Stepping Up to the Plate: America, and Australian Democracy

2016

CHAPTER 1

America and Australian English

Australia’s former prime minister, John Howard, was keen on telling people ‘to step up to the plate’. Why not ‘to stride out to the crease’? It takes no more syllables, and resonates with Australia’s national sport. Mr Howard was often called a ‘cricket tragic’, whatever that may mean. He was nominated (unsuccessfully) by Australia and New Zealand to become the head of international cricket: vice-president and eventually president of the International Cricket Council. Why then, when he calls on someone to make an extra effort, does he fall back on a baseball image? Nowadays just about everybody is using it. The former New Zealand cricket captain, Danny Vettori, was heard to ask his players to step up to the plate. Even Allan Border, one of Australia’s most successful captains, now a frequent commentator, calls upon cricketers to step up to the plate. As an aside, it should be added that Howard did occasionally use a cricketing expression: ‘I’ll let that one through to the keeper.’ Ironically, and unfortunately, its connotation was negative, meaning ‘That is a question I will not answer’. So the vigorous exhortation was saved for the baseball metaphor. And now any tough situation throws us a ‘curve ball’, whereas cricket’s best exponents deal in swing, seam and spin.

Baseball is of course an American game, whether it was invented there or not. It is a raging passion in America. The use of the American image by cricketers, and certainly by many more of them than Border and Vettori, probably shows first that images have lost their imagery, and second, that American parlance is infiltrating Australian discourse. It is scarcely thinkable that our cricketing greats should actually picture in their mind’s eye a ‘batter’ moving up to the batter’s plate when they want a ‘batsman’ or ‘batswoman’ to get their head down and play a fighting innings, or a bowler to run in faster and bowl more accurately. The image simply does not fit. The clash of images is softened by the abbreviated ‘step up’, where baseball equipment is not actually referred to but the source is the same. In any case, if the baseball image were actually borne in mind when being used, one would be looking at a player sauntering over to the batter’s mark. The image of a ‘batsman’ striding purposefully to the crease at the centre of the field is a stouter one.

Many suspected that baseball had invaded cricket in a big way when World Series Cricket was introduced in the 1970s. Kerry Packer’s enterprise thoroughly commercialized cricket, borrowing many American marketing methods and employing American consultants. Yet Richard Cashman and Anthony Hughes remind us that one-day cricket was dreamt up in England and that coloured clothing was a home-grown intervention, although both phenomena are associated with Packer’s World Series Cricket.¹

Baseball is of course played here in Australia (and Allan Border was indeed a noted batter). While people can watch American baseball on pay TV, it has scarcely been a national pastime. When Major League Baseball was staged at the Sydney Cricket Ground, it threatened a concerted invasion. Baseball and cricket still represent two different cultures, despite the best efforts of Beth Hise to emphasize their similarities.² Yet the metaphor of stepping up is pervasive in language emanating from America. The truth is that we are dominated by American parlance that has long been predigested, and probably even in America has already lost its imagery force. Nowadays we ‘kick ass’, ‘make out’, eat ‘fries’, put ‘diapers’ on our babies, and live in apartments rather than flats. Have we not heard our children, moving their plastic dinosaurs or spaceships, instructing their toys in American accents borrowed from cartoon programs and video games? ‘Children here are Americanized from birth with such programs as Sesame Street, in which they are taught that zed is zee, that sandshoes are sneakers, flats are apartments, and rubbish is garbage [or trash].’³

On a Saturday afternoon near Halloween some Australian cities witness the celebration of Zombie Day. Groups of teenagers walk the streets shrouded in macabre, blood-spattered Gothic drapes, their faces gored with ‘blood’ paint, their eyes obscured by black bruises or hanging out of their socket in a welter of exposed flesh. This bizarre new festival is quite inconsonant with Australian traditions. It is recently imported from America, mimicking the rash of vampire and zombie films coming from the States, and being loosely associated with American Halloween antics. One can scarcely object to young people making harmless fun, but a certain cultural thraldom to America is signified by its appearance. Halloween is a northern hemisphere commemoration, associated with the coming of the dark part of the year, just as Australian days are lengthening into lackadaisical summer. ‘It has become almost totally disjoined from its religious connections and the lineaments of the observance. Trick or treat, jack-o’-lanterns, sorcery, ghosts, vampires and other wanderers in the nether world are entirely imported from America, which imported them from Europe as recently as the 19th century.’⁴ It would be surprising if any of the new ‘zombies’ had any inkling that their celebration emerged from a Christian festival of All Saints, or All Hallows, the eve of which sees the exorcizing of evil spirits.

