Strong Verbs Are Just Better

Now after the fact, I remain unconvinced that author and critic Dale Peck’s critique of presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, “My Mayor Pete Problem,” originally published (and then unpublished) by The New Republic, was homophobic in any definition of the word that I have ever experienced, despite having experienced the exact sort of gay-on-gay bitchery and contempt for the way I live my life as a gay man that Peck displays in his essay. NBC, The Hollywood Reporter, our sister site Gizmodo, on top of legions of tweeters all deemed it “homophobic” without much support, as if it was so self-evidently bigoted that they didn’t need to waste their time explaining. Or maybe it was as if they believed the definition of “homophobic” to be “being mean to a gay person.”

But are enough people listening? It would seem doubtful. In a recent essay, the Guardian UK columnist Gary Younge reflected on the global conservative movement and its strategy to take control of the term ‘identity politics’. By ‘railing against liberals, feminists, migrants and Muslims,’ he wrote, ‘the right has cornered the market in victimhood’ (Guardian Weekly, 12 October 2018). While conservatives, in Younge’s view, often conflate identity as an exercise in pandering to special interests, dubious affirmative action initiatives or simply uninvited competition for oxygen, he reminds us that identity often denotes the obvious contrast between privilege and discrimination. He comments that ‘in Britain there are, on an average day, roughly 1,400 assaults on women [and] 25 hate crimes committed against gay and transgender people’. Meanwhile, in the United States ‘for every $100 of wealth a white person has … an African-American has just $5’.

Younge suggests that it is perhaps time to ‘retire the phrase “identity politics” for good’ if it primarily serves the interests of white people feeling sorry for themselves. Reflecting on his call for a shift in terminology that might also advance the necessary debate, I picked up a copy of the Weekend Australian (27–28 October 2018) and read an article by another retiree, John Howard, under the headline ‘Broad church is the best bet in this age of identity politics’. In danger of extending the gambling metaphor, it seemed clear that Gary Younge was on the money.

Ley was not the only reviewer who couldn’t seem to accept he was reading a dramatised critique of misogyny, not a documentary account of it. Even the positive reviews seemed fixated on the misogyny of the characters as if books and films about Western toxic masculinity were unheard of. ‘Yet by having fictional characters refer to real-life rape victims as “sluts”, this novel enters controversial and sensitive territory … taking creative liberties with actual victims … might not be so well received,’ wrote Clinton Caward in the Sydney Morning Herald, who has, presumably, never watched a Hollywood film about the US military’s many exploits in the Middle East.

‘This is what white men always do; they protect the bullshit in their own culture,’ Ahmad scoffs. ‘If you look at American Pie, it’s full of sexual assault.’ He is referring to Ley’s rebuke that the book failed in its attempt to juxtapose the misogyny of the Lebs with that of white society by having the characters watch the film American Pie.

‘He called it a false equivalency [but] my argument has always been that misogyny, sexism, and patriarchy is learned behaviour,’ Ahmad explains. ‘And in The Lebs, I try and show you where they learned it from, and they didn’t learn it from the sheikh.’

But what of those alleged culprits, characters who materialise out of obscurity only as a result of their victim’s mature epiphany? Many might assume that once they enter the scene any semblance of ordinariness goes out the window. The impulse is to see proven child molesters as anomalous: as soulless, evil men. (And yes, they are almost always men.) This, however, is another misconception.

If profound evil exists, it is best attributed to the manoeuvres certain institutions have instigated in order to conceal past sexual abuse in Australia. The most striking thing to be found in the class of historical sex offenders is how grindingly conventional they tend to be. These too are ordinary people with regular jobs: landscape gardeners; public servants; unemployed labourers; retired architects. Human beings whose inner workings have by some means become disordered, tainted; unremarkable types who are morally deficient in some indefinable way.

It always amazed me how alleged perpetrators would appear utterly unsurprised to have the law arrive at their door, a reaction that only tended to heighten our suspicions. Some appeared defiant, even arrogant. Others showed something like a sense of relief, as if they too had tired of carrying alone across the years the weight of their crimes. Ultimately, though, few of them had anything much to say to us. Lawyers would invariably be contacted, the right to silence quickly invoked. Where the evidence allowed it the opposing parties, in all of their ordinariness, were fated to meet in that most unordinary of settings: the courtroom.

The men’s love of the bridge was associated with the pride they took in their work and with the symbolic nature of the West Gate Bridge in the imagination of the city. It wasn’t only the workers, Melburnians were watching and waiting with anticipation for this bridge that was going to be bigger and better than the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Hundreds visited the site, standing on the viewing platform to watch its progress. It’s that love which haunts me when I stroll along the Stony Creek Walkway, when I drive over the West Gate. And the injustice and tragedy, that these workers were the ones who paid with their lives for poor decisions that they had no role in making.

On 15 October every year a memorial ceremony is held under the bridge; survivors, friends and family remember their workmates. There is a memorial plaque, garden and sculpture under the bridge; the plaque was paid for by the workers—the union members, who wanted to ensure that their mates were not forgotten. The survivors have continued over the years to tell their story whenever they’ve had the opportunity but while there is usually some reporting of the tragedy on the anniversary every year, when the survivors gather with their families and the families and friends of the victims, the story is largely forgotten. Certainly, I have found that in my classrooms there are rarely more than one or two who know the bridge collapsed during construction.