Treme and Me

 In a world in which it seems normal to go through life thinking that all is forever lost and that it would be so easy to give up and move on to something better somewhere else - somewhere ostensibly safer and nurturing, to a certain moment in time and space in which the soul was nourished, the scars wiped clean, and the ruminations numbed permanently... Anywhere but here in this discarded, decrepit, wasteland that is now forever altered and emptied of humanity with only the ghosts of good times past to inhabit the detritus of a reality that has betrayed us.

Treme (2010-2013) begins in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and examines through the lives of New Orleans' musicians, chefs, publicans, wanderers, and assorted dreamers what it means to try to resurrect a community in the face of every possible (natural and structural) hurdle imaginable.

Until recently it seemed impossible to view the world as moving backwards through our time of; technological advancement, steady dissemination of a human rights framework to eventually encompass every human being who lives today, growing awareness of the critical importance of universal education and income equality, and the tireless work towards equity and justice outcomes for our historically disadvantaged communities across the world.

Everything in the above seems to have reset in a very short time these days, so imagine my mental state that it so happened that I clicked on Treme on HBO exactly when I was the most pessimistic about the state of our world, and was delivered head first into a universe so completely unfamiliar and, at the same time, incredibly enticing - that any semblance of natural resistance to being enveloped in its warm, musical, colourful, magical embrace was altogether rendered futile immediately.

I certainly have to say that it brought me out of a dark place, personally, to see the effects of John Goodman's character's suicide in Season 1 on his fictional family, and I had to switch off from the show for a few weeks after Khandi Alexander's character's brutal gang rape and Steve Earle's character's death - to a pointless mugging gone wrong - in Season 2.

The music, though, is what did it for me. The hyper-real presence of the horn sections, the street musicians, the rappers, the country and westerns, the jazz ensembles, the 'Indian' chants (and costumes), the wannabe musicians who are forever striving, and the classicists who are always pushing beyond their comfort zones, the hustler musicians peddling their wares to whoever has a buck (or a barbecue rib) to spare... Can you imagine a show where the music is not just a narrative arc enabler but the central character among almost every other tangible signifier of culture that could exist; the food, the carnival sights, the beauty of the French Quarter and the lakefront/bayous/Gulf Coast... the music completely envelopes the city in its musty haze, in its dimly lit storefronts and bars and clubs, in its period housing and shanty towns laid waste to by Katrina... in its deeply felt struggle of city natives returning to a devastated land to recover something of themselves in the face of predatory shark-like corrupt public officials and police... determined to once again change the course of this mercurial city.

I suspect that I will never again love a show as much as this one, and that makes me look forward to Season 3 ever the more.   

Soup Kitchen-ing

 I feel dumb.

To qualify, I feel dumb these days.

I also feel; left behind; overcome; trampled upon; overtaken; marginalized; destitute.

I don't know if I should have fed all these feelings into a generative AI program to get back a whole post about exactly what I am feeling - disseminated to the masses in an easy-to-digest, grammatically impeccable, particularly anodyne, and carefully overwrought perdre la boule.

The older I get, the more I seem to regret ever being born - all this aspiration and go-getting and transitory-mindedness and, eventually, responsible citizening in a foreign country... points to a large cosmic joke, the dust of which I increasingly sense to have been wasted on me.

It's regrettably too late now to turn back into dust, cosmic or otherwise. Too many stories of day-trippers in mid-life crises, leading on to full-life calamities for those left behind - cautionary tales that I cannot ignore any longer... Similar to how I feel when I think about powerful motorcycles and the open road these days: all well and good for back in the day, back when there was so much I didn't know about the vagaries of chance and sheer dumb luck.

I can catch the feels these days from those around me, just as I can low-key sense the extra-ness in my slow unravelling - which is a whole impermeable mood... but what is worse is that I feel like I must express myself in this way; a figurative gotcha smirk at a convivial mode of expression, shared among those with whom I could have nothing in common but to whom I still feel a need to relate.

Is this what being middle-aged is, then? The slowly tanking cred, the superflousness, the irritation at a voice being tolerated for the time-being...

I thought I was going to be consequential by now. 

I guess I just must need to feel lucky that I've survived thus far.

Somewhere over the horizon

Having been someone with a pretty loud internal monologue manifest over the course of my forty-six years of life, it has always been a source of interest to me to dispassionately observe the topics that make up the main theme of the monologue at various times - through periods of change and continuity, through personal crises and successes, through epoch-making instances, and to the extent that the dull, daily drivel of being a productive contributor to the global economy determines your abiding self-image.

The main theme that's running through my head these days is; ageing. That's not really a surprise considering that my main source of employment involves long, meaningful hours spent contemplating and managing the daily foibles of a plethora of older people availing of federal government subsidies to sustain their independence in (what they don't always describe as) their golden years.

My monologue, though, has also been considering ageing through a lens of pitiful self-awareness - I now have two chronic health conditions, diagnosed over the last couple of years, necessitating the daily intake of medication, and shaping just how my prospects appear to me over the next (possible) thirty-plus years of a now compromised life. It dwells on a sudden, unprepared-for end and what it would leave behind in its financial wake. How that would shape my wife's and daughter's remaining years - in the context of my own experience of the loss of my parents. What retirement really means. What fantastical experiences remain to me over the following years. What legacy I have left behind. What emotions I have engendered among those who have known me. What memories I will linger in, and what must be forgotten or hidden.

