The Flying Aussieman

The arbiter of all that is good and righteous, Scott Morrison, is metamorphosed between two monumental choices: to speak of nothing, or have nothing to say.

He who has mastered the crucible of the contemporary politician – that of simultaneously being a puppet and a puppet master – is capable of ejaculating many controversial opinions, yet at the same time remain totally inept at having one for himself.

Life would be easy if one could simply subsist on the Murdoch feed trough without having to worry about what one is eating, but every now and then a spine would have to be shown – toward a dictator or two, a rape victim or three – so reluctantly, the teat-suckling is put away in exchange for a tough-guy suit.

‘I have values,’ he says. ‘Of what values exactly, I’ll need to check with whoever is paying me today, but it is important that you understand that I have them, and you should behold my fortitude and temperance at possessing values, and refrain from remarking that I have none.’

Watch how deftly he manoeuvres between the powers that be, how eloquently he speaks – for hours on end, expressing nothing, pleasing everyone that need to be pleased, and offending those who cannot muster enough political leverage to adversely affect his position.

It is like watching a blindfolded figure skater navigating an obstacle course with one skate and no toes. No seasoned diplomat, no veteran deal-maker, is as effective at political survival as he.

Yet, somehow, some way, he has managed to piss off everybody, even those who had put every word he has ever spoken into his mouth. How can it be, when he is the ballerina of the political theatre, the RTX 3080 of the power-trip cabal, the arbiter of all that is Catholic-certified pure and Murdoch-approved virtuous? How can one grow to be so hated, when one is trying his best to please whoever he needs to please at any given time?

Well, the thing about being the arbiter of all that is rambunctious and cantankerous is, you are going to take hate no matter what you do, because scumbaggery is in your nature.

Let’s be real: every-day scumbaggery-doos – pretend to arrange a meeting with a rape victim and then dragging it out, hoping that everything will blow over in a couple of months, and at the same time taking exactly four days to fire a guy the Murdochs disliked – have only become scumbaggery-doos because they got called out.

It is not possible to live as a human bean without either suffering from or becoming a progenitor of scumbaggery-doos. The shit-eating gene is a part of human nature; the difference being, sometimes you get called out for your shit and get punished, and sometimes you get away with a 99-year lease. Scamming 50 bucks off an unwary stranger has been a staple of human society since monkeys first grabbed two rocks and bashed them together.

Despite appearances, the Flying Aussieman is not despised for being caught partaking in low-level, every-day corruption. Everyone does that. It is called being a working man.

He is despised because of the indignant way in which he reacts to being called out.

‘It is unfair that I am being lambasted,’ he laments. ‘I am a leaf in the wind. I am only doing what I have been told to do, so why are you giving my trivial scumbaggery so much coverage?  I don’t deserve this manner of treatment! I am the arbiter of all that is magnificent and unassailable!’

He says a lot of nothing, but what he is really saying is one word: privilege.

A low-level employee uses company cash to buy lunch without approval; he gets told off. If he then proceeds to complain about the fact that he got told off to everyone he meets, chances are he will be put onto HR’s petty little list and have his career put under a chokehold.

A thief steals 50 bucks and gets caught. If in court he starts lamenting about how unfairly he was being treated, that he should have been allowed to steal 50 bucks, it was only 50 bucks, then the judge will put him up for contempt and pass a tougher sentence.

Yet, every day, the Flying Aussieman is complaining – that using taxpayer money to fund a private trip is no big deal, that he’s doing everything he could to tackle climate change when he’s just using it as an opportunity to hand out government contracts to his donors – and for some dastardly reason, he wants everyone to understand that he should be getting away with it.

He was getting away with it, until he started whining.

It’s OK to be scum, my man. Look around. Scumbags rule the world. Embody the shit person that you are, and you’ll realize that people will like you better.

Stop pretending to be the arbiter of all that is virtuous and correct. When you want to tell a rape victim to fuck off, just tell them to fuck off; it won’t please many people, but it will sure as hell please some goblins.

And if behaving like an authentic asshole makes you crash and burn – well, then you would just be like everyone else.

The Filibustering Of Depravity

The famed philosopher and philanthropist, Ted Cruz, upon returning from a vacation during which his constituents back home suffered from yet another climate-change-exacerbated extreme weather event, has said that the thing he most objected to about the criticisms leveraged against him was that ‘people were being assholes to him’.

What triggered him was not what he did, but how upset other people were about him doing it.