Sometimes we ‘make a federal issue’ out of something that is more in our state’s domain, even in a low-key argument between friends. This last, of course, actually accords with Australia’s federal system of government in a vaguely familiar way, but it plainly derives from American crime stories; in any case, therein lies another case of America’s political domination of our way of life that we shall come to later: a borrowed federal constitution.

Australia is suffused in American business language, and ‘the bottom line’ has migrated from the office ledger to be the last word on just about anything, ‘at the end of the day’, of course, no matter what time it is. Once powerful words, which had colourful impact when used sparingly and refreshingly, have now been denatured by business language, assiduously forged in American business schools, and retailed in Australia. ‘Robust’ was once a powerful image, invoking the presence of the mighty oak, and of the stout oaken planks that built the British Empire’s ships, but now it is rattled out for any old company’s bottom-line figures, for any old politician’s actions, or for any old spruiker’s slogans. ‘Synergies’ once galvanized the collaboration between two or more persons’ endeavours, but now any old company promises them whenever it takes over any other old unfortunate company. All of them wish to ‘enhance’ their bottom lines, whereas once the maiden quickened her lover’s pulse as the moonlight enhanced her shimmering profile. We now have ‘windows of opportunity’, ‘forward-looking time-frames’ and ‘robust synergies’. ‘Synergy’, says Benjamin Barber, ‘turns out to be a politic way of saying monopoly.’⁵ We once used to get pay ‘rises’, but they long since became ‘raises’. Some called the result a pay ‘increase’, until it became a pay ‘hike’. Now news services are happy to anticipate the Reserve Bank’s next interest rate hike, when we used to take a long walk in the bush, not necessarily uphill.

There was once a perfectly good word, ‘till’, to anticipate a new time, but now American-inspired advertisements teach us that apparently ‘till’ is illegitimate, and only ever should have been regarded as an abbreviation for ‘until’, since now more and more we see it spelt ’til. American retail management has long since taught its staff, or its ‘team’, to be customer friendly by exhorting each to ‘have a nice day’. Now obviously it is better to be treated courteously than rudely, and some customers find the salutation endearing, but irritation is also understandable in those who reflect on the hidden message that their nice day is conditioned by their having spent money in someone’s shop, and that the greeting might be cajoling them to return soon to spend some more. Surprising is it to many who buy a hamburger wrapped in tissue to be told ‘enjoy your meal’. Business leaders incessantly talk about ‘going forward’, as though there was some way to avoid the future. Nick Webb’s Dictionary of Bullshit has kindly gathered for us the irritating distortions of language emanating mostly from American corporate jargon. A sample: ‘downsizing’, a euphemism for reorganization that involves the sacking of staff; ‘rightsizing’—‘a more nauseating version of ‘downsizing’; ‘get with the program’—‘do as you’re told’; ‘hopefully’—‘via German (hoffentlich) into American English … it avoids responsibility [but] does not commit the speaker in the same way as I hope that …’; ‘let go’ an American coinage meaning ‘sack’; ‘MBA’—‘more bullshit from America’; ‘thinking outside the box’—creative thinking; ‘pushing the envelope’—extending the limits of possible action; ‘raising the bar’—another sporting allusion to go along with ‘stepping up to the plate’; ‘outsourcing’ for hiving off functions that are not ‘core business’ and ‘offshoring’ for exploiting the cheap labour of foreign countries; ‘suboptimal’—not so good; ‘win–win situation’—‘a decision in which the outcome is favourable whatever the strategy adopted’.⁶ The Newspeak is ubiquitous. I was recently asked to ‘upcluster’ some academic teaching units from one group of subjects to a better funded group.

