I purchased a motorcycle yesterday, my first. I’ve ridden a 50cc scooter for the last 6 months, which technically is a motorcycle; however, yesterday I bought a real one. I’m not a big guy: at about 5’7, and only 65 kilos, I’m what’s often called ‘diminutive’ (‘midget’ is another word I have heard now and again). My new bike is also not a monster, it’s a 250cc Kawasaki, a red ZXR from 1995, affectionately known as the Little Ninja.
I’ve noticed, since I’ve been in the market for a bike, how distinctive they all sound. There are bikes which roar and bikes which throb, bikes which putt and stutter, and then bikes which don’t even really sound like bikes, and purr along. My bike does none of these things. No, my bike screams. I must admit, in the past I’ve often been one of those people who tracks racing bikes as they pass, revs high, raising one eyebrow, and thinking, ‘Wanker.’ I repent. I’ve discovered that it’s impossible to ride this bike any other way. I was sitting at 80 km/h this morning on my way to work, in 6th gear – that’s the top one – and the bike was sitting comfortably at about 7,500 rpm. To put that in perspective should you not be mechanically minded, your car redlines about here, unless you’re driving something exceptional, like the Honda S2000, which will go to 9000 rpm. My little ninja redlines at a hysterical 18,000 rpm.
In short, it screams like a fiend out of hell, and riding it is like hugging a small demon (crouched over, thanks to the shape of the seat and handle-bars) which has escaped from the abyss and is screaming its rage at the sky. Now, compared to some of the big racing bikes – the Ducati Desmosedici RR, the MV Agusta F4, the BMW HP2 – it’s a bit of a foot-dragger. But for all that, it is an evil, evil machine, and I love it!
To read more, check out http://www.room-in-nations.blogspot.com
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Monday, August 17, 2009
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Slippery
It has been, as they say, one of those days. My awareness that this would be the case began to dawn at about 8:00 this morning, when I started to try to leave for work. My wife looked out the window and commented that it was still raining. Sighing then, I pulled off my boots and began unrolling my waterproof pants – riding a motor-scooter, I’m very much more at the mercy of Frey and his friends. It’s not that I mind the rain – once I’m sealed in my riding gear it doesn’t touch me, and my jacket will dry, hanging on the coat hook at work – but it’s a hassle having to negotiate the layers of plastic and carbon-fibre. Still, this is the life I chose when I transitioned from four to two wheels.
Waterproofs on and done up around my boots, I was now ready to go. Again. I just needed my keys. My search for my keys became gradually more irritated and frantic as I checked all the obvious places, and then moved to the obscure – there was no reason for them to be in the shopping bag my wife had taken out yesterday, but I looked anyway. Twice. When a possibility occurred to me, I resisted it for a couple of minutes, continuing to look under pieces of paper and plates. I even lifted my daughter, but she wasn’t sitting on them. It was with a sense of fatalism that I eventually called my manager, knowing she would already be at work, and asked her to look in my desk-drawer. She found a bunch of house-keys, one scooter key, and one key for a wheel-lock. I had caught a ride with a co-worker yesterday, and forgot about them. Spare keys were dug out, and I eventually got to work, late.
The day did not get easier. The volume of calls I took throughout the morning, the printing of new appointment letters, the running back and forth, felt like being sprayed in the face with a high-pressure hose, and there seemed to be nowhere I could turn my head to get a breath. Just as lunch rolled around, and I was settling in for my first bit of peace, a client arrived who needed to be escorted to the shops for some interview clothes. Clamping a lid on my despair (and ensuring it did not spontaneously mutate into a foaming, homicidal rage) I walked through the fluorescent fun-park that is Marion shopping centre, smiling.
I commented to a friend that my day feels like trying to catch the soap in the shower, and each time my fingers begin to close on it, it slips away in a new direction, ricocheting off walls and falling, falling, falling. At least, he commented, it’s not as bad as dropping the soap in a prison shower. Possibly true. On the other hand, I have been so busy I’ve had trouble staying sitting down, so perhaps the analogy holds.
Read more!
Waterproofs on and done up around my boots, I was now ready to go. Again. I just needed my keys. My search for my keys became gradually more irritated and frantic as I checked all the obvious places, and then moved to the obscure – there was no reason for them to be in the shopping bag my wife had taken out yesterday, but I looked anyway. Twice. When a possibility occurred to me, I resisted it for a couple of minutes, continuing to look under pieces of paper and plates. I even lifted my daughter, but she wasn’t sitting on them. It was with a sense of fatalism that I eventually called my manager, knowing she would already be at work, and asked her to look in my desk-drawer. She found a bunch of house-keys, one scooter key, and one key for a wheel-lock. I had caught a ride with a co-worker yesterday, and forgot about them. Spare keys were dug out, and I eventually got to work, late.
