Restoring faith in human nature – via a trip down memory lane

Nostradamus

I don’t know what the final figures for donations to charities came to prior to Christmas. Did we give more or less? It makes a difference because the numbers of the needy grow daily. And it was hardly a surprise that Tasmanians used the Rudd government’s economic stimulus package to hit the pokies in record numbers. Thanks Paul, thanks Brendan, David and all the others complicit in rolling out gambling facilities into the areas of greatest poverty. Who wouldn’t take a chance at the big prize? When I read the Mercury article on the amount spent on gambling following the economic package, my heart sank. (”Pokies soak up stimulus package” Mercury February 10, 2009)

And on the very edge of making a decision to quit on TT (who reads this bilge anyway?) the great disaster of February 7 hit Victoria and by extension the whole country. In the days that followed as we learned who had died, the famous and the unknown alike and we heard tales of looting and arson, I despaired. But out of the enormity of the tragedy came a miraculous revelation. Tasmanians, the poorest state in the nation gave more per capita than their richer counterparts. The soul of Tasmania had returned uplifted – the sharing of grief and sorrow became palpable.

We have been told that 7/2 will be a memorial day commencing next year. Well and good but can we now turn, back to the days when being Tasmanian was different, seen to be different and keep the momentum going. The politicians are bit-players in this drama – the onus on the rest of us is to hold to a sense of community and never let it go.
Restoring faith in human nature – via a trip down memory lane

Of late, I have been moved to write articles concerning depression and suicide and mentioned certain cases but more particularly, I had problems with the attitudes of certain members of the public who take time to blog on the Mercury website. As a regular listener/watcher of radio and TV, to say nothing of the Internet the affairs prompted my article were forged in the crucible of anger, that Tasmanians were becoming too much like those on the mainland – the beggar thy neighbour mentality (or should it be bugger thy neighbour?) which is destructive of a sense of community in the first instance. Secondly, it accomplishes by different methods the societal situation and attitudes espoused by Margaret Thatcher and John Howard in his early years – “there is no such thing as society; only individuals making their own way.” While it is true that our beloved former Prime Minister recognized society later on when it became apparent that the view he held was electorally unacceptable and quite possibly a vote loser, he changed tack.

It was at roughly that point that I decided that contrary to what I had promised myself, namely to dedicate my writing to social problems, at least for a while, I start to think of underlying causes. And so I wandered back through the years, recalling the world of 40 years ago. Quite a lot of people written on this theme of late and I and I thought why not? Somewhat inevitably, it took me back to considering how we view politicians and quite frankly, picking up The Australian these days is like reading an Opposition/Coalition Journal, clinging desperately to ideas whose times have passed; treating John Howard as a revered statesman who hands down words from lofty heights; not on tablets of stone but tomorrow’s garbage wrap. And more recently, they are silently undermining Turnbull and backing Peter Costello, one of the people who came out of that dreadful TV program The Howard Years worst – so badly that LJH almost appeared human. However, he is squandering his fortune by carping criticism from the sidelines and there is no chance of a Damascus-road conversion.

The smirk has a future so they say. He is waiting to be called like the Messiah to lead them out of the political desert and you don’t have to be completely ignorant to know that his ideas have changed very little. Kevin Rudd won government but the glassy eyed ideologues of the feral right do not concede that he has legitimacy. He has faced an economic situation that was not of his making, possibly the worst for decades and writ on his face last week was the suffering of many who faced bushfires with the death toll still unknown: his capacity for crisis management is about to be tested. Yet like some of the pundits that write for magazines such as The Economist, the solution to our problems is more of the same. And there are still those who hold the identical views lurking in the background, sometimes unable to keep their mouths shut. Prof. Jeffrey Sachs an economist of international renown has taken a look at Eastern Europe and appears to believe that they need more legal free-market policies. Enough said but it takes me back once more to politics and politicians. And to the matter of John Howard discovering society, although as an aside, I’d like to see the new Messiah in the wilderness (preferably one of the more radioactive areas of the central desert) clad in camel hair and eating wild tubers – fat chance.

Getting back to our beloved former leader, his behaviour is/was what we expect politicians to do; change tack, fiddle on the fringes of policy and then start talking about social capital and how important community really is but how genuine are these supposedly altered views? There is an old saying that leopards don’t change their spots and I know full well that there are a number of people in the Liberal party at federal level to this day who cling to the absurd proposition that there is no such thing as society. Carried to its logical conclusion, the Thatcherite-Howard doctrine meant the individualization of everyone and the effect would be to pit each man (and I refuse to be politically correct – man is a common term for what a depressing number of people who should know better refer to as humankind) against his fellow in a dog-eat-dog situation.