I am painfully becoming aware, through my internal monologue, that I have now become something that I don't recognize; that I have preoccupations now that preternaturally defeat my will to keep a sense of myself as weak away at the far recesses of consciousness. I have even started to forget spellings of words and their meanings; I used 'they' instead of 'there', and 'respectively' instead of 'respectfully' in two work emails recently - something that I sincerely could not have imagined myself doing, considering that 'proof-reading' is an existential matter to my sense of self... proving that even the hitherto rock-solid checks and balances in the sacrosanct are now at risk.

My monologue also continues to delve into the idea of violence; a fitful concept that hasn't visited me that often physically and, if I am honest, not even psychologically or emotionally in any sustainable way through my life. It seems like the occasional violent thought that runs through my internal monologue is some kind of last-ditch effort to retain a whiff of that wild, uncontrollable rebel I confronted in the mirror each day in my late teens and early twenties; reflecting the current status of the pathetic, miserable, and scared young man I was, posturing with all my might about... what could be.

Liminality or Death

I'm not sure if this is to be my last post on this blog or the first post in a new series... 

I'm not sure if the world will ever awaken from this dribs-and-drabs consciousness of our place in deep time or if we are condemned to fade away like every other apex species - a victim of our own sentient capriciousness and greed.... 

I'm not sure if the oceans will soon rise up in protest and wash off, once and for all, the stains of our dastardly presence on this good earth or if we will, once and for all, limit our impact on the natural rhythm of this unique, singular, precious sphere of nurtured life - at once full and impossibly diverse and absolutely solitary in the vastness of space...

I'm not sure if right is ever going to be clearly delineated from wrong, if universal truths are ever again going to be distinguished from cultivated falsehoods, if violence and predation is going to overwhelm balance and custodianship in our relationships with everything 'other' that is 'useless' to our lives...

I'm not sure if I live or die in this time and place - in this actual moment - in this air and temperature and motor-neuron function manifest in the typing of this dribble.

I'm sure, though, that I will miss it dearly when it is all gone.

The Age of Peak Gaslighting

If there is a word that has discovered a contemporary relevance in the modern world far beyond its original raison d'être - as a gag used to psychologically manipulate a hapless spouse in a movie first made in 1938... a word that was also Merriam Webster's Word of the Year in 2022, gaslighting has so thoroughly transcended its common usage in quasi therapy-speak as to now actually and fully describe the current status-quo of global realpolitik.

It is fortuitous that I finally write this long-distilled screed during the exact moment when the International Criminal Court as well as the International Court of Justice finally begin the process, after eight long months of genocide, to assign the nation of Israel a richly deserved pariah status and declare it a country so far beyond rehabilitation (despite the best efforts of the world's richest and most powerful countries to save it from itself) to be almost doomed to disappear after a mere hundred years of contentious existence.

In time, these events will barely warrant a footnote in the history books; inevitably remembered as an interregnum during which madness took over the earth and comeuppance eventually claimed the wicked... to be included amongst a million other footnotes describing various times in history during which humankind's march towards emancipation was periodically stymied by the tenuous bonds of our wild evolutionary passions. But I don't think a lot of us who have lived through these last eight months will ever cease being uneasy that all this was allowed to occur in a world where the confluence of technology, ethics, and entertainment delivers to us day-after-day a chimeric vision of a world marching towards a real and everlasting justice - for all the peoples of the earth. 

We see the righteous protagonists emerge victorious in fantasy-world creations in our cinemas, learn about Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela in our classrooms, go to see Ai Weiwei's latest exhibition at the gallery or take in David Attenborough's latest entreaty about climate change on our subscription streaming service.The lessons from almost every media landscape we inhabit lull us into this notion of a reflective parody of a time when justice was once hard-fought which thankfully is now overcome and whose retelling we can take for granted as natural heirs of a world enlightened.

The tens of thousands of the children of Palestine now lost to us will never have that luxury.

The tens of thousands of homes destroyed, of futures ended, of families erased will not have that reposeful relief.

The tens of thousands of histories and stories and dreams eradicated will never see the light of that day.

What we have allowed to occur over the last eight months is evil - in every possible sense of the term that has ever been allegorically and explicitly used since the dawn of time. And I hope the blood of the children and the innocents we have allowed to be massacred stains our souls and haunts our quiet reflections right until we close our eyes for the final time.

We live in a world in which we look at ourselves in a giant mirror - as we wilfully dim and brighten the gas lights that allow us to be seen - all the while wondering why the lights are getting dimmer and then brighter..... dimmer and now brighter.... now dimmer and then brighter.

Ignatius Hirudayaraj

 My Father doesn't exist on the Internet.

I google his name expecting to see some rare snippet of lost information about him

As if the ghost of his passed life will somehow emerge

In the memory of someone who was so inspired to enter it into:

a post/ a comment/ a reflection/ a reference...

For me to see

And to know that

His life made a difference to someone somewhere,

Other than me.

My Father doesn't exist on the Internet.

That's because he died in 1987

A few days after my 9th birthday

During the same week when a much-loved and much-loathed political man in our city died too.

So, there was a public mourning,

And much wailing and gnashing of teeth...

For me to ponder

That I knew that the people around me were not mourning for him or anyone like him

But for themselves and the void in them for now so to co-exist with mine.

My Father doesn't exist on the Internet

He's not there for me to look up or follow or stalk

He's not there for me to sound off to about war and regret

And failure, and the shape of clouds.

