Hypocritical spin of Donald Bradman hate

The cricketing legend has been unfairly derided as an extremist ideologue.

Spectators applaud Don Bradman as he takes the field during the fourth Test match at Headingley in 1938. Picture: Getty Images

What is most rotten about the modern marketplace of outrage was on full display this past week. The volume of confected emoting from many people, especially on the left, to the revelation that in December 1975 Sir Donald Bradman wrote a private letter to then prime minister Malcolm Fraser was exceeded only by their capacity for hypocrisy. Worse still is the damage done to our language by these purveyors of indignation.

To pick first at the low-hanging fruit of their labours, the contrived nature of progressive angst is reaching new lows. The Sydney Morning Herald declared it an “extraordinary” letter, with sportswriter Daniel Brettig describing Bradman’s letter as “strident” and “personally intervening” at “the most explosive juncture of Australian political history”.

What nonsense. Bradman’s private letter is not even close to being extraordinary. Many people used to write letters, even letters to their elected leaders. My favourite letter was written by three schoolgirls to President Dwight D. ­Eisenhower, with, as the US ­National Archives in Washington DC records, “a passion far more impressive than their spelling”:

“My girlfriend’s (sic) and I are writting (sic) all the way from Montana. We think its (sic) bad enough to send Elvis Presley in the Army, but if you cut his sideburns off we will just die! You don’t no (sic) how we fell (sic) about him. I really don’t see why you have to send him in the Army at all, but we beg you please please don’t give him a G.I. hair cut, oh please please don’t! If you do we will just about die!”

Nor was Bradman’s letter any kind of intervention. It was a polite, private letter of congratulations from a conservative former cricket player to an incoming conservative PM. After a period of political and fiscal turbulence, Bradman – a businessman – raised his concerns about inflation, the power of unions, and the need to support free enterprise.

Perhaps Brettig’s inflated response to Bradman’s letter is inevitable in today’s environment.

How on earth can anyone get noticed without employing the same language tools as other hyper-emoters?

That said, some people reach for a different set of tools. Philip Adams accused Bradman of being a RWNJ, or right-wing nut job, on Twitter after the letter was revealed. Why Adams, a man in his 80s, is wasting his time on Twitter is for another day. But hurling inane abuse at a quiet bloke who wrote a private letter to an incoming PM is, to borrow a cricketing term, a golden duck.

We should be so lucky if more Australians, let alone a famous sports star, today expressed a private and genuine concern for inflation, the power of unions and the future of those running a business in this country.

Remember that Bradman wrote that business should abide by rules that are “fair and reasonable”. For this he has been derided as an extremist ideologue.

The hysteria over Bradman’s letter is not just a sign of some people reaching peak stupidity, as Andrew Weeks, one of our readers, wrote on the letters page on Wednesday. The same culprits have also scaled peak hypocrisy.

Those having conniptions about Bradman’s single private letter to a PM 47 years ago are often the same people who fawn over the frequent and public utterances about everything from migration policies to climate change by assorted unqualified grandstanding celebrities. They are invariably praised by those on the left as being courageous truth-tellers, speaking truth to power, or some such inanity, whenever they jump into current politics.

But Bradman writes a private letter and they go berserk about this meddling in politics. Private letters by conservatives, bad. Public utterances by progressives, good. Hypocrisy, unrivalled.

Bradman never intervened publicly in political affairs. Unlike so many of today’s economically illiterate, virtue-signalling celebrities, the cricket legend certainly never took a partisan position in an election campaign.

As Rodney Cavalier, who was chairman of the Sydney Cricket Ground Trust from 2001 to 2014 as well as a former NSW state government Labor minister said, Sir Donald’s public statements “did not trespass into party politics”.

“He did not claim his cricket skills gave him a right to speak beyond the game,” Cavalier said.

If only Cavalier’s standard were applied to today’s voluble sports stars.

Two other key differences between Bradman’s private letter and the public emoting of today’s pop singers, sporting stars and Hollywood actors are sincerity and altruism. By definition, a person who writes a private letter is not searching for public congratulations or trying to burnish their public reputation. The same cannot be said for the myriad celebrities who routinely seek maximum publicity for their political utterances to boost their reputations and bank balances.

The worst part of today’s fake outrage is not even the glaring hypocrisy. It is the damage being done to our language. It goes well beyond a sportswriter’s fiction that Bradman’s private letter is an extraordinary political intervention.

It is inevitable that words get mangled and twisted beyond recognition to suit some new daily pile-on. That inevitability makes the outcome no less ugly. When the mob scans the horizon for the latest target of its ire, it ends up plundering the language more, stripping words of meaning and power.

For example, “violence” is deliberately overused by some people to shut down speech they don’t like. Words are not violent. Words and speech can certainly incite violence, and laws ought to protect against that. But the connecting part – the incitement – is a critical distinction between words that cause real violence and words that offend someone’s sensibilities. This distinction matters in a free society, but is lost in the marketplace of outrage and hurt feelings.

Similarly, those who exploit words such as bullying or harassment or sexism or racism to suit their own purposes end up damaging important causes by stripping these terms of their power.

To be sure, language evolves over time to meet our changing needs and to reflect our own evolution. But today’s attempts by small groups of social engineers to appropriate the most commonplace words for new purposes takes language warfare to new depths.

Now that the Cambridge Dictionary has decreed that the word “woman” includes a trans-woman, this powerful word, used by women to fight for their rights, has lost its meaning. “Woman” is the casualty of the newest, most fashionable, political outrage whereby trans rights trump women’s rights.

When small sections of society get away with misappropriating words as weapons to re-engineer society, the sooner more words will lose their meaning. We will then be left with fewer words to ­describe real violence, real sexism, real misogyny, and real racism. Not to mention things that are genuinely extraordinary.

The only extraordinary thing about Bradman’s private letter to Fraser is that it harks back to an earlier, more modest time when even this nation’s most celebrated cricketer – a man revered the world over – did not presume to think that his genius in his chosen field made him a rock star of politics off the field.

Bradman’s humility and his hankering for privacy was, in modern terms, extraordinary. Perhaps that is what most drives his attention-seeking critics crazy.