The Inspector-General of Misconception (9 page)

Crisis is the most overused word in the media. Perhaps after the term ‘technological revolution'.

The country is in crisis. Every lobby group has a crisis. Every industry is in crisis. Everyone must have their crisis.

Here at The Office, we found ourselves forced to ‘confront' (you always confront a crisis; no one ever admits to running away from a crisis) yet another crisis.

The Existential Crisis – or the how-should-we-live crisis. Or perhaps it is, in part, the Pleasure Crisis.

It is the ultimate crisis. It requires a Royal Commission and a Task Force and a Think Tank, a Regulatory Board, a Statutory Authority, a Monitoring Body and an Oversight Committee and a Standing Committee. Oh yes, and a Joint State-Federal Initiative.

The crisis appeared slowly.

It began, we like to think, after we had appeared on a panel at the Melbourne Festival to discuss the question of ‘Decadence' and a journalist interviewed us afterwards and asked the excellent question, ‘What's so attractive about decadence?'

We were unable to give a quick answer. We said that it was a question better directed to our fellow panellist, Oscar Wilde (whose superior ghost sits on every panel on which we sit).

Further back in our life, Fiona Giles once asked us, pensively, ‘Do you think I should have a vice? Would chocolate count?'

Again, we lacked a wise or witty reply, although we think we worried privately about which wine should go with chocolate.

These two instances, were, we now see, the beginning of the pleasure crisis. There is much anxiety and restlessness in Western countries about the idea of ‘pleasure'.

Despite all the innovation to our ways of life, many of us consider at some time or other whether there might be
another way to live
.

Could we arrange our lives in a radically different way and live more pleasurably, more fully?

We leave aside the question of the way we work, simply for want of space – but that is undergoing reexamination and change, with flexible hours, parenting time, job sharing, and the awareness that we are working too much, and so on.

There are other contemporary Ways of Life (apart from the romantic notion of ‘the artist's life') which are
popularly seen, and considered, as offering perhaps more pleasure, fulfilment, whatever, than the nine-to-five (eight-to-eight) mortgage existence.

That is apart from the sneaky private dream of Walking Out On It All. Which some do.

These people are looked at resentfully and ridiculed. Usually they're men (but not always) who ‘suffer' a mid-life crisis and, well, walk away from it all and take off on a yacht with a younger person to live in Tahiti.

Usually having a great deal of fun.

There are other versions. There was a television documentary recently about a Melbourne lawyer who, with permission from his tolerant family, gave up the law, bought an outback pub, and became a part-time husband and father.

The late Ross Campbell, a
Bulletin
comic columnist, used to tell the story of the brain surgeon who came up to him at a party and said that he was thinking of taking a year or two off to write a book and would Ross give him a few hints.

Ross replied that meeting the brain surgeon was a happy coincidence. ‘I was thinking of taking off a couple of years from writing and having a go at brain surgery,' Ross said.

If running away from it all is an attempt to return to youth, there is also the idea of Extended Youth. Within our society we still have a life-phase known as Settling Down – the opposite to that of Walking Out On It All (or perhaps it's the phase of life which leads to the idea of walking out on it all).

Settling Down is seen as something of a renunciation of the Good Life (it is, of course, for most, a swapping of one sort of good life for another).

A recent
New Yorker
cartoon has two guys talking. One is saying, ‘Settling down? What's the rush, you're only 54.'

The cartoon accurately distils some recent statistics from Western countries.

Not only are there fewer families (a quarter of women now do not have children), those families which do start are smaller, and they are started later.

This seems to indicate that the society has begun to realise that raising a family is not for everyone; that it's not a social obligation or the only credential of ‘normality' or path to ‘fulfilment'.

More people are spending more of their life alone – seen rather crudely by media commentators as an increase in ‘loneliness', when it really shows that more people have at least, more
solitude.

And that some prefer it.

Another subgroup who are now seen to have the possibility of the Good Life are the retirees who are healthier, wealthier and younger than other generations of retirees.

The retirees are a new group of hedonists.

Retirement investment funds' advertising carries messages which seem to say that ‘
at last
, now that you are retired, you can really
live'
. You can ‘do the things you have always dreamed of doing'.

