22 Jul 2018

Big Edna And The Decline Of The Arts

By James Gervaise: Back in the 80s, when I was just beginning my career as a TV writer my newly acquired agent secured me my very first job. It was writing a little in-house doc for the then NSW Film Corp. The film was to be used to educate school principals on the joys of multiculturalism. I threw myself head first into it just like any other fresh faced and overly keen cadet and did my research. Within in a day my heart sunk. As I explored the theme of the doco I quickly came to the conclusion that “multiculturalism” was simply a concept. It did not exist. It was someone’s idea. And worse, it was a very bad idea and, when held up to the sunlight, could not hold its shape or form in reality. Imagine my dilemma. The person running the NSWFC at the time was a formidable woman, “Big Edna.” To get an accurate picture of Ed think Doris Lessing, up-sized, wearing a house dress, grey hair tied back, chardonnay marinated face devoid of make-up. From what I had been told Ed had been a Gough Whitlam appointee in the “arts” bodies and had managed, over the ensuing years, to lever her way into various positions she was wholly unqualified for. Similar woman went on to dominate all the Australian Film funding bodies and still do. They are entirely political and have a ruthless agenda.

So, this young and keen writer attended a script meeting as the only male in the room and I expressed my concerns about my subject – “I am trying to spin something that there is no working model for and isn’t that just propaganda? And from the extensive personal research I have done in our ethnic communities I have discovered that it is these very communities themselves who do not want multiculturalism. They have, in fact, very little respect for each other’s cultures and worse, their religious differences not only make true multiculturalism impossible but show that unless there is one dominant “culture” that forms an umbrella for the rest to sit under even a watered down version is out of the question.“ Look at the Ottoman Empire I said – other religions and cultures were tolerated but only if they acknowledged the supremacy of Islam. Unless we establish some hard and fast ground rules or at least a blue print of how we envisage our secular multicultural society working we are simply making a rod for our own backs.
After a very long and thick silence Big Ed stood up and said: “Have you got an abo into it?” I shook my head. “Get an abo into it. And a crip if you can.” Then she walked out. I’m not making this up, that’s what she said.
I wrote the thing. It was shown throughout the Australian education system and was very well received. When I saw it years later there was no writer’s credit on it. These are not nice people. Those women hated men like me then and they still hate us now. And make no mistake: “multiculturalism” is entirely a “feminized” crude attempt of social engineering, a theory stemming from a warped idea that a bad person and indeed an unsuitable culture can be all made good under the billowing aprons of mother.
I recall a story regarding the playwright/scriptwriter David Williamson. He had been giving a scriptwriting workshop at some private venue. After the event he was standing in the bar chatting when a young and very keen budding scriptwriter approached him to offer:  Mr Williamson, I loved your lecture. Your work has really inspired me. I’m going to stop what I’m doing and become a television writer.” David asked what he was currently working as. “In real estate” the acolyte replied. David smiled and said; “And I bet you think you’ve met some cunts…”
Never a truer statement.  As Jack once asked: Can you handle the truth?
Ask yourself this and make sure you are old enough to properly answer it:  Has television got better or worse over the last thirty years? Think about it and you will soon realize that the feminization of our television and entertainment industry has been an absolute disaster. (As it has in nearly every area of life where it has been allowed to be dominant. Even cars – the style, pizzaz and performance has gone only to be replaced by those loaves of bread on wheels called SUVs with the easy park system.)
Do the research. Look at the viewer demographics. Why did awful day time drama get the name “soap?” Because that’s what was advertised around the program to its mainly female viewers. What started off as a small grass snake has now grown into a bloody great python that swallows everything in its wake.  Advertisers, seeking to get some of the huge “femidollar” have had a direct and dire influence on programming. Soap has been disguised as mainstream drama. We no longer think of it simply in terms of junk food for the brain. It is now our staple fair.
“Women’s drama” (playing with Barbies as I like to call it) has now become the main course. Note the recent Emmy Awards and the lauding of both “A Handmaidens Tale” and that turgid little film about “domestic violence.”  Both of them are of the “It made me want to cut my own throat” variety yet we are supposed to quell our nausea and politely clap the makers of this stuff onto the podium. This is not about good drama. This is about ideology. And it’s about money. Women have the financial power to create their own world within a world and they are doing just that.
Have you done the demographics yet? Reality TV. Think about shows like Big Brother, The Bachelor, Survivor. What is the underlying theme of all these shows? Well, how well you can lie, how great you can cheat and pretend. How good are you at being a rank hypocrite who can serve it up to your fellows behind their back? Can you shed crocodile tears when needed? Women love a good stitch up. It feeds their limbic system the juices their need to outdo each other on a quotidian level.
And then there are the food and DIY shows – so let’s sum it up:
It’s all about killing off your competitor in love, securing the “romantic wedding,” getting the poor sap to build you a house then happily stuffing your face while watching soap (and if you get as fat as a walrus then it will be “his” fault for not loving you enough). Keep in mind, the TV soap story is nearly always the same warped theme: girl caught in a dilemma – the boring good guy or the exciting bad guy. Eventually, she marries safe, beta male – Brian – then she fucks rebel alpha male – Jack. Of course she agonizes about it for a while, that’s what gives it legs, but in the end she succumbs to Jack’s charms even though she’s been the one driving the narrative right from the start.
