Tracee Hutchison has gone COMPLETELY MAD

At least, that's the only explanation I can come up with for this.


It seems like it was only a few weeks ago that I left a comment over at Melba’s place suggesting that regular Age columnist Tracee Hutchison has her good and her bad days. That’s broadly true, but it seems the good days are few and far between lately.

I decided to let it go when, around the time that I was suggesting that there were a few issues surrounding the choice of Governor Palin as running mate to John McCain, Tracee Hutchison was writing hymns of praise to Ms Palin and complaining that attacks in relation to her qualifications to govern were sexist.

Just for the record, I was right. Also, saying that a person is entirely unqualified to hold high political office is not an act of sexism merely because that person is a woman and the person making such a suggestion is not. To take that a little further, crying ‘sexism’ whenever a woman is criticised, regardless of whether or not the criticism is valid, serves no good purpose and hands a whole bunch of ammunition to the critics.

In passing, Hutchison’s impassioned defence of Governor Palin was somewhat marred by her inability to resist taking a gratuitous swipe at the choices the Palins made when naming their children.

In any case, I was quite happy to let Governor Palin continue to say random words in interviews and thus demonstrate the flaws in Hutchison’s theory without anyone needing me to join the dots, but Hutchison’s latest contribution to the world of "insane stupidity really thinly described as journalism" cannot be allowed to pass without comment.

When it comes to climate change and journalistic slackness, its quite possible that boiling frogs, proverbs about being unable to eat money and references to the emperor’s lack of clothing are the three biggest cliches around and Hutchison manages to fit them all in to one relatively short article.

For the record, the story about the emperor’s new clothes was about the powerful not wanting to appear stupid, not, as Hutchison seems to think, about the powerful trying to con the rest of us. Also, the boiling frog thing is about failing to notice that anything is changing until one is already dead from it, and if Hutchison thinks nobody has noticed climate change she is possibly a little bit mistaken.

As for the saying about not being able to eat money, it has been suggested that this is not actually an old saying but something that a Canadian geography teacher made up in the 1970s. I can’t be sure on this, since when I googled the phrase I got around 55600 hits and I am yet to read them all, but there are a few indicators that suggest a certain amount of urban mythology. Firstly, there seems to be a couple of different versions of the quote. The one Hutchison uses appears to be more recent, in that it refers to air pollution in place of concerns about over-fishing. Secondly, the quote is variously attributed to Chief Seattle, Chief Sitting Bull of the Sioux tribe and, most commonly, to the Cree people, who actually live in Canada.

Since most people seem to think that someone from among the various groups identified as Cree said this some time in the 19th century, it’s a little curious that there is absolutely no mention of it on the Cree Cultural Site. From this we conclude that if, at some point in history, a member of the Cree people did say this or something like it, the Cree have long since gotten over it and everyone else should too.

Let’s accept for a minute that the quote just might be genuine. Even if it is, Hutchison should probably consider that repeating it is nothing more or less than flat out lazy journalism. She should also consider that, if one is going to invoke the wisdom of a long standing culture with a close connection to the earth in support of one’s argument, one could perhaps spare the time to look at a damn map and stop referring to these people as Indians. One could also look at Wikipedia and discover that Cree is a French slang term, and the people we know as Cree actually call themselves "Nahathaway".

This blog is now officially better researched than the opinion pages of The Age, which is absolutely terrifying.

And my concerns with this travesty of journalism are far from done. Hutchison takes a moment from whatever she was doing in this article to take a swipe at Russell Crowe for getting his maths wrong when talking about the Wall Street Bail Out plan. This would be fine (if somewhat irrelevant) except that Hutchison, mid-swipe, manages to get the population of the United States wrong by approximately 270 million people. She then wanders into an equally irrelevant swipe at Sarah Palin, which seems a touch on the hypocritical side, considering her recent writings on that topic.

As if all that is not enough, we then come to a more central problem with this article. Hutchison passionately argues that the environment and the economy are ‘inextricably linked’, which is true, but she does it in the context of the collapse of Wall Street without ever coming close to explaining how global warming and drought caused a number of under regulated banks to lend too much money in the sub-prime mortgage market.

Hutchison’s only attempt to actually demonstrate the link comes half way through where she points out that we watched the Wall Street collapse on televisions that use non-renewable energy sources. (Yes, this is the link that is so obvious that Hutchison cannot understand why no-one else can see it and she therefore suggests we all must be stupid.) Hutchison claims this is ironic, at which point I simply stop pretending that I have any idea what this woman is talking about and start to suspect that she doesn’t know either.

Incidentally, it’s not even true in my case, as, in order to do my part for the environment, my television is powered entirely by rechargeable batteries.

Since we’re on old proverbs, let me add that Hutchison’s increasingly unhinged search for a link between the economic collapse and global warming does remind me of Rowan Atkinson’s description of "A blind person. In a dark room. Looking for a black cat. That isn’t there."

Just to round out this utterly surreal collection of wacky non-sequiturs from someone who really shouldn’t be patronising about Sarah Palin, Hutchison goes completely mental and starts trying to talk like a cartoon pirate. Then, equally mystifyingly, she stops again.

In the end, none of this matters all that much, however tempting it may be to point out that if Hutchison loves the environment, she should stop wasting paper by writing this complete trash. What does matter is Hutchison’s utterly callous and staggeringly stupid response to the economic crisis, which is, in effect, "bring it on and isn’t it great that this is happening to those terrible Americans".

It is no doubt obvious to everyone in the world except Hutchison that the financial crisis is not going to cause the world’s largest polluters to lose their homes. It will, however, cause this to happen to any number of families who were already struggling. Relationships will break under the strain, children will suffer. Global warming will only be reduced to the extent that those who no longer have homes won’t have to worry about heating them, but the cost in real human pain will be high.

Anyone who can look at this crisis unfolding and say ‘bring it on’ forfeits all right to claim the moral high ground on an issue ever again.

Tracee Hutchison, I hope you google yourself often, just so I can tell you that you are an absolute disgrace. If your employers have a shred of common sense you will be fired immediately and replaced by a decent human being who can actually write sensibly about serious matters.

And, in conclusion, please go away.