Tag Archive for: Madeleine Awards

The 16th Madeleine Award: truths and totems in tumultuous times

Amid tumultuous times, it’s the annual moment to lift the curtain, up the lights and open the envelopes for the 16th Madeleine Award for symbol, stunt, prop, gesture or jest.

The Madeleine is a silly-season special, served at year’s start with a soupcon of seriousness, seeking sense in sayings, signs and symbols.

The award is inspired by the late Madeleine Albright, the US ambassador to the United Nations (1993 to 1997) and US secretary of state (1997 to 2001), who sent diplomatic messages via her lapel brooches. Now displayed at America’s diplomacy museum, those lapel pins expressed ‘hopes, determination, impatience, warnings or warm feelings’.

For Albright, it wasn’t ‘read my lips’ but ‘read my pins’. Her favourite mistake was taunting Vladimir Putin over Russia’s military brutality by wearing three monkey brooches, representing Putin’s stance of ‘See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’. Putin went ape. Sometimes the message is just too sharp, Albright reflected, judging ‘I’d gone too far’.

With no monkeying about, we turn to the minor Madeleines. The first is the OOPS! Award for blooper and blunder. This slip-up star is almost always won by a politician. The prize’s nickname is ‘The Boris’, in honour of Boris Johnson who provides the OOPS! axiom: ‘There are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.’

The Boris winner is South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol, for imposing martial law. Yoon’s power grab—the first use of martial law in 44 years—was a gamble that crashed in six hours. The president declared emergency rule at 10:30 pm on 3 December, only to lift it at 4:30 am on 4 December after the members of the National Assembly rushed to vote to overturn the decree. By 14 December, the assembly had impeached the president, and he faces the possibility of a separate charge of treason. For conjuring up a disaster that destroyed his leadership, Yoon becomes a worthy member of the Order of the OOPS!

Next is the ‘Diana prize’, marking ‘the utility and force of photographs’. The trophy is named for Diana, princess of Wales, a noblewoman who understood that you’re nix without pix: ‘As Diana used to say, the picture is what counts,’ former British prime minister Tony Blair wrote.

The Diana goes to the photo of Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese being welcomed to Papua New Guinea with headdress and garb. The picture by the ABC’s Melissa Clarke is a winner, not least, because it overturns the don’t-look-silly-rule of the political minder class: never let your boss wear a strange hat or unusual costume. Context beats the minder rule. Albanese was on his way to walk the Kokoda Track with PNG’s prime minister. The image shows a cheerful leader paying homage to PNG as well as to the military legend of Kokoda.

While giving the Diana to Albo in PNG headdress, the judges point to one of the greatest ever news pix, the July photograph of a bloodied Donald Trump with his raised fist and an American flag in the background, after he’d been wounded in an assassination attempt. The photo by Associated Press photojournalist Evan Vucci is in the same class as that of the US Marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima in World War II. Journalists use the word ‘iconic’ too often, but Vucci’s image reaches that rare grade. The only defences for not gonging Vucci’s magnificent work is that the Diana tends toward light, not shade, and Trump was last year’s Diana winner, for his scowling police mugshot after being indicted on racketeering charges.

Now to the George Orwell prize for double think. In Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith labours in the Ministry of Truth, rewriting the past so history meets the shifting needs of the Party. In that spirit, the Orwell goes to Russia for creating a modern Ministry in RuWiki, to counter Wikipedia. In the RuWiki rendering of Vladimir Putin’s truth, Russian atrocities in Ukraine are merely ‘Western disinformation’.

As Foreign Policy commented: ‘RuWiki is an isolated digital ecosystem that has created an alternate reality. In this version, Holodomor, the man-made famine under Stalin’s rule that killed up to 8 million Ukrainians by some estimates, never happened.’ RuWiki lives the slogans Orwell describes carved into the concrete facade of the Ministry of Truth: ‘War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.’

We stay in Russia for the Madeleine Award itself. Finding hope in Putin’s Russia is the mark of an award that arcs towards optimism, channelling a great Albright line: ‘I am an optimist who worries a lot.’

