(from a chapter of novella in progress. Aussie metafiction, memoir, micro narratives, 2023-2024)
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The officious frump, with the heavily downturned mouth, lives to left of me in a mirror-image, inner-city terrace. I get the impression she hates me, though I don’t know her that well.
Things took a turn along the way, as they always do when people accuse others of being someone they’re not ,while espousing their own questionable virtues at some else’s expense.
Some people are so lost, so self-entitled, so sure they are never wrong, that they become delusional and begin to believe their own lies. These people are everywhere. They never apologise , never take responsibility or accountability for their actions or contemplate the effect their actions have on others. But I can’t allow them to bully me anymore. I will no longer bear their lies and delusions just to keep the peace. I don’t care where they work or what their accolades are. I’ve always been reasonable but I draw the line in places.
The salient stench of dog shit wafting from over that fence every Summer, the blowflies that settle on every plant in my yard, is unacceptable. I can almost taste it. It’s been going on for years, like living in a giant dog kennel.
She had not one, but two cattle dogs back then. One of them was quite cute, but a very stinky creature. He liked people, craved interaction, this clever, happy, smelly fella, and he I think he knew I was a push-over.
Day after day, month after month, the cheerful canine would practise, for hours at a time, jumping, pouncing, with as much spring-like stamina as his breeding allowed until he until he scaled it.
I saw his tongue-happy face in boing-boing fashion whenever I was in my yard,
Let me explain that sentence. You’ll need to visualise the term ‘boing boing’.
It’s not that hard, it’s just the bouncy vertical up/down image of a dog with a friendly face, appearing and disappearing from behind a two metre wall.
That’s an example of metafiction by the way.
So is this, I’m still doing it…
Anyway, back to the neighbour’s dog…
One morning, I wake to Percy the dog, bouncing on my head, licking my face, like he’s very happy to see me. The stench is overwhelming.
Lewi was still living here then, so this is a verifiable fact out in the real world, If you can find him and ask,
off this page,
And beyond the possibility that this is a work of fiction, which it isn’t, it’s a memoir piece,
Percy was tired of being cooped up in that shit-drenched yard. He wanted to explore the neighbourhood, so he figured out how to jump his fence, and get me to open my back gate to set him free, which I immediately did – just to get rid of him. I woke up to the dog on my bed many times over, often returning him to our next door neighbour without receiving a single apology, a thankyou or assurance the recurring issue would be dealt with.
He was smart, resourceful, focused, and most importantly for a good cattle dog – determined.
If Jesus had sunglasses there’s a chance he’d have never been crucified.
They didn’t have sunglasses in the Middle East back then, so people had to look each other straight in the eye with no buffer. Must have been hard looking into the windows of his soul. At first they saw their own agonised reflections staring back at them. Then the compassion flooded through, causing visceral emotional reactions. That’s what happens around the enlightened, because they transcend the ego and have no fear. A pair of sunnies would have saved him some drama and might have stopped all those people following him around, asking silly questions they didn’t understand, or like the answers to.
It’s not that the idea of sunglasses didn’t exist – even in Jesus day. The Inuits invented the predecessor to sunnies about 4000 years ago to protect them from snow blindness. They carved goggles from walrus ivory with slits to peer through; I had a pair of slit-style sunglasses in the 90s.
Sunglasses are probably up there with one of the most important inventions in human history. They’ve certainly saved me a whole lot of grief.
It wasn’t until the 12th century that the design for modern sunnies appeared. Skilful, clever and resourceful Chinese artisans made tinted glasses from panes of smoky quartz, copper and precious metals. However, unlike the Inuits, the main purpose of tinted glasses was for Chinese judges to hide their emotions to appear impartial (I use them for a similar purpose)
“Historically, whenever a culture is on the brink of stepping into a new paradigm, members of that culture react quite predictably. As the old paradigm begins to disintegrate, people attempt to reinvigorate or reinforce the paradigm in order to try and preserve what is known and therefore safe and secure, while resisting the forces of change for fear of facing the unknown” (Noble, 2010)
I set out to examine Intersexuality as one of the more invisible battlegrounds for postcolonial assumptions of a sex and gender binary – set against the mythical backdrop of Australia’s postcolonial whiteness, our patriarchal culture and the idealised national identity, which continues to infuse the Australian national consciousness (Lopez, 2012).
The construction of sex, race, gender, and the Australian national ideal
The construction of sex and gender is closely related to the construction of race through claims of biological determinants and factors, which also maintain the notion of white racial supremacy (Glenn, 1999). These social constructs are deeply embedded in Australian culture through historical narratives, and maintained through powerful institutional structures, hence it has been difficult to detach from the beliefs that have no actual basis in reality, yet continue to profoundly inform and shape the social experience (Hall, 1997). Lopez writes that there is a lack of theory on colonial whiteness particularly in the exploration of the relations between whiteness and the continuance of colonial power through institutional discourses. The patriarchal nature of colonial rule and the rigid binaries set out for both its colonists and the colonised remain embedded in Australian society to this day (Lopez, 2012) and perhaps it is the invisibility of whiteness that ensures it maintains its power and keeps its sexual stereotypes alive.
There is no doubt that intersex births challenge Australia’s normative stereotypes, exposing the remnants of colonial discourses on sex and gender. The most enduring remnant that continues to inform Australia’s historical discourse is that of the mythical heroic bushman as the ‘Aussie’ pioneer and the working class battler (Bellanta, 2012). This vision of Australian masculinity, which emerged at the end of the colonial era, signaled a shift from the patriarchal sentimentalities of British Imperialism to that of a ‘tough but honest’ ideal that persists as the national image of Australia. The great Australian stereotype is the all-Australian bloke, who works the land and never complains. Each night, after a drink with his mates he makes his way home to his subservient but loyal wife and adoring family, satisfied with a job well done and ready to work for the good of the nation. We all recognise this image because it’s still informing the national imaginary.
The Australian Legend, written by Russell Ward and published in 1958 is the enduring postcolonial interpretation of Australian-ness (Davison, 2012) and it is this idealised notion that not only battles against the reality of Australia’s colonial and indigenous histories but also against the non-binary reality of sex and gender. Australia’s assumed colonial past informs the discourse of Australia’s dominant institutions – together with the assumption that; sex exists within a natural stable framework, in a white heteronormative society. To renounce this belief would destabilise our patriarchal social and political systems. However over the last three decades, Australia’s assertion of white masculinity struggles to retain cultural supremacy (Bellanta, 2012).
The ‘all-Australian’ imaginary and intersexuality
The Australian contemporary understanding of intersexuality is deeply flawed as is the notion of what it means to be Australian – limited by the normative experience of a white male/female gender binary, which forms the central framework and context for a personal sense of self, and the construction of an Australian national identity (Murrie, 1998). One of the legacies of colonialism is that this established power-dynamic continues to undermine anyone who does not fit the ‘Aussie’ masculine/feminine ideal.
This has effectively erased the voice of the intersex community, which is heavily marginalised through its biological ambiguities, and routinely defined through medical discourse (Bing, Bergvall & Freed 2013, p.8). Discussion of Intersexuality is a social taboo; it has been kept hidden and has no place in the national imaginary. If we add being indigenous to this equation, then we have a multi-marginalised experience as constructions of sex, gender and race come into play (Glenn, 1999). Aboriginal people who identify as gay or transgender have described their early years of coming out; they were rejected by both the indigenous and non-indigenous communities and perceived themselves to be on the lowest rung of a heavily stratified society. This is confirmed many times over by indigenous members of the LGBTI+ community (Sisters & Brothers NT, 2016). Without minimising the experience of other sex and gender variant individuals, I discovered during my research that the intersex individual has been hidden deep within our social, sexual and racial hierarchies; invalidated, surgically and/or hormonally assimilated into the dominant binary order, and then more recently, burdened with the responsibility of leading society out of its hetero-normative limitations (Holmes, 2008, p.16).
Defining Intersex: alternative genders and the missing Intersex
It is important to clarify and reclaim the term ‘intersex’ as distinct from the more generalised understanding of terminologies associated with alternative genders – particularly if sociological research is to be effective in addressing intersex marginalisation. Intersexual persons are routinely mistaken for transgender. Put simply, the difference between intersex and transgender is that transgender has to do with ones gender identity and intersex is about ones biological characteristics. The term intersex applies to a chromosomal, biological phenomenon and intersex births are not as uncommon as most people think. 1 in 2,000 births are considered intersex, however 1 in 400 births show some kind of hormonal and sexual anomaly that does not fit neatly into the ideal male/female binary. 1 in 4,500 are born with both male and female genitalia (Fausto-Sterling, 2000). Sexual dimorphism is a dominant area of research in studies on sex and gender, with definitions of sex variant and non-binary genders including persons born carrying a combination of XX and XY chromosomes (Organisation Intersex International Australia, 2012). The number of intersex people worldwide is estimated to be 1.7% and may be as high as 4% of the world’s population – if we include people born with “unacceptable genitalia” (Fausto-Sterling, 2000). Clearly there is a human sex spectrum that has always, naturally occurred. This is not some recent mutation or abnormality; nor is it rare, therefore it’s vital that we examine why we still find it difficult to distinguish intersex from transgender, as they have always been part of human biological history. On deeper investigation, they have not been included as part of Australian social or cultural histories, which are constructed around colonial and postcolonial perspectives. I sought to investigate whether there was ever a time when the intersex individual was recognised or socially accepted – relative to Australia’s colonial past.
Intersex in the pre-colonial era
I was surprised to find that “17th century England recognised two genders but three biological sexes: male, female and hermaphrodite” (Moore, 1998). Intersex persons were socially acknowledged and accepted, provided they chose one of the binary-gender identities and either married an opposite gender or entered the church for a lifetime of monastic service. This was in adherence to church law and the religious belief that sexual relations were for procreation between a man and a woman. Also interesting to note is that attraction to the same sex, although considered a transgression was tolerated as long as the status quo was maintained and people continued to be married as man and wife. It was between 1690 and 1710 that this attitude radically changed. It appears that during the pre-colonial Enlightenment era the secularists sought to delegitimise religious authority. As we entered the colonial era, the move toward individual autonomy developed and these changes became the “ideal prerequisites for modern masculinity” (Moore 1998, p.4). Consequently, what we term as the ‘alpha male’ was coming into his dominion. Through colonialism, with its white racial ideal and masculinity, it became the central figure for Australian national pride.
The normalising society
While Australian society has in recent times become more accepting of trans/sexuality our medical institutions continue to define those born with both male and female chromosomes; and more specifically those born with ambiguous genitalia, pathologically (Fausto-Sterling, 2000) and perhaps this is because they represent a scientific challenge to the status quo. Intersex infants are routinely assigned a gender at birth, with many subjected to surgical intervention from infancy and nearly all receiving hormonal intervention as pre-pubescent children – despite irrefutable scientific evidence that a male/female sex-binary does not exist in nature (Ainsworth, 2005). Biomedicine has come to recognise intersexuality as a naturally occurring anatomical and sexual variant but defines it as pathology rather than a natural difference (Holmes, 2008, p.20). Hence the intersex body from birth is subject to the laws of a particular mode of living, centred on the acceptable appearance of human genitalia in order to conform to social expectations and be suitable for life in a binary system (Guidotto, 2007). The histories of sexualised bodies and sexualities are formed within a political and cultural framework that continues to deny the instability of sex. Our biomedical institutions act as agents for a heteronormative society and legitimise the assumption of a stable sex binary, by altering the bodies of healthy intersex infants. This invasive, violent body shaming has emerged as a serious human rights issue (Wilson, 2012). It is hard to accept that we live in a society that gives up its intersex infants as the subjects of a personified medical discourse on sex and gender (Holmes, 2008) to satisfy the systemic belief in a sexual binary.
Why intersex? : Postcolonial bio-politics in Australia
As Intersex persons have existed throughout human history and are about as rare as redheads (Barnes, 2013) I was motivated to explore why healthy Intersex births continue to be defined as a chromosomal disorder, an abnormality or a medical problem and I determined that colonial constructions of sex and gender are deeply embedded in contemporary discourses, which have controlled the topic of intersex through largely medicalised terms. Foucault found that power operates within the institutional apparatus and uses knowledge to regulate the conduct of others (Hall, 2001). The relation between sex, race and gender as historical, social and cultural constructs began to make some sense to me at this point (Stoler, 1995). The dominant system has rules and these rules regulate behaviour and physical appearance until they are in line with its social norms:
“ It is taken for granted that sexual and racial difference are inherent qualities of the corporeal, and, moreover, that male and female bodies, black and white bodies, may each respectively fit a universal category” (Price & Shildrick, 1999).
There is little sociological research that deals specifically with intersex invisibility, or the deeper systemic implications of the taboo nature of their existence. They have almost no protections under Australian law as intersex people; in fact a paper that consolidated federal anti-discrimination laws was 60 pages long yet the word ‘Intersex’ was not mentioned (Wilson, 2012). It is curious that this would occur despite extensive feminist scholarship on the construction of sex and gender and a substantial history of medical research on hermaphroditism. Gender seems more deeply engrained than race in biology; through reproduction, sexuality and the body itself. Women of colour for example have historically born the bulk of the burden as household laborers for the middle-classes in colonial and postcolonial societies with the added emotional responsibility of rearing white middle class children hence freeing middle class white women to pursue cultural activities and later take up careers, which ironically facilitated the feminist movement (Glenn, 1999) and initiated debates on human rights and equality. While Australian political discourses about equality and human rights are convincing, they have their limitations and partialities.
