CLIVE PALMERTHE MEDIA’S CURRENT “FAT MAN”

Clive Palmer is a very fat man.

But the fact that Clive owns lots of property doesn’t make his body public property, and it doesn’t justify the media’s casting of Palmer as the modern-day “Fat Man”.

Media constructions of Palmer present him as a buffoon, a cartoonish capitalist; fat, greedy, lording it over the masses.

These depictions draw on a capitalist “Fat Man” mythology more than a century old.

In some cases - notably amongst cartoonists - the modern media’s appeals to the Fat Man mythology are faithful to the meanings constructed by the original Mr Fat, and make a valuable contribution to the necessary discourse around wealth distri-bution.

Oftentimes, though, the media’s cracks at Palmer’s weight are just mean. If drawing attention to, or cracking jokes about, Palmer’s weight serves no useful purpose, then it’s totally unacceptable, particularly given the modern media’s pontificating against discrimination and political incorrectness.

Unfortunately the Fat Man caricature, which is now ubiquitous in Australian media discourses about those at the top-end of town, has been hijacked.

If we are to take seriously the idea that the media should act as a gatekeeper against arbitrary and prejudicial attacks, we need to reexamine the Fat Man’s place in the media, so we can better examine his place in society.

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Who is The Fat Man?- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The “Fat Man” was popularised by cartoonists around a century ago as a way of discussing the iniquity and immorality of free-market capitalism.

The Fat Man rhetoric built a dis-course, particularly within Australia’s labour movement, around the iniquity and immorality of free-market capital-ism.

Cartoon depictions of the uncaring rich were imported from the U.S and U.K., and adapted for the Australian context - often depicting a muscle-bound worker standing up to Mr Fat, and demanding change.

The image at right, the work of Mon-tagu Scott, was one of the first such depictions to appear in the Australian Media.

Scott’s cartoon, according to Nick Dreyenfurth of Sydney University, “pictured the male icons of ‘Labour’ and ‘Capital’ engaged in a life and death struggle ‘All the world over’.

“The stalwart labourite wields the weapon of the ‘strike’ against a villain-ous ‘Mr Fat Man’ figure, here repre-sented as an imperialistic ‘John Bull’ who grips the ugly club of the ‘Money Power’.”

Mr Fat’s bulk denotes inferiority and weakness, and his juxtaposition against the muscle-bound worker suggests it is not through a fault of the worker that he is poor and downtrodden, but rather the “money and power” of the capitalist.

The image is a powerful rebuttal to the notion that the upper class was somehow in-herently superior, or that the rich were rich because of hard work rather than a so-cial and economic strata tilted in their favour.

This sort of iconography still appears, to similar effect, in today’s media.

However, more than a century on, Australian society prides itself on having moved towards egalitarianism - including a rejection of discrimination based on arbitrary factors of aesthetic (including race, gender, and so on).

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The rejection of such prejudicial attitudes has included fat-shaming, with one impor-tant caveat - the rich.

In the decades after Scott’s 1901 cartoon, Mr Fat would don a top-hat and be seen chomping cigars, but the discourse around capitalist economics and the right to a ‘fair go’ ultimately remained the same until recently.

Unfortunately much of the current commentary on Palmer’s weight does not con-tinue this tradition.

The meaningless - just mean.- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

There are circumstances where the iconography and associated discourses in-spired by Mr Fat’s labour-movement past are very useful still to this day.

But Clive Palmer is also frequently the butt of schoolyard fat jokes which contribute less than nothing to the national conversation around wealth distribution.

Two main jibes, from Chanel Ten’s The Project, stand out for being especially mean-spirited.

In one episode, co-host Peter Heliar asks Jacqui Lambi, who’d just done the Ice Bucket Challenge live on-air, whether she thought Clive would give it a go. She didn’t think so, and Heliar came back with this cheap gibe:

“What if we put the ice in a bucket of KFC?”.

Not to be outdone, on a different episode of the show Wally Aleed, a journalist for the ABC, chimed in.

Palmer had stuffed up a joke in a speech to the Business Council (a joke involving Cadbury chocolate):

“I can’t remember what he said in the end but I know I ate it!” was Aleed’s insightful critique.

That particular instance of fat-shaming, I came across on Youtube under the heading"”Obese Billionaire" Clive Palmer Chocolate Joke Fail!”.

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“I can’t remember what he said but I know I ate it.”Image via Project T.V.

“I can’t remember what he said but I know I ate it.”Image via Project T.V.

