Arena Magazine articles from June 1999

Arena Magazine archives from June 1999

YOUTH, GUNS AND AUTOMATIC RESPONSES.(discussion of cultural causes of school violence)
June 1, 1999... SIMPLISTIC CELEBRATIONS OF YOUTH AND POPULAR CULTURE ARE ULTIMATELY UNHELPFUL, ARGUES SIMON COOPER. The frequency of schoolyard slayings in the United States over the past few years, and the depressing `copy-cat' attempts to repeat the...

PANGEA REVISITED.
June 1, 1999... LET'S GO ALL THE WAY WITH NATIONAL ALTRUISM. It is time to step outside the all too predictable knee-jerk responses on the global issue of nuclear waste, and think again. The recent proposition put together by Pangea to store world waste in...

THE INVISIBLE MAN.(illegal Kurdish refugee in Australia)
June 1, 1999... I meet Kurdo as arranged at the Asylum Seekers Centre. We're put into a back room and left in private. Kurdo is nervous. He is taking a risk in talking to me. In soft, broken English and considerate sign language, he guides me through his...

OVERLAND AND ARENA.(call for solidarity among the Australian Left)
June 1, 1999... DEVELOPING NEW FORMS OF SOLIDARITY This section of Arena Magazine--`Against the Current'--is a space for short and pointed reflections on contemporary events. The editors wanted it to break a little bit of new ground, to stay both close to...

ART AND CONTESTED PLACES.(importance of artistic community to cultural identity)
June 1, 1999... CULTURAL PLANNERS AND DEVELOPERS CLOSE IN ON A COMMUNITY'S SENSE OF IDENTITY. Gnarabup, the charming little cafe that was once a change-shed overlooking the bay, was forcibly closed at 6 a.m. on New Year's Day 1999 by officials from the...

LETTER FROM THE HINTERLAND.(Broken Hill, Australia)
June 1, 1999... You can't get more outback than Broken Hill, some 1100 km west of Sydney. You also will not get a more classic case of rural decline from what was once a place of fabulous wealth. Revolution in communication cannot alter the fact that the...

A TOWN LIKE CHARLTON.(Victoria)
June 1, 1999... ALL DAY IN THE DARK This article is another in our series `A Town Like...'. We welcome contributions which deal with the complications, joys and problems of living in place. Charlton is a small town in northern Victoria, with a...

CORAL BLEACHING AND DO-IT-YOURSELF MONITORING.
June 1, 1999... HOT SPOTS ON AND OFF THE WEB It is possibly going to be a new pattern of eco-catastrophe. You sit at home and check the web for daily readings from the world's hot-spots. That is what happened with the big eco-catastrophe story of 1997-98,...

THE FIRST LETTER TO THE REPUBLICANS.
June 1, 1999... I, Don, called to be a writer by the will of God, To the vanguard of the various republican movements and to my brothers and sisters in Australia: grace and peace to you. I was saddened to read the article `Republic case in crisis' on...

UNCANNY AUSTRALIA: A CRITICAL RESPONSE.
June 1, 1999... Is Australia postcolonial? For Russell Wright, in his affirming review of Uncanny Australia the answer appears to be `yes' -- self-evidently so. But what does it mean to be in a postcolonial nation and for whom is it postcolonial? It seems to...

DRUGS--ONE SIZE DOESN'T FIT ALL.(response to article by Grazyna Zajdow, Arena Magazine no. 40)
June 1, 1999... In her article `Harm reduction for whom?' (Arena Magazine 40), Grazyna Zajdow gives the impression that a drug-free outcome is rendered almost impossible by harm-minimisation frameworks of treatment for substance use. There is no question that...

HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF IN NORTHERN IRELAND.
June 1, 1999... The depth and spread of modern civil warfare, of which Northern Ireland is perhaps the most salient case, requires healing processes which are beyond the capacities of politicians and bureaucrats. Added layers of governmental and bureaucratic...

DUMPING ON AUSTRALIA.
June 1, 1999... Robert Gallucci, US Special Envoy on Weapons of Mass Destruction, has urged the Australian government to consider an international plan to establish a disposal site for the world's nuclear waste. He maintained that `Australia could play a...

PEACE ENTERTAINMENT.
June 1, 1999... It is clear that nobody out there knows how to make peace--they have no idea, really, of what peace could be. When small countries start committing economic suicide and mass murder, and roll their tanks, all the West can think of after the...

BORN TO SHOP--BORN TO DEBT: Jubilee 2000 - bringing Third World debt to a store near you.(Alternative Futures)
June 1, 1999... JUBILEE 2000--BRINGING THIRD WORLD DEBT TO A STORE NEAR YOU This is the second article in our series `Alternative Futures'. We invite contributions from writers interested in critically exploring projects, large and small, marginalised and...

A TIMOR SETTLEMENT: can it be achieved before 2000?
June 1, 1999... CAN IT BE ACHIEVED BEFORE 2000? On 5 May this year, after fifteen years of negotiating, the governments of Portugal and Indonesia finally reached agreement to consult the people of East Timor on their own future. Until January no-one would...

FRONTING THE ENVIRONMENT, 1. From SLAPPS to astroturf groups.
June 1, 1999... FROM SLAPPS TO ASTROTURF GROUPS It's open shop at Friends of the Earth on Smith Street, Collingwood, and a drizzle of vegetarians make their way for the miso and hand-made soap in the food coop. The front counter never sees the light of...