My Father doesn't exist on the Internet.

The Voice to Parliament 2023

Far be it from me to ever claim that I am anything but mostly ignorant of the lived experience of the First Nations people of this land; of those who continue to experience one of the worst ongoing atrocities ever to be committed on Indigenous peoples anywhere in the world through time and space in the history of our civilization. But I do want to weigh in on the sad debate that is currently doing the rounds as it relates to the contentious realm of the colonial project that continues to be modern-day Australia.

I hope that while doing so I do not seem unknowing of my place and status as an immigrant living as a guest on Wurundjeri country of the Woi-Wurrung language group of Indigenous people - members of the Kulin nation.

There are very few occasions in history when one is invited to be a part of the turning back of time as it relates to our barbaristic, predatory and unconscionable actions through our collective history as colonists who have come to inhabit a geographical region in the world today having displaced in our wake a culture that thrived and cared for this land over so many millennia that the comprehension of its passage, itself, challenges our sense of time. 

The imminent Voice to Parliament referendum is a singular event in history in which I am honoured to be allowed to play a part, but to see the vile misinformation and innuendo being spread about its value to modern Australia, blak and otherwise, is disheartening and cruel; both to the memory of the atrocities committed on the original inhabitants of this land, and the clear opportunity that it now presents - to retell a history of dispossession and disgrace by writing a new story that could point towards a future of hope and regeneration.

I acknowledge the groundswell of scepticism and suspicion that has now emerged about the referendum's enactment from what, effectively, are two factions; one - that is made up of academia and activist groups that bemoan the small step that The Voice represents when viewed against the entirety of what needs to be done towards actively decolonising this country, and two - a group that merges disingenuous multi-national corporate interests centred on the mining and resource extraction industrial-complex with the recalcitrant 'quiet Australian' contingent of white-supremacists who will never change their inherent racist prejudices and will forever fight against any acknowledgement of the continuing devastation their enduring actions have spawned over the last six hundred plus years all over the world.

To the first group, I say - Leave your ivory towers, your vast libraries and secure tenureships aside for a minute; desist from your weekend activism and put down your fashionable banners for just a second, and see the referendum for what it is... a small step down a long, rickety staircase of emancipation and reconciliation for the multitudes of people who now collectively make up this continent and whose own cultural histories, wherever they come from in the world, may include revolts, genocides, and erasure from the 'white' history text books. Acknowledge that all this moment in history represents is but incremental progress towards the future that we all want and strive for - one that embodies a true and authentic decolonisation, once and for all, and a collective moving on from a violent and unforgivable past.

As for the second group, there is really nothing anyone can say to convince you to change. But know this; you cannot stem the tide of history. There can be no future without reckoning, there can be no sustainability without acknowledgement, there can be no progress without reparation, there can be no You without I.

Vote Yes to The Voice.

The Queen Is Dead...

The news over the last few weeks has been like a tediously long hallucinogenic trip that has overstayed its welcome. 

But what it has done for the world's understanding of how much we are still beholden to the idea of a supposedly divinely preordained 'chosen' bloodline to represent the standard of what being human entails is... revelatory, to say the least.

The pomp and splendour and ceremony and the keeping of 'tradition' via the funeral rites for a long-reigning monarch and the investiture of a new one has certainly beguiled the world, taking with it every last vestige of self-respect and dignity that we, as a species, once collectively thought we possessed.

With respect to the post-colonial world, the scales have scandalously fallen from our vision of 'empire', revealing a not so much decolonised world as one whose nostalgia for a violent submissive past has not worn thin despite decades of supposed evidence-based academic reckoning and multi-national self-determination. 

You can hear it all around you - plaintive responses of, "the 'Commonwealth', the 'Commonwealth'" abound whenever any mendacious readings of the horrors of British colonisation are challenged. Leave aside the blatant inequity with which treaties and arrangements for withdrawal from their colonies by Britain were negotiated with the rudimentary representatives of its erstwhile subjugated lands only after they were stripped bare of any semblance of agency with which they could capitalize on their remaining 'natural resources' after the 'global economy' had had its say.

This isn't a curious all-encompassing amnesia so much as a shouting down of all unbiased thinking and expression.

The West has certainly revealed itself over the past few weeks for what it has always been; a craven, despairing beast unwilling to face upto its cannibalistic mercantilist history that dominated so much of the world for hundreds of dark and terrifying years (for the subjugated). A time in which large swathes of the world lost its own 'history' and 'culture' and 'traditional practices' and socio-religious identities. 

I cannot abide a world that 'they' have made up, whatever human sensitivities I may hold for the passing on of a 90-year old affectatious white woman. A culture and a people that has not gotten over its predatory past must be confined to the dustbin of history. 

'Their' time is at an end.

A return to conservatism?

 As the world grapples with the full-blown threat of global recession, as China's gargantuan property market faces imminent collapse, when local worker shortages are being felt everywhere and in everything all at once, and the clear and present (and visible) danger of climate change resoundingly self-advocating in a northern hemisphere summer of dried up river beds and flooding clearing whole provinces in vulnerable nations, what can a return to those values that embody the virtues of 'holding on' and 'preserving' and 'conserving' look like in these times of rapid and vicious change?

Can we refuse to let in the immediately available and desperately needed labour of the third-world because we're worried about 'our' local workers who will have to 'compete' in a job market that is experiencing its bottom actually falling out in real-time?

