Barnaby Joyce’s clumsy bullet analogy triggers confected outrage

Ignore the mortgage defaults, the poverty, the restaurants and small businesses going to the wall — Barnaby Joyce said some hurty words.

Sitting amid the concrete blocks and orange cones that strangle the approaches to the Harbour Bridge one morning last week I was suddenly seized with the desire to attack the motorists around me. I was shocked. What could explain this alarming, absurd rage? (Normally I suffer nothing worse than “road disappointment”.)

Then it clicked: the traffic report a few seconds earlier had described the roadworks as a “choke point”, and the inevitable Pavlovian response was that I would act out the violence implied in the expres­sion.

At least that’s the pathology our government ministers would have us accept, with their outrage at Barnaby Joyce’s clumsy analogy of ballots as bullets to be fired on election day, and their sanctimonious demands that he resign. Confected outrage, of course, because politicians know as well as the rest of us that our language is rich in violent imagery that – like all imagery – is not meant to be taken literally, and which they deploy without compunction when it suits them.

They take aim at their opponents and gleefully make mincemeat of them. And when internal squabbles boil over it’s like the best bits in Game of Thrones. It starts with a bit of needle, then heads start to roll (sadly not in the full French Revolution way). Suddenly Julia Gillard knifes Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott is knocked off by Malcolm Turnbull, political assassinations as cunningly choreographed as any Mafia hit. Not for nothing is their caper described as a blood sport.

We use language like this every day. Miss your sales target in business and no matter how many bullet points in your presentation or how much of a gun you are, you might be axed in the next round of bloodletting; nothing to do but head to the pub to get slaughtered. (I know it’s early, but I could murder a beer right now.)

Politicians who prosper in proportion to their facility with language (or more likely their ability to recruit smarter people who write their speeches) are disingenuous to feign horror at perfectly standard embellishments of colour and metaphor to everyday conversation, for they, and we, know instinctively and precisely where the boundaries lie.

It’s hard to conceive how a caste inured to others’ pain, with hearts so hard they remain unmoved by the misery they dispense, can be so sensitive when their own feelings are wounded, swooning like Victorian spinsters, unless – surely not? – what we’re seeing is a bipartisan display of synchronised hypocrisy.

This kind of artificial problem, whose solution requires only grandiose rhetoric and self-righteous posturing, is a reliable weapon of mass distraction in the politician’s armoury.

Look at some of the charlatans who’ve sneaked into office in the past few years: you wouldn’t trust them to look after your goldfish, never mind the country. No wonder they’d prefer you to look elsewhere as they bumble through their day, snuffling at the trough of public funds and wallowing in the adulation of simpletons.

‘With luck our pollies will one day devise an entertaining new shell game to beguile us, but until then they should continue to neglect their responsibilities and pursue their puerile attempts to divert attention from the woeful state of the nation.’

However even they, and we, recognise genuinely dangerous speech when we hear it. Incitement to violence is hard to mistake, and prohibited by law: “Donald Trump must be assassinated.” But “I have Trump very clearly in my sights” from a political rival (although in dubious taste after the recent attempt on the former president’s life) is not code for “Please shoot him”; it’s a common expression, a lazy cliche.

The interesting area, as always, lies in the middle: “Trump is a danger to democracy and needs to be stopped.” Is that a lament, a call for the electorate to vote against him, or a subtle goad to violence?

Henry II’s despairing cry in 1170, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” led to the murder of Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, who had excommunicated a number of the English king’s supporters, and has been debated ever since.

Was Henry’s reluctance to commit the profound sin of ordering Becket’s assassination circumvented with a medieval dog whistle, in the certainty that the king’s merest wish would be interpreted by his loyal knights as a command? Plausible deniability?

Thomas Becket’s murder in Canterbury Cathedral

Whatever your view, there would be few in this country who truly believe Barnaby’s thoughtless pronouncements carry such majestic weight, and I guarantee none of them are in government.

The desire to control speech is never far from the would-be despot’s heart, though, and has resulted in the softening and sugar-coating of some of history’s most dreadful crimes. As George Orwell noted in his essay on Politics and the English Language, “the great enemy of clear language is insincerity”, where a euphemistic mass of words “falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details”.

There’s no shortage of insincerity and euphemism in our own polity, although Orwell in 1946 was referring to world-class monsters such as Joseph Stalin, whose Great Purge meant show trials and the execution of millions, or Adolf Hitler, whose Final Solution was the ultimate euphemistic obscenity.

In the 1950s and ’60s, for tens of millions of Chinese peasants, joining Mao Zedong in his Great Leap Forward landed them in the grave; and in the Balkans just 30 years ago, the term “ethnic cleansing” was bestowed on numerous filthy campaigns of imprisonment, torture and murder of minorities, a practice long popular around the globe.

Australian politicians’ linguistic transgressions are trivial in comparison, but they are nonetheless irritating; and we are daily insulted with the casual abuse of language that furthers their deceptions. Chaos masquerades as “stability”. Regression is rebadged as “reform”. Incompetent and shortsighted innumeracy is dressed as “sound economic management”.

Productive agricultural land is repurposed to build wind and solar “farms” (now there’s an ironic slap in the face of meaning) that delight only China’s coal-fired steel and rare-earth mineral industries – and the amoral rent-seekers here who have learnt how to tickle the throat of government until it spews money all over them. This, we’re told in a catchy sound bite, will make us a “renewable energy superpower”. Apart from being a meaningless slogan, there’s only one superpower in this relationship, and it ain’t us.

But don’t look there, look over here, where there’s a bombshell revelation about a Hollywood blockbuster: how can we use those rough words given what’s happening in the Middle East?

With luck our pollies will one day devise an entertaining new shell game to beguile us, but until then they should continue to neglect their responsibilities and pursue their puerile attempts to divert attention from the woeful state of the nation. Ignore the mortgage defaults, the growing number of homeless, the restaurants and small businesses going to the wall.

Dance around the schoolyard of Parliament House, you political giants, chanting your jejune mantra: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can literally kill me.” Turn your heads from the poverty, the unchecked flood of immigration, legal and illegal, the housing crisis, the squandering of our boundless energy advantage, the savage rise of domestic anti-Semitism and religious extremism, the real violence in our streets; and focus your laser-sharp minds on what really matters: the removal of hurty words from our political and social discourse.

If you ask me, any ambition to cleanse the English language of its brutal imagery and make it super-cuddly is doomed to failure, but hey, that doesn’t mean you can’t have a bloody good stab at it.