Radio Australia Today Editorial
Archive for April, 2009
Barack Obama. The first 100 days.
30 April 2009
So it’s 100 days today since Barack Obama’s inauguration.
It makes you realise just how transitory life is. JFK only survived 1000 days in office. Obama is already a tenth of the way there, and if he wins the next election, he will have another 2820 days before he becomes a memory and a writer of yet more memoirs.
The fact is that his first three months have been dominated by a rabid economic crisis, wars in two countries, a cold enemy that insists on firing rockets, and now a swine flu epidemic that is getting to critical levels and has caused , this morning, a death in his own country. And he hasn’t yet had to deal with the looming climate change disaster.
Amnesty International has come out with a report card on Obama’s first 100 days and its assesssment is that he has been good and bad. The Obama adminstration has ordereed the closure of the Guantanamo Bay military facility in Cuba, but has gone short of banning torture techniques for American military interogators. He has also not gone as far as to say that the Guantanamo Bay inmates should be released. These are people who have never been charged. There may be terrorists among them, but habeas corpus rules of law suggest that someone is entitled to be brought before court, face a charge and have it dealt with. This hasn’t happened in the years that some of these people have been held in custody, and Amnesty says its time to put up or release them. We are talking about the land of the free after all.
We know that some released detainees have gone to work with terrorist cells. That’s the price of having a justice system. Bad people go free in every good justice system, but a good justice system will stop good people from wrongly convicted.
Only 2820 days to go, Barack. No-one said it would be easy.
– Phil
Mothers-in-law. Dragons or just undervalued people?
29 April 2009
Mothers-in-Law have been lampooned on television for about as long as there’s been television. The most famous dragon M-in-L was actually a witch. Literally. It was Samantha Stevens’ mother Endora in the TV series Bewitched. Men across the world laughed nervously at Endora’s running battle with her son Darren, who could just not let up, even after she changed him into a donkey/pig/coffee table.
Fast forward forty years and Ray Barrone’s mother in Everybody Loves Raymond brought us a more real M-in-L, the kind that comes into her daughter-in-law’s house at all hours, giving unsolicited opinions on her cooking and curtains. The whole program is based on the presence of this dragon M-in-L and it was hilarious. Nervously hilarious.
But according to British researcher Luisa Dillner, the whole M-in-L issue has been around for a lot longer than the last sixty years. She uncovered jokes about the M-in-L made as far back as the Roman times.
I had a great M-in-L, but part of the affection could be because she lived halfway around the world. It’s hard to get annoyed about familial interference when you only see the M-in-L once every two years. Dillner does say that it is the proximity of the M-in-L that can cause the problem. These women have been through the raising of a family. They have experience, having been through every conceivable problem a married woman would have to face, and so would find it very hard not to want to put in an opinion about important things like child raising.
Given this proximity, it might be surprising that Dillner advocates spending more time with your M-in-L. She says you should become friends, and talk about things outside of the family unit. After all, you have something in common ie: her son or daughter.
With Mother’s Day not that far away (May 10), at the very least I think we ought to cut them some slack. They may feel like a chief executive who is usurped by a younger replacement. Of course this is not what’s happened, but the feeling might be there.
So why do I still laugh at Ray Barrone’s M-in-L jokes? Dunno. I’ve got a cruel nature I guess. Well that’s what my M-in-L says.
– Phil
Swine Flu. A quick and unifying reaction.
28 April 2009
Perhaps it’s the fact that media is so fast.
Perhaps it’s just that people have strong memories of the SARS epidemic.
Perhaps, after all the financial terror of recent days, people are like coiled springs, ready to react.
Perhaps our care factor has gone up a tad.
Whatever the reason, the news of the Swine Flu from Mexico has brought reaction so instant around the world that markets have wobbled; shares in airlines and oil have dropped; pharmaceutical companies involved in vaccine production have soared on the market, even if they are a long way away from having the solution for the Swine Flu. Mostly importantly, governments have taken action and are sharing information and help like never before.
I have never seen such a rapid response to a health-related story. The fact that the news got out of Mexico within days, and that countries like New Zealand, Canada and Australia were across the risk and were implementing border control plans on Day One of the breaking story, is extraordinary. Remember that this is a morphing virus for which there is no vaccine yet. Doctors we spoke to on the Club yesterday already knew all about it, even if they didn’t have the answers on how to kill it.
The news is going to keep coming too. This morning the California Health Department announced that at least eleven of its citizens have the virus. The good news is that the worst case is a woman who is, at the time of writing, recovering well.
It’s rare to see the world acting as one on anything. They are doing it now, just as they have started doing it for the financial crisis. It could be that the current adversities are bringing people and countries together after a prolonged period of plenty and selfishness.
You can only hope so.
– Phil
ANZAC Day. Another thought.
27 April 2009
There was a kerfuffle last week about ANZAC Day and whether shops should be allowed to trade on this sacred day.
There were certainly two views. One said that it was a day of remembrance that should not be sullied by commercial interests. Shops should be closed. Movies should not be shown.
The other view, put forward by a former head of the Australian defence forces, Peter Cosgrave, was that shops should be allowed to open at any time during the day. His attitude was that people can remember fallen soldiers in the morning then go about their lives and celebrate by having fun if they wish.
A scan of the shopping strips on Saturday (ANZAC Day) showed me that many proprietors were closed in the morning, with signs in their windows announcing that they were intending on opening at 1pm.
Othere of course just opened as usual. Others closed all day.
And here is the rub. It was about choice. The government kept out of the whole thing, and there was no hassle as far as I could see. There were not stories in the media yesterday about people complaining about open shops (or closed shops for that matter). Some opened and some didn’t, and in the way of Australian acceptance, society went along with whatever choice the shop-owners made.
In all, it was a pretty good example of what the soldiers were fighting for, even if we had to wait a few hours longer for our chai latte.
– Phil
ANZAC Day. It never goes out of fashion.
24 April 2009
Well it did for a while.
I remember when I was a child, ANZAC Day, which commemorates Australians and New Zealanders who fought in wars, was most uncool. Perhaps it was too close. We were in the Vietnam War, which was very unpopular, and the soldiers bore the brunt because protestors were unable to make the distinction between the Australian government that sent troops to Vietnam, and the soldiers themselves. Horribly unfairly, the troops were targeted as much as the policy makers. This is even more unfair when you know that many of the soldiers were conscripts. They were forced to fight, often against their wishes, yet still the protestors gave them a hard time. The sight of a returned soldier in uniform was not something to be admired back then.
These were soldiers who saw the very worst of personal fighting. The Viet Cong were masters of their landscape, and were a people who were desperate. To this day many Vietnam War veterans wear the emotional scars of that campaign, a campaign that many now agree should never have happened.
Now, after more than thirty years, our soldiers are celebrated. With the emotion of the Vietnam War out of the way, people recognise that to fight an enemy is an extraordinarily brave thing to do, far braver than what most of the rest of us will ever do in our lifetime, regardless of whether the decision to go to war is a good or a bad one.
There is no plus to fighting in a war. You kill, and you are a target. You see death, you see abuse, you see victims, you see destruction. No matter what the American war films tell you, there is no glamour. You will be scarred, you will be changed. You might not even come back. And of you do, you will most certainly not be the same person you were before.
These are the things that are recognised on ANZAC Day. And a lot of the credit for this must go to John Howard, the former prime minister who pushed so hard the significance of ANZAC Day. Somehow he made the young of his country feel the importance of the ANZAC tradition, without ever making it cool.
That was some feat.
– Phil
