Free to a Good Home, By Catherine Deveny, Black Inc., 2009, 213 pp, $24.95 (pb)
Catherine Deveny spends most of her time being incensed, and in this latest collection of her humorous columns from the Age she gives ample reason for being in a semi-permanent rage.
Wrath and satire are certainly needed for the objects of her ire: from the ugly antics of flag-wearing patriots to the sleazy jockstrap and alcohol culture of rugby league; from the unpaid domestic burden of married women to government funding of private schools; from the reckless greed of bankers to the soul-destroying emptiness of shopping centres.
Hers are not just the exasperated rants of a grumpy, old(ish) columnist. Deveny's frequent thematic target is capitalism, whose "fundamental tenet" is to cultivate human dissatisfactions in order to sell us stuff that won't fix them, a self-awarded licence to print money.
High on her list is sex and its commodification (she attends "Sexpo" only to discover that it is "no more arousing than a massive book clearance or top-name Manchester warehouse sell-out"), closely followed by traditional sex roles.
Deveny reads four Mills and Boon "books". The sick feeling that results arises either from the M&B message that women can only be whole after finding "that special man" or from the two packets of mint slices it took to get through the ordeal. Women's magazines, too, are culpable: "Self-hate manuals, full of diets you'll never be able to stick to, lives you'll never be able to lead, recipes for food that'll never look as good on your table as it does in the pictures … craft at which you will fail. Bodies you'll never have."
An "escaped Catholic", Deveny gives special attention to religion as capitalism's partner in crime, diagnosing god with a narcissistic personality disorder and Christian fundamentalists with double standards. Her local "god-botherers" are, for example, blase about the "stalkers, serial killers, kidnappers and rapists" who periodically populate the Home and Away television soapie, but are morally agitated by the show's one-off, tepid lesbian plot-line,
Deveny's analysis: "Ten per cent of people are gay. Only 9 per cent of people attend church on a regular basis. Gays win."
It is not always easy being a consistent "inner-city lefty", however. Deveny has known sin. While taking her clamouring brood to the Royal Melbourne Show, what was her response to their beseeching for "several non-biodegradable plastic bags full of stuff that could choke you, rot your teeth, make you fat, encourage violence, reinforce outdated and unhealthy stereotypes, cause psychological damage and destroy the environment, use obscene amounts of lead, all made by three-year-olds in sweatshops and transported with non-renewable fossil fuels?". Why, "absolutely, kids".
Where capitalism meets culture (TV with its organising principle of advertising), Deveny is like a pig in manure: "Domestic flight delays, street brawls, driving lessons, weight loss, farmers needing roots and vain, attention-seeking media whores with no discernible talent" vie with "trauma porn", reality TV (lately specialising in the "humiliation of the fat and ugly") and other ethical bottom-feeders in a race to the moral and artistic depths.
How sad it is that the "faked, scripted, soap operatic 'professional' wrestling is the best drama on telly by miles".
One of the few exceptions on "Planet Telly" was the ABC's The Howard Years, which justified Deveny's feeling of blessed relief about the end of the Howard unpleasantness, although she is worried that dwelling on the Howard era may show a certain "unhealthy fascination" with evil like all the programs on the Nazis that SBS keeps running.
The Howard Years also disappointed Deveny's hope to "see a crushed man sobbing, 'I was wrong. I raped the soul of this nation, I encouraged fear over faith, greed over bounty and 'us and them' over 'we'. I should have been a newsagent.'".
So what's Deveny's conclusion about commercial TV? "Don't spend your life watching Days of Our Lives or the days of other people's lives. Kill your television and get back to your own."
Like too many of us, however, Deveny keeps coming back to more televisual degradation (she reviews TV for a living — the car rego makes her do it).
Deveny at least deserves a medal for bravery for watching so much TV… or perhaps we should take a whip-around to pay for her car rego so that she can spend more time reading improving literature.
But then we would be deprived of reading her scathing and sharply funny reviews of a TV world whose crassness and conservative values helps to keep Deveny fired up.
"Don't tell me to calm down — you fire up!" is Deveny's favourite response to those who think we've heard enough from a feminist-lefty slant on the ills of the world. The social and political pathologies of the world demand that we should all be as fired up as Catherine Deveny.