Election rant
I missed the great debate, but something tells me I didn’t miss much.
The televised debate between two men who would be prime minister for
the next 3 years is a farce anyway, as is much of the so-called election
campaign and the wider democratic system. Its a saturation of the
mass media with promises and accusations with no real depth. The
shallowness of the whole deal is pretty disturbing.
You have politicians (who everyone knows lie to suit their own ends)
promises to do this or fix that but lurking below the surface are
some serious questions which everyone, except for the greens perhaps,
are really avoiding. We have heard that one party is in the thrall of
the trade union movement to the point of being unsuitable to govern,
because they would wreck the economy. Its a non too subtle
rearrangement of the truth, the economy is a thing that is often
trumpeted as benefiting everyone (but only when it is growing or
healthy) but in reality it is merely just another name for business
and commerce, that is the private creation of wealth. A growing
economy means that the rich get richer quicker and as a by-product
some of that wealth trickles down to the bottom feeders. So what is
really meant when one political party (who are clearly more aligned
to business and commercial interests) says that the other party will
wreck the economy is that the other mob mightn’t be quite as friendly
to the big end of town and as a consequence the big end of town might
move some of their activity and money somewhere else.
So a debate about the “economy” is crap because it avoids a debate
about the distribution of wealth which as an issue has far greater
ramifications for most people.
But the thing that really disturbs me is something that The Age in
part, picked up on today. Climate Change and its friend
Peak Oil are the most pressing issues of our time. They mightn’t seem
that way to bill smith as he trundles along to work because there are
pressing issues which seem closer to home, but the fact remains that
without cheap oil and in a world environment that is rapidly
transforming itself from the relatively benign and stable state we
have enjoyed for the last several thousand years into something we
can only guess about, all of the relatively trivial issues that we
currently obsess about will take a huge back seat as we start to
worry about more fundamental issues, like staying alive. Ask the 1
million Californians recently evacuated in the face of devastating
wild fires.
So at a time when we should be talking about some pretty big picture
issues and when one of our more cherished social traditions provides
for the illusion of some choice over who governs you could be excused
for wondering why we seem to be debating anything but. There is a
possible explanation, it could be that general public debate about
the big picture requires that the public is informed and able to
participate. Dominating media agendas with fear and lies prevents the
idea of something more serious gaining political traction and of
course all of the mass media is very one way in terms of
communications. We could be talking about building better societies
or facing up to the future challenges of energy and climate change
but instead we get wall to wall crap about spending money, running an
economy and unionism.