Many years ago, before my hair turned white, I spent considerable time reading what I refer to as a key analytical text in understanding social dynamics. It was: “The Politics of Mass Society” by William Kornhauser (Free Press, 1959). My copy is brown at the edges and well-thumbed. There is a stain from a coffee cup on the back dust jacket and I abhor defacing texts in any way: it says something about the person who was visiting me at the time and thought that the book would make a resting place for his cup of coffee. But then again, back in the 60s, private possessions were trivialities and books, only things. As much is anything that generation of schoolteachers passed illiteracy along to successive generations but I don’t want to hammer the education system, yet.

The critics of Kornhauser referred to him as being a dystopian and to a certain extent, that is correct and he was probably only a minor figure and rejected by many. But it is more usual to take a dystopian view these days than to be optimistic, proactive, community-minded and active participants in the political process. I have written far too many words on the way we regard politicians in Tasmania and I do not propose repeating myself because those who bother to read this column already know the argument and my strongly-held views on the subject.

Kornhauser wrote in 1959 and it is important to keep writings in their historical context. Some will recall those years, although not necessarily younger readers and remember that he wrote 3 years after the Hungarian revolution was brutally suppressed by the Soviet Army. In 1968, Soviet troops rolled into Czechoslovakia and crushed the reformist government Alexander Dubček: so-called communism with a human face. The US and allies, including Australia, were mired in Vietnam and faced civil unrest and demonstrations in the streets. In France, there was talk of another revolution as students and workers faced down the government, only to watch the movement falter, ironically undermined by the French Communist Party, then as always, under the thumb of Moscow. The revolutionaries devoured their own children and not for the first time.

For some months, possibly a year or so, there was talk of a new international order in the air and lately, we have had another whiff with the economic crisis that appears worldwide and likely to be to prolonged. There is no doubt that nostalgic marxists of all stripe as well as optimists thought that a third way was possible between the two great power blocs. In the West, especially in America, which sets the cultural trend for the English speaking world, became enamoured of the concept of countercultures, which flourished briefly leaving only a few diehards in its wake and of course residuals in the form of hippie/drop-out communes, like Nimbin, which have been turning a nice profit. Smoke dope; knit your own yoghurt and “Don’t vote – it only encourages the bastards” – an amusingly irresponsible bumper-sticker.

Long hair; Levi jeans (an irony in itself) beards and doing your own thing was in — nonconformity became de rigueur amongst the young. My own personal protest was modest enough, I let my hair grow but not too long, grew a beard (which was no big hardship, because I hate shaving) and a stubborn refusal to wear a suit and tie but I didn’t protest against the Vietnam War: I didn’t agree with our participation in that conflict but I didn’t like the idea of protesting when we had troops in the field. Many of my friends were conscripts and I missed out on the draft. However, I certainly opposed what amounted to Tattslotto for the selection of conscripts. The greatest prize with this lotto was an inglorious death in Vietnam or repulsion and rejection on your return. At one stage, I think I would have volunteered but it would have interrupted University studies and that was one chance I was not prepared to forego. I hate the jungle for many reasons, mostly masculine – crotch rot is extremely unpleasant.

In a very strange way, this was when what many people call monopoly capitalism clasped its hands around the testicles of fashion design. How many people remember wide lapels; bell-bottom trousers for men, culottes for women and ties as works of art? Part of my pre-protest protest was to wear a tie described by my kids as resembling vomit – that was the general intention – to take the piss out of the establishment and I shared a room with a very talented young man with a rebellious disposition. And between us we jotted down an unofficial manual for the bureaucratic guerrilla: based on the simple premise that if you want to strangle bureaucracy, do it with their own red tape. It was a principle that was to serve me well even when I reached the exalted heights.

I don’t regret that attitude because it became part of the managerial revolution as the rigid hierarchies started to crumble. I always admired the ingenuity of a long forgotten American who received his power bills in the form of what was known as a Hollerith card, which had to be returned with payment. These were spewed out by primitive computers and read by a machine, which tallied nicks and other identifying marks cut into the card – a precursor to barcodes. Yankee ingenuity came to the fore and he turned sabotaging the system by using a razor blade on the card into an art form. Oh how we admired that unknown bureaucratic guerrilla.

All of us at one stage or another fell under the trance of protest music, especially the folk idiom, with Peter Paul and Mary, Bob Dylan (a capitalist poseur in my view), Leonard Cohen, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and many others. I am reminded of this era by Jennifer Warnes; “First we take Manhattan… and then we take Berlin” and most recently by Sandy Thom’s,”I wish I was a punk-rocker, with flowers in my hair.” It was popular to hate politicians in those days too. Unfortunately it became an infection. We had voted in Gough Whitlam and Labor after 23 wilderness years, only to see him kicked out of office ostensibly by the much-despised Governor-General, John Kerr, in an act that some still like to call a constitutional coup but the people passed the verdict in the ensuing and subsequent elections. We got Malcolm (Easter Island) Fraser and while he parades as a genuine small L. liberal today, it seemed we were back to the autocratic control of the ruthless right.