Our human rights discourse once excluded anyone who fell outside of the white, middle class, male classification and emphasised particular values and meanings as comprehensive and unanimous. These values, which are a legacy of Australia’s colonial past, remain engrained in our culture and within our language (Weedon, 2002) and continue to support Australia’s social hierarchies. The Patriarchal construction of gender is not based on natural difference but on the inherent view of women as the frailer sex, which is conversely in possession of an unknown and threatening source of power. Most alternative genders still function within this binary framework and do not challenge it, however I believe the intersex individual has been isolated for special treatment precisely because they do. The intersex individual’s biology contradicts the patriarchal domestic order; based on the mistaken assumption of a natural sex binary, yet today this assumption cannot be supported by scientific evidence (Moore, 1998 p.6).
We can easily imagine the social, political and legal upheavals, which intersexuality poses for Australia’s patriarchal systems, particularly for the assigned roles within our society and for the actual language we use – since they challenge the established order of ‘man or woman’, ‘black or white’ and ‘heterosexual or homosexual’ by occupying a space in between and stand as physical evidence for what modern biology has confirmed – that the binary is not natural but a social construct, which serves to support the patriarchy and its colonial legacies (Moore, 1998). It is therefore a bio-political assault that otherwise healthy intersex persons are medically defined at birth and treated to conform to a binary system. Our medical institutions are enduring symbols of patriarchal authority and power, and as such they practice bio-politics on the population. Medical discourse and its discursive subcategories demand submission to biomedical surveillance, authority, diagnosis and treatment (Turner, 2007). The regulating power of medical discourse is particularly relevant for parents who give birth to an intersex child with ambiguous genitalia, which is seldom anticipated (Organisation Intersex International Australia, 2012). Many parents submit to medical authority, which intervenes quickly to change the intersex infant’s body (Chase, 1998).
The postcolonial gender imaginary: binary personal pronouns
By the end of the 20th century, postcolonial theories of sex and gender were being questioned. Exploration into previously unchallenged social, moral and biological assumptions prompted new discussion about the influences that have shaped mainstream views on gender and sexuality (Noble, 2010) particularly as British colonial literature and scholarship had featured sexual domination as symbolic of European supremacy (Stoler, 1989). The structure of the English language was therefore key to colonial power and control, and continues to support the assumptions of a sex binary and anyone who does not outwardly conform to the accepted gender stereotypes are marginalized or excluded. It has been suggested that the binary pronouns of he, she, his and her, forcibly impose the normative binary system in support of the assumption that non-binary genders must fit into either the male or female gender category and this is profoundly relevant to the intersex individual (Wayne, 2005). As far as the English language is concerned there are two sexes, two genders and two sexual orientations. Modern attempts to address the missing reference to a non-binary sex and/or gender are admirable and may take hold in the future, (Corwin, 2009) however what is interesting is that a pronoun for the third gender has never existed in the English language besides the derogatory ‘it’ even though intersex individuals have been a part of humankind since the dawn of time. Consequently the intersex individual is easily overlooked and excluded from the national histories of Australia and the cultural adherence to a gender binary, which is embedded in our social and political discourses and supports the continuance of the colonial puritanical imperative on the intersex body (Hester, 2004).
Supposition
Australia’s national narratives are bound to both a white racial ideal and a patriarchal sex binary that do not exist. The struggle for liberation becomes the location for an ideological battle yet it is also the point of departure; where we can cast off the unnatural assumptions and beliefs that dominate Australian culture.
Bellanta, M.J., 2012, ‘Australian Masculinities and Popular Song: The Songs of Sentimental Blokes 1900–1930s’, Australian Historical Studies, vol.43, no.3, pp.412-428.
Bing M., Bergvall V.L. & Freed A. F., 2013, 1996, Rethinking language and gender research: theory and practice, Routledge, London & New York.
Chase, C. 1998, ‘Hermaphrodites With Attitude: Mapping the Emergence of Intersex Political Activism’, GLQ: A Journal of lesbian & Gay Studies, vol.4, no.2, pp.181-211, Duke University Press.
Corwin, A.I., 2009, ‘Language and gender variance: Constructing gender beyond the male/female binary’. Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality, vol.12 no.4.
Davison, G., 2012, ‘Rethinking the Australian legend’, Australian Historical Studies, vol.43 no.3, pp.429-451.
Fausto-Sterling, A., 2000, ‘The Five Sexes Revisited’ Sciences, vol. 40, no. 4, p. 18.
Glenn, E.N., 1999, ‘The social construction and institutionalization of gender and race’, Revisioning gender, pp.3-43.
Guidotto, N., 2007, ‘Monsters in the Closet: Biopolitics and Intersexuality’, Wagadu, Intersecting Gender and Disability Perspectives in Rethinking Postcolonial Identities, vol. 4.
Hall, S. 1997, ‘Foucault: Power, Knowledge and Discourse’, in S. Hall (ed), Representation: cultural representations and signifying practices. The work of representation, London, Sage.
Hester, D. 2004, ‘Intersexes and the end of gender: Corporeal ethics and postgender bodies’, Journal of Gender Studies, vol.13 no.3, pp.215-225,
Holmes, M., 2008, Intersex: A perilous difference. Associated University Press.
Lopez, A.J., 2012, Postcolonial whiteness: A critical reader on race and empire. SUNY Press.
Moore, C. 1998, Colonial manhood and masculinities, Journal of Australian studies, vol.22 no.56 pp.1-35
Murrie, L., 1998, ‘Changing masculinities: disruption and anxiety in contemporary Australian writing’. Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 22 no.56 , pp.169-179.
Stoler, A. L. 1989, ‘Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th-Century Colonial Cultures’, American Ethnologist, vol.16, no. 4, pp. 634-60.
Stoler, A. L. 1995, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, Duke University Press., pp. 19-54
Turner, B.S., 2007, Medical Power and Social Knowledge, Sage, London.
Valentine, D. and Wilchins, R.A., 1997. ‘One percent on the burn chart: gender, genitals, and hermaphrodites with attitude’. Social Text, vol.52, no.53, pp.215-222.
Wayne, L.D., 2005, ‘Neutral pronouns: A modest proposal whose time has come’. Canadian Woman Studies, vol.24, no.2.
This opinion piece looks at key interactions between surveillance, the internet, mass media and neoliberalism (economic rationalism) through a mythological lens.
The principles, structures and strategies of neoliberal capitalism work together deliberately and opportunistically for the goal of global, political and economic supremacy, and always for the few ruling the many. However in order for this to happen the masses must be duped (or lulled or coerced or just convinced) into agreements that may not be in their best interests.
I discuss surveillance and the manipulation of consent as an evolving phenomenon, and raise existential questions about freedom, authenticity and meaning, while reflecting on the allegorical narrative of Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, and the Tree of Knowledge at its centre.
Methodology
There are multiple aspects to the topic of surveillance and it was challenging to narrow down a theme for exploration. I settled on writing a dialectic opinion piece that draws inspiration from two versions of the Adam and Eve creation myth; one from Genesis and the other from the Nag Hammadi scrolls.
The Garden of Eden is used as context for discussing surveillance, the manipulation of consent and neoliberal agendas, but it is also used as a narrative device.
My interpretation and definition of a well-known cross-cultural creation myth, is a comparative analysis sourced from various translations. I reviewed a broad range of literature; academic and technical journals, fiction and non-fiction books, news media, religious literature, social and philosophical works, government publications and websites , and I have included in-text hyperlinks.
Civil disobedience in the Garden of Eden
The Christian myth of Adam and Eve has the hapless couple living in ignorance and tilling the garden grounds until a snake tempts Eve to eat from the forbidden ‘Tree of Knowledge for both good and evil’ (Note that the knowledge is ‘for’ both good and evil and not ‘of’ both good and evil.) They are expelled from the garden for disobeying God, and to stop them from eating from another tree…the Tree of Life; the source of their immortality:
“Then the Lord God said, ‘Now, lest [the humans] reach out their hands and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—” therefore the Lord God sent them out from the garden of Eden to work the ground (dust) from which they were taken. He drove out the humans, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned in every direction to guard the way to the tree of life.” (Genesis 3:22b-24)
Clearly, and for unknown reasons, God did not want them knowing stuff and living forever too.
According to the gnostic Nag Hammadi, this garden variety god is not the true God, but a false god, a god of lies. In the gnostic version the imposter god is a god of slavery, surveillance and control (The Gnostic Society Library, 2003). This is a jealous god who imprisons the spark of supreme divine consciousness in matter. Adam and his saviour Eve (the divine feminine archetype) escape the prison of ignorance by eating the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge for both good and evil. The first emotion they experience is shame, as with knowledge comes the loss of innocence, and a sense of responsibility. In the Nag Hammadi creation myth the fall of Adam and Eve represents human consciousness waking from a dream state and its escape from an illusory utopia (Davies, 2005). Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the garden by an imposter god symbolises the awakening human psyche, which collectively shares the knowledge for both good and evil. Up until that moment, Adam is a sleepwalker, a puppet, ignorant of any possibilities outside the garden of the jealous god that is referred to by gnostic Christians as the Demiurge. Eve wakes first and saves Adam from eternal ignorance. They have woken from the appearance of freedom and autonomy because the Garden of Eden is actually a totalitarian surveillance state. Adam and Eve are under the dominating gaze of the Demiurge and just like Bentham’s panoptic prison design, the garden exists to serve its meticulous all-seeing power (Foucault, 1980).
Everybody Knows
‘Free’ capitalist societies ( as opposed to an authoritarian capitalist society as China has become) engage incrementally in covert mass surveillance and data collection and retention, allegedly for public safety and security, however it’s primarily for control, profit and power, as Edward Snowden’s revelations about Prism in 2013, and the anonymous leak of the ‘Panama Papers’ in 2015 clearly revealed. The significance of this covert activity is reflected in the time, effort, money and resources that have gone into government investigations on Julian Assange for allegedly having had sex with a broken condom (The Assange Agenda, 2017). Since then, mainstream media has moved on and the masses in the Garden of Eden seem curiously passive, giving little resistance beyond ‘Clickivism’, a form of pseudo-activism, and behaving in general as if it’s all a big show; a socio-political spectacle.
‘The end result is the reduction of activism into a series of petition drives that capitalise on current events’ (White, 2010). Democracy is in grave danger and everybody knows it, yet most of us are passively disengaged, living the spectacle through our devices and projected images, where we connect through the Tree of Knowledge that occupies the centre of the Garden of Eden.
Debord wrote that the spectacle presents itself as the unquestionable and inaccessible reality that demands our passive acceptance, which is already imposed by the spectacle’s monopoly of appearances. The spectacle is everywhere,
‘The tautological character of the spectacle stems from the fact that its means and ends are identical. It’s the sun that never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the globe, endlessly basking in its own glory’ (Debord, 1967).
The battle for minds amidst the spectacle
Unfettered, deregulated capitalism is a lot like the demiurge of the Garden of Eden. It presents itself as the only viable system and traps its subjects by presenting itself as the ideal, free society. We inhabitants of the garden find it increasingly difficult to imagine an alternative reality because we’ve come to believe there’s no other way.
Our systems have become the ‘vast inaccessible realities that can never be questioned’ (Debord 1967).
We’re complacent and live in denial despite witnessing ever-increasing levels of control, a gradual undermining of democratic values, and the narrowing of avenues for community empowerment. Civil rights are systematically dismantled over time to protect the financial institutions that dominate society, and to make citizen dissent more difficult. Elaborate propaganda is disseminated through mass media over generations, creating a political void of disinterest, yet our societies and our experiences therein, are shaped by political decisions made for us despite our civil disengagement, which is very convenient for those with the power and influence to drive political decisions and policy making. It appears to be a long-term strategy that uses a combination of deliberation and opportunism. Governments, which have traditionally represented the will of the people, are undermined with the help of a highly concentrated ownership of mass media and the global political elites they serve (Herman & Chomsky, 1988). Governments have come to represent the will of those who own the means of production, who control the resources, hold the majority of wealth and who can influence public opinion. Over time, the control of state assets is transferred into private hands under the guise of more cost effective management and better efficiency. That’s never the outcome however. The push for privatisation was propelled by a radical squeeze on workers rights and conditions – slipped in under the guise of ‘flexible labour markets’. It is nothing less than the commodification of poverty, made easier because there are fewer advocates who will, or can speak for them. People are distracted, busy surviving and dealing with a cumulative massive increase in information, coupled with a strategic shift of responsibility from those in positions of power, to the individual citizen or rather ‘consumer’.
The majority is self-occupied and fighting to retain composure, in a system designed to covertly transfer power to a minority elite.
More people are being born into servitude than at any other time, with 45.8 million people trapped in some form of slavery (Global Slavery Index, 2016). Few find their way out of their appointed stations in life in a fiercely competitive, profit-driven system (Loewenstein, 2015). The appearance of our society may have changed with new technologies, which once bore the promise of making life fairer and easier, but the agenda remains the same. Set the masses fighting amongst themselves, give them an imagined enemy ‘Other’ and flow all benefits into the hands of a few.
Debord wrote: ‘Contemporary society is both the meaning and the agenda of our particular socio-economic formation. It is the historical moment in which we are caught’ (Debord, 1967)
The rise of the immortal gods: Mass surveillance & God’s Panopticon: (why people accept it)
Forms of surveillance, political propaganda and totalitarian control have existed for thousands of years, as an evolving narrative in human history. Foucault’s panopticon became the leading metaphor for surveillance studies among scholars … and then an odd thing occurred… scholars got bored with it. Either that or they were overwhelmed with surveillance studies, becoming ‘haunted by its omnipresence’ (Caluya, 2010).
For me the panopticon is an overtly religious concept that represents humanity’s desire for protection by an omnipotent deity, which has existed ideologically in human consciousness from the beginnings of civilisation, then institutionalised as a means for regulating conduct through its moral discourses (Foucault, 2007). ‘The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion’ (Debord, 1967).