Military and political speech can generate distorted language as readily as business. Consider terms launched by the American military: ‘friendly fire’, and the obscene ‘collateral damage’. Or the ‘pre-emptive war’, actually meaning unprovoked invasion; or ‘weapons of mass destruction’, which seems to apply everywhere else but the United States’s massive arsenal of nuclear weapons. Note also the ‘axis of evil’, which implies that evil is the attribute of one’s selected enemies alone. People in positions of high trust may use language to distort and cover the truth. In July 2005 President George W. Bush declared: ‘There’s an enemy that lurks and plots and plans and wants to hurt America again. And so, you bet we will aggressively pursue them. But we will do so under the law.’ In response to questions about reports of sinister activities in Abu Ghraib prison, Bush said, ‘We do not torture.’ Yet the Associated Press that reported these statements went on to say that Bush had supported the effort of Vice-President Dick Chaney to ‘block or modify’ a proposed Senate-passed ban on torture.⁷ What was not torture were ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’, authorized by President Bush. Cheney declared that this was ‘a presidential-level decision. And the decision went to the President. He signed off on it.’⁸ Cynthia Enloe has suggested that the bravado shown by leaders during the Iraq War was ‘a contest between masculinities’, since risk-taking in international affairs was a sign of manliness. A ‘real man’ would subordinate the path of negotiation to military confrontation. This ‘powerful strand of American political culture … values manly shows of overt strength over allegedly softer more feminized demonstrations of patient, careful negotiations’.⁹ It would be foolish to suggest that America was the original source of dishonest propaganda; the Nazis gave it a good go. Nevertheless, America’s predominance in international affairs at the beginning of the twenty-first century brought its public discourse to a massive international audience, and is seen as an example of how politics should be conducted.

Our universities have succumbed to managementspeak in a big way. That is because we have been told over and again that ‘Whether you like it or not, the university is a business’. Of course universities manage large funds, and must do so responsibly and efficiently. In principle, however, that is where the resemblance to business should end. Nobody denies that they are still places for teaching students and conducting research, but research is now scarcely valued unless it has attracted big subsidies and grant funds to support the business. University ‘management’ now talks about core business, writes mission statements and strategic plans, all ideas borrowed from American business and dubiously applied to places of learning. Students have to be recruited by big new ‘general staff’ (non-teaching) units that conduct polished marketing campaigns relying more on glossy brochures and pictures of the nice parts of the campus than the quality of the teaching. Some time ago one beach-side university advertised the university experience by depicting a nubile student in a wet T-shirt on the cover of its brochure. Another advertises a course as ‘totally awesome’. Apparently offended by the linguistic subordination of their viceregency, some vice-chancellors have added to their designation the Americanesque title ‘president’ or CEO (chief executive officer). Sometimes wardens of the university unions have become CEOs. Fond of acronyms, administrators instruct academics to get their forms in by COB (close of business), as if academics knew anything about ‘close of business’. Universities have adopted ‘brands’ and slogans, one such declaring itself ‘Australia’s relevant university’ (begging how many questions?). What were once staff offices or even personnel offices have become ‘human resource departments’ who address us as their ‘clients’ rather than their colleagues. People who use university libraries are no longer students and staff but ‘customers’ or ‘clients’ of the library, inhabiting the ‘learning commons’. In protest at the change to the Staff Office, a retired professor at our university once wrote to the now-defunct common newssheet signing himself as a ‘superannuated human resource unit’.

In our unthinking adoption of Newspeak terms, where we do not probe the surface to the image conveyed by the word, we too readily pass over the sinister implications of the terms; our teachers of the university are now reduced to a commodity, a ‘resource’, just as are the pens and papers and computers and test tubes we use. How far we had come from the honourable commitment entrusted to the highly educated to foster open enquiry and nurture questioning minds. (Even that once honourable word, ‘commitment’, has been hijacked and harnessed to corporatespeak in the interests of company loyalty, team-playing and profit-making.) Zelman Cowen, former Governor-General of Australia and sometime vice-chancellor of two universities, told the story of a management consultant visiting Oxford University and addressing the fellows and professors as ‘employees of the University’. One bold fellow stood up, interrupting the meeting to say, ‘We are not employees of the university. We are the university.’ In one of Cowen’s former universities, the security office is now ‘Safety and Security’, as though staff and students are too dumb to realize that security implies safety.

