Duking it out : the Bowie phenomenon

A couple of days ago I did something a bit uncharacteristic – I fired off a post on my TWW Facebook page about David Bowie. Usually I think so long and carefully about things before I post, I either never get round to posting at all, or by the time I'm ready, everyone has moved on.

Perhaps it was a tad insensitive of me to post critical comments about Bowie while people who admired or adored him were still reeling from the news of his death – however unsurprising that death might have been in light of his age and having been a 50+ a day smoker for most of his life, an enthusiastic ingester of cocaine and alcohol for a good few years, and having had several heart attacks. 

The emotional reverberations from the death of some people is an interesting phenomenon. People who did not know the dead person except as a media construct, experience a very real and at times overpowering sense of loss. Anyone who was in the UK when Princess Diana died will tell you that you could almost feel the emotion. It was spooky, and there wasn't social media to blame it on. 

With someone like David Bowie, the intensity of emotion and deep sense of loss is all the more odd because the way all those mourners knew or could ever hope to know him - i.e. via photos, films, videos, recordings – remains with them. The means of "knowing" him and feeling connected to him is as real as it was when he was alive with the one exception of live concerts.   Bowie was even so obliging as to spend his last few months making an album to mark his passing. In so doing he played the part to the end, as some have breathlessly claimed, he "made a performance of his own death". What a man, what an artist. 

We're left pondering the extent to which Bowie was acting a part or really believed in the pop star myth he'd created. Well, a few of us are pondering – it seems the majority of people of a certain age in the over-developed world are being carried along by an irresistible current of emotion and are for the moment at least, incapable of serious reflection.

I've had to take a break from Twitter because the spectacle of usually acerbic and irreverent people (men mainly) being maudlin and reverential was putting me at risk of saying something I might later regret.

Philip Matthews is a journalist and avid tweeter who has been very open about his adulation of Bowie. Matthews is capable of being a very outspoken and sometimes quite harsh critic of certain people such as the so-called Twitterati, and has been known to take up cudgels in defence of the right to be politically incorrect. He retweeted a link to a piece which revisits some under-age sex issues reported about Bowie's early years that Bowie's fans and PR people would rather see consigned to the dustbin of history. 

	Philip Matthews @secondzeit
Dreading the Roman Polanski thinkpieces. twitter.com/stacefamily/st… 3:22 PM - 12 Jan 2016

	James Robins @James_ARobins	5h
	@secondzeit I thought we were flagging #satire these days
	View conversation ·

The tweet and the reply are a bit coded but the way I read that exchange is that the abuse of girls barely out of puberty by rich and powerful men is excusable if those rich and powerful men are your cultural heroes, like film director Roman Polanski who still faces historic child sexual abuse charges in the USA. I never asked for clarification, for fear of sparking off the sort of Twitter firefight that no one ever wins but which always results in a lot of collateral damage,  but I think I read it right.

I doubt that either of these two intelligent and well informed men would excuse the conduct of the likes of Garry Glitter or Jimmy Saville, but the fact is that rich and famous men having sex with girls barely out of puberty, even if the girls '"consented", is at the same end of the consensual sex continuum – the wrong end. 

We might of course consider the unhinging effects, on young men, of drugs and fame and being involved in an exploitative industry which, with the aid of the parasitic enterprises that feed off it,  encouraged and condoned hedonistic, self-indulgent and abusive behaviour – and still does. 

That may help explain but it doesn't excuse and anyone who wants to forgive their heroes for fucking impressionable young girls, needs to ask themselves whether they are prepared to extend that forgiveness to all powerful, rich men who choose to have sex with girls or boys barely out of puberty. There's no standing on the high moral ground over the likes of the Roast Busters if you're prepared to exempt your personal heroes from worse conduct.

I worked in inner city London in the mid 1970s. I was young and a feminist and angry about a lot of things – none more so than the sexualisation and sexual exploitation of girls and very young women. I'm old now, still a feminist and still angry.

I don't know if the reports of 26-year-old Bowie having sex with under-age girls as young as 13 are true. To my knowledge he never denied it, and he was immersed in a milieu that was pushing the boundaries of what was permissible. 

The notion of 'free love', the existence of female contraception and penicillin, the coming out into the open of gay sex, the blurring and blending of gender and a fascination with androgyny within a milieu and a wider culture that was still profoundly phallocratic – all meant it was a small step for rich and powerful men to see skinny little star-struck girls barely out of puberty as sex objects. 

