Things You Learn Along The Way By John Menadue

Posted on July 19, 2020 by Luke Ford

According to Wikipedia: “John Laurence Menadue AO (born 8 February 1935) is an Australian businessman and public commentator, and formerly a senior public servant and diplomat. He is currently a patron of Asylum Seekers Centre, a not-for-profit that provides personal and practical support to people seeking asylum in Australia.”

Here are some highlights from his 1999 autobiography:

* As a country boy from South Australia, I grew up in White Australia. Malayan students at university college unknowingly reflected White Australia back to me. It was an unpleasant experience. They changed my life and triggered my 45-year commitment to promoting Australia’s relations with Asia. Aldous Huxley described this change process: ‘Experience is not what happens to a man. It is what a man does with
what happens to him.’
A sceptical university professor unwittingly helped me draw a link between Christian values and social justice.
Gough Whitlam awakened a new world of ideas and opportunities for me. I am ever in his debt.
My first wife’s death in 1984 humbled me. I didn’t have the spiritual and psychological resources to handle the circumstances in which I found myself. It helped me to understand my vulnerability. I learned the hard way that success and status weren’t really important in the end. They were props that made it easier for me to shut out my inner voice. We learn best in hard times.
In the Catholic Church I encountered the same problem as in so many other institutions: the alienation of people from leaders who, despite the rhetoric, do not feel they are accountable. Power is inevitably abused.

* I am the son of a Methodist minister. That probably says more about me than anything else I can say about myself. So much of my life and how experiences affected me is predicated on my first 15 years in a Methodist manse.
Self-improvement and a strong work ethic were a part of daily life. We had to be ‘up and doing’. Idle hands made mischief. My sister and I were told that if we believed in something, the energy and enthusiasm to achieve goals at study or sport would come. Hard work and determination would produce better results than flashy brilliance. We
had a duty to try to make the world a little bit better.
My family were temperate, not given to wild flights of fancy or excess. Alcohol and gambling were taboo. Methodists were earnest. Time and effort should not be wasted on the superfluous.
I have never escaped the imprint of this upbringing. A close friend of mine often told me that I confused earnestness and competence. I think he was right.

* The Methodist Church was at the centre of our lives. An evangelical movement, Methodism grew out of the established Church of England in the mid-18th century. Methodists were dissenters and ‘methodical’ in
their devotions. They found that the Church of England had lost spiritual vitality. Their reform movement finally broke away and pursued its own course with emphasis on the New Testament, a very personal spiritual experience and social concern. The enthusiastic and confident singing of Charles Wesley hymns, set to Welsh tunes, and evangelical preaching are my warm and nostalgic recollections of Methodism. At church, bosomy organists pedalled furiously to get maximum volume out of the organ and led the singing at the top of their voices. Methodism was born in song.

* My father, Laurie, seldom referred to hardships. He was quite laconic. Although intelligent and an avid reader, he went only to fourth grade of primary school and then only for three days a week.

* He got into arguments with fundamentalists who thought he should be preaching more ‘fire and brimstone’. He saw them as very narrowminded and mean people. He knew that life was a lot more complicated than they thought. They hurt him a lot. His temper flared with them, but always passed quickly. He was a member of the Masonic Lodge, but
not very active.

* Sickness was a respite. It was her way of asking for help.

* The first week in all those schools was painful. Even today, I feel alone in a schoolyard. I can still smell the bitumen playground in a February heatwave when we started at the new schools. On the first morning my mother would escort us. The headmaster would try to cheer us up, but didn’t help much. If you feel alone on the inside, outsiders can’t really help. Beth would be with me. She would be lonely too, although she was a better talker than me. But sisters are not much use in the schoolyard. You can’t stand talking to your sister all day. At
lunchtime I would quickly eat my mother’s soggy white sandwiches with tomato sprinkled with sugar, then I would sit close to a group of boys and wait until they started playing with a tennis or cricket ball. Then I would join them uninvited. I knew that I was good at sport and, given half a chance, I would be admitted to the group. Sport was
my way out of loneliness in the schoolyard.

* Those three years in the air force were the greatest years of my father’s life. He often spoke of them: the pleasure of male companionship after female-dominated local churches, travel to new places like Townsville,
new work and status, and without the grind of the circuit and the financial problems and parochialism that went with it.

* We had a highly developed puritan view of right and wrong, with an exaggerated sense of guilt–whether it was about alcohol, gambling or sex. God would love us if we were good and probably not otherwise. I was hard on myself
and hard on others. A good Methodist boy had to live by a strict moral code. There was to be no playing around with girls. Illegitimacy was a common subject of discussion at home or in the schoolyard. The stigma of illegitimacy was terrifying—a fate almost worse than death. What amazed me was that, despite the stigma, people kept doing those things outside marriage. What was the attraction? It takes a while to work that out of one’s system. It probably explains why, in later life, I found my Irish friends so attractive, and harboured a vicarious longing for their
lifestyle. How could you enjoy life, feeling guilty? We didn’t discuss many emotional or psychological issues within the family. There were no therapy sessions in our house. We knew the rules very clearly. Within those boundaries, Beth and I were expected to work things out for ourselves. We knew what had to be done and were
urged to get cracking. We learnt that we were responsible for success or failure. There was no point in blaming parents or the ‘system’.

* I had a stereotyped view about Asians as poor, unskilled workers or hustlers working street stalls in Bombay and
Singapore. A threat! But in Australia in 1953 there was a group of articulate and educated young Asian students. Their presence was reassuring. Not surprisingly the push to abolish White Australia came out of the universities and, particularly, Melbourne University. I recall the pamphlet Control or Colour Bar, published a few years later, which argued the moral case against White Australia but recognised that there had to be some restrictions on numbers or it would frighten the Australian community.

Lincoln College changed so many things for me. That experience, and other ‘foreign’ experiences, whether in Australia or Japan, taught me about Australia and myself. We are not often changed by the intellect but by experiences of the heart and emotions. As a result their influence is long lasting. It is also painful to admit error and then change. No wonder the Israelites murmured against Moses. They preferred the predictable life of slaves in Egypt rather than change and be free and uncertain in the wilderness.

* For those like me leaving university at the end of 1956, there was seldom concern about a job. It was simply a matter of picking and choosing. It was a lucky period for most Australians. There was economic growth and widening prosperity. For Prime Minister Menzies the British Empire still held sway and the countries of our region were becoming more prosperous but no threat strategically or economically. There was largescale white immigration. Aborigines looked like disappearing as a people and a problem. Foreign investment was pouring in. God seemed to be in his heaven and all was going well in our closed white world. The one cloud on the horizon was communism, with conservative governments everywhere thriving on anti-communist rhetoric. The ‘red menace’ was exploited to the limit.

* Re: Gough Whitlam: The tongue that could entertain could also lacerate. A Senate colleague was described as having a ‘conflict of disloyalty’. He retorted to a New Zealand academic in Canberra who irritated him that ‘the
best New Zealand academics make it to Oxford and Cambridge and the second raters make it only to Canberra’. A Liberal Member of Parliament, a former Presbyterian minister and oil exploration executive was referred to as ‘his oiliness’. He said a certain minister owed his promotion not to how he stood in Cabinet, but how he crawled outside
it.