Can we continue to allow the multi-national fossil fuel merchants of death to covet and exploit the vast planetary 'reserves' of raw materials whose ongoing use decrease our ability day-by-day to continue to live on this planet?

Can we continue to prop up neo-fascist movements, neo-apartheid regimes, genocidal maniacs (who became national leaders in a previous paroxysm of 'conservative' blood-letting), perpetual-growth evangelists, 'gig' and 'crypto' economy pseudo-intellectuals, and all the people around us who are apprehensive of 'change'?

There is no time but the present for a final, loud, expulsion of any last remnants of nostalgia we might have once had for the 'way things once were'. That's what's led us to where we are here and now and, therefore, cannot have been so 'good' anyway. 

It's time to burn our bridges with the past and move forward to a renewable energy future focused only on social justice outcomes for the poorest of the poor first and foremost, and then, via late-stage capacity-building, work our way up to the most privileged amongst us. 

There is no other way past this miasma of regret.

The last roll of the dice

I sincerely wish I do see a time when I can finally look back, come the fat lady reaching the highest pitch in her song, and when the hills have long since been climbed over and now disappeared from view behind me, and when liminality is a concept in my life that has both served its purpose and has its ultimate relevance renewed, and revel in the knowledge that the Australian election of 2019 was the last time this country had ever produced a majority government.

There is too much at stake in this world to leave to the mercy of two cis old white guys (and their associates) who do not possess a lasting experience of disadvantage in a structural, institutional, and personal setting. Yes, I know all about Albo's single mum upbringing but his experience of having grown up with social supports and services in a first-world urban environment could not have adversely affected his prospects.

A hung parliament will produce all the deliberation and painstaking analysis of every policy decision that is to come which we most definitely deserve - in a world where fire and flood, homelessness and destitution, adverse experiences of the health system - for both physical and mental illnesses, seem to be all-encompassing and increasingly accepted as the status-quo.

What is at stake here is that on May 21st, 2022 we will have our last chance to actually determine the course of our futures. The road past this point is one in which we will only be catching up with all the destruction we have so far spawned, and that world will not have the luxury of choice.

 

So much to say, so little to do

The movie, 'Groundhog Day' (1993), which allows the Bill Murray character a chance to redeem his erstwhile obnoxious existence by reminding him of the preciousness of seemingly simple 'everyday life' in small-town America, has become the definitive trope of our times to describe our collective sense of futility at the endless re-visitation of the current cycle of lockdowns and restrictions guiding our local response to the Covid-19 crisis. Australia has been lucky in that; our insularity, our cruelty, and our isolation (both geographic and pyscho-social) has allowed us to escape the worst wages of the pandemic as it evolves into eventual insignificance after carving through the earth with its metaphorical scythe over the past couple of years. But isn't the Myth of Sisyphus - the notional King, infamous for his trickery and his cheating of death, receiving his divine comeuppance via the punishment of having to push up a heavy boulder to the top of a hill only to see it roll down again and revisiting his task ad infinitum - the better analogy for our times?

Through this daily manifestation of what must seem to most of us like extremely cruel and unusual punishment, we have no choice but to delude ourselves into believing in the existence of the rainbow at the end of the tunnel - that we will come upon by the dint of our hard sacrifice or by a lucky happenstance or by the grace of 'God' - that will take the shape of our promised freedoms, our 'escape' from the death tolls that the rest of the world has suffered, our collective reward for our 'good' social-isolationist behaviour...

But has our existence now become a case of Sisyphus turning on himself and seeing his eternal task/punishment as a goal in itself; as a means by which to filter his inadequacy through the hellish spectre of self-induced privation as penance for his sins in the era 'Before-Lockdown'?

This scenario was only ever meant to be transient - a temporary gag on the spread of infection whilst other means could be found to ensure that we were spared the worst effects of the virus. But once we started down this road, can we now still remember where it was supposed to end? The people of Victoria vs. the people of New South Wales, the returnee vs. the resident, the essential worker vs. everyone else... Was this our fate all along - to be mired in the quicksand of self-pity, and loathing the motivations of everyone else, and being constantly preoccupied by our own dread and despair at the state of things... How do we now extricate ourselves from this situation - where we are turning on the apparent 'anti-science/anti-vaxxer/anti-lockdown' enemy and not realising that they are really the enemy within; bereft of the ability to isolate, without the parklands next door and the steady Work-From-Home income?

There will come a time of denouement - when we will have to examine the mass hysteria that led to this collective madness, this suspension of civil discourse, this turning on all the qualities we thought our small country was characteristic of during a once much simpler time... but was it ever really simple, or are the ghosts of our past sins driving our present abasement? 

Panic in Needle Park

If you drive a really nice car down a dirt and gravel road, through a shabby-looking part of town you have never been in, at the dead of night, all alone with no GPS and very little gas left in the tank... you would be forgiven for that onset of hysteria beginning to take shape in the pit of your stomach, long distilled from childhood warnings of unseen chainsaw-weilding marauders and chewing-tobacco spitting toothless deviants with shiny eyes and very little charity in their hearts. What does one make of, though, meticulously well-heeled and well-read bon vivants, given to cavorting in various wine and cheese circles, usually seen flitting from one art gallery to the next must-see exhibition, or holed up in their two/three-storey beach 'shacks' through the pandemic, perpetually well-hydrated and exercised, worrying about the efficacy of the vaccine and the 'side-effects' on their bodies?