In that spirit, the 16th Madeleine goes to an inspiring Russian politician, Alexei Navalny, killed in jail by the regime on 16 February 2024, at the age of 47. A fine obituary judgement of the opposition leader is that Navalny didn’t just defy Putin, he showed up his depravity, exposing the fear and greed at the heart of Russia’s regime.

Putin’s first attempt to murder Navalny was in 2020, when the lawyer was poisoned by nerve agent. Navalny survived and recovered in Germany. Then, he bravely returned to Russia, knowing exactly what he would face—a rigged trial and exile to the modern gulags. At the close of his trial, Navalny blasted the court with a favourite movie line: ‘Tell me, where does power lie? I believe that power lies in the truth.’

Alexei Navalny was a proud Russian nationalist who used his own life to symbolise what Russia should be. More than gesture, this was sacrifice expressed as greatness.

The 15th Madeleine Award: balloon up, Trump mugs up, humanity reaches up

Pick your response: Big Brother is watching, perhaps? A passport snap on a really bad day? The worst school photo ever? Maybe it can be a read as a wanted poster that asks: ‘Do you want me?’

Donald Trump’s police mugshot welcomes you to the annual Madeleine Award for symbol, stunt, prop, gesture or jest. The award is inspired by the late Madeleine Albright, the US ambassador to the United Nations (1993 to 1997) and US secretary of state (1997 to 2001) who sent diplomatic messages via her lapel brooches.

For Albright, it wasn’t ‘read my lips’ but ‘read my pins’. She wore a golden brooch of a coiled snake to talk to the Iraqis, crabs and turtle brooches to symbolise the slow pace of Middle East talks, a huge wasp to needle Yasser Arafat, and a sun pin to support South Korea’s sunshine policy. Her favourite mistake was wearing a trio of monkey brooches to meet Vladimir Putin, causing him to go ape.

The Donald is the gift that keeps on giving for these awards. The 45th president of the US won the 9th Madeleine for post-truth ‘alternative facts’ and the 10th for a magnificent stare-off with Angela Merkel (the supporting cast included the crossed-arms resignation of the Japanese prime minister and the astonished brow of the French president).

Trump doesn’t win this year’s main award for this mugshot in August at the Fulton County Jail, in Atlanta, after being indicted on racketeering charges. Instead, this first police booking photograph of a US president gets a minor gong, the ‘Diana prize’, marking ‘the utility and force of photographs’. The trophy is named for Diana, Princess of Wales, a noblewoman who understood pics: ‘As Diana used to say, the picture is what counts,’ former UK prime minister Tony Blair wrote.

The way Trump’s pic will count is still being added up. True to form, Trump embraced the image and started making money and merry politics. The image generated  ‘a record-breaking fundraising haul’ as his campaign sold shirts, posters, bumper stickers and beverage coolers bearing the mugshot. Cut-up pieces of the blue suit he wore are priced at US$5,000.

The New Yorker scowled that the scowl shot is the true presidential portrait. The chief fashion critic of the New York Times dubbed it the de facto picture of the year:

He glowers out from beneath his brows, unsmiling, eyes rendered oddly bloodshot, brow furrowed, chin tucked in, as if he is about to head-butt the camera. The image is stark, shorn of the flags and fancy … Mr Trump is a man who has always understood the power and language of theater. Of putting on a show. Of the way an image can be used for viral communication and opinion-making.

From the Trump mug-up we move to the moment when the balloon went up: the Chinese balloon that floated across the US before being shot down by the US Air Force on 4 February. The balloon caused a huge tizzy in America, making it the most bizarre crisis of the Biden administration. Seven months later, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff quietly announced that the balloon wasn’t spying, revealing Washington’s conclusion that ‘there was no intelligence collection by that balloon’. The balloon’s sensors had never been activated while over the continental US.

While thousands of jokes and memes floated free, Washington–Beijing relations plunged into the drink along with the balloon. The strangeness of it all makes the up-in-the-air moment the natural winner of the OOPS! Award for blooper and blunder. Next time China wants to wish America a happy Lantern Festival, it should just dispatch a card.