The day did not get easier. The volume of calls I took throughout the morning, the printing of new appointment letters, the running back and forth, felt like being sprayed in the face with a high-pressure hose, and there seemed to be nowhere I could turn my head to get a breath. Just as lunch rolled around, and I was settling in for my first bit of peace, a client arrived who needed to be escorted to the shops for some interview clothes. Clamping a lid on my despair (and ensuring it did not spontaneously mutate into a foaming, homicidal rage) I walked through the fluorescent fun-park that is Marion shopping centre, smiling.
I commented to a friend that my day feels like trying to catch the soap in the shower, and each time my fingers begin to close on it, it slips away in a new direction, ricocheting off walls and falling, falling, falling. At least, he commented, it’s not as bad as dropping the soap in a prison shower. Possibly true. On the other hand, I have been so busy I’ve had trouble staying sitting down, so perhaps the analogy holds.
Read more!
Friday, July 24, 2009
Alanis, Swine Flu, and Sucking the Sack
I’m not sure when exactly it was that Alanis Morissette released ‘Ironic’. I remember I was in early high-school, so I suppose it must have been 1996 or ’97. One thing I do remember though was the absolute shit-storm (and I do not use that term lightly) of a response her use of the word Ironic got.
‘Her examples of irony,’ people kept pointing out, ‘are not ironic! That’s not what the word means! A black fly in your chardonnay is annoying, but not ironic!’ Though it doesn’t surprise me when a few people have a chuckle at the cost of some celebrity, the sheer volume of complaints about this one issue looms large in my memory, a crowd of critics, each trying to push to the front, each wanting to tell us, ‘That’s not what ironic means!’ I even remember seeing an episode of Lois and Clark, the 1990s Superman TV show, which concluded with the principal characters talking about how silly the song was. I will deflect attention from the implication about my television viewing habits as a teenager here by deftly and wittily pointing out the irony of the writers of Lois and Clark, of all shows, criticising a piece of popular culture for factual inaccuracy and internal inconsistency.
Oddly though, much as I might make light of the clamour now, I personally retain a certain nervousness about using the word in conversation. It is as though I’m afraid Teri Hatcher might leap from behind a door, laugh in my face, and point out that my example of irony is no more appropriate than meeting the man of my dreams, and then meeting his beautiful wife – an example which is suddenly imbued with greater, more disturbing meaning than ever before and for which, sadly, I have no deft or witty distractions.
I suspect however that my usage is appropriate, and that criticism of factual errors from Lois and Clark probably counts as irony. Similarly, there is a quote in the new Transformers movie, Revenge of the Fallen, which I suspect is equally ironic. It occurs relatively early in the film, when Sam, the human boy we last saw kissing his girlfriend while reclining on his car (the fact that his car is a sentient alien robot raises interesting questions about the number of beings present in this scenario; for good or evil however, those questions fall outside the scope of this post), first meets his college room-mate, Leo. In an incredible (and predictable) coincidence, Leo is a conspiracy theorist who runs a website investigating the presence of the Transformers on earth. (The film is full of such coincidences, and lends itself well to use as background for a drinking game.) In attempting to deflect Leo from his interest in the aliens, Sam tells him that it’s ‘all fake,’ and obviously made up. Leo’s response is very much in keeping with the feel of the movie, and accompanied by hand-gestures:
‘Don’t be sucking the sack, man!’ Pushed for clarification on what this statement might mean, and ignoring his friend who chips in with ‘the ball-sack’, Leo responds, ‘The mainstream-media sack!’ The implication, obviously, is that Sam should not simply absorb everything served up in the media. The irony here is hilarious and, I suspect, deliberate. An artefact of culture more tightly coiled in mainstream-media than Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, is a hard (and terrifying) monster to imagine. Fallen is loud and rude, consumerist in almost every way (the movie is based on a line of toys, to start off with), and panders to American culture and the American military (there are long sequences of shots of military hardware, clearly there for no reason except to demonstrate that Michael Bay was able to get them through his astonishing brown-nosing). None of this should be taken to suggest that I did not like the movie – quite the opposite, I have seldom enjoyed a trip to the cinema so much – but I recognise it for what it is.
Comments on the tone of the film aside, I know that Leo has a point. Mainstream media is something to be taken carefully. Not, I think, because the whole thing is created as an elaborate conspiracy to keep us from knowing the truth about the alien conspiracy, but for another reason. Somebody once asked me, 'What is the main purpose of the TV news?' The typical answers sprang to mind: to convey information; to influence; to inform. The answer, however, was startlingly obvious once he said it. 'The principal purpose of the TV news is to sell advertising slots.'
