Folks, welcome to the culture wars. It’s well-known at this point that despite their salvos against ‘snowflake culture’ and the perpetually offended, The Australian‘s opinion pages contain some of the shrillest grievances imaginable. A brief glance at their homepage on any given day reveals thousands of words of distilled whinge, delivered via a roster of truly diverse voices:
https://twitter.com/SamuelCooney/status/936703451295236096
Today they’ve truly outdone themselves: they have not one, not two, but three opinion pieces currently running about the Triple J Hottest 100, all of which are ostensibly aimed at an audience who stopped listening to popular music altogether because they thought Elvis‘ pelvic gyrations were too lusty and pornographic. I for one am incredibly glad that they’re trying to whip up outrage among a group of people who have probably never actually heard of the Hottest 100, let alone the date it takes place.
The first column comes from Maurice Newman, who I stress looks like this:
Maurice, who is potentially old enough to have personally met Mozart and congratulated him on his beautiful concertos, used the changing of the Hottest 100 date as a platform for a generalised invective against the ABC, which he chaired from 2007 to 2012. Before that particular CV addition gets you offside, it’s worth remembering that Newman’s main role in the media is to claim that climate change is a hoax. I think it’s safe to disregard any opinions on the future of the planet from a 79-year-old man who could conceivably cark it at any moment, and it’s safe to assume the same for his opinions on an annual radio programme.
His opinions on Triple J are clearly well-reasoned:
Now, acting like a rebellious teenager, Triple J has fired a broadside at Australia’s other hallowed anniversary, Australia Day. Triple J claims the Hottest 100 is “an institution that’s the cornerstone of many young Aussies’ Australia Day celebrations”. The move to “a less inflammatory date” follows research and feedback from 65,000 listeners aged 18 to 30, most of whom voted for it.
We’re told the Hottest 100 has mostly been held on Australia Day, but it’s not about Australia Day. No. It’s about “Invasion Day”. It’s a political statement. It’s the latest left campaign being pushed by some in local government to “mark the loss of indigenous culture”.
Well, he says it right there. Most of the listeners aged 18 to 30 voted for a change of the date. You can’t see a more shining example of liberal democracy in action, really. Besides, a bunch of youths tuning in to find out whether PNAU cracked the top 40 on a slightly different date does not affect Maurice’s life one iota. And yet he whines.
The second column comes from Jennifer Oriel, whose columns I strongly recommend unto you as they make less and less sense every week she publishes them. Her role at The Australian seems to be to optimise the website’s SEO for the key phrase ‘cultural Marxism’, because she manages to say it about 50 times per column.
Here’s the kicker from her piece, which is a furious rage against university postcolonial studies and also the Hottest 100 itself, which she pretends to have listened to at some indeterminate point in the past:
If you’re offended by the arrival of Anglo-European culture in Australia, let me suggest a few tips for decolonising the nation: turn off your radios, hand back your phones, smash your computers and TVs, toss out your toilet, give back your antibiotics, soap and running water, burn the vines and bulldoze the university, forget the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, Mozart, Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, democracy, formal equality, freedom of thought, freedom of expression, the English language, newspapers, cars, aeroplanes, movies, jeans. And switch off the lights on your way back to the cave.
Ah yes, that classic philosophical argument: “If you hate society so much why do you freakin’ live in it?” Mighty scholars of the Enlightenment like Hume and Rousseau would no doubt bow down in front of Oriel’s unimpeachable logic, which has somehow linked widespread opposition to the current date of Australia Day and the Hottest 100 to… the invention of the radio. The specific date of Australia Day must remain untouched, or you’re disrespecting the guy who invented jeans. Never mind the European massacres on the Australian continent. Focus on the jeans.
The final piece comes from former editor Chris Mitchell, who argues that the decision on the Hottest 100 is designed to merely “make inner-city hipsters feel good”. He fails to mention that the countdown itself is a long-running project with the specific goal of making inner-city hipsters feel good once a year for roughly eight hours.
After spending a number of paragraphs arguing that it doesn’t actually matter that much, and it’s not that big a news story, and he’s not that mad about it despite the fact he’s written a furious column, he drops this clanger:
To my mind, the decision represents something worse in the national debate about race than the ongoing Australia Day controversy: the privileging yet again of the feelings of metropolitan white and immigrant Australians over concern for — and action to fix — the destructive living conditions of regional and outstation Aboriginal people, who are still dying 20 years younger than the rest of the country and whose women and children are too often subject to unspeakable abuse.
It’s interesting that Chris argues changing the date is both a pointless act of gesture politics requiring next to zero effort, and also such a world-changing ideological move which sucks the air out of any parallel effort at helping Indigenous Australians. I might argue that the Hottest 100 move – as symbolic as it is – hasn’t devastated Indigenous communities as thoroughly as The Northern Territory Intervention, which Chris’ newspaper strongly advocated for.
There you have it. The Australian isn’t mad about the affectations of inner-city hipsters, who are faffing about while noble columnists put their heads down and do the real work. They’re so not mad about it they published three columns about how not mad they are.
