When a Column is a Steaming Pile

Three sure-fire ways to save a great deal of time: never pay attention to anything about crypto-currencies, whatever the hell they are; don’t buy an electric car, thereby avoiding hours lost during recharging; and always bail out of a Phillip Adams column when you happen upon the first mistake.

I encountered an Adams piece just the other week. It might have been his 250,000th column about America’s cultural dominance of Australia.

“For generations more than 97 per cent of Australian cinema tickets went for American movies. Britain was shoved aside as we swapped the cultural cringe for Coca-colonisation,” Adams wrote, or rather repeated. “We lost our distinctions by osmosis. Even our colloquialisms were lost to those drongos. Sorry, those SOBs. Our heroes were their heroes. Forget Ned Kelly—here’s Hopalong Cassidy.”

We’ll get to Phillip’s traditional mistake in a moment, but for now let’s consider his curious reference to Hopalong Cassidy, the fictional cowboy of global screen fame. More than sixty Hopalong movies were made between 1935 and 1948, followed by a Hopalong television series that aired from 1949 to 1954.

That’s a total span of twenty years. Adams has been talking about Hopalong Cassidy for at least twice as long. In a 1980 column, he was upset about Australians who “cheered John Wayne and Hopalong Cassidy at Hoyts matinees”.

Good old Hopalong obviously made quite an impression on Plodalong Phillip. He also provided Adams with the opportunity for one of his most inexplicable blunders.

The following is from a 1983 Adams column, back when he was writing for the Bulletin. His subject in these paragraphs is Australia’s remarkably creative Boyd dynasty:

“Look at the way the Boyds produced Penleigh (painter), Arthur (painter), David (potter, painter), Robin (architect) and Bill (cowboy).

“For some reason the Boyds don’t often talk about Bill, who went to America as Phar Lap’s strapper, wandering off broken-hearted when the Yanks killed the horse. A few weeks later, he found himself in Hollywood where he gained overnight fame as Hopalong Cassidy.”

The reason the Boyds didn’t often talk about their movie star relative Bill was because they didn’t have such a relative. In Australia, William Merric Boyd—a talented studio potter—was the father of artists Lucy, Arthur, Guy, David and Mary. In the US, actor William Lawrence Boyd—born in Hendrysburg, Ohio—played Hopalong.

By all accounts, the actor Boyd had nothing to do with Phar Lap and visited Australia only one, drawing crowds of as many as 100,000 when he visited Melbourne. As well, Boyd didn’t gain “overnight fame” in those Hopalong movies. He’d been prominent in film since the silent era. And the first Hopalong movie wasn’t shot “a few weeks” after Phar Lap’s death in 1932. It hit cinema screens three years later.

Anyway, Adams—who for all I know wrote that ancient column to win a bet—might have a point about American cultural imperialism if he’d only drag his references into the current century. Thanks to Phillip’s leftist comrades, we’ve imported from the US Black Lives Matter, identity politics and the pronoun craze.

Greens leader Adam Bandt lifted holus-bolus his “Green New Deal” from New York socialist Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Bandt’s colleague, Lidia Thorpe, raised her fist in a Black Panther salute when taking her senatorial oath. Dozens of Aboriginal performers duplicate American rap and hip-hop music.

More broadly, however, modern Australia bears a greater resemblance to a nation other than the US. Fearful of upsetting trans activists, we now marginalise women by defining them by their capacity to reproduce (“birthing people”) or other biological properties (“people who bleed”).

The content of all newspapers, books, films, songs and social media is heavily policed for any signs of moral deviation. For the best part of two whole years, we demanded that men, women and children wear facial coverings. During the same period, Australia created a new clerical caste—chief health officers—whose authority was greater than that of any elected representatives.

Lockdown beards are everywhere, including on me. And, in the form of climate change, Australia now has its own official state religion. Non-believers are relentlessly driven from public life. It’s not even enough to merely believe; the holiness of the climate cause must be the primary and overriding element of every policy, action and thought.

