A Lack of Conviction or a Lack of Confidence?

Is it a lack of conviction toward an ideology of the Left, a lack of confidence that the Left can lead them to personal prosperity, or a lack of corporate memory of how the Right-wing has damaged the working people of this nation that has created this pot-pourri of political confusion?

And if there is anything the Right of politics thrives on, it is confusion within the voting public…because when there is doubt, a promise of financial security via pork-barrelling is “votes-in-the-booth” for the demagogues..and given that it is a dead-weight on the decency of a party with good intent that they cannot use the same machinations and malevolence of a cruel party to try and convince the voter in a now corrupted “democracy”, they are on the back-foot from the start.

Then we have the “swingers” in the party..or the base..chockers to the gills with enough social media links up their sleeve to gaslight a whole suburb with their “knowledge and opinions”…coupled with a middle-class lump of singular topic “identity politics” scare-crows that allows the right-wing of politics to drive more wedges into their precious sensitivities that a log-splitter working overtime in Kuipto Forest! Unfortunately, as many of us have witnessed with our own now grown gen X or Y children, there seems to be a lack of solid anchoring to any ideology other than that which is delivered down a smartphone with 4 or 5G multi-megabyte speed from their peers or some of the most dubious sources on the net…and we see yet again that as in the old adage of ; ”If it is reported in the newspapers” …then it must be true….

But hey, this is where a lack of corporate memory comes into the game…In an age where the reading of deep-thinking tomes of philosophy, history or satirical literature is a thing of the past as far as this next generation goes, lessons of the past, let alone advice most salubrious for the future is scorned for the incessant rush of “You Tube Instant Enlightment”…heaven knows how many “gosh!” moments I have had to listen to from young people enlightening me with such profound newly learned knowledge…

I didn’t know I didn’t know so much!

And that takes us to the inevitable next phase of this post-modern (yes..sigh..it is still among us) outcome of spoon-fed dis-information…the lack of confidence of a rising generation to make decisions based on their own evolved knowledge and experience.

How can we expect a person raised upon uncertainty or distrust in culture, ideology, education and work to have the confidence to strike out without fear or favour. A whole generation..NO ..several generations..thrown into a mix of massive debt before diploma, no certainty of employment after graduation, be it in many spheres of training or tertiary education, and then only casual or crude short-term contracts and perhaps only a fall-back position of chance and circumstance in the notorious “gig-economy” of Uber or such-like..a ghastly outlook…It is this removal of a qualified skills base, be it in Trade, or Profession, that has reduced so many of the younger generation to seek uncertain, casual employment…a skills base training scheme is a must for a stable society.

We recently had to go to the Telstra Store in the capital city to get them to validate our ownership of an ipad that had locked itself over password difficulties…we were told to go wait in the corner like shunned lepers while a bevy of hipsters worried over the legitimacy of ownership…It soon became clear from snippets of overheard conversation and grave looks in our direction that these youngsters couldn’t individually come to a decision without the whole group agreeing that those two obviously aged pensioners were perhaps part of a black-market gang trading in stolen ipads!…this little “jury of doubt” would have passed my fatalistic acceptance of the trials of modern technology but for another one-on-three feisty complaint another aged pensioner was having with Telstra staff over his old flip-top mobile phone, the staffers telling the old chap that he ought to upgrade to a later “smartphone” to get the service he now complains that is lacking..

“Smartphone!”..he loudly exclaimed “ The phone may be smart, but I have doubts that those who run it are!”…and he stormed off leaving the youngsters giggling and smirking…gone to us of a certain generation is the old Telstra..as reliable as the “On the stroke, the time will be . . . “ man..and there we see not so much a gap between the generations, but more a gaping abyss of distrust and deception… a rising generation that leans more and more on fed dubious information and jargon of a rhetoric complexity that both reassures and appeals to the demand of instant solution…the type of solution that pork-barrelling of various methodologies can assuage..the sort of thing we have seen the current collision of clowns in gov’t are brilliant at.

So there we have it…a combination in my opinion of a lack of conviction toward class ideology politics whilst TOO MUCH of identity politics, a lack of “follow-your-instinct” confidence in one’s own self and confirmed with a sadly lacking corporate memory of historical precedence to give solid grounding to one’s political stance…

Whether an attractive by its brutality swing to the far right, or a fright by the brutality swing to radical left will win the day and the vote, it all seems up in the air at the moment…one thing is for certain is that anyone with demagogue rhetoric will be out there swinging their shlock to create more doubt and confusion and if there is one thing Right-wing politics thrives upon, it is doubt and confusion in the electorate…grist for their mills and no mistake.

A Traveller’s Journal.

RISORGIMENTO!

