Weekly Refugee Posting

Immigration Minister Scott Morrison has stopped the practice of weekly briefings about asylum seekers, during which journalists can ask questions, and replaced it with a regular written statement. This is (a) hilarious, (b) outrageous, (c) a further sign he can't handle the pressure of his job, IMHO, and (d) alarming - when will we lose the written statements? Is this stumbling retreat from public scrutiny, or was it planned from the start?

According to this week's written statement, no asylum seekers have arrived in the past week.

On arrival at Christmas Island, an intellectually impaired and mentally ill Iranian asylum seeker was deprived of her medication. Her advocate states: "Within 10 days she became deeply disturbed, screaming, rolling in the dirt, exposing herself, and was subsequently brought to Perth with her father for medical treatment." Despite the sick woman's pleas, her mother remained on Christmas Island; mother and father were told they would be sent to Nauru while their daughter remained in Perth. Thank gods, this nightmare has a happy ending, with the government promising to reunite the entire family in community detention so they can care for the sick woman.

How many others?

Having failed to reintroduce Temporary Protection Visas and to place a cap on protection visas, the Minister has resorted to introducing a code of conduct for asylum seekers in the community under which they can be returned to detention, not for breaking the law, but for "antisocial" behaviour. However, it looks like, once again, the courts will overturn this proposal.

According to budget projections, offshore processing will cost taxpayers up to $500,000 per asylum seeker. It would be cheaper and simpler to fly them here first class and put them up in five-star hotels while their paperwork is done. (Bringing them here safely by boat or plane and then releasing them into the community on modest pensions would of course be even cheaper.) The guvmint expects to spend $9.5 billion over the next four years, but predicts - on what basis it won't say, of course - that arrivals will drop off over that time. Paradoxically, if I've understood correctly, it would be exactly that slowdown that would push the cost up to half a mil, since the offshore detention centres have to be kept open regardless of how many people are imprisoned there.

A report has found that lives could be saved if Australia's various maritime agencies communicate better over search and rescue operations involving asylum seeker boats.

First Draft of "Why Robbie Can't Dance" at 4400 words

YESSSS

I need to prune the story back a bit, but gee I got a shock just now when I searched for [square brackets] - the way I mark [unfinished passages] - and Word couldn't find any. I thought it was malfunctioning.

Kitsch

While sitting around in the ER a few weeks ago, waiting for my swollen tootsies to be triaged (a harmless if alarming medication side effect, as it turned out), I did a little triage of my own – reading some of Kitsch (edited by Gillo Dorfles - translated from the Italian by person or persons unknown). Skip it? Keep it? Extract its knowledgy goodness and pass it on?

In the process I came across several interesting points. The editor argues that, up until very recently, there could be no such thing as "bad taste" when it came to art:

"In ages other than our own, particularly in antiquity, art had a completely different function compared to modern times; it was connected with religious, ethical or political subject matter, which made it in a way 'absolute', unchanging, eternal (always of course within a given cultural milieu)."

Defining kitsch, Dorfles remarks, "it is a problem of individuals who believe that art should only produce pleasant, sugary feelings... in no case should it be a serious matter, a tiring exercise, an involved and critical activity..." Kitsch-lovers he adds, "will judge Raphael as if he were a painter of picture postcards". Kitsch is inferior imitation of art which substitutes sentiment for emotion.

Well, the idea of kitsch as comfortable cutesiness wasn't new to me, and it's easy to sniff at others' taste (the whole book is, inevitably, full of snobbery). What struck me was Dorfles' assertion about "the kitsch aspect in works of today or yesterday which not only clash with our own alleged good taste, but which represent a basically false interpretation of the aesthetic trends of their age". If you will, kitsch is that which aims for art, and misses.

The book covers multiple areas in which kitschy art is liable to be found, including sex, death, and religion. (I turned a page while reading on the bus and was aghast to find myself facing several awful examples of pornokitsch.) "The image of death needs vigor and severity," writes Dorfles, "innocence and putrefaction, blacks and whites; it certainly needs no half tints, sky blues, pinks, angels' wings, frilly chapels or sterilized technology devoid of any real ethical meaning."

In his chapter on Christian kitsch, Karl Pawek remarks, "There has been an enormous loss of substance in Christianity... It is the result of a centuries-old watering-down of the current theological spirit and consciousness. It would not have been possible at the time of the consciousness of mystery which prevailed during the first centuries of the Christian era..." This watering-down resulted in "the substitution of something sweet and nice for something extremely powerful, of secondary for primary, of the psychic and moral Christian event for the objective, ontological event." Now if I'm understanding what this guy is saying, for the earliest Christians, the reality of the divine and its intervention on Earth was profound and immediate, and that's been lost – inevitably? – over so many centuries. (I remember a Catholic friend telling me the Omen movies spooked him because they made it all seem real.) Perhaps the New Age movement is the kitsch version of Neo-Paganism – though gods know we produce plenty of kitsch ourselves.