TV News is prime-time television. Channel 7's Network Rating Report for New South Wales in July (you can find it here) states that at present 7 news is drawing 1.532 millions viewers, up on Nine by 253,000. To save you the maths, that puts Nine at 1.279 million, giving them a combined total of 2.811 million. New South Wales has a population of about 6.8 million at present. Even assuming that each TV is being watched by only one person (and I would assume this is unlikely) that means that the news reaches more than one person in three each night. There are few advertising platforms more powerful, and though I can't find information online about actual costs of slots, estimates seem to range between 10 and 30 thousand dollars for a 30 second slot.
The implications of using the news to sell advertising space are nothing new – people have been worried about it for a long time – and also fairly apparent: news programmers have to avoid saying anything to undermine the messages of their advertisers; they also need to avoid boring or confusing their viewers, therefore causing them to tune out. The news has to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. The lowest common denominator, if you like.
During the recent rise of swine flu across the globe, the media has provided story after story with titles like 'Australia's First Swine Flu Death', without mentioning that most of those who have died with Swine Flu have also had other, serious illnesses. Like cancer, for instance.
I don't in any way want to minimise the pain of the families of those who have died with Swine Flu. But it does seem as though the media has been content to play the story for all it has been worth, frightening people into watching, and making a good deal of money out of the whole thing.
I had thought of ending this post with a sentence a little like this: if you jump on board the media wagon, without ever once considering the motivations for running a particular story, or focusing on an element of a story, you are the lowest common denominator. However, while I was doing a bit of reading for it, I found this wikipedia article, explaining that actually, the phrase 'lowest common denominator is an error of understanding, and a more accurate use of language would be to refer to the 'highest common divisor'.
The things you learn while you're sucking the sack.
Read more!
‘Her examples of irony,’ people kept pointing out, ‘are not ironic! That’s not what the word means! A black fly in your chardonnay is annoying, but not ironic!’ Though it doesn’t surprise me when a few people have a chuckle at the cost of some celebrity, the sheer volume of complaints about this one issue looms large in my memory, a crowd of critics, each trying to push to the front, each wanting to tell us, ‘That’s not what ironic means!’ I even remember seeing an episode of Lois and Clark, the 1990s Superman TV show, which concluded with the principal characters talking about how silly the song was. I will deflect attention from the implication about my television viewing habits as a teenager here by deftly and wittily pointing out the irony of the writers of Lois and Clark, of all shows, criticising a piece of popular culture for factual inaccuracy and internal inconsistency.
Oddly though, much as I might make light of the clamour now, I personally retain a certain nervousness about using the word in conversation. It is as though I’m afraid Teri Hatcher might leap from behind a door, laugh in my face, and point out that my example of irony is no more appropriate than meeting the man of my dreams, and then meeting his beautiful wife – an example which is suddenly imbued with greater, more disturbing meaning than ever before and for which, sadly, I have no deft or witty distractions.
I suspect however that my usage is appropriate, and that criticism of factual errors from Lois and Clark probably counts as irony. Similarly, there is a quote in the new Transformers movie, Revenge of the Fallen, which I suspect is equally ironic. It occurs relatively early in the film, when Sam, the human boy we last saw kissing his girlfriend while reclining on his car (the fact that his car is a sentient alien robot raises interesting questions about the number of beings present in this scenario; for good or evil however, those questions fall outside the scope of this post), first meets his college room-mate, Leo. In an incredible (and predictable) coincidence, Leo is a conspiracy theorist who runs a website investigating the presence of the Transformers on earth. (The film is full of such coincidences, and lends itself well to use as background for a drinking game.) In attempting to deflect Leo from his interest in the aliens, Sam tells him that it’s ‘all fake,’ and obviously made up. Leo’s response is very much in keeping with the feel of the movie, and accompanied by hand-gestures:
‘Don’t be sucking the sack, man!’ Pushed for clarification on what this statement might mean, and ignoring his friend who chips in with ‘the ball-sack’, Leo responds, ‘The mainstream-media sack!’ The implication, obviously, is that Sam should not simply absorb everything served up in the media. The irony here is hilarious and, I suspect, deliberate. An artefact of culture more tightly coiled in mainstream-media than Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, is a hard (and terrifying) monster to imagine. Fallen is loud and rude, consumerist in almost every way (the movie is based on a line of toys, to start off with), and panders to American culture and the American military (there are long sequences of shots of military hardware, clearly there for no reason except to demonstrate that Michael Bay was able to get them through his astonishing brown-nosing). None of this should be taken to suggest that I did not like the movie – quite the opposite, I have seldom enjoyed a trip to the cinema so much – but I recognise it for what it is.
Comments on the tone of the film aside, I know that Leo has a point. Mainstream media is something to be taken carefully. Not, I think, because the whole thing is created as an elaborate conspiracy to keep us from knowing the truth about the alien conspiracy, but for another reason. Somebody once asked me, 'What is the main purpose of the TV news?' The typical answers sprang to mind: to convey information; to influence; to inform. The answer, however, was startlingly obvious once he said it. 'The principal purpose of the TV news is to sell advertising slots.'
