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Drowning in Lunatics

By James Moylan

It’s hard to avoid damaging the technology. I almost punched the screen. Coffee spills and dying mice are all a part of a bad morning at the best of times. But then there is Tony Abbott, silently sticking his head up on a nearby monitor. At six-thirty in the bleary aye-em. It made for a bad moment.

Just typing away quietly, then I turn around, see Tony, and suffer a major attack of déjà vu. Instantly I am in the midst of a political panic attack. A parade of backstabbing and backstabbed ex-prime ministers, with long knives sticking from their backs, march across my memory – all before my common-sense can catch up. Then of course I realise it’s just more of the ‘no-backstabbing’ that Tony had not been engaging in for the last few months. But it does point to how jumpy I have become.

Remember the Chinese curse? ‘May you live in interesting times.’ The times have become so interesting I am getting emotionally exhausted. Are we ever again going to have a political class that we can trust? In fact, at the moment I would settle for one that I can understand. Once upon a time I thought I had a vague handle on what was going on, but the older I get the less sure I become. And this has nothing to do with the developing of wisdom. Rather it has become increasingly obvious that the world is simply becoming ever more insane. No wonder I have become jumpy. At times it feels like the world is slowly going crazy.

I live on the North Coast so I am used to fraternising with people who are often only loosely connected with the same reality that most of the rest of us inhabit. But once upon a time you could look to the television or the papers, or listen to the radio, and listen to some boring ‘news’ and ‘current affairs’ and get a bit grounded. However, of recent times, even this tentative connection to a rational and generally explicable description of reality has been swept aside. Even the bits of the ‘news’ that fill me with guilty schadenfreude still horrify me. And where once upon I used a measure that might be called ‘aspirational’. Now I just feel happy if I understand some of what is occurring, at least a little bit. All that is left is various degrees of disappointment and confusion.

Apparently satire is now passé. We have finally got to the point in our post-modern montage that we can have a female groping reality television star announcing on all channels that he will only accept the results of the election “if I win”. Yes it really did happen. I have seen the footage and very soon will likely believe that it actually happened.

But that footage has now entered a fairly large pile of undigested lunacy that I have simply flicked aside, onto the pile, promising to get back to it as soon as my disbelief and growing sense of alarm fades a little. Many of the items in the pile have now moved well beyond surreal and have entered the realm of ‘creepy’.

Syria is a mess, half the Middle East is fighting the other half of the Middle East so vociferously that Isreal, Hezbollah, and the occupied territories are all shocked. The EU is slowly crumbling as local rightwing fiefdoms decide to go back to the old middle ages ways of doing things. Here in Aus the opposition continues to be redundant as we enter a fourth year of deep freeze government where there is only political sniping left. Everything else has ground to a standstill. It has something to do with Turnbull having a ‘working majority’ of 1 and tiny testicles (which may or may not be related conditions). Anyway: four years or so after Labor lost office we still have no government to speak of. Just three and a half oppositions all fighting it out for the sake of God, the constitution, the corporation, the economy, the environment and fossil fuels, and the right to own and use thumping big automatic shotguns for Jesus (and of course bashing welfare recipients for fun and profit).

But somewhere along the way even the ‘News’ jumped the shark. It seems that now I see things on my tele every other day that not so long ago I would not have believed even in a second rate Hollywood plot. Lunatics everywhere? It’s as if the population and the politics of the whole western world has jointly gone insane, with only ten percent of us rational people left.

Unfortunately it also seems that there are at least twenty different sets of ‘ten percent’s’ all inhabiting mutually excusive versions of reality. It’s getting weirder and weirder. Where once I was pretty sure that one day it would all come together, now I am not so sure.

Think about Brexit. The whole event clearly indicates that the entire population of the UK has lost its collective f’n mind. We all know the US is insane but now it seems to have spread to the UK. The whole population, led by all of the politicians, all at once, pull out a gun, put it to their collective heads, and threaten to pull the trigger if the rest of Europe doesn’t instantly do everything it says. OK we have seen this scenario before. But then they pull the trigger?

Then watching the three debates in the US Election can only be described as feeling a little like rolling naked in molasses before getting licked clean by four cows. It was weird but strangely bracing in an obscene and disgusting sort of way. Something I never ever want to do again. If that is the future of politics then we simply have to revisit the idea of a benign monarchy. Maybe even a new stone age? Perhaps I will have to forgo the use of electricity? Anything else would be preferable.

 

16 comments

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  1. John

    “Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.” – Joe Stalin

    With the mainstream media lambasting Trump for daring to suggest the election process is rigged – despite hard evidence – this is the hack that proved America’s elections can be stolen using a few lines of computer code.

    The ‘Hursti Hack’ in this video is an excerpt from the feature length Emmy nominated documentary ‘Hacking Democracy’.

    The hack of the Diebold voting system in Leon County, Florida, is real. It was verified by computer scientists at UC Berkeley.

    (from http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-20/hacking-democracy)

  2. bobrafto

    Then watching the three debates in the US Election can only be described as feeling a little like rolling naked in molasses before getting licked clean by four cows. That’s funny!

    Here are 2 verses to Billy Joel’s song, We didn’t start the fire.

    Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again
    Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock
    Begin, Reagan, Palestine, Terror on the airline
    Ayatollah’s in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan
    Wheel of Fortune, Sally Ride, heavy metal, suicide
    Foreign debts, homeless Vets, AIDS, Crack, Bernie Goetz
    Hypodermics on the shores, China’s under martial law
    Rock and Roller Cola wars, I can’t take it anymore

    We didn’t start the fire
    It was always burning
    Since the world’s been turning
    We didn’t start the fire
    But when we are gone
    It will still burn on and on and on and on
    And on and on and on and on…

  3. wam

    hahaha what a giggle google giga googol james.
    There are smiles for you because the north is only close to qld and far from barnaby
    The boys tony and donald are clearly amoral so can be ignored as innocent escapees from the asylum.
    But the serious walk by palestinian and israeli women for peace will soon hit the media or maybe have to wait to be announced at the same time kerr’s correspondence with lizzie is released?