We are in the midst of a severe backlash against powerfully racist and sexist moral mendicants, begging for mercy from their straw mansions, exposed for the obtuse & cruel overseers of extreme privilege they really are, driving in reverse through an Age of Transparency - in thought and deed and ethical absolutism. Seen in the light of a world in spate - from daily briefings of how bad the climate crisis is getting, to reports of habitat losses, and destroyed ecosystems, and dried-up rivers, and the upending of harvest-time, and regular summer and winter temperatures being long replaced by an endless cycle of fire and flood... can we still fall back on our belief that a just law will prevail and save us all from ourselves?

Trump is gone, long-live Trumpism. Right-wing populism on the rise and already all around us, western governments long accustomed to an easy and familiar recognition of the brown-skinned and foreign-tongued extremist amongst us, suddenly forced to reckon with handsome Harry and debonair Delilah down the street driving down the Brenton Tarrant-track in their Dad's Audis and Mum's Range Rovers, inevitably running up against Cho from the office and Atak at the helm of the barrista machine in the corner-cafe, and harshing everyone's mellow with their putative superiority-complex.

Dogs and Horses, horses and dogs, O what a nice coffee-table, glossy picture book that would make... sipping an infused flavourful tea, looking at page after page of large-format photos of dogs and horses, horses and dogs; in play, at rest, out and about... with no people in the frame to spoil the idyll.

I dream of a cloistered English village, a vacant savannah, a Great Lakes-vista, an Amazon not yet cut down... I dream of palaces made of stone, a pile of precious stones glinting in the moonlight, a clear still pool of water - one that you peer into all the way down the bottom, to see the ghosts of time and patience beginning to rise, disturbing the integrity of the stillness, creating a distorted pattern, until they disappear at the surface - having already broken your hard-won reposeful rectitude.

White Boy Rick (2018) and the privilege of narrative

What we find ourselves believing of the world today depends on whose story we're listening to. Climate change matters... or it doesn't, Trump Derangement Syndrome or the Dumbest Fucking Criminal President That There Will Ever Be, Brexit or Bust and Colonialism Was A Good Thing... etc. etc.
The debate about who gets to tells these stories is as old as time itself and there has been a tradition of dissemination of alternative histories that have had an emphatic effect on the identity and personal historiography of myriad niche audiences made up of those most affected by the telling.
As related to 'White Boy Rick' (2018), I must admit I was bemused at my lack of emotional response to the sad travails of the main character, a disadvantaged white American boy caught up in the drug war of 1980s America, and found myself much more interested in the narrative arc of the black characters on show. For most of my life these kinds of characters (both, white and black) existed in a realm removed from any lived experience, and parallels, if there existed any at all, related only to a comparable lack of agency. Having had an occupational experience now of disadvantage in a mixed-race highly urbanised setting in a 'western' city, I wonder if we are doomed to a non-convergence of real-life expectations of the outcomes of personal journeys we are directly invested in seeing through in our day-to-day lives today. I see what I want to see in a movie, irrespective of the direction the story-teller is trying their hardest to lead me towards, and as in life, I have now the agency to resist their point-of-view in a way that I couldn't when I was younger.
How that relates to the way the world is today is in the inevitability of a shared journey that we now seem to be increasingly unable to accept. International and inter-continental trade, OPEC, embargoes and boycotts, Hollywood, even, are mere manifestations of a fragile transnational cooperative structure that has existed in some shape or form through every age of mankind. And the repercussions of not following the script has always been existential and based on prevailing agency and power. Where we begin to unravel today is in the false choice we are presented with - of not following the basic script of a 'human', not Western or Soviet or Capitalist or Socialist or Allied or Axis, complicity.
It seems like such an irony; to live at that point in human history when a majority of us can touch, see, hear, smell and feel the experiences of those far removed from our immediate scope of experience via the tools of the modern age, and yet, feel so capable of dissociating ourselves from the experience of an all-encompassing togetherness and empathy, if not communion, with our fellow human beings wherever they live and whatever their own experiences of life.
I am at that point, myself, of dissociation right now - from a job, a community, a way of life. It feels surreal that I can actually do this because there really was never a choice in the past - just a decision to be made. Perhaps this is what adulthood looks like - to have the consequences of a journey made manifest in the time and effort it takes to stop it.
I wish White Boy Rick didn't have to go to prison, sure, but neither did his black friend, Boo, and nobody got to tell his story.

The name's, 'Mud'

I like movies like, 'Mud' (2012), full of atmosphere and vernacular, rich in metaphor (the character's name, the white shirt, etc.) but also overflowing with human failing, and the loss of innocence, and the gulf between; expectation and reality; hope and faith.
This is a momentous week for me... for us as a family. The end of a long, torturous journey certainly, but also the end of some expectations. To change one's citizenship is not to change one's nationality, I wrote somewhere else, but equally, to change one's citizenship is to confront the change in one's own identity.
This is a country that has maintained some myths about itself since inception, as do we. Change affords us a chance to redraw, reset, renew... but that renewal brings with it a convivial maintenance of those same myths that are sold to us as a facet of reality. If the means to success is only ever via one's own initiative, failure can also only ever be your own fault, the pitfalls and treacherousness of the road notwithstanding.