A few years ago the ‘quality assurance’ wave hit us from across the Pacific. Asking what it meant, we were told that a person could walk into a McDonald’s ‘restaurant’ anywhere in the world and be assured of buying a hamburger of uniform quality. There was no use being affronted by the comparison of our lectures and academic papers with hamburgers and ‘fries’; quality assurance, on this account meaning levelling to conformity, had come to stay. Now, to be sure the assessors of QA do not treat us as hamburger mongers. Yet there is no mistaking the business model of quality assurance. It is focused on mission statements and strategic plans, goal-setting and performance ‘outcomes’. Mission plans are assessed by ‘triangulating’. Business people, from commercial accountancy firms and human resource management units conduct the training and assessment programmes (now, sensibly it must be said, ‘programs’). They teach us to set out our ‘KRAs’—‘key result areas’, or ‘KPIs’—‘key performance indicators’ as managers attempt to measure the unquantifiable. Key performance implies that there must always be new methods of work, and new results, measured by an enhanced ‘throughput’ of more students and more graduates. The system is also called ‘GSPR’—‘goal setting and performance review’. Yet the notion of ‘quality education’ is patently at odds with bigger outcomes, increased throughput, since there is a temptation to lower standards, at the expense of real quality, to produce more graduates. A former assistant registrar recently gave his opinion: ‘Every dollar spent on quality assurance is a dollar not spent on quality.’

The QA promoters have taught us to connect with our ‘stakeholders’, a misfit term in the context of education, since it implies that the whole endeavour is a gamble. Interestingly, when stakeholders are enumerated, high on the list come businesses, along with students and scholars, and somewhere tucked in is ‘the community’. Although there are certain disciplines that should appear on any curriculum, individual ‘institutions’, no longer accorded the courtesy of being ‘universities’ by the bureaucrat mandarins, are asked to identify their ‘core business’, which should gather around their ‘strengths’ and eschew their ‘weaknesses’. ‘Excellence’, becoming the universal description of all programs, is so devalued as to have become meaningless. Weaknesses, unfortunately, too often denote the stronger subjects, because throughputting students find them too hard, and they choose (‘opt for’) more vocationally rewarding courses promising lucrative careers. And so the hard subjects, taught to rigorous standards, like physics, chemistry, mathematics, philosophy, Greek and Latin, become ‘weaknesses’ because the majority of students are enticed elsewhere. Medicine and Law would be exceptions in that they require rigorous study, but the future compensations are huge, whereas physics offers a less certain financial reward for most students.

Business management promotes a ‘brand’ for the institution. Along with the brand goes a new ‘logo’, devised at great expense to the public purse by some private enterprise consultant. The new managerial approach to universities is preoccupied with ‘change’. The implication is that universities, it may be taken for granted, are by nature hidebound and backward-looking. What is rarely explained is the benefit change is supposed to achieve. One obvious benefit is for managers who can point to the changes they have made to prove their ‘vision’ and energy, and ability to manoeuvre unwilling staff. At one training session for new managers, held in an expensive hotel with spectacular views of the Gold Coast beaches, participants were told by one worthy, a ‘keynote speaker’: ‘You must believe in change. If you do not believe in change, go back to your institutions tomorrow and resign your positions.’ We were not told change from what to what, or for what purpose. Change had become an ideal in itself. We may hope that the worthy vice-chancellor himself was ready to welcome change, because he was soon afterwards sacked by his university for plagiarism and other misconduct. A more reflective view comes from philosopher Raimond Gaita: ‘It is not … a truth written in the heavens that universities should change with the times.’ Moreover, the push towards ‘progressivism’ may be permanently damaging to the formation of students; those ‘who self-consciously speak of their studies in the language of the times, having learnt to speak no other, are likely to be prisoners of their times and will not have the words with which to name, and so to recognize, their inheritance. Sometimes, therefore, universities must resist their times if they are not to betray their students.’¹⁰