And it goes way back to Jane Austen, the writer who started the entire “He loves me, he loves me not” form of storytelling, the one feminists love to try and put on a pedestal even though deep down they know Jane is utterly unworthy of the term “literature.”  Now, Soap is masquerading as prime drama. It and the cynical reality programs have been result of the total and relentless feminization of our television and yet, this is not the worst of it. It has a much darker side.
Female cop shows now swamp the airwaves. Every drama currently gracing our screens has to have a heavy dose of sexual politics. Of course the male writers know this so they cynically load their stories up with SexPol fodder so they can get the thumbs up from the menopausal monsters who call themselves commissioning editors. I tuned in to the first episode of George Gently the other night thinking at least a cop show set in the (now) 70s would be safe. But no, the first ep was entirely about “women’s issues.” Entirely. In fact the very first word of dialogue was “misogyny.” Yet a cop show with a female lead can be made brilliantly:  take Vera, it does not get better.  Please note the absence of sexual politics.
Blame the awful Swedes.
Some more research to keep you busy: see if you can find one Nordic drama made in the last five years that does not show a woman hitting, kicking, slapping, biting or inflicting an act of violence against a male. You won’t. The message is clear – we can do it to you but if you do it back then you carry the stigma for eternity. We can hit. You cannot. Full stop. I blame the chain smoking, now mercifully dead, Stig Larson for much of it. In his overly praised series of novels ( The Girl with the etc)  created a totally ludicrous character in the form of a slightly built, punk styled female sociopath who goes around beating up men, some of them mean-as-shit bikers.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for super heroines but let’s call them that. Let’s acknowledge the fantasy, not pretend it’s real and have to legislate laws to protect the idiots who carry the fantasy to the streets, offices or homes.  If you want a really good example of the “fantasy as real” genre watch the Swedish series Modus. The bad guy, a professionally trained special-forces assassin, manages to elude and indeed fight off every attempt to bring him to heel until the penultimate scene where he is bested by an angry mum with a kitchen knife. I am not making this up. And it isn’t just the Swedes: I recently tuned into a UK cop show to see a woman stabbing a man viciously in the hand with a pen for breaking off his relationship with her. And she was a cop! The act was never mentioned again and he just walked through the following scenes with a bandage. Now swap genders and try to imagine how that would pan out. Is it any wonder that Wonder Woman is due to become a female role model? Ahh…she’s not real.
If you want to see how women fight watch them on the MMA circuit. It’s pathetic. And these girls are the best at it. Here’s the cold hard truth: street fights. 90% of the time, end in grappling on the ground. Then it’s all about strength and body weight. So it’s highly unlikely that woman will best a man. And this is a good thing. Consider the over emotional, blind, knee jerk violence women excel in and you will thank god on a daily basis that they are the “weaker sex.”
Of course the Nordics make great drama to: Borgen, Lillyhammer, The Killing, The Bridge and many more. But the urge to substitute irrational polemic for reality means that much of what they are offering up is tofu dressed up as the Sunday roast.
So, while you still have Google up… Find out how many male book editors are currently working in Australia. And while you are at it, find out how many male Heads of Drama there are.  No one would deny that women are now in a position not just to influence society through both the arts and the news but dominate it. Of course, they will say that this is a good thing while in the same breath argue for sexual equality in every other industry. Do not ever make the mistake that these women are rational. Their agenda is portrayed as a nightmare manifested by the limbic brain, wholly lacking in logic and reason. It’s ok, in their heads, to discriminate against me in terms of my skin colour, gender, sexual orientation while in the same breath say how sexism, racism etc. should be fought against. It’s Orwellian double speak and if you dare to question it then you risk the wrath or Big Brother, or worse Big Edna.
Getting back to multiculturalism…
You will also notice that Nordic drama, as well as tirelessly promoting feminist issue and actively undermining masculine integrity also spruiks multiculturalism ad nauseum.  You will never see a Nordic, and in many ways European, drama series that does not have a rich mix of diversity, in fact so rich that obscures reality. Muslim women are the favourites to tell a story about – the plight of the poor refugee who wants nothing more than to live peacefully in your country while trying to undermine your culture so it becomes just like the one she ran from. And if you absolutely cannot find a story about immigrants then at least pepper the background with hijabs to show how normal it all is, or at least, will be when you’ve managed to sway an entire generation to your thinking so they can happily commit an act of collective suicide while all the while think they are being “tolerant.”