It's obvious that the imposition of an arbitrary age at which a person can consent to have sex is problematic. It's at its most absurd in the USA where the legal age of consent varies between states and the charge of statutory rape can be used unfairly and oppressively. Chronologically based age limits cannot take account of differential development or of personal choice but problematic though they are, we have to impose some limits.

I had a colleague in the 1970s who ran a community arts centre – a flow on from the Arts Labs movement – who advocated the legalisation of sex with minors and supported his views with theories about the innate sexuality of children and the advantages to kids of learning about sex from a caring adult – like him. It would be unthinkable for a person with those attitudes to work with young children in our current climate of fear and loathing of the actual and imagined activities of criminal paedophiles but at that time he – and he was not alone – felt free to expound and probably to act on his belief that, as children are sexual beings, it was okay for adults like him to have "consensual" sex with them.  

On the question of power differentials of age, gender and class and on the issue of exploitation, he was strangely silent. But therein lies another discussion.

I was also anti-racist and I saw, up close and personally, the rise of the extreme right and the effects of anti-immigrant rhetoric and action on the community I worked in. So, when massively influential "working class heroes" like Bowie and Eric Clapton publicly flirted with fascism, I didn't see it as just some youthful, drug-fuelled high-jinks. 

I liked Clapton as a musician, but I damned him for his public statements in support of Enoch Powell at a time when the extreme right was working hard to recruit kids who admired and were influenced by musicians such as him. I felt the same about Bowie's flirtation with fascism because he was hugely influential among a very wide range of young people. His fling with fascism is downplayed by his supporters and he attributed it to the effects of drugs and becoming immersed in the Thin White Duke persona. I think that may well be a post-hoc rationalisation, and in vino veritas might equally be cited.

If I'd really liked Bowie's music I might have forgiven him his early transgressions as it was clear that he did move on, and he did express regret about at least some of them. I just never saw him as a part of my life – for all his theatricality and flair and gender bending – he was too mainstream, and his music was too white and too poppy for my taste.

I accept that he was a hugely successful and prolific writer and singer of pop songs, i.e. songs created for a popular audience and within the formats imposed by the corporations which produce and market them as hugely profitable commodities. But he didn't have a great voice and only people who have never listened to really great voices could think that he did. 

What he did have and had in spades was the ability to catch a musical and style wave as it was forming and ride it so well and so confidently that he was widely credited with being the originator of it. And he knew when to get off a spent wave and catch another that was forming.

From a young age he'd been determined to be a pop star, not to be just a musician but to have the fame and money that only pop stardom brings, and he pursued that aim by voraciously gobbling up influences and ideas from others. From Gary Kemp's European theatre and mime to Kabuki; from bits of African-American rock and soul to so-called Krautrock; from the Velvet Underground and Iggy Pop to Marc Bolan and Glam Rock….he borrowed and synthesised, and presented it as his own with characteristic flair and aplomb. And ruthlessness. He could be quite ruthless in pursuit of his ambition, and he is being hailed as an astute and calculating businessman who foresaw and benefited from the changes that the internet forced on the music industry.  The truth probably is, he listened to someone who foresaw those changes and who knew how to benefit from them. 

I tweeted that if David Bowie's final album was indeed a "final gift to his fans'" then he should have arranged to give it away as his estate could well afford it. Typically that tweet sank without anyone registering its existence but the fact is that, as with any celebrity, Bowie's death is a very rich harvest – from sales of the newly released album and the back catalogue, the making of TV specials, the writing of books and the staging of memorial concerts.  

Surely even the most blinkered and addle-pated of Bowie fans realises that, behind all the glitz, the glamour, the hype and the crocodile tears, are cold and often pretty ugly commercial realities. The popular music business is, in the final analysis, all and only about money, and the edifice rests on the shaky foundation of novelty. Bowie's greatest gift was his ability to keep being novel. 

Occasionally novelty and true genius combine but very often in the music business the truly gifted go largely unremarked, uncelebrated and unrewarded while the mediocre are elevated to the level of greatness and rewarded beyond any sensible measure. This is not to say Bowie was mediocre but to ask, was he truly that great? 

I was reminded of the fact that fame, fortune and talent are not always congruent and the fact that fame is a precarious and often ephemeral thing when I was talking to young person about Bowie's death. I was musing that, given Bowie's love of word play, his Thin White Duke persona was a nod to both the dapper, white, fascist Duke of Windsor, and the dapper, black Duke Ellington. She looked bemused and said she'd never heard of the Duke of Wellington.

