Rudd as literary construct
Image via The Canberra TimesPolitics is not poetry. It is built on a sickly bureaucratic tongue, prone to repetition, passivity, dangling third-person plurals and a whole stinking host of corpse-like lexical impoverishments. This is the lingua franca of politics, a system with a grand taxonomy. The newest local addition is the Ruddism; the verb “fiddle-faddle”, the graceless metaphor “life’s walls”, among a catalog of stand-ins for his much-hyped foulness of tongue. “Balderdash”, he rebuked the miners with, “absolute bunkum”. The Gillardism is perhaps on its own humble journey, although “moving forward” just cannot compare to the much-erring “fair shake of the sauce bottle mate”, nor the magisterial “detailed programmatic specificity”.
Then why, with such fertile oratory in the air, does Kevin commentary carry with it such a comprehensive, and equally divers, bank of literary and historical illusions? The man refuses to be pinned down by the bored scholarship of the opinion pages that repeatedly dips into the histories and the canon to find evidence of his true nature, turning up many contradicting versions of a thoroughly unfathomable figure. Latest efforts continue the trope. A Canberra Times piece, Rudd is Banquo at the feast, adds not much more than a headline and a cartoon to the dramatic cause. And an inch-by-inch (or cm x cm) Napoleonic allegory in The Sydney Morning Herald’s Labor’s Little Corporal rallies troops for Battle of Waterloo went as far as predicting a full scale comeback after Rudd ‘blitzed’ the ABC’s Q&A (when did they tune in?). Both attempts to render Rudd readable leave much to the imagination, if for different reasons. Where one lacks illustrative detail, the other bends multiple histories to fashion an incomprehensible future. Leave it to some pithy Brisbanite’s in the comment section to cry foul:
Napoleon introduced reforms that last to this day. The Napoleonic code, the metric system, establishment of the central bank, Banque de France. Rudd gave us Pink batts, fuel watch and the BER. (Pete)
This column is a waste of space. (Bob Meadows)
The literary and historic allusion writes politics large, larger than it often deserves, stealing the ethos of more illustrious political characters and kindling present-day parliamentarians in their image. The floor of the House is oft the stage, not merely the reference, for such rhetorical conceits. So it was with the spectre of the ‘carbon tax’, driving Abbott’s gormless misquote “Out, out, foul spot!” trying to somehow fashion a “latter-day Lady Macbeth” from Gillard’s back-room conspiring against a ransomed King Rudd. Not as Banquo, but the King of Scotland, Rudd’s blood spilled over into the hands of the Opposition. In particular, the Shakespearean palette provides for useful application in the political sphere. Not explicitly historical, it wraps a thread of the fantastical to the discourse without miring the assertion in the stick of historical ‘fact’. In the ribaldry of politics, Shakespeare provides a context to discuss the various fictions of political life in their true form—as fictions.
The challenge remains, unaided by a culture ever waning in affection for the Bard, to somehow interpret Kevin Rudd through this rubric. The drama is there—the man cried on national television after being pried from the leadership in his first term—yet the scholarship is messy, and once and for all his psychology needs to be given an Elizabethan equivalent and set aside, lest we all lose hope in the ‘Shakespearean method’, a certain loss to posterity.
Rudd, of course, liked to picture himself as the benevolent Henry V, invoking him in the great GFC siege of ‘09, mustering his citizenry “into the breach”. But come the auguries of “the greatest moral and economic challenge of our age”, Rudd is crestfallen, harassed by an obese mining lobby, and plots are afoot among the assassins of the Labor right. Henry V would have seen that coming, beheaded Gillard and Shorten, and perhaps hung drawn and quartered that “cruel, ingrateful, savage and inhuman creature”, Mark Arbib. But this did not come to pass, and Rudd made a muck of Henry V by blubbering on the evening news after a very efficient, bloodless coup. Truly, at no point was Rudd ever made of the same mettle as Henry V, and would have rightly feared to wander the Labor camp at nightfall to find out what the caucus really thought of him. As the precise, uncompromising leader Rudd was known to be, his “merry few” turned out to be literally three people in the upper establishment of cabinet.