“I can’t remember what he said but I know I ate it.”Image via Project T.V.

“I can’t remember what he said but I know I ate it.”Image via Project T.V.

“I can’t remember what he said but I know I ate it.”Image via Project T.V.

“I can’t remember what he said but I know I ate it.”Image via Project T.V.

“I can’t remember what he said but I know I ate it.”Image via Project T.V.

“I can’t remember what he said but I know I ate it.”Image via Project T.V.

“I can’t remember what he said but I know I ate it.”Image via Project T.V.

“I can’t remember what he said but I know I ate it.”Image via Project T.V.

“I can’t remember what he said but I know I ate it.”Image via Project T.V.

“I can’t remember what he said but I know I ate it.”Image via Project T.V.

“I can’t remember what he said but I know I ate it.”Image via Project T.V.

“I can’t remember what he said but I know I ate it.”Image via Project T.V.

“I can’t remember what he said but I know I ate it.”Image via Project T.V.

“I can’t remember what he said but I know I ate it.”Image via Project T.V.

These sorts of jokes are common to The Project’s approach to news-telling. They use this sort of ‘colour’ to break up the drabness of real news. Fair enough.

But these gags about Palmer were not only mean, they added nothing to the sto-ries, and there was not a single word mentioned about the real story - Palmer’s growing influence.

Cheap jokes like these contribute to a broader culture of fat-shaming, which con-nects weight with greed and a lack of self control, inadvertently conferring these characteristics on all fat people

Incidentally, Palmer has told journalists that his weight is partially a result of (diag-nosed) sleep apnoea, which serves to highlight the arbitrariness of The Project’s judgements.

An anecdote Palmer recounted to The Northern Weekly shows the wider cultural ef-fect the media’s objectification of Palmer can engender:

"She reads the cartoons they make about me and she always recognises me,” Palmer says of his five year old daughter.

“Why? Probably because of my fat tummy”

“She says "That's dad's tummy!" and she comes and pats my tummy and says, "Look, dad, there you are”.”

There you are, Clive.

A billionaire, and one of the nation’s most powerful political figures, reduced simply to his figure.

And there he was – on the cover of the Herald-Sun, a full page of tummy.

In July the Herald-Sun gave Palmer’s “GUT” a full, front page spread.

Shot from a low-angle to emphasise his stomach, Palmer’s buttons bulge below the headline “We’ve had a GUTFUL”.

The caps are theirs, just in case you didn’t get it - it’s funny, because Clive Palmer has a bit gut.But again, Palmer’s size was totally irrelevant to the story.

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Photo via google imagesPhoto via google imagesPhoto via google imagesPhoto via google imagesPhoto via google imagesPhoto via google imagesPhoto via google imagesPhoto via google imagesPhoto via google imagesPhoto via google imagesPhoto via google imagesPhoto via google imagesPhoto via google imagesPhoto via google imagesPhoto via google imagesPhoto via google images

The Herald-Sun’s story was actually about the repeal of Gillard’s Carbon Price – certainly an important topic, considering the “obese billionaire” also stood to benefit hugely from its repeal.

However, the accompanying article did not contain a single reference to Palmer’s conflict of interest.

So why take a dig at Palmer’s shirt-size?

Over recent weeks Nova Peris has been drawn into a scandal over her alleged mis-use of public funds to bring her lover, and fellow athlete, Ato Bolton to Australia.

There is no doubt that there would have been an outcry - both from the public and the media - had a news outlet run a full page headline to the effect of “Peris’ reputa-tion BLACKENED by Ato Bolton scandal”.

Of course, no paper did run a full page headline conflating Peris’ race and the alle-gations against her.

That is because it’s just not relevant, and society has come to expect better.

But there was virtually no reaction to the Herald-Sun’s Palmer headline.So why hasn’t the public, or the media, had a “GUTFUL” of the unwarranted fat-shaming of the rich?

Examples of similar baseless attacks on Palmer are not hard to find.

In June the Daily Telegraph ran a story about “PALMERSAURUS”, describing a “huge, omnivorous reptile”, with a “physical mass” so great “the lumbering land lizard needs at least 250 kilograms of attention ev-ery day just to stay alive”.

“How to spot a Palmer- saurus?” It has “several chins”.

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Ambient affiliation: Not rich & powerful, but not fat either.- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Is the media’s insensitive pecking party a genuine reflection of society?