Curiously, this line of advertising indicts the other half of the retirees' life as being ‘a time of doing what you
wished you didn't have to do'.

Diet, exercise, make-overs, image consultants and sudden abrupt changes of occupation, religion, partner or place of residence, buying a book on ‘the spiritual life', are expressions of this uncertainty about
whether we are living right.

It could be said that what is revealed by this listing of Other Ways of Life, is that some of us are not quite convinced that we are
living right
.

It is expressed in the contemporary phrase, ‘Get a life!' which is said to people who are perceived as Not Trying Hard Enough To Be Happy.

What we see revealed in this restlessness about other ways of living is really the emergence of
a multi-phased life
.

We live longer, we have more options, we know more about the world. And we can now take up options.

Many people have more than one occupation in life, more than one marriage, sometimes live in another country for a time, and there is a morally acceptable flexibility about how you arrange your private life and public life.

People sometimes have more than one religion during their life. We're told that they ‘shop around'.

The list is then not necessarily an either–or choice, but the possibility of
having it all.

You can also ‘opt' for remaining the way you are (if your partner agrees).

And, statistically, many people still have one partner and one job for life, presumably from choice.

Going back to the start of this essay and the journalist's question, ‘What's so attractive about decadence?'

One of the things which has happened in our lifetime, is that the description and acceptance of ‘normal and natural' have widened.

The range of available decadent acts has been consequently seriously reduced.

The great option in life of being ‘a decadent' as opposed to an ‘everyday' person is fading.

It's harder these days to find a decent, unnatural practice.

Decadence traditionally comes from being able to fashion a pleasurable aesthetic way of life by defying a restrictive ‘social order', such as religion, social expectation, gender and morality.

Once a certain order or aesthetic could be identified, accurately or not, as dominant and oppressive, such as ‘the bourgeois way of life', then it becomes deliciously decadent for subgroups to involve themselves in reversal of, revenge against, regression from and refusal of that dominant and ‘oppressive' way of life.

Perhaps the greatest part of the art of decadence is in the nature of its conversation – that conversation which is wonderfully perverse in its unbridled humour and licentiousness – which is
shameless
(happily, sometimes, also accompanied, later, by the usual excesses and debauches).

Maybe this is still rare, the decadent conversation.

And Fiona's question? Should you have a vice, Fiona?

Vices are the unproductive and unhealthy pleasures, but pleasures nonetheless. The only problem with vices,
say, addictions, is that by nature, they exclude and diminish other pleasures.

We now know more about the chemistry of the body, the brain and about hormones and about how chemicals in food and other substances work (although it's interesting how much of the ‘health' information is overturned and revised from year to year).

That knowledge, together with wider freedoms of behaviour have, we're afraid, robbed vice of much of its mystery and allure.

Though
health consciousness
, we've noticed, has, itself, begun to be seen as an ‘order' against which one can transgress – flying in the face of good health is perhaps a new decadence (but sadly, we do not have to go to wicked, dark, private clubs to do it).

We've heard the eating of desserts described as ‘wicked' but we had other things in mind, we suppose, when talking about vice.

And of course, Fiona, the reports now say that chocolate is, in fact, a health food.

The rise of connoisseurship

In the absence of reliable decadence, the great change in the Australian way of pleasure, which we have identified, is a growing
connoisseurship.

Of course, it doesn't rule out the odd debauch, if you can find it.

More and more media space is given over to connoisseurship – techniques and knowledge about
how to enjoy
(cooking, wine, gardening, antiques, the arts,
planned educational tours).

We are more arts conscious; more design conscious; more gastronomically conscious (domestically, as well as in public dining); more sartorially conscious with the emergence of Australian clothing designers and ethnic influences; we are better at, and more involved in, home and garden design (perhaps the most enthusiastically practised of our aesthetic expressions).

We are more involved in controlling and shaping our environment, both protectively and aesthetically.

Connoisseurship involves a
sensual quest
, and an ongoing curiosity, towards the world of experience.

For us, a connoisseur is not necessarily the person who
knows
(who can be a bore) but the person who has
the questing attitude
. The person pursues The Questions.

