Chickens in Charge.(Book review)

The Triumph of the Airheads and the Retreat from Commonsense, by Shelley Gare: Park Street Press/Media 21 Publishing, 2006, $29.95.

SHELLEY GARE is affectionately remembered by Australian intellectuals as the founding editor (1996-98) of the Australian's Review of Books. Just for once, the feuding classes put away their backbiting and resentment to admire a publication that commissioned a wide range of high-quality writing on ideas and paid a dollar a word for it.

ARB was widely read but lost money and could not last. Gare herself moved on to edit the Sun-Herald/Age's lifestyle magazine, giving her hands-on experience in the parade of airheaded culture she excoriates in Triumph of the Airheads. She wrote for the magazine an unexpectedly successful column purportedly written by her cat, and when her position as editor was made "redundant", she was allowed to take the cat's intellectual property (if that is the correct phrase) with her. The column continued successfully elsewhere, only to be outmanoeuvred by a rival column written by a chicken.

But chickens, as she says, don't just write columns, they come home to roost. Gare argues that the bloating of newspapers and other media with enormous lifestyle supplements and celebrity trivia is a symptom of something that has gone seriously wrong across the board. Airheads, people without general knowledge or common sense but with an eye for hype and the main chance, have moved from the decorative fringes of society to the centre. They have taken over, in business, government, the arts and education. And the youth are being corrupted by imitating them.

This is a book of examples, not of graphs and statistics. And very readable examples they are--this is one of most snappily written non-fiction books in recent times. Many of the horror stories are lined up in the margins of the page under headings like "Omigod" and "Whatever". "Sydneysider Tony Keep went into David Jones to buy a jumper. A young salesman showed him one, and Keep asked him if it was wool. The salesman looked at the label and said, 'No, it's pure merino.'" An AFR ad for the Porsche Cayman S: "Porsche's new baby. An excellent reason to delay yours." (Supposed to be a joke, no doubt, but ...) From the Body + Soul supplement, Sunday Telegraph: "'Laurie touched different areas of my body and asked every organ what it needed,' she says. Now ... she checks in with her organs on a daily basis to ask them what they need."

Very funny. But there is analysis behind the stories. Gare fingers two culprits, postmodernism (widely understood) and economic rationalism. Those two bodies of ideas are not normally attacked by the same people, but Gare argues they form a pincer movement that shreds decent human values and coherent thought processes. Most readers of Quadrant will probably agree with her views on postmodernism and appreciate her examples of its effect on the education system (Australian Education Union branch president: "I would hate to see this debate turn into an absolute prerequisite that all teachers have to pass spelling bees. Literacy is more than just learning how to spell."). They may warm less naturally to her criticisms of the doings of capitalists, but her evidence gives cause for concern.

According to economic theory, businesses are subject to a "reality principle" (unlike, say, literary theory) in that they have customers to satisfy and have to do it as efficiently as their competitors in order to stay in existence. A nice theory, and no doubt true in the long run, perhaps even in the short run for the corner delicatessen. But as in the parallel case of biological evolution, for more complex organisms there can be detours through a lot of peacock tails and overgrown antlers on the path to extinction. The distance from market "signals" to management accountability is illustrated by one of the more satisfying stories in Triumph. ...