  4. keerti

    Are you speaking from experience when you refer to our”…….” leader as having tiny testicles, personally I’d be prepared to bet (that like Goebbels) he has no balls at all! I dream of going to another country, preferably one where I don’t speak the language, so that I can escape the…

  5. Jaquix

    If Trump should win the Presidency, we can believe the election was rigged.

  6. Deanna Jones

    It’s basically all because of a few greedy men

  7. Adrianne Haddow

    Yep we sure are drowning in lunatics.

    I wonder how those people who voted for One Notion feel this morning with the news that all four pretend senators are voting against the ‘ little’ people they supposedly represent, in their backing of the ABCC legislation.
    They ‘tell it like it is’ only as long as it takes to get their hoofs at the trough, and their entitlements in hand.

    As for Trump and Tony proudly displaying their Napoleon complexes………. along with the murderous president of the Phillipines……. it’s like living in one huge insane asylum, and we can’t get out.

    Not to mention the cabinet of curiosities ……. er, Christian Right wingers (who make Bob Santamaria and Fred Nile look normal) who are holding our government, and our rights, in a stalemate.

    Sadly I think that democracy has run its course when drongos such as these can run for government and be voted in by the misinformed and envious.

  8. Möbius Ecko

    Adrianne Haddow. More than that, you have to wonder what the government has horse traded to get One Nation’s support.

  9. Adrianne Haddow

    Mobius, I guess we can expect that Royal Commission into whether Islam is a religion pretty soon, or whether we are allowed squat toilets in this fine Christian country.

    And legislation to allow the rednecks to sport their rapid fire shotguns to shoot kangas and people who disagree with them.

  10. Kaye Lee

    And a Royal Commission into the CSIRO and the BoM to go along with our Wind Commissioner?

  11. Möbius Ecko

    It’s interesting Kaye Lee that it was Roberts who announced this and not Hanson. Hanson is not shy of seeking media attention but has taken a back seat here.

    I think a concession on something related to reducing environment policy may be on the cards. This would also appease the extreme right of the L-NP.

  12. Terry2

    On Brexit.

    The pound has dropped 20% in recent times, the Bank of England is applauding, exporters are cheering and tourism is booming.

    Brits I have spoken to are quite happy to have a common market or the EEC as a trading bloc but things had just gone too far and sovereignty had been traded to a very pushy mob in Brussels.

    Most Brits have been uncomfortable about open borders and in particular the free movement of labour : can you imagine a similar situation in our region or North America ?

    The free movement of people is all very well but there are practicalities to consider. The UK government has constantly warned of “benefit tourism”, saying it is unacceptable for jobless migrants to “shop around” in the EU for social welfare. That is why the UK is insisting on tighter controls, so that only genuine workers and their families, legally resident, are eligible for benefits. Netherlands and Germany have voiced similar concerns.

    In recent years France has carried out mass deportations of marginalised Roma, sending them back to Bulgaria and Romania, after they had established squalid camps on the edges of French cities.

    Today we have heard that the Canadians have given up on a free trade deal with the European community following a no vote by the French speaking Belgium region of Wallonia: this alone demonstrates that the EC experiment is deeply flawed.

    Ultimately the UK will be better off with a relationship crafted with the EU on its own terms and there is a strong probability that other European countries will follow the British lead.

  13. Lord John

    This chap reminds of an old SP bookie I used to have dealings with in a dark and dingy old Pub in Fitzroy.

    http://statuscope.co/au/The-head-of-Fair-Work-Building-Construction-says-he-doesnt?id=785364ae

    The head of Fair Work Building Construction says he doesn’t keep an official diary, his Chief Operating Officer says he doesn’t know where he is or what he’s doing… It’s just bizarre. This is the guy that the Turnbull Government pays $440,000 a year to be a union-buster.

  14. JEANETTE

    Whilst on holidays I met several Americans who stated quite emphatically they were looking for a new country to migrate to and each time they met another fellow traveller they apologised for their country and actions stating that all fellow Americans had lost all control of everything. I said well don’t look to Australia because our politicians are puppets to the rich, totally gutless, interested only in filling their own pockets and delight in continually bashing the poor, the disadvantaged and the helpless. We no longer manufacture anything TY to the loss of tariffs, FTA’s and within the next 12 months if not sooner we will be in an accelerating downward rush to the bottom of a recession. Banks will lose money, people will walk out of their mortgages wearing only the clothes on their backs and suburbs where the car manufacturing is will turn into ghost suburbs, empty shops etc. AND still the politicians will do nothing. So, not a good time to consider Australia. Since returning home, I too am looking for somewhere to migrate to.

  15. Jake

    I cannot see why we can’t go back to making things again like tools/plastics or electronical products or anything.I would gladly pay more for a tool that last’s; than buy one from China that breaks the first time I use it. lets get real again. Extreme Globalism doesn’t work.

  16. win jeavons

    Humanity is normally in a state of insanity, occasionally punctuated by brief bouts of near sanity, Perhaps it is in the water or the food or the junk that infests our mass entertainment. Perhaps women should take over the world , they couldn’t do any worse, and might care a bit more about killing their children in insane wars . Are we really capable of true democracy? the Greeks stuffed it up and very few nations seem up to it . Currently the insane are in charge of the asylum!

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