We have to take a pledge, under God, of allegiance to this myth, this entity, this complicity... this nationhood. An allegiance to continue being, but now essentially transformed by the gift of legal status - an identity now bestowed, not born with... an identity of one's choosing.
Gratitude... To whom? - the country, its people, our benefactors who helped us along the way. 'You must be so glad, so relieved, so grateful...' say they, the words left hanging... waiting... waiting for an affirmation, a confirmation that here now is someone that should be grateful for what I was born with - an implicit bias... of one's own greater status... of someone else wanting something that has come naturally to me.
The poverty in 'Mud' (2012) is like a mood; all-encompassing, never remarked upon, a state of being... natural. A citizenship conferred can never be like that. It must be an aspiration, a goal, a constantly remembered edifice to artificiality. 'When did you come over?', they will ask my daughter when she's grown... 'When I was two,' she will say... to a reception characterised by a relaxation of breath, emblematic of a complicity shared, a reckoning of a mostly common naturalness.

It is hard to say that things have ever been worse 'back home', but that is something you can say about a lot of countries nowadays... There mightn't be anything to go back to, but is there something to look forward to.... except 'othering' for the rest of my life?
I want to say I am happy, but this country, over the last six years, has made me wary of admitting to too much... it is enough to say, "I am relieved," I have learnt... lest anything more becomes an invitation to violence.

I saw John Pilger's Utopia today

I saw John Pilger's Utopia today.
After I had argued with an Aboriginal girl about who was blacker - she or I.

I saw heaven reflected in the face of a child.
I thought about leaves and the setting sun and the full moon.

I read about refugees committing suicide.
And then I read about refugee-suicide (with the dissociative hyphen included prominently).

I dreamt about knights and minarets and sailing ships.
I saw the dreams of the subaltern rendered helpless,
Lost in the waves of a metal storm.

I learnt about the First Industrial Revolution, and then the Second, and what if the Third?
I felt the land under us sundered dry in a chemical deluge.

I experienced pain and retribution and shame
I also know redemption and love and the forgiveness of sins

I try to be a good person
When all I can do is be less bad than I ought.

I saw John Pilger's Utopia today.
And I exoticised the Red Earth of the First Nations.
And imagined the riches under the graves of the Frontier Wars.
And forecast the rise of the untethered soul,
Dismissing country and home and connection,
For an existence dictated to by the Next Great Experience.

Which exploits, first, the luckless and gun-less
Then the topsoil, and the water, and the beasts and birds
And becomes the New Age Guru
Of Loss and Consequence, in that order.

I saw John Pilger's Utopia today
And then I argued with a white girl about privilege - hers and mine.

Do the Russians love their children too?

In the aftermath of a 'surprise' result in the Australian federal elections, and in the wake of long-form comparisons being made between it and the Trump/Brexit debacles in the rest of the Anglophone world, it may be relevant to examine the fault-lines between the 'local' interest and the 'common' interest, and whether one can still support the idea that people can be persuaded, emotionally or otherwise, to vote against their 'own' interests.
In this convoluted mass-media landscape, where partisan-interest-driven scare campaigns prey on the susceptible, and folks are living to a ripe old age even while witnessing and living through cataclysmic changes in local weather patterns and extreme weather events, is the message that most of us seem to invest in de rigueur; about imminent societal collapse and species extinction, actually a lived experience for the wider electorate? When jobs are scarce and 're-training', especially for wizened self-appointed subject matter experts in our rural and regional areas, the only option, can we really not extrapolate the results of what seems to be a self-evident choice, to most of us, of local and federal leadership to the existential concerns of a wide swathe of our fellow citizens?
People get used to a certain way of life; those ways of life involve religion, food, self-defence, sustenance, and kinds of work; those kinds of work have not been subject to a great variation on the use of the basic ready-made cognitive and dexterous tools that most of us are born with and have learned to use functionally for a plethora of tasks at hand, over millennia; only the processes by which we use them have changed over the course of time. Can we really begrudge the person taught from a young age that; they have to be self-reliant; are meant to take advantage of the plentiful, bountiful earth around them; will never fail if they have faith; is duty-bound to resist the encroacher and be suspicious of the foreigner; who has only ever had a liminal understanding of the intersection between infrastructure and policy-making and special interest lobbies and technological disruption, their support of the cautious, limited, unimaginative sceptre of a cowardly political representation that can only reaffirm that uneasiness in the pit of their stomach?
If we are to really be progressive, we have to embrace the conceptual realities of the idea of progress in the case of that seminal and elemental Joe/Jane of the bush. They are alienated from pop-culture discourse. They are only bound to the science of change in so far as they can see it, or smell it, or 'feel' it, whatsoever that may mean to them. This notion of uninformed resistance on the part of neo-luddites, burying their heads in the sand, and tied to the local iterations of their guns and their gods, must end lest we dance with the prospect of mass insurrection and civil strife for generations to come. We cannot let fear dictate our policy, we cannot let misinformation lead us astray from our responsibilities, we cannot let ignorance subsume our hope for a better life in a better world. The sooner we include everyone in a 'common' vision, the faster we will be able to fulfil it. After all, we and Sting do now know that, back in the eighties, the Russians did love their children too.