A curious aspect of assessing quality is that in some exercises it pays little attention to what is actually being taught and what is being researched. Assessors look first to see what policies are given status in print, and what procedures are undertaken to see that they are actually read and absorbed by staff throughout the ‘institution’. Of course they must comply with the vision, the mission statement and the strategic plan. Much more important to the assessor than the quality of work actually done is the teacher or researcher’s first-hand knowledge of management policies, and a ‘triangulation’ exercise is conducted to find out. Each ‘employee’ is subordinated to a ‘line manager’ with clearly defined reporting systems. Each must be involved in adopting clear, ‘goal-driven strategies’. There must be procedures in place to achieve and monitor objectives. What is more, one’s research can scarcely be valuable if it is not conducted as part of a team, the bigger the better. The inquiry of individual scholars is downgraded in this atmosphere. Assessment teams are strongly discouraged from wasting time by showing interest in the actual nature and results of research being undertaken. Process is everything, and its source is American.

Discussion of American influences on Australian language is by no means new; and there remains the important secondary question whether the adoption of certain modes of language actually conditions modes of thought and action. An important study conducted in 1998 critically examined the proposition that Australia had at that time been subject to ‘Americanization’.¹¹ In that collection Pam Peters discussed American influences on Australian English, and concluded that Australian English had not been Americanized ‘because the essential systems are still more or less intact’. Peters acknowledged a large number of Americanisms adopted in Australia, but said that they ‘have rarely replaced the equivalent Australian/British terms—rather they have been restructured into Australian paradigms and denationalised … The host language or dialect simply neutralizes the aliens.’¹² Some expressions have been so assimilated that they are no longer recognised as imports, such as ‘tough luck’ or ‘getting hitched’.¹³ In colonial times we absorbed and appropriated such terms as ‘squatter’, ‘pre-emption’, ‘homestead’ and even ‘the bush’ from the Americans, while our squatters deployed the American axe (ax) to ‘ringbark’ trees in clearing virgin lands. W.C. Wentworth named a property ‘Vermont’.¹⁴

Speech and action

No doubt it is still the case that most foreign words have been nationalized, although one could well argue that globalization has advanced apace since 1998, and that there has been a surging influx of Americanisms since then. Don Watson has remarked how the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001 have changed the language of response in a form of discourse that has girdled the English-speaking world.¹⁵ As a cover for all the measures designed to enhance our security by downsizing our liberty, we are now told over and again, ‘the world is not the same’.

If terrorist attacks have changed the world, so has language. One of the earliest to discern the power of speech to create moral purpose, and thus to motivate action, was Aristotle, writing at the beginning of his treatise on politics: ‘[S]peech is designed to indicate the advantageous and the harmful, and therefore also the right and wrong; for it is the special property of man [human] in distinction from other animals that he [or she] alone has perception of good and bad and right and wrong and other moral qualities, and it is partnership in these things that makes a household and a city-state.’¹⁶

However far modern zoology has expanded the realm of basic moral understandings to other primates, the humanism of the ancient Greeks took these matters seriously, according to the state of their science. Thucydides lamented the decline of morals during the fierce civil war between the Athenians and the Spartans: ‘Words changed their ordinary meanings and were construed in new senses. Reckless daring passed for the courage of a loyal partisan, far-sighted hesitation was the excuse of a coward, moderation was the pretext of the unmanly, the power to see all sides of a question was complete inability to act. Impulsive rashness was held the mark of a man, caution in conspiracy was a specious excuse for avoiding action.’¹⁷ This idea was not confined to the ancient world. It recurs in the work of Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century,¹⁸ and is current in modern political science, often referred to as conceptual change: ‘… language enables us to engage in the practices that make us the moral and political creatures that we are’.¹⁹ In Burke’s era, the Americans rebelling against the British sought to create a new political landscape for themselves by declaring it into being through revealing self-evident truths, so ‘changes in language may be felt not as deteriorations but as great advances’.²⁰ The American Declaration of Independence pronounced the gift of freedom for the rest of the world (if not for American slaves); Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was a succinct, grand and honest enunciation of democracy (a democracy that emancipated slaves).²¹