Whitlam usually preferred to throw his barbs from a distance in a letter or speech and then withdraw. There was no hand-to-hand combat. He avoided close confrontation if at all possible. I never saw him in an intense head-to-head argument…

He said that no matter how much he drank, no one would believe that he was drunk—and no matter how little a certain political opponent drank, no one would believe he was sober.

* He was always dignified, a quality which the Australian public greatly admired, particularly after the embarrassment of ‘Silly Billy’ McMahon as prime minister. McMahon had been asked in 1971 by Time Magazine about his
vision for the future. He requested from his press secretary the ‘file on the future’, and on being told there was no such file McMahon replied that he had nothing on the future.

* Opposition is a hard and thankless life. It destroys more Opposition leaders than it makes prime ministers. Whitlam described the problems he faced in his 1957 Chifley Lecture. ‘The way of the reformer is hard in Australia. Our Parliaments work within a constitutional framework which enshrines Liberal policy but bans Labor policy. Labor has to persuade the electorate to take two steps before it can implement its reform, first to elect a Labor Government, then to alter the Constitution.’

* In Los Angeles I met the Black Panthers, whom I had read so much about and admired for their radicalism. They were no ‘Uncle Toms’, pleading for a place in the sun; they confronted white racism head-on and didn’t pull their punches. I made a line for their newsstand to buy their weekly newspaper. An act of solidarity I thought, as I handed my 50 cents to the tall, imposing black man. Once I took the paper I was greeted with, ‘Fifty cents won’t save you, whitey’. So much for brotherhood.

* In 1963 and again in 1967, I was enthralled by Israel’s struggle to maintain democracy and its institutions and practices under unrelenting outside pressure. It was thrilling to see Israel’s modesty after its 1967 victory. We
met Prime Minister Eshkol and Foreign Minister Eban. On return to Canberra I inquired from the Israeli Ambassador whether our children might be able to live and work on a kibbutz with its communalism and socialist inspiration. He was delighted and said he would pursue it with me when the children were ready. In 1971 I visited Israel again. Israeli modesty had turned to arrogance. Solidarity with others had become contempt for the Palestinians they had displaced. The only opinion that seemed to count was their own. The King of Jordan, who had lost territory on the West Bank to the Israelis, was now derided as the ‘Mayor of Amman’. I forgot about the Israeli kibbutz for the children and from that time became increasingly sympathetic to the Palestinians. It seems to me that only more blood and tears lie ahead.

* Aside from poverty, two things struck me about India. The first was how firmly the British parliamentary and legal systems were rooted and how fervently they were admired. They loved things English. Politicians and bureaucrats we met spoke like Peter Sellers. The other thing that struck me was how India had copied some of the worst features of British bureaucracy, particularly its pedantry and pettiness.

* Queensland was the pilot state for Whitlam to publicise his policies and to hone his skills in the electorate. Up and down the state in 1960 and 1961, he recited figures to prove that Queensland was getting a raw deal from the Menzies Government, whether it was on roads, education or health, or whatever unfavourable comparison he could make. Queenslanders, even the most conservative, responded to the antisouthern and particularly the anti-Canberra message. It was very tribal, as if Whitlam was barracking for Queensland in a State of Origin football
match. He laid it on with a trowel. The story fell on very fertile ground in Queensland. Here was a great state, the ‘sleeping giant’ ready to develop but being restrained by unfair treatment from Canberra. Later, BjelkePetersen developed this story into an art form, blaming all his mistakes and problems on Canberra.

* Like most Australians we also had something of a cultural cringe—we were impressed by things British. In policy development we were influenced by the British Labour Party, particularly its National Health Scheme. The Wilson Labour Government had also promised Britain ‘a white-hot scientific revolution’, whereby science could open up new
economic and social benefits for British people. We worked hard on both health and science policy, influenced by the British experience.

* Nothing could illustrate Whitlam’s ‘crash through or crash’ attitude better than his speech to the Victorian Conference of the ALP on the evening of 9 June 1967. It was the most courageous and passionate speech I ever heard him make. He was in the lion’s den, living dangerously that night.

* (1967): I found Murdoch attractive. He was not part of the business or media establishment; he was a nationalist without colonial cringe and he was politically to the left of centre or at least had more of an open mind than
many other businessmen… Working with him for seven years I saw what drove him. It was not making money, as useful as that was, but gaining acceptance by and then influence with people in positions of power… Shy and reserved, he felt slighted by the establishment. He was dismissed as the ‘boy publisher’, the young bloke who had returned
from Oxford in 1953, ‘Rupert the chick’, young and fresh-faced. At Geelong Grammar, which he had attended in the late 1940s, he was ‘Red Rupert’. He wanted recognition and acceptance by senior business and political leaders in the way his father had enjoyed. Menzies and Holt had no time for him.

* The Australian national newspaper: Murdoch saw a market niche for a slightly left of centre newspaper, although he spent a lot of his life tugging it back from the left when he came under pressure from his business friends. He saw a broadsheet newspaper as a means of gaining political acceptance that his tabloids could not provide. He was also committed to national development and saw a national paper as essential to that. He didn’t particularly care for state governments. Throughout his public life and also privately he was a nationalist and a republican. He never took British awards, despite the fact that he could have expected that they would be offered to him. In
the end it was an Australian award that he accepted rather than a British award. Even though he later took American citizenship I always found him aggressively Australian.

It was a very courageous decision to launch the Australian and he lost a great deal of money over many years. When I was there we were losing about $20,000 a week, a lot of money in the late 1960s. On quite a number of occasions during industrial disputes Murdoch mused, ‘What’s the point of continuing; it’s losing so much money’. But to his credit he hung on and the Australian progressively became a financially successful paper.

* When someone fell out with Rupert Murdoch—and it was usually an editor—he would get that person out quickly. I don’t think he ever left anyone in his organisation who was disaffected. He rooted them out, gave them a package and sent them on their way. He created a highly personalised business culture. But every king needs a knave, or a fool, to tell him the truth. There weren’t many knaves or fools at News Limited in those days.

* Murdoch had a very good financial reporting system that Merv Rich, the financial controller, developed. Rich never seemed to show any interest in the content of the newspapers. I thought that amazing. Using Rich’s system, Murdoch could check quickly what was happening around the world in his business units. He was also a great telephoner, ringing any time of the day or night. He had a great telephone technique: long silences. We are usually frightened of silence. Following those long silences Murdoch was told a lot more than was ever intended. We
blundered in.

Cynthia often said to me that I was in danger of losing my identity to other people and confusing myself with the job. I ignored her advice. I was idealising others to make it easier to live with myself. I submerged myself and made personal compromises for the sake of my career and the esteem and recognition that came with that. The role became the man. In Rupert Murdoch, a Business Biography, published in 1976, Simon Regan commented, perhaps with some perception, how I played the game.