Our rapidly evolving technologies allow those who own the means of production to replace the idea of God, who has seemingly failed to protect us from evil, with god-like systems that use surveillance technologies as the structure of an all-seeing eye, which in many ways positions the Internet as the mind of God. Satellite angels covering the four corners of the globe and everywhere in-between complete the picture with their capacity for omniscience. This omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent deity is always under construction. It is in a state of constant flux, ready to shape shift into whatever appearance the masses will accept and endorse. Its survival and growth requires the participation of the masses, who are now dependent on it. The World Wide Web has been cast. The many have put their knowledge together and collectively given power to the new system, a cyberspace that functions like a God. I’m not saying this is a bad thing – it’s as good or as bad as the intentions of the people who manage and use the technology, and the direction it will take is yet to be determined. However, the struggle is clear and looks for all purposes like a battle between good and evil.
The networked Tree of Knowledge
The Internet has always needed produsers (Bruns, 2007) and open participation to build the Internet’s knowledge base, which has simultaneously created a data-based crystal ball into the hearts and minds of humanity. Bruns described Web 2.0 or social software as part of an important paradigm shift that would profoundly impact our social practices, legal and economic frameworks, our media and our democratic societies. (Web 3.0 is coming).
Back in 2007 this shift was poorly theorised or understood (Bruns, 2007). The excitement and positivity with which many intellectuals and academics approached the new world order of things was admirable however the intellectual elitism that plagues some of the brightest minds of our time is a democratic Achilles heel. While basking in their own brilliance, their complex theories and fancy terminologies, they seem to ignore the dark undercurrent of neoliberal opportunism and a quiet militaristic supremacy, which is whisking humanity toward a new dystopian destiny. State protections industries aren’t just protecting their citizens or their established geographical borders, but also the state’s economic and military interests.
Surveillance is a key component of intelligence and espionage. The Internet was developed from a military communications technology called ARPANET, a prototype for the Internet that began as a memo nearly 50 years ago (DARPA, 2017).
It is said that no one really owns the Internet, but that depends on the definitions of ownership, i.e. if I had free access to all the data generated through the Internet, and if I could decrypt and store that data or capture it before it was encrypted for later reference or sale, then in a sense I’d own the Internet. Then there’s the access that gatekeepers such as Telstra control; if you don’t pay your bill then you have no access to the net. The greatest value of the Internet is in the information it contains but also in its capacity for the capture, communication and dissemination of information, and the ensuing influence of ideas.
The whistleblowers of our time are in great danger and for good reason. Many governments do not want people to focus on the dark side of global systems operations, however, information settles in strange and fascinating ways in the human psyche and the effects of the panopticon works in both directions. The focus can also go from the many to the few. In countries like China, where slavery is rife (Global slavery Index, 2016) and the memory of revolution is relatively fresh, media and online censorship is a priority (Muller, 2004). Naturally, western neoliberal capitalist governments, as directed by the private political elites and their corporate agendas, periodical push for Internet censorship citing citizen safety and national security, and of course at times that is necessary, but I can’t help wondering if some shadowy demiurge, doesn’t want us eating from the tree of knowledge or sharing ideas too freely.
Afterword
We have never lost the desire or the drive to create a utopian society, and so far all attempts are at the expense of truth, freedom and privacy. Despite resistance, there is also a loss of authenticity, because any individual or group that resists oppression by a dominant ideology does so at risk of being cast as the enemy other. One group’s heaven is another group’s hell.
The Internet is the manifest appearance of the mythical tree of knowledge, placed at the centre of our world, with networked branches that reach all around the globe and we are mesmerised by a plethora of information. As we awaken from this dream, what we do with our knowledge for good or for evil, will determine our future and the future of the planet.
Refs:
Bruns, A. 2007. Produsage, generation C, and their effects on the democratic process.
Bruns, A. 2007, ‘Produsage’, Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI conference on Creativity & cognition pp. 99-106. ACM.
Caluya, G. 2010, ‘The post-panoptic society? Reassessing Foucault in surveillance studies’, Social Identities, vol 16, no. 9, pp. 621-633.
“Bullshit is all the reasons we give for living. If we can’t think up reasons of our own, we always have the God bullshit.” Chayefsky 1976
While architecture, music, fine arts and literature owe much to religious inspiration and patronage, average interpretations of religion are at best fluffy, delusional or mediocre, and at worst elitist, despotic and depraved.
Politics is by nature an extension of religion, but without God. We don’t do God in Australian politics (Jensen 2016) though the similarity between politics and religion is undeniable, particularly when you look at neoliberal-driven politics. It has its own catechisms in accordance with an exalted code of conduct, has universal ambitions, is buoyed by a legal system that tramples the meek and vulnerable, and directs its benefits almost exclusively to a ‘power elite’. It even has a prophet in Friedrich Von Hayek, and its church is the The Mont Pelerin Society (Ponniah 2012). This demiurge passes control of its pilfered resources to an undeserving progeny in an act of nepotism. Australian politics is in a death-grip with Mammon, lord of economics, king of all wars and hence the most prolific serial killer of all time. The total deaths in recorded history now number the hundreds of millions (White 2014).
Humanity’s social movements may originate from well-intentioned philosophies but they have a knack of morphing into messy, complex counterfeits. Politics walks a fine line between truth and bullshit.
Mass media follows the corporate imperative
“We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale.”Chayefsky 1976
There is significant mainstream confusion, deliberate or otherwise, surrounding definitions of democracy in capitalist societies. Democratic intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, are relentlessly misrepresented in their defence of social democratic ideology and policies, despite their commitment to raise a lamp and shine light into the darkness, which is not ahead of us but in the here and now. Some Western journalists have portrayed social democracy as a form of either socialism or communism, further adding to the confusion within Western ideological and political debates. If political ideologies are open to interpretation then they are the godless extensions of religious dogma, and in a capitalist free-market state, the definition of a political ideology is limited to the parameters of the dominant economic forces that influence government policy making.
These economic forces direct corporate mass media, and frames mainstream discussion, influencing and manipulating public opinion on the benefits of the state, the free market, and far-right political economic agendas. Mass media always follows the corporate imperative – filtered to assure conformity to the interests and needs of an elite private sector. Media networks that don’t tow the line are pushed aside in favour of those that support the corporate social purpose (Chomsky 1990). Transnational media operates within the limits of a market-driven satellite news oligopoly. The spectacle of distant violence and suffering sells, hence it is prioritised and produced to suit the demands and tastes of a Western audience, while serving shadowy private interests (Chouliaraki 2008).
The Twin towers & disaster capitalism
“I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad” Chayefsky 1976
Since the events of September 11 2001, political violence has touched every Western nation to some degree. Aired and viewed in real time on screens and portable devices, 9/11 was mediated, analysed and officially concluded, despite valid unanswered questions from professional observers who raised concerns about the physical events of 9/11 (Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth 2016). Humanity has been collectively traumatised by an ongoing series of shocks, imparted with precision by transnational media (Chouliaraki 2008). Between shocks, we return to our daily lives, our families, our careers and our pursuits as if nothing has changed. We ask few questions and receive fewer answers, yet obediently follow the edicts of our governments, which are being hijacked by devolving neoliberal ideologies.
It is a fact that the neoliberal agenda seeks nothing less than the transfer of all public goods and services to the private sector. This undermines the significant socio-economic achievements of (once-regulated and fair) capitalist societies like Australia (Chomsky 2015). The post 9/11 period accelerated the global spread of neoliberal principles, using Naomi Klein’s term disaster capitalism with resistance, and viewed as an obstruction to progress (Klein 2007). Symbolically our power is all but privatised and we are expected to buy into neoliberal free-market philosophies, complacently entrusting our health services, our educational institutions and our social security into the private hands of a corporate sector that packages its booty with slick advertising campaigns and media propaganda…while also drawing on the public purse!
Western governments will continue to play the impending doom card, whether it’s terrorism, economic collapse or some other disaster, as a political ace. It’s a transparent system that populations dutifully adopt with robotic conformity. We wear this ‘corporatocracy’ like a snug suit because we can’t see the details. And so, we continue to whinge and sling shit – amongst ourselves – while sinking incrementally into a state of powerless despair.
Le cirque de 9/11
“You’re never going to get any truth from us. We’ll tell you anything you want to hear; we lie like hell” Chayefsky 1976
Hiram Johnson said in 1917 that the first casualty in war is truth (Bagdikian 2004). Rumours of war cause social, hence economic panic and a proliferation of propaganda at a time when people need accurate and balanced information, but is this what governments and media deliver? The ‘War on Drugs’ rolled out the red carpet for the War on Terror, which then graduated to the Global War on Terror (GWOT). In what amounts to a class war with the global rich lording it over the global poor, one has to take pause at the power of these terminologies and of the role that mass media plays as vehicles for western propaganda. (Nohrstedt & Ottosen 2008) This kind of rhetoric was a bit of a joke when it first appeared; nevertheless it has become embedded in the mainstream political vernacular.
After the events of September 11 the western world was rocked by events rarely experienced by western nations and all of us witnessed these epic dramas unfold live via satellite. We may never know the whole truth behind 9/11, however western governments have been riding the wave of an emerging fear culture ever since. I.F. Stone once explained to a group of green journalists that when covering politics, the first thing to consider is that all governments lie (Bagdikian 2004). I remember my own instinctive distrust during 9/11 media coverage. it hit me in the gut, knowing it would be used as motivation for an invasion of Iraq. It was inevitable and we all knew it. Media networks covered 9/11 like a bizarre sports event, repeating segments over and over to an international western audience that was dumb struck, horrified, yet too afraid to switch off their televisions. It was reality TV at its finest and it marked the global shift from ‘risk society to threat society’ (Nohrstedt & Ottosen 2008). Rather than a breaking news event, it was an historical narrative complete with denunciative moral agency and promises of revenge (Chouliaraki 2008). The US Government had the whole world’s attention and worked it like a circus, with media ringmasters directing our gaze to wherever was required.
The Bin Laden/ Hussein adjustment & Weapons of Mass Deception
“You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here.” Chayefsky 1976
Who can forget the sudden rhetorical switch from Osama Bin Laden to Saddam Hussein in the immediate post 9/11 period…yeah, I remember that switcheroo. I brought it up often in conversation but no one seemed to fully grasp the implications. Sure, I understand, people were in shock, and exposed to successive shocks ever since, so this glaring inconsistency has been lost in the din, forgotten. Osama Bin Laden was conveniently dropped from the mainstream media landscape and Hussein was spliced in as his understudy – no one talked about it much, if at all. bin Laden was eventually snuffed, but the ‘Axis of Evil’ agenda shifted public attention from one enemy to another, as documented in global news trends covering a pre and post 9/11 world. As the US and her allies prepared the public for war, leaders simply manoeuvred their rhetoric through the media (Althaus & Largio 2004).
I could have tuned out and taken solace in the thought that nothing would ever sneak up on me again. I could face reality with resignation and move on, but I looked back and turned to stone. I still joined the march against the invasion of Iraq. Howard ignored us, enamoured as he was of George W. who juiced him up for the upcoming Free Trade Agreement. Murdoch’s journalists dutifully underplayed the numbers, but I was there – a lot of us were. However, the justification for war was sealed a long time before we reached the streets and I think we knew it.
There was no self-critical reflection by journalists, when it finally emerged that there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. The media became Weapons of Mass Deception (Nohrstedt & Ottosen 2008). Hussein was conveniently hung and that was that.
Symbolic annihilation of the non-western ‘other’
“There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars” Chayefsky 1976
In a socio-political sense, the non-Western other is only real while being discussed. The moment a designated ‘other’ is dropped from media discourse they cease to exist. It’s the forward thrust of political narcissism and a convenient distraction from the realities of war, which has stalked Middle Eastern oil fields like the many-faced god and his faceless assassins (Game of Thrones, 2016). Western powers can invade the villainous Orient without contrition and with impunity under the banner of democracy and beam these heroic efforts live via satellite through the amphitheatre of western media. We access the horror through the internet on multiple devices 24/7 – as we rely on easy access to news media to assure us the threat is contained. So far, the ultimate heroes and defenders of western democracy have always been the American military – protecting us from the perils of the non-western other.
We can go to sleep safely knowing that all is well, as long as our protector is out there, still stationed in the vast Australian desert, still carefully tending its garden of advanced war tech and missiles.
The people, distracted, will always be divided
“I want you to go to the window, open it, stick your head out and yell: “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.” Chayefsky 1976
Social media is both the opportunity to unite and a labyrinth of distraction. Castells bubbles with optimism on the potential of social media networks for social change; for shaping a brave new 21st century (Castells 2015). As a public space we’re still awestruck by the grandeur of cyberspace with its transnational media and social networks. However from where I’m standing, favour increasingly leans toward the corporate interests of the companies that own them; companies that profile each user as a consumer and political punter. Facebook and Google have direct access to vast amounts of data, akin to having a crystal ball that can predict the future. Predictive analytics (Software & Solutions 2016) reveal collective trends across social, political and economic spectrums. Anyone who has the money and power to access and mine the data can prepare well in advance to stem the flow of an inconvenient social movement. They can divert attention, manipulate opinion and cut it off at the pass. It remains to be seen what kind of social change the World Wide Web will enable before I stop feeling like a fat juicy fly.
Australia has a complacent, manageable population with a vulnerable indigenous community. Most of us are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, with either colonial or post-war histories, and the majority of us are disinterested in politics beyond the few weeks of pre election madness that lead to an election, and our personal investment in the promises that come with this cyclical ritual. However we have a compulsory voting system with 78% enrolled (& 93 % of those voted in the 2013 election; IDEA 2016). The rest of the time we disengage from the political process and it shows. The rise of armchair activism aka ‘Clicktivism’ is one telltale sign of a dying democracy. More people claim to know that the emperor is stark naked yet only a fraction turn up at public protests – less if it’s raining. One could be forgiven for believing we’ve fallen into the clutches of a sociopathic, corporate ruling class (Chomsky 2001). In Australia, Democracy can still parade the streets but only after applying for permission to protest. The naked emperor has been pirouetting openly for quite a while.