Not deterred by the OOPS!, Beijing has grabbed the idea of making mischief in the sky. There’s been a surge in sightings of Chinese balloons over Taiwan recently, sending a ‘calculatedly ambiguous warning’ to Taiwan’s voters ahead of Saturday’s presidential election.

Now to the George Orwell prize for double-think and euphemism. Orwell preached that ‘ugly and inaccurate’ language is the woolly cover for all sorts of dreadful deeds—‘political chaos is connected with the decay of language’—and the only way to get good politics is with the clarity of good  language.

In the Orwell spirit, the Plain English Foundation hands out awards for clangers, spin and gobbledegook. The people’s choice award for 2023 went to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which described the explosion of one of its rockets on launch as a ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly’. Bravo for a mighty effort, but the Orwell must go to an inflection moment in thinking and writing.

The arrival of artificial intelligence means our species now shares the planet with something that might get smarter than us. And large language models like ChatGPT and Bard are doing our writing. Yet when the technology doesn’t know the answer, it wanders off into fantasy—or as the techies like to put it, the model ‘hallucinates’, generating text that is ‘incorrect, nonsensical or not real’.

In a nod to the new language of our AI future, the Cambridge dictionary made ‘hallucinate’ its word of the year for 2023. The Madeleine judges agree. As humans, we speak against lies and laziness, reaching towards dimensions of morality, honesty and rigour. Go program all that into a language model! Give the Orwell to ‘hallucinate’.

Finally, to the main event. The Madeleine Award always arcs towards optimism, toasting the times with a glass that’s half full. The award spirit channels a great Albright line: ‘I am an optimist who worries a lot.’

As La Madeleine was an unsettled utopian and vexed visionary, so this year’s award is a two-parter: the 75th birthday of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on 10 December 2023, and 2024 as ‘the year of democracy’. The award honours humanity’s better angels, while noting those angels have dirty faces and ragged garments and calloused hands.

The United Nations says the declaration is the most translated document in the world, with 562 translations, proclaiming the ‘inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family’. This year many in the family will get a chance to vote, with more than 80 national elections ‘directly affecting an estimated 4.2 billion people—52 percent of the globe’s population—in the largest election cycle the world will see until 2048’.

The year of elections says that even dirty despots and dastardly dictators want the legitimacy conferred by a vote: in embracing the election form, they must offer a small nod to its central function in creating democracy. You can have undemocratic elections, but you can’t have a democracy without elections.

And so, our hard-working angels take small wins and half-gains, always reaching for the best in our humanity.

The 15th Madeleine Award salutes the year of elections, partly built on the magnificent affirmation and aspiration of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. More power to our better angels!

The 12th Madeleine Award: picturing a pandemic

In the Covid era of gloom, doom and Zoom, Australia’s prime minister went to summit meetings while doing 14 days quarantine. And the lockdown PM fronted the cameras with board shorts and thongs just out of camera shot.

What became normal in an abnormal year introduces the annual Madeleine Award for the use of symbol, stunt, prop, gesture or jest.

The Madeleine is inspired by the former US secretary of state and ambassador to the UN, who sent diplomatic messages via her lapel brooches.

Rather than ‘read my lips’, Madeleine Albright’s messaging was ‘read my pins’. Her favourite mistake was wearing a trio of monkey brooches to meet Vladimir Putin, causing the Russian to go ape.

Over its dozen years, the Madeleine Award has spawned several minor prizes. First up, the Diana on ‘the utility and force of photographs’, named for Diana, Princess of Wales, a princess who understood pics: ‘As Diana used to say, the picture is what counts’, former UK prime minister Tony Blair wrote.

The Diana goes to that image of Scott Morrison doing virtual business during virus. Up top, the business shirt and coat, but below the belt—well, all bets are off, just like the belt. The prime minister clarified: ‘Just FYI, they’re boardies, not PJ shorts.’ So dress code for the G20 or APEC is yes to board shorts but no to pyjama shorts.

Strange times, indeed.