The opinion in Holt Street is that John Menadue is the bright boy in the Murdoch camp. Not a lot is heard of him publicly and he seems to be a bit of a loner in Mahogany Row (the nickname for the executive part of the Holt Street building).

He is a first-class and experienced in-fighter. Although he shows the customary loyalty to Murdoch, he is very much in command of his own tactics and claims he only refers to Murdoch on matters of great importance. He is not a typical Murdoch executive to be so high in the hierarchy. He is a new boy without the usual ‘up through the organisation’ background. It was generally felt that the ‘Adelaide Mafia’ were unsure of him.

Before joining Murdoch, John Menadue was in Whitlam’s ‘bright young men team’ and had built a fair reputation in this field. He combines a bit of whiz-kiddery with cool political judgement. He is concise and precise as a business-man and is first class at managerial decision-making. Within the intrigues of Mahogany Row he is a central character.

He is smooth and dapper, soft spoken and a bit of a charmer. He oozes an aroma of executive power and is
extremely sure of himself. He has shining bright teeth and one gets the feeling he cleans them with razor blades. He has extraordinary eyes which have a softness to them around the edges while at the same time a penetrating glint screams out from the pupils.

There is a certain style to top executives which distinguishes them from others. The fact they are well fed and
expensively clothed is not really it. Fat executive faces can have a lean and hungry look. It really is quite undefinable. But, whatever it is. John Menadue has it.

* I had not then appreciated the damage that was to come from the media that Murdoch owned or influenced. I did not foresee how far ‘infotainment’ would go in persistent and unwelcome invitation to voyeurism and ‘dumbing down’. There is no question of good or bad, right or wrong. In the world of market shares, everything is relative. It is
all a matter of personal taste. To the Murdoch media now, talk of quality is snobbery.

The cultural and moral relativism of some modern media today reminds me of those lines of Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov: ‘It’s God that’s worrying me. That’s the only thing that’s worrying me. What if he doesn’t exist? Then if he doesn’t exist man is the chief of the universe. Magnificent! Only how is man going to be good without God? That’s the question. Without God all things are lawful. They can do what they like’. I also had not appreciated how the media would become the cause of so much social envy and alienation. The media urge us daily to buy more and consume more. We are encouraged to ‘keep up with the Joneses’. The lifestyles of the wealthy and famous, however vacuous, are flaunted before us. They are held up as our role models. Personal worth is confused
with personal wealth. People who are doing it tough could be forgiven for feeling alienated when they see the good life of the famous and consumerism projected daily in the media.

The visual nature of the media also contributes to frustration and fear in a new way. It often seems that news does not occur unless there is a TV camera to cover it. As a result, the media is highly visual, with a heavy focus on violence and disaster. It provides dramatic pictures. No wonder old people particularly are fearful about crime as they watch commercial television.

* I do think that Murdoch’s powers are overestimated, particularly by politicians. Murdoch’s papers are influential but, more importantly, he can pick public moods and trends and reinforce them. He will back political winners who he thinks can be made kings. Whosoever wins, Murdoch is determined not to be a loser. It didn’t need a king-maker to conclude that Whitlam would win in 1972, Fraser in 1975, Reagan in 1984, Thatcher in 1987 and Blair in 1997. Murdoch’s political power is that politicians think he can make or break them and they are not prepared to chance their careers on a gamble to find out. The perception is enough. Politicians now fall over themselves to advantage or at least not to disadvantage Murdoch. He often does not have to ask for favours; they are offered. With Keating he didn’t even have to pay his respects at the Lodge. Keating called at Murdoch’s Red Hill residence.

* Whitlam was brilliant as Prime Minister but not so much at ease leading a team, something I had learned as his chief of staff in a small office in Opposition. In three years he had three Treasurers and three Deputy Leaders and reshuffled his Cabinet four times. Seldom was political strategy discussed in Cabinet. It was submission after submission, most of them promoted by public servants who, not surprisingly, did not know what the political strategy was. Graham Freudenberg rather tenderly described the reactions of some staffers to the Government’s
problems: ‘we were rather given to tears in the Whitlam Government’.

One thing I learned above everything else working with Whitlam in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet was that execution of policy was just as important as, if not more important than policy itself. Wise and effective execution must go hand in hand with good policy. Whitlam was a remarkable policy innovator, but the means to execute policy were often an afterthought.

* Prime Minister Fraser was an inspiration to work with on immigration and multicultural affairs. The contradictions in the man kept multiplying. His commitment to non-discriminatory immigration was deepseated. He buried White Australia as no other prime minister had.

In 1975, population growth due to immigration was the lowest for 30 years and the lowest this century if we exclude the Depression and war years. It was Fraser who was responsible for accepting a large number of Indo-Chinese refugees after the fall of Saigon in 1975. Those refugees, supported by the generous Australian community response, were the decisive turning point in moving Australia away from White Australia.

* Japanese learned well the lesson of Takeda Shingen, a famous Japanese general, that ‘People are the castle, people are the battlements and people are the moat’. I was impressed by the care that Japanese put into people
relationships. I often cringed at how poorly we reciprocated. I am still embarrassed by it; courtesies not being acknowledged let alone reciprocated, being late for appointments and showing little interest in what Japanese guests are saying.

* In a mono-ethnic and consensus-based society like Japan there is not sufficient grit in the system to force change. The dissenter is punished.

* The ghost of White Australia followed me all over Japan. I spoke to scores of chambers of commerce, Rotary clubs and business groups throughout the country. In Japan, ambassadors are always a drawcard regardless of the merits of the individual or what he or she says. It was also a pleasant opportunity to get around and see the country. I told
these community groups about Australia and how relations were improving with Japan. But at question time, and invariably the second or third question, depending on whether they had had a sake or two, was ‘That is all very well, Ambassador, but what about White Australia?’ Coming from a country with a racist past and present, I found that red hot. I pointed out that, despite our history, Australia in the 1970s had the least discriminatory migration policies in the region. But they didn’t believe me.

I was irritated and challenged by the Japanese questions, and determined to do something about it, particularly when I returned to Australia. On reflection, and particularly after the reaction I have encountered following John Howard’s equivocation on Pauline Hanson, I think that I got it partly wrong. Japanese were not so concerned about
our discrimination against Asians and Africans. It was discrimination against Japanese that offended. Some leading Japanese businessmen told me in 1998 that we have admitted too many Chinese!

* I told him that I had been promoting the Working Holiday Scheme but confessed that I was having difficulty in selling it to the Australian bureaucracy. I explained the scheme. He said, ‘Leave it to me. I will see what can be done at the Tokyo end’.

At Prime Minister Ohira’s press conference at the conclusion of his visit, he said that Japan would be delighted if it were possible to negotiate a working holiday agreement between Australia and Japan. He said that Australia had expertise in such schemes and that perhaps an agreement with Australia was possible. Suddenly there was renewed interest. The Japanese had helped me outflank the Canberra bureaucracy.