And if you remain a life participant of connoisseurship, all these pleasures (design, gastronomy, the arts, sexuality etc.) have hidden within them
infinitely
pleasurable variations.

How come infinite?

Because age, the passing of time, and the accumulation of experience, inescapably introduce variation and surprise into this way of life, the life of connoisseurship (you have to try things, now and then, which make you nervous,
seriously nervous
).

Life is too short? Too late to start?

The secret is not to fret about perfection, while seeking it.

There's no such thing as a perfect connoisseur (except perhaps Tony Bilson or Simmone Logue).

For some time now, we have been prompting Australians to drop their nervous resistance to speech-making and their insistence that there should not be speeches at any group gatherings.

Time and again Our Office has ruled that Australians should stop repeating the stale proposition that ‘all speeches are boring'.

For a start, our speeches are not boring.

However, whether people resist speech-making from their own sense of inadequacy or from bad experiences, thankfully, the speech persists.

Speech-making is one of the few amateur performances still surviving in our deformed social gatherings, even if grudgingly.

Joke-telling is about the only amateur performance really welcomed, and that can at times be very original.

It was with some dismay that we found ourselves given two speech-making books this Christmas. Both anonymous gifts. What implication?

Our Agents will of course track down those who made these rather pointed, may we say rude, even cruel gifts.

The first gift was
The Serious Joke Book
by George Coote (1994, and according to the title history, reprinted twice in 1994, 1995 and 1996).

It is dedicated to his ‘first wife' (yes, George, we assume that one of the reasons she gave for leaving you was that you lacked a sense of humour and you have set out to prove you do have one). Sorry George, you haven't. You are, though, a dogged collector of jokes.

George says in his introduction, ‘that a lifetime of journalism and travelling has meant listening to hundreds of speeches, most of them dull … But the speakers remembered were those who had a sense of humour and those who included a few gags …'

We doubt it. Name a few of these speakers.

George says, ‘I always remembered the wisecracks and usually forgot the earth-shattering theme of the speech.'

No ideas for George, not the attempt at communicating something personal or important, just the wisecrack for George Chuckles.

But the memorable chuckle is not quite the intention of the art of the speech.

The art of the speech is to give the evening some diversion from the social chat, to give theme and celebration to the event and then, in turn, to give to the
conversation something about which to talk.

A good speech can inject into the stale, putrid pool of conversation one or two new thoughts. It's not that difficult.

George's book gives basic guidance to the speech-maker together with hundreds of jokes for speeches in categories such as Marriage, Hospitals, Husbands, Kiwis and so on. The Englishman-Irishman-and-a-Scotsman genre finds itself under the new category, Multi-national.

There is one absurdist joke in George's book that we half-liked. It is under the category Funerals.

The wife looks at the dead husband in his coffin and says, ‘He's smiling because he died in his sleep and doesn't know he's dead. He's dreaming he's still alive. When he wakes up and finds he's dead, the shock will kill him.'

Oh well.

There is no Aboriginal joke category in George's book. George thought to himself ‘No – too much trouble brewing there.'

Freud said we tend to joke most about those things which disturb us most. But what would Freud know about jokes? Tell me one good joke Freud ever made? And certain absences and silences also point to a sense of unease.

He
did
know about the Family.

In his advice to speech-makers who use his book, George has a section called ‘Keeping them Clean':

Oh dear. Scansion, George, scansion.

He has marked some jokes in his book ‘R' for those who cannot trust their judgment.

He has not marked with an R those jokes about money-obsessed, lying and cheating Jews who both have a category of their own and are also scattered throughout the other sections. Oy vey.

Example: Young Moishe asked his father about business ethics.

‘Ethics?' repeated his father, ‘You ask me about ethics? Well, my lovely boy, let me put it this way. A lady comes in and buys a garment for $65 and she pays with a $100 note. She is very excited about the garment and as she leaves the shop I notice that she has left her $35 change on the counter.

‘Now here, my son, comes the big question of ethics. Do I split it with my partner?'

These jokes are at least a hundred years old but would nowadays in Australia lack the requisite bed of anti-Semitic folklore off which to bounce. The jokes, apart from being racist (which has never deterred a good joke), are passé.

Or are we out of touch?