Bearing witness
“Indifferent to suffering; insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer” Chayefsky 1976
My friend came to Australia from Bosnia as a refugee. He works hard to pay his mortgage and run a thriving business. He came with nothing from a war that left him with a multitude of unanswered questions. Why did UN peacekeepers disarm the Bosnians, put them all in one place and then leave them to be massacred? World governments knew it was happening. There were clear verified reports coming out of Bosnia through embedded Western journalists, yet no one saved them (Crossette 1999). As my friend explained, they waited but nobody came. When his 21-year-old cousin was raped, mortally stabbed and left to die in the boot of her car, they couldn’t help her because snipers took aim at anyone who tried. The family began covert preparations to move their remaining youth to Italy. The eventual autopsy showed that she had lived for days, dying just metres from her family in the boot of her own car. It’s one story among thousands, however it is my friend’s personal story that brought the reality of war up close.
I searched for online footage of the Bosnian genocide and scoured the Internet for balanced media reports and footage, not because I thought I could change anything, or to satisfy morbid curiosity. I was bearing witness for my friend.
We the Victorious
“No matter how much trouble the hero is in, don’t worry, just look at your watch; at the end of the hour he’s going to win.” Chayefsky 1976
The ancient ruins of blood sport arenas, sacrificial temples and amphitheatres dot our globe. Bloodlust is part of our entertainment histories. These days the West fights its wars on foreign soil and continues to perfect military technologies that can destroy the planet in a day. For the West, the line between reality and fiction is blurred and the bloody horror of war is sanitised. Therefore the viewer is spared the full shock that precipitates action and transformation (Chouliaraki 2008). The horror is only partially revealed; made palatable for consumption through privatised networks. Violence and the threat of violence, disaster and the threat of disaster, poverty and the threat of poverty, are hidden beneath the spectacle. The Western psyche is hijacked by well-crafted rhetorical tales of suffering and doom, with the promise that the heroic West will do its utmost to stop disaster from reaching our shores (Borchers, 2013). After all, we’re the victorious West. We consume distant suffering like vampires. Our mainstream news media goes into a competitive frenzy over every latest disaster, lingering on every detail. If a network can’t report anything new, it picks over the carcass and endlessly speculates chat-show style (Thussu, 2003). In Australia we get a well-monitored feast or black-out famine. A gratuitous glut, or nothing at all. Produced as infotainment, it’s filtered, sanitised, sensationalised and de-contextualised, in order to reduce demand on the emotional and cognitive capacities of a western audience (Chouliaraki 2008).
Wanted: Western audiences – dead or alive
“This is not a psychotic episode. This is a cleansing moment of clarity. I’m imbued, Max.” Chayefsky 1976
One of the primary contributory effects of Western media is the distorted perception an audience forms of a villainous non-western other (Kamalipour 2004). I’ve caught myself with the same perception. I exorcise this demon by careful self-observation, by paying close attention to my thoughts and reactions to local and transnational news reports. I ask questions. I don’t assume what I read or hear is truth. Nevertheless I have a dead spot, which is only resurrected by the realisation that I have it, although the alternative isn’t much better as compassion turns to empathy, empathy turns to grief, and grief to despair. The Western cultural perspective is etched into my consciousness. It’s my operating system. I have learned to enjoy a good war epic because actors are playing the roles of the heroes and villains. I can rest in my imaginary place of indifference, and lose myself through the willing suspension of disbelief.
Epilogue: The devil hides in the detail
“We want a prophet, not a curmudgeon…He should do more apocalyptic doom.” Chayefsky 1976
From the banks of the river, a crocodilian humanoid grins from its leafy shadows. The hush-hush of water lapping at the hull, lulls the passengers into a deep sleep. No one on the boat can see the camouflaged reptilian grinning knowingly from the riverbank. And the closer I look the wider it grins. I awake in my bed with the eyes of that creature burned into my memory.
But it’s just a dream set in the dusk of a mental landscape, with me on a long wooden boat, seated on a bench at the stern. When I notice the creature, I turn to see if anyone else can see it, but no. All I find are the glassy faraway stares looking straight ahead. The devil’s in the detail. My fellow passengers are not aware of each other. They’re alone in the crowd, mesmerised by the forward thrust of this damned vessel.
…………………………………………………………
(2014)
We don’t mix God with politics
“Bullshit is all the reasons we give for living. If we can’t think up reasons of our own, we always have the God bullshit.” Chayefsky 1976
While architecture, music, fine arts and literature owe much to religious inspiration and patronage, average interpretationsof religion are at best fluffy, delusional or mediocre, and at worst elitist, despotic and depraved.
Politics is by nature an extension of religion – but without God. We don’t do God in Australian politics (Jensen 2016) though the similarity between politics and religion is undeniable, particularly when you look at neoliberal-driven politics. It has its own catechisms in accordance with an exalted code of conduct, has universal ambitions, is buoyed by a legal system that tramples the meek and vulnerable, and directs its benefits almost exclusively to a power elite. It even has a prophet in Friedrich Von Hayek and its church is the The Mont Pelerin Society (Ponniah 2012). This demiurge passes control of its pilfered resources to an undeserving progeny in an act of nepotism. Australian politics is in a death-grip with Mammon, lord of economics, king of all wars and hence the most prolific serial killer of all time. The total deaths in recorded history now number the hundreds of millions (White 2014).
Humanity’s social movements may originate from well-intentioned philosophies but they have a knack of morphing into messy, complex counterfeits. Politics walks a fine line between truth and bullshit.
Mass media follows the corporate imperative
“We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale.”Chayefsky 1976
There is significant mainstream confusion, deliberate or otherwise, surrounding definitions of democracy in capitalist societies. Democratic intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, are relentlessly misrepresented in their defense of social democratic ideology, despite the commitment to raise a lamp and shine some light into the darkness, which is not ahead of us but in the here and now. Some Western journalists have portrayed social democracy as a form of either socialism or communism, adding to the confusion within Western ideological and political debates. If a political ideology is open to interpretation, then political ideologies are the godless extensions of religious dogma, and in a capitalist free-market state, the definition of a political ideology is limited to the parameters of the dominant economic forces, which influence government policy making. These economic forces navigate the corporate mass media that frames discussion, influencing and manipulating public opinion to the benefit of the state, the free market, and neoliberal economic agendas. Mass media always follows a corporate imperative, filtered to assure conformity to the interests and needs of an elite private sector. Media networks that don’t tow the line are pushed aside in favour of those that support the corporate ‘social purpose’ (Chomsky 1990). Transnational media operates within the limits of a market-driven satellite news oligopoly. The spectacle of distant violence and suffering sells, hence it is prioritised and produced to suit the demands and tastes of a Western audience, while serving shadowy private interests (Chouliaraki 2008).
The Twin towers & disaster capitalism
“I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad” Chayefsky 1976
Since the events of September 11 2001, political violence has touched every Western nation to some degree. Aired and viewed in real time on screens and portable devices, 9/11 was mediated, analysed and officially concluded, despite valid questions from professional observers, who raised their concerns about the physical events of 9/11 (Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth 2016). Humanity has been collectively traumatised by a series of shocks, imparted with precision by transnational media (Chouliaraki 2008). Between shocks, we return to our daily lives, our families, our careers and our pursuits as if nothing has changed. We ask few questions and receive fewer answers, while obediently following the edicts of our governments that are being hijacked by devolving neoliberal ideology. Neoliberalism seeks nothing less than the transfer of all public goods and services to the private sector, undermining the significant social and economic achievements of capitalist societies like Australia (Chomsky 2015). The post 9/11 period accelerated the global spread of neoliberal principles, using Naomi Klein’s term disaster capitalism with resistance, and viewed as an obstruction to progress (Klein 2007). Symbolically our electricity (power) is all but privatised and we are expected to buy into neoliberal free-market philosophy, complacently entrusting our health services, our educational institutions and our social security into the hands of a corporate sector, which packages its booty with slick advertising campaigns and media propaganda. Western governments continue to play the terrorist card as a political ace. It’s a transparent system, yet populations dutifully adopt a robotic conformity, wearing corporatocracy like a snug suit because they cannot see the details.
Le cirque de 9/11
“You’re never going to get any truth from us. We’ll tell you anything you want to hear; we lie like hell” Chayefsky 1976
Hiram Johnson said in 1917 that the first casualty in war is truth (Bagdikian 2004). Rumours of war cause social, hence economic panic and a proliferation of propaganda at a time when people need accurate and balanced information, but is this what governments and media deliver? The ‘War on Drugs’ rolled out the red carpet for the War on Terror, which then graduated to the Global War on Terror (GWOT). In what amounts to a class war with the global rich lording it over the global poor, one has to take pause at the power of these terminologies and of the role that mass media plays as vehicles for western propaganda. (Nohrstedt & Ottosen 2008) This kind of rhetoric was a bit of a joke when it first appeared; nevertheless it has become embedded in the mainstream political vernacular.
After the events of September 11 the western world was rocked by an event rarely experienced in a western nation; all of us witnessed the epic drama unfold live via satellite. We may never know the whole truth behind this event however western governments have been riding the wave of an emerging fear culture ever since. I.F. Stone once explained to a group of ‘green’ journalists, that when covering politics the first thing to consider is that all governments lie (Bagdikian 2004). I remember experiencing an instinctive distrust during 9/11 media coverage. it hit me in my stomach – knowing that this would be used as the motivation for an invasion of Iraq. It was inevitable and everyone knew it. Media networks covered 9/11 like a bizarre sports event, repeating segments over and over to an international western audience that was dumb struck, horrified, yet too afraid to switch off their televisions. It was reality TV at its finest and marked the global shift from ‘risk society to threat society’ (Nohrstedt & Ottosen 2008). Rather than a breaking news event, it was an historical narrative complete with denunciative moral agency and promises of revenge (Chouliaraki 2008). The US Government had the whole world’s attention and they worked it like a circus, with its media ringmasters directing our gaze to wherever it was required.
The Bin Laden/ Hussein adjustment & Weapons of Mass Deception
“You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here.” Chayefsky 1976
Who can forget the sudden rhetorical switch from Osama Bin Laden to Saddam Hussein in the immediate post 9/11 period…yeah, I remember that switcheroo. I brought it up often in conversation but no one seemed to fully grasp the implications. Sure, I understand, people were in shock, and exposed to successive shocks ever since, so this glaring inconsistency has been lost in the din, forgotten. Osama Bin Laden was conveniently dropped from the mainstream media landscape and Hussein was spliced in as his understudy – no one talked about it much, if at all. bin Laden was eventually snuffed, but the ‘Axis of Evil’ agenda shifted public attention from one enemy to another, as documented in global news trends covering a pre and post 9/11 world. As the US and her allies prepared the public for war, leaders simply manoeuvred their rhetoric through the media (Althaus & Largio 2004).
I could have tuned out and taken solace in the thought that nothing would ever sneak up on me again. I could face reality with resignation and move on, but I looked back and turned to stone. I still joined the march against the invasion of Iraq. Howard ignored us, enamoured as he was of George W. who juiced him up for the upcoming Free Trade Agreement. Murdoch’s journalists dutifully underplayed the numbers, but I was there – a lot of us were. However, the justification for war was sealed a long time before we reached the streets and I think we knew it.
There was no self-critical reflection by journalists, when it finally emerged that there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. The media became Weapons of Mass Deception (Nohrstedt & Ottosen 2008). Hussein was conveniently hung and that was that.
Symbolic annihilation of the non-western ‘other’
“There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars” Chayefsky 1976
In a socio-political sense, the non-Western other is only real while being discussed. The moment a designated ‘other’ is dropped from media discourse they cease to exist. It’s the forward thrust of political narcissism and a convenient distraction from the realities of war, which has stalked the Middle Eastern oil fields like the many-faced god and his faceless assassins (Game of Thrones, 2016). Western powers can invade the villainous Orient without contrition and with impunity under the banner of democracy and they beam these heroic efforts live via satellite through the amphitheatre of western media. We can access the horror through the Internet on multiple devices 24/7 as we rely on easy access to news media to assure us the threat is contained. The heroes and defenders of western democracy have always been our American heroes, who protect us from the perils of the non-western other. We can go to sleep safely knowing that all is well as long as our protector is out there, stationed in the vast Australian desert, carefully tending its garden of missiles.
The people, distracted, will always be divided
“I want you to go to the window, open it, stick your head out and yell: “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.” Chayefsky 1976
Social media is both the opportunity to unite and a labyrinth of distraction. Castells bubbles with optimism on the potential of social media networks for social change; for shaping a brave new 21st century (Castells 2015). As a public space we’re still awestruck by the grandeur of cyberspace with its transnational media and social networks. However from where I’m standing, favour increasingly leans toward the corporate interests of the companies that own them; companies that profile each user as a consumer and political punter. Facebook and Google have direct access to vast amounts of data, akin to having a crystal ball that can predict the future. Predictive analytics (Software & Solutions 2016) reveal collective trends across social, political and economic spectrums. Anyone who has the money and power to access and mine the data can prepare well in advance to stem the flow of an inconvenient social movement. They can divert attention, manipulate opinion and cut it off at the pass. It remains to be seen what kind of social change the World Wide Web will enable before I stop feeling like a fat juicy fly.