There is no arousing the sympathy of a career politician. Having wrestled in the mud pit with the worst traits humanity has to offer for so long, all politicians recognize that sympathy is just another tool in their arsenal. Joe Biden can cry about half a million dead on one hand and continue locking up kids in cages on the other because he knows how to weaponize his sympathy to amass maximum political capital.

In this sense, Ted Cruz is a way worse politician than Joe, but is somehow – in a twisted turn of logic – a better human being, because he behaved authentically – like the douchebaggy asshole that he is – by failing to leverage his impromptu vacation to his political advantage.

Picture him going on camera and starting to cry, slobbering snot as he apologizes to his constituents about how he failed them, and vowing to do better next time. Those will be crocodile tears, for sure, and he will for sure do absolutely nothing to fix anything, but with a performance of sympathy he could have tricked people into believing that he truly has become a changed man, and get a bump in the polls.

Yes, that’s right. He could have done nothing, gone on vacation, let people die, and still become more popular than before, had he played his cards right.

He didn’t though. He is a degenerate asshole through and through, on camera and off, and that is exactly why he, alongside his fellow philosopher the Donald, retains a loyal fanbase that licks up every gooy drop of asshole juice that drips out of his mouth.

Photo by cottonbro on Pexels.com

People have long assumed, consciously or not, that politicians will do nothing for them, and because of the saturation of crocodile tears in the media – from politicians, corporations, and every clouted individual – they can no longer rationally perceive any act of ‘good’ as genuine.

Everyday, we are surrounded by bullshit like Saudi Arabia’s social media account celebrating Pride Day, or the Chinese government spokesperson eulogizing about the need for free access to Facebook and Twitter. (both of these things actually happened).

So it’s no wonder that everything good appears fake – because they so very often are – and everything vile and degenerate appears authentic.

Nowadays, when you hear a line like ‘We respect Indigenous culture’ or ‘This is an equal-opportunity workplaces’, how would you interpret it?

Most times it’s just bullshit put into a recruitment video or at the top of a gig, but if you assume it’s bullshit, then you’re bundling the idea inside the message with the bullshit. The act of ‘respecting Indigenous culture’ is not intrinsically meaningless. Neither is ‘providing equal opportunities’. Yet when it is used so often as a throwaway, PR-sounding line, with no real change to back them up, people start to treat them like they are meaningless.

You’ve heard it before. ‘We acknowledge that this is the traditional land of…’ or ‘Small businesses are the backbone of the economy.’

Meanwhile, the vilest, the most sinister ideas – those that involve ‘lock them up’ in one form or the other – get a free pass when they receive the same this-isn’t-real treatment. ‘Oh it’s just bunch of bullshit, families don’t really get separated at the border,’ or ‘Oh, we’re just re-educating them, no big deal.’

Both sides are reduced to, essentially, trash-talking and shit-spinning.

By applying this ‘nothing is authentic, everything is rhetoric’ filter, the highest of moral aspirations and the vilest of human nature have become mingled together and indistinguishable from one another. No good deed is authentic. Bad deeds aren’t that bad. It’s all just people blowing air.

It’s no wonder, looking out from this swamp of intangible apathy, that the politicians/companies/countries who are the vilest, or the most partisan, come out sounding the most real. Mild flavours are drowned out by this deluge of meaningless PR.

Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels.com

I’d like to believe that there are very few people out there who are truly cruel under everyday circumstances. Your racist uncle may spout white supremacist bullshit while sitting on the couch, but he will have done less damage to ethnic communities than, say, a multinational conglomerate setting up a quarry in a remote community, flying in non-local workers, destroying the local ecology, yet all the while declaring, ‘We care about the local community’ or ‘We bring jobs’ or ‘Here’s a new school, cos we ain’t paying for groundwater remediation.’

So I suppose the true message of this blog is: make sure to separate the contents of the message from the way it is being presented to you. Separate the speaker, who believes not a single word he’s saying, from the contents of the speech, which must not be tainted alongside the human refuse that is the man orating on his golden stage. 

When you think like this, you realize a great many things:

Why Ted Cruz and Donald Trump appeal to so many people;

Why career politicians like Joe Biden seems completely fake;

Why big corps are suddenly giving you a ton of free services; and,

Most importantly, your true enemies are not the racist uncle who hates black people, or the lone protester who blocks a road for ten minutes; they are those who would filibuster the concentration camps, saying, ‘Oh, fake news, it’s not that bad.’