The book has a section of mother-in-law jokes which fit remarkably the anthropological understanding of this humour – that it is a form of taboo to keep the mothers-in-law out of sexual reach of the sons-in-law.

In these jokes the mother-in-law is depicted as an ogre.

Example one from George's book: ‘My mother-in-law
thinks I'm effeminate. But compared to her I probably am.'

Example two: ‘I never forget a face. But in my mother-in-law's case, I am willing to make an exception.'

Anthropology says that the mother-in-law is presented as threatening because she has some of the attractive qualities of the daughter but has the advantages of guile and maturity. She also has the unconscious attraction of a being designated a ‘mother' who is our first infantile sexual experience; but the mother-in-law is a mother without the incest taboo which keeps most of us from pursuing our mother into adulthood.

Consequently, the mother-in-law is potentially attractive to the son-in-law. This is all the more true where child-bearing occurs young and the mother-in-law is herself a youngish woman at the time of the marriage.

The taboo and the joke-telling have been socially introduced to blind the son-in-law to the attractiveness and often, availability, of the mother-in-law.

Anthropologist Les Hiatt in his book
Arguments about Aborigines
examines the widespread taboos in tribal cultures about mothers-in-law. Some require that the son-in-law and mother-in-law not speak to each other or even look at each other.

More commonly, as in our society, they are pushed into a quasi-hostile joking relationship. Anthologists call it ‘privileged disrespect', a combination of friendliness and antagonism intended to prevent any funny business occurring between them.

The other book we received here at The Office was
Toasts for the Times in Pictures and Rhymes
by John William Sargent with pictures by Nella Fontaine Binckley, published in 1904.

It is a book from the time of highballs, cocktails and Gibson Girls (see later). One toast is even to ‘the frisky High Ball'. It is a drink we have seen in American movies throughout our life (spirits and soda – traditionally the soda is shot from a soda-siphon charged by a small gas cylinder – served in a long glass with ice).

As an opening dedication, the authors quote from Edmund Gosse and give us a hint of their position both on toasts and on Life itself.

The book keeps up this theme (much more life-affirming than George and his jokes).

If this toast book is a guide, times were frivolous at the turn of the century in the old US of A.

The first toast, naturally, is to Bacchus.

The second toast is to ‘The Guest' wherein the other partygoers are advised to:

The other toasts are to subjects such as:

The book pulls itself back momentarily, but only
momentarily, to sober respectability with a toast ‘To Home'.

More than a tinge of regret here.

But leaving aside the obligatory nod towards Home and Marriage, the toasts move well away and we have a toast to a rather splendid woman named in the toast as ‘The Knowing One'.

Another toast is to the ‘Girl of the Hour'.

There is a toast to Bohemia, in fact two toasts; the only subject in the book that receives two toasts.

Bohemia is seen as a place

There is a rather-self-forgiving toast, ‘To Myself'.

As with the toast to Home, the toast to Marriage is half-hearted, if not hostile.

In fact, the political philosophy of the book and its toasts is a robust libertarianism.

In the book this toast is illustrated by a banner held aloft by a ravishing Edwardian woman dressed in an off-the-shoulder evening dress with a bustle to increase the impression of fullness of figure. She also wears a loose belt slung just below her hips with the vee of the belt pointing delightfully at her crotch.

Here at the office we excitedly identified her as a ‘Gibson Girl'.

The Gibson Girl was created by pen and ink artist, Charles Dana Gibson between 1890 to 1910. She was tall and poised, and came to represent the modern woman of those times. When engaged in sporting activities, she was even shown sometimes in short skirts.

This style of woman is illustrated a few times in the book by Nella Fontaine Binckley. In the toast to the Fencing Girl with her fencing foil across her shoulder and with a glint in her eye:

And in the toast to the Bowling Girl and in the toast to the Bachelor Maid who is

The toast to Woman in the abstract, however, pictures a serious woman speaking from a public platform to a large audience. It was the time, too, of the suffragette.

In the toast to Wine, the book quite properly advises that:

Our Ruling:
Let's be more theatrical; let's learn a few coin tricks, some new acts; skip George's speech jokes book.

A Lament:
Oh, where are the lyric people flinging their robes to the wind today?