Which leads to the OOPS! Award for blooper and blunder, also known as a ‘Boris’, saluting a British prime minister who proves blunders needn’t define careers. When sacked from shadow cabinet, many moons ago, Boris Johnson commented: ‘There are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.’ It seems so right that this year’s Boris is for a runaway hair crash.

The OOPS! goes to the melting moment suffered by US President Donald Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, as hair dye, or maybe mascara, ran down his face during a press conference. Here was hair malfunction as metaphor for the melting of the Trump presidency. Ageing leaders around the world shuddered: ‘There but for the grace of God, and my hairdresser, go I.’

In politics, a lot of dyeing goes on. In his memoir, Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama notes the black-hair fixation in Beijing (‘as far as I could tell, few Chinese leaders turned gray as they aged’) and on a 2009 meeting with Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, ‘an octogenarian with a jet-black moustache and beard (male vanity seemed to be a common trait among world leaders)’.

Now for the Orwell prize for double-think and euphemism (North Korea is barred from this category, because it’d win most years). China gets the gong for denying that it’s sending Uyghurs to gulags, instead claiming Muslims are going to ‘vocational education and training centres’ for ‘re-education’. See ASPI’s Xinjiang Data Project, which is Orwellian in the noblest sense (rigorous analysis, tightly written).

As Trump leaves the White House, George Orwell’s pronouncement in his 1946 essay ‘Politics and the English language’ resonates anew: ‘Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’

The Donald’s presidency has lived out Private Eye’s prediction on the president’s inauguration in January 2017. The Eye’s cover picture of Trump taking the oath of office had these words coming from his mouth: ‘I swear to tell the post-truth, the alternative truth and nothing like the truth.’ Some jibes go straight to the truth. In the history of the Trump presidency, the manner of his leaving will be a dark scar serving as a final, dark exclamation point.

The Madeleine Award’s focus on symbol, stunt, prop, gesture or jest means political protests are often in the running. Singapore gets a mention for charging an activist with violating the public-order law by holding up a sign with a smiley face. In Singapore, brandishing a smiley face in front of a police station is no laughing matter.

In Thailand’s battle royal (the king versus his people) the three-finger salute from The Hunger Games has become a gesture of resistance and call for democracy (a potent makeover for the boy scout/girl guide salute). Large inflatable yellow ducks also serve as playful symbols—and shields against water cannon. Thailand’s democracy battle happens on both streets and screens: see ASPI’s Quicktake on how activism is shaped and amplified by social media and digital activism—and the pushback, using the same tools, by the government and military.

The 12th annual Madeleine, however, doesn’t go to a smiley face, a salute or a duck.

The emblem of a dire year must be—drum roll, please—the face mask.

In the face of the global virus, masking has gone viral around the world.

A response to pandemic, the mask has become personal and political; a health measure for protection and precaution now has social meaning and often legal weight. That’s quite a load for two loops over the ears and a piece of material across the nose and mouth.

Australian researchers writing a book on the face mask during Covid say it’s part of a culture of decoration, fashion and self-expression, with customised face masks available for bridal wear, footy matches, birthdays, baptisms, bar and bat mitzvahs, first communions and even funerals.

The 12th Madeleine Award goes to the face mask as a sign of our times, along with some typical wisdom from Madeleine Albright: ‘I am an optimist who worries a lot.’

As La Madeleine would say, embrace the job and the joy, not the jingoism—and wash your hands!

The 9th Madeleine Award in the time of The Donald

The heat of the Oz new year is here, heralding our annual Madeleine Award for the use of symbol, stunt, prop, gesture or jest.

The envelopes, please, for the 9th awards ceremony, named to honour former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright for sending diplomatic messages via the brooches worn on her left lapel. Albright messaging wasn’t about ‘read my lips’, it was ‘read my pins’: her favourite mistake was wearing a trio of monkey brooches to meet Vladimir Putin, causing the Russian to go ape.

In just such a spirit, Australia’s foreign minister Julie Bishop nearly won the 7th Madeleine Award for answering questions using only emoji characters. Just as Albright monkeyed Putin, Bishop’s least diplomatic response was replying to a Putin question with a red-faced angry-man emoji.