Australia has a complacent, manageable population with a vulnerable indigenous community. Most of us are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, with either colonial or post-war histories, and the majority of us are disinterested in politics beyond the few weeks of pre election madness that lead to an election, and our personal investment in the promises that come with this cyclical ritual. However we have a compulsory voting system with 78% enrolled (& 93 % of those voted in the 2013 election; IDEA 2016). The rest of the time we disengage from the political process and it shows. The rise of armchair activism aka ‘Clicktivism’ is one telltale sign of a dying democracy. More people claim to know that the emperor is stark naked yet only a fraction turn up at public protests – less if it’s raining. One could be forgiven for believing we’ve fallen into the clutches of a sociopathic, corporate ruling class (Chomsky 2001). In Australia, Democracy can still parade the streets but only after applying for permission to protest. The naked emperor has been pirouetting openly for quite a while.
Bearing witness
“Indifferent to suffering; insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer” Chayefsky 1976
My friend came to Australia from Bosnia as a refugee. He works hard to pay his mortgage and run a thriving business. He came with nothing from a war that left him with a multitude of questions. Why did UN peacekeepers disarm the Bosnians, put them all in one place and then leave them to be massacred? World governments knew it was happening. There were clear verified reports coming out of Bosnia through embedded Western journalists, yet no one saved them (Crossette 1999). As my friend explained, they waited, but nobody came. When his 21-year-old cousin was raped, mortally stabbed and left to die in the boot of her car, they couldn’t help her because snipers took aim at anyone who tried. The family began covert preparations to move their remaining youth to Italy. The eventual autopsy showed that she had lived for days, dying just metres from her family in the boot of her car. It is one story among thousands, however it’s my friend’s story that brought the reality of war up close and personal.
I searched for online footage of the Bosnian genocide and scoured the Internet for balanced media reports and footage, not because I thought I could change anything, or to satisfy morbid curiosity. I was bearing witness for my friend.
We the Victorious
“No matter how much trouble the hero is in, don’t worry, just look at your watch; at the end of the hour he’s going to win.” Chayefsky 1976
The ancient ruins of blood sport arenas, sacrificial temples and amphitheatres dot our globe. Bloodlust is part of our entertainment histories. These days the West fights its wars on foreign soil and continues to perfect military technologies that can destroy the planet in a day. For the West, the line between reality and fiction is blurred and the bloody horror of war is sanitised. Therefore the viewer is spared the full shock that precipitates action and transformation (Chouliaraki 2008). The horror is only partially revealed; made palatable for consumption through privatised networks. Violence and the threat of violence, disaster and the threat of disaster, poverty and the threat of poverty, are hidden beneath the spectacle. The Western psyche is hijacked by well-crafted rhetorical tales of suffering and doom, with the promise that the heroic West will do its utmost to stop disaster from reaching our shores (Borchers, 2013). After all, we’re the victorious West. We consume distant suffering like vampires. Our mainstream news media goes into a competitive frenzy over every latest disaster, lingering on every detail. If a network can’t report anything new, it picks over the carcass and endlessly speculates chat-show style (Thussu, 2003). In Australia we get a well-monitored feast or black-out famine. A gratuitous glut, or nothing at all. Produced as infotainment, it’s filtered, sanitised, sensationalised and de-contextualised, in order to reduce demand on the emotional and cognitive capacities of a western audience (Chouliaraki 2008).
Wanted: Western audiences – dead or alive
“This is not a psychotic episode. This is a cleansing moment of clarity. I’m imbued, Max.” Chayefsky 1976
One of the primary contributory effects of Western media is the distorted perception an audience forms of a villainous non-western other (Kamalipour 2004). I’ve caught myself with the same perception. I exorcise this demon by careful self-observation, by paying close attention to my thoughts and reactions to local and transnational news reports. I ask questions. I don’t assume what I read or hear is truth. Nevertheless I have a dead spot, which is only resurrected by the realisation that I have it, although the alternative isn’t much better as compassion turns to empathy, empathy turns to grief, and grief to despair. The Western cultural perspective is etched into my consciousness. It’s my operating system. I have learned to enjoy a good war epic because actors are playing the roles of the heroes and villains. I can rest in my imaginary place of indifference, and lose myself through the willing suspension of disbelief.
Epilogue: The devil hides in the detail
“We want a prophet, not a curmudgeon…He should do more apocalyptic doom.” Chayefsky 1976
From the banks of the river, a crocodilian humanoid grins from its leafy shadows. The hush-hush of water lapping at the hull, lulls the passengers into a deep sleep. No one on the boat can see the camouflaged reptilian grinning knowingly from the riverbank. And the closer I look the wider it grins. I awake in my bed with the eyes of that creature burned into my memory.
But it’s just a dream set in the dusk of a mental landscape, with me on a long wooden boat, seated on a bench at the stern. When I notice the creature, I turn to see if anyone else can see it, but no. All I find are the glassy faraway stares looking straight ahead. The devil’s in the detail. My fellow passengers are not aware of each other. They’re alone in the crowd, mesmerised by the forward thrust of this damned vessel.
It never stops… her interior monologue on race, racism, blackness, whiteness, appearance, culture and identity. Her search for belonging is at the heart of it though she’s long stopped searching.
To look at her now, you might wonder what the problem is. Why she finds it difficult to move on from her imaginary struggle with an identity once shaped by seasonal processions – when the Sun darkened her skin and changed her ethnicity. Of course, the Sun did no such thing. It only changed the colour of her skin. Not to an ideal golden tan, but a deep muddy brown that made her palms seem pink. With her curly black hair, big dark eyes and full lips, her grandmother used to say ‘sei diventata nera’ (you’ve become black) and sing that song to her. The Italians have a song for it – they have a song for everything. It’s the playful lament of a girl who turns black in the Sun. Not lightly tanned, not golden brown. She becomesNera, Black. So black that she can’t be seen at night unless the moon is full.
We’ve never had an Aussie in here before
She’s pulled out of a queue at Heathrow airport. Her bag and passport are confiscated. She’s interrogated, then held in a special glass room for hours and bundled onto a bus with meshed windows, which takes her to a detention centre on the outskirts of London. Believe it or not, it’s because she has diventata nera.
She lays across a row of stiff grey velveteen seats with her head tucked into her cashmere coat to block the stark fluorescence. Her hand is buried deep in her pocket, clasping her lucky stone as she sits in a fishbowl full of very quiet, dark-skinned people.
A First Nations American boy makes a furious entrance breaking the solemn silence:
…And WHY IS EVERYONE in this room black!? Do you know who my father is?
She sits upright because of it,
I’m not, she says, I’m not black – this is a suntan,
He looks surprised then annoyed,
Lady…You’re black! Ok?
But she insists,
I’m telling you I’m not black, I’m white – it’s a bloody suntan. It’s summer in Australia.
The boy is perplexed,
It’s my southern Italian features, she explains,when I’m tanned, my perceived ethnicity changes.
Well, that’s near enough to what she says, but no one cares about her fucking suntan, least of all the Navajo boy. She experiences a familiar mix of alienation and powerlessness. It’s confusing. It frightens her as she tries to make sense of the situation.
The boy gets out quickly. They must have found out who his father is. And, lucky for her she’s a temporary black person who’s only seasonally privy to the treatment reserved for poor black people getting off planes. The experience gives her a deeper understanding of the world. She mulls over the bullshit printed on the first page of her Australian passport; ‘Let the bearer pass without let or hindrance’ or some such shit. She’s not even going to double check that.
She was born in Crows Nest Sydney. Australia is not her country but neither is the rest of the world.
None of her story checks out. Her host is in Zurich on business, though she manages to get a message through. He sends an envelope of cash, delivered in person by a tall young man in an expensive suit. Immigration finds that as suspicious as her skin colour, and her trendy cap with the red star brooch she bought in New York. It’s a life-changing event. Not the man in the suit. Not the envelope of money. Not the cap with the red star.
We’ve never had an Aussie in here before! Says a cockney cleaner when she asks where the kitchen is. It’s the first time she’s referred to as Aussie.
Never?
Forty-eight hours later she’s back at Heathrow. Pan American Airlines foots the bill for her deportation to Australia. She can’t pick up her things from Hackney or collect her open-return ticket from a Piccadilly Circus travel agency. She’s given a whole row of seats on her own and told the pilot will personally return her passport when the plane is in the air and out of British air space. This is the way it’s done.
By now she’s sure the flights cursed and the plane will crash, because everyone is so damned ugly. All of them look demonic, even the whimpering toddler sucking on his chunk of snotty apple. There’s doom on every face. She asks the hostess to hold her hand at take-off because then has a panic attack thinking they’re all going to die. To say she’s traumatised is understating the event. It reopens an old wound.
She remembers walking to school with her little sister and the relentless verbal assaults. She was so ashamed of herself she hid her face whenever possible under her hair. And it was bewildering that every summer the insults changed from wog to abo, boong or black cunt. Her sister didn’t hide though, she was the fighter,
Ha-ha you fucken’ idiots!… Come here and say that
And little sis’ always got a few good punches in. They didn’t belong. They were on someone else’s land, on someone else’s planet. She still believes this is the case and works hard not to emanate the alien spirit. She would gladly go back to wherever the hell she comes from but obviously that conduit’s closed. She exists somewhere in between, in the spaces she finds herself, as an unwelcome guest on her planet of birth. Her despicable skin and features are her prison, but also her redemption. You can’t see it now, but it’s there grounding her whenever she gets complacent.
Where my mother comes from
The Ottomans laid waste to my mother’s island in the 1500s. Before that, it was the Saracens, the Bourbons, the Normans, the Portuguese, the Moors, the Ostrogoth’s and the Aragonese, who dominate the island in the 1500s after defeating the Ottomans. They claimed the Castello Aragonese, which dates back to the 5th century BC when it was known as the Castrum Gironis – attributed by historians to Girone (Hiero) of Syracuse. He rescued the Cumaeans in a war with the Tyrrhenians in 474 BC. The story is chiselled into the round outer walls of a castle carved from a huge rock, which sits in the island’s bay. The rock was named Insula Minor to distinguish it from Insula Major – the island of Ischia – a complex volcano that rumbles from time to time. You can wade to the rock from the island at low tide.
Our family descends from the original inhabitants who were absorbed by a growing population in the Middle Ages. The land is still there, on the peak of the island in Serrara Fontana. I imagine it was the safest place to live, with its 360-degree view of the sea from an ancient tower. Those at the top are always last to fall in battle, and the remnant still stands. There are endless assaults on the island by pirates of all colours, between occupations. Ischian legends tell the heroic stories of brave canonised martyrs and the miraculous victories of the saints. For thousands of years, marauders kill the men and fuck the women. My DNA represents thousands of years of rape and murder.
In the 1700s, Lord Nelson orders the execution of my rebel paisan. The British must have been invading Australia around the same time.
My mother is green-eyed and freckled, but my grandparents had a rainbow brood. It’s called atavism, more commonly known as the ‘throw-back’. Aunty Angela looks Moorish, while Uncle Charlie looks like a Scottish pirate. The Tyrrhenian Sea has a long and bloody history, with its smattering of volcanic islands situated in an ancient maritime thoroughfare. The islands were missing from most contemporary maps, which turned out to be a good thing because WWII passed right over Ischia. My mother remembers the sunset blackout rule and the sudden adult hush when children entered a room. It isn’t right for children to think about war. Ischia is one of the few European communities where the children were not aware of WWII, which is astonishing because Ischia is only 30 km from Naples by boat.
Warm and safe in their beds at night, they heard muffled radio broadcasts; the occasional hum of planes overhead, and faint distant booms they thought was thunder.
The stone
Naples smells like rotting garbage in summer, and the underground is stifling.
The ferry leaves from Porto di Napoli at sunrise and stops at Capri, Procida, then Ischia, which shines like a jewel in the distance.
An island sunlit gold in sea mist
This is the last thing her mother saw
Awe becomes sorrow
Familiar, unstoppable
She sobs and a tourist asks, Ok? Ok?
Oh, Mama, it’s so beautiful
The ferry moors at Ischia Porto
She walks uphill with her stone in pocket, to find a place to stay
Senti – my mother was born here…
Who are your genitori?
Ettore e’ Ida Trofa…
NO! Trofa!? Who is your mother?
Tee-Tee…
TEE-TEE!?
The small hotel keeper swoons and shakes his hands in prayer
But we went to school together when we were this high!I sat behind her – I used to dip her plaits in the inkpotMa-ma-meee, she beat me senseless…she fought all the boys She was the brightest in the classThe best at everything!Your mother liked to swim right out to the rock She was the most beautiful girl on the island… Oh yes!
She walks and walks, wrapped in the silk of a Tyrrhenian breeze,
Did my mother run here, ride there, swim in that bay, climb that tree? Walk to school down this cobbled lane past ancient ruins and wild violets? Play under these grapevines? Sit under those fig trees by her sapphire sea?
She eats pizza and gelato, drinks coffee and sketches. She sits on the beach until sunset then walks the vertical slope and falls into deep sleep and vivid dreams with the windows open. Her mother’s right – there are no mosquitoes here. In the mornings, she eats polenta and figs. She could eat this forever.
One morning she wakes up and reaches for her stone. She searches every pocket, turns everything inside out and upside down but it isn’t there. She has to find her stone. She retraces her steps. Returns to every shop, every laneway, every café, even searches the beach sifting through sand. She can’t sleep.
It’s a fucking stone
At three am, she stops staring at the ceiling and goes looking for the stone, taking her torch. A black sea sighs to the shore, below a steep and narrow road.
She’s crying for a stone
Then back up the vertical road exhausted, hating herself. Not for losing the stone but for loving it. She stops under a street lamp and says it aloud,
IT’S JUST A STONE
At that moment she hears a gentle tapping on the ground, looks down and sees the stone, between her feet. She heard it drop – a gentle rattle – not from a great height but placed, enough to make a sound but not so hard it might shatter. A warm gust circles her too many times for a breeze. Stone in hand, she laughs like a child. Her spirit lifts and soars to the sky. And she goes to bed and laughs herself to sleep.
