Black Lives Matter activists need to take a page out of this year’s Anzac Day celebrations
Anti-racism activists and our tax-funded creative elites have been exposed as far less imaginative, thoughtful and innovative than ordinary everyday Australians, writes Tim Blair.
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The only people less creative than Australia’s Black Lives Matter activists are Australia’s creative arts community.
BLM agitators spent all last week arguing with the courts, police and the NSW government over their planned protest march on Tuesday.
“Going to the aquarium, going to sex-on-premises venues, going to football matches — these aren’t essential to our democracy,” BLM barrister Felicity Graham wrote in a submission to the Supreme Court on Friday. “Protest is.”
Whatever you say, Felicity. But why must the protest take the form of a march?
At no stage have these alleged progressives set their minds to finding another way of making their concerns known.
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For them, it’s a march or it’s nothing. This failure of imagination should come as no surprise.
Australia’s BLM crew have already taken the title of their movement and all of its behavioural aspects directly from the US. Coming up with an idea of their own is clearly an impossible task.
Compare these rigid, inflexible BLM types to ordinary Australians, who are so frequently vilified as narrow-minded and averse to challenge.
When told there would be no Anzac Day marching or traditional Anzac Day commemorations in coronavirus-hit 2020, they didn’t waste everybody’s time by grandstanding in court.
Instead, they quickly devised another option.
Australian stood in their driveways and on balconies at dawn on Anzac Day to commemorate our fallen. Many held candles.
This attracted global notice, such was its impact. The BBC reported: “Some of the alternative, home-bound tributes reported on Saturday included musicians playing the Last Post on brass instruments in suburbs, while others shared pictures of poppy wreaths online and baked Anzac cookies at home.”
This was beautiful, moving, clever — and completely COVID compliant.
Perhaps BLM activists should hire a few old Diggers as creative consultants. More on that later. There’s no sense in turning to Australia’s creative classes, who have no ideas at all.
Well, that’s not entirely true. Between all of them, they have exactly one idea about how to fund the arts.
Make the government pay for it. It’s their version of BLM marching. They have no alternatives. They’re not smart enough to think of anything else.
Artists weren’t always this useless during adverse times.
“Behind the Iron Curtain, Soviet hippies stole coils from phones to string their electric guitars and play banned music,” The Spectator recently reported.
“When war broke out in 1939, London theatres closed, but soon reopened under public pressure. The arts adapted to the rationing of costumes, make-up and paper, and some London troupes performed in the safer provinces. The Old Vic, for instance, took a production of Macbeth through Welsh mining villages.
“In London, theatregoers prided themselves on their resilience — when Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit opened in 1941 at the Piccadilly, the audience gamely climbed over rubble to reach the theatre.”
That’s the spirit. But rather than delighting Wilcannia with some sort of socially-distanced dance piece about a heroin-addicted Newtown single mother, or sending an all-percussion orchestra to Inverell, our own artists responded to the coronavirus as you’d expect.
They begged for money. It’s all they do.
And they got it. The Morrison government last month announced a $250 million arts funding package composed of grants and low-interest loans.
Or, in other words, just more of the fancy dole that Australian artists have come to feel is their right.
You know, there are other ways for artists to finance their hobbies. Just a theory, but perhaps our arts sector should try creating compelling and impressive works. People may then be drawn to these works and will pay money directly to those responsible. Crazy, right? But maybe it’s worth trying. Just once or twice.
After all, it’s not as though decades of tax-funded arts has produced much in the way of anything memorable.
Arts funding mostly exists because governments are scared they’ll be denounced as philistines if they cut money for people claiming to be artists.
In fact, government funding should be cut because art is too important to be a function of government. Dead bureaucratic hands smother artistic initiative and creativity.
Artists should be liberated from filling in grant application forms so they can then devote their precious energies to actual art. In the same way, BLM activists should turn away from marches and instead turn towards struggling indigenous communities.
This may involve doing something useful, but they’ll get used to it. Habits of a lifetime are difficult to break, granted, yet they’re still just habits.
A closing tip for our BLM friends. Please don’t be sad that the Supreme Court on Sunday ruled against your pointless and potentially dangerous march.
And don’t bother pursuing a last-ditch appeal against the court’s decision.
Just sign in to any outer-suburban RSL and ask at the bar for Macca, Laurie or Jacko. One of them is bound to be there.
They’ll set you straight in about 20 minutes, either by coming up with an alternative protest plan or by turfing you out on the street.
However it goes, Australia will be the winner.