I returned to Australia at the end of the year, September 1980, as Secretary of the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs. I was able to pick up the proposal and conclude the agreement. There was no real opposition, only caution and lethargy. There were plenty of precedents for such a scheme. All that was required was a little enthusiasm to push it along. Malcolm Fraser and Ian Macphee, the Minister, were strong supporters.

It was a real breakthrough, considering the racial history of both countries. I regard it as more important than the dramatic growth in Japanese tourism that came later when I was at Qantas. From that scheme, over 70,000 young Japanese have come to Australia on working holidays and about 20,000 young Australians have gone to Japan. It provided a real enrichment of the relationship between the people of our two countries.

* In my first week in the department in September 1980, there was a major immigration advertising campaign in Manchester. I got reports from delighted staff about how 11,000 people queued up to inquire about immigrating to Australia. I didn’t feel the same delight. I told the staff that if we put a similar advertising campaign into Manila or into Singapore we would have had even more in the queue. I sent a senior officer from Canberra immediately to tell the UK Regional Office that things had to change. Special advertising in the UK only was cancelled on the spot. We had to advertise on a non-discriminatory basis and where the most skilled applicants could be found. For the first time we commenced advertising the business migration scheme in the Far Eastern
Economic Review in Hong Kong… Applicants feared that if they looked too black they wouldn’t be admitted.

* We took advantage of government policy to cut expenditure by proposing cuts in programs that reflected the earlier preferential and discriminatory days of ‘Bring out a Briton’. Since 1945, over two million migrants had received assisted passages at a cost of over $500 million. More than 50 per cent of the money went to UK immigrants. We proposed to end all assisted passages immediately. Macphee told me that in Cabinet Deputy Prime Minister Anthony and Treasurer Lynch said that there would be an outcry from the Government’s pro-British
supporters if we did so. Fraser supported Macphee and in April 1981 the Government removed the favoured treatment that UK immigrants were receiving. There was no outcry. Part of the annual savings was used to fund expanded English learning for non-English-speaking migrants.

* Macphee and I were particularly concerned about racial violence in Western Australia against Asian immigrants which, we were advised, was provoked by some immigrants from Southern Rhodesia. Macphee agreed that we should attempt at immigration interviews to assess whether applicants were sympathetic to the non-discriminatory policies of Australia and would settle happily in Australia, or try to carry on their racism in their new country. It was important in terms of suitability for settlement in Australia. It is very difficult to administer such criteria.
Racists are usually smart enough to hold their tongue in interviews. But we made an attempt.

* One issue that did worry me was that treatment of the 50,000 ‘illegal immigrants’ in Australia was not evenhanded. Illegals were people staying in Australia without proper papers. Australians had an erroneous view, and probably still do, that illegals are here because they jumped ship or arrived on refugee boats. That number is miniscule. The largest number of illegals in Australia were British tourists who came legally and then stayed illegally after their entry permit expired. Those who were reported as ‘illegals’ by neighbours, contacts or just busybodies, were invariably non-white and non-English-speaking. The assumption was that if you were white you were probably legal. If you were Asian or from the South Pacific the chances were you might be in Australia illegally.
So the reports we received about possible ‘illegals’, which we had to act on, gave us a very heavy skew against non-whites.

* In the department we were under pressure to develop a population policy for Australia. What was an optimum population? After discussion with Macphee we resisted, for several reasons that I still find compelling.
The primary reason was that ‘population policy’ was really code for ‘stop immigration’. It was coming from the green anti-development groups. It is ironic that almost 20 years later the Greens have been joined by
Pauline Hanson to resist immigration. We also believed that, in contrast to a heavily populated Asia, Australia has space, resources and opportunity. With a small population we have a moral obligation and it is also in our
self-interest to increase our population. We were also certain that immigration had brought great vitality and development to Australia, so why should we turn our back on new, enterprising people in the future? Since my days in Japan I have always favoured a significantly higher population for Australia: nearer 50 rather than 18 million.

* I believed then and still believe that in a referendum on the question, ‘Should we have more Asian immigrants?’, the response would be ‘no’.

* it is loyalty to Australia which binds us together, not blood or ethnicity.

In Australia in the 1980s there was overwhelming support from politicians and all parties for the migration program. There were niggles around the edges from right-wing and anti-development groups but there was strong support. That has been a great feature of migration and multiculturalism in Australia. It has been supported by all the major opinion leaders, whether they were in politics, business, unions or the media. The only significant exception over many years has been John Howard. He first broke bipartisanship in immigration in 1988 when he was Leader of the Opposition and again as Prime Minister in 1996.

* Customer service took a lot of my time. Public enterprises like Qantas had great records in engineering and technology but customers were a bit of a nuisance…. As Australians we often felt that providing and receiving service was a little demeaning—it was something that other nationalities were good at, perhaps the Italians, but not us.

* My other main focus was staff attitudes and loyalties. There were many examples of unacceptable attitudes. Susie and I were on a Qantas aircraft that was forced to make a stop in Darwin because of a minor technical problem. Under provisions of their award, cabin crew could insist on an overnight rest break in Darwin or fly some additional hours and take the plane to Sydney that night. The pilots decided to fly on to Sydney and arrive before curfew. But the cabin crew said they were too tired and voted to stay in Darwin. So all the passengers were off-loaded for a night in a Darwin hotel. Over sandwiches and coffee at the hotel I heard the cabin crew at the next table planning their evening at the casino. I pointed out their selfish behaviour and the damage they were doing to Qantas and in the long term to their own jobs. They complained to their union about my abruptness and wanted an apology. I refused. There was clearly a long way to go.

* When I was travelling, I would usually go and have a chat to cabin crew in the flight kitchen and ask, ‘What are the loads like lately on the flights you have been on?’ It soon became clear that to them a high passenger load was a horror trip with more work.

* The telephone taught me what life would be like after Qantas. Asked, ‘Who’s calling?’, I would reply, ‘John Menadue’. Then I would be asked, ‘What company are you from, sir?’ I was confronted by that. It seemed that unless I belonged to a company or a group, I was a non-person.

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Black Economist Glen Loury On Race Relations

Posted on July 19, 2020 by Luke Ford

From City Journal:

* I happen to be suspicious about the assertion of authority based upon personal identity, such as being black. Let’s take this example. Were the actions we’ve all seen of the police officer in Minneapolis, Derek Chauvin, expressions of racial hatred? I happen to think that we have no reason to suppose that about him, absent further evidence. There are plenty of alternative explanations for his actions that could be given, from negligence to him just being a mean son of a bitch.

* It’s ad hominem. We’re supposed to impute authority to people because of their racial identity?

* These events don’t speak for themselves. Americans disagree about Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter is not axiomatic. The group represents a thrust in American politics. We can talk about it. I’m not without sympathy for the struggle for racial justice, but I have disputes with people when it comes to interpreting what’s going on in American cities. The letter doesn’t mention the fact that it’s dangerous on the streets of many inner-city neighborhoods where police have to operate every day, that there are a lot of weapons out there, or that the homicide rate is extraordinarily high and that most of the people committing the homicides in these places are black.

