Club Troppo

Or, What We Really Know about the "Culture Wars" and American Elections Who'd have thought that Thomas Frank and class analysis would set the Australian political blogosphere on fire in our attempts to analyse the American election? Ken's sought to douse the theoretical flames...

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They get to be too busy to blog. I promised Ken a post as to my views on the US elections; my post got overtaken by events, and by the time I will have time to finish it, it will be very stale indeed. But I notice much angst about 'the state of the left' in electoral terms, bo...

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The lot of a political centrist is sometimes not a happy one. Lately I've been suffering pangs of angst and self-doubt. After joining the anti-Howard and anti-Bush camps for the recent elections and jinxing both of them, I couldn't help wondering whether I might be suffering a...

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Thomas Frank - critical theory, prairie style When John Quiggin reviewed Thomas Frank's One Market Under God (2000) he was surprised to find a reference to Osama bin Laden. The book gave Quiggin the "eerie impression that Frank, writing at the end of the twentieth century, had...

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Chris Sheil at Backpages , Don Arthur here at Troppo and myself in an earlier post have all been picking up on the work of Thomas Frank in an attempt to understand what happened in the US election. The more I reflect on this, the more I realise that what we've all done - in di...

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When a society becomes as rich as the United States status is no longer about quantity - how big your house is or how many cars you own - it's about quality. Today status is more about what your possessions say about you as a person. And the trouble with status in 21st century...

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It looks like the blue states and the red states split in the US presidential poll is almost identical to the results in 2000, and both Houses of Congress are still almost evenly poised - with some small movement to the GOP. Chris Sheil's post at Backpages and comments there b...

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Tim Dunlop sums up my thoughts about the US Presidential election and likely future prospects far better than I could have done myself. But read John Quiggin as well for more detail on the economic dimension.

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According to this story at News Online, citing this story at MSN Slate, exit polling shows Kerry leading Bush in a tight contest in the late afternoon in the US. Of course, exit polls are dubiously reliable . But pending meaningful real results, they at least give us something...

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If Bush is re-elected tomorrow, there is speculation that Colin Powell will step down and Paul Wolfowitz (currently Deputy Secretary of Defence and the most senior Neo-Conservative in the administration) will take his place as Secretary of State. If Bush loses (and I'm hoping...

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Troppo talks to Jon Kudelka about the Prime Minister, weapons of mass destruction, and Star Wars "I was hoping to get the phrase 'fully operational death star' on the front page of the national broadsheet" says cartoonist Jon Kudelka , "There was beer in it." Kudelka has been...

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I was brought up on films as well as books, and the silver screen loomed quite large in our family story. My paternal grandfather worked as a cameraman in the French film industry in the inter-war period, and indeed the story goes that he stood in for Douglas Fairbanks Jr, who...

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When politicians make ignorant statements in an election run-up period, there's a fair chance they're focus group-driven and designed to cater to the lowest common denominator of public taste. When they do it immediately afterwards, however, it's a good bet they're just displa...

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I remember reading somewhere that The Australian's columnist Janet Albrechtsen has a law degree. If that's right, she should know better than to make this silly statement in a recent article where she slagged High Court Justice Michael Kirby: Gleeson could have added that he,...

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John Gray provocatively begins his interesting article "The Curious Dogmatism of Atheists" ( reprinted in Friday's Fin ) with the assertion that - A revival of atheism is a curious byproduct of the September 11 attacks. We've read a lot recently about religion and politics, wh...

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I never believed the hopeful myth that Osama bin Laden was just a smear of DNA in a cave in Tora Bora. I mean, this was a guy who'd survived the war with the Soviets and then years of being tracked by Western and Arab intelligence services, long before 9/11, not to speak of su...

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Just a very quick post, to draw attention to Julia Baird's op-ed column in today's Sydney Morning Herald, which quotes yours truly a couple of times, one from my book In Hollow Lands, once from my controversial piece the other day. It's generally about Halloween; and she has i...

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Or so said Second Lieutenant Melissa Stockwell on her return to the States after a routine trip in a Humvee from the Green Zone in Baghdad to the morass of Mosul outside Iraq's sanitised Western occupied zone led to an attack on her armoured vehicle, which because of the disor...

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"Cute kittens grow up to be cute cats" writes Arthur Chenkoff . They sure do! Take Private Hammer for example. Hammer is a brave tabby cat who provided some much appreciated support to American soldiers in Iraq: "He was born at the site," said Staff Sgt. Rick Bousfield. "There...

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Troppo is gaining a decidedly genteel, cerebral flavour of late. Nothing wrong with that, but for this Scots-Irish member of the oz trailer-trash class there's a need for an occasional leavening of down-market physicality. And what better way to do it than muse about Brigid De...

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