It was a week ago when I was duped by the fake John Howard speech and it made a brief appearance on Webdiary as-real. The next day I put it up again [0], introduced this time as the satire that it is. Then on Thursday we published Richard Neville's account of the disappearance of his spoof site from the web, Secret silent censorship in cyberspace [0]. Webdiarist Stephen Smith [0] now brings us the broader perspective of 'culture jamming'. It's not my habit to make much comment in introduction to Webdiary threads, but here I will only make the observation that if a weapon of culture-war is going to be celebrated by some, they are going to have to accept it being used by every other political force as well. Waddayareckon? Stephen Smith's last article for Webdiary was It's a mad world - the rise of middle class angst [0].

by Stephen Smith

We’re jammin’, jammin’,
And I hope you like jammin’, too.

Ain’t no rules, ain’t no vow, we can do it anyhow...
Jammin’ till the jam is through.

- Bob Marley

The Left may be criticized for missing a sense of humour. Well, Richard Neville’s recent culture jamming of John Howard’s website has proven to be one of the best japes in years. Jammin’ may refer to dancing in Jamaican patois, but our own brand of creative jamming is in the spirit of another Marley line – “forget your troubles and dance!” Whatever your jammin’, diving into the media fray to rock the system from within has a lot to recommend it.

The brillance of Neville’s jam was that the funnier, most ironic side took a while to sink in. As a ‘speech’ by Howard on Iraq, the spoof exposes a long list of speeches by the PM that also lack credibility. His Iraq policy already lacks a moral base; it is a quicksand of lies and deceit. Therefore to dress up a phony speech as genuine is a case of faking the fake. The conclusion we can draw is that the hoax Howard speech is no less a fake than some of his ‘real’ speeches. Furthermore, this speech that never was works to create a simulation of John Howard. In its own way this replicant is more real than the original. We sense a shred of humanity. A heart and soul lacking in the Cyber-Minister who has hardened over his decade of power. His softer copy would speak to us thus:

Flying home from India, I started to ask myself what a leader like Mahatma Gandhi would do, but I feared I would not be able to live up to the answer, unless I have some wise advice from my longtime friends. Please look into your hearts and let me know what you find.

How do we define culture jamming? The website spoof set up by Richard Neville falls into the category of what is called Tactical Media [1].

Tactical media are what happens when the cheap ‘do it yourself’ media, made possible by the revolution in consumer electronics and expanded forms of distribution (from public access cable to the internet) are exploited by groups and individuals who feel aggrieved by, or excluded from, the wider culture. Tactical Media do not just report events; as they are never impartial, they always participate and it is this that more than anything separates them from mainstream media.

Thus Neville was able to buy a cheap ($9.71) Yahoo domain and clone the look of the official Howard site.

We can find another stirring aspect to this hoax on Howard. It offers him redemption for at least one past appearance of culture jamming. This earlier escapade too saw the emergence of a Howard simulation. It took the shape of Greg Taylor’s statue of the PM. Known as “If the Boots Don’t Fit”, this bronzed Howard appeared briefly on the lakeside lawns facing Canberra’s Old Parliament House. But its statuesque satire was not on show for long. The ‘gardeners of the state’ quickly arrived with a truck and crane to hoist it from view.
 

In reaction to this view of Howard, art critic Sasha Grishin sees a man who hides in someone else’s clothes, in this case, those of an Anzac Digger. “A contrast is drawn between the smallness and ‘mean-spiritedness’ of the little man inside, and the greatness of the tradition through which he tries to conceal his pettiness.“ [1]

Taylor’s artwork captures the essence of the Howard era. The faking and feigning of his posture can be seen in the monuments to Howardism cast in the public stance on asylum and the war in Iraq. Remember children overboard; the Tampa; and now the AWB affair. Welcome to Howard’s ‘my life as a fake’: a place where exclusion, denial and forgetfulness displace the rule of law and Westminster traditions.

The above caricature draws us back to the irony of Neville’s culture jamming. Although the speech is a spoof, if we examine it side by side with Howard’s history of spin, we soon realize that the hoax version is no less valid than any other Howard address where the act of speaking is real but the words are false. One fake resembles the other.

John Howard should welcome the words from his website doppelganger. Were the words truly spoken from his lips they might transform the way people perceive his decade of power. The public allegedly ignores his lies in the face of economic ‘good times’. However history is not so easily satisfied. Howard is well advised to heed his ‘own’ words and reflect upon what it might feel like to have a heart.

Endnotes

[1] Sasha Grishin, “A Serious Work that Engages the Public”, in The Canberra Times, 20 March 2004; see also: ”Boots Take a Hike [2]”, Stateline Canberra, ABC Online, 23 February 2004, and If the boots don't fit [3].