Emptying the Haunted Air

An exemplar of Intelligent Design

One of the best things about coming to China is the extent to which I’ve been able to keep up with Australian politics, as well as the international issues that interest me. I was expecting it to be much more difficult – the firewall, my (mis)conceptions about the reliability of internet connections in Shanghai, as well as some vague idea that geographical separation would, somehow, disengage me from public debate in Australia.

In fact, it’s turned out quite the opposite. Being away from Australia has made me more determined to remain in touch which, in turn, has resulted in me spending more time on the internet. More time watching streaming video, reading articles, blogs and forums. (Of course, it helps that every media organisation in Australia is allowed through the firewall over here.) For some reason, the habit of tuning into politics via television made me complacent, for I always had the option of not watching my nightly dose of news and current affairs. If I missed Joe Hockey making a dick of himself on Lateline (now celebrating its 20th year with a series of fascinating archival videos on the website), it wouldn’t worry me. I’d be sure to see something equally interesting on tomorrow’s news.

Now, I’ve entered into an almost-unhealthy ritual of consuming each day’s current affairs in the early hours of the morning. And, because I am far less likely to watch news reports (preferring meatier analysis and commentary), I don’t get my little snacks from Australian Parliament. So, instead, I just go to its website and watch the whole gorram’ thing. Or, at the very least, much more than I used to watch. In Australia, I tended to miss the ABC’s Q&A, because the format is tiring a little and the panellists are frequently dull. Last Monday’s episode looked intriguing and, considering I was already on the internet watching old Lateline videos, I decided to watch it. So, when Steve Fielding made an absolute dick of himself, I was able to savour every moment.

Tony Abbott - Leader of the Coalition

I call the process Moncktification, and it can be applied to any picture that is wanting of eye-googliness.

So, Lord Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, is visiting Australia to give talks on climate change, and also presumably to have his desiccated penis massaged by his staunchest allies in Australia. Alan Jones – who, in spite of multiple breaches of the broadcasting code of conduct, has managed to keep his particular brand of bullshit on the air – was among them. The footage that was shown in the otherwise uninformative 7.30 Report, uh… report gave me a good idea of what this presentation was all about: basically a couple of hours of Lord Banana of Brenchley preaching to the converted, replete with PowerPoint slides and jokes.

From transcript:

(to audience) As you can see the houses of Parliament would disappear, to which my saying is, and your problem is?
(audience laughs)

And I along with them!

Of course, the silliest thing about Monckton is still his charge that the global warming lobby is actually contriving to bring the world under a single government – Illuminati style. Unelected sponge that Monckton is, he even had the stones to emphasise the point that these shadowy rulers would be vilely unelected. All the drama around this – Monckton’s visit, Tony Abbott’s questionably-funded green policy, the stirrings of a Sceptic Revolution, of an empire on the brink of collapse – masks a fairly mundane political truth.

I don’t spend a lot of time going around talking to ‘the people’. Recently, in fact, I’ve spent most of my time talking to deliciously-animated space vixens. However, if gauging the public mood through politics is an endeavour that has any validity, it seems that things have changed a bit since before the Coalition leadership spill of late 2009. As a political issue, climate change is losing momentum. Here, Andrew Bolt might claim some sort of personal victory, attributing the stagnation to the daily truths that he ejaculates onto the face of Australian politics via his blog. He wouldn’t be entirely wrong, and an ALP federal election campaign that dodges the issue would be a major victory for sceptics.

But it’s not because the science is, somehow, ‘falling apart’. The relationship between man-made carbon emissions and the global climate remains well-founded, and scientists and researchers will continue their work in this regard for a long time. All we are seeing is an Australian public with a relatively short attention span getting bored of the politics, in a mediascape teeming with distractions.

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"But wait, there's... Oh, no. There isn't really."

Naturally, I watched tonight’s Lateline interview with Ian Plimer and George Monbiot. It was, if nothing else, entertaining, and revealed nothing of the two men (or the issue of climate change) that we do not already know. The thing that stuck with me was the peculiar contrast of Plimer’s ‘I’m just a scientist’ argument, and the image of him holding up (on at least three occasions) a copy of his book, Heaven and Earth, in the manner of Tim Shaw with a set of Demtel steak knives.

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Ian Plimer stopped being a scientist the moment he set foot on the climate sceptic warpath. Which isn’t to say that he lost any of his credibility, or any right to speak his mind. But he is now effectively a politician and lobbyist, and his performance on Lateline (as well as one earlier in the year when he released his book) made this starkly apparent. A genuine scientist is a thrall to empirical evidence, and will change their findings to suit it, but Plimer’s reluctant to answer questions because, as a politician, he cannot concede any such territory – in the same way that Paul Keating could not admit to his broken promise with the LAW tax cuts, or Howard with the ‘children overboard’ deception. In politics, a concession to one’s opponents is a tangible step towards death. Whether he has put himself in this position, or because he has been hauled atop the shoulders of the climate sceptics, Ian Plimer is no longer a scientist, in spite of his regular assertions to the contrary.

What’s particularly strange – and my brother, who is far less inclined to take these debates in earnest, pointed this out to me – is that Plimer, aside from his corpulant appearance and slightly weak voice, resembles a classic pro-wrestling heel. From his ever-smug countenance, to the part of the interview in which he told Monbiot to mind his manners, “young man”, I can imagine him marching to the ring, in full suit-and-tie, holding high a copy of his book – all to the glorious boos of the audience.

