Wednesday, November 28, 2007

"OKAY GUYS" & the 'Thousandfold Hullo'

Kevin Rudd’s ‘OKAY GUYS!’ speech as Bonhoeffer’s ‘Thousandfold Hullo’.

Kevin Rudd, on the very moment of his ascension to the podium as Prime Minister elect of Australia, his face beaming, his hands waving minimally to the crowd much as a pop celebrity would do, came in a slow entrance through a hail of camaraderie made by much cheering and clapping, and finally began his speech by directing two simple déclassé American words down into the Las Vegas style Queensland party melee.

‘Okay Guys!’

‘Okay Guys!’ he said! Not: ‘Men and Women of Australia.’ ‘Okay Guys’ was telecast across the continent. Two Americanisms were the first words the new Prime Minister said to the Australian People. I admit they were as if asides, in the passive voice, and uttered as a prelude to gain quiet for the speech itself. But they are likely indicative of a certain impotence, an emasculate beginning in terms of saying something. A failure of backbone to address a nation and confess to real matters of judgement and truth.

Hands raised in silence would have said more in Australian…in any nation.

My complaint is not against America, just as Bonhoeffer’s criticism of certain American traits is not; it is maybe, rather, that comradeship (or mateship) and a hollow sense of being a community, are allowed to ride roughshod over truth.

Rudd’s ‘okay guys’ party style was American Presidential. ‘Okay Guys’ - to be one in common with the people. His ‘Okay Guys’ soothed out the message that he was not so much a leader coming from above us with a higher path to help us up to, but merely one of us, a common man, even a mate, in a levelling of leader and led, a levelling that in its smothering of truth, of critical intelligence, shed all high benchmarks of public purpose.

And Rudd is the leader who claims to follow Bonhoeffer. A man whose public political engagement is driven by the strong principle and backbone of his beliefs.

Stanley Hauerwas writes: Bonhoeffer saw little point to theological engagement if truth does not matter. He was, for example, quite critical of his fellow students at Union Theological Seminary. In his report of his study at Union in 1930-1, he noted that the upbringing and education of American students was essentially different from the education German students receive. According to Bonhoeffer, to understand the American student, you need to experience life in a hostel which produces a spirit of comradeship as well as a readiness to help one another. The unreservedness of life together, “the thousandfold ‘hullo’,” manifests the American desire before all else to maintain community. In America, in the tension between the attempt to say the truth and the will for the community, the latter always prevails. Fairness, not truth, becomes the primary commitment necessary to sustain community for Americans. As a result “a certain levelling in intellectual demands and accomplishments” shapes the life of the American educational institutions. Intellectual competition and ambition are lacking, making innocuous the work done in seminar, discussion, and lecture.6
Bonhoeffer’s views of his fellow students reflected his general account of American religious and political life.”

And so us Australians become American as we enter into this gratuitous comradeship, this gratuitous public policy that tells us ‘to have a nice day’. We call it mateship over here, and think we are unique.

Then the ‘Fair-Go’ got taken out and was given a shiny polish as well, and all admired and cheered for the old ship even if she had lost her sails. But climate change seemed to have sent only contrary winds. Bonhoeffer said: ‘Fairness, not truth, becomes the primary commitment to sustain community for Americans.’ Well the ‘Fair-Go’ might be repainted, but the old girl has too long been economically rationalised, and kept as a museum piece in dry dock, no labour winds will move her down the gangplank into real water again.

Water is too scarce anyway, and there is something going to be done about that. What it is escapes us all, this balmy weather is too fair for intelligence. And I’m sure there must be a convivial party to get to.

No comments: