Give Yourself A Hug

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An autumn blooming of wax flowers on the Glebe foreshore, many Australian flowers bloom in the cooler months.

"A noticeably homogenous class of inner city, tertiary-educated social professionals, often referred to as the chattering classes, has an identity that developed together with mass tertiary education. While the old Left emphasised economic reforms to help the working class, the new class focused on issues such as refugees, multiculturalism, reconciliation, civil liberties and so on. This new class of social professionals includes teachers, academics, public servants and welfare workers who adopt distinct ideological positions and values that serve as social markers for the new class."
Douglas Kirsner. Professor of Philosophy, Deakin University.


Give yourself a hug, the osteopath said, contorting sore and ancient muscles. The whole city was gurgling down into a dark place, his own life stripped of meaning, just like everyone else. They line up in the grim pre-dawn at the city's bus stops, waiting for the ride which will take them to their factory jobs. Days of routine. Resignation is written on their faces. The Gucci socialists who rule us are swanning around the world, meeting George Bush, Hilary Clinton, chatting with Barak Obama, hobnobbing with the powers of NATO. Urging us to fight the good fight in Afghanistan.

What exactly is good about it? Why are we hunting down and killing villagers because of their religious beliefs? Why are the Taliban experiencing a resurgence in popularity, despite our best efforts? They don't even look up, they show no signs of life, as he walks through them. The old world, where one went to work and was well rewarded, where one worked through the grades and became more substantial, with authority and property, as one grew older, it has all collapsed. Sydney is full of flash cash and gangsters, people who have never worked.

While the wage slaves, truly now the working poor, peddle faster and faster to stay still. Anyone with credit or a mortgage or mistakes in the past struggles to make ends meet on a normal wage. Sweepers, cleaners, factory workers, no one in a menial job can find anywhere affordable to live anywhere near the work that's available. Vast amounts of welfare dollars are forked out to non-working parasites, cradle to the grave welfare that is crippling the country and poisoning the social fabric. Resentment builds like arsenic in the veins. No one is happy.

The grim lines of traffic snaking 20 miles out to the dormitory suburbs, each and every working morn, bear witness to the insanity of a city choking on itself. It just doesn't make sense anymore. Most of the money people flash about is made from property, stocks, or from illegitimate sources. Once high status jobs, teachers, journalists, managers, barely pay enough to make ends meet; eroding their status, making so much of what happens in this place meaningless. Upper management have never done better; multi-million dollar salaries, palaces dotting through the harbour suburbs, yachts bobbing on the too-blue water.

Everyone else wonders what the fuck they're doing; why they're getting up for work every morning, why they're sitting in queues of idling cars for hours every day, choking in pollution filled tunnels, forking out exorbitant tolls just to sit in traffic jams miles long. The hapless state government, with the present incumbent Morris Iemma even more hapless, hopeless and moronic than his predecessoers, live in comfort on public service wages counted in multiples of the average wage. In private enterprise; those paying a mortgage struggle to survive. Statistically Australia has never been wealthier, the pundits said. He couldn't see it.

The traffic queues grew longer, the tolls more tormenting. When things clicked into meaningless like this, when the fabric started to flake apart like this, civilsation itself, the soceity itself, risked collapse. Individual effort was no longer rewarded. Without trust funds and stock portfolios it wasn't possible to live a reasonable, even moderately middle class life. Bills mounted. Interest mounted. Tormenters circled. Guns were oiled. Nooses fantasised. Desperate arguments erupted out of nowhere. Stress ruined everybody's day.

He didn't know what else he could do. He didn't know how to generate any more income. The same frantic despair he had documented in other people's lives was filtering into his own. They spread their flat hopelessness through the flaking visual sheets, the stunted, dusty trees, the cardboard houses, the same same same of their minted lives, behind closed door and brick cladding, behind the summer grills that kept the flies out and stored the echo of the sound of the television that never went off; anything to distract a serious thought. The smell was the same: of hopelessness. Chenille bedspreads and tasteless built-ins, last years' kitchen unpaid for, the couches already looking worn, still on hire purchase.

And the ads kept coming: buy buy buy. No deposit no interest. Show off to your neighbours, live the good life, prove the world you're somebody, a real man, with your possessions and your power. And meanwhile not just the government but the entire public conversation, the television, the public radio, most of the newspapers, had been taken over by the chattering classes. Reality never filtered up to these people, comfortable on their fabulous salaries, convinced, daily confirmed, in their neat array of prejudices against the common man, comfortable beliefs in overcoming injustice. Injustice! These poeple wouldn't have a clue what the real world was like. A plastic bag flaoted down the street. He kicked it in despair, frustrated. There was no call to arms. There was no joining voice. He kicked it again as he walked past; there wasn't going to be a next time. This was the only life.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/alliance-goes-back-to-business-first-with-rudd/2008/04/03/1206851098321.html

In Washington this year, March was the month of the two PMs.

First, former prime minister John Howard came through town as the guest of honour at a splashy dinner at the last redoubt of the neoconservatives, the American Enterprise Institute. A couple of weeks later, Kevin Rudd arrived on his first official visit.

At his dinner, Howard received a gong for outstanding achievement (what would they have given him had he won last year's election?) and delivered the annual Irving Kristol lecture, named for the intellectual godfather of the neocons. A couple of Americans who attended the dinner told me they winced at Howard's attacks on the new Labor Government. But to Australian sensibilities, unaccustomed to the quaint American notion that politics stops at the water's edge, his criticisms of Labor seemed mild. The speech was very long and attendees had to wait until he had finished before dinner was served. But overall it was a red-blooded defence of his cause which no doubt delighted the Paul Wolfowitzes and John Boltons in the audience.

If Howard enjoyed his Washington sojourn, Rudd must have been delighted with his. He spoke to all the people who matter in the Administration and the three candidates to lead the next one.

Elements of both the right and the left in Australia predict Rudd will be a facsimile of Howard, although they differ on whether this is a good thing or a catastrophe. (The notion that Howard and Rudd are in any way similar produces blank looks and disbelief from Americans who have dealt with both men.) However, several aspects of Rudd's visit indicate his Government will be as different on foreign policy from the Howard government as the Howard government was from the Keating government.

http://blogs.smh.com.au/whitehouse08/archives/2008/04/rudd_wins_us_primaries.html

There is a clear, decisive winner in the US primaries this season, and it is Australia's Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd.

While it is customary for visiting presidents and prime ministers to seek out the opposition and pay their respects when travelling abroad (as President George Bush did with Rudd in September), it is highly unusual for those campaigning to succeed the president to break off from their efforts to see another foreign leader.

Aside from the prime ministers of Israel and Ireland, there are very few (Gordon Brown? Nicolas Sarkozy? Vladimir Putin or Dmitry Medvedev? Hu Jintao?) who would render negligible the political risk in spending time with the head honcho of another country, even an ally.

But not so with Rudd. The friendship with Australia is a given, but consider the scenario had John Howard been re-elected last November. Would Barack Obama really have cared to spend any time on the phone with Howard, who dissed him big time last year? And would Hillary Clinton have cared to miss much of a day in Pennsylvania, which is life and death for her, to see an Australian architect of the war in Iraq?

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23480277-662,00.html

HE has successfully wooed some of the US's most influential leaders, but to ordinary Americans Kevin Rudd remains an international man of mystery.

Mr Rudd, who left Washington this week for the next leg of his world tour, has failed to filter into US living rooms. He has a long way to go before he becomes as well known in America as Paul Hogan.

It is little wonder. While news of his election and his historic apology to the stolen generation was covered extensively in the US media, Mr Rudd's "getting to know you" visit to Washington and New York has received little cover.

Cable news networks ran his joint press conference with US President George W. Bush but newspaper coverage has been limited.


A truck parked in our neighbourhood.