Global recession and the rebirth of violent non-revolution

I've probably read half a dozen articles in the last few weeks trying to sell the "financial crisis will cause violent revolution" angle, with varying degrees of sympathy to the prospect, but because of my short attention span and generally dismissive attitude I've pretty much pushed them out of my mind.

However, the recent Real IRA attacks have given me pause over that. Although it's very anecdotal, it's a really good anecdote. A settled issue, with previously no popular support for violence, has suddenly resurfaced, in the developed nation that has probably had the most dramatic reversal of fortunes in the global financial crisis. (Well, not technically IN it, but let's not be pedantic.) Combined with a little bit of time spent with the notion of the Depression causing German support for Nazism, and suddenly I'm coming over to the other side.

Certainly the long-suffering socialists are keen on the idea. Tune in to Phillip Adams on Late Night Live anytime you feel like hearing an old pinko gloating.

However, one could argue that this is a revival of an anti-globalisation and subtextually anti-capitalist movement that has been sleeping for a while - which I guess is a contribution we can chalk up to Bush, as it's hard to get angry about the relaxing of tariffs and foreign investment regulations when someone's torturing innocent people because they're easier to catch than terrorists. Ironically Bush has probably done more to threaten capitalism than anyone since Stalin, by fueling a massive debt bubble while undermining the world economy with almost deliberately incompetent wars, and simultaneously inspiring the organisation of vast grassroots networks of leftists. He got them mad, he got them marching and he gave them a pretext.

So maybe we'll see a return to marching in the streets. The protest bunnies have always horrified me with their incoherent, intellectually bankrupt ideas and methods that seem to be a lot more geared towards trying to impress girls than accomplishing any sort of change. Still, in a way I hope for a massive protest movement to erupt. I miss those innocent days when I could be outraged over the terrible violation of civil rights that was riot police breaking up peaceful protests. Well, actually that's a way of covering with irony the sick heaviness of knowing that more people will die to accomplish nothing, but saying it is a bit of a downer, isn't it?

On a peripherally related note, here's another good article by Ross Gittins on the recession.

The best summation of the Bush years

I missed this one at the time, but here it is now.



Although the tear-jerker line right at the end might be wearing a little thin six weeks on.

Watchmen

Watchmen is getting reviewed and dissected all over the internet, and that volume of chatter on a topic normally puts me off, because I'm stil under the delusion that I can somehow accomplish something original, but I'm a fan of the graphic novel and having just seen it last night I have some bile to spray. So here tis.

It was, frankly, shocking. The first work to take comics seriously as an art form, and to force non-comics lovers to take them seriously as well, the first graphic novel to have deep fully realised characters with motivations, peccadilloes and multiple dimensions, had been translated as a cheesy tossed off gore-porn spectacular, which to a non-fan must seem like an 80 minute movie crammed into 3 hours. I spent the whole movie wincing at the titters of the audience, wanting to stand up and shout to the cinema at large, "No! You don't understand! The graphic novel isn't like this! It's actually an elegant, eloquent work of art! You can't take this seriously!!"

The acting was shocking, the script clumsy and although many scenes from the comic were faithfully recreated, the lack of vision in realising the live action was enough to have me questioning whether the original was any good at all.

How could the beautiful, graceful, textured graphic novel be transformed into something so goofy and cheesy that punk snotnose fourteen year olds are giggling at it? I wouldn't have liked that movie even if it hadn't apparently deliberately desecrated something I loved in the process of its birth.

Watching this film had the effect of both lionising the original to fans and pushing it out of reach of a lot of people who will now think of Watchmen as cheesy and childish. It made me realise that one of the novel's greatest achievements was its pacing, the way it doles out its exposition and expands its universe in novel and never boring ways. It's something that pops into your mind when you see the approach someone else has taken to telling the story, which largely amounts to having the characters shout it at the camera, in dialogue so well crafted that you know they thought about it for almost as long as it took to say the lines.

Something that was previously regarded as the most significant work in a particular medium is now being mocked by both elites and masses because it was smashed into a medium that everyone knew it didn't fit, for the sake of making a little extra money out of something already wildly profitable. A LOT of people will never read Watchmen because of this abortion. It's an act of vandalism.

Before the film, a lot of people hadn't heard of Watchmen - in fact, just about everyone I mention it to hasn't heard of it, although those of us who like to spend time discussing pop culture might not get that. Now, however, Watchmen is unlikely to be mentioned in my life for a long time without being followed by "Oh, you mean that movie? That was shit!"

Some fans are already looking forward to the director's cut, which they think might be more coherent and less insulting. However, isn't a superior director's cut something normally associated with talented directors, not people the studios like because they'll do whatever they're told without letting any sort of auterial vision or sense that they're anything more than technicians employed by a commercial enterprise? Nothing in Zack Snyder's previous work suggests that he is such a director.

Fuck this movie. Clearly hundreds of hours were spent on the CGI while the acting seems to have been the first take of amateurish actors, poorly directed.

The only suitable punishment for this movie would be for Zack Snyder to be contractually obliged to appear at every comics and sci fi convention in the industralised world for the next year, where he must do Q&A with fans for at least an hour.

Also, the first Watchmen fan to see him at each convention should rush up to him, and scream "FIRST!!" wetly in the face.

Then flick him in the balls.

UPDATE: Worst of all, the movie was an insult to the legacy of this masterwork!

