THE MONTHLY ESSAYS

“Winning the game becomes the only thing that matters; the means become the end. And, in the eyes of the media, the professional politician is the one who knows how to play the game to perfection, not the one with the ideas and vision that are supposed to drive the whole process … Under these circumstances it is inevitable that policies are increasingly launched upon the populace with insufficient forethought and preparation.”

In “Amateur League”, Mungo MacCallum ponders the modern politician, and how this figure has evolved since Federation. What was once a “bit of a diversion” for idle gentlemen has become an all-consuming career. MacCallum is concerned, though, that in the current media-saturated environment, politics is no longer about policy, but “winners and losers”, “control and spin”.

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“Virgin p#rn is obsessively focused on whether young women’s vaginas have been penetrated; a great deal of religious-based discussion obsesses over exactly the same thing. However, while p#rnographers and abstinence cheerleaders may produce the most extreme examples of virginity fetishism, they didn’t create it and they aren’t alone in perpetuating it. The fetishisation of female virginity is older than sin and more widespread than any religion.”

In “Like A Virgin”, Emily Maguire critiques several forms of virginity fetishism at play in our society and discovers parallels between the Christian chastity movement and internet virgin-p#rn. She probes the implications of Tony Abbott’s claim he would advise his daughters to consider their virginity “the greatest gift”, and reflects more widely on the public discourse about how young people should understand their s#xuality.

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“At the outset of the 2010 flu season, 16 million vials of the vaccine for H1N1, also known as swine flu, lay unused. The biggest vaccination program in our country’s history, costing an estimated $120 million, triggered a wave of inaction. The federal health minister, Nicola Roxon, sees this inertia as the palpable cost of complacency. Since the vaccine’s arrival on 1 October last year, Ms Roxon, backed by the major voices in our health system, including the Australian Medical Association, has been urging Australians to take the injection. By the end of January, only 27%, or 6 million people, had listened.”

And in “Known Unknowns”, Malcolm Knox assesses the current health of the nation and its ability to cope with a potential influenza epidemic. Last year’s H1N1 pandemic had a relatively small impact on the nation, but viruses can mutate into more devastating entities, as in the 1917–18 pandemic, and on the cusp of this year’s flu season people are not heeding the warnings to inoculate themselves against a worst-case scenario.

THE NATION REVIEWED

“Even in this most ideologically charged terrain [the education debate], Rudd finds it difficult to define himself sharply. Perhaps Rudd remains haunted by Howard’s ghost when it comes to anything resembling the politics of culture, where, at key points, he relinquishes his own voice and begins to sound like the man he defeated in 2007.”

In the first Monthly Comment, Waleed Aly examines the Rudd government’s proposed national curriculum and explores the way it expresses the current ideology of the Labor party. Recognising that discussions over education inevitably feed into wider cultural debates, Aly is concerned that this policy marks a retreat by Rudd – a nod to the staid “cult of common sense” of his conservative predecessors.

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“For much of the last three years, the conventional wisdom has been that Britain’s New Labour was experiencing its slow death under Gordon Brown’s leadership. Few would have imagined anything other than David Cameron’s Tories winning this year’s general election in May. Yet at the time of writing, Westminster commentators are revisiting the draft obituaries of New Labour they had filed away.”

In another Monthly Comment, Tim Soutphommasane compares and contrasts the political battles being waged this year in Australia and the UK. The governing parties of both countries find themselves in volatile positions as they seek re-election and neither is sure how the wheel of fortune will turn. With the recent home insulation scheme debacle, the failure of Copenhagen and the resurgence of the Coalition with the defeat of the ETS, Australian Labor faces many of the same problems as its Third Way counterparts in the UK.

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And in a further Monthly Comment, Bill Bowtell considers the Rudd government’s proposed hospitals reform; plus, in “Plots”, Debra Adelaide visits Waverley Cemetery in search of an unlikely narrative.

ARTS & LETTERS

“Music – with its crazed intensity, its determination to press emotion out of human bodies and to torment wood, metal and strings into voicing our distress and joy – [took Barrie] Kosky captive. He lived in Australia as if in exile from the overwrought, collapsing world where Mahler’s cosmic symphonies and the violently disruptive operas of Berg and Strauss were composed. The works he has directed during the last decade in Austria and Germany come mostly from this culture of romantic delirium and modernist hysteria.”

In “The Possessed”, Peter Conrad meets the expatriate opera director Barrie Kosky, who is due to become the director of the Komische Oper Berlin in 2012. Conrad traces Kosky’s journey from the claustrophobic, culturally barren Australia of his boyhood to the epicentre of European opera culture where he is free to unleash his expressive best.

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“The Holocaust as literary topic is stuck all over with ‘Do Not Enter’ signs. [Yann] Martel was ready to defy those signs because he believed that fidelity to ‘historical realism’ was killing the imaginative pull of the Holocaust … He wanted ‘the Holocaust’ to spring to new life in readers’ minds just as he had made stained old ideas about the evolution of human intelligence, the human passion to dominate and the imperishable allure of nature to our soiled human spirits burst into flower on Pi’s imaginary lifeboat.”

In “End of History”, Inga Clendinnen reviews Beatrice and Virgil, the new work by Yann Martel, 2002 winner of the Man Booker Prize. The novel is a fable about the Holocaust, told through the voices of a taxidermist, an unpublished writer and two stuffed animals – a donkey and a howler monkey. Clendinnen considers Martel’s motivations for writing a “metaphorical representation” of the Holocaust’s cruelty and analyses his claim that the “historical realist” mode of expressing Holocaust themes stifles our ability to understand it in other ways.

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“The way [Les Murray] can register, in words nobody else would quite choose, a perception nobody else could quite have, is at the centre of his art, ensuring almost infallibly that a poem will work like a lucky charm for as long as he pours in the images … Murray sees the things of this world mis à nu, like Baudelaire’s heart. The charm is infinite because the universe goes on forever, and he would have something unique to say about every bit of it if he could go on sailing long enough through its eternity of transparencies.”

In “Nobel Calling”, Clive James meditates upon the subtlety and resonance of the poetry of Les Murray as he reviews his new collection, Taller When Prone. James suggests that Murray’s ability to grab and enthral us with a combination of immediacy and dynamism – his ability to traverse the places and themes of the world in an essentially universal language – should have paved the way to Stockholm for him.

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Plus, there’s Luke Davies on Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon and Jan Kounen’s Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky; and Anna Goldsworthy on the Sydney Symphony’s Mahler Cycle.