 

                                                                  

An open letter to Tony Veitch

Dear Tony,

The current media storm you're at the centre of started when you made a comment about an incident in a rugby match which, if made by anyone else, very likely would have been viewed as a harmless observation on the referee's odd distinction between a "punch'" and a "push with a fist".   

I hadn't seen the meme until the controversy blew up but I think it's no more offensive than it was insightful or witty. 

However, some people, no doubt remembering the time when you made a clear distinction between a "kick" and a "push with a foot", thought you were advocating or trivialising violence, and criticised you for it on your Facebook page. 

The details of your domestic violence conviction were circulated and much was said about your failure to take responsibility for your actions. The fact that you were widely perceived to have failed to own your actions and to have blamed your victim is what has given this so much traction. 

You then posted an emotionally charged comment on your Facebook page attacking your critics and seeming to taunt them with your popularity and success, and you referred to the domestic violence as having occurred in the context of a "hideous relationship". It was an unfortunate choice of words. 

Social media – as it is wont to do – immediately split into warring factions. 

On one side are those who think that what you were charged with in 2009 wasn't your fault; it wasn't a serious assault; your ex-partner exaggerated her injuries; it was in the past and should stay there, and anyone who raises it now has a dodgy political agenda of some sort. 

On the other side, are those who see you as one of those men who say they're sorry for inflicting violence on their partner but whose subsequent conduct shouts the opposite, and who like to cast themselves in the role of a hapless victim of a scheming / unreasonable / mad / cheating / domineering woman. Take your pick of adjective. 

The upshot of it all is that you're back in the sort of spotlight you don't like – one that's harsh, unflattering and too revealing.

I must confess that I never listen to you or read anything you write and never have; and, in terms of your work as a sports commentator or news personality, you seldom come up in the sorts of commentary I read or the conversations I have.  

But I had formed an opinion about you which predates your domestic violence conviction. It's of course that infamous statement you made on radio about Serena Williams :

"Do you know where apes come from? She's a reminder."

That wasn't just racist, cruel and misogynistic – it was also profoundly stupid.  It was even more stupid than your boss's claim – after he told you to apologise on air – that what you had said was "not a racial slur."   

This was the first time you got handed the career equivalent of a get out of jail free card.  

But, perhaps you learned from that. Perhaps you understood just how harmful and hurtful a statement like that is.  Perhaps you realised how very lucky you were that you worked for an organisation, and appealed to an audience which had a very high tolerance for that sort of grossly unprofessional and unpleasant behaviour. 

Or perhaps not.

Enough has been said about your domestic violence conviction without me revisiting it in detail apart from saying that a man who kicks a woman in the back when she's on the ground is giving vent to a depth of rage and contempt that says a great deal about him, and none of it good.

The fact that you were charged with recklessly injuring your partner instead of a more serious crime such as actual or grievous bodily harm was due to your celebrity and the considerable efforts that had been made to ensure that, in the court of popular opinion, you'd been found not guilty. It was the Kiwi equivalent of a plea bargain. The dropping of most of the charges and your guilty plea to a lower order of offence than a less influential man would have faced, allowed you to continue to rebuild your life and to build your profile as a wronged man.

That was your second get out of jail free card – a more literal one that time.  Had you the wisdom and the heart to play it right you could have come up from it smelling sweet. But, there was always that hint of angry arrogance that makes some people doubt the authenticity of your public persona.

However, I firmly believe that, whatever the crime, if the person who committed it has faced up to what they did, wants to make amends and be a better person and citizen, they have the absolute right to live their lives without having their past used against them.  We don't have double jeopardy in our court system, and nor should we have it in the court of social media.

A lot of your supporters profess to believe the same but I'd lay odds that many of those who shout loudest about your right to a second chance would happily deny that to others. I've no doubt that there would be certain sorts of crimes committed by certain sorts of people that many of your supporters would never forgive and that they would rub the perpetrator's face in their past whenever they had the chance, rejecting mitigating circumstances as "PC nonsense", and self-righteously demanding maximum and on-gong retribution. 

In the interests of fairness, it must be said there are some like that among your critics as well. 

 In NZ, the physical and emotional battering of women by men is as commonplace as it is indefensible. I don't expect you to speak out against domestic violence although it would be great if people like you used your considerable influence to such an end – recognising that the soil in which male violence against women and children grows is well watered by the run off from laddish, 'locker room' behaviour –  that striving for one of the 50 shades of machismo which is still prevalent in some parts of the sporting world and which flows into the consciousness and conduct of affluent and powerful men as well as poor and relatively powerless ones. 