“The Culture is dead, long live the Culture!”… When I was quite young, and I heard for the first time the cry of ; “The King is dead, long live the King!”..I was confused…how can the king live long if he is already dead?…But of course, ..well..you know the logic of that old saying with … Continue reading

The long term effects of the Drought.

  One can feel the drought settling in for the summer around here in the Mallee. (NB. This article was written in the lead-up to this Summer of 2019) It’s dry now and as the farmers will sighingly say..: “There’s nothing in the bank..there’s nothing in the bank…” Of course, they are talking about the … Continue reading

Passwords.

A close friend told me that not long before their mother passed away, she was given a “smartphone” by her children so as to be ready reachable and in case of emergency…they paid the connection fees etc. all she had to do was sign on. Of course, signing on to such services has a security … Continue reading

On Health Practitioners and other medicines.

There ought to be a rider attached to that response on the “happiest day of your life”, with the assurance of ;”I will……….provided!(see section 31-a…clause 19)”….I say that because when I first entered into that ‘contract’, I went from a batchelor whose only adult affliction was a terminal case of “lateral spine” with the attitude … Continue reading

Too much of Plenty.

In an era of such discrepancy between those who have too much and the great majority who have too little, it is with a kind of disbelief that I keep on seeing the tyrannical political representatives of the former being repeatedly gaining office to inflict even greater burdens on the latter … As the good … Continue reading

The Hollowed Stone.

( Love: The lost child of sophistication.) Romantic love.. Do we even know what it means anymore?  And if we did, how many of us would be willing to “throw it all over”..our whole lives.. on a whim of passionate emotion…I mean, now that we are all aware and sophisticated and have example and warning … Continue reading

The Gender Contract.

Did you watch that you tube vid’ ?…no? well go back and watch it.. you have to so as to understand this post.. Says about it all when it comes to gender relations and without a word. Where have we gone wrong?.. What should be an equal distribution of respect of give and take has … Continue reading

The Flaw in the Glass…

There is a weakness in the Armour , a flaw in the glass of the politically educated upper middle-class in these times..I have witnessed it when I prod and tease some posters who come to the site “trying it on” with their presumption of “authority of opinion” which they mistakenly presume is backed by an … Continue reading

As Game as Ned Kelly.

By the living Jaysus Bloody Keerist, this needs to be put up again and again to remind us how those effing bastards in the “Born to Rule” class will stop at nothing and never cease to try to destroy our icons of cultural heritage and our heroes of rebellion against tyranny..The latest piece of subjective … Continue reading

La Classe Décontractée. (The Casual-Class).

The rising of the interconnected but dis-connected entrepreneurial internet class..:The “Gig Economy”.. No flag, no ideology, no nationality, no loyalty…..no security save capital shifting from tax haven to tax haven. Description : “The New Class Rising Podcast was created of today’s struggling Middle-Class. You’ve always followed life’s advice – you’ve gone to College, put in … Continue reading

The Social Contract between Humanity and Measured Time.

Edward Gibbon’s assessment of the “Golden Age” of humanity below could, many would demand, be measured against Gibbon’s social status, his time and place in history and of course..his gender. But THAT would be doing a disservice to such a scholar and artist who dedicated over twenty years of his adult life ,which would in … Continue reading

No longer “suitable to terrain.”

Poor Geoffery Rush .. Poor Andrew Broad … and all those other damned and condemned poor bastard hetero’ males who were mesmerised beyond capacity for self-control by that demon of delight, that goddess of goodness .. ; the female of the species … poor me … We are just no longer “suitable to terrain” vehicles … Continue reading

The Final Solution : The LNP. and Democracy.

The answer to that pesky problem of Democratic Governance by Bureaucracy  for John Howard floated serenely over the Australian horizon with the arrival of the Tampa with a number of refugees rescued on board..who immediately morphed into “illegal arrivals” and were dealt with by sending a detachment of SAS. Military to take control of the … Continue reading

The Advanced Society / Barbarian Intellectualism.

Pellampellamwallah, an Aboriginal woman of the Coorong. #1 The Advanced Society. In his book The Road to Serfdom, Freidrich Hayek asserts that the economic freedom of capitalism is a requisite of political freedom… with continual growth being the mechanism that feeds such “economic freedom”. So we have to propose the question : What makes an … Continue reading

The loneliness of the long distance runner.

That short story from 1959 by Alan Sillitoe, which gained fame through a film of the same name in the early sixties is still one of my favourite stories…The awakening of consciousness of class, the rebellious nature of the “anti-hero” and then that ending of the long distance race where Smith, the working class lad … Continue reading

An Argument for Writing.

I posted this piece to show my disappointment at the dearth of  apparent interest in the posting of stories and tales on a certain blog site. I based this on the sad lack of follow-up commentary and others contributions to the page. Eventually, the page was shut down due to this lack of interest. A … Continue reading

The Philosophy of STOP!

