Spats and simpers: celebrities are news

Ann Curry's simpering interview with Angelina Jolie has been aired over and over - as if it has some major news significance. Oh, lordy, where will I have to see it next? Curry whispers at her subject with coy adulation, leaning forward in her chair, nodding like a bobble-head and daring to inject her own opinions and moist-eyed life stories into her interview - as if she and Jolie are just such special peers. I think I will dub it the American "simperview" since the talent-challenged Curry is not the only interviewer who uses this cringe-inducing technique. It seems intended to inject some emotional gravitas into what is basically pretty airhead material. Let's face it, Angelina Jolie is doing interviews to promote a new movie. The whole vast "scoop" interview is just a plug. This is not to say that Jolie is not one of the more interesting actresses around. She has always been "different" and she has a powerful and admirable political conscience which, one hopes, is of some influence to the masses in this gob-smacking culture of celebrity. But, bottom line, when she goes out there doing a dollar-driven movie promo, the media dissolves into a pathetic goo of star-worship.

How very differently does the media treat Jolie, the political animal, from the way it treats Rosie O'Donnell, the political animal!

The big bad right wing men in suits can't spew enough bile about Rosie. Rosie, a self-described "fat lesbian", is a popular hate target for expressing views not dissimilar to those of the beautiful Angelina Jolie. Rosie is intelligent and highly articulate, but Rosie is portrayed as a wicked loudmouthed left-wing extremist. The big bad right wing men in suits devour her with relish as an outlet for their deep anger at the very existence of a thinking left. She's an easy target, a soft target - and there's nothing they like better.

After yesterday's The View, they are having a field day - since Rosie was in very heated dispute with the very pretty and pregnant poster girl of the right, Elisabeth Hasslebeck. Hasselbeck is The View's balance of opinion - since most prominent and politically aware females in showbiz are, in fact, of Democrat sympathy. Hasselback is the NeoCon plant. She is a creationist.

While Rosie rose through the ranks of showbiz with brains, wit, originality and talent as a comedian, Hasselbeck's vast achievement was being a pretty thing on Survivor: The Australian Outback. I watched that show and I can barely remember her, but apparently American viewers so adored the cute shoe designer that, while she did not win Survivor, she won the bigger prize of national celebrity. She's a pretty little blonde, after all. The stereotypical American mould.

Watching the political spat on The View, I saw Hasselbeck on the attack and Rosie on the defensive. Hasselbeck struck out stridently, a ferocious viper already enraged by Joy Behar's praise for Al Gore and criticisms of the Bush regime. "Poor little" nothing! As she, indeed, said. Hasselbeck is a confident, self-righteous Republican and, doubtless, she is subject to constant briefing and revving up by the party cronies who would see her as a media prize. If you watch footage of that now historic spat, you will see Hasselbeck doing most of the talking and shouting - not Rosie. In sad fact, the two of them drowned out the real speaker, comedian Joy Behar, who had outlined a carefully-considered list of the political crimes of George W. Bush and his administration.

Rosie was naughty because she had a personal agenda with Elizabeth and, in giving vent to it, she enabled Elizabeth's shrieking outburst - all of which effectively took the audience's eye off the significant political ball that Behar had put into play. And it gave the men in suits yet another opening for yet another onslaught against Rosie.

Rosie will be gone from The View in three weeks - rather controversially insofar as all the denials in the world will never convince us that her departure was not pressured by the men in suits.
Meanwhile, pretty little Mrs Hasselbeck will stay on, radiantly pregnant with the next generation of Christian Republican creationists.
And, here's the bet, it won't be long before Fox is making a lucrative offer to draw her into their fold of "fair and balanced" rabid righties.

China out of control

We were eyeing off the price difference between farmed and wild scallops in the supermarket tonight. It has always been an ethical preference to buy farmed fish since they are a renewable resource, so to speak. The wild fish are twice the price - and rightly so. But we noticed that the farmed scallops came from China and immediately we recoiled in horror. Such is the impact spurred by the Chinese pollution of the food chain.

Their toxins now are in fish food - and young farmed fish fed with their cheating ingredients are suspected to have been liberated into the streams of America. Heaven alone knows what the Chinese are using as feed in their own fish farms. One can only imagine that yet more corners have been cut. One simply has no trust in the Chinese any more.

Now there are poor people with kidney failure from the antifreeze ingredient, diethylene glycol, the Chinese substituted for glycerine. People drank it in cough syrups - took it as medicine to make them well. What a grotesque irony.