* I object to the soft tyranny of having political postures put forward as self-evident truths to which every decent member of this community should subscribe. I object to that. That’s the last thing that a university should be doing. It’s malpractice. It is administrative malpractice of this precious institution to be swept along by political fad and fancy, and then demand the assent of every administrator, in lockstep, without any dispute among themselves. This is horrible, I thought. I thought the propagation of such groupthink at our university was just horrible.

* People cry, “structural racism.” Is that why the homicide rate is an order of magnitude higher among young black men? They say structural racism. Is that why the SAT test-score gap is as big as it is? They say structural racism. Is that why two in three black American kids are born to women without a husband? Is it all about structural racism? Is everything structural racism? It has become a tautology explaining everything. All racial disparities are due to structural racism, evidently. Covid-19 comes along and there’s a disparity in the health incidence. It’s due to structural racism. They’re naming partners at a New York City law firm and there are few black faces. Structural racism. They’re admitting people to specialized exam schools in New York City and the Asians do better. This has to be structural racism, with a twist—the twist being that this time, the structural racism somehow comes out favoring the Asians.

This is not social science. This is propaganda. It’s religion. People are trying to win arguments by using words as if they were weapons.

* Take structural racism’s narrative of incarceration. It’s supposed to be self-evident that if there’s a racial disparity in the incidence of punishment from law-breaking, then the law is illegitimate. Well, an alternative hypothesis is that, for reasons that we could perhaps spend lots of time pursuing, behaviors are different. Behaviors that bear on lawbreaking are different between races, on average. Violence is one behavior, but it’s not the only one I’m talking about. People have tried to do these studies. They’ve examined whether policing practices can accommodate disparity in arrest rates. They’ve examined whether court dispositions are somehow structurally biased, finding blacks guilty when whites would have been found innocent; whether judges systematically pronounce longer sentences for blacks than for whites. The net finding was no.

* Sam Harris says that if we can’t reason together, then the only alternative for dispute resolution is violence.

* I think Fryer’s studies give us good evidence of the Ferguson Effect’s validity. This most recent paper is only one study, but the numbers are stunning. It looks at Ferguson, Riverside, Chicago, and Baltimore as cities where there were Michael Brown- or Freddie Gray-type viral incidents of police brutality, which caused a big public stir that then drew in a federal investigation of each respective local police department. He compares those to other cities, similar in demography and economic structure, but where there was no viral incident, or there was a viral incident, but it was not followed by an investigation by the federal government of the local department.

Fryer finds that violent crime is significantly higher in those cities that were investigated than it is in comparable cities in the years after the federal investigations. It’s a very comprehensive regression-discontinuity study. It’s not perfect, but I think it’s compelling. They estimate that these investigations caused an additional 900 homicides and an additional 30,000 or so felonies. Why? Because, he says, the amount of policing activity in those places diminished significantly with the onset of the federal inquiry, which he shows by documenting the decrease in stops made by police in those places. So he’s got two findings, really. First: police engagement with citizens seems to be sensitive to the extent to which police are placed in jeopardy by the scrutiny of the federal government. Second: the amount of violent crime in those places depends on the amount of police engagement because violent crime goes up when police engagement goes down. That’s an association, not a demonstration of causality, but it’s a very suggestive association.

* You have two alternatives. You can live with disparities, or you can live in totalitarianism.

* Why would I ever expect that there would be parity across the board between ethnic, racial, cultural, and ancestral population groups in an open society? It’s a contradiction because difference is a very fact of groupness. What do I mean by a group? Well, it’s genes, to some degree; it’s culture; it’s networks of social affiliation, of intermarriage and kinship. I mean the shared narrative, the same hopes, the dreams, the stories. I mean the practices of parenting and filial piety and whatever else there might be.

A group is a group. It has characteristics. Those characteristics matter for whether you play in the NBA. They matter for whether you learn to master the violin or the piano. They matter for whether you pursue technical subjects or choose to become a humanist or a scientist. They matter for the food that you eat. They matter for how many children you raise and how you raise them. They matter as to the age when you first have sex. They matter for all those things, and I think everyone would agree with that.

But now you’re telling me that they don’t matter for who becomes a partner in a law firm? They don’t matter for who becomes a chair in the Philosophy Department somewhere? Groupness implies disparity because groupness, if taken seriously, implies differences in ways of living life. Not everybody wants to play the fiddle. Not everybody wants to dunk a basketball. Not everybody is frightened to death that their parents are going to be disappointed with them if they come home with an A-minus. Not everybody is susceptible to being swayed into a social affiliation that requires them to commit a violent crime in order to prove their bona fides. Groups differ. Groups are not evenly distributed across society. That’s inevitable. If you insist that those be flattened, you’re only going to be able to succeed by imposing a totalitarian regime that monitors everything and jiggers everything, recomputing and refiguring things until we’ve got the same number of blacks in proportion to their population and the same number of second-generation Vietnamese immigrants in proportion to their population being admitted to Caltech or the Bronx High School of Science. I don’t want to live in that world.

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David Shor’s Unified Theory of American Politics

Posted on July 19, 2020 by Luke Ford

From New York Magazine:

* Clinton campaign hired pollsters to test a bunch of different messages, and for boring mechanical reasons, working-class people with low levels of social trust were much less likely to answer those phone polls than college-educated professionals. And as a result, all of this cosmopolitan, socially liberal messaging did really well in their phone polls, even though it ultimately cost her a lot of votes.

* Campaigns do want to win. But the people who work in campaigns tend to be highly ideologically motivated and thus, super-prone to convincing themselves to do things that are strategically dumb.

* a lot of people on the Clinton campaign tricked themselves into the idea that they didn’t have to placate the social views of racist white people.

* So working-class white people have an enormous amount of political power and they’re trending towards the Republican Party. It would be really ideologically convenient if the reason they’re doing that was because Democrats embraced neoliberalism. But it’s pretty clear that that isn’t true.

* Non-college-educated white people with low levels of racial resentment trended towards us in 2016, and college-educated white people with high levels of racial resentments turned against us.

* But when you look at Trump’s support in the Republican primary, it correlated pretty highly with, uh … racially charged … Google search words. So you had this politician who campaigned on an anti-immigrant and anti–political correctness platform. And then he won the votes of a large group of swing voters, and vote switching was highly correlated with various individual level measures of racial resentment — and, on a geographic level, was correlated with racist search terms. At some point, you have to be like, oh, actually, these people were motivated by racism. It’s just an important fact of the world.

* Obama-to-Trump voters are motivated by racism. But they’re really electorally important, and so we have to figure out some way to get them to vote for us.

* The single biggest way that highly educated people who follow politics closely are different from everyone else is that we have much more ideological coherence in our views.