Actually, it seems the media is muting the vitriol that ordinary Australians vent to-ward Palmer for being rich, and fat.

Late last year Michelle Zappavigna, a media lecturer at the University of New South Wales, published a paper examining “how we use social media to construe identi-ties and align with others into communities of shared values”.

Zappavigna examined thousands of tweets as acts of “microblogging”, which she defines as “the act of posting short character-constrained messages to the inter-net”.

The idea is that the aggregation system used by Twitter for grouping phrases and words by hash-tags as well as making them searchable, enabled people to enact “quotidian bonds”.

“Microblogging”, or tweeting, allowed people to share how they feel with others and create a community around shared values, interests or opinions.

A quick search for “Clive Palmer Fat” in Twitter returns hundreds of results - most of them vicious, and only loosely aligned to the shared cultural understanding entailed

by the Fat Man discourse.

Many of the tweets are simply school-yard bullying with no justification for their at-tacks on Palmer’s girth.

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In a significant portion of other tweets, users expressed a shared outrage - or a “quotidian bond” - at their relative power-lessness compared to Palmer.

An agreed narrative permeates the cor-pus of tweets: People think Palmer’s wealth has allowed him to have undue in-fluence over the way the country - and in-advertently, their lives - are run.

Zappavigna, who argues “users of lan-guage perform their identities within uses of language”, divides tweets into three “communicative functions” - Interpersonal, Experiential, and Textual.

The Palmer tweets revolve around the common experience of Clive Palmer (which, incidentally, is usually an experience had via the mainstream media). The tweets also “enact relationships” through the “ambient affiliation” of a shared position on Clive Palmer, which is seen to possess inordinate and ill-deserved power.

Often there is no direct interac-tion between the tweeters, but “this form of online fellowship is ‘ambient’ in the sense that it does not necessarily presume direct interaction”.

In the tweets, Palmer is vari-ously characterised as “a fat festering conflict of interest”, a circumventer of democracy, “a self serving cunt” and a “GREEDY FAT MAN”.

Importantly, only loose connec-tions, if any, are made with the Fat Man mythology, despite the only component common to all tweets in the corpus being the search term “Clive Palmer Fat”.

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The fat-shaming is just an impotent barb, an expression of anger and frustration which serves no real function outside of that expression.

The impotence of insulting Palmer for being “fat” is, in fact, a way to vent and fume about the notions of power imbalance which are captured so strongly by the Fat Man iconography of political cartoons.

But do these modern attacks on the fat rich serve a productive purpose?

Of Zappavinga’s four “kinds of interaction” - Offer, Command, Statement and Questions - the “fat” component of the tweets always fits into the “state-ment” category.

Palmer is “Too FAT to backflip”, a “LYIN FAT FUK”, “the fat cunt” - “a GREEDY FAT MAN with no MORALS/ETHICS”, according to vari-ous tweeters.

The usages of the word “fat” fit with Zappavigna’s ‘statements’ because they do not invite comment or suggest action like Questions, Commands and Offers do.

“Fat”, and the words that make up its immediate context, are the only component of the tweet that does not suggest any agency on Clive’s part.

“Fat” is the only thing that Palmer is, ostensibly, unable to control.

Palmer cops a pizzling for being fat because it’s the one thing - or at least the easi-est and most conspicuous thing - that a majority of people are doing better at than him.

I doubt many fat people make fun of Palmer for his weight.

In contrast, other components of the tweets carry implicit suggestions of some fu-ture occurrence, as in “If its good for you bank balance it shall pass”.

Similarly, “democracy has been officially circumvented” points - in its byte sized way - to how palmer has used his wealth to influence the parliament.

Likewise, “he is just a Tory in disguise” carries certain connotations within the “am-bient discourse”, including a propensity to believe in free market capitalism (with low regard for how this impacts others), and a willingness to conflate business with politics.

But that Palmer is a “FAT MAN” suggests nothing beyond what it says. Palmer is fat [queue laughter].

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Of course there are connotations of greed and selfishness in most of the tweets but they are predicated on other elements of the tweet, and “fat” acts as an adjective, which the sentence would make sense without.

The only time “fat” is used as complement (a grammatical term meaning “a word or word group that completes the predicate in a sentence”) is in the tweets that carry no political message or insight - the schoolyard fat-jokes.

“Fat” is the punchline - without it, the jokes don’t make sense.

Unlike the tweets which act purely as jokes, those tweets which offer some contri-bution to the discussion about why Palmer is rich, and how he leverages that wealth, do not rely on the word “fat” to work syntactically.

