Category: Writing

“Stress, celebrity worship and rising complacency are fuelling a growing political ignorance.” The Fun-Herald on why no one’s interested in politics.

I think it’s because it takes so long to digest. It’s much quicker to get to grips with the finer points of Britney’s ups and downs, though I haven’t read much about her lately. There aren’t enough summaries and short ongoing narratives on politics.

For some news stories, it’s not even clear – if you’re not a newshound – whether they’re talking about state or federal politicians. And TV news just mangles everything. There’s no middle ground for people who just want to read summaries of poltics on-the-run.

Katharine Murphy’s piece “In the belly of the beast” makes it clear why politics is such a huge turn-off.

Dried rations are stashed under the desk. There are no family photographs because there are no families, dogs, lawns or detritus of any kind, apart from some long-suffering girlfriends.

… And the blokes absolutely run this show. They like football, and novellas, and blogs, and popular culture in boxed sets of DVDs they can devour down the back of the Prime Minister’s plane.

I enjoyed reading “In the belly of the beast”, though it confirmed what a pointless waste of time those staffers are with their skewed priorities.

 

It hurts my eyes every time it’s shown on TV. I don’t like how they have to squish together on those benches, either. Maybe it was designed in earlier times when there weren’t so many MPs.

From Phil Scott’s column on Same Sex marriage:

“So I have a plan. Before the next ALP conference, let’s each of us get out there and befriend one member of the public who has never met a poof or a dyke. It’s not hard. You just bowl up to some beige little person in the street and say, “Hello, I’m a deviate.”
“Oh really?” they answer. “I’ve never met one of youse before. Youse don’t look much like Carlton Kressley. Why don’t we grab a coffee and talk? I’ve often wondered when someone says, ‘Go fuck yourself’ if that is actually possible…” and so on.
Of course, you have to pick the right person. Lebanese boys in souped-up ’90s cars are out. They might think you’re after sex. Fifty per cent success rate apparently, but only if you get them alone.”

I’m all for being “anti-pollution” (as it was called when we did primary school projects in the 1970s, featuring many cut-out and pasted pics of dying fish in rivers and dead forests and stories about acid rain).

Miranda Devine points out: “Australia produces just 1 per cent of the world’s cardon dioxide emissions so if we were to shut down the country, the impact on the global climate would still be negligible.”