Sometimes violent behaviour by men towards women has its roots in a personal insecurity and inadequacy. Sometimes it occurs when a narcissist's sense of aggrandisement or entitlement has been challenged. Sometimes it's when power over women is an illusory compensation for a wider social and economic powerlessness. 

Whatever the root cause, it's of little comfort to the person who's on the receiving end.

If I tread on someone's foot and break it, even if I didn't mean to do it, and even if I say I'm sorry, it still hurts and it takes time to heal. 

If I tread on someone's foot and break it and I don't apologise, or my apology is insincere, or I blame the person for getting in my way, I add insult to injury and may delay healing. 

If I deliberately stamp on someone's foot and break it and then claim that not only did they put their foot under mine but, in so doing, they caused me to hurt my foot and damaged my Italian shoes which cost me a lot of money, I can hardly complain if people call me a liar and a bully.

Creating the Myths

The piece that follows was originally written in late 2006 – pre-blog,  after a major story in The Press about a policing operation aimed at "Māori crime families".

The article offended me deeply for its cavalier treatment of statistics and its failure to deal with the ethnic and class dimensions of the social problems it purported to address.

I wrote a reply to it and sent it off to various politicians and publications. It was met with a resounding silence. 

The following year, the writer of the Press article won a Quantas Media Award for it.  

I was reminded of my piece when I heard Anne Tolley on RNZ, raising the issue of compulsory contraception for women who have children who are deemed to be at risk. Given the socio-economic profile of the sort of women Tolley is referring to, it's obvious that a disproportionate number of those affected by such a move would be Māori. 

It's also obvious that such a move will be very popular with some people and seen as regrettable but necessary by a large number of others. 

  

The targeting of certain women for contraception or sterilisation is an issue that pops up again and again, as politicians test the waters to see if the "public" will accept it this time round.  It is ground that has been stomped over before by such right-wing luminaries as Michael Laws, David Garrett and Paula Bennett.

The way it works is you create a sub-set of society and you give it a label – the feral underclass. Those who belong to it can be caricatured and stereotyped at will. They don't have relationships, they have "sexual unions"; they don't have children, they "breed" or "spawn".

Such language is not accidental – it not only dehumanises, it pushes these people so far into the social distance that they become an anonymous, amorphous mass but one that is seen as so threatening, the coercive arms of the state are given free rein to deal with it as they see fit.

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In The Press's full frontal expose of Canterbury's top 10 crime families (2nd Dec. 2006), it was revealed that all the families are Māori.  Leading the Mainland section, the story continued across two pages. In places it read like a tabloid screamer, peopled with "faceless felons" and "rampant recidivists" who are operating in a district-wide "crime empire".

A diagram was used to illustrate the composition and activities of one of the families, which comprises 26 individuals across three generations. The type and scale of this one family's criminal activities were said to be typical of the "top 10 families" and are the motivation and justification for an "in-your-face" policing strategy of round-the-clock surveillance and intensified bail and vehicle checks.

How typical the type and scale of this family's activities actually are must be judged against the fact that, according to the article, it comprises 20.5% of the targeted offenders, and has been charged with 37% of the offences.

A side bar stated in prominent type, that "the criminal branch of one of Canterbury's 10 worst offending families which are being targeted by Police…. clocked up 673 charges for burglary, assaults, car thefts and drugs, of which 284 were in Canterbury." (My emphasis)

This family had actually been charged with a total of 246 offences in those categories (36.5% of the total) of which 88 were for burglary, 39 for assault, 103 for vehicle theft, and 16 for drugs offences.

Why did The Press claim so prominently that all the charges fell into those 4 categories?  

As journalists know, headlines powerfully influence people's responses to, and understanding of the facts contained in the text. Journalists also know that an article may mislead as much by what it doesn't say, as by what it does say.

Over one third of the 673 total charges fell into the category of "other", which includes minor traffic offences, breaches of court orders, probation, bail conditions etc.

This is certainly statistically significant. It is also journalistically significant in that at least some of the offences in this category could have resulted from the policing strategy itself. But the article does not even acknowledge this as a possibility.

Nor does it provide a breakdown of the 42% of charges that have been clocked up in Canterbury. This is a surprising omission, given the way the family has been conducting itself here would be relevant to the article and of interest to local people.

