What a Bastard of a Year!
Oh, I don’t know, perhaps I’m wrong on this, too but I see Albo as an Aussie version of Biden, or, even worse, a Sanders without the little flame he had fluttering in his belly, a little flame that once added some energy to his rhetoric. Gone now the flame, gone the verbal energy, gone now Sanders and what’s left now is just Biden. Sure, Biden is not Trump, not as bad everyone says but is he any better? Better than Trump, better than Obama, better than Clinton, better than all the Bushes, the Reagans, better than all the eight kings that paraded before McBeth?
“What, will the line stretch out to th’ crack of doom?”
If Albo will win the forthcoming election, it’ll be a hollow and a near-meaningless win, a paralysing win, I suggest because, like Biden, his win will be barely perceptible, barely of substance since he’ll have lost many of his troops and since he’ll be dealing with a hostile senate. Not the requisites of a vigorous, luxuriant government a cornucopia of humanitarian policies. It’ll be more like a party whose job it is to keep the seats warm for the next lot’s turn, barely better than the job of keeper of the king’s bum, the keeper of the King’s stool.
Which is pretty much what’s been going on since the Hawke-Keating tango, eight Aussie kings ago.
I see an ALP that is behaving like an old man with weak knees, a weak heart an over-demanding bladder and a mind that has been re-wired so as to work in faultless synergy with a callous pragmatism and a disdainful laziness. The Left – if there ever was a Left in this party – it seems, has already returned to their cappuccinos and their lattés and their mulled wine and their reclining-chair chit-chat, about the good old Whitlam days, so beautifully out of the way, so “long ago” and so beyond their need to do anything but romance lyrically about it. Thinking any more deliberately about anything for this crew is just too tiresome.
And, of course they’re probably writing their autobiographies for the good instruction of the younger generation of course, for the covering up of their sins and for the plenishment of the academic library shelves. For the precious autographs.
Hold on, dear reader, the cascade of cynicism is still coming down with great force.
The whole party at the moment, feels to me at least, like Odysseus’ crew when they gorged themselves on the lotus fruit. There they were, all laid out beneath the trees, in the bliss and fog of being stoned – and just as heavy. Albo’s crew has been under those trees for the last – what? twenty years? – and they have shown that they just love this state. Too much, I assert and are now fully harmonised with it. A near-comatose state of euphoria.
They need an Odysseus to wake them up. Desperately so, desperately urgently so. None of Odysseus’ crew made it home to Ithaca and Odysseus himself did so only with the help of the goddess Athena, the wise one, the meticulous one, the circumspect one.
What will happen with Albo’s lot? Is there a god of some sort who’s got his and their back? How are their ships holding on? Are they going to make the same mistakes that Odysseus’ crew made, slay the sacred cattle of Helios, say, or let Aeolos’ winds out of the sack and loose to wreak havoc? How many sacred cows will Joel Fitzgibbon slay? And is anyone among them able to calm the wild winds of trade churning about all around us? To stop the Pentecostal’s many tongues, not let his bellicose words escape the barrier of his teeth (as Homer would put it?)
Personally I can see no god anywhere near them. Certainly not a wise one. Some malevolent daemons, sure, but protective gods, no.
And gee, I do hope that Albo and this lot of lotus-addicts are not still hanging around after the next election – win or lose – their political carcasses meekly but stubbornly propped up by their egos and blocking the entrance of some young and mentally agile minds with a strong sense of duty and a connection to other human beings around them – and to the planet!
Albo, don’t plug your ears with wax as did Odysseus to his crew when they sailed past the island of the man-eating sirens and their divine sounds. We are your mates and you, for better or worse, are our captain. Listen to our calls and make your crew listen also. Ours are not divine sounds but they are human and they are this also: sacred. Listen to us and let your crew also listen!
This lot of Albo’s crew, I feel, has expanded all its energy and all its will also, to find any more of it. They should now take their generous pension and their cushy new jobs, their lecture tours and their lotus fruit and just go.
Do like Elvis, guys, do like Elvis and leave the building.
Rudd seems to be the only one to be working at the moment. Sure, in concert with Turnbull but he is the only man with even a whiff of ALP proclivities, highlighting the very essence of the evil of conservatism, which is monopoly.
I’m strongly reminded of something that Laura Tingle said (inter alia aplenty) in the pages of The Financial Review in 2015:
“… we don’t seem to quite be able to take in the growing realisation that we actually are being governed by idiots and fools, or that this actually has real-world consequences.”
She was talking about the Abbott govn’t at the time and I’d so love to hear her words on this mob, Albo’s crew.
Mungo, I miss you! I now know how Aristophanes must have felt when the last of the best playwrights, Euripides died.
But I might be wrong.
Merry Xmas to you all and let no year henceforth be as grim as this one. This was a bastard of a year!
George Theodoridis
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