TV News is prime-time television. Channel 7's Network Rating Report for New South Wales in July (you can find it here) states that at present 7 news is drawing 1.532 millions viewers, up on Nine by 253,000. To save you the maths, that puts Nine at 1.279 million, giving them a combined total of 2.811 million. New South Wales has a population of about 6.8 million at present. Even assuming that each TV is being watched by only one person (and I would assume this is unlikely) that means that the news reaches more than one person in three each night. There are few advertising platforms more powerful, and though I can't find information online about actual costs of slots, estimates seem to range between 10 and 30 thousand dollars for a 30 second slot.
The implications of using the news to sell advertising space are nothing new – people have been worried about it for a long time – and also fairly apparent: news programmers have to avoid saying anything to undermine the messages of their advertisers; they also need to avoid boring or confusing their viewers, therefore causing them to tune out. The news has to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. The lowest common denominator, if you like.
During the recent rise of swine flu across the globe, the media has provided story after story with titles like 'Australia's First Swine Flu Death', without mentioning that most of those who have died with Swine Flu have also had other, serious illnesses. Like cancer, for instance.
I don't in any way want to minimise the pain of the families of those who have died with Swine Flu. But it does seem as though the media has been content to play the story for all it has been worth, frightening people into watching, and making a good deal of money out of the whole thing.
I had thought of ending this post with a sentence a little like this: if you jump on board the media wagon, without ever once considering the motivations for running a particular story, or focusing on an element of a story, you are the lowest common denominator. However, while I was doing a bit of reading for it, I found this wikipedia article, explaining that actually, the phrase 'lowest common denominator is an error of understanding, and a more accurate use of language would be to refer to the 'highest common divisor'.
The things you learn while you're sucking the sack.
Read more!
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Capitalism, Kindness and Maddie Bowen
After Titanic, it took a long time for me to take Leonardo DiCaprio seriously. To be fair, the movie wasn't terrible, but like a lot of people, I found the hype around it got on my nerves. It probably didn't help that my girlfriend at the time had Leo plastered all over her bedroom walls. But I digress. The Aviator was good, and I thought his performance was solid, but not until more recently did I finally see a film that actually sold me on Mr DiCaprio. That film was Blood Diamond.
If you've not yet seen Blood Diamond, I can't recommend it highly enough. Set in Sierra Leone in the 1990s, it looks at the trafficking of conflict-diamonds, and the myriad complications and pains that creates. It is moving and thought-provoking without coming across as preachy. The characters feel like real people, flawed and heroic, and it says much for DiCaprio's performance as diamond smuggler Danny Archer that, despite the fact that he puts on a white-Zimbabwean accent for the part, his fan base among people with just that accent actually increased as a result of this movie. The other two main players are Djimon Hounsou as Solomon Vandi, a Mende fisherman (who performed the entire piece in his second and third languages!) and Jennifer Connelly as American Journalist, Maddie Bowen, in Sierra Leone to try to expose the evil diamond empires who are funding the pain. Both are equally superb, but there is one particular interaction between Bowen and Archer which caught my attention when I watched it. Identifying him as a diamond smuggler, Bowen tries to enlist Archer's help in uncovering the story that will sink the diamond moguls. Trying to get rid of her, Archer eventually asks her what she thinks she can even achieve: "People here kill each other as a way of life. It's always been like that... You come here with your laptop computer, and your malaria medicine, and your little bottles of hand-sanitiser, you think you're gonna change the outcome, huh?"
It's no secret among people who know me that I have tended to be a bit left-wing, politically speaking. It's not that I read (or write) crazed articles calling for the destruction of government as it exists and the installation of a socialist system, but still, a good mate of mind affectionately and smilingly refers to me as 'you lefty bastard' from time to time.
My reasons for this are probably not complicated. After spending a year unemployed in 2005, I became more familiar than I ever wanted with Australia's welfare system. Our welfare system is a reasonably good one, globally speaking: not only do we have a welfare system, which many countries do not, it also shows up other countries' systems as lumbering, ruthless beasts, which pay the barest lip-service to assistance before condemning society's fallen and walking away. We are certainly better than that. However, there remains an element of our system which, it seems to me, is less about assistance, and more about making assistance unpleasant so people try their hardest not to be 'welfare dependent'. This always seemed vaguely unfair to me, though for a long time I could not explain exactly why. Eventually I returned to study and completed a Bachelor of Social Work, and now I find myself on the other side of the counter, administering the welfare system. It still seems to me that there are elements of the system that are unfair and unkind, and I am now able to qualify my reasons for that.
Firstly, capitalism, like most systems, rewards those who are good at using it. It stands to reason: if you are good at making money, you will become rich, making you increasingly powerful, and making it easier for you to remain rich - to remain at the top of the heap. If you are not good at making money, you will become poor. Poverty, coupled with a natural inability to make money, means that you will stay poor, and probably become 'welfare dependent'. The rich get richer, as they say, and the poor poorer, and this is a fundamental feature of capitalism.