To give such prominence to 36.5 % of the charges, and to ignore the possible significance of 34%, is either negligent, or deliberately skewing data to beef up the story.

But these are not my only concerns.

The cost to the tax payer, and youth offending are another two issues of public concern which the article highlighted.

It stated that 127 individuals from the 10 families have "been apprehended for'" 1808 offences over 5 years and, in total, they have cost the country $53m.

The article also stated that people under 19 comprise 33% of the district’s population but account for almost half of all apprehensions, the costs of which are calculated separately from those of adults.

There is no detail on how many of the 127 individuals from the 10 families are youth offenders but, if the national average applies, around 60 or so young members of the families have been charged with around 900 offences.

These youth offenders in the 10 families cost around 87% of the total cost of the families' offending last year but account for just under 3% of the District's total apprehensions for burglary, 4.4% of vehicle thefts and 1.6% of theft from vehicles.

The article didn't state what proportion of the District's remaining 97% of burglaries, 95.4% of vehicle thefts and 98.4% of thefts from vehicles were committed by the adult members of these crime families.

But, as the total adult offending for these families last year cost $900k against the $6.1m for youth offending, we can assume that it was not very much.  

If so, how much attention is being paid to all the other criminals who are obviously pretty busy throughout the District?

There were many other obvious flaws and omissions in the article. We were not told what the overall clear up rate is for the highlighted offences, or how much the initiative is affecting clear up rates. Nor were we told how much the strategy is costing, and whether it is diverting police away from other crimes.

The analysis of the significant civil liberties issues was cursory as was the attention paid to the "diversion strategy" aimed at young non-offenders within the families.

The cartoon used to illustrate the article, which appeared to be a group of fat, anthropomorphised dogs in burglar masks, was gratuitous and distasteful. 

Some language was emotive and inflammatory, for example, a woman was said to have had "sexual unions" that "spawn" criminals. Why use such morally charged words?

The unusually high profile given to the story and its potential to confirm negative stereotypes and to fuel racism demand a far more rigorous examination of the politics of the situation, the statistics, and the assumptions flowing from them.

It is reasonable to ask, would this story have been given the same prominence and form if all the "rampant recidivists" had white faces?  

A senior police officer was quoted as saying: "sadly the 10 families are Māori families. It a sad indictment that so many Māori people want to make a difference to their Māori community and every time they hear crimes on the radio… they think, 'I hope that wasn't a Māori'."

If the word Pakeha is substituted for Māori the statement sounds absurd because white people are seldom highlighted on the grounds of their ethnicity in this way.

There are crimes that mostly poor people do, and there are crimes that only well-off people can do. An intellectually and politically meaningful analysis of crime would look at rates of similar crimes within populations with similar socio-economic profiles.

Māori are over-represented in the lower socio-economic categories, and Māori children are significantly over-represented in poverty statistics. We are told that Māori are over-represented in crime statistics, but what this article doesn't even ask is whether they are over-represented in apprehensions and convictions for some types of crime, and equally or under-represented in others? For example, what are the offending rates for Māori in serious fraud cases?

The public's perception of and reaction to crime, like that of the police and other branches of the criminal justice system, is often affected by both conscious and unconscious prejudice. Judgments about the degree of seriousness and of mitigation enter into definitions of the crime itself, perceptions of the criminal and how he or she should be treated.

Leaving aside all the examples of corporate and serious organised crime where the really big money is made, the fact is that most everyday, law-abiding citizens commit crimes. People steal from their employers, in the obvious ways of stealing equipment, materials, goods etc and in less obvious ways of making personal phone calls, inflating expense claims, spending time on personal business, taking unwarranted sick leave etc.

Many people speed, drink and drive, drive their vehicles over environmentally protected areas, illegally dump rubbish, avoid paying GST and income tax, and inflate insurance claims. The car fetishists who make rural people's lives a misery in Canterbury break the law in dozens of ways every week – with virtual impunity.

Very often, not only do the perpetrators of this sort of "white collar" crime get away with it, they don't even think they're doing anything wrong.

This policing strategy is likely to glamourise and/or make martyrs of what appear on the whole to be habitual but essentially petty criminals. It may marginally improve the District's poor clear up rates for some crimes. It will inflate police officers' pay packets. It will, inevitably divert resources away from other areas.

Possibly more importantly than any of that, like the "sus" laws in Britain in the 1980s, this policing strategy and the sort of coverage given it by The Press will be highly effective – not in stopping crime but in turning it into a race issue.