Arena Magazine articles from December 1999

Arena Magazine archives from December 1999

UNCANNY REFLECTION.
December 1, 1999... CHECHNYA MIRRORS KOSOVO, ARGUES SIMON COOPER. When we hear the Russian bombers coming we say here comes `humanitarian aid'. Resident of Grozny Like a funhouse mirror, the brutal mass-bombing and shelling of Chechnya by Russian...

DEAD REFERENDUM.(Brief Article)
December 1, 1999... WE NEED TO MOVE NOW TOWARDS A DIRECTLY ELECTED PRESIDENT. John Howard may be happy that the monarchy has been maintained in the recent referendum. The Queen is still our head of state. Her position is sufficiently meaningless not to disturb...

SOCIALLY EXCLUDED.
December 1, 1999... BRIEFING FOR A DESCENT INTO POVERTY According to the United Nation's Annual Human Development Report, the combined wealth of the richest 255 people in the world is greater than that of half of the world's poorest people; and that of the...

DEMOCRACY: EATING SIMPLE FARE.
December 1, 1999... Wei Jing Sheng, China's most famous dissident, has spent nearly eighteen years in jail in the People's Republic. In an address at the event Stand In For Wei Jingsheng held on 13 May 1997 at the New York Public Library, the writer Don De Lillo...

A WAR BY OTHER MEANS.(Brief Article)
December 1, 1999... THE UNITED STATES AND JAPAN'S CRISIS Reports of a crisis have reached new heights since the currencies and stock markets of South-East Asia were set in a downward spiral in the second half of 1997, with an increasing association with Japan....

HOWARD'S WAY.(John Howard)
December 1, 1999... CARRYING THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN Defying what common sense might suggest, a car rental company some time ago trumpeted `We're Number Two, We Try Harder!' This audacious advertising ploy excepted, it is hard to imagine who would ever...

DERRIDA COMES TO TOWN.(Jacques Derrida)
December 1, 1999... MORAL PANIC IN THE MEDIA CIRCUS You know that a critic or theorist has achieved fame when they feature in a pop song. F.R. Leavis reached stardom in a song by TISM. Also enshrined with the immortals is Jacques Derrida after a funky number...

TO THE NORTH BY IRON RAILS.
December 1, 1999... TRACKING BETWEEN THE NATION AND THE GLOBE So finally the decision has been made. After ninety years of appearing and disappearing as an issue of national policy, it has finally been determined that Alice Springs and Darwin will be joined by...

THE SPECTACLE OF CORRUPTION.
December 1, 1999... The sour taste which is now the Sydney Olympics is much more than a scandal of the local offspring of the IOC or a comment on how sporting events are poorly administered. As well as these things, it is a window onto how we have come to live...

MEASURING PROGRESS: IS LIFE GETTING BETTER?
December 1, 1999... If we ask ourselves whether our personal lives are getting better, we have to weigh up many factors. We need to take account or our personal health, our housing conditions, our environmental quality and the amount of time we have for leisure...

MARK LATHAM IS MISTAKEN.(Brief Article)
December 1, 1999... Mark Latham makes some good points about the importance of creating civil society, but the story (`Marxism, Socialism and The Third Way', Arena Magazine 42, August-September 1999) lacks perspective on the part to be played by those with the...

THE RIGHT NOT TO WORK.
December 1, 1999... Some people like to work. Others don't. Why can't we accept this fact, and arrange our society so that people have an enhanced prospect of living the kind of life they prefer? Work-obsessed authoritarians like Tony Abbott and Mark Latham...

HENRY FORD AND THE AUSTRALIAN BANKS.(Brief Article)
December 1, 1999... Currently the Federal Government acting, presumably, on behalf of the banks is `resisting growing calls to introduce a community service obligation charter' for Australia's banks. A major problem about such a charter is the present legal...

WHEN WE DEAD AWAKEN.
December 1, 1999... On 1 November 1999, dining at the Royal Palace in Oslo, President Clinton was struck by the distinctive indigenous jacket of Norway's Sami Parliament president Sven-Roald Nysto. His host, King Harald, explained that a national elected Sami...

