All tip and no iceberg
Nov. 17th, 2007 09:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
todayiamadaisyOne more week to go until the federal election. [deep sigh] It might as well be one more year. Hurry up, week!
It doesn't help that the campaigns are micro-managed now; what little spontaneity manages to poke its head up gets stamped down very quickly.
How different things used to be! My electoral blog reading turned up this gem: the Paul Keating Insults Archive. I loved Paul Keating, self proclaimed "Placido Domingo of Australian politics". I even had a poster of him inside my desk in Year 11.
For the uninitiated, Keating was Treasurer and later Prime Minister in the last Labor Government. He looked the way you'd imagine a cartoon undertaker to look (and, indeed, that's how he was often portrayed). He was an atypical politician (in Australia, at least): where other politicians follow football and affect empathy for the man (or woman) on the street, Keating didn't like sport, collected antique clocks and wore expensive Italian suits.
There was one area, however, in which Keating didn't shake off his working-class roots: his language. On a dull day, he would coast, calling a few Opposition members "scumbags". On a good day, he was hilarious. He popped up on radio a few months ago, saying that the current (conservative) Treasurer was "all tip and no iceberg", which is an excellent insult, any way you cut it. He is even the subject of a recent musical (called "Keating: the musical").
I read a theory once that a strong political leader always has a dark clown, that one trusted colleague who can be called on to get media attention by either being funny or being brutal. It went on to suggest that Keating as leader acted as his own dark clown, which is a good call. The Labor Party made an attempt to regain the Keating magic a few years ago, by appointing Mark Latham to a short, disastrous stint at leading. Latham gave us a memorable quote about the current government's relationship with George W. Bush as being like "a conga-line of suckholes", but he never sustained Keating's level of insult brilliance.
It doesn't help that the campaigns are micro-managed now; what little spontaneity manages to poke its head up gets stamped down very quickly.
How different things used to be! My electoral blog reading turned up this gem: the Paul Keating Insults Archive. I loved Paul Keating, self proclaimed "Placido Domingo of Australian politics". I even had a poster of him inside my desk in Year 11.
For the uninitiated, Keating was Treasurer and later Prime Minister in the last Labor Government. He looked the way you'd imagine a cartoon undertaker to look (and, indeed, that's how he was often portrayed). He was an atypical politician (in Australia, at least): where other politicians follow football and affect empathy for the man (or woman) on the street, Keating didn't like sport, collected antique clocks and wore expensive Italian suits.
There was one area, however, in which Keating didn't shake off his working-class roots: his language. On a dull day, he would coast, calling a few Opposition members "scumbags". On a good day, he was hilarious. He popped up on radio a few months ago, saying that the current (conservative) Treasurer was "all tip and no iceberg", which is an excellent insult, any way you cut it. He is even the subject of a recent musical (called "Keating: the musical").
I read a theory once that a strong political leader always has a dark clown, that one trusted colleague who can be called on to get media attention by either being funny or being brutal. It went on to suggest that Keating as leader acted as his own dark clown, which is a good call. The Labor Party made an attempt to regain the Keating magic a few years ago, by appointing Mark Latham to a short, disastrous stint at leading. Latham gave us a memorable quote about the current government's relationship with George W. Bush as being like "a conga-line of suckholes", but he never sustained Keating's level of insult brilliance.