Just ask the likes of Josh Frydenberg, Tim Wilson, Dave Sharma and Trent Zimmerman what happens to the insufficiently climate-holy. They were all replaced in the May federal election by the sacred Teals, our ladies of eternal concern.

And lately climate change is said to be respon­sible for a number of music festivals being cancelled following floods. Those cancellations have vastly increased insurance costs for such events, so we’re looking at a possible future with reduced live music.

Obviously, many similarities—cancel culture, Covid panic, climate alarmism—exist in the US. But nothing happening in present-day Australia looks much like the confident, dominant US depicted by Adams and his leftist friends. They are fixated on an America of their childhoods.

Instead, modern Australia more closely resembles post-revolution Iran.

Oh, and as for the standard mistake in his recent column, at one point Phillip Adams wrote: “Buy US culture today! … Listen to John Laws and Alan Jones mimic Rush Limbaugh.”

Jones, whose on-air career began in 1985, predated the late US radio presenter Limbaugh’s national prominence by three years. Laws, of course, has been in radio since the 1950s. If anything, Limbaugh mimicked them.

Keep those errors coming, Phil. Hop to it.

Perhaps you woke up one day not quite feeling like your usual self. If you’re a bloke, perhaps you felt, well, a little girly.

No bacon and eggs for you that morning. Instead, you opt for a grapefruit. Then, after a few hours of shopping and a manicure, you settle in back at home to enjoy some favourite old movies.

But rather than dialling up Guns of Navarone or Patton, you counter-intuitively download Bridget Jones’s Diary and every series of Sex in the City.

Something is definitely going on here. The next day, you trade the HiLux for a Fiat 500 that you immediately damage in a parking accident. Then, when a tyre goes flat, you don’t fix it yourself. You call the NRMA.

Slightly anxious, you consult a few online guides about this transgender caper everyone’s been talking about. Might you be a candidate for gender-reassignment surgery?

In your case, no. But not because you don’t believe you’re now increasingly identifying as a woman. You’re just petrified of hospitals and operations. If only there was some way to become legally known as a woman without any actual physical alterations. Or, for that matter, any hormone treatments.

If you’re in Germany, you’re in luck. A new bill is expected to pass there that would allow you to legally change your name and gender without any complicated surgery, hormone therapy or even a psychological consultation.

“The Self-Determination Act will improve the lives of transgender people and recognise gender diversity,” German Family Minister Lisa Paus said of the new bill. “In many areas, society is further ahead of legislation. As a government, we have decided to create a legal framework for an open, diverse and modern society.”

It goes further than that. Suppose that after a year or so as a woman, you suddenly feel those old masculine feelings kicking back in. Dishes pile up in the sink next to a pile of pizza boxes. You can’t remember what impulse made you cover the bed with pillows.

The final indicator: when a Harvey Norman staffer asks your preferred colour for a new fridge, you find you simply don’t care. Yep. You’re a bloke again—but what to do about all that legal documentation now listing you as female?

You’re in luck again, you fortunate fraulein. Under Germany’s Self-Determination Act, you’re allowed to reverse your gender change, no questions asked. And you can keep changing your name and gender once every year, for every year of your entire confusing life.

Those Germans sure are weird, right? Not like sensible Australians. But wait. It turns out that this new German law only catches up with a law already in place in Victoria, as that state’s Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages helpfully points out: “Victorian law allows people born in Victoria to change the record of sex shown on their birth certificate … You don’t need to have surgery.”

As well, Victorians also have an annual get-out-of-gender-free card: “You can change your record of sex only once in 12 months.”

It’s adorable how they make it sound so strict. Only once per year—it’s the law! Victoria won’t tolerate any trivial six-monthly gender changes. Tough but fair.

At least New South Wales still requires gender swappers to have some skin in the game, as it were. “If you have had a sex affirmation procedure,” a government website explains, “you can apply to register your sex as male, female or non-specific.”

I’ll leave you to consider what procedure leaves a person as “non-specific”. Something tells me a Google image search might be ill-advised