'The Atlantic's' Yemen report: In praise of competence

The Atlantic's handling of the Trump Administration's group-chat security breach debacle should be commended, writes Rosemary Sorensen.

IN A WEEK WHEN the incompetence of some of the people of the United States of America was on hilariously terrifying display, may we please tip our hats to competence — to those who have the expertise and experience to do things well.

We could start with the editor of The Atlantic, who was so careful with his reporting when he discovered that he had been added to a group chat about American plans to attack Yemen and who then was abused by U.S. Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth for his reporting.

President Trump, for good measure, of course, slandered The Atlantic as the ABC reported:

'The White House insists no classified information was shared, and attacked coverage of the incident as a "coordinated effort" to distract from Mr Trump's successes.'

Thus do the incompetent brutes of the world respond to competence.

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Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg’s stunning exposé, 'The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans', of the level at which former television presenter Hegseth and company operate, their boyo lack of gravitas and responsibility, stands out in yet another ugly news week. Enough to curl your toes. And so, prompted by that unexpected example of how to do things well, to the standards we used to believe were normal, let’s gather a few examples of good work, done with acumen.

In praise of competence…

For instance, some Saturday mornings, especially if I’m in the car, I catch Andrew Ford’s The Music Show on ABC RN. Last weekend, I was off to Heathcote, to pick out a box of native grasses, at the home of one of the excellent workers at Tree Project — a volunteer-network organisation that distributes native plants to landholders wanting to regenerate properties.

So, even before we get to Mr Ford, hats off to Peter in Heathcote, who uses all the slow, steady, sometimes tedious but also endlessly rewarding work of germinating native seeds to (I think) stave off the rage one might feel at the continued despoliation of the land — and all the life that is dependent on it.

It's a nice drive from my place to Heathcote (which has seams of rich dark soil excellent for growing red wine grapes — hats off to those who make excellent wine), so I almost switched off the car radio when Andrew Ford came on to announce The Music Show this week was about French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez.

Hats off (maybe I should now shorten this to HO, so as not to get up your readerly nose) to brilliant composers such as Boulez. Clearly, this was one exceptionally clever and competent human being — but it’s never been of much interest to me to try to acquire a taste for (or knowledge of) that difficult music.

Boulez was revered in his own lifetime, a member of that elite, mostly male, musical club admired for their rare, highly developed, intensely creative abilities. So an HO for Pierre, who died in 2016, aged 90, is a bit irrelevant; not so for Andrew Ford.

What a wonderfully competent radio host he is. This Boulez program included interviews with a pianist who specialises in the inordinately difficult music of Boulez and a couple of writers who have written books about the music (not so much about the man, who was protective of his private life, although the various fallings-out he had with other genius composers make for dramatic, entertaining reading). Along the way, Ford mentioned he had interviewed Boulez a couple of times for this same RN program, which had me counting backwards as I started to realise just how long The Music Show has been on air.

It's an art, the interview. And when it’s done well, it’s a joy. To listen and ask succinct but interesting questions, to engage in a conversation that enhances the interviewee’s responses, is a skill indeed. Confidence is important and so is passionate interest, and Ford, who is a composer and writer himself, has both. The radio program has the advantage of being editable, so there’s an economy to the listening, but that’s a skill as well.

I almost came away from that program about Boulez wanting to listen to 'Notations' — but probably won’t. And yet I do feel I am enriched by hearing these people speak about such an influential cultural figure and hearing just a little of the music with Ford’s commentary to help.

It's dismaying to be constantly confronted by incompetence, from the unanswered email to the poorly completed work, the arrogant use of platitudinal clichés by politicians or the sloppy response to criticism by business and organisation managers. Australians, it seems to me, have never been great at public speaking — a result, maybe, of a lack of educational focus on eloquence, as well as on conversational skills. We tend to mistake bombast (shock-jock style) for eloquence, impressed by someone who loves to hear the sound of their own voice.

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Last week, too, I had the good fortune to hear wildlife sound recordist Andrew Skeoch speak — HO to this audio ecologist who has spent many years recording sounds in the bush, using the technology now available to map those sounds visually, and then thinking about what those sounds tell us about animal behaviours and what we might learn from them. Andrew shaped his talk through experience. He has developed a skill in knowing how to engage people, to encourage us to understand and not feel threatened by new information and knowledge. You don’t have to be a twitcher (like you don’t have to be a musician in the case of Boulez) to connect with what you’re hearing when someone has the competence to explain it well.

One of Andrew’s ideas about what happens in the bush, when birds sing or kangaroos spar, is that they are learning and displaying cooperative behaviours, co-existing rather than competing. He’s got recordings to back that up (his book, Deep Listening to Nature, has links to his website where the recordings are accessible). The calls, and countercalls, of a thrush are a soothing and necessary cleanser — once you’ve witnessed something like what happened in the White House when a grotesque President Trump sought to belittle the President of Ukraine.

In a week when – sigh – along came the inevitable, lazy “winners and losers” analyses of another budget stuffed with announcements, the quiet competence of an Andrew Ford or an Andrew Skeoch was a tonic, gratefully received and salutary. Not even more dire news out of the USA could squash the lovely joy of that — well, not totally, anyway.