The Memes of Production: A cultural studies weblog

According to some reports about 17,000 people joined in Tuesday’s Vindaloo Against Violence event to demonstrate solidarity with the Australian-Indian community, following a number of apparently racist attacks against Indian nationals—mainly students—in Melbourne.

Now this strikes me as mainly a consciousness-raising exercise. No, it probably won’t have much effect on its own, but 17,000 agreeing to do something (admittedly something with very little cost to themselves) creates a community of sorts, and fosters a sense of solidarity with Indian students and with other people who abhor racist violence.

I started thinking about then when I came across a discussion on Twitter with a couple of people, including Barry Saunders, who asked the question:

While I appreciate the gesture behind Vindaloo against Violence, isn’t reducing Indian culture to, um, buying a curry, a bit problematic?

This is a good question. For a start, Vindaloo was originally a Portuguese dish, and is largely unknown in India, being far more popular in Anglophone countries. As DPN pointed out on Twitter, it is ironic that this was the dish chosen to be emblematic: it underlines the huge gulf of understanding between many Australians and their India guests.

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I got this via email a couple of days ago. Another of those well-intentioned spam emails that purports to show how we should get back to “common-sense” (always of the conservative variety, of course). Things were always better in the “old days,” before political correctness.

I’ve added a few comments…

Scenario: Jack goes rabbit shooting before school, pulls into school parking lot with rifle in gun rack.

1957 – Vice Principal comes over, looks at Jack’s rifle, goes to his car and gets his rifle & chats with Jack about guns.

2009 – School goes into lock down, Star Force called, Jack hauled off to jail and never sees his truck or gun again. Counsellors called in for traumatized students and teachers.

Comment – A culture that normalises and glorifies guns leads inevitably to obscene tragedies such as Columbine High and Virginia Tech. But of course, guns don’t kill people—apparently it’s heavy metal music and Dungeons and Dragons that kills people.

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Since I originally posted it in June 2006, the most read article on Memes is one called Forever Young and the Politics of Meaning, a short meditation on the way in which context and personal experience change the meaning of a text. It generated a reasonably brisk debate at the time, but then I moved on, and most of the commenters did also.

But for the last three and a half years we have had an average of four visits a week from people googling something like “meaning of forever young.” I’ve visited other sites that come up in this search, and I think that it is time I added my view on the song, because I don’t think many people get it.

The song was originally written by German synth-pop outfit Alphaville, and “Forever Young” was the title track on their 1984 debut album. For me the clue is in the date of the original release: 1984 was smack in the middle of the Cold War and the song captures the sense of existential dread and fatalism that afflicted many young people at that time:

Let’s dance in style, let’s dance for a while
Heaven can wait we’re only watching the skies
Hoping for the best but expecting the worst
Are you going to drop the bomb or not?

This isn’t a political song; there is no advocating about arms reduction or political solutions, just the plea to forget politics and go out dancing. While the songwriters don’t want to die, anything seems better than waiting around for an apocalypse that ordinary people felt they didn’t have a way of stopping.

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Just over ten years ago now, in the face of the Howard Government’s favouring of private education, I wrote a paper for a little in-house journal which discussed the problems inherent in league tables and their effects on educational, and thus social, equity. Well, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Now under a Labor Government, the same fights are being fought, this time, though, in the name of accountability rather than choice.

As you are probably aware, the government has today launched its MySchool website amid much controversy: it gives data that can enable the ranking of schools due to its publication of, among other things, national NAPLAN test results.

If you want to know why the publication of these results is so problematic, take a look at this paper by Professor Alan Reid, presented to the 2009 Australian Curriculum Studies Association National Biennial Conference in Canberra in October.

A Seven Network poll shows that 71% of respondents want Prince William to be next king, rather than Prince Charles.

Why do supporters of the monarchy have so much trouble with the concept of succession? It’s one of the fundamental aspects of a hereditary system: the succeeding ruler is the eldest male offspring of the monarch. It’s not a democracy, you don’t get to choose, and the heir can’t just decide to let it skip a generation.

Assuming there is no accident or fatal illness (or the admittedly unlikely chance that Elizabeth II is actually a cyborg who will live forever), the next British monarch will be Charles III. Get over it people.

Of course, if you really don’t want Charles as Australian Head of State, there’s one simple thing we could do, isn’t there…

The winner of the annual “Labour Photo of the Year,” organised by the LabourStart organisation, has been announced. K M Asad, an Indian photojournalist, won with a striking image of a Bangladeshi boy resting after working, probably unpaid, in a filthy shipyard. The photo is a stark reminder that child labour is an ongoing issue in some parts of the world.

Asad’s caption reads:

A Bangladeshi boy works in a shipbuilding factory in down town. These factories employ young boys as apprentices without pay for the first few years. They work in extreme conditions without safety tools like gloves, goggles, and other protective gears. In exchange, they learn the skills of the trade. But this costs them loss of health and education. In Bangladeshi child work lad is under 18th years child don’t work in any work site. But no body eels to see them and no security in their life.

See Asad’s Flickr photostream here.

As promised, this is the follow up to my last post on why women are not blogging politics. It has taken so long for me to get back to this, and so much has been written in the mean time, that there is probably not too much more that I can add. Jenny Ejlak, writing in the Crikey Daily Email on 25 August, made the point that I was trying to make so much more eloquently than I managed. Nevertheless, there are still a couple of points that I feel I could reiterate.

My last post was in response to a question raised on twitter by Jonathan Green and was quoted by Possum Comitatus on his blog post on the Crikey Blogs website. On Possum’s blog, Venise Alstergren, comment 86, accused me of “whinging” in what amounted at a personal attack. While the attack itself doesn’t bother me, (my family and I had a great laugh at some of Venise’s more outrageous assumptions), her comment and others demonstrate and raise a number of points that still deserve some attention.

Interesting link from Kevin Drum on one of the consequences of the decline in traditional newspaper reporting budgets — newspapers are less likely to file lawsuits to obtain information from public bodies.

Drum wraps up with a sentence that tickled me somewhat:

In the great power struggle between government secrecy and the public’s right to know, the demise of the newspaper industry is a victory for the bad guys.

Well, of course. It’s because we let the bad guys — hi, Rupert! — buy up the entire newspaper industry.

Today on Twitter, GreenJ, one of the Crikey writers asked “serious question: why don’t women (proportionally the unbalance is weird) subscribe to crikey?” This question was retweeted by Pollytics who took the issue up on his (her?) blog, asking “where are Australia’s female political bloggers?” [oops, just burnt the soup because I’m trying to blog while cooking tea] Some of the people who left comments, especially JaneShaw, Anna Winter, and BH, made similar points to those that I had made on Twitter, but I’m going to repeat them here anyway.

I’m sure that I’ve written about this topic before on this blog, but for the life of me can’t find it in the archives just at the present.

Much is made in the research literature, and also in popular discussion, about how ‘young people’ are not interested or involved in politics (or indeed civic participation, as my last post went on about). A colleague and I remarked a couple of years ago that there did seem, however, to be a growth in grass roots political activism that wasn’t necessarily connected to political parties and that was based around particular areas of social life or issues. This has been borne out in recent research, and is variously referred to as “advocacy” politics, “issue politics”, “new” politics, “life” politics, or “sub-politics” (Dahlgren and Olsson 494-495). Increasingly, the point is being made that much disconnection from traditional politics is because people don’t feel that politicians and institutions are listening to them, and this is no less the case for young people (Couldry, Livingstone, and Markham 189; Couldry 394; Harris and Wyn 335-6).