At eight am, she wakes to a ruckus at the door, and a tribe of cousins bum-rush the room. The shopkeeper told the butcher told the hairdresser told her cousin,
Tee-Tee’s daughter is staying at Erasmo’s!
Big news, big fuss! She’s a long-lost relative. She can’t find the words, but their blood understands. They stroke her head and kiss her face, one after another. Laughing, crying, talking at once, asking about her mother, crying for her grandmother, thanking God she came and packing her things without asking.
She’ll stay with them on her ancestral land in Serrara Fontana.
They’ll feed her family secrets, and she’ll sit in the room where her mother was born.
It’s perched on a cliff overlooking the sea, and this night the place was alive with the raps and rattles of a fierce seaborne wind. Her woeful song wailed through every gap and crevice, a crescendo of vowels fading to resolute moans that lingered in loops and climbed to spirited howls.
I slid from the oversized bed with the cotton sheets and a wafer thin throw that offered little insulation, and wrenched at the great carved doors of the built-in robes, but they were empty. No blanket, no doona in sight, just two small neatly folded bath towels. I wrapped myself in the flimsy throw and crept into the hall, now filled with the sob of that wintery gale. Chamber doors rattled. I imagined thick woolly blankets and feathery quilts stashed somewhere beyond them. The hall was lit with dim lamps. No light peeked from under the doors and no faint voices murmured. There were no signs of life at all and my catholic civility kept me from knocking hard enough to rouse the occupants.
‘Tap-tap-tap’, I could barely hear my feeble attempts over the wails and whistles. ‘Tap-tap-tap’, I did not succeed in waking a single soul and could not bring myself to knock any louder. A bit like Rose Kennedy who choked to death on a chicken bone rather than cough at the dinner table. ‘Tap-tap-tap’ I went but no, nothing. I tiptoed back to my room now chilled as a tomb, my feet numb with cold and the sheets so icy and stiff I could hardly bear to touch them.
Defeated, I went to my luggage and put on every item of clothing. My black tights, my caramel jodhpurs, two cream singlets, my brown angora jumper, and my Prussian blue cashmere coat, which I tugged on with difficulty. Then I pulled down my bottle green beanie, put on two pairs of socks, wrapped my neck in my tartan scarf and bundled back to bed thus cocooned, if not a little constricted.
I awoke sweating to a tap-tap-tap at the door, ’Good morning sweetheart!’
It was the lady of the manor in her green velvet robe, a fountain of warmth cascading from her lips. She held a silver tray of toast, jam and tea and set it on a small table by the bay window before casting open the heavy drapes and filling the room with wintery light.
‘Oh no’, she said, ‘Darling! You’re wearing all your clothes? Fuck, I forgot to put the bloody quilt back after airing! Oh but my dear … why didn’t you wake me?’
‘He was sucking your dick, and you tried to ignore the kiddy porn he had pinned to the walls… then out of the blue, you wrapped the phone cord around his neck and throttled him to within an inch of his life. Then we took all his money’
He remembered looking down his arms into the monster’s eyes. Bloodshot. Bulging in their sockets. The shock-turned-terror as he struggled to breath, tearing at the cord, ripping at his own throat. He remembered how right it felt as he pushed him to the floor and tightened the cord until the old man’s eyes rolled up. When Jack let go I was disappointed.
He lived. Lived because Jack let him live, but it would always remain Jack’s one regret. He was on the floor still gasping like a fish out of water when Jack pulled up his jeans and buckled his belt. Beautiful Jack Junior with his perfect face and form, and his dark seraphinite gaze.
Jack got a job as a dog walker after that, for an affluent New York lady, walking her Shih-tzus and Toy Poodles in Central Park, getting big tips for a flirt and a social visit. God, the stories he told made me laugh and he wasn’t kind about it. She used to get him to bend her over the couch for some extra income. He’d close his eyes and think of something else to finish the job. It paid the rent.
Maybe it’s tragic, is it though? We came to accept it. Our lives entangled like fine gold chains forgotten in a drawer. We’d hook up for a while until we reached a cold hard moment that threatened to shatter our secret places and scatter the contents for all to see.
We surrendered to fate with grace,
‘Ok. See you later’
‘Ok. Love you’
‘Love you too’ I hated it but always felt relief. The beast in my head rattling at the bars would settle, until a thin etheric thread held us in place somewhere in the back of my mind, and anchored him to my heart.
What I like to remember is the way we sat around naked without a hint of lust, eating apples and grapes, listening to music and telling scary stories. How we dreamed each other’s dreams and spoke without speaking. We were more like siblings than lovers. He’d bring me vintage trinkets to watch my eyes light up. He had no interest in them himself but always had them there for me. I lost them all.
I remember a pair of little copper crowns with red velvet backing. I sewed them on to a coat that someone stole. All is dust. He was devastated when I gave birth to someone else’s baby. I didn’t know it would do that, I didn’t realise. I missed all the signs, and though my heart reached out for him, I protected my child from something intangible, not a physical danger but a psychic influence. Danger by osmosis.
Jack wasn’t someone you could fuck with. If he didn’t get you on the spot he’d wait. He’d plan his revenge in secret and in great detail, they never saw it coming. I’d hear about it later. I’d hear about an unfortunate accident that befell an enemy, or of a terrible beating by an unknown assailant in black and a balaclava. Shit, I hope he doesn’t recognise himself in this story.
We were masters of secrecy. We left no trails.
A photo album
I was staying at Jack’s place one weekend when he left for a job. We’d been back from New York for two years by then. I’d just done an all-day house call with a corporate lawyer in Darling Point, a strange little man who did offshore deals with China over the phone, wearing rubber undies and a silk kimono. It was a Friday afternoon and I was bored so I thought I’d surprise him and clean the place. I played some music, smoked a few joints and started cleaning the kitchen, it was a mess. His bedroom was neat, he was very fussy about his bedroom, but I ran the vacuum cleaner through it anyway. I hit something under his bed, a metal toolbox with a padlock. It was one of those old red enamelled types. I remembered seeing keys in the kitchen drawer. I felt bad but the curiosity was overwhelming and one of the keys fit. When I jiggled the lock I felt slight remorse and probably should’ve closed it right there but I didn’t. What I found was an album full of Polaroids, of naked men in complex pornographic poses. I laughed at first. Why would he lock it away? It wasn’t like I cared about his sexual exploits. Then I looked closer.
‘Oh shit. Are they fucking dead?’ I turned page after page after page and looked real close for ligature marks or visible injuries. There was no blood, they weren’t blue, but then I couldn’t see their throats because of the weird angles. Some of them were tied into place. My heart was pounding by then, beating like a drum in my ears. Was JJ a fucking serial killer?
A mournful siren wailed in the distance like a dead boy’s mother. I slapped the book shut, put it back in the box and locked it. I wiped off my fingerprints with a Kleenex and pushed it back under, deep into the dark place. He’d be home soon.
*
‘Babe…’ he says, ‘You’ve cleaned the place.’ He hid his shock with a twitch and a kiss on my forehead. He was almost believable, ‘Find anything interesting?’
‘Interesting? I said with a puzzled tone, then followed quickly with, ‘You hungry?’ I was convincing, oh yeah I’m good. He looked into my eyes and I didn’t flinch. Satisfied, he took a shower. I called out I was ordering takeaway,
‘What do you feel like babe?’
‘Whatever sweetie, whatever, there’s a menu on the fridge from that Italian place.’
He went to his room and closed the door. I heard the faint click of the lock, unusual for Jack. I heard him shuffling stuff around so I went up to the door and listened until the doorbell rang. When I answered the door I got deja vu. The delivery guy looked familiar. I wondered if he was in Jack’s album as I passed the money, then he says,
‘Bon appetit! Say hi to Jack for me.’
It was a question I would come to ask about a lot of people. I imagined him with his legs up in the air, and with something up his arse,
‘Ok!’ I said. I wanted to believe he was in that album. I wanted to believe those men were alive, that it was a kinky consensual game, that their eyes were closed because they were enjoying themselves. But I just couldn’t get the possibility they were dead out of my mind.
*
We ate our lasagna with a bottle of 1982 Bordeaux Merlot, a gift from a client. He had a whole case of the stuff. I remember there wasn’t much conversation but Jack was silent and secretive by nature, even on coke. After dinner, we smoked weed and went for a ride on his green Kawasaki GPZ Ninja 900. We went to La Perouse where he rode too fast and blew everything out of my mind. He loved that bike. The rest of the night was cosy. We cuddled, watched videos, and smoked so much weed that my jaw hurt laughing at my own stories. But there was a vibe – I think he suspected something. I wasn’t sure because Jack was as good at pretending as me.
We got up early Saturday and went for a ride down the south coast stopping for lunch and a game of pool at a pub in Scarborough. He was in a great mood, enjoying the attention he attracted for a change. He was so striking that people either stared from a distance or hovered around him like moths. Some people couldn’t get past his appearance and he tortured them for it. I was on my best behaviour but my obsession with the album made it hard to focus on our scant conversations. I wondered if he noticed. On the way back from Scarborough, we made a quick stop to our local dealer. Jack was more affectionate than usual. Smack always did that with us. We didn’t do sex much. I think we found it psychically painful, unbearable at times – we avoided it. There was an intensity that bordered on rage and it scared me. It was something we never understood. We’d fuck on hammer though, swaddled in the warmth, slowing to a stop in the middle of it, living statues in space, the act impossibly frozen in time, only to start up again an hour later as if we hadn’t stopped at all. But it was a drug we’d use only occasionally, when Jack’s vanity allowed. People look so fucking ugly on that shit.
It was a luxurious high punctuated by trips to the toilet bowl for projectile vomits. Lucky we weren’t shooting it. He passed out after a few more pipes, fell still with his arms around me, one hooked around my neck and the other around my waist. It took some maneuvering to extricate myself so I could go sleep in the spare room.
We spent most of Sunday floating around his apartment like a couple of broken butterflies. I woke up around 11 am because Jack was practicing Ain’t No Sunshine on his saxophone in the bathroom. He liked the acoustics in there. He was getting better at it but the flat notes were a killer.
I remember when he got that saxophone. We were kids hanging out at a nameless nightclub on Kellet Street Kings Cross. I think we all called it Kellet Street. Everyone knew where you meant. It’s a place few admit existed, frequented entirely by pedophiles, hebephiles and under-aged hookers because it was free entry for anyone under 18. Hazel, God rest his sleazy soul, managed the place – though not a kiddy-fiddler himself. He was just a shady old businessman who was kind to us sometimes. He gave Jack his saxophone and he hasn’t stopped playing it since.
You wouldn’t believe who went to that club. Important men. Judges, detectives, celebrities, a priest, all kinds. They had their private entrance and the cops were paid to turn a blind eye. Most of the kids had histories plagued by despair, abuse and neglect. Not Jack Junior though, he came from a good Christian rural family. I suppose he was naturally drawn to the dark side. He was born that way, as people sometimes are. And Jack explored his sexuality with gusto, figuring out if he was gay or straight while making a living too. I think we bonded over that. We’d been led to believe we had to be one or the other. Our pursuit for self-discovery was an adventure, but the need to survive took us to dark places. Ok. Horrific places. Bad things happen to people and we weren’t angels. I’ve lost count of the dirty old men left beaten in laneways, bedrooms and on lounge room floors by broken forgotten children, and I know something awful happened to Jack back then.
One summer, just before dawn, he crawled into bed shaking. We rented an apartment above a laundry in Kings Cross, using fake ID’s to make us legal. He fell asleep with his teeth chattering and clung so tightly it was suffocating. I uncoiled him like a snake. I woke up later alone and found blood on the sheets. He was in the bath off his face, with a split lip and blue-black bruises on his wrists and ankles. The irony of my working name, the name Jack chose, wasn’t lost on me. Whenever Jack fell down and broke his crown, I came tumbling after.
‘What the fuck happened?’ No answer. ‘Jack?’
He blew a long stream of smoke and popped a few smoke rings, his dark eyes looking straight through me.
‘Jack? Talk to me.’ The hint of a sneer rose in the corner of his mouth. He didn’t want to talk about it and I never asked again.
A bottle of wine and some pills
By Sunday night we were still pretty smashed. Jack was called out on a job and he cruised out the door without a care in the world. I went straight to the kitchen to grab the keys but they weren’t in the drawer. I needed a second look at that album. I wanted to figure things out. How I felt. How I was supposed to feel. I made a strong black tea just the way I like it but we’d run out of honey so I rummaged through the cupboards looking for something sweet, some sugar, anything. I found a sugar bowl with a lid but it was filled with pills not sugar. They were Rohypnol, a tasteless, wickedly effective sedative. We called them Rowies, pronounced ‘roh-eez’.
Why did Jack keep loose Rohypnol in a sugar bowl? It was right at the back of the pantry up high, where he thought I couldn’t reach. I pocketed a couple. I also found a gun, a pistol, wrapped in a tea towel and a loaded magazine. It was a semi-automatic, not unlike a Beretta but with Arabic lettering on the side. I was careful to make sure it was wrapped exactly as I found it and put back in the same spot. I didn’t know what it all meant or why he had a gun, but one thing was certain, I didn’t know Jack as well as I thought. I wondered about the delivery guy again. I wasn’t sure he was one the guys in the album, but I needed to know. I had to have another look.
*
I waited for Jack to get back and reheated leftover lasagna. I looked into his dark green eyes across the table and wondered what the fuck he’d become. He caught me staring, and just then he smiled and brushed the hair out of my face like I was a child.
‘Lasagna ok?’
He said it was good … did I like it? Yeah I said, it was good but needed some cheese and got up to get the Parmesan.