Secondly, capitalism requires the presence of the unemployed. Capitalism is dependent on unemployment to continue to provide a reserve labour force, able to replace current workers should their demands become overly strident in regards to pay or conditions. If you don't want the job...
As a consequence then, the poor, who are unable to make money under a capitalist system (for whatever reason, and not simply because 'they're just lazy') continue to be poor, and in their poverty, prop up the system that keeps them down by frightening others into working harder. Our system responds to these people by punishing them for their unemployment, and that is what I find so unfair.
So it was probably no surprise that I became a bit of a lefty bastard. For a while there I would challenge people about their right-wing approach, accusing them of having a grown up case of the terrible-twos: it's mine and I'm not sharing! I have been challenged on this many times, asked if the alternative is anything more than the inverse: 'That's yours: give it to me!' I reject that as the alternative: since the power is with the rich, so is the ability to state how it will be, and I would prefer to see people say 'This is mine, but I have much and you have little, so I will give some to you.'
That was not the argument that eventually began to change my mind. Instead, it was when people began looking at me skeptically and asking, 'you think you're gonna change the outcome, huh?' If I didn't like capitalism, what then was I proposing? Communism? There are plenty of examples of why that doesn't work. Socialism? Same problem.
The issue seems to be one of human nature. Where the power lies with the rich, it will be abused and the poor are down-trodden. Where the power lies, at least theoretically, with the poor, it will again be abused, and those who work hard will be taken advantage of by those who don't. People cannot help but be themselves, and as CS Lewis put it, a person's self is 'that one self of all others which is called I and me, and which on that ground puts forward an irrational claim to preference.'(1) The problem is in people, not in systems. Surely then, the solution also lies in people, and not in left-and right-wings, or in -isms.
What then, is the solution? Ultimately, the solution will not be found in any one system. As a follower of Jesus, I believe the solution lies in him, but I'm aware that not everyone who reads this will agree with me. I'm also aware that the church, and people who also claimed to be following Jesus, have often done more to add to the problem than to solve it. I'm not going to try to peddle an ultimate solution here.
But a small solution is I think found in Maddie Bowen's response to Danny Archer. Confronted by his cynicism, she responds, 'Yeah, it's a shit, shit world, but you know what? Good things are done every day. Just apparently not by you.'
We are not responsible for fixing all the shit, shit things in this world. There is no system that will do that. We are only responsible for the things that we can and cannot, or perhaps do and do not, do to make our bit of difference.
I'm aware that so far this is not terribly original, encouraging you, my hypothetical readers, to do your bit. 'What bit is that?' you may ask. However, I do have a suggestion. Start with compassion or, if you like, with kindness. I'm not entirely sure what kindness is, but I think it might be something like generosity. It seems to me that kindness is a willingness to look for the best in people, to give them the benefit of the doubt when maybe you wouldn't normally, to assume that they are doing their best with what they have, instead of assuming that they are deviant, the lazy unemployed or the vicious rich. Kindness is about showing mercy to those who are weaker than you - letting slow-moving traffic into your lane when needed; refusing to condemn the foolish or the socially inept; doing that chore that your partner forgot, without lecturing them, maybe just this once.
Kindness can grow, of course - there are charities in need of kindness to pass along - but I think all I hope for today is to see people doing their part to make one six-billionth of a difference.
(1) Lewis, C.S., 'Two ways with the self', in CS Lewis Essay Collection: Faith, Christianity and the Church, Harper Collins, London, 2000
Read more!
If you've not yet seen Blood Diamond, I can't recommend it highly enough. Set in Sierra Leone in the 1990s, it looks at the trafficking of conflict-diamonds, and the myriad complications and pains that creates. It is moving and thought-provoking without coming across as preachy. The characters feel like real people, flawed and heroic, and it says much for DiCaprio's performance as diamond smuggler Danny Archer that, despite the fact that he puts on a white-Zimbabwean accent for the part, his fan base among people with just that accent actually increased as a result of this movie. The other two main players are Djimon Hounsou as Solomon Vandi, a Mende fisherman (who performed the entire piece in his second and third languages!) and Jennifer Connelly as American Journalist, Maddie Bowen, in Sierra Leone to try to expose the evil diamond empires who are funding the pain. Both are equally superb, but there is one particular interaction between Bowen and Archer which caught my attention when I watched it. Identifying him as a diamond smuggler, Bowen tries to enlist Archer's help in uncovering the story that will sink the diamond moguls. Trying to get rid of her, Archer eventually asks her what she thinks she can even achieve: "People here kill each other as a way of life. It's always been like that... You come here with your laptop computer, and your malaria medicine, and your little bottles of hand-sanitiser, you think you're gonna change the outcome, huh?"