L-R: Ludvig Borga, Jerry 'the King' Lawler, Ian Plimer, The Repo Man, I.R.S, Yokozuna, Ted 'the Million Dollar Man' DiBiase

Arcology

This evening’s report on that nirvana of news and current-affairs, Lateline, about population growth and urban sprawl in Australia’s major cities, made for bonerifically nifty viewing – and not only because it featured a debate between two of Australia’s most intelligent, erudite former leaders, Bob Carr and Steve Bracks, both of whom possessed the rare quality in politics of knowing when to jump ship.

The report was framed in light of comment Kevin Rudd made weeks ago, in which he expressed his idiosyncratic, bland pleasure about the forecasts for Australia’s population growth: 35 million by the middle of the century. He wants Australia to be a ‘big country’.

It is the geographic and social implications of this ‘big country’ that are at the centre of the debate. Carr was, as ever, doubtful of the necessity for feeding a population boom. The most interesting point he raised questioned the practice of boosting immigration to satiate skill shortages. New citizens bring co-dependents, who in turn create other skills gaps. Bracks was far more optimistic, speaking of the opportunities afforded by population growth. To this, Carr replied that population growth will increase urban density and sprawl.

It is in quarter-acre sparsity that Carr, and many others, it seems, locate Australia’s quality of life. The problem is, this notion has been living on borrowed time since the beginning of Australia’s port-WW2 migration program. Naturally, a decade of uninterrupted economic growth and countless government hand-outs and tax-cuts have acted as a sort of saline solution to this dying ideal, but the arguments to maintain it now seem really scant.

This is all really precious, coming from somebody who grew up in this lifestyle, so I leave the rest to city planners, environmentalists and economists. Watch the report. Suffice to say, now the most popular Prime Minister in Australian history has signalled that the Federal Government will take a bigger hand in city planning, the time has never been better to realise my dream of the Sydney Arcology!

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Jourmedian – a delightful coalescence of the words journalist and comedian – refers to the twats who present the new ABC TV show, Hungry Beast, while also indicating its structure and tone. It combines didactic (albeit occasionally informative) journalism, lame sketch humour, ill-conceived blog-style rants and general wankery into half an hour of incomprehensible television. This evening, viewers were treated to a sketch about discrimination against vampires in Sydney. At least, that’s what I thought it was – I stopped watching at this stage. Perhaps it was hilarious.

Harmony in Ultraviolet - Tim Hecker

Instead, I went and played around a little in AudioMulch. Then I stopped, and watched John Safran’s splendid Race Relations. Looking at the site for the first time, I see that’s it’s been designed in HTML to resemble Facebook. Not quite sure why they did that, besides it being a bit of a laugh. Like everything done in Safran’s inimitable style, it dances around serious issues, then retreats from making a coherent argument, preferring to succumb to its own twisted, internal logic. It’s wickedly funny stuff – there’s nobody else quite like him.

After this, I went back to Mulch – again. I was thinking about what I wrote yesterday. Of the middle ground between drones and breakbeats for which I’m searching. There are, of course, many who already compose in this sort of territory. Autechre have always enthralled me with their music, but sometimes I have felt their music is always beats with drones, or beats then drones, or drones then beats, rather than a weaving together of the two. Quaristice was their strongest album in this regard. However, what it lacked for me was the drama of a track like Eutow, from Tri Repetae – drama that Eutow loses after three minutes of a propulsive industrial beat. (It’s probably the best example of a song that I only listen to for a minute before stopping.) Tim Hecker is a master at lacing music with such drama. Sometimes I get frustrated – angry even – that he hasn’t ever composed for film.

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So, all that being said, here’s what I came up with. It’s based around the Amen break. I wanted to imply rhythm, but have it threaten to fall apart at any given moment. If nothing else, it’s reminded me of the need to get into a more traditional, timeline-based DAW, so I can edit more easily after I have recorded the Mulch performance.

So, I guess the last (woefully empty) post was meant to be some sort of enlightened piece about contemporary South Korean director Park Chan-wook. It’s not that I ended up having nothing to say, I just couldn’t be bothered saying it… I’ll get around to writing the piece – I’ve wanted to write an essay discussing some things about Park Chan-wook for a while.

Meanwhile, Australia’s embattled Opposition leader, Malcolm Turnbull, had returned to a dark theme; perhaps the only consistent theme of his leadership. Beating on Labor over ‘border security’ (as it’s now typically called) is political territory well-worn by the Coalition, only now the rhetoric has changed a little, from John Howard’s divisive call to arms:

“We will decide who comes to this country, and the circumstances in which they come”

to some sort of attempt to claim the moral high ground on issues of the well-being and excretory health of detainees :

“I really have great concern about whether or not this Government has any forward plan other than more bunk beds more portaloos and that quite clearly is chaos it’s not a strategy that is going to deal with the humanitarian issues…” – Sharman Stone, Opposition Immigration spokeswoman

The Coalition, as it turns out, have almost no chance of winning the next election, so it all doesn’t really matter. What it shows, however, is how farm Malcolm Turnbull has strayed from the small-L libertarianism that brought him to public prominence in the first place – his advocacy of the Australian Republic, support of gay marriage, his belief in climate change. Issues that, incidentally, grant him a significant personal vote in his inner-Sydney seat of Wentworth.

Perhaps he’ll take over the republic movement again. It’s a nice thought.

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