* Mitt Romney and Donald Trump agreed on basically every issue, as did Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. And yet, a bunch of people changed their votes. And the reason that happened was because the salience of various issues changed. Both sides talked a lot more about immigration, and because of that, correlation between preferences on immigration and which candidate people voted for went up. In 2012, both sides talked about health care. In 2016, they didn’t. And so the correlation between views on health care and which candidate people voted for went down.

So this means that every time you open your mouth, you have this complex optimization problem where what you say gains you some voters and loses you other voters. But this is actually cool because campaigns have a lot of control over what issues they talk about.

Non-college-educated whites, on average, have very conservative views on immigration, and generally conservative racial attitudes. But they have center-left views on economics; they support universal health care and minimum-wage increases. So I think Democrats need to talk about the issues they are with us on, and try really hard not to talk about the issues where we disagree. Which, in practice, means not talking about immigration.

* There’s like 20 percent of the electorate that trusts Democratic elites tremendously. And they will turn their views on a dime if the party tells them to. So this is how you can get Abolish ICE to go from a 10 percent issue to a 30 percent issue. If you’re an ideological activist, that’s a powerful force. If you convince strong partisans to adopt your view, then when the party comes to power, strong partisans will ultimately make up that administration and then you can make policy progress.

The problem is that swing voters don’t trust either party.

* Campaigns just can’t effect those kinds of long-term changes. They can direct information to partisans who trust them, and they can curry favor with marginal voters by signaling agreement with them on issues. But there isn’t much space for changing marginal voters’ minds.

* voters view center-left parties as empathetic. Center-left parties care about the environment, lowering poverty, improving race relations. And then, you know, center-right parties are seen as more “serious,” or more like the stern dad figure or something. They do better on getting the economy going or lowering unemployment or taxes or crime or immigration.

* One thing that Democrats consistently get rated highly on is improving race relations.

* What’s powerful about nonviolent protest — and particularly nonviolent protest that incurs a disproportionate response from the police — is that it can shift the conversation, in a really visceral way, into the part of this issue space that benefits Democrats and the center left. Which is the pursuit of equality, social justice, fairness — these Democratic-loaded concepts — without the trade-off of crime or public safety. So I think it is really consistent with a pretty broad, cross-sectional body of evidence (a piece of which I obviously tweeted at some point) that nonviolent protest is politically advantageous, both in terms of changing public opinion on discrete issues and electing parties sympathetic to the left’s concerns.

* when violence is happening, people become afraid. They fear for their safety, and then they crave order. And order is a winning issue for conservatives here and everywhere around the world. The basic political argument since the French Revolution has been the left saying, “Let’s make things more fair,” and the right saying, “If we do that, it will lead to chaos and threaten your family.”

* the real inflection point in our polling was the Lafayette Park incident, when Trump used tear gas on innocent people. That’s when support for Biden shot up and it’s been pretty steady since then.

* In the postwar era, college-educated professionals were maybe 4 percent of the electorate. Which meant that basically no voters had remotely cosmopolitan values. But the flip side of this is that this educated 4 percent still ran the world. Both parties at this point were run by this highly educated, cosmopolitan minority that held a bunch of values that undergirded the postwar consensus, around democracy and rule of law, and all these things.

Obviously, these people were more right wing on a bunch of social issues than their contemporary counterparts, but during that era, both parties were run by just about the most cosmopolitan segments of society. And there were also really strong gatekeepers. This small group of highly educated people not only controlled the commanding heights of both the left and the right, but also controlled the media. There were only a small number of TV stations — in other countries, those stations were even run by the government. And both sides knew it wasn’t electorally advantageous to campaign on cosmopolitan values.

So, as a result, campaigns centered around this cosmopolitan elite’s internal disagreements over economic issues. But over the past 60 years, college graduates have gone from being 4 percent of the electorate to being more like 35. Now, it’s actually possible — for the first time ever in human history — for political parties to openly embrace cosmopolitan values and win elections; certainly primary and municipal elections, maybe even national elections if you don’t push things too far or if you have a recession at your back. And so Democratic elites started campaigning on the things they’d always wanted to, but which had previously been too toxic. And so did center-left parties internationally.

* Education is highly correlated with openness to new experiences; basically, there’s this divide where some people react positively to novel things and others react less positively. And there’s evidence that this relationship is causal. In Europe, when countries raised their mandatory schooling age from 16 to 18, the first generation of students who remained in school longer had substantially more liberal views on immigration than their immediate predecessors. And then, college-educated people are also more willing to try strange foods or travel abroad. So it really seems like education makes people more open to new experiences.

But politically, this manifests on immigration. And it’s ironclad. You can look at polling from the 1940s on whether America should take in Jewish refugees, and college-educated people wanted to and non-college-educated people didn’t. It’s true cross-nationally — like, working-class South Africans oppose taking in refugees from Zimbabwe, while college-educated South Africans support taking them in.

Other research has shown that messaging centered around the potential for cooperation and positive-sum change really appeals to educated people, while messaging that emphasizes zero-sum conflict resonates much more with non-college-educated people.

* Black voters trended Republican in 2016. Hispanic voters also trended right in battleground states. In 2018, I think it’s absolutely clear that, relative to the rest of the country, nonwhite voters trended Republican. In Florida, Democratic senator Bill Nelson did 2 or 3 points better than Clinton among white voters but lost because he did considerably worse than her among Black and Hispanic voters. We’re seeing this in 2020 polling, too.

* So if you look at Black voters trending against us, it’s not uniform. It’s specifically young, secular Black voters who are voting more Republican than their demographic used to. And the ostensible reason for this is the weakening of the Black church, which had, for historical reasons, occupied a really central place in Black society and helped anchor African-Americans in the Democratic Party. Among Black voters, one of the biggest predictors for voting Republican is not attending church.

* Democratic politicians, relative to the country, are very left wing. But campaigns really want to win.

* I think a really underrated political consequence of coronavirus has been a large increase in Democrats’ odds of taking the Senate. A year ago, I thought it was possible but a long shot. Now, it’s something that has a very reasonable chance of happening.

And I think that’s partly because a lot of Senate Republicans have put themselves in the position of opposing very popular things. The coronavirus has really increased the salience of health care, which is a Democratic-loaded issue. But it’s also made opposing things like paid leave incredibly toxic.

* It’s not just that every new generation is more Democratic. Something much weirder has happened. People who were 18 years old in 2012 have swung about 12 points toward Democrats, while people who were 65 years old in that year have since swung like eight points toward Republicans. Right now, that’s a bad trade. Old people vote more than young people.

* The reason people aren’t splitting their tickets anymore is probably because the internet exists now and people are better informed than they used to be. There was this broadband rollout study where they looked at the fact that different places got broadband at different times. And what they saw was that when broadband reached a given congressional district, ticket-splitting declined and ideological polarization went up.

if we have a neutral national environment in 2024 (i.e., a 2016-style environment), we’re going to be down to 43 Senate seats. It’s really quite bleak. The Senate was always a really fucked-up anti-majoritarian institution. But it was okay because people in Nebraska used to vote randomly. But now they have the internet, and they know that Democrats are liberal.