FRONTING THE ENVIRONMENT, 2. The intellectual sorcery of think tanks.
June 1, 1999... THE INTELLECTUAL SORCERY OF THINK TANKS Conservative think tanks have played a central yet largely unexamined role in the corporate battle against environmental policies and reforms. Think tanks are generally private, tax-exempt research...

Fever.
June 1, 1999... When you wake your body remembers that shattered vase your head whose memory is pushing off into a cold sea burning, slipping in an oily kindling. Those ice-hot splinters, ...

Between Stations.
June 1, 1999... Black sawn into by white shot through negatives. Two trains eclipse like poles repulse bulldozing mountins of dark and quiet

Reims -- She tilts her head to the sky.
June 1, 1999... `L'Azur! L'Azur! L'Azur! L'Azur! L `Azur!' Mallarme She tilts her head to the sky and through the lens of the camera tries to frame all the moments that have drifted from her life. On the cobblestones of the town...

A POSTMODERN JANUS, PART 1.(US/NATO offensive in Serbia)
June 1, 1999... THE HUMANITARIAN WARMONGER? No one responding to the war in Serbia can avoid the massive media concentration on the plight of whole populations uprooted from their homes and the country that they made their own for generations. At least in...

KOSOVO AND WESTERN STRATEGIC HUBRIS: NATO's slide into war was based on stupid triumphalism.
June 1, 1999... NATO'S SLIDE INTO WAR WAS BASED ON STUPID TRIUMPHALISM. The Kosovo disaster should make some leading Western strategic gurus pause for thought. In particular, they should ponder how the availability of sophisticated military hardware can...

WHY ARE WE OVER YUGOSLAVIA? Coherent strategies may lie beneath NATO's liberal blunderings.(includes related article)
June 1, 1999... COHERENT STRATEGIES MAY LIE BENEATH NATO'S LIBERAL BLUNDERINGS. That the war in Yugoslavia has nothing to do with the welfare of the Kosovo Albanians should be clear by now to a wide number of people, especially those on the Left. This is...

YUGOSLAVIA ...(US-NATO war over Yugoslavia)
June 1, 1999... COP FLICK, WESTERN, ACTION MOVIE American television and cinema audiences love cop shows, westerns and action pictures. The current United States-led NATO war over Yugoslavia and the handling of the Kosovo crisis plays very well within the...

GLOBAL RESPONSE TO LOCAL CONFLICT.(conflict resolution in Kosovo)
June 1, 1999... WHAT IS TO BE DONE? The harrowing situation in Kosovo yet again paints in stark relief the central security dilemma of the post-Cold War era. When and how should the global community respond, if at all, to deadly conflict threatened or...

KOSOVO -- HOW TO ACT?
June 1, 1999... MORAL RESPONSIBILITY CUTS BOTH WAYS. The anxieties of Kosovo For those of us on the Left, NATO's military intervention in Kosovo is a source of great moral and practical anxiety. On the one hand, our commitment to humanitarian values...

A POSTMODERN JANUS, PART 2.(intellectual theorist E.P. Thompson)
June 1, 1999... FRAMING A CO-OPERATIVE THIRD WAY That nuclear weapons are merely one expression of a whole class Of proliferating technologies has been slow to establish itself in social awareness. A generation ago, at the high point of nuclear...

The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy.(Review)
June 1, 1999... Anthony Giddens, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy, London, Polity Press, 1998. As the effects of the globalised market have become more apparent, the search for a viable alternative is evident in the increasing interest in...

Open Australia.(Review)
June 1, 1999... Lindsay Tanner, Open Australia, Sydney, Pluto Press, 1999. As the effects of the globalised market have become more apparent, the search for a viable alternative is evident in the increasing interest in the revised versions of social...

Celebrities, Culture and Cyberspace: The Light on the Hill in a Postmodern World.(Review)
June 1, 1999... McKenzie Wark, Celebrities, Culture and Cyberspace: The Light on the Hill in a Postmodern World, Sydney, Pluto Press, 1999. As the effects of the globalised market have become more apparent, the search for a viable alternative is evident in...

The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink.(Review)
June 1, 1999... Mark Dery, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink, Grove Press, New York, 1999. One of the main characters in William Gibson's cyberpunk novel Idoru displays `a peculiar knack with data-collection architectures, and a...

THE GENDERING OF DEPRESSION IN CHILDREN'S FILMS.
June 1, 1999... I have started taking my six-year-old son to films in the school holidays. While I hardly expected to be exalted by commercial children's cinema, I was surprised to see that so many films revolve around the character of a depressed boy. It...

WAR IS HELL?(war according to Hollywood)
June 1, 1999... The Thin Red Line, Terrence Malick's first feature for twenty years, is a flawed and overblown attempt to explore the metaphysics of war. The `novel' representations found in this film present historical events as metaphors and `mythologise'...

THE SKY'S THE LIMIT.(income disparity between executives and workers)
June 1, 1999... There were once two corporate heavies in a limo. One says to the other: `I'm over-compensated, but I'm not overcompensated enough'. There you have it: a New Yorker cartoon's neat depiction of the remunerative open-endedness of today's global...