Admiring America

The present discussion is not intended to denigrate all that is American. Far from it; there are endless features of American life to admire and to enjoy. As it happens, very many—probably most—Australians really love America and Americans. They see Americans as a people of endless energy, enterprise and sophistication. They are excited about the landscape, and wish to visit. If they travel there, they find Americans friendly and welcoming. They admire and use American inventions, and marvel at American achievements unmatched anywhere else, such as in space technology—‘rocket science’. They submerge themselves in American pop culture, and make sure that local versions of pop music are copies of American style, accent and all. They adore American films and television, and follow them closely. Many are riveted by the latest gossip about American ‘celebs’. American ‘high culture’ is also admirable. Helen Irving has penned this accolade to American literature, contrasting it to the English tradition:

The contrast between American and British literature of the nineteenth century is telling. Melville’s Moby Dick, for example—possibly the greatest novel of the century—written in 1851, is a novel of language. Read it and you will gasp at the power of words. In contrast, the writings of Dickens, or Wilkie Collins, or George Eliot—great and powerful English novelists of the same era—are works of character, of plot, and of circumstance. It is not the words that have a life of their own in their work, but the things they describe. In the twentieth century, the great American novelists—Steinbeck, Updike, Roth, DeLillo—wrote stories constructed of words. They wrote a type of documentary fiction. Like the art of journalism, where the shape of sentences, the choice of words to achieve both economy and power, are as significant as the ideas it conveys, this type of muscular, direct-voice fiction is distinctly American. It is documentary fiction, invented journalism.²²

Most Australians were as shocked as Americans themselves by the terrorist attacks in 2001 and, led by the Australian Government, absorbed the blows as though rained upon ourselves. Australians readily accepted that a violent attack on America might lead to attacks on Australia, which indeed happened to Australian tourists and holiday-makers on the Indonesian island of Bali in 2002.

To criticize some American attitudes and policies is not to be out-and-out anti-American. We could do well to take a leaf out of Arundhati Roy’s book:

What does the term ‘anti-American’ mean? Does it mean you’re anti-jazz? Or that you’re opposed to free speech? That you don’t delight in Toni Morrison or John Updike? That you have a quarrel with giant sequoias? Does it mean that you don’t admire the hundreds of thousands of American citizens who marched against nuclear weapons, or the thousands of war resisters who forced their government to withdraw from Vietnam? Does it mean that you hate all Americans?

[The] sly conflation of America’s culture, music, literature, the breathtaking physical beauty of the land, the ordinary pleasures of ordinary people with criticism of the US Government’s foreign policy (about which, thanks to America’s ‘free press’, sadly, most Americans know very little) is a deliberate and extremely effective strategy. It’s like a retreating army taking cover in a heavily populated city, hoping that the prospect of hitting civilian targets will deter enemy fire.²³

Brendan O’Connor has proposed three levels for the term ‘anti-American’: first, criticism of American politics, values and culture: ‘Calling rational objections to the US anti-Americanism is a disingenuous way of dismissing unwanted criticism.’²⁴ Second, ‘sweeping claims about American people and culture or an inability to see anything admirable about American foreign policy’. Third, sheer unthinking hatred.²⁵ Although this book will inevitably make some harsh comments on American politics, it is in no sense intended to be critical of the American people, individually or collectively. It is more concerned with unthinking acceptance of certain peculiarly American ‘values’ that are imported into Australia.

The American response to the 9/11 attacks was outrage mixed with disbelief, a brief outpouring of spiritual piety, and a deep-seated urge for revenge. The post-9/11 discourse heralded—and indeed unleashed—much violence upon the world. Despite Australia’s admiration for America, and our government’s obsequious desire to fall into line with America’s global Realpolitik, it must be acknowledged that the influence of recent American discourse—much of it spinning and distorting and corrupting language—has influenced patterns of thought and behaviour around the world. ‘[T]he loss of a common language is the loss of community and the destruction of a common world.’²⁶

Prominent Australian human rights lawyer Julian Burnside likens the replacement of a common language of meaningful content to a version of George Orwell’s ‘Newspeak’:

Meaning is shrouded in abstraction; vagueness and ambiguity pile up; and the hearer is left wondering whether the speaker would be able to explain what they mean, or whether they mean anything at all. The sad result is that most of us hear the message we want to hear, or give up altogether and turn to more useful pursuits like beekeeping or hibernation—anything but try to distil ideas from the wash of words coming from those who presume to lead us.

