> Catherine Driscoll wrote:
>
> >But the unfocused rhetoric still bothered me.
>
> What focus would you have preferred?
I would have been happier with anything less clearly designed to please everyone and offend no-one. Even Simon Crean's idiocy at the Brisbane rally, claiming the while there should be no war Iraq must be "disarmed", was at least a position on the issues at hand, rather than generally unassailable (and unassailably general) rhetoric like "war bad hunger bad poverty bad". Brown's only concession to the specific questions raised around this war was to encourage the crowd to demand "no war under any circumstances", by which I know him to be implying 'even if the UN support it', but I don't think he ever actually came out and said that and it was a moment buried in things much easier for everyone there to applaud and cheer.
Don't get me wrong, I'm for the applauding and cheering, and for the things they were aplauding and cheering, and I'm glad that there is a Bob Brown, even, who takes such general stands for the general "common good" in Australian politics, god knows the rest of them are fucked up enough for the most part... but John Pilger was at least on topic if less accessible. And I guess I don't expect any more from Natasha S-D.
I know that to succeed such rallies need to speak to the people who would not ordinarily go to rallies, and speak to their concern as much if not more than to those who have more critically informed approaches to what's going on. I'm not even positive why it bothered me so much. Perhaps it's just a Brown thing: because the audible politicians in Australia seems such a dismal crop at present, and Brown seems to have taken on some position as saviour.
All around me -- and I mean all versions of all around me from unemployed rural relatives through the higher-up admin folks at work to the political activist youth -- increasing numbers of people are or at least talk about "turning to the greens". And Brown is their leader, local hero, and all round good guy. I can't help being bothered by the very comfortable urban middleclass niceness of him, even while pragmatically I see that he has to have general appeal. Anyway, maybe I was just disappointed in him. Australians, even or maybe especially demo-crowd Australians, don't do a lot of ecstatic applause for politicians, and I guess I just wish the hero was a bit more... dangerous.
Catherine
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