The three tweets below are the only ones which are purely jokes about Palmer’s weight, and the only ones which use “Fat” as a complement.

(They’re the only ones which would not make sense if you removed the word “fat”.)While the first tweet does, to some extent, recall the Fat Man mythology, the other two are jokes which rely entirely on mocking Palmer’s weight. Nor can the first tweet be said to provide a particularly insightful critique of why Palmer’s wealth con-cerns the “ambient community”.

This is because, like racism or sexism, the fact that Clive Palmer is fat is actually ir-relevant to what kind of bloke he is, and whether he deserves the influence he exer-cises.

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None of the tweets are exactly the sophisticated analysis you’d hope for, but the fat-jokes which rely solely on mocking Palmer for being “fat”, are exactly the type of discourse the media has started using to criticise Palmer.

The fact that the linguistic role played by the word “fat” is so shallow points to the fact it is an expression of rage - but actually not effective in engendering a produc-tive discussion of Palmer’s power.

The tweeters are unhappy about Clive, and the fat-shaming is a snipey act of re-venge.

The “Fat joke’s” on us - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Palmer once famously responded to “fat jokes” Kevin Rudd reportedly made about him.

He told Lateline that he had called on “all fat people to band together to throw the Prime Minister out of office.”

“ I went off to China and I got back on Thursday and they’d done it,” Palmer said.

“So fat people rock.”

A typically smooth diversion for Palmer.

But it wasn’t “all fat people” who threw Rudd out of office. It was substantially Palmer, and other rich mining magnates (fat and thin).

Fat people and rich people are different things.

Of course it’s necessary to interrogate how the rich use their power, and there are certainly times when the iconography and mythology of the Fat Man are a useful way to do this.

The media, though, should be especially careful not to use Clive Palmer’s weight against him if it’s doesn’t contribute anything to that discourse.

There is obviously a resentment in the general populace about Clive’s bank bal-ance and how he’s using it, but Clive’s recollection of his role in overthrowing Kevin

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Rudd makes clear that calling him fat is not a useful way to challenge his wealth

and power.

The twitter-sphere’s fat-shaming of Palmer is a symptom of their anger at a system of iniquity - the fact that Clive’s overweight gives them an outlet. Really, though, the mainstream media should be contributing productively to the discussion.

In order to have a useful discussion about the Fat Man’s privilege, we need to talk about the causes and consequences of that privilege: the Fat Man of the popular imagination is only useful if it contributes to that discourse.

Source list- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

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Bedranek, M & Caple H 2012, News Discourse, Continuum, London.

Caple, H 2013, Photojournalism: A social Semiotic Approach, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.

DeWeaver, L 2014, ‘"Obese Billionaire" Clive Palmer Chocolate Joke Fail!’, Youtube, 23 July, accessed 04 November 2014:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FigkoMKbGQY

Dyrenfurth, N 2014, ‘The Fat Man in History’, The Monthly, June, accessed 29 Oc-tober 2014:http://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2012/june/1342072733/nick-dyrenfurth/fat-man-history

El Refaie, E 2009, ‘Multiliteracies: how readers interpret political cartoons’, Visual Communication, vol. 8, no. 2: 181-205.

Fromkin V (et al) 2012, ‘An introduction to language’, 7th edn, Cengage, China.

Jacqui Lambi Ice Bucket Challenge: Project TV 2014, Channel Ten, Sydney Sep-tember 2, accessed 4 November 2014,

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http://tenplay.com.au/channel-ten/the-project/extra/season-5/jacqui-lambie-ice-bucket-challenge

‘ Media briefs: Kenny apology … bikini brief … bring it on …’, Crikey, 04 June, 2014, accessed 29 October:http://www.crikey.com.au/2014/06/04/media-briefs-kenny-apology-bikini-brief-bring-it-on/?wpmp_switcher=mobile&wpmp_tp=1

Whinnett, E & Marszalek, J 2014, ‘We’ve had a gutful’, Herald-Sun, 11 July 2014, p. 1, accessed 4 November 2014:via Factiva

Wilmoth, P 2013, ‘The big guy: Clive Palmer’, Northern Weekly, July 19 2013, p.12, accessed 29 October:Via Factiva.

Zappavigna, M 2013, ‘Enacting identity in microblogging through ambient affiliation, Discourse & communication, 19 December (version of record), accessed November 2 2014:http://dcm.sagepub.com/content/8/2/209

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