It's no secret among people who know me that I have tended to be a bit left-wing, politically speaking. It's not that I read (or write) crazed articles calling for the destruction of government as it exists and the installation of a socialist system, but still, a good mate of mind affectionately and smilingly refers to me as 'you lefty bastard' from time to time.
My reasons for this are probably not complicated. After spending a year unemployed in 2005, I became more familiar than I ever wanted with Australia's welfare system. Our welfare system is a reasonably good one, globally speaking: not only do we have a welfare system, which many countries do not, it also shows up other countries' systems as lumbering, ruthless beasts, which pay the barest lip-service to assistance before condemning society's fallen and walking away. We are certainly better than that. However, there remains an element of our system which, it seems to me, is less about assistance, and more about making assistance unpleasant so people try their hardest not to be 'welfare dependent'. This always seemed vaguely unfair to me, though for a long time I could not explain exactly why. Eventually I returned to study and completed a Bachelor of Social Work, and now I find myself on the other side of the counter, administering the welfare system. It still seems to me that there are elements of the system that are unfair and unkind, and I am now able to qualify my reasons for that.
Firstly, capitalism, like most systems, rewards those who are good at using it. It stands to reason: if you are good at making money, you will become rich, making you increasingly powerful, and making it easier for you to remain rich - to remain at the top of the heap. If you are not good at making money, you will become poor. Poverty, coupled with a natural inability to make money, means that you will stay poor, and probably become 'welfare dependent'. The rich get richer, as they say, and the poor poorer, and this is a fundamental feature of capitalism.
Secondly, capitalism requires the presence of the unemployed. Capitalism is dependent on unemployment to continue to provide a reserve labour force, able to replace current workers should their demands become overly strident in regards to pay or conditions. If you don't want the job...
As a consequence then, the poor, who are unable to make money under a capitalist system (for whatever reason, and not simply because 'they're just lazy') continue to be poor, and in their poverty, prop up the system that keeps them down by frightening others into working harder. Our system responds to these people by punishing them for their unemployment, and that is what I find so unfair.
So it was probably no surprise that I became a bit of a lefty bastard. For a while there I would challenge people about their right-wing approach, accusing them of having a grown up case of the terrible-twos: it's mine and I'm not sharing! I have been challenged on this many times, asked if the alternative is anything more than the inverse: 'That's yours: give it to me!' I reject that as the alternative: since the power is with the rich, so is the ability to state how it will be, and I would prefer to see people say 'This is mine, but I have much and you have little, so I will give some to you.'
That was not the argument that eventually began to change my mind. Instead, it was when people began looking at me skeptically and asking, 'you think you're gonna change the outcome, huh?' If I didn't like capitalism, what then was I proposing? Communism? There are plenty of examples of why that doesn't work. Socialism? Same problem.
The issue seems to be one of human nature. Where the power lies with the rich, it will be abused and the poor are down-trodden. Where the power lies, at least theoretically, with the poor, it will again be abused, and those who work hard will be taken advantage of by those who don't. People cannot help but be themselves, and as CS Lewis put it, a person's self is 'that one self of all others which is called I and me, and which on that ground puts forward an irrational claim to preference.'(1) The problem is in people, not in systems. Surely then, the solution also lies in people, and not in left-and right-wings, or in -isms.
What then, is the solution? Ultimately, the solution will not be found in any one system. As a follower of Jesus, I believe the solution lies in him, but I'm aware that not everyone who reads this will agree with me. I'm also aware that the church, and people who also claimed to be following Jesus, have often done more to add to the problem than to solve it. I'm not going to try to peddle an ultimate solution here.
But a small solution is I think found in Maddie Bowen's response to Danny Archer. Confronted by his cynicism, she responds, 'Yeah, it's a shit, shit world, but you know what? Good things are done every day. Just apparently not by you.'
We are not responsible for fixing all the shit, shit things in this world. There is no system that will do that. We are only responsible for the things that we can and cannot, or perhaps do and do not, do to make our bit of difference.
I'm aware that so far this is not terribly original, encouraging you, my hypothetical readers, to do your bit. 'What bit is that?' you may ask. However, I do have a suggestion. Start with compassion or, if you like, with kindness. I'm not entirely sure what kindness is, but I think it might be something like generosity. It seems to me that kindness is a willingness to look for the best in people, to give them the benefit of the doubt when maybe you wouldn't normally, to assume that they are doing their best with what they have, instead of assuming that they are deviant, the lazy unemployed or the vicious rich. Kindness is about showing mercy to those who are weaker than you - letting slow-moving traffic into your lane when needed; refusing to condemn the foolish or the socially inept; doing that chore that your partner forgot, without lecturing them, maybe just this once.