The hatreds of those years still linger in my generation and I for one regret the all too brief flowering of genuine liberalism with John Grey Gorton, much maligned by the ruling class but a delightful nonconformist. My fondest memory of him was emerging from a car to address a political meeting looking immaculate in a steel gray suit and after the speech making, he resembled an unmade bed, all creases and crumpled but thoroughly human.

I remember reading one book at University and I think it was by the French Marxist André Gorz, who is accurately described in Wikipedia as “an Austrian and French social philosopher. Also a journalist, he co-founded Le Nouvel Observateur weekly in 1964. A supporter of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist version of Marxism after World War Two, in the aftermath of the May ’68 student riots, he became more concerned with political ecology. In the 1960s and 1970s, he was a main theorist in the New Left movement. His central theme was wage labour issues such as liberation from work, just distribution of work, social alienation, and guaranteed basic income.” My interest in his work turned on the principle of alienation and I do not intend to rehash Marx or Gorz but I doubt very much whether any worker is more alienated from the product of his labor than your average white collar worker.

With a prescience seriously lacking in the thoughts of the left wing in America, who of late have been quietly rubbing their hands at the final demise of capitalism, Gorz stated somewhere that those who thought that capitalism would cease to be the goose that laid the golden egg were doomed to disappointment, or words to that effect. I would welcome anyone who can recollect this quote and its origin sending it to me at Tasmanian Times and the ABC has carried reports of Barack Obama’s stated desire to reinvent capitalism – a strange conundrum for a bunch of lunatics who think he is a Muslim and a socialist. Probably because he was French, André Gorz did not really enjoy the greatest of reputations despite being ahead of his time in many respects and certainly in tune with the sentiments of those who wanted greater cooperation and participation in decision-making in the workplace. After all, these were the days of consultative management and workers’ participation.

If I remember my studies correctly, Soviet imperial ambition and the intervention in the affairs of Afghanistan, a scenario that resonates today (and not merely because the anniversary of the Soviet withdrawal fell a few days ago); the Khomeini revolution in Iran and the election of Ronald Reagan as US president put the cat among the pigeons. It has long been my contention that the greatest tragedy of the so-called Western triumph in the Cold War was that genuine social democracy, Scandinavian-style, was thrown out of the bathtub with its totalitarian relative behind the Iron Curtain.

Militant triumphant capitalism led to the abomination of Reaganomics and Thatcherism, with its pale shadows around the world. The individual was king but in fetters, slave to a new brutalist managerial style, epitomized in Australia by John Hewson; massive cuts in the public sector and outsourcing of some quite critical functions; the crazed and demented actions of management gurus as they imported ideas from those such as “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap, a man who made a fetish of downsizing, resizing, rightsizing and a host of associated synonyms for gutting companies before disposing of them. It was said of him that he checked his wife’s shopping receipts down to the last cent. My contention is that in that era, the notion of the disposable worker was born. Contracts, work agreements, no such thing as a career or job for life – that is what was taught and believed and I don’t think we are any the better for it because it set the likes of you against me and opened the door to more capricious management styles and the notion that greed is good. At least we have a PM who has publicly rejected that notion but the knuckle-dragging diehards still lurk in dark corners.

In everyday life, we saw the commercialization of commodification of everything. Rampant free-market liberalism had turned a profit on revolution: look at the number of people who venerate the image of the mass murderer and psychopath Che Guevara on T-shirts. Strangely enough, I can’t recall that famous iconic image appearing on toilet paper. The fashionistas won the day. Women have to be so skinny on the catwalk — a size 6 or thereabouts to the extent that suffered problems with eating disorders – and people such as Naomi Campbell literally get away with almost anything because they are celebrities. But the clothes that are paraded in Rome, London and New York are not designed to fit ordinary people. Mind you, some of the outfits are so impracticable as to be unwearable except on a catwalk. Social attitudes changed in for a while androgyny flourished. The male of the species was dragged into the world of fashion and sensitive New Age guys arrayed themselves like peacocks at social gatherings.

Arguably one of the greatest gains by women during the early periods of Women’s Lib – disposing of the bra was lost along the way unfortunately. I’m not only blaming women because men have become slaves to fashion just as surely as the so-called gentle sex. And in Australia we still have yet to decide what constitutes an appropriate mode of summer dress for the male of the species, given the heat, the hole in the ozone layer and the flies. The tyranny of the suit and tie remains. I wonder how many business executives realize that the notion of buttons on the sleeves of a man’s jacket dates back to the 17th century Emperor Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia, of the House of Hohenzollern, father of Friedrich the Great and was designed as a measure to stop his soldiers wiping their noses with their sleeves.