We’ve all had those times in our travels through life, when we’re on a roll and there seems to be no stopping us…perhaps it’s a winning streak at punting on the horses..I heard of one chap went years on such a winning streak…till it suddenly crashed and he just couldn’t believe it would end, so he kept going and going, losing and losing till he was back where he started..

Perhaps it is something more simple, where as a young high-flying, good looking, partying person, you have the option of dating more than one or even two people at once…and you start to believe you’re almost movie-star material…….until a chance meeting between one or the other persons in your dating life and then . . .

Yes, you get the drift…we’ve all been there one way or another..but the curious thing is not being able to read the signs that it is all getting way out of control and the best solution would be to pause right there in your actions and …. STOP!….STOP right here, right now…don’t go a step further, gather those thoughts together, sit down and work it through to where the current line of action will take you.

When we look at the actions or policies of, particularly, conservative governments in Australia, we see a momentum of hubris that builds from the first days of coming to office, where there is a surge of enthusiasm to purge uncontrollably those policies of the Labor govt’ to the point of breaking every election promise, every reassurance of trust and integrity, until they move on to the inevitable blunders and corruption..a seemingly endless caravanserai of plunder and rapine of social and economic essentials.

With the business community also, riding on the coat-tails of such a govt’, CEO’s mindlessly granting multi-million dollar bonuses to themselves and their favourites until the companies they lead and rely upon for their living standard begin to totter and collapse under such insatiable greed..”When first the tottering house begins to sink, thither goes all the weight by an instinct”…Even private citizens, investing their retirement superannuation in property to rent or speculate on or negative gear in the search for ever more wealth..and of course, those famous “Franking Credits” cabal of parasites again investing their retirement monies in stocks and shares know no limit to their slavish hunger for more and more!…until suddenly they discover their financial adviser or bank has been leading them down the garden path and they smack themselves on the forehead for not seeing the obvious…they should have done a STOP!…and considered their options..but too late.

No….we have to incorporate the philosophy of STOP! Into our culture, into our creed and into our deepest psyche to pull us up BEFORE stepping into the abyss. But how do we know just when the fall is coming so to be warned?

I’ll tell you..

It’s that moment when you are about to commit to action a deed or statement and you are in such a euphoric / confident state of mind that you think ; “No-one will notice”…or “This won’t affect anything or anyone”..or “This’ll be funny” and you blurt something out and it all goes to shit in an uncontrollable way in an instant. I call such moments “ Self incontrovertible blunder” …a thing coming from your own “left-field” and yourself watching / listening to yourself saying / doing a thing whilst simultaneously thinking “what the hell am I doing?!” …there is that split-second moment in the hiatus between the actual action and the framing of what you are going to do where your logic/reasoning capability says..or OUGHT TO SAY …STOP!….just fucking STOP!…….don’t be so stupid!….and after all, stopping demands no effort, indeed, it could be described as “inaction”.

We’ve done this as well..and congratulated ourselves later in dodging a bullet for the deed. We have to be able to recognise that split-second moment and be able to mentally put on the brakes to STOP! I would suggest practicing by creating mock scenarios and recognising the moment when STOP is needed. There are also opportunities on social media platforms like Twitter etc. where you can bait a conversation to a point where it is getting out of hand and then execute a STOP moment by pulling up and giving ground to the person / s you were baiting…such an exercise is easy to set up and to wind down so that you do not come under suspicion of trolling and perhaps your sudden admission of compliancy would be seen as altruistic and you get complimented for a conciliatory action…but such an exercise would be more recommended for the experienced “player”..and I’ll take my own advice here and STOP! Before I go too far..

The recent shenanigans in America is a perfect example where the Philosophy of STOP! Ought to have been enacted…perhaps as far back as 2016 when Trump could not help himself as he played to his own ego and plunged into the vortex of national destruction. Here in Oz, we can now witness a similar scenario in regards to a leader who has neither ability to fore-see, nor capability to fore-bear catastrophe or corruption and as far as one can see, no time soon will his mental faculty nor his political advisors put a brake on the runaway controversy of reckless governance and say STOP!..just bloody well STOP!……………and let the nation and it’s battle-weary citizens take a breather and stop the forever grinding machine.

Yes, there is need in an age of increasing “just in time” economics for this new philosophy..never before have we had need to STOP! And reconsider our work opportunities, our social positions and our relationships in a time of epidemic and lockdown.

We must embrace this Philosophy of STOP!

The Lost Blend.