Kindness can grow, of course - there are charities in need of kindness to pass along - but I think all I hope for today is to see people doing their part to make one six-billionth of a difference.
(1) Lewis, C.S., 'Two ways with the self', in CS Lewis Essay Collection: Faith, Christianity and the Church, Harper Collins, London, 2000
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Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Beginning
This last week I read The Scar, by China Mieville. It was an enjoyable book in most ways - the imagination that went into its creation was expansive (and clearly more profound than what eventually made it into the book, restricted as it was by its finite number of pages), the plot was engaging, and the resolution was satisfying. However, what really hooked me in was the prose itself. Reading Mieville felt like physically taking words from the page, and enjoying the way they were hooked in together, almost seamlessly from start to finish; it was like running my hand over a piece of finely crafted furniture, and being aware of how beautiful the finish was, how well concealed all the joins. It was like expensive scotch. It was a truly enjoyable experience.
In 2004, I graduated from my first degree, a Bachelor of Creative Arts: Creative Writing, from Flinders University. Most people would doubtless say that a creative writing degree is a hobby degree. These days I would tend to agree. When I applied for the brand new degree though (application by portfolio; no TER required) my mind was full of possibilities. When I was accepted at the beginning of 2002, an eager (and arrogant) 18-year-old, part of the inaugural class, all those possibilities seemed to be confirmed by promises, delivered at congratulatory information sessions.
'This course,' they told us, 'has an extremely limited intake, because there are very few jobs in Adelaide for people who want to write. It will be intensive, and you will meet people in the industry. You will attend events, and at the same time as you develop as a writer, you will develop as a user of the writers' market place.' In the event, none of these things occurred.
Well, that is not true. I learnt a great deal about writing, mostly from one or two really brilliant tutors who were prepared to bear with the class and its pretentions (creative writing students are painful people), but the promised 'contacts' proved untrue, either forgotten or ignored by university staff. The only event was compulsory attendance at Writers' Week in 2004. (That was an event I could happily have missed, as it seemed to be in no small part populated by people who wanted to seem intelligent and sophisticated by virtue of attending Writers' Week. Mid-way through the week I started collecting quotations from random strangers I overheard, astonished as I was by the academic pretentions on display. Sadly I don't know where those ended up, but I think I remember one woman in a wide-brimmed, red hat saying something along the lines of 'Of course, when I heard him speak in Rome, he said...') There were rumours in the class that the reason we were not given the opportunities promised was because the course-coordinator had decided she did not like us, and that our writing lacked substance because we lacked life-experience - it was an incautious tutor who dropped that hint. (I don't know if that was true or not: it seems an uncharitable attitude which it would be uncharitable to believe in. The following year however, the bachelor was filled with Mature Age students, rather than the crop of school leavers in that first run through.) Whatever the reasons, the degree left me qualified for nothing, and I spent 2005 unemployed. It was the most miserable year I can remember from my priveleged little life.
Those I went through university with are all employed in totally different fields now. Some went back to study (myself included, in 2006) some found work where they could. The closest to publication that I am aware of any of us getting was when one of the girls got a job cataloging books in a distribution business. Most of us, to my knowledge, didn't put pen to paper in any meaningful sense again. For me that degree is now a ten-thousand dollar albatross that I am gradually paying off through a job I got from my next, more useful course of study.
This is, of course, a self-pitying story of being given a good thing and complaining, naively, because it did not lead to another good thing. But there is a point to it. Like my classmates, I haven't really written anything since graduation. I had a brief dalliance with poetry while I was studying Social Work (probably a result of gaining some real life-experience) and have occasionally made half-hearted attempts at putting together a story or two, but in the main, these have been poor, cliched creatures, like fan-fiction found languishing in some dingy corner of the internet, but without even the entertainment value of ridiculous (by dint of being anatomically impossible) sex. Lacking the genius for instant success or the motivation to persist, and made bitter by what I felt had been promised, and not delivered, I set down my pen.
Reading Mieville's work this week sparked something in my brain that has been dormant for a long time. Feeling his writing in my mind made me suddenly realise, 'I want to write.' But.
I still lack motivation, and certainly I still lack genius. I have other priorities now, artistic passions not made sterile in the autoclave of formal education. I have a little girl, a beautiful thing who nevertheless cries when I am sat for too long at the keyboard. I don't, then, want a project; I don't want the depression of feverishly pumping out five-, ten-, even twenty-thousand words, only for inspiration to run dry and leave me with another half-formed embryo of an idea. There are already too many still-borns in my imagination. What I need is something small, something piecemeal, that I can take and leave as I want and need, and not feel guilt about my lack of drive and commitment.