A commitment to social justice brings Burnside to supplying parallel examples to Thucydides’s words with changed meanings: ‘When innocent victims of oppression become illegals; when immigration policy becomes border protection; when global warming becomes climate change, it is time to be alert and also alarmed.’²⁷

The following chapters, while never forgetting the overt admiration Australians have for America, attempts to deal honestly with the underlying differences between Australian and American culture, and to consider how the influence of the much larger society can be a danger to the integrity of the smaller. We sometimes fear that Australia, along with much of the rest of the world, is being asked to step up to America’s plate.

Notes

1Cashman and Hughes, ‘Sport’, in Bell and Bell (eds), Americanization and Australia , pp. 186–7 [hereafter Americanization ].

2Hise, Swinging Away .

3Geoffrey Maslen, ‘The Americanization of Australian English has some scholars worried’, Chronicle of Higher Education , 9 February 1996, p. 39; cf. Brian Matthews, ‘Trashing American English’, Eureka Street , vol. 29, no. 19, 2011.

4Brian Matthews, ‘Supermarket witches and the Australian pumpkin boom’, Eureka Street , vol. 22, no. 22, 2012.

5Barber, Jihad vs McWorld , p. 137.

6Webb, The Dictionary of Bullshit , pp. 1–26.

7Associated Press, ‘Bush: We do not torture terror suspects’, 11 July 2005 (viewed 19 February 2016), < www.nbcnews.com >

8Joe Peyronnin, ‘Cheney’s torture logic’, HuffPost Politics, 25 May 2011 (viewed 19 February 2016), < www.huffingtonpost.com >. Information from unpublished manuscript by A. Lynch, delivered 30 September 2010.

9Enloe, Globalization and Militarism , p. 47. Thanks to Professor Stephanie Lawson for this reference.

10 Raimond Gaita, ‘Truth and the university’, in Coady (ed.), Why Universities Matter , p. 42.

11 Bell and Bell (eds), Americanization .

12 Pam Peters, ‘Australian English’, ibid., pp. 32–44, at p. 41.

13 Ibid., p. 36.

14 Noel McLachlan, ‘The future America: Some bicentennial reflections’, Australian Historical Studies , vol. 17, no. 68, pp. 361–83, at pp. 369, 375.

15 Watson, Death Sentence , pp. 81–8.

16 Aristotle, Politics , 1. 1. 11, trans. H. Rackham, London: Heinemann, 1977, p. 11, and for the seventeenth century, cf. John Locke, A Essay Concerning Human Understanding , London, 1690, 3. 1. 1: ‘Language is the great bond and common tie of society.’

17 Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War , 3. 82, trans. Richard Livingstone, London: Oxford University Press, 1943, pp. 189–90.

18 White, When Words Lose Their Meaning , p. 3.

19 Ball, Farr and Hanson (eds), Political Innovation and Conceptual Change , p. 1.

20 Ibid.

21 Watson, Death Sentence , p. 84.

22 Helen Irving, ‘A nation built on words: The constitution and national identity in America and Australia’, Journal of Australian Studies , vol. 33, no. 2, 2009, pp. 211–25, at p. 218.

23 Roy, The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire , p. 16.

24 Brendan O’Connor, ‘Are we all Americans now?’, Australian Journal of Political Science , vol. 39, no. 2, 2004, pp. 421–6, at p. 422 (parenthesis added).

25 Ibid.

26 Ball, Farr and Hanson, Conceptual Change , p. 1.

27 Burnside, Word Watching , p. 342.

CHAPTER 2

Americanization and political culture

In 1998 an instructive survey, edited by Philip Bell and Roger Bell, explored the influences of American life and culture on Australia.¹ Scarcely any aspect of Australian life was unaffected by American example or direct intervention by Americans, almost from the beginning of our colonial history. This fine collection of essays exposed a rich vein of observation on the United States, and offered astute commentary on the interactions between our two polities—all the while accepting that America, being vastly bigger than Australia, was the dominant partner in any exchange. Yet the somewhat patriotic tenor of the volume was that, although these American influences were everywhere to be found, they were largely assimilated to our own purposes, and changed into acceptable Australian patterns. As one of the contributors put it, the process was largely to ‘adopt, adapt and transform’.² This applied as much to language as to popular culture, film, television, sport, urbanization, literature, race relations, industrial relations and popular movements.

