and have always needed them to stick their head above the parapet and say, hey, something’s wrong. This camp seems to break down into two kinds of people. There are those who seem to know from an early age that they are destined to create waves – Germaine Greer; John Pilger; or Giles Coren and Boris Johnson in Britain – people who almost revel in shouting from the parapets.

And then there are the ones who can’t help themselves. This is the type of person who goes along to a meeting or a conference and stands up to say something they care about and that they think should be noted. Or maybe they write a memo to the boss, copied around the office. And then they think, that’s done, now I can think about my lunch. And as they wonder about sandwich fillings, or salad dressings, someone comes up to them and says, gosh that was brave. That was SO honest, SO courageous. And the sandwich thinker, interrupted from reveries about chicken or tuna or cheese, goes: Bloody hell, what did I say? (The sub-text being – where’s everyone else???)

In fact, Kate Jennings herself writes in Trouble that she hadn’t read her moratorium speech for 35 years and when she did re-read it, as part of preparing this collection, she was staggered. She says, “Holy shit! Blistering!” She sat in a state of shock for several hours.  So what is it that produces the kind of person who’s always opening their big trap to set the baby ballerinas right? Nature or nurture?  Whatever it is, it has to be said upfront, that the trouble-maker’s lot is not always a happy one. Society finds them awkward.

They get in the way of money-making schemes, of ruthless cost-cutting and down-sizing. They point out that pie in the sky schemes don’t work and nor do pigs fly. Emperors don’t like having their nudity pointed out to them. A former editor of mine once said to me – with some fondness I might say – you know, Shelley, it’s not that you used to tell certain people they were EFF-wits. It’s that you used to tell them twice, just to make there sure there was no uncertainty about it.”

What can I say? Too many airheads have triumphed. We need to let the air out of their hot-air balloons. But the funny thing is that there must be something in the human spirit that really responds to the idea of the trouble-maker. Think of how many books and films revolve around a protagonist who refuses to toe the line. James Dean, Gregory Peck playing Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mocking Bird, Russell Crowe in The Insider, Tom Cruise in The Firm, Daniel Craig in Defiance. Think of how many real-life heroes we venerate. Socrates; Nelson Mandela; anyone who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

There is something in us that yearns to know there are other human beings out there, fighting for the right things, standing up against the crowd. At the same time, we would …. kind of, rather, umm, prefer it if … the trouble-makers … would you just mind … ummm … not doing it too close to us… Wouldn’t want to draw attention. Have to think about the littlies, and the pay cheque.

Whenever I’ve interviewed whistleblowers, they say the same thing. They expected the loathing and condemnation from their bosses – but they didn’t expect to be turned into pariahs by their colleagues – colleagues who also knew what was going on and why it had to be aired. It’s the survival instinct at work, of course. It’s also the herd instinct. Whichever animal strays from the herd is the one that will get picked off by the lions, cheetahs and other hunters.

Trouble-makers peddle dangerous ideas and thoughts. There is a famous maxim which is sometimes attributed to the American philosopher William James and I’ve also seen a version attributed to Mahatma Gandhi. It describes how unwelcome ideas, and their proponents, are treated: And it goes like this – “First they ignore you; … then they mock you; … then, they attack you viciously. Finally they say, oh we knew that all along.” You can stick your head above the parapet and shout out – but what happens if you’re ignored, if people pretend they can’t hear you, or indeed, if people go out of their way to make sure you aren’t heard.

I recently wrote a couple of pieces – one for the Australian edition of The Spectator and a much longer one for Quadrant – which revolved around a new word I’d learned – totschweigtaktik. It means “death by silence”. I learned it from reading an essay by Geoffrey Wheatcroft, on George Orwell, published in The Spectator in 2002. The totschweigtaktik is basically an astonishingly effective tactic for killing off creative work or fresh ideas or even news stories. You don’t criticise or engage with what’s being said or produced or expressed; instead you deprive someone and their work or opinion of the oxygen of attention. You just let it all expire soundlessly, like a butterfly in a bell jar.

