fiction
Jocelynne Scutt
Bob Ellis
So It Goes: Essays, Broadcasts, Speeches 1987-1999
Viking $26.95pb, 401pp
0 670 88971 7
As is to be expected with such a volume, readers will agree with the author's views in some essays, disagree in others, and with yet more wonder why he (or the newspapers) bothered at all. Some pieces, read consecutively, highlight contradictions in positions taken by Ellis. Others show him at his self-indulgent worst -- or best. Some expose an inability to judge clearly his own work, a blank spot where sense would see that others' works are better than his -- not even in the same league. (Nostradamus Kid contending with Broken Highway -- on screenplay, script, acting... -- whatever critics' views of the American film, American marketing, American hype?)
So It Goes shows sympathy for the unemployed and poverty stricken, and anger at what's left for a world ravaged by (ir)rational economics, what remains of societies damaged by so-called leaders and corporate kings' genuflecting to globalism.
Yet what of the ability to recognise the struggles and turmoils of others? Is it fair to discern within these pages a glib moralism in the condemnation of those who face realities never faced by the writer? A lack of understanding of the lives women live, in a world dominated not by our decisions, through not experiencing the lived lives? (Ah, but I love women!)
Who, having thought for half a second of women's lives and reproductive realities could attribute pregnancy termination to fashion? Is there room for melodrama in this, oh, so personal, and oh, so political of struggles?
In the cold, cold fear confronting the pregnant fifteen-year-old, the despair in the face of the thirty-something mother of two, three or four who face another pregnancy, or the crushing apprehension of any woman who, because she cannot be a 'good' mother right now, knows abortion is the only 'choice' -- because she has no choice -- no room for 'trendiness' as reason, surely? Yet:
There are children daily sloshed into buckets who would have loved you and it's a crying pity and I mourn for them, as I would for victims in war, and I curse (in vain) the trendiness (sic) that numbly and hourly slaughters them.
And to many it's an odd notion that ' sexual abuse and sexual harassment have become, in the absence of the communist menace or nuclear attack, the great devils of our time, the motiveless root of all evil, the great Satan, as omnipresent as they are incurable'. Oh? So on and on, So It Goes, it seems, women must put up with the unwanted indignities and humiliations, the slanders, sexual insults, the sleazy imprecations and sexual assaults inflicted on them, by men -- who can do no other, their conduct 'incurable'? And on and on, it seems, some children shall endure sexual abuse at the hands of the `incurable', growing up to sexually abuse their own children, or others, or to be exploited and abused in their own adulthood? All because, so it seems, sexual abuse and harassment are 'incurable' and not for condemnation?
'Who (asks Ellis) at the office Christmas party has not strayed?' Yet at the pain of being paired with the Red-baiters, those MAD nuclear warriors, why not another question? Who at the office (never mind the Christmas party -- or that, too) has not had to fight off red-faced, middle-aged men? Is position elicited by point of view?
Ellis laments, in his 'Introduction', the paring down of column inches, the lesser word length allowed to today's essayists. How to make an argument in 1000 or 500, or even 300 words? Three hundred is the tabloid limit, 700-800 generally the norm in newspapers and magazines. The going is tough.
Yet to whom is space given, however limited? To whom is space given, rather than no space at all? Who gets the space for writing that moves head and heart, at times, or influences human thought, calling deeds incurable, when others might condemn? Who gets the space, to judge -- or let others off? Who fills the space, however small?
So It Goes -- and if ever there was evidence of the breadth of issues for which Bob Ellis has been given space, it's here and it's huge -- and it's been going on for years. Faced with this, can the reader but reflect upon why it is that, so often, women (with notable exceptions) get to do the 'I'm funny -- look-at-me' or 'Me-at-home-being-domestic' columns, whereas the men write newspaper and magazine pieces on politics, economics, current affairs, the media...?