#Auspol

I cannot vote in this election, though I most probably will in the next one. This puts me in the unique position, advantageously or disadvantageously, of a concerned political stakeholder incapable of participation. What this uniqueness gives me is an 'out' - a way to distance myself from the complicity of my fellow man/woman in the choosing of the quality of governance in this country over the next three years, and the option to affect a studious silence when presented with the opportunity to respond to the inevitable manifestations of the shortcomings of the next government with either a jaded, "I told ya so..", or a shame-faced, "If you reckoned the other side would have done better, you're dreaming...". That will be the sum total of the result of all these myriad gladiatorial contests and psycho-social dramas being played out in the media about the choice for our next national political leadership, at least for me.
I cannot deny that I feel a huge dread conjured up from the depths of my modern human soul these days when elections and political representation are being discussed wherever they happen over the world. Whether on hearing about extensions of 'lifetime' chairmanships, such as what happened in China recently, or the discrediting of validly conducted elections, such as what is happening in Turkey right now, I am less and less convinced that the fundamental democratic processes for representation that some states have put in place appeal at all to the vast majority of human beings across the world, exactly at a time when the stakes for a valid representation of the public interest have never been higher in the history of human civilisation. We are faced with existential threats of climate disaster, tribal internecine conflict stoked by the insidious appeal of white and religiously chauvinistic nationalism, the never-ending flow of millions of refugees, and the erosion of trust in institutions that have traditionally safeguarded the inevitability of progress in the world such as education, medicine, and journalism. What would a citizen anywhere in the world gain by dipping their toe into these troubled waters simply for the chance to claim some 'skin in the game'? Isn't it better to find some way into the globalised system of capital financing or multi-national corporatism to ensure our continued relevance in this world in which the very ground beneath our collective feet seems to shake every time we move an inch towards developing any sense of conviction?
There is no doubt that some people, and we all know a few in our families or amongst our past acquaintances and friends, have been way ahead of the curve in preparing themselves and their immediate circles for this cruel world the rest of us seem to have suddenly found ourselves in. The question is whether those people have really succeeded in insulating themselves from the coming weather-related, market-collapsing, and politics-negating catastrophes that all that cumulative subjectivity and 'sensible pragmatism' has been preparing for and ushering in over the last thirty years.
The abiding problem with cynicism, I have always found, is that it eventually leaves one without a map with which to navigate one's way out from under its weight. So, yes, I will have formed an opinion over the next fortnight on what I believe would be the best possible future that my daughter could have, and which political persuasion, whether in the form of a political party's stated policy position or in the utterances of a particularly well-informed independent, would best herald in that future. We are, after all, a very thinly populated country situated in a very far corner of the world. If we cannot even govern ourselves appropriately given all our natural and civic advantages, what hope can there be for a multi-cultural, multi-linguistic, multi-dimensional world out there?

Reckoning

The drama of life is incomplete if one has not had the singular experience, each time, of being singled out; I speak of the occasions when I have felt uneasy at an interaction with someone in authority whilst being treated with less dignity than the perpetrator(s) would probably afford their domestic pet; an occurrence that leaves me feeling bereft of an easy categorisation within which to place a particular episode in and amongst the behavioural pantheon of modern neuroses.

When I do have these experiences the response is generally to try to forget it as quickly as it happened, in the vain hope that the emotion generated hence does not add to the flood of unwanted rumination that readily already occurs in spite of repeating ad nauseam the modern mantra that I am, indeed, a being of agency and free will.
Subjectivity is key here - I was singled out; I was unfairly treated; my person-hood, at the time, was unfairly maligned; of these there can be little doubt.
Add to this the perceived and manifest inadequacies that we already bring to social interactions; perhaps a bad day at work was had; perhaps I woke up feeling not my best self; perhaps we live in a society that accepts discrimination based on colour, creed, religion, and race as a condition of life that everyone must accept lest one is asked to love it or leave.
The debate, here, is how to accept these interactions as inevitable episodes conditional on critical-mass and boilerplate acceptance of the argument that fresh air, clean water and workable infrastructure is worth the bargain.

Let me illustrate:
- A family of three travels to the CBD by train in the days when one could still buy a printed ticket from a vending machine in a suburban railway station platform. They display their tickets at the exit gate to transit officers. The transit officers see that one of the three tickets has been erroneously purchased in place of the correct one that is 20 cents more than the price of the ticket so produced. The transit officers question the family about their antecedents, especially related to how long they have resided in the country, and then levy a $100 fine on the family, whose day, by now, is irrevocably ruined.
The argument is not that a fine isn't warranted in the case above, but rather that the perpetuation of a narrative of institutional bias and the upending of a sense of security that the episode fosters is added on to a preponderance of existing subjective cultural narratives about inequality and discrimination and subservience.

Another illustration:
- There are three students in vocational education. After a year of attending classes, submitting assignments, and completing placements, only two students are granted diplomas. The third student is informed that their paperwork is incorrect even though they did receive prior verbal guarantees from the tutor that it was acceptable. The third student is the only immigrant of the three.
The argument here, again, is not that the third student is immune from sanction because of their nationality, but that their presentation is inextricably bound to their experience of educational (and employment) outcomes that have a decidedly emphatic effect on their psycho-social functionality.

There are many other occurrences over the last five and a half years, each with its own unique modality concomitant to an underlying experience that has contributed to driving a narrative of victimisation and discrimination, that I have had to overcome so as to sustain the myth of an empowered day-to-day existence in this country.

I am sure that this is a part of every immigrant's narrative. I am also sure that I could have done without them.