* I think one big lesson of 2018 was that Trump’s coalition held up. Obviously, we did better as the party out of power. But if you look at how we did in places like Maine or Wisconsin or Michigan, it looked more like 2016 than 2012. Donald Trump still has a giant structural advantage in the Electoral College.

So, in 2016, we got 51.1 percent of the two-party vote share (of the share of votes that went to Democrats and Republicans). And if we had gotten 51.6 percent of that, we would have had about a 50 percent chance of winning an Electoral College majority. We probably needed to get to 52 percent in order to have a high chance of winning the presidency. For most of the last six months, in public polls, Biden was at 52 or so. Now, we’re at like 54.

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Killing Fairfax: Packer, Murdoch and the Ultimate Revenge

Posted on July 16, 2020 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this 2013 book:

* Then they turned the conversation — as they had so many times before — to Fairfax, the hallowed newspaper company and third force on Australia’s media scene. Fairfax was in free fall. Media companies across the globe were in trouble, caught in the teeth of a new-media juggernaut that had brought once proud companies to their knees. It was an industrial revolution. The old guard was sagging under the double bind of high costs and the remorseless onslaught of social media, while the internet was cutting a sharp path through the classified advertising that had once been the monopoly of newspaper firms. Fairfax had fallen fast and far.
‘They lost the classifieds to the internet,’ said Packer scornfully. ‘They just didn’t see it and didn’t understand it, and now they’re finished…

‘Lachlan, how much did realestate.com cost you?’ Packer demanded, leaning forward and slapping the table.
Murdoch put down his fork. ‘Well, I think it was $10 million. But don’t forget, $7 million was in comp. And it’s worth nearly $2 billion now.’
‘Fairfax just didn’t see any of this coming. They thought it was all beneath them. They thought we were idiots. You know, I think we killed Fairfax,’ James Packer said.

* Packer told them about his father. Kerry had always wanted to buy Fairfax, he said. It was a company the family hated: its pioneering investigative journalism had targeted Kerry Packer over many years, with exposés of his business dealings and the private world of the very rich. James Packer himself had a visceral loathing of Fairfax for more than a few reasons, but a Fairfax takeover was not on his mind. He planned to take a different form of revenge. ‘I think there’s a better way: by being involved with the players who are going to take their business off them,’ he told his three astonished listeners. Packer was convinced the Fairfax classified print advertising business was going over a cliff. And that was something he wanted to be part of.

* The Fairfax papers, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, were so physically huge on the weekends — stuffed with classifieds — that they had the capacity to damage a front door if thrown hard enough by the paperboy. The classifieds were not known as Rivers of Gold for nothing. This was the revenue that paid for the journalism, and Fairfax seemed impregnable.

* Pay television was late arriving in Australia by contrast with America and the United Kingdom, where cable and satellite subscription broadcasting was well entrenched. But with the allocation of a second Australian telecommunications licence to Optus in 1991 to compete with the national carrier, Telecom (later known as Telstra), the die was cast. Subscription television was permitted from 1992 and with that the gates were open.

* Kerry Packer, with his adored free-to-air Nine Network, was possibly the most antagonistic individual in Australia to the idea of pay TV and he would fight over it from inside and outside the tent for the rest of his life. Packer’s son James, however, had no such one-eyed affection for traditional broadcast media as the old man. For the Murdochs, whose News Corp had sold the Ten Network to shopping centre mogul Frank Lowy in 1985, pay TV in Australia offered a chance to re-enter the broadcasting industry, but also to consolidate what had become a roaring financial success for News in the UK with its big stake in the subscription service BSkyB, overseen by Sam Chisholm.

* Fairfax no longer had any members of the Fairfax family on its board. Its days as a family dynasty were gone, although pride in the company’s 150-year history remained rooted in the heart of its newspaper operations. The robust Fairfax corporate identity, expressed through its quality newspapers, was regarded by the Packer and Murdoch media dynasties as arrogant hubris. Conrad Black had appointed South African media executive Stephen Mulholland as chief executive; he was widely expected to kick the company into shape and with it, kick some of the stuffing out of the famous Fairfax culture.

* For Foxtel, however, it was just the beginning. The service commenced broadcasting on 23 October 1995. Three months later on 19 February 1996, Sky News was launched to run on Foxtel. Sky was a 24-hour news channel with a former Network Ten journalist, Juanita Phillips, as the first newsreader. It was owned in equal thirds by BSkyB, the Nine Network and the Seven Network, bringing together content from the two leading Australian broadcasters and BSkyB’s 24-hour UK service. The ownership structure behind Sky might have been confusing to outsiders riveted by the sniping between warring pay TV operators supported by either the Murdochs or the Packers. But Sky was a channel seeking the widest possible distribution. Pay TV in Australia had become big business, attracting all the most powerful media players in the nation, but it was far from profitable. Millions of dollars drained from the wallets of the key investors.

* With the election of John Howard’s Liberal Government in 1996, Packer had anticipated changes to the laws preventing cross-holdings in newspapers and television, something Howard had publicly made it clear he was willing to consider. In 1997, Packer commenced a high-pressure public and private lobbying campaign. It would eventually collapse in the face of widespread political opposition in parliament. Howard was prepared to introduce new laws, but he was unable to garner the support, including in his own party, to push it through. He was caught, too, in the most uncomfortable of positions for a Prime Minister — between the demands of a media mogul controlling the leading television network with its influential nightly news, and another media mogul controlling the largest share of the national newspaper market, including the killer metropolitan tabloids. By assuaging the demands of one giant, Howard could fall victim to the fury of another. Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited might benefit from a change that allowed it to buy into television, but it would still be restrained by the limits on foreign ownership. To allow everyone a piece of the pie, Howard would be forced to amend the foreign ownership laws too. By eventually dropping the planned reforms, Howard restored order in the jungle.

* One day Kerry [Packer] phoned me and I [Kim Williams] quite politely said, ‘Good morning, Kerry, how are you?’ He replied, ‘Stop being such a smart arse.’

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This Week’s Torah Portion – Parashas Matot, Masei (Numbers 30-36)

Posted on July 16, 2020 by Luke Ford

Listen here.

Parasha Matot is Numbers 30:2–32:42, and Masei is Num. 33-36.

* Num. 30:2-17 assumes that all adult women are married. By giving the husband 24 hours to nullify the wife’s vow, it assures him that he is head of the household.

* Num. 31:1. The Lord spoke to Moses: “Avenge the Israelite people on the Midianites, then you shall be gathered to your kin.”

God and Torah are A OK with vengeance. Moshe’s final mission is annihilation of Midian. What does God mean by “avenge”? God wants retribution for the Midianites seducing Israel into worshiping Baal-peor while the Israelites want revenge for the devastating plague that followed that worship. How hard was it to tempt the Israelites into screwing Midianite women? There’s a human tendency to hate those who present us with temptations we can’t resist. Most people prefer to hate others than to hate their own moral weakness.

This repeated invocation of “gathered to your kin” indicates that ties of blood are important in the Torah world view.

