Posted by sigismund on February 19, 2019, at 21:56:23
In reply to Re: Richard Flanagan » sigismund, posted by beckett2 on February 19, 2019, at 16:38:59
I gave up hoping that there was sufficient concern for future generations or the web of life. There seemed to be a cynical, hidden belief that, although it did not exist and wasn't happening, it was already too late, along with a perverse pleasure in seeing the poor and coloured suffer first and most.
We have the same thing. From the alternative media today........
There is now something more than anger attached to this government. Theres a sort of disgust around. Disgust with them, at the sheer volume of waste, shonk and grift, disgust with ourselves for having let it go for so long, for being the mugs who let it happen. It is once again of the paradox of Australian self-conception. Weve imagined ourselves to be relatively uncorrupt and competently governed for so long, that a keener sense that government had entirely collapsed into cronyism, clientelism and dirty tricks was lacking. The capacity for trust in Australia is being rotted from the top down. Its rational to think of a Coalition government the way Italians tend to think of their government, something that has absolutely nothing to do with representation at all: simply a self-contained predatory element, feeding off the body social.
This is part of the intent of right-wing parties of course, to increase cynicism and distrust of government altogether, and enrich themselves at the same time. All the same, they may well have overshot the mark in the last year or so. Am I alone in feeling sick to my stomach, literally nauseous, at reading the national news these days, wondering what the next story of corrupt, corrosive, destructive rorts is going to be? Is disgust now a live political factor? I think it might be. We now have a fundamental asymmetry in Australian politics. One major political party, Labor, capable of government; one minor, the Greens, with some internal strife, but no accusations of rorting. And on the other side something that is neither a Coalition, nor parties at all. Its simply a random, rhizomatic piss cloud of sleaze, grift, incompetence, reactionary obsessiveness, glued together by nothing other than hatred not merely of the left, but of good government itself, and an eye for the skim off the top.
The disgust is something more than political contestation or the belief that the political right, in our era, is a sham. Its a real pain that this has happened to our country. There was, as Ive noted before, until about a decade ago, some sort of implicit agreement about limits, some sense of being pointed forward, whatever political differences there might have been about what form progress would take. The effect of living in such a continental Rortopolis is to make you feel like a mug for doing anything other than making millions from transfers of state money for no product. Why bother? While youre putting your energy into art, science, honest commerce, the very fact that you thereby entrust other people with governance is taken by them as a chance to shonk it.
poster:sigismund
thread:1103130
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/poli/20181106/msgs/1103304.html