I have almost resigned myself to the fact that I may never more be inclined to write another story, nor to record local history events. I am afraid that, like my mother foresaw in her later years, there comes a time in one’s life for “the end of stories”.

https://freefall852.wordpress.com/…/23/the-end-of-stories/

The rapid onset of this covid19 pandemic has, I suspect, accelerated a change in attitude toward the telling of stories…and where once I would write of characters from a recent past generation, using storylines of a recent past era and with a style of the “author as objective observer”…such a genre and style is now also of a thing past..the covid19 lockdowns and restrictions have created a population, I believe, that has shrunk more inside itself..become more insular, more introverted…where once I would describe my style of writing as “they and those”…now there is more a demand for “me and thee”…the author now more a “subjective participator” in the story itself, becoming a central character themselves and the reader, vicariously joining the author in a kind of “identity persona” in the plot and storyline.

Mind you, I doubt the passing of Joe Carli as author will create even the slightest ripple in the calm mill-pond of Aust’ literature, but what is happening here is a bigger picture event..I believe we are witnessing a decline in cultural renovation that begun with such cinematic classics as “Sunday too Far Away” on through to the cheekily arrogant “Crocodile Dundee” and a host of Art-House delights in Indigenous films that demonstrated a rising confidence in risk-taking in the Arts…But now we are seeing that risk-taking that is the proving-ground of cultural confidence being wound back and mainly “safe-house” genres of performance and bottom-line payables are being considered.. a tragedy in itself.

It’s the price we pay with conservative governments holding the purse-strings of artistic development…conservatives who most likely have little artistic imagination beyond a mental picture of ANY art other than that metaphoric Nordic “fat-lady-sings”.

I have been challenged many times to describe what exactly is Aust’ culture…and of course there is this perception that there really is no solid foundation that can be called “national cultural identity”…I disagree..after all, I grew up amongst it..and like all national cultures, you can’t really pin it down to an absolute..to point a finger at something and say “THIS” is Oz culture..because it is a “moveable feast” as Hemmingway described Parisian society back in the 1920’s…and you can read of it in Gertrude Stein’s  “Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas”…but it is there all around us in the cynical strine of the rebellious individual against conservative social structures..the “won’t take shit” confrontation of both vulgar boganism and wry witticism of the clever wordsmith..We see it in Kelly’s “Jerilderie Letter” and in front-bar repartee..

A bloody excellent example of the latter was Gough Whitlam’s sudden interjection at a Town Hall meeting to Sir Winton Turnbull (a Victorian MHR) who was raving and ranting on an adjournment and shouted ‘I am a Country member’… Whitlam interjected with : ‘I remember’…Which brought the house down!

It is this singular style of twisting the language from straight understanding to sardonic irony..that is inherent in every dialect and ethnicity..but has been given freedom of expression in this expansive, wide-open country that (ought to and once DID) allows broad interpretation to both logic and lies with neither fear nor favour and has the ability to liven the conversation in any room. This freedom of idiosyncratic, laconic expression is the foundation of many iconic stories and displays in book or audio/visual art…Sidney Nolan’s “Ned Kelly” series springs to mind, as does Russell Drysdale’s “The Cricketer”, with the stark image of the individual batsman lighted against the imposing backdrop of the huge structure there..truly a contrast of determination against odds in a lonely landscape…likewise a short story I remember of Peter Carey’s “The Windmill in the West”.. and that hilarious song by The Tennants ; “You Shit Me to Tears” …. of the individual battling a lonely vigil against seeming impossible odds..yet battling on…a central theme in many Lawson stories like “Water them Geraniums”.. and I would like to think that I too in my own humble way, have carried on with that tradition..strength of character vs. imposing power of the seeming inevitable.

But now things have changed..that window of voyeurism on the past has shut and a new window brought about by the immediacy of confrontation of both covid pandemic and a distinct change in social confrontations of extreme politics and gender issues…neither of which allow contemplative reflection on history. In my case of “where to from here?”.. I cannot find a sympathetic connection to a rising generation that places “self” at centre and “them” on the outer with accusatory condemnation..for there seems so much injustice in our immediate vicinity, that there must be at least someone to blame, even if that someone is a closest companion..Myself..call me old fashioned..but I like to sling my arrows of accusation at that old bogeyman ; the conservatives..after all, their style of stubborn refusal to admit even ethnicity into their comically insular environments gives opening for any number of “taking the piss” moments.

So I have to accept that a rising generation that is more inclined to demand that the 1st person singular be central to plot and character, has little interest in a broader picture of the wider complexities of work and the outside world around them…truly, the vicissitudes of life that were once grist for the “mill of life” of a hardy pioneer generation have now become a means of income for a legion of New-Age therapists servicing the vainglory of a materialist / consumerist society…

And good luck with all that!

Ps. The title for this piece comes from a O’Henry story about a couple of shady characters seeking vainly for the blend of ingredients for a cocktail of accidental mixing that created an alcoholic elixir of sublime delight…worth a read..