Douglas Mercer
November 18 2024
In the movie Look Who’s Back the stand in for Adolf Hitler says that the television set in his hotel room is paper thin and is a marvel of human ingenuity; but that all they show on it is trash. He said that in times of distress he understands that people want light entertainment, that’s why in 1944 the National Socialists showed light comedies. But, he asks, how bad do times have to be for the kind of idiotic nonsense that is shown now? (Germany, 2014). He says that we are racing towards the abyss but we don’t see the abyss because the abyss is not shown on television, what you see on television is—and here his voice drips with utter contempt—a cooking show. So the very idea of a “celebrity chef” is utterly nauseous but a chef who pens a middling (and piddling) tale of derring-do in Australia involving everyone’s least favorite pygmy runts the aborigines, the ones who never did a thing worth mentioning on this planet but in a decaying age have become Media Superstars and are catered to at every turn, well that chef is beneath contempt. The book in question is a children’s book called Billy and The Epic Escape and you know it was meant to portray the brown midgets in the best of all possible lights but somehow they ruffled the feathers of the atavistic throwbacks and, as usual, there was hell to pay.
“Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has pulled his new children’s book from the shelves after complaints it stereotyped Indigenous Australians. The 400-page fantasy novel, Billy and the Epic Escape, features an Aboriginal girl with mystical powers living in foster care who is abducted from her home in central Australia. First Nations leaders have said the book reproduces harmful stereotypes and trivializes the complex and painful history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children being forcibly removed from their families under government assimilation policies.”
Apparently the author did not take the notion of Aboriginal Dreaming seriously enough or treat it with due deference. We’re not sure what exactly the dark-skinned homunculi were dreaming about but it could not have been much. From what I can glean their one great invention was the didgeridoo, a musical instrument that has caught the imagination of the world but which emits a drone and buzzing like sound which can be said to assault like a drill bit the ear drums of anyone with even a modicum of sensibility. Other than that they have no claims to fame for until the White man appeared on the horizon they wandered around the island continent aimlessly and accomplished nothing but meager survival. The Media celebrate this dreaming as some kind of deep relationship to the mysteries of the Cosmos but that can’t be true; the Cosmos had long ago wrote them off as an evolutionary cul-de-sac or rat hole and regarded them with the cold indifference which they so richly deserve; and if in this Dreaming they were prophesying it must have been disappointing because the future was going to be simply a continuance of the hand to mouth eking out they are so justly known for; unless they were able to peer into the future and see millions of the gullible who would treat them a victims and give them money and positions of power which they had done nothing to earn.
“Oliver - who is in Australia promoting a new cookbook - has apologized and said he was devastated to have caused hurt. It was never my intention to misinterpret this deeply painful issue, he said in a statement. Publisher Penguin Random House UK said that a consultation with Indigenous Australians requested by Oliver had not happened due to an editorial oversight. Critics said the book contained language errors and oversimplified the identity of First Nations character Ruby. This superficial treatment of Ruby’s character dehumanizes her, and by extension, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples said Sharon Davis of the First Nations educational body Natsiec.”
You bet Penguin is falling all over itself to get back in the good graces of “the First Nation people” although that phrase is a misnomer as walking around barefoot and smelling of dung and dirt and having matted hair that has never been washed does not constitute any definition of a nation of which I am aware. You know that in their heart of hearts the people at Penguin are annoyed by this fracas but in public they have to put on a long and dour face and get in mourning gear as they say just how very sorry they are for offending—editorial oversight you know, sheer inadvertence, so sorry and you can be sure it will never happen again. The next time they have a book about the genetic defectives they will be sure to have them pore over the manuscript and give them total veto power over each word until it paints them as kinds of superheroes and moral paragons. You see this kind of groveling is just the price of doing business in today’s world, someone writes a book which sincerely want to extol primitive nonentities but he misses the mark somehow and, before you can say Outback Lawn Jockey, the barbarous leeches are screeching in the press and the investment of what was sure to be a top seller given the poor taste of the public goes right down the drain.
“Among the complaints is that Ruby is given the ability to read people’s minds and communicate with animals and plants, because that’s the Indigenous way. Sharon Davis said that reduced complex and diverse belief systems to magic. The character is also at the center of an abduction plot, something community leader Sue-Anne Hunter called a particularly insensitive choice, given the painful historical context of Australia; s Stolen Generations. The story’s flippant approach to narrating the theft of a First Nations child dangerously trivializes the ongoing trauma associated with Australia’s violent history of child removal, Natsiec said. A statement from Penguin Random House UK added: It is clear that our publishing standards fell short on this occasion, and we must learn from that. Natsiec said it acknowledged and recognized their apologies and swift action in removing the books from sale.”
That bit about complex and diverse systems is a real howler, who’s kidding who here, right? Not much is complex about some dirty headed animal scratching the rat’s nest on his head and trying to work out the dream which came to him, the one about better bugs being over beyond that dung heap. But it is important for them to puff up the lore (such as it is) of these people so they can have a dignified seat at the table of world history; and if a children’s book writer seems to make light of their so called super clairvoyance and romantic mental capabilities, why then he needs to be called on to the carpet and that book needs to fly off the shelf to the pulp bin. And as for that Stolen Generations claptrap cry me a river on that score, so many had to have that movie Rabbit Proof Fence shoved down their throats all those years ago, and go boo hoo over some runts in short pants who were put in kiddie suits and taught about the wonders of Jesus Christ in a straight-laced school room. I agree that the endeavor was ill conceived, but not for the reasons they claim; the reason is that you never spend your hard-earned money trying to educate the ineducable, and you never try to civilize that which is not fit for it. But by now we are well past the deluge on all this, and no one is crying for the lot of a cooking show host—let him hang---but the banshee wail of the press magnifying this molehill of a story all out of proportion is nothing short of sickening spectacle