The first of the minor awards is the Diana Directive on the Utility and Force of Photographs and Images. The title comes via Tony Blair, who cited the Princess of Wales: ‘As Diana used to say, the picture is what counts.’

Blair’s biography recounts Diana’s understanding, both emotional and analytical, of the demands of the media age:

I had a conversation with her once about the utility and force of photographs and how they could be best used, which showed a mind that was not only intuitive but also had a really good process of reasoning. She had the thing totally worked out. Occasionally she would phone and say such-and-such a picture was rubbish or what could be done better, and though not, as I say, at all party political, she had a complete sense of what we were trying to achieve and why. I always used to say to Alastair [Blair’s PR supremo]: if she were ever in politics, even Clinton would have to watch out.

A fine example of the picture directive was Donald Trump placing his hands on a glowing orb in Saudi Arabia. That’s the sort of image advance teams crave. Governments around the world took note: captivate the US president with colour, movement and bright stuff that feels important.

As politics is show business for ugly people, the Diana Directive mandates fashion shoots for pols in suits. So the official portrait of French president Emmanuel Macron went through 91 Photoshop tweaks—the location, pose and props of the picture offer ‘a masterclass in soft-power symbolism’.

Broadening our understanding of the directive, the Diana award this year goes to a picture that didn’t happen. Ahead of delivering the British budget, Chancellor Phillip Hammond planned to take a trip in one of the driverless cars he wants to see on UK roads by 2021. Downing Street and the Treasury cancelled the photo-op, killing the image of a chancellor who didn’t have his hands on the wheel in a driverless government.

Next, our little-sort OOPS! Award, celebrating an I-wish-I-hadn’t-said-that blunder. The headshaking ruefulness of the OOPS! was captured long ago by the Tory MP Boris Johnson after a political smash-up: ‘There are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.’ The gleeful side of the OOPS! was epitomised when Prime Minister Tony Abbott won for announcing that he wasn’t ‘the suppository of all wisdom’.

The disaster dimension of the OOPS! is to the fore with this year’s winner: United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz apologising for having to ‘re-accommodate’ a passenger who was hospitalised after being dragged bloody and screaming from his assigned seat on an overbooked flight. Passenger videos went viral and ‘re-accommodate’ was dubbed ‘possibly the worst bit of crisis-PR in history’. OOPS!

Next, the George Orwell Prize for Doublethink and Euphemism (North Korea is barred from this category—otherwise, it’d monopolise the prize). When Donald Trump was sworn in as Big Brother, Orwell’s 1984 was quickly back on the bestseller lists. Following Ministry of Truth guidelines, the new administration is banning words it doesn’t want bureaucrats to use: ‘vulnerable’, ‘entitlement’, ‘diversity’, ‘transgender’, ‘fetus’, ‘evidence-based’ and ‘science-based’. Newspeak lives.

Now the biggie, the 9th Madeleine Award. An honourable mention goes to Australia’s foreign affairs department for renaming some rooms in its HQ. When the original naming happened three decades ago, lots of big rooms were named after important blokes in Oz foreign policy (Arthur Tange, Gareth Evans), and when they ran out of blokes, another eight smaller meeting rooms were named after flowers and plants. What’s missing from that picture?

A Madeleine salute to Australia’s first female foreign minister and first female foreign affairs secretary for renaming those eight rooms after significant women in Oz foreign affairs history. As Albright always argues, getting more women into the room makes for better decisions, although there’s a typically dry Madeleine caveat: ‘If you think the world would be better if it were fully run by women, you’ve not gone to high school.’

In the era of Trump-eting, this year’s winner was obvious. We are in the ‘post-truth’ period (Oxford Dictionaries picked post-truth as the 2016 word of the year). We are in the time of truthiness, a festival of feelpinion. Anything The Donald doesn’t like in the media is denounced as fake news.

The spirit of the new age was unveiled back in January 2017, when Trump’s counsellor Kellyanne Conway gave the world the concept of ‘alternative facts’.

The alternative universe of alternative facts wins the 9th Madeleine.