* Was Balaam a good guy or a bad guy? Num. 31:8 says the Jews slew Balaam. Yet we use his words in the Jewish prayer book.

* Dennis Prager: “What did God command [about Midian]? Retribution. There is no other specific command from God. It is all from Moses. Moses does all the commanding of killing. Did Moses do exactly what God wanted?”

* Num. 31:14 Moses was angry with the officers of the army—the commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds—who returned from the battle.

15 “Have you allowed all the women to live?” he asked them. 16 “They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the Lord in the Peor incident, so that a plague struck the Lord’s people. 17 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, 18 but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.

Dennis: “The ones who caused the problems were the ones who you spared…so that the Lord’s community got the plague… I do not believe that God wanted the children of Midian killed.”

“They [the Israelites] didn’t kill the women and children. Obviously it is Moses interpreting God’s command. The Israelites got the same command. Retribution. Moses relayed it and the Israelites did what they understood as retribution — kill the men. But that’s it.”

“I think Moses did misinterpret [God’s command]. Maybe God wasn’t vague. Maybe the Israelites understood Him perfectly. Or you have to argue that everyone got it wrong except for Moses.”

“Moshe misinterprets God’s command with the rock…and says we will bring forth water from the rock, not God. Moses is old, angry… Moses is over-compensating for his error that Pinchas corrected when in front of Moses, a Midianite woman is seducing an Israelite man and Pinchas slays both of them. It is clear that God thought this was right because it was unbelievably brazen. In front of Moses, they announced they were having sex and worshiping false gods.”

“We do not have a hint that the Jews obeyed Moses’s command. It is clear that his authority has waned. Maybe for humanitarian [reasons] or maybe because they still like Midianite women, it is clear that they didn’t do it because it always adds they did as God commanded. They never leave it up in the air as to whether or not they obeyed.”

Moses was over-compensating for having married a Midianite wife. This was his way of saying that I will not be swayed by my own personal inclination towards Midianite women. His father in law, Jethro, was a Midianite priest who nursed Moses to health and it is to him that Moses goes to for advise.

Earlier in Exodus, Moses was saved by the daughter of the Pharoah. The Torah does not portray the Jews as the good guys and the goyim as bad guys.

* Num. 31:54. A midrash says that the Jews stripped the Midianite women of jewelry, but they did not rape them: “Each of us had gone into the houses of the Midianites, into the bedchambers of their kings. And we desired their daughters, pretty and beautiful, delicate and tender; and we unfastened the garlands, the gold crowns from their heads; rings from their ears, necklaces fro their necks, chainlets from their arms, chains from their hands, signet rings from their fingers, clasps from their breasts. Nevertheless, not one of us was joined with one of them in this world, so as not to be with her in Gehenna in the world to come.”

* Num. 32: 1-30: The Gadites and Reubenites want to help Israel but they don’t want to live there because they can make more money living elsewhere. Sound familiar?

Dennis Prager on Num. 31-33: “The truth is, who has suffered as much as Jews historically? I can’t think of any group who has suffered as long as the Jews have.” Do Jews win the Victimhood Sweepstakes? And what is the prize for that?

“If you let the Canaanites live with you, they will probably seduced you to their values… And then I, God, will dispossess you. It is hard to make a monotheistic world… At least half of the Jews of the world are not God-oriented.”

“If God took the Jews out of Egypt just to free slaves, then God is a racist. Why didn’t He take ever group out?”

“It is not possible for Jews to think they are better than everyone else when they read the Torah because it describes them as worse than everyone else.”

* Numbers 34: God tells the Jews the boundaries for Israel to let them know not to conquer more and not to become an empire.

* Cities of refuge. There are no accidents in Torah. If you sin accidentally, you have to bring a sin offering. If you kill someone accidentally, you have to flee to a city of refuge and stay there until the High Priest dies. You can’t just pay off the family for your killing.

* This week’s Torah portion is concerned with vows. It doesn’t like people making vows. The Torah enforces all sorts of restrictions about vows. The Torah lets men feel in charge because they have 24 hours to revoke a wife or daughter’s vow. I think this is more about a man feeling in charge of his domain than actually giving men power. It is similar to the Torah’s approach to slavery — evolutionary not revolutionary. The Torah makes slavery difficult. It makes it difficult to annul the vows of his wife and daughter, giving him but 24 hours.

* Do modern men need to man up and take charge of their households? I was raised to believe that the man has the final vote in the home. He’s the one in charge because he is more rational and less ruled by his emotions. I had this modern atheist Jewish girlfriend who said to me, “You are so afraid to set limits on me, but when you do, I’m just a meek little lamb.”

* The Torah doesn’t like people taking on unnecessary religious restrictions. All religions tend to ascetism, to a hatred of pleasure. One of the things I appreciate about many Hasidic Jews, as opposed to the more Lithuanian strands of Judaism, is how much they enjoy life.

* Torah has guidelines for everything, even taking on ascetic practices. If you want to afflict yourself, the Torah has guidelines.

* Another point this Torah portion emphasizes is the sanctity of speech. Words are things. They matter. They have power. You can create your own halachic (Jewish law) status through vows. I am impressed when I meet someone who takes language seriously. I like people who obey the laws of proper usage aka spelling and grammar. I respect people who say what they mean and mean what they say. It’s a great guide to someone’s character. I find that the verbally slick are usually rascals. One mark of a good man is that he will take trouble with his words and be willing to be awkward to find the right meaning.

* Moshe tells the Israelites to take vengeance against Midian (Num. 31) but when they bring back women alive, he gets mad and commands that all women who’ve had sex must be slaughtered. It’s easy to read the Koran and say it is a bloodthirsty book but so is this week’s parasha.

* When Moshe commands the Jews to wipe out the Midianites, he does not say anything about making exceptions for the mentally ill. Nor does the written Torah make any exceptions for capitol punishment for the mentally ill. So this freak in New York, Levi Aron, who apparently tortured and murdered a kid, Leiby Kletzky, should fry. I don’t buy that you never execute the mentally retarded. If they are not smart enough to know that it is wrong to murder people, then why do they try to get away? Why don’t they just hang around the murder site and tell people, yeah I did it? If they don’t know murder is wrong, then that is an argument that they should be executed so they don’t murder again.

* Kosher utensils are a far greater concern of Torah (Num. 31:23) than they are of me. I gotta face it. The Torah is suspicious of the world outside of Torah and things from the outside world that want to enter the Torah world have to go through a trial by fire, including would-be converts. A big concern of Torah is keeping Jews separate from non-Jews. You can’t just say, “I need to love my neighbor as myself” and go out and bang shiksas.

* Jews are good at pointing out flaws. The Jewish tradition argues with God. The midrash finds flaws in Moshe’s behavior. Jews have often been societal revolutionaries. Jews are good at deconstructing society and finding its flaws. Most Jews are not radicals but many radicals are Jews.

* Twenty three verses on how the booty is given out. It is to make war more civilized.

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