Which brings us to SBS, a TV channel set up with the very best of intentions. A broadcaster whose purpose was to provide news and entertainment to “new Australians” so they did not feel too alienated or excluded while trying to establish a new life in their chosen country:  A worthy exercise if it had have stayed as a sort of “way station” on the way to learning English, understanding Australian values and respecting our free and secular culture. Yet somewhere along the line the hollow theory of multiculturalism took over. The concept that had no working model, anywhere, at any time, became the beat for the SBS drum. In the same way an entire nation can go to bed one night thinking they live in a free society yet wake up the next day under a Stalinist government, we woke up and turned on SBS only to discover it was no longer the channel that was to help migrants integrate but one that actively promoted the superiority of holding on to the old values and raising a middle finger at the new. SBS became the propaganda arm for the multiculturalists. And the multiculturalists were, by proxy, all cultural Marxists. Just like Big Edna.
A dream within a dream….
Let’s jump cut forward a tad because SBS has morphed again. Instead of being solely the multicultural channel it has now transformed itself into “the progressive channel.” SBS has now become the champion of gay rights and LBGTQ (etc) issues. It uses tax payer’s money to promote things crass disguised as “fun kitch” like the Eurovision song contest, or the gay mardi gras, something that started off as a sort of protest – and a somewhat worthy one – to become an exercise in bad taste and excess embarrassing to most Australians, even some of the gay ones… So what is SBS up to? Ask the people who run it – you’ll find that many of them are British. Most are, like their sisters in the other channels, alpha females who surround themselves with lesser, sycophantic females and a few beta males just to keep up appearances (Just like the Catholic Church  and the UN there are lots of gays at SBS – but let’s not mention that).
These people see no contradiction in actively spruiking for the “yes” camp in the gay marriage plebiscite, even though the people most opposed to it are the Muslim and Chinese communities, you know, the ones that they have been tasked to serve. Or maybe they have decided “integration” can be a good thing when it fits their agenda. No hypocrisy there. Or have they finally admitted that they never wanted to serve any community in the first place but only every saw their task as undermining the existing Australian society that punches their tickets?  SBS News Service is as biased as it’s possible to be without waving a hammer and sickle flag and should be shut down. In fact, the best thing that could happen to SBS is that they are made to go back to their original mandate and show a diverse mix of cultural programming. The only news they should be allowed to broadcast should be news made in other countries. Whoever gave them the right to unashamedly try and shape society to match their personal progressive masturbation fantasies?
Many are saying that Europe is finished. It has committed suicide by influx. If this is the case then those most to blame, after the politicians, are the women (and a few emasculated men) who have come to dominate our arts and culture institutions both in broadcasting and universities. These people see the whole of society through the blinkers of “white male privilege/patriarchy” – something akin to a sociological disease to be despised and destroyed. Hence, they become enemies of the very society that nurtured and educated them. These people, now in positions of authority, actively undermine society with a view to its destruction. Make no mistake, the feminist politicians in Germany and the Nordic countries who are calling for mass immigration of Muslims do not give a toss about them in truth. They simply know that they can be used as a tool to destroy a society they have been taught to hate. And here is the really amusing part: the Muslims that they willingly embrace often hate them “to death” in return.
The terrible truth of the matter is that the hijacking of the arts by the bitter, unfulfilled women who call themselves feminists deals a fatal blow that it may never recover from. The censoring of the creative voice of strong men, alpha males, has and will have a devastating effect on society. Do you honestly think that if writers like Hemmingway, Miller, Orwell, Steinbeck, Golding, Mailer, Cendres, Behan, Joyce, Thompson were writing today they would get published? Of course not.  Playwrights like Beckett and poets like Bukowski would be unknown. One female theatre critic in the Guardian (what else) recently described Shakespeare’s McBeth as a “bad play.” The great TV scriptwriters like Dennis Potter, Paul Schrader and Troy Kennedy-Martin would never get a meeting let alone a commission.
And yet, here we are, in 2018 with more choice than ever before. We no longer have to be at the whims of the free to air channels, we have Netflix and a host of other providers. Yet, conversely, ironically, if one talks in terms of content and theme and of the socially constructed crucible our drama is made in we have less choice than ever. The message is like a solitary drum beat that rings out monotonously, a cultural call to prayer that we must all bow down and submit to. And in doing so we pay homage to ravenous God of Mediocrity.
But do we? It’s easy enough to simply make a conscious decision not to buy a product whose advertising belittles men –  and we all know there are many of them. It’s a little bit more effort to write to the company and tell them why you have put a personal embargo on their product. But it takes commitment to note the advertising around a program that promotes values that you consider abhorrent and complain robustly to. Yet, the truth is, if enough of us did it would have an impact. Make no mistake, advertising influences and even feeds content.
Of course, given that I work in the industry one might assume that I too am committing “career suicide” by writing what is never really said out loud in the plastic hallways of television. However, as an argument for my overall sanity let me just say that it’s harder for a white, male heterosexual to get a novel published or a script commissioned in Australia in 2018 than it is for Pauline Hanson to walk down the streets of Tehran without a bourka. So it’s like that indigenous saying: “If you’re up a tree and you begin to fall…relax.”
I am not an ideal agog. I am a jobbing writer who has written for some of the worst and some of the best TV series over the last 30 years. But drawing a line in the sand is what real men do. It was once called honour and it was valued.  I will not kiss Big Edna’s flabby arse and I will not get an “abo or a crip in it” just to get my pay cheque.





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