In Orwell’s case, it was used on his book about the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia, in which he revealed the role of Stalinist Moscow. The left was appalled by his lack of solidarity. Orwell was met with either poisonous abuse or – Wheatcroft wrote – “with what used to be known in Vienna as the Totschweigtaktik, death by silence. By the time Orwell died in 1950 the book [first published in 1938] hadn’t even sold out its first edition of 1,500 copies, and it only gradually acquired its reputation as one of the 20th century’s central political and moral texts.”

I knew the tactic existed because I had seen it at work on the writing scene with people like Kate herself. I had just never known it had such a chillingly apt name. Here’s a recent example from the world of news. If it hadn’t been for The Australian newspaper’s relentless coverage of the rorts in the Building the Education Revolution school building program, along with Ray Hadley at 2GB,  that story would have died. Every other news outlet in town was pretty much ignoring it.

Of course now, as William James put it so well in his fourth point: EVERYONE knows the BER is a major embarrassment to Julia Gillard. This happens all the time with news and sometimes it’s The Sydney Morning Herald breaking a story which The Australian will ignore. Interestingly, The Herald made Kate’s book Trouble its lead review back in April; The Australian and The Australian Literary Review are yet to review it.

One of my favourite trouble-makers is a British columnist and restaurant reviewer called Giles Coren. He’s most famous for a terrible email he wrote to the sub-editors at The Times when they changed a word in his final sentence so it both changed the meaning and also the rhythm. His 1000 words of vitriol to them were leaked. Here’s one of the less dreadful paragraphs of that email –

I only wrote that sodding paragraph to make that joke. And you’ve fucking stripped it out like a pissed Irish plasterer restoring a renaissance fresco and thinking Jesus looks shit with a bear … so plastering over it.

The subs retorted with their own prissy email, also leaked, and there were various other letter writers pursing their lips. But you know what, there were a huge number of writers and others who couldn’t help cheering. It was just so wonderfully funny and sharp.  And rare!

The subs asked Coren in their letter – do you have to be so rude? Well yes, Coren no doubt thought, I do. He’s famous for his outbursts. One of his friends said of his tirades. “I think it’s born of a genuine disappointment that the world doesn’t meet his ludicrously high standards.”

Now the point of telling this story tonight is that it introduces another obstacle to trouble-making. The new insistence on Niceness. Coren’s outbursts ARE ridiculously intemperate – searingly awful – but they are so refreshing in our new politically correct, sugary, inclusive, relativist, consensus-seeking, world where we all have to be team players. Coren is not a team player. And he’s very often spot on with his criticisms.

Of course it’s true that honey catches more flies than vinegar, but in the last 30 years that proverb has been taken to the nth degree. We mustn’t be judgemental. We can’t upset people. No-one must be made to feel awkward. Be careful if you complain. No-one can be a failure. If something seems too difficult, too challenging, well the challenge must be taken out of it. Thirty or 40 years of this sugary, suffocating bromide has meant we’ve ended up in deep schtuck. If you can’t ever say, what rot! – an awful lot of rot is going to be promulgated.

I recently heard a repeat of a terrific interview on the ABC with a French professor Didier Maleuvre who now teaches literature at the University of California. And he was addressing the question: should museums be inclusive? Well, he certainly wanted all visitors to be welcome but “No!” – he didn’t think that curators should tailor their work to the visitors. He believed that “A museum needs to give people what they need. Not what they want.”

Now the interviewer was astounded. She kept asking questions like: “But if it’s about a people’s culture do they know more about it than the museum?” And a doozy – “So do you think people will still learn as easily in what you might be describing as an old-fashioned museum?” To which Monsieur Maleuvre responded – with great Gallic insouciance – “I didn’t think there was anything old-fashioned about the old-fashioned museum… We should trust people’s intelligence,” he assured her. He handled it extremely well and graciously but you could sense the Gallic impatience stirring. My own impatience was certainly arc-ing up. What I reckon is that we need more piss and vinegar. A lot more piss and vinegar.

