Emptying the Haunted Air

Sexy-smoldering Barnaby

The title is a reference to a Kurosawa Akira film, and the post isn’t about Barnaby Joyce – it’s just such a wonderful picture. I was just reading Andrew Bolt’s blog (which I do fairly regularly, in spite of myself) and wondering, for the hundredth time in my life, how a person can become such a wretched, conservative ideologue – or any ideologue at all, for that matter. The right wing/left wing spectrum is so ludicrously artificial, yet it remains a compelling way to pigeonhole those whose views about the world are passionate. Someone like Bolt selects his political causes as though completing a checklist in a Political Spectrum for Dummies book – he is a climate sceptic, an apologist for Israel’s foreign policy (and for the Howard government, as for Keith Windschuttle), and seems to have an unhealthy infatuation with Sarah Palin (I can’t quite work that one out). He posits himself diametrically opposed to ‘the left’, and presumably ‘the lefties’ as well.

I’ve often wondered whether the whole thing is self-perpetuating; that a person, through parental influence or a prejudicial stance on a particular issue, comes to adopt indiscriminately the values imposed by history and society. Or, perhaps the whole edifice is maintained by self-perpetuating mutual dislike. Bolt’s writing style is embattled and self-righteous; he’s no journalist, and doesn’t pretend to be, as he wages his daily assaults on a real-or-imagined enemy.

It’s either one of those two, or else there is some essential, biochemical characteristic that motivates an ideologue. An irrepressible awareness of, and sympathy with, all worldly things (that’d be the ‘bleeding heart lefties’, I suppose), or a complete lack of it in the case of Bolt. That is, an obsessive love for one’s own immediate locality – the foregone memories that create geography and culture. A fear to step away from it. There’s nothing wrong with that sort of fear, which I suppose is wholly natural and sensible, but it is a little pitiable. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to live without an expansive mind.

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