There are odd exceptions but even jeans, part of the uniform of the revolt, subject to fashion changes and accepted in the workplace for many, especially among computer nerds. Lack of conformity is still frowned upon, even though a whole ideology and its economic principles have been crafted around hyper-individualism. I have a much more freewheeling attitude to dress codes, which if I were still working, would probably be the norm because as Deng Xiaoping said: “it doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white but whether it catches mice.”

One of the most despicable manifestations of the late 80s which has continued to this day has been the stigmatization and vilification of those who do not work or have been tossed aside as the economic tide ebbed and flows. The Opposition Journal is busy with the grim calculation of unemployment and shock horror, the professions will suffer along with those people being laid off from companies that have collapsed or are rationalizing their staff policies; yet another euphemism for sacking. Back when Kornhauser wrote, he was concerned about the development of mass society. This was where the majority became isolated and separated, community links severed and even familial ties seen as irrelevant. He was concerned about an attitude formation that would lead people into the hands of unscrupulous, demagogic political leaders. Could it happen? People say no but the ugly spectre of Hansonism and xenophobia provides an example of what a gifted amateur can accomplish and the sentiments upon which a certain prime minister capitalized accordingly.

***
Before chucking it all in, I had been charmed by Tasmania. My first visit was in 1967 to Smithton and Marawah. The only way across the Arthur River was by punt. The bush was dense, the beer cold and clean on the palate and the verdancy of the Northwest Coast stood in stark contrast to where I had come from on the big island to the North. This led to a long standing love affair with Tasmania and its people because they were different – open-hearted, warm, generous and possibly one of the small handful of places where I have not experienced racial discrimination firsthand. When I made the big move, I exulted: surely here was paradise. But I saw firsthand dodgy real estate deals, the flouting of development rules and laws and creeping urbanization based largely on greed rather than effectively housing everyone who has the need. And I found to my disgust, that dobbing-in people to such many beneficent organizations such as Centrelink was accompanied by sensationalization of the legendary dole bludgers on those mindless TV programs to the masses find so attractive. I wondered whatever happened to the notion of not dobbing-in your mates. Not for one moment do I condone Social Security fraud but what happened to Social Security? It became welfare and unemployment benefits became the dole and all manner of behaviours were attributed to the less fortunate in society. I have often maintained that it would do every politician, federal and state alike, a great deal of good to live in public housing for a year with only Social Security benefits as income and no recourse to rich mates.

When you consider some of the mindless TV programs such as The Biggest Loser and the like, it is certain that no media is game to examine the plight of the least fortunate in our society – to get down and dirty. And Tasmania has slowly, almost inevitably, lined up attitudinally with the mainland. Look at our outer suburbs known by bus drivers to be bandit country and people from those areas seeking work face an immediate handicap – the stigma attached to Bridgewater, Gagebrook, Clarendon Vale and Rokeby, and their northern comparators in Launceston, Burnie, Devonport and innumerable pockets of disadvantage and poverty across the state. The common feature is alienated youth; hoons; vandals the totally disaffected venting anger in road rage, driving without a license, drink-driving, stoning public transport and getting stoned. More recently we have seen ugly fights in the streets, another indicator of unrest and aggression in a volatile mix.

I don’t know what the final figures for donations to charities came to prior to Christmas. Did we give more or less? It makes a difference because the numbers of the needy grow daily. And it was hardly a surprise that Tasmanians used the Rudd government’s economic stimulus package to hit the pokies in record numbers. Thanks Paul, thanks Brendan, David and all the others complicit in rolling out gambling facilities into the areas of greatest poverty. Who wouldn’t take a chance at the big prize? When I read the Mercury article on the amount spent on gambling following the economic package, my heart sank. (”Pokies soak up stimulus package” Mercury February 10, 2009)

And on the very edge of making a decision to quit on TT (who reads this bilge anyway?) the great disaster of February 7 hit Victoria and by extension the whole country. In the days that followed as we learned who had died, the famous and the unknown alike and we heard tales of looting and arson, I despaired. But out of the enormity of the tragedy came a miraculous revelation. Tasmanians, the poorest state in the nation gave more per capita than their richer counterparts. The soul of Tasmania had returned uplifted – the sharing of grief and sorrow became palpable.

We have been told that 7/2 will be a memorial day commencing next year. Well and good but can we now turn, back to the days when being Tasmanian was different, seen to be different and keep the momentum going. The politicians are bit-players in this drama – the onus on the rest of us is to hold to a sense of community and never let it go.

Nostradamus