The change we've been waiting for is weak leaders

Today I’m frustrated by the weakness of leadership of both the Australian Labour Party and the US Democratic Party.
In both the US and Australia, the upper house conservative rump is blocking the stimulus packages of recently elected leaders with strong mandates. This seems to be largely a way of asserting some sort of relevance in the dark days of minority. The Coalition, however, has been at these tricks for nine months, since they decided to block budget legislation in May last year.
This goes strongly against the democratic principle that those who have most recently faced the electorate and won should be allowed their way with their core agenda. Unfortunately, political literacy in both nations is so low that very few people understand exactly how what is being done is wrong.

From here, the ALP has only one course of action left open to it, with two likely results. They must make the rogue Senators stand on their dignity and reject the stimulus package again, so the Prime Minister can pull the trigger on a double dissolution election. Let the Coalition face the electorate over their quibbling against a popular and necessary economic stimulus. Either the Coalition will be forced into a humiliating backdown, or Kevin Rudd will be returned with a more favourable Senate, more likely to recognise and respect the government’s democratic mandate.

The Democrats are in a similar position. They must have the courage to force the Republicans to actually filibuster them, to stand up on C-SPAN and justify themselves 24 hours a day, rather than meekly retiring from the field whenever they don’t have the requisite 60 votes.

In both nations, vital projects are being held back because of a lack of the intestinal fortitude it takes to accomplish anything in leadership. It’s enough to make you want to strike your colours and switch sides.

An Anecdote

Inspired by Rebecca Traister's story over at Salon, here's a short anecdote.

My brother brought home a dog he had got from someone who couldn't take care of it anymore. It was like a cross between a Scottish terrier and some sort of fighting dog; endearingly fluffy and floppy-eared, but with a heavily muscled chest and legs and those huge jaws, built for pulling down much larger animals. My brother called him Nugget.

He had the most manic, upbeat personality of any dog I've ever come across, bouncing madly up to try and lick hands and faces, puppyishly firing little spurts of urine. To keep him from shooting into the house every time the door was opened, my father put metal bars across the entrance to the porch, but the irrepressible Nugget kept pushing at the bottom bar until he had made a gap to push his broad shoulders through.

Ultimately, however, my parents found themselves living in fear of what he might do. He leapt all over strangers and other dogs alike, and in their constant fear they found themselves unable to tell if it was with affection or ill-intent. Finally they put him down.

I was shocked to hear of it, but ultimately I had been unwilling to take care of him, and no one else was, so what could have been done? Still, I feel a twinge of sadness when I think of that mad little mutt who loved his masters so much he'd push through steel to be a little closer to them.

Gary Kamiya sums up the Bush legacy

Read this great article.

Please.

On a completely different line of thought, I enrolled in uni today, which is a slightly difficult thing for a 26 year old to do. While an eighteen year old thinks he is the most interesting, compelling and attractive individual in any given room unless given some undeniable evidence otherwise, you only have to be very slightly older to realise that someone whose life experience consists of being born, going to school and graduating is very rarely going to have something to say worth hearing, so spending one's time in a social setting almost entirely reserved for the aforementioned eighteen year olds is a little bit frustrating.

I did learn something very important today, though. Keep your head down and your wits about you on a university campus - performance art can happen any time, to any one.

Australian exceptionalism

I was thinking about the 2005 Asian tsunami today, and specifically my own brush with it. For our first overseas holiday, my wife and I had planned to go to Phuket, but instead decided on Sabah, in Malaysian Brunei. We were lounging on a beach there on the day that Phuket, Sumatra, southern India and any number of other areas around the Indian Ocean were levelled.

In Australia, we are a proudly agnostic nation, where aggressive atheism is often considered a part of our natural charm. Yet we share a strong faith and that is: bad things don't happen here, not the way they happen elsewhere.

Sure, we're not entirely insulated from reality. We have car crashes, floods, bushfires, drownings and bankruptcies. The very mundanity of those events, however, goes towards the ultimate thrust of our belief. There are no terrorist attacks in Australia. (Not entirely true, but true in effect.) Our soldiers go overseas, rough up the natives and come back largely unmolested. Our economy might labour at times but it rarely goes backwards. Our worst earthquake, in 1989, was the result of mining subsidence and killed about thirteen people.

So we instinctively feel that, here, we are safe, or as safe as one can be in a soft, pink, infinitely breakable body. The obverse of this belief is that once we transgress our national borders, we live under an unfamiliar shadow of danger.

This mindset has its most outstanding example in the Bali bombings. Australians were shocked - shocked! - that anyone would want to carry on their nasty foreign politics in a way that might hurt Australians, let alone in Bali, which because of the number of bogans wandering its beaches had been adopted as an honorary part of Australia. So upset were we that we couldn't help but adopt Indonesia's tragedy as our own, wearing our horror at the death of 88 Australians shamelessly while completely disengaging from the significantly larger number of Indonesians murdered.

It's a big part of the reason the world has started to regard us as louder and more drunken Ugly Americans - this air of bulletproof freedom from consequences, the feeling that anything happening to us is a lark rather than a real event, that the rest of the world is a mere amusement park for the cynical atheists of Australia.

But what is this attitude if not faith?

It's an easy argument to make that this shared belief is a truer and deeper faith than that of the average churchgoer. Separate from societal expectation, and without any real reason to do so, we accept that the world is run in a specific and benevolent way for our own benefit.

It's an odd position for a nation built on genocide to take.