‘I’ll grab the wine too babe’
In the kitchen, I crushed a Rohypnol and put it in his wine. It was a spontaneous thing. I refilled his glass twice before it reached the bottom to conceal any sediment. I wondered how fast it would take to knock Jack out. He was a little wonky by the end of dinner. I asked if he was ok, told him he looked tired. He said he was going to lie down on the couch for a bit and almost tripped over the coffee table.
*
‘Jack? Jack?’ No answer. Just deep slow breathing. I shook him gently. Still nothing. I went to his room and reached under the bed. The toolbox was gone… and his closet was locked.
I’m watched him sleep. Listened to the rise and fall of his breath and played with his hair, twirling his earring. I positioned his arms behind his head and played with him like a doll – never seen him so vulnerable. He was dead weight but I pulled his t-shirt off and repositioned his arms. He grumbled, groaned a bit and tried to open one eye, which was really fucking funny. When I tried to pull off his jeans, they could have been glued on. I had to work my hand into his front pocket to get the key. Elated, I unlocked his closet and used a stool to search up high for the box. It was pushed right back behind his camping gear next to a clear plastic zip-locked bag of trinkets and his Kodak Polaroid camera. When I pulled them down, the toolbox hit the carpet with a huge clang. I froze for a second then opened the box and took out the album, but it was strange, because by then I wasn’t interested in it anymore. I put it aside. Instead, I played with the bag of mysterious shiny interesting things, which took on a dark new meaning for me.
*
I lit a joint and put it in the corner of JJ’s mouth for safekeeping. After I arranged the knick-knacks on his head, his chest, his legs, everywhere, I took a photo. I positioned the album under his right hand, which was resting on his cock, and took another photo. I tried to take more but the camera ran out of film, so I brushed the trinkets back into the bag but kept a tiny gold heart locket. I locked the album back in the box and put everything back in its place in the closet. Then I pushed the keys back into his pocket, slipped the polaroids I took of him under the couch and climbed on top of him. It was so romantic. Jack unconscious, warm and helpless beneath me.
‘She lights a cigarette she shouldn’t smoke. It gets stuck to her lip and rips a bit of skin off. Cloudy snapshots of last night’s dreams hover through her mind, but never quite materialise. She wants to remember but knows it brings no comfort, only confirmation of the dark places ahead. Yet another man hacks and spits as he passes her window. She takes it personally. It’s disgusting.
Here comes the black dog stalking. The shadow poised above her head, the salivated drip, a familiar scent of shit, and the effortless drift into oblivion where even sorrow flees…’
‘…Why don’t we just enjoy the birds today ey?’ I say, but the old fart ignores me and continues,
‘Anyway’, he drawls, like he’s been rudely interrupted, ‘She drives to the river with a bottle of booze and a length of rope. We’re entering the dead zone, where she hangs from a tree someone else planted. Suspended in time and space. Numbed, but fully aware of her miserable state. Alone with the accuser, her long-time companion, but never her counterpart. She surrenders to a woeful quiescence as maggoty thoughts burrow deep into the arsehole of her soul…’
‘Arsehole of her soul?… You must be fucking kidding mate’ I say. The professor laughs and continues,
’Eat shit you filthy demiurge she says, this is all your fault, if I die you die too. And the demiurge replies, There’ll be no dying today! Not today my daughter, my wizened little one, forged from the eons with a line you can follow all the way to a sunburst and further. And why stop there? You are after all a child of chaos. Your most distant ancestor is an explosion, whose bits have not stop spinning. Relax. Take your time. It ends slowly with a whimper. You know the man was right. REJOICE!’ he shouts, jerking his arms skywards, and startling the Indian Mynas that are fighting over half a ham sandwich he’s thrown to the ground.
‘You’re an arrow of time. The passage of conscious matter through space, observing itself and its environment. What more do you fucking want? She fights her mental torpor, and although she sulks she has to admit she’s being ungrateful. Then the demiurge adds, And the underlying principle of matter is, and always has been, the requisite descent of organised matter into chaos and disorder. See for yourself, peer through the veil. She looks through the mist and into the abyss. She could not deny it. The shadow was right, why fear it. Why fear how it is. So the rope loosens, the fog lifts, she hears the birds that twitter. Fuck it she says, if the birds can rise automatically each day until they don’t, so can I’
‘Oh good, she lives happily ever after then’ I say.
‘God No!’ the old rascal replies. ‘She eventually hangs herself. She drinks her bottle of expensive scotch under a tree by the river and leans forward, drunk as a skunk, with one end of a rope tied to a branch and the other end ‘round her neck. Leans forward. Can’t feel a thing. Just passes out and can’t lean back again. A passing kayaker finds her at 5 am next morning. She looks like a mannequin at first, so still and pale that the colour of her skin bleeds into the grey of her tracksuit.’
‘That’s horrible’ I murmur but loud enough to hear.
‘Not for her though, she didn’t feel a thing. It is said she’s still there on the river. Still sitting under the tree with the full moon shining. String theory see. Still drinking expensive scotch’, and he shakes his head up and down and gives me a cheeky wink.
‘What made her do it?’
‘It was the fatal combination of chronic despair and a moment of courage’
“The artist’s task is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. If artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found.” – Terence McKenna
“To whom shall I hire myself out?
What beast must I adore?
What holy image is attacked?
What hearts must I break?
What lie must I maintain?
In what blood tread?”
– Rimbaud
………………………………………………..
City of Bones.
Silent in the caves and caverns,
sleeping long forgotten,
tucked deep under steel and concrete,
lay my bones, my cold and dry ancestral bones.
I know my bones
calling from undocumented histories.
And when bones come up as they do,
an eternity of souls sigh, yeah they never stop whispering.
Offering their secrets to me,
trapped somewhere inbetween,
where the symbol meets substance and ideas seed potential.
If I squint, I can see the tellers of the obvious,
though my eyes are imitations with limitations,
until I fly into my eternal night,
spinning colours unimagined, telling stories never heard
with words that will change the atmosphere.
It’s cold in here but the apprehension’s lovely
watching and waiting,
catching a glimpse of what precedes the manifested.
Their souls take shape in trees and clouds
these ancient ones.
I’m just a passing cloud that exists in dissipation with the wind.
When I’m very still I remember myself
Laid to rest in the before and after of a story that never stops.
It never stops,
falling from dumb lips,
striving to be heard
the dead love to talk.
They’re convincing too but I’m barely real.
A glitch, a spark, a twitch.
A perfectly faulty entity
the gods know me well.
Omnipresent as dust,
they write secrets in my blood –
It’s caked on the tips of their fingers,
and fills small spaces.
And here are my bones,
Still and silent as the end of chaos.
……………………………………………….
Politics, media and the unfettered free market economy
We don’t mix God with politics
“Bullshit is all the reasons we give for living. If we can’t think up reasons of our own, we always have the God bullshit.” Chayefsky 1976
While architecture, music, fine arts and literature owe much to religious inspiration and patronage, average interpretations of religion are at best fluffy, delusional and mediocre and at worst elitist, despotic and depraved. Politics is by nature an extension of religion but without God. We ‘don’t do God’ in Australian politics (Jensen 2016). However, the similarity between conservative politics and religion is undeniable and is particularly the case with neoliberal driven politics. It has its own catechisms in accordance with an exalted code of conduct, has universal ambitions, is buoyed by a legal system, which has trampled the meek and the vulnerable and directs its benefits almost exclusively toward a powerful elite. It even has a prophet in Friedrich Von Hayek and its church is the The Mont Pelerin Society (Ponniah 2012) This demiurge passes control of its pilfered resources to its undeserving progeny in an act of contemptuous nepotism. Australian politics is presently in a death-grip with Mammon, the lord of economics, king of all wars and hence the most prolific serial killer of all time. The total deaths in recorded history now number the hundreds of millions (White 2014).
Humanity’s social movements may originate from well-intentioned philosophies but they have a knack of morphing into messy, complex political counterfeits.
Politics walks a fine line between the truth and bullshit.
Mass media follows the corporate imperative
“We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale.” Chayefsky 1976
There is significant mainstream confusion, deliberate or otherwise, surrounding definitions of democracy in capitalist societies. Democratic intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky are relentlessly misrepresented in their defense of social democratic ideology, despite his commitment to raise the lamp and shine a light into the darkness that is not ahead of us, but in the here and now. Some Western journalists have portrayed social democracy as a form of either socialism or communism, adding to the confusion within Western ideological and political debates. If a political ideology is open to interpretation then political ideologies are like godless extensions of religious dogma, and in a capitalist free-market state, the definition of a political ideology is limited to the parameters of the dominant economic forces that influence government policy making. These economic forces navigate corporate mass media, influencing and manipulating public opinion to the benefit of the state, the free market and its own neoliberal economic agendas. Mass media follows corporate imperatives, filtered to assure conformity to the interests and needs of an elite private sector. Media networks that do not tow the line are pushed aside in favour of those who support the corporate ‘social purpose’ (Chomsky 1990). Transnational media operates within the limits of a market-driven satellite news oligopoly. The spectacle of distant violence and suffering sells, hence it is prioritised and produced to suit the demands and tastes of a Western audience while serving largely shadowy private interests (Chouliaraki 2008).
The Twin towers & disaster capitalism
“I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad” Chayefsky 1976
Since the events of September 11 2001, political violence has touched every Western nation to some degree. Aired and viewed in real time on our screens and portable devices, 9/11 was mediated, analysed and officially concluded, despite valid questions from professional observers, who have raised their concerns about the physical events of 9/11 (Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth 2016). Humanity has been collectively traumatised by a series of shocks, imparted with precision by transnational media (Chouliaraki 2008). Between shocks, we return to our daily lives, our families, our careers and our pursuits as if nothing has changed. We ask few questions and receive fewer answers, while obediently following the edicts of our governments that are being hijacked by a devolving neoliberal ideology. Neoliberalism seeks nothing less than the transfer of all public goods and services to the private sector, undermining the significant social and economic achievements of capitalist societies like Australia (Chomsky 2015). The post 9/11 period accelerated the global spread of neoliberal principles, using Naomi Klein’s term; disaster capitalism with resistance viewed as an obstruction to progress (Klein 2007). Symbolically our electricity (power) is all but privatised and we are expected to buy into the neoliberal free-market philosophy, complacently entrusting our health services, our educational institutions and our social security into the hands of a corporate sector, which packages its booty with slick advertising campaigns and media propaganda. Western governments continue to play the terrorist card as a political ace. It is a transparent system, yet populations dutifully adopt robotic conformity, wearing corporatocracy like a snug suit because they cannot see the details.
Le cirque de 9/11
“You’re never going to get any truth from us. We’ll tell you anything you want to hear; we lie like hell” Chayefsky 1976
Hiram Johnson said in 1917 that the first casualty in war is truth (Bagdikian 2004). Rumours of war cause social, hence economic panic and a proliferation of propaganda, at a time when people need accurate and balanced information, but is this what governments and media deliver? The ‘War on Drugs’ rolled out the red carpet for the War on Terror, which has since graduated to the Global War on Terror (GWOT). In what amounts to a class war, with the global rich lording it over the global poor, one has to take pause at the power of these terminologies and of the role that mass media plays as vehicles for western propaganda. (Nohrstedt & Ottosen 2008) This kind of rhetoric was a bit of a joke when it first appeared; nevertheless it has become embedded in the mainstream political vernacular.
After the events of September 11 the western world was rocked by an event rarely experienced in a western nation; all of us witnessed the epic drama unfold live via satellite. We may never know the whole truth behind this event however western governments have been riding the wave of an emerging fear culture ever since. I.F. Stone once explained to a group of ‘green’ journalists, that when covering politics the first thing to consider is that all governments lie (Bagdikian 2004). I remember experiencing an instinctive distrust during 9/11 media coverage. it hit me in my stomach – knowing that this would be used as the motivation for an invasion of Iraq. It was inevitable and everyone knew it. Media networks covered 9/11 like a bizarre sports event, repeating segments over and over to an international western audience that was dumb struck, horrified, yet too afraid to switch off their televisions. It was reality TV at its finest and marked the global shift from ‘risk society to threat society’ (Nohrstedt & Ottosen 2008). Rather than a breaking news event, it was an historical narrative complete with denunciative moral agency and promises of revenge (Chouliaraki 2008). The US Government had the whole world’s attention and they worked it like a circus, with its media ringmasters directing our gaze to wherever it was required.
The Bin Laden/ Hussein adjustment & Weapons of Mass Deception
“You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here.” Chayefsky 1976
I cannot erase from my mind the sudden rhetorical switch from Osama Bin Laden to Saddam Hussein in the immediate post 9/11 period. I kept bringing this up in conversation and alarmingly no one seemed to fully grasp the implications. I understand that people were in shock and have continued to be exposed to successive shocks ever since, so this glaring inconsistency has been lost in the din, forgotten. Osama Bin Laden was conveniently dropped from the media landscape and Hussein was spliced in as his understudy and no one talked about it much. Bush’s ‘Axis of Evil’ had shifted the public attention from one enemy to another, as documented in global news trends covering the pre and post 9/11 period. As the US and her allies prepared the public for war, leaders simply maneuvered their rhetoric through the media (Althaus & Largio 2004).
I had a choice; I could have tuned out and taken solace in my instincts. Nothing would sneak up on me. I could face reality, at the very least with resignation, yet I looked back at Medusa and turned myself to stone. We marched against the invasion of Iraq but Howard had ignored us, enamoured as he was of George W. who was juicing him up for the coming Free Trade Agreement. Murdoch’s journalists had dutifully underplayed the numbers but I was there. The justification for war was sealed a long time before we’d reached the streets and I think we knew that.
There was no self-critical reflection by journalists when it emerged that there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. The media had inadvertently become Weapons of Mass Deception (Nohrstedt & Ottosen 2008), Hussein was conveniently hung and that was that.