EAST TIMOR 1: WITNESS TO STRUGGLE.
December 1, 1999... WHY ARE YOU SHAKING? A storm of dust and debris forced the crowd of officials, police and on-lookers to turn their backs as the big United Nations helicopter lifted off from the soccer field in front of the UN compound in Maliana. We were...

EAST TIMOR 2.
December 1, 1999... LITURGY OF THE FREE A mechanic from Elwood worked through the night, sawing and hammering an old wooden fruitbox into a candle-holder the shape of East Timor, and finished as a rose glow heralded dawn. Later, in St Patrick's Catholic...

THE Y2K MILLENNIUM.
December 1, 1999... THE END OF HISTORY, AGAIN The atom at the Greenwich Clock splits, the Eiffel tower's clock ticks over, and the crowds jostling the Times Squares of the world erupt. Who wants to be late for the end of History (to borrow a quip from Jacques...

REINVENTING THE SNOWY.
December 1, 1999... FIFTY YEARS OF MYTHMAKING The Australian Alps currently provide the backdrop for advertisements promoting an up-market new car. We are invited to purchase the latest four-wheel drive vehicle, The Snowy. With its chrome plating and velour...

BLAMING THE BABY BOOMERS.
December 1, 1999... TALKIN' 'BOUT MY `GENERATION' Myth deprives the object of which it speaks of all History. In it, History evaporates. Roland Barthes, Mythologies. Recent media commentary on the ageing of the postwar `baby-boomers' recycles the...

SURVIVING CUSTODY.
December 1, 1999... BURMA'S HIDDEN HEROES, BURMA'S SHAME On 31 May this year U Hla Khin died in Burma's notorious Insein Prison. He was a member of Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy party (NLD) and the latest NLD member to die in government...

UNIVERSITY CHAOS.
December 1, 1999... APOCALYPSE, NO When I arrived here in the early 1980s as a refugee from Thatcherism, I had expected to encounter a hopelessly provincial, intellectual backwater. But the place where I arrived, the Centre for Comparative Literature and...

THE UNDERSIDE OF FASHION.(unfair labor practices)(Brief Article)
December 1, 1999... FIGHTING EXPLOITATION OF HOMEWORKERS Finding yourself in your underwear in a shopping centre is the stuff of nightmares. As `liberated' as we might claim to be about nudity, post the sexual revolution, there remain strict, unarticulated...

The Glorious Dead.(Poem)
December 1, 1999... awash with brilliant light banners fly on high on the midnight street the emporium palace frowns from glittering galleries eyes un-dead blank stare gowns of Eros cut perfect bodies wear wandering...

The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order.(Review)
December 1, 1999... Francis Fukuyama, The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order, London, Profile Books. There is a broad consensus that the 1960s were some sort of golden age, but there is little agreement about why....

Off the Rails, The Pauline Hanson Trip.(Review)
December 1, 1999... Off the Rails, The Pauline Hanson Trip Margo Kingston, Allen & Unwin One of the most memorable features of the 1998 Federal election campaign was the appearance on nightly news bulletins of Margo Kingston, Sydney Morning Herald political...

Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism.(Review)
December 1, 1999... Marilyn Lake, Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1999. The young women who joined Women's Liberation in the early 1970s, or who took feminist studies courses in the 1980s, felt themselves to be part...

Reading the Holocaust.(Review)
December 1, 1999... Reading the Holocaust, Inga Clendinnen Clendinnen's book might cause some consternation among the more learned in the field, but it is an intelligent and accessible text for those who want to expand their understanding of one of humanity's...

TRIUMPH OF THE WILT.(Brief Article)
December 1, 1999... So colour me bitter. No, not against the monarchists; Australia's apathists inevitably won after the third force blinked. The memory of that nationwide royalist frothing-at-the-mouth in '96, when Keating slagged the English for dumping us in...