Exiled, not assassinated, Rudd finds himself in the psychological moor of the foreign affairs portfolio, a lonely, white-haired misanthrope reminiscent of the ailed King Lear. Roaming the heath of the UN Security Council, demanding urgent briefings on unstable Japanese nuclear reactors, marshaling a no-fly zone over Libya, the deluded champion of the good shook his pen at the storm clouds. Filial ingratitude had taken its toll and the minister, like the sorry Lear, was tolerated in his fits of righteous tally-ho-ing, but not encouraged. In the opening act, the ETS was like the honest beauty Cordelia, apparently unwilling and unable to summarise its merits in a few sweet stanzas. It wore the fate of all unsellable policies and was promptly sold off.
On the other side of politics, the subplot found its footing in the ousting of Malcolm Turnbull, that noble Gloucester who’s far-seeing eyes only led him towards calamity. A similarly brutal fate awaited the Liberal leader, and after his eyes had been plucked out in retribution for his Earthly disposition, the most eloquent of parliamentarians roamed blind through the hinterland of the backbench lamenting the loss of a saner polity, “I have no way, and therefore want no eyes; I stumbled when I saw. Full oft ‘tis seen, our means secure us, and our mere defects prove our commodities”. In the months that ensued, the backwardness of the Abbott reign began to take shape as Rudd searched for insights in a private storm cloud.
Foreign Minister Rudd, strangely hanging onto the airs of a Prime Minister, was resolved to be philosophical. His recent Q&A appearance mixed mea culpa with a more naturalistic bitterness. As he squirmed through the recent history of Labor injustices, he seemed to revel in the chance to flick some mud at Gillard and Swan, his scoundrel progeny, by suggesting that “there were those in cabinet” that wanted to scrap the emissions trading scheme for good, something he could not abide. And in case this gave the impression that it was not all his fault, Rudd launched into a pining aside where the audience got another dose of his uniquely uninspiring contrition. And this is the first of many threads that unravel Rudd qua Lear, and where the ‘Shakespearean Method’ begins to lose its footing over a man who seems destined to forever be “hidden in full view”, as David Marr observed in his Quarterly Essay treatment of the former PM’s psychopathology.
Lear is only applicable to Rudd as a cautionary tale, something with which the younger, pernicious bureaucrat could measure the lessons wrought from his downfall. In Lear’s stormy, shattered state, the old king turns to Rudd and jeers; “Get thee glass eyes; And, like the scurvy politician, seem to see the things thou dost not.” Rudd wanted to have it both ways; noble martyr in the battle for a greener economy and mild servant of the people, waxing apologetic to the ABC audience over his failure to enact this self-same policy. Forever the politician, his ‘just call me Kevin’ act was more foolish than ever now the reality of the brief Rudd years has been shown for the intricate fabrication of media-managing and poll-driven plotting that it was.
He has been called characterless, driven by anger, stubborn, ambitious, vicious, domineering, an alien—yet something remains unfinished in the public discourse on Rudd that suggests a deep fascination with his glassy exterior - fragile yet not at all malleable. Tragedy is founded on the maxim that justice inclines its scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering, but for our Kevin this wisdom seems eternally beyond reach no matter the inflictions made on his person. Stuck in the gyre of pretense that sabotaged his erstwhile impervious man-of-action façade, he struggles to communicate, having stretched the public’s patience too thin. As David Burchell at The Australian pointed out last year, “because Rudd has assembled his public personality out of his perceived need to be all things to all men - a Jew to Jews, a gentile to gentiles, speaking to the weak in the language of the weak… it’s hard to discern the character on whom this tragedy is being enacted.” Burchell, like Marr is prone to dwell on the esoteric nature of political identity, but there is something undisclosed in Rudd that calls for such responses.
The man brilliantly fashioned a mirage of respect and solidarity that eddied across the entire party structure, concealing the real potential of a leadership challenge. No one saw it coming—especially Rudd, who squirmed for hours in front of Gillard, Swan and the negotiator John Faulkner on that fateful eve’. The sudden leadership baton-swap was as jarring for the media as it was for the majority of the Labor party, and efforts to evaluate the mess turned up more Shakespearean allusions than the member for Griffith could wear. Not Banquo, Henry V, Lear, nor any other exiled, deposed or baited character from the folio would prove a worthy mach. Prospero forgave Antonio. Coriolanus had the guts to rebuke his usurpers. Rudd, true to his legacy, did nothing. He resists that tradition in politics to die the good death, accept one’s fate and move to the subterranean of memoir writing or public speaking engagements. The Labor show will struggle to go on as long as Rudd’s glassy mantle haunts its stage. Not quite a politician, not quite a work of art, he is a character more splintered than Shakespeare could endure.