The Edge of Space

A facet of immigration that is lost on commentators when they idealise the many reasons why people from distant shores come over and make lives in the West is the need for atonement. It is a hard concept to articulate for many immigrants because atonement, or the idea that one confronts active or passive realities and makes peace with them with humility and emotional reparation, brings with it a whole host of remembrances that are ideally best buried. It is the beginning of something to emigrate, certainly, but also the end of something else... and this every migrant knows.
Being brought up middle-class in a third-world country makes one self-centred - the competition for resources, opportunities, love, leisure, etc., are well understood and dissected around the world, even sometimes to the immigrant's advantage. Everywhere one goes as a local in the third world, the worst of us must be indulged if we are to get ahead of someone else. Occupations are remunerated not for the value they bestow on society, but on their ability to make someone else much richer than you'll ever be. In this cauldron of conceit it is natural that social markers of privilege are accentuated rather than hidden because they could give you an edge over someone else in an universal marketplace of one-upmanship. What ends when one migrates to the West is the need to sustain a fundamental fiction - that one actually deserved to be better off than the billion-plus souls one has left behind. It isn't necessary anymore to believe that you are a master of your destiny... because you have escaped it. It isn't necessary to fuel your self-belief by ritualising and fetishising your differences... because they really don't matter any longer. It isn't necessary to dismiss your faculty with language, your ambition, your idea of success, the sacrifices that the many people in your family and wider community made on your behalf over the course of your lifetime... because in your adopted country in the West you will always only ever be exotic. It isn't even necessary to think that you're smarter than anyone else and that your genes or antecedents have made you the manifest fulfilment of the sum of your entire clan's historically consolidated hopes and dreams... because the sustained weight of that much expectation will very likely drive you to insanity.
What one atones for is much more tangible - the sense that here, finally, is a place where I can look at myself in all my imperfection and know that it is only chance that mattered in the end. There is no reason your erstwhile; servant, driver, maid, cook or cleaner couldn't have been you - it was and remains pure dumb luck that you are where you are now. The impetus for your hard work over the years, the drive to achieve things by virtue of dedication and application, the fuel for your success... could have been shared by every other person you ever came into contact with over the course of your time in the country you grew up in; that is the reality.
My family and I are on the cusp of gaining citizenship in a foreign country. It is a country with a complicated history and a whole host of dark phantoms that are continually being dredged up from a hoary past that it must confront. It is also a country with a whole host of current challenges, the responses to which may very well determine whether it still remains a viable, sustainable, and enjoyable place to live in in the years to come. For me, though, it is a country in which I can see most clearly that I am a product of the immense privilege that my home country has given me, without which I would be just another statistic; a stranger with strange looks and a strange accent; an outlier; an anomaly; just another curiosity in a new world of impenetrable diversity. The debt I owe that idea of India can barely be measured, let alone repaid, but I can see now the fullness of my perversity - the manifest injustices and the criminal neglect I perpetuated on so many people I have now left behind forever. I can now see that a society can only ever be measured by the conditions of life of its most disadvantaged, most vulnerable, most needy individuals. I know now that when one turns his/her back on someone in pain and suffering, one turns their back on a version of themselves.
I can acknowledge now, in the full light of an antipodean summer, that it simply isn't enough to understand that life is unfair - we must work towards a reality when it need not be.

To be seen, and not heard

Are we complicit in sustaining a structurally racist patriarchy the world over simply by trying to be nice?
It's a question that has to be asked if we are to achieve anything like a semblance of parity in a world where brutality seems to reign supreme; over our coveted personal spaces and our time; over communities struggling to provide for their basic necessities; over whole nations whose right to exist is thrown in doubt simply because the civilised thing to do is to smile and be silent when appalling, criminal, shameful acts are perpetrated in plain sight of everyone, even those who avert their gazes at the last minute.
When we are confronted by a starkly repelling sight, such as a person being dehumanised in public, our reactions to the fact of its immediately present enactment becomes, first and foremost, a political act. Auto-applying context, judging the degrees against which these acts must be measured, and justifying bizarrely violent responses to everyday events seem to have become second nature to those of us who live in a world without recourse to a fundamentalist ideology that we can use to mask the harsh realities of the world in which we live. Community standards are referred to when we are confronted by uncommon practices that we are loathe to spend a smidgen of time researching, while we could be catching up with people with whom we have the most in common and with whom those same standards can be relaxed without fear of social reprisal.
No one is advocating a world where we question our present-day realities, and that is, in and of itself, a strangely medicated response to a state of absolute abnormality. There is much to be said of the need for maintaining communal peace and harmony, and contributing to the economy by following socially established norms such as; obtaining gainful employment, paying taxes, consuming necessities and luxuries in varying measures based on our skills at manipulating the labour and/or capital markets. But, to condone a direly inequitable global system of basic wants and needs as it affects over half of the world's population while, at the same time, manifestly ignoring the shabby form of the homeless person one purposefully passes by everyday to and from a daily mélange of meetings, appointments, and trysts, is... inhuman surely. Why do we smirk when a colleague who is a little removed from the rest of us, whether in ability, provenance, race, or gender, has that difference pointed out to them in a particularly pointed manner? Why do we nod our heads in understanding when we hear judgements being made in ignorance, biases being aired freely in 'polite' company, prejudices being fortified in solemn solidarity? Are we subscribing to a sense of conformity that it is expected of us, an expectation that a certain amount of rocking the boat within unspoken of parameters is tolerable so long as it doesn't list too much?
Stop being nice to the people around you when they are not being nice to others. There really isn't anything else to say. The wages of your complicity will not overcome a world of heartache, and war, and disease, and waves of refugees descending on your shores, and environmental ravaging, and the question being asked of a quiet night in the stillness of your child's bedroom about why the world is as it is.