Another worthy intellectual edition to the Bill Henson debate…
Arty farty types — got any other suggestions for controversial art installations, besides Parry’s ‘Ecstacy Tablets On Canvas No 304’ or ‘Ruminations on an AK47 Assault Rifle’? Email boss@crikey.com.au
Aah, good old cheap populism. Never get between a publicity-desperate politician and an idea which sounds instantly brilliant on talk-back radio (ie the stupider the idea the better). If one extends Senator Parry’s logic to its conclusion, kids with no clothes = evil, therefore all children will now have to wear raincoats and blindfolds while taking showers. By the way, is that the Senator’s direct mobile you’ve listed or is it his publicity dude? (I’m thinking the political hangers-on from O Brother Where Art Thou – fat greasy dudes trying to come up with the next brilliant idea to save their boss’s election campaign).
Further to my previous comment, this press release reminds me of a significant moment in my own political development. It was 1999, I was 23 and the remake of ‘Lolita” was just hitting the screens. I saw Deanne Kelly interviewed on tv about this, and realised for the first time in my life that there were people in Federal Parliament who were total morons. Kelly was appalled about the film, despite having not actually seen it, because she’d heard it was a ‘sympathetic’ portrayal of a paedophile. Moving on from the fact that Lolita far more resembled your average 17 year old than an 11 year old, the cleverness of the film was that it did indeed portray the main character (name escapes me) sympathetically whilst leaving the viewer in absolutely no doubt that, from the second he decided to turn his fantasy into reality, he was absolutely doomed. This meant nothing to Kelly, whose idea of your average paeodophile was clearly some creepy bloke in a big raincoat with a bag of boiled lollies targetting kids in playgrounds. She was in total denial that most paedophiles in fact fit a very different description in terms of both their own lives and their relationships with their victims. The upshot of all of this is taht her idea of a good approach to reducing child sex abuse is to ban films about the topic and pretend that trusted family members, teachers or priests are totally harmless. This is clearly very stupid, because it’s counter productive and does virtually nothing to protect kids at risk. It’s also one of the obvious problems with this press release, and Hetty Johnson’s approach to Bill Henson. While she’s got the whole country up in arms about an art exhibition, kids genuinely at risk from people who aren’t trendy photographers (and I’m pretty sure it’s fair to say that most kids at risk are not at any risk from trendy photographers) are forgotten. While it’s good that Senator Parry claims to be concerned about this issue, it would be even better for him to do some genuine work to protect kids at genuine risk rather than just come up with overly simplistic sound bites to appeal to moronic shock jocks. After all, I thought that’s what we were paying him to do.
Having just read Bernard Keane article. It would appear the senator is just another rabid, right-wing Catholic who wouldn’t know ‘art’ if it was stuffed up his an*s. His key words illustrating the point “Our children must be cared for, etc. Does the good senator have any children of this age group?
I would say the Hon Senator did the people of Tasmania a favour by leaving the Force. Not so sure the favour has been extended by sending the yearling member to the Senate. Sounds like a one term wonder to me.
What if I became the opposition whip without having been educated about logical fallacies, to wit, straw man arguments?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
Idiots and politicians. But I repeat myself.