Sick and dead people, sick and dead pets, polluted fish...
Where will it end?

I'm now boycotting all foods from China. Every thinking person should do so.
In fact, they should boycott the Olympics, too.

Hicks is torture for us all

As Australia goes into assorted paroxysms about the news on Australia's Gauantanamo detainee, David Hicks and his first court appearance, I slink into a corner of despair. I am sick and tired of hearing about this foolish would-be terrorist who now has pled guilty to supporting a terrorist organisation.
I think the American Government has been yet more obnoxious than Hicks in insisting on his lengthy and inhumane incarceration at Guantanamo, which is the very sort of hell hole of torment from which the US purports to want to rid the world. Its' treatment of Hicks has only served to turn him into a celebrated case - and, doubtless, a seriously traumatised nut case.

I venture to suggest that this whole shambles might have been avoided if David Hicks had stayed at school and learned a thing or two. He left school at 14, expelled - a raw boy with comic book dreams of being a warrior. He replaced school learning with gun learning, drugs, car theft and sex. He had two children by the time he was 20. At 24 he was off in Albania joining the Kosovo Liberation Army. Any fight would do. He tried to get into the Australian army, but it insists on education among its recruits. So he turned to Islam, headed off to Pakistan to be trained and the next thing, he was bragging he had met Osama bin Laden 20 times.
He was a pretty reprehensible young man.

But then the Americans mistreated him and denied him his rights in that vile detention centre - and he has been headlines ever since.
This man who sought to fight against his own people is now a cause celebre. Not a day goes by without mention of his name. He has turned into a major political issue - so much so that the forthcoming Australian Federal election is destined to be waving the flag of his case in a frenzy of point-scoring. It is going to go on and on.

And we are all punished for a school drop-out's stupidity.

In support of hemp

Hemp! Hemp! Hemp!
The call by Australian union leader Bill Shorten for the country to replace water-wasteful crops such as rice and cotton with hemp is the sort of common sense I have been waiting to hear from the world of politics - as they bleat and argue about the drought and the pitiful state of the poor, over-used River Murray.

Which complete idiot decided that Australia should be a rice or cotton-growing nation in the first place?

Talk about inappropriate, illogical and completely damned profligate.
The ultimate inanity of it all is that Australia has to export its cotton to India, China and Korea to have it processed. That's only half an industry - with a considerable cost to the environment. The Cotton Australia website admits freely that cotton "ammonium nitrate, radiological sources, harmful biological materials and hazardous chemicals" are associated with cotton-growing. Chemicals such as endosulfan, sodium chlorate, paraquat, aldicarb, disulfoton and phorate are actually national security concerns, for heaven's sake.
What are we doing here?
All it can do is to pollute the landscape and suck up the water supply.

As for the rice. We grow the worst rice in the world, in my expert culinary opinion. I do anything to avoid buying Australian rice - because it always means a disaster in the pot. I love my son very much - but when he brought Australian rice into the house instead of proper Thai Jasmine, I was really piqued with him. I had to cook this crap? Guess at water measurements because it is never consistent with the ancient traditions of rice cooking? Our neighbours in Asia grow wonderful rice in environments suited to the required irrigation. I don't care what the industry proponents say, it seems to me that we are compromising our fragile environment for the sake of an unnecessary and second-rate product.

Australia now has a scandalous 2500 rice farms and brags it lives at the top end of the international rice market.
Australia, always short of water, now is in the throes of drought. But we still divert water for rice crops.
Hemp is the logical answer.

It is no silly hippie solution as the market conservatives try to propagandize. It is a brilliant fibre crop which produces a product stronger than cotton with by-products equivalent to wood pulp plus an excellent seed oil. It endures drought and climate variablility and it does not need a squillion pesticides or supplements.

But of course, gasp, it is "hemp" and attracts the knee-jerk response of the ignorant who seem to think it is a drug. It has negligible THC. The THC thing is the big red herring and the rice/cotton vested interests will drag it around to see if they can make it stink rather than change any of the things they are doing.

It will take a resolute government to tackle water shortage from the cropping point of view. One with a new sort of moral fibre - er, so to speak.

Oh, Molly.

The geographical distance could not be greater but nor could the spiritual proximity.
Molly Ivins was one of my own kind - one of the very best. She may have been writing in Texas, but we were reading her in South Australia. Avidly. With absolute joy that she was allowed to have a voice in the American media landscape. The balanced voice, the funny one - satirist and wise woman. She wielded wit and irony as weapons of mass communication.
That breast cancer has taken her is an outrage and an injustice.