Terry's Bon Bon On His Blog Blog

Compliments of the Season to you all and many thanks for your support in 2014.

 

Lament for the Lindt Cafe

It started out as a perfect day in Sydney. People were getting ready for the work day, Christmas shoppers were grabbing a coffee to have some energy for their day and tourists were on their way to or from the Opera House and Circular Quay, maybe planning out their day of sightseeing. Martin Place and the Lindt Café were a refuge in the ‘moment before’.

The moment came around 9.45 on a Monday and for three people there would be no more Mondays or any other days. They had seen their last birthday, they would never need buy another Christmas present, and there would be no more weddings to attend, no more holidays to enjoy. Their moment had come and now it was gone with them.

Just engaging in the mundane suddenly became deadly.

It’s hard to fathom what goes through a seemingly twisted mind. It’s hard to contain one’s rage, even our prejudices or fears and it’s impossible to filter our sadness.

It’s unimaginable what friends and family went through while watching the rolling TV coverage or standing near the scene. It’s even less imaginable to know the anxiety and terror of those inside. 

Is there moral equivalence anywhere here? We condemn someone for choosing a murderous terror to espouse his views but our condemnation requires us to espouse our own and promote them thus as superior. Odd at best.

I think it’s pointless to label what happened as terrorism; that almost legitimises,in its demonising, an act of murder and a hideous crime as something that has as much weight as September 11 and other terrorist acts. But I fear in my criticism I am also adding to the culture of making these acts a contest of tragedy.

Similarly to call what was done ‘evil’ lets him off too lightly.  It gives an excuse when none ought to be given. Labelling an act as 'evil' means they don't have to be responsible nor that their actions were a choice. He committed murder as I said, he chose and acted and exploited fear, and he committed an intentional, terrible, terrifying and ghastly cold act. That’s what he did.

And let’s be clear he did not do one single thing as a Muslim. He dishonours the peaceful, caring and beautiful faith that is Islam. He was a cleric sure but that did not inform his actions. Murderous and hateful intent did and that was informed by a mental imbalance and a warped view of his place in the world.

Martin Place is a peaceful and pleasant place to rest amidst the hubbub and fast pace of the Sydney CBD. Sadly it now has a place in the sadder history of that beautiful city.

Today is another day and we stop and reflect, mourn, and sip a coffee.  We wish Tori Johnson and Katrina Dawson could join us. RIP.

#illridewithyou

“Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts.”    ― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

A Need to Read

I like newspapers and magazines. I mean ‘real’ newspapers and mags, the physical type. I have problems with looking at text on screen and absorbing the information contained therein. It’s one of the reasons I like to turn pages of paper in a book rather than a collection of text on a device. I think a book is perfect for reading so I don’t ‘get’ why I would use a Kindull, a Hobo or whatever. I have tried but I don’t absorb the story or the content as well as I do when I ‘bury’ myself in a book. Odd perhaps but there you go.

I also like to leaf through a newspaper to have the stories laid out in front of me across a page, ordered and neat, ads placed out of the way or nicely breaking up the lay out of the page. I even like the occasional battle getting the pages to turn over without getting all messed up. My Saturday ritual has been for about 40 years to get up, shower, walk to the milk bar and buy The Age then read through it over a slow breakfast.

I don’t mind checking out headline stories on line but if I want to read a feature piece or a lot of stories I have to have a physical paper. I notice I am distracted far more easily reading something on line than if I read a paper which is interesting isn’t it?

It has been alarming to see how quickly newspapers and (to a lesser extent) newspaper have become diminished and are disappearing.   The Herald Sun seems to be doing better than the quality paper but it is a cut and paste paper in many ways with a few pages of local, freshly sourced content and the hideous sweeping generalisations of the adversarial Andrew Bolt plus some acidic Sydneysiders in their opinion pieces.  Fairfax on the other hand seems to have simply decided to let The Age wither away and the business model is to direct readers to online ‘services’ but hasn’t ensured advertising rates reflect the costs of providing content. Fairfax outsourced things like photo content, sub editors (well who knows if they even exist anymore), even printing. The Age is an amalgam of product from New Zealand, regional centres and probably Nauru. The wonderful Age printing works complex out on the Tullamarine airport only about a decade old will now lie empty. The historic Age building in Spencer Street has been demolished (I hear the old printing presses were still in the basement abandoned). The quality has gone, the content has reduced and they just sat back and let it happen and operated on the mantra ‘it’s a changing world’. Sales dropped but readership really didn’t. It wasn’t readers who have killed the Age, it’s the business model and letting advertising dollars slip away.  Duh.

Where does it leave journalists? There are a few, very few investigative journalists, McKenzie and Baker at the Age for instance, and they do a great job. The rest though have become reactive rather than going out and finding stories. Resources and numbers dictate that’s the way it will be from now on. There are reductions in bureaus so stories are sourced from other agencies and that can be fraught with inaccuracies or manipulations which once published become the ‘truth’. To fill pages the temptation is to grab a story from on line sources or ‘stories for sale’ banks. Sometimes they are badly written, sometimes they are simply dodgy but always they are depriving another journalist of an income and the readers from getting real news, stories that have been worked through, edited and are consistent with the values of a masthead. And of course if the tenor of content is a reflection of the newspaper’s owner or a particular political bias the credibility is surely affected. A paper isn’t necessarily playing the boss’s tune directly but if it’s taking its content from other paper’s in that boss’s stable then it will be arguably homogenous. It’s really a shame.

In London there are still about nine newspapers published daily and selling well, Hong Kong has three or four, New Zealand has a couple, the States are still strong and throughout Europe every country seems to be far better served than Australia and are still loyal to the ‘daily rags’. Interestingly media ownership is usually much more diverse in the countries where newspapers continue to do well. I doubt that sales are soaring anywhere but it seems they are maintaining levels. 

I suspect the Herald Sun will survive, the Australian will become a weekly and the Age will be published as a ‘digest’ one day through the week with a Weekend Age.

I shan’t abandon newspapers or my Saturday ritual. I will even occasionally read the Herald Sun and the Oz. I will continue to worry about journalists and their jobs.

But I just wonder if one day in the future a whole swag of people think to themselves ‘I think I’ll go back to buying a newspaper’ and there aren’t any there? Vinyl records are being sold again (and at a crazy expensive price), physical book sales increased last year (even a few new bookshops opened), there are several ‘phone only’ mobile phones available and ‘old fashioned’ sandwich shops are becoming popular.

Have to go now, the cryptic crossword awaits and then the cartoons.