Another reason why you should take away a copy of Kate’s book tonight are some of the titles of pieces in the collection – Gutless Fiction; Moral Trouble; Bad Manners; The Hypocrisy of Wall Street Culture; Mistakes, Too Many To Mention … You get the drift – cat fur being dragged backwards.

When you’re nice to everyone you turn yourself into a small target. So always using honey, without any vinegar, is actually a cowardly thing to do. The English humanist William Hazlitt is a joy on this. He wrote a scalding essay in 1816 “On Good-Nature”. What a foppish affectation he thought that was:

Good-nature … is the most selfish of all the virtues: it is nine times out of ten mere indolence of disposition … A good-natured man is, generally speaking, one who does not like to be put out of his way … No good-natured man was ever a martyr to a cause …

Similarly, I’m always delighted by the stirring words of our own essayist Walter Murdoch who wrote, early last century:

It is pleasant to have troops of friends; but you can hardly feel at ease in your conscience unless you also know that you have regiments of enemies. The more the merrier … The planet on which we live is not a place where a man can do the right thing without making enemies.

One of my touchstones has always been a question that Justice Owen asked when he handed down his report from the Royal Commission into the 2001 collapse of insurance giant HIH, with all its shenanigans. “Did anyone stand back and ask themselves the simple question: is this right?” We need people and organizations to keep asking questions like that.

Trouble-making has one more new foe, and this one is bigger than all the rest. It’s about a new way of dealing with the world and its unpleasantnesses and it’s becoming more and more fashionable. It’s basically the message : oh, just suck it up. The people who talk like this imagine that by saying it, they are somehow showing how wise they are in the ways of this astonishing twenty-first century with all its breakthroughs and revolutionary changes; how superior they are. And you, by wanting to grumble and kick and scream and generally do everything but NOT suck it up – why, you’re showing what a naïve rube you are.

That you belong back in the twenty-first century with you and your like…

I’m currently embroiled in a small insurrection against billionaire Kerry Stokes, the details of which are too complicated to go into, but which revolve around a small group of freelancers thinking that:

A: we rather like owning our copyright and

B: we quite like owning our houses and bank accounts too and we’re not that keen on indemnifying HIM every time we write a story.

We quite like the established way where the publisher – rich, powerful, with legions of lawyers and insurance policies at his or her disposal – indemnifies the writer. A lawyer friend looked at the agreement that Kerry Stokes has demanded we sign, if we want to keep freelancing for him, and his note on that particular clause was: No self-respecting lawyer could EVER advise a contributor to agree quietly to that clause. What is interesting about this dispute is how uninterested many other journalists have been. Even though the ramifications may soon come to a desk near them. Oh – said one writer, who also works in business – suck it up. (This is how it is these days. Get used to it.)

This attitude is so much worse than the totschweigtaktik.

What if you give a party up there on your parapet … and instead of certain people pretending you’re not there, what if no-one can even see the point of coming in the first place? Like, you know, what’s the problem? Is this what happens when a society becomes so used to unfairness and greed and bullying and short-term thinking – and not thinking about other people – that it becomes inured to all this.

My problem is that I really do believe in Edmund Burke’s wonderful epigram: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”. And Margaret Mead’s, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

If we stop thinking that nothing can be done, that this is now the way of the world, that people should stop bleating about their missing cheese … If you really think like that, you will quickly find yourself on page 239 of Kate’s book where she writes – and here, she’s talking specifically about the artificial world of wealthy bankers and their botoxed wives – but it easily applies to many other situations: “Keep company only with people who behave like conger eels and after a while that seems normal.”

So the next time someone says with a superior flourish, oh suck it up. Don’t suck it up. Instead, hand them a copy of Kate Jennings’ excellent new collection: Trouble.