The internet is a wonderful place at times. There is so much that is fascinating, useful and beautiful hanging in the long corridors that stretch across the continents, stored on massive computers I-don't-know-where, and indexed by Google, the new Librarian, for our pleasure and use. At the same time, there is much that the internet has made worse: internet forums are filled with the shrieks of racists, extremists and fools; the crazies of the world no longer need to drag a chair, step-ladder or milk crate to the side of the road to harangue passers-by, because everyone has a voice. And the internet, in a quirk of technology, has allowed the astonishingly imaginative and beautiful work of China Mieville, to inspire another god-damned blog!
Read more!
In 2004, I graduated from my first degree, a Bachelor of Creative Arts: Creative Writing, from Flinders University. Most people would doubtless say that a creative writing degree is a hobby degree. These days I would tend to agree. When I applied for the brand new degree though (application by portfolio; no TER required) my mind was full of possibilities. When I was accepted at the beginning of 2002, an eager (and arrogant) 18-year-old, part of the inaugural class, all those possibilities seemed to be confirmed by promises, delivered at congratulatory information sessions.
'This course,' they told us, 'has an extremely limited intake, because there are very few jobs in Adelaide for people who want to write. It will be intensive, and you will meet people in the industry. You will attend events, and at the same time as you develop as a writer, you will develop as a user of the writers' market place.' In the event, none of these things occurred.
Well, that is not true. I learnt a great deal about writing, mostly from one or two really brilliant tutors who were prepared to bear with the class and its pretentions (creative writing students are painful people), but the promised 'contacts' proved untrue, either forgotten or ignored by university staff. The only event was compulsory attendance at Writers' Week in 2004. (That was an event I could happily have missed, as it seemed to be in no small part populated by people who wanted to seem intelligent and sophisticated by virtue of attending Writers' Week. Mid-way through the week I started collecting quotations from random strangers I overheard, astonished as I was by the academic pretentions on display. Sadly I don't know where those ended up, but I think I remember one woman in a wide-brimmed, red hat saying something along the lines of 'Of course, when I heard him speak in Rome, he said...') There were rumours in the class that the reason we were not given the opportunities promised was because the course-coordinator had decided she did not like us, and that our writing lacked substance because we lacked life-experience - it was an incautious tutor who dropped that hint. (I don't know if that was true or not: it seems an uncharitable attitude which it would be uncharitable to believe in. The following year however, the bachelor was filled with Mature Age students, rather than the crop of school leavers in that first run through.) Whatever the reasons, the degree left me qualified for nothing, and I spent 2005 unemployed. It was the most miserable year I can remember from my priveleged little life.
Those I went through university with are all employed in totally different fields now. Some went back to study (myself included, in 2006) some found work where they could. The closest to publication that I am aware of any of us getting was when one of the girls got a job cataloging books in a distribution business. Most of us, to my knowledge, didn't put pen to paper in any meaningful sense again. For me that degree is now a ten-thousand dollar albatross that I am gradually paying off through a job I got from my next, more useful course of study.
This is, of course, a self-pitying story of being given a good thing and complaining, naively, because it did not lead to another good thing. But there is a point to it. Like my classmates, I haven't really written anything since graduation. I had a brief dalliance with poetry while I was studying Social Work (probably a result of gaining some real life-experience) and have occasionally made half-hearted attempts at putting together a story or two, but in the main, these have been poor, cliched creatures, like fan-fiction found languishing in some dingy corner of the internet, but without even the entertainment value of ridiculous (by dint of being anatomically impossible) sex. Lacking the genius for instant success or the motivation to persist, and made bitter by what I felt had been promised, and not delivered, I set down my pen.
Reading Mieville's work this week sparked something in my brain that has been dormant for a long time. Feeling his writing in my mind made me suddenly realise, 'I want to write.' But.
I still lack motivation, and certainly I still lack genius. I have other priorities now, artistic passions not made sterile in the autoclave of formal education. I have a little girl, a beautiful thing who nevertheless cries when I am sat for too long at the keyboard. I don't, then, want a project; I don't want the depression of feverishly pumping out five-, ten-, even twenty-thousand words, only for inspiration to run dry and leave me with another half-formed embryo of an idea. There are already too many still-borns in my imagination. What I need is something small, something piecemeal, that I can take and leave as I want and need, and not feel guilt about my lack of drive and commitment.
The internet is a wonderful place at times. There is so much that is fascinating, useful and beautiful hanging in the long corridors that stretch across the continents, stored on massive computers I-don't-know-where, and indexed by Google, the new Librarian, for our pleasure and use. At the same time, there is much that the internet has made worse: internet forums are filled with the shrieks of racists, extremists and fools; the crazies of the world no longer need to drag a chair, step-ladder or milk crate to the side of the road to harangue passers-by, because everyone has a voice. And the internet, in a quirk of technology, has allowed the astonishingly imaginative and beautiful work of China Mieville, to inspire another god-damned blog!
Read more!
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Set Up
This is just a post I'm creating so that I will have a frame of reference for picking my colours. Stop reading it.
Read more!
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