Fortunately I wasn't drinking a cup of hot tea this morning, during the interview with Amnesty International chief Irene Khan. She described Australia's human rights record as "appalling": if you have to crank up the dial to 'appalling' for Australia, what's left for Cuba, North Korea, Iran, China or practically any Arab or African country? What's 'eleven' on Irene's dial? But I was particularly glad I didn't have a mouthful of tea when the interviewer asked Irene if she had any tips for Australian voters in the coming election. She recoiled like a Victorian maiden having received an obscene suggestion:
"Amnesty International is not a political organization".
Watching the mainstream anti-Howard media at the moment, I get the uncomfortable feeling you might get from watching a sleepwalker marching towards the edge of a precipice. If you could wake them, wouldn't it be almost as dangerous?
I confess to being disconcerted by the degree to which the media have wrapped themselves up in the story spun from the ludicrous polling being delivered at the moment. The 'story' of Howard's imminent annihilation is, as of about 48 hours ago, now the new gold standard in reporting on this subject, and everything is framed against this assumption.
I'm not discounting the possibility that Howard might lose, though personally I think it unlikely. My real question is, what will all these people, who are now so convinced that Howard is finished, do if he wins? I've noted before the need of the Howard-haters to invent myths to explain his repeated election victories, when everything in their worldview tells them that such a thing should be impossible. The emotional investment at this point, however, seems so great that no myth could explain it. Still, I probably underestimate the capacity of the Howard-haters for mythic rationalizations. If you can persuade yourself that vast numbers of people who normally vote for Howard are now enraged by his IR laws, you can surely believe six other impossible things before breakfast.
The ABC were wetting themselves with excitement yesterday over the first official recognition by Gordon Brown of the continent of Australia. ABC correspondent Rafael Epstein was at a press conference; he piped up, identifying himself as an Australian, and posed a question on - what else? - climate change. Brown flustered for a moment and then came out with "you led the way on the long-life electric bulb". Somehow it just doesn't have that Churchillian ring to it.
One of the intellectual heroes of this blog is the sci-fi visionary Philip K. Dick. He had a habit of clipping weird headlines from the newspapers which mirrored the skewed fantasies of his writing: one of his favourites was "Scientists say that mice cannot be made to look like human beings".
Dick is dead, but the crazy headlines go on. One of the best I ever saw was about a plan to use virtual-reality helmets to subject people suffering from various manias and psychoses to simulated experiences of their fantasies, as a form of therapy. That would be one of the best stories he never wrote. (Though you could argue he did, in a story like "I hope I shall arrive soon".)
One of the few things about our crazy modern world which Dick didn't predict was the 'Second life' phenomenon: people acting out fantasy lives via real-time networked computer animations. Today's Dickian headline concerns the legal question as to whether people who perform actions in their second life, whose images are proscribed by law (I won't spell these out or link to the article, for good reasons), are guilty of a crime.
The legal question is not my main concern: despite the surface craziness of the question, the answer actually seems fairly straightforward, at least to this layman. What really intrigues me is the story that Dick could have made out of this. Surely he would have enjoyed writing a novel in which the Police create a second life squad, who enter the world of the avatars and bust the perps online. There must be at least a dozen scripts on this idea doing the rounds of Hollywood at the moment: 'Joe Avatar, SLPD'.
Stop me if you've heard this one. Local guy in an Islamic country - Morocco, as it happens - invades a tourist resort and attacks western tourists with a machete. The Melbourne Age is absolutely baffled as to what motive could possibly lie behind such a deed. (The link keeps getting updated, and the version as of this posting is even more careful to hose down suggestions of links to a particular cultural group. It emphasises a quote by one of the tourists that the attack was "random" and the work of "just an angry man".)
One bit of good news yesterday was the conviction of vandal/tagger Simon Nelsen, whose tag was 'Vosco'. Graffiti 'artists' are bad enough, but taggers are so moronic that they make Greens candidates look like members of Mensa (which some of them they probably are, come to think of it). For one who wanted to write his name across the city, he was remarkably shy about showing his face, and with the familiar and reassuring click of a mechanism falling into place, came the assertion of his defence that he had suffered from depression and attention-deficit disorder while at school. Why does ADHD only ever seem to afflict feral bogans, or spoilt middle-class brats?
For the record, Simon is 23 and lives at home with his parents in the very heartland of Melbourne's leafy middle-class eastern suburbs. From his brief appearance on TV, he appears to be overweight, which is remarkable given the athletic feats he must have performed to put some of his tags where I see them every day on my commute into the city. None of the news reports make any mention of him having a job. For his pains, he gets 300 hours of community service, which will apparently include cleaning off some of his tags. One of the most interesting things about Vosco's story is what his father does for a living, but out of regard for his parents, who have already suffered enough, I must decline to publish it.
As they teach us in Classics 101, myths are a way of explaining the world, and the fact that left-wing political parties usually have a greater store of myths and rely more on myth-like thinking to explain their world, tells us something about them.
I was made to think of this again today during a conversation with an old friend who happens to be a rusted-on Howard-hater. I asked her what she thought would happen in the coming Federal Election, and she immediately started talking about a new golden dawn under Kevin Rudd. I gently interrupted her: "M., don't tell me what you want to happen, tell me what you think will happen". At which point she came out with exactly the response I was expecting. Howard-hater she may be, but even she thinks Rudd has gone too far in his plan to wind back Howard's workplace laws, and that this will allow Howard to sneak back in. That's what I was looking for. Every Howard-hater I speak to on this subject - without exception - always believes that Howard only ever wins an election by some last-minute piece of cunning, guile, deceit or infernal good luck. The idea that Howard wins because a majority of the electorate actually prefer his government and his policies is quite literally inconceivable to them.
Howard, in their 'analysis' resembles something out of the old myths, a trickster-god like Hermes in the Greek myths, or Loki in the Norse, or Mantis in the Bushman mythology: someone who achieves a mischievous success by trickery and guile.
The Howard-haters' view of democracy in Australia also has a lot in common with the phenomenon of cargo cults. These cults, which flourished on Pacific Islands particularly around the period of World War Two, often involved a belief that the vast amounts of material goods which Europeans seemed to have at their disposal were in fact intended by the gods for the islanders themselves, and had been feloniously intercepted by superior European 'magic'. This is exactly how the Left think about Government in Australia: it's a gift, self-evidently intended for them, but which time and again is mysteriously snatched from their grasp at the last moment by the inexplicable magic of the Coalition.
With each election defeat comes first the stupor of astonishment, quickly followed by the scramble for a myth to explain it. If Rudd loses in November, which I personally expect he will, it will be interesting to see what they come up with.
Tim Blair links to a meditation by Melbourne's Rosa Luxembourg, Jill Sparrow, on the waning effectiveness of street demonstrations. Even Jill gets it now: she realizes that 'demos' are so patently ineffectual that they actually function as a badge of failure on whatever cause they espouse.
As should be apparent to anyone, street demonstrations in a modern, western capitalist democracy have about as much to do with any kind of authentic political will, or mass movement, as a Civil War re-enactment has to do the Civil War. Rather less, in fact.
As the political philosopher Guy Debord observed some decades ago (in the high summer of street protest, as it happened), supposedly spontaneous, revolutionary gestures such as the street protest suffer an almost immediate petrifaction by repetition. The first time, it's a gesture - the second time, it's a piece of theatre, a re-enactment, a spectacle.
