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.