Things may well have changed since 1998. The Gulf wars and Afghanistan have complicated our relations with the United States, but scarcely more than did Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, the Korean War in the 1950s or World War II in the 1940s. Since then a watershed event, the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, and later major attacks in Britain, Spain, Indonesia, India, France, Australia and elsewhere, have changed our outlook on the world. After 9/11 we were persistently told that the world (no less) was not the same.

This book is not an attempt to update or question the conclusions of the Bells and their collaborators since 1998. Neither is it an anti-American tract. The Bell book held up a candle to the many miraculous contributions America, set in a rich, majestic landscape from sea to shining sea, has made to world culture, and continues to make. It would be presumptuous to try to elaborate on American achievements in science and technology in order to appreciate their decisive influence on the rest of the world. We have all had the opportunity to enjoy American popular culture in music, film and television, which have the capacity to delight as well as to exasperate. Popular culture scarcely covers the achievements of some of the greatest symphony orchestras in the world, such as in Cleveland, New York, Minnesota or Philadelphia, or the recent international transmissions of live performances from the Metropolitan Opera. No one could deny that Jackson Pollock, Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ursula Le Guin, Rachel Carson, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison, John Updike or a host of others have contributed to culture the world over. It is not our purpose here to catalogue unending American achievements (and lists are invidious because they must stop somewhere), or to debate whether the contributions of such endeavours have been benign or pernicious in our culture.

The present purpose, rather, is to take up a comment in the essay, ‘Political culture’, by Elaine Thompson, concerning the rise in Australia ‘of a more individualistic ideology more akin to that which has dominated the United States’.³ The individualism of which Thompson speaks issues in a distinct aversion to collective effort as exemplified by the activities of the state, and in a deep—if ambiguous—hostility to the federal government. That hostility was built into the federal system of government, an American invention. Thompson writes perceptively of the ‘profound consequences for the entire definition of Australian politics’ by anti-statist ideas coming out of the United States in the twenty-five years before her essay was written:

Given Australia’s history, the impact of supply-side economics and anti-State ideas that spread out of the United States was remarkable. For the first time in Australia’s history the State was seen as parasitic and as antagonistic to the health of the private sector, rather than in partnership with it. Metaphors were taken from the United States and applied inappropriately to Australia. For example, it was claimed that Australia, like the United States, had seen the growth of the ‘special interest’ or ‘captured’ or ‘overloaded’ State.⁴

It must be acknowledged that, over the years, those epithets have actually become more descriptive of Australian attitudes. This process has continued apace since the publication of the Bell collection. The so-called special interests had become, falsely and insultingly, ‘elites’, characterized by intellectualism and a propensity to sip latte and chardonnay. Such ‘elites’ were ironically so labelled in place of the real elites of the wealthy, the landed property-owners and the business tycoons. The source was ‘the American environment of weak and divided government. According to the overloaded state thesis, by the 1960s the capacity of the American government to influence the direction of public policies was systematically abdicated to private groups.’⁵ ‘Privatization’ became a catchword for the dismantling of government services in both America and Australia (and elsewhere in the spreading contagion). In a blunt riposte, the American political scientist Benjamin Barber declares that ‘Privatization … is about terminating democracy’.⁶

In the final essay of the Bell collection, McKenzie Wark wrote astutely of America’s having lost ‘the art of being a public’.⁷ The great vehicle of individual endeavour was the market, which replaced most senses of community. In fact, the nation itself was reduced to a market:

The dismal discourse of economics offered, in the end, nothing beyond the path of working, eating, and distracting ourselves until we die all with the utmost efficiency. What had promised to be a discourse that would rationalise those parts of life not worth spending any more time on than necessary, leaving more time for things worthwhile, had promoted itself to the only thing worth anything. What had once been merely the means to the good life touted