No Feud Like an Old Feud

FAST food is a delightful convenience, but to those of the tablecloth-and-cutlery generation it does somewhat cheapen the overall dining experience.

Likewise, while the internet may allow access to all manner of information at an instant, this also involves a certain decline in dignity. Majestic libraries of the previous century contained their wisdom within solemn, near-silent surrounds. Online, even a search for literary antiquities is likely to be accompanied by raucous advertising and any number of visual and sonic distractions.

You know, there really is a market out there for Oldtimer Internet. Pages could load with graceful ease, perhaps accompanied by a gentle Schubert sonata. Any advertising might be limited to Chesterfield lounges, Wolseley owner manuals and hand-bound copies of Elizabethan verse.

In the event of an error, readers would not be assaulted by an abrupt and impolite “page not found” announcement. Instead, they would find themselves soothed by a verdant Turner landscape overlaid by Macbeth’s lines of wretched regret: “I’ll go no more / I am afraid to think what I have done; / Look on’t again I dare not.”

We can dream. In any case, most of us have learned to cope with the online realm’s coarse ways, which are not that great a price to pay in exchange for centuries of riches. Let us forgive the internet, then.

Except, of course, for the inexcusable way that the internet degrades and corrupts one of humankind’s most elevated and noble pastimes.

The internet has ruined feuding.

A decent, long-lasting feud was once a life-sustaining thing, able to be shared and enjoyed by individuals, groups and onlookers alike. Feuds of the highest drawer attracted large and appreciative audiences. The celebrated Hatfield–McCoy hillbilly dispute of the mid-nineteenth century was basically contained within a tiny area on the border of West Virginia and Kentucky, but involved such furious passion that the entire US watched it for decades in rapt fascination.

I knew of a similar multi-generational two-family rivalry in Ballarat, Victoria. It had been running for so long by the time I learned of it that nobody could remember how or why it began, but feelings ran so deep that when one family’s star footballer took over coaching at the other clan’s team, the offended supporters handed in their memberships.

Paul McCartney and John Lennon conducted their post-Beatles breakup feud in song and in the letters pages of Britain’s music magazines. One Lennon missive, an open letter to McCartney published in 1972 by Melody Maker, condemned the gentler ex-Beatle as “conservative”, adding: “Your politics are very similar to [morals campaigner] Mary Whitehouse’s. Saying nothing is as loud as saying something.” In the same long, vengeful and obsessively detailed dispatch, Lennon—who referred to early Beatles album liner notes, ancient management issues and the precise timing of various years-ago phone calls—bet that McCartney would be “living in New York by 1974”.

Lennon could hate like a champion but his predictions weren’t much chop. McCartney remained in the UK and Lennon was shot dead in New York (“the only place to be”) in 1980.

All of these feuds were nourished and devotedly built upon until they grew into spectacular works of performance art. Quality feuds are an angry pleasure for the participants and a thrill to follow for everyone else. Well, almost everyone. A few years ago I asked US satirist P.J. O’Rourke about his time in the late 1970s and early 1980s as editor-in-chief of National Lampoon, possibly the least politically-correct magazine ever to be published.

Judging by its content, the place should have been more fun than a Wiggles abattoir with Dorothy next up. Instead it was riven with ugly enmities between various Yale and Harvard graduates, so much so that the only office entertainment was the actual work. “Having a bunch of humorists in one place,” O’Rourke once wrote, “is like having a bunch of cats in a sack.”

Still, even in that case the dispute in question had accumulated its power over a prolonged period. Now, with social media, it is possible to become swept up in ten new feuds by breakfast. For that matter, one ill-judged or ill-received line on Twitter can see a person immediately feuding with the whole English-speaking online world.

This is all cheap, nasty and usually ephemeral. It’s fast-food feuding. And most practitioners demonstrate very little rhetorical and research expertise, preferring to rely on the weight of supportive numbers to overwhelm their opponents. Left to their own devices, these individuals are pretty much useless.

Measure modern lightweights against Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, whose titanic battle raged through Hollywood for almost their entire professional careers. Davis had a clear edge in bitchy wordplay over her enemy Crawford, who once observed that Davis’s misery was due to an absence of men: “Poor Bette. It appears she’s never had a happy day—or night—in her life.”

Davis’s response: “I’ve had affairs. Not as many as her, but outside of a cathouse, who has?”

But Crawford held an advantage when it came to sheer brutality. During filming of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, which brought the two veteran actresses together on a film set for only the second time, one scene called for Davis (then in her mid-fifties) to carry Crawford from her bed, across the room and along a hallway.

Hollywood legend has it that Crawford wore a weightlifter’s belt loaded with lead beneath her nightgown. And then, halfway through the scene, Crawford coughed. The scene had to be re-shot.

According to script supervisor Bob Gary, quoted in Shaun Considine’s superb Bette & Joan: The Divine Feud, by the end of that take Davis was broken. “It was the most terrible scream I ever heard,” Gary recalled. “‘My back! Oh, God! My back!’ she screamed as Joan got to her feet and strolled contentedly back to her dressing room.”

That, my friends, was a feud worthy of three Michelin stars. Today’s try-hards could learn something from those terrifying broads.

THE New South Wales Land and Environment Court recently ruled in support of a legal bid to block the Hunter Valley’s proposed Rocky Hill coalmine.

“The construction and operation of the mine, and the transportation and combustion of the coal from the mine, will result in the emission of greenhouse gases, which will contribute to climate change,” Justice Brian Preston found. “These dire consequences should be avoided. The project should be refused.”

We now move ahead to a future Land and Environment Court ruling, to be handed down in 2025. Take it away, Justice Earthspirit Girlington-Nancyworth:

“The court has heard compelling testimony detailing the enormous potential impact of the proposed project.

“Among the most compelling was an account of the production of greenhouse gases directly and unavoidably associated with the project, and which run contrary to Australia’s aims as a signatory to the Paris Agreement.

“The project will emit greenhouse gases and contribute to climate change, the consequences of which will burden future generations.

“Greenhouse gases change the climate by trapping outgoing heat from the earth’s surface and retaining it in the lower atmosphere and at the surface, thus increasing the energy of the climate system and raising its average temperature.

“In his appearance before the court, Professor Fundy Torpor predicted the likely future changes in the climate of Australia and New South Wales: ‘Future climate change will be driven in the near-term by the further amount of greenhouse gas emissions emitted by human activities.’

“To address these impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on the climate system, the terrestrial and oceanic environment and the people of the planet, governments around the world not only agreed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992 but in 2015 agreed in the Paris Agreement to ‘holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2ºC above pre-industrial levels’.

“All of the direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions of the project will impact on the environment. All anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions contribute to climate change. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found, most of the observed increase in global average temperatures is due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. The increased greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere have already affected, and will continue to affect, the climate system. The current and future impacts of climate change were summarised by Professor Torpor and have been set out earlier in the judgment.

“Many courts have recognised at this point that climate change is caused by cumulative emissions from a myriad of individual sources, each proportionally small relative to the global total of greenhouse gas emissions, and will be solved by abatement of greenhouse emissions from these myriad of individual sources.

“In conclusion, the construction and operation of Steve ‘Swisho’ Wilson’s backyard barbecue in Coonabarabran, and the transportation of individuals to and from Steve ‘Swisho’ Wilson’s backyard barbecue in Coonabarabran, will result in the emission of greenhouse gases, which will contribute to climate change.

“These dire consequences should be avoided. The project should be refused.”