Symbolic annihilation of the non-western ‘other’
“There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars” Chayefsky 1976
The non-Western other is only ‘real’ in the social and political sense, while they are being discussed. The moment they are dropped from media discourse they cease to exist. This is the forward thrust of political narcissism, and a convenient distraction from the reality of war, which has stalked Middle Eastern oil fields like the Many-Faced God and his faceless assassins (Game of Thrones, 2016). Western powers can invade the villainous Orient without contrition and often with impunity under the banner of democracy. They can beam these heroic efforts live via satellite into the amphitheatre of western televisions and we can further access the horror through the Internet on multiple devices 24/7. We rely on easy access to news media to assure us that the threat is contained. The heroes and defenders of western democracy have always been our American heroes, who protect us from the perils of the non-western other. We can go to sleep safely knowing that all is well as long as our American protector is out there, stationed in the vast Australian desert, carefully tending its garden of missiles.
The people, distracted, will always be divided
“I want you to go to the window, open it, stick your head out and yell: “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.” Chayefsky 1976
Social media is both an opportunity to unite and a labyrinth of distraction. Castells bubbles with optimism about the potential of social media and its networks for social change, and for shaping a brave new 21st century (Castells 2015). As a public space we are still awestruck by the grandeur of the Internet and its transnational social media networks, however from where I’m standing, favour increasingly leans toward the corporate interests of the companies that own them and which profile each user as a consumer and political punter. It is time to realise that Facebook and Google have direct access to enormous amounts of data, akin to having a crystal ball that can predict the future. Predictive analytics (Software and Solutions 2016) reveals collective trends across social, political and economic spectrums. Anyone who has the money and power to access or ‘mine’ that data, can prepare well in advance to stem the flow of an inconvenient social movement, diverting attention, manipulating opinion, cutting it off at the pass. It remains to be seen what kind of social change the World Wide Web will enable, before I stop feeling like a fat juicy fly.
Australia has a complacent, manageable population with a vulnerable indigenous community. Most of us are migrants or descendants of migrants, with either colonial or post-war histories and the majority of us are quite disinterested in politics – beyond the few weeks that constitute an election and the promises that come with this cyclical ritual. However we have a compulsory voting system with 78% enrolled and 93 % of those voted in the 2013 election (IDEA 2016). The rest of the time we are disengaged from the political process and it’s starting to show. The rise of armchair activism aka ‘Clicktivism’ is the telltale sign of a half-baked democracy. More people claim to know that the emperor is stark naked yet only a fraction turn up at public protests and less if it’s raining. One could be forgiven for the conclusion that we have fallen into the clutches of a sociopathic corporate ruling class (Chomsky 2001). In Australia ‘Democracy’ can still parade the streets though only after applying for permission to protest. The naked emperor however has been pirouetting openly for quite a while.
Bearing witness
“Indifferent to suffering; insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer” Chayefsky 1976
I formed a close friendship with a Bosnian refugee in my neighbourhood, who now owns his own inner city home and a thriving business. He arrived in Australia with nothing after losing half of his family in a war that still leaves us with a multitude of unanswered questions. Why did UN peacekeepers disarm the Bosnians, put them all in one place and then leave them to be massacred? World governments knew it was happening, there had been plenty of reports coming out of Bosnia through embedded Western journalists, yet no one saved them (Crossette 1999).
As my friend explained, they waited – but no one came. When his 21-year-old cousin was raped, mortally stabbed and left to die in the boot of her car, they could not help her because snipers took aim at anyone who tried. The family began covert preparations to move their remaining young members to Italy. The eventual autopsy showed that she had lived for days after the attack, dying just metres from her family in the boot of her car. It is one story among thousands, however it is my dear friend’s story, which brought the reality of war up close and personal.
I searched for online footage of the Bosnian genocide and scoured the Internet for balanced media reports and footage, not because I thought I could change anything or to satisfy morbid curiosity. I was bearing witness for my friend.
We the Victorious
“No matter how much trouble the hero is in, don’t worry, just look at your watch; at the end of the hour he’s going to win.” Chayefsky 1976
The ancient ruins of public blood sport arenas, sacrificial temples and amphitheatres dot the globe. Bloodlust is part of our history, only now the West fights its wars on foreign soil and has military technologies that can destroy the planet in a day. For the West, the line between reality and fiction is blurred, the bloody reality of war is sanitised; therefore we are spared the full shock of war that would precipitate action or transformation (Chouliaraki 2008). The horror is only partially revealed, made palatable for our consumption through largely privatised news networks. Violence and the threat of violence, disaster and the threat of disaster, poverty and the threat of poverty – the reality is hidden beneath the spectacle. The Western psyche has been high-jacked by well crafted rhetorical tales of suffering and doom, with the promise that the heroic West will do its utmost to stop it from reaching our shores (Borchers, 2013) after all we are the victorious West. We consume distant suffering like vampires while the media goes into a competitive frenzy over the latest disaster, lingering over every detail. If it cannot report anything new it will pick over the bloodless carcass and endlessly speculate, chat-show style (Thussu, 2003). In Australia we get a well-managed feast or famine. Produced as infotainment, it is sanitised, sensationalised and de-contextualised to reduce demand on the emotional and cognitive capacities of a western audience (Chouliaraki 2008), or we get nothing at all.
Wanted: Western audiences – dead or alive
“This is not a psychotic episode. This is a cleansing moment of clarity. I’m imbued, Max.” Chayefsky 1976
One of the primary contributory effects of Western media is the distorted perception the audience forms of a villainous non-western ‘other’ (Kamalipour 2004) and I do occasionally catch myself in fear. I exorcise this demon by carefully observing my reactions to both local and transnational news reports. Nevertheless, I have a dead zone, which can only be resurrected by the realization that I have it, though the alternative is not much better, as compassion turns to empathy and empathy turns to grief. The Western cultural perspective is etched into my consciousness. It is my operating system.
While I have learned to enjoy a good war epic, it is because actors are playing the roles of heroes and villains that I can rest in that imaginary place of indifference and lose myself in the willing suspension of disbelief.
Epilogue: The devil hides in the detail
“We want a prophet, not a curmudgeon…He should do more apocalyptic doom.” Chayefsky 1976
From the banks of the river, a crocodilian humanoid grinned from its leafy shadows. The hush of water, lapping at the hull had lulled the other passengers into a deep sleep. No one on the boat saw the well-camouflaged reptilian grinning knowingly from the riverbanks. And the closer I looked the wider it grinned.
I woke up with the eyes of that creature imprinted in my memory. It was just a dream, set in the dusk of a mental landscape, with me on a long wooden boat, seated on a bench at the stern. When I noticed the creature, I turned to see if anyone else could see it, but all I saw were glassy, faraway stares looking straight ahead. ‘The devil is in the detail’ is my reliable interpretation. My fellow passengers weren’t even aware of each other – they were alone in the crowd, mesmerized by the forward movement of that damned vessel.
…………………………………………………………
Surveillance in the Garden of Eden
Foreword
This opinion piece looks at key interactions between surveillance, the Internet, mass media and neoliberalism – through a mythological lens. It has a special kind of relevance today, with the Sentient World Simulation program well underway and the Internet of Things.
The principles, structures and strategies of neoliberal capitalism work together deliberately and opportunistically, for the goal of global, political and economic supremacy – the few ruling the many. However in order for that to occur the masses must be duped into agreement.
This essay looks at surveillance and the manipulation of consent as an evolving phenomenon, raising existential questions about freedom, authenticity and meaning, while reflecting on the allegorical narrative of Adam and Eve, the utopic Garden of Eden, and the Tree of Knowledge.
Methodology
There are so many aspects to the topic of surveillance that it’s difficult to narrow down a theme for exploration. I settled on writing a dialectic opinion piece that draws inspiration for research from two versions of the Adam and Eve creation myth; from Genesis and the Nag Hammadi.
The Garden of Eden is used as a context for discussing surveillance, the manipulation of consent and neoliberalism, but it’s also a narrative device.
I define my interpretations of two versions of the cross-cultural creation myth, with a comparative analysis sourced from various translations. I sourced and reviewed a broad range of literature – from academic journals, technical journals, fiction and non-fiction books, news media, religious literature, social and philosophical works, government publications and websites.
I’ve included in-text hyperlinks.
Civil disobedience in the Garden of Eden
The mainstream Christian myth of Adam and Eve has the hapless couple living in ignorance and tilling the garden grounds until a snake tempts Eve to eat from the forbidden ‘Tree of Knowledge for both good and evil’. They are then expelled from the Garden for disobeying ‘God’ and to stop them from eating from the ‘Tree of Life’, which would grant immortality, however according to the gnostic Nag Hammadi, this garden variety god is not the true ‘God” it is a false god, a god of lies. In the gnostic version the imposter is the god of slavery, surveillance and control (The Gnostic Society Library, 2003) that has imprisoned a spark of the divine consciousness in matter. Adam and his savior Eve; the divine feminine archetype, escape the prison of ignorance by eating the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of both good and evil. In the Nag Hammadi creation myth the fall of Adam and Eve represents human consciousness waking from the dreamstate and escaping from the false god’s illusory utopia (Davies, 2005). Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the garden by an imposter god is a symbol of the awakening human psyche that has within it the knowledge for both good and evil. Up until that moment, Adam is a sleepwalke, ignorant of any possibilities outside the garden of the jealous god, known to gnostic Christians as the Demiurge. Eve awakens first from the dream and saves Adam from eternal ignorance. They have awakened from the appearance of freedom and autonomy. The Garden of Eden can be interpreted as a description of a totalitarian surveillance state. Adam and Eve are under the dominating gaze of God and just like Bentham’s panoptic design; the garden exists to serve God’s meticulous all-seeing power (Foucault, 1980).
Everybody Knows
Our ‘free’ capitalist societies increasingly engage in covert mass surveillance and data retention, allegedly for public safety and security, but we know it’s really for profit and power, as Edward Snowden’s revelations about Prism in 2013, and the anonymous leak of the ‘Panama Papers’ in 2015 clearly revealed. The significance of this covert activity is reflected in the time, effort, money and resources that have gone into government investigations on Julian Assange for allegedly having had sex with a broken condom (The Assange Agenda, 2017). Since then, mainstream media has moved on and the masses in the Garden of Eden seem curiously passive, putting in little resistance beyond ‘Clickivism’, and generally reacting as if it were all just a show.
“The end result is the degradation of activism into a series of petition drives that capitalise on current events” (White, 2010). Democracy is in grave danger and everybody knows it, yet most of us are passively disengaged, living the spectacle through our devices and projected images, where we connect through the Tree of Knowledge that occupies the centre of the Garden of Eden.
Debord wrote that the spectacle presents itself as the unquestionable and inaccessible reality that demands our passive acceptance, which is already imposed by the spectacle’s monopoly of appearances. In short it’s everywhere;
“The tautological character of the spectacle stems from the fact that its means and ends are identical. It is the sun that never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the globe, endlessly basking in its own glory.” (Debord, 1967)
The battle for minds amidst the spectacle
Unfettered deregulated capitalism is a lot like the demiurge of the Garden of Eden. It presents itself as the only viable system and traps its subjects by presenting itself as the ideal, free society. As the inhabitants of the garden we find it increasingly difficult to imagine an alternative reality because we have come to believe there is no other way. Our systems have become the “vast inaccessible realities that can never be questioned” (Debord 1967). We are complacent and live in denial, despite our knowledge of increasing levels of control that are gradually undermining our democratic values and narrowing all avenues for community empowerment. Civil rights are systematically dismantled over time to protect the financial institutions that dominate society and to make citizen dissent more difficult. Elaborate propaganda is disseminated through mass media over generations, creating a political void of disinterest yet our societies and experiences are shaped by political decisions made for us despite our civil disengagement, which is very convenient for those with the power and influence to drive political decisions and policy making. It appears to be a long-term strategy that uses both deliberation and opportunism. Governments, which have traditionally represented the will of the people, are undermined with the help of a highly concentrated ownership of mass media and the global political elites they serve (Herman & Chomsky, 1988). Governments have come to represent the will of those who own the means of production, who control the resources, hold the majority of wealth and who can influence public opinion. Over time, the control of state assets are transferred into private hands under the guise of cost effective management and better efficiency. This is never the outcome however, and this push is propelled by a radical squeeze on workers rights and conditions – slipped in under the guise of ‘flexible labour markets’. The commodification of poverty is made so much easier because there are less who will, or can speak for them. People are busy surviving and dealing with a cumulative, massive increase in information – coupled with a strategic shift of responsibility from those in positions of power – to the individual citizen, or rather ‘consumer’.
The majority is self-occupied and fighting to retain composure in a system that is designed to covertly transfer power to a minority elite. More people are being born into servitude than at any other time, with 45.8 million people trapped in some form of slavery (Global Slavery Index, 2016). Few find their way out of their appointed stations in life in a fiercely competitive, profit-driven system (Loewenstein, 2015). The appearance of our society may have changed with new technologies that once had the promise of making life fairer and easier, but the agenda has remained the same. Set the masses fighting amongst themselves, give them an imagined enemy other and flow all benefits into the hands of a few.
Debord wrote: “Contemporary society is both the meaning and the agenda of our particular socio-economic formation. It is the historical moment in which we are caught” (Debord, 1967)
The rise of the immortal gods: Mass surveillance & God’s Panopticon: (why people accept it)
Forms of surveillance, political propaganda and totalitarian control have existed for thousands of years, it is a part of human history. Foucault’s panopticon became the leading metaphor for surveillance studies among scholars and then an odd thing occurred, scholars got bored with it, or overwhelmed with surveillance studies, becoming “haunted by its omnipresence”(Caluya, 2010). For me the panopticon is an overtly religious concept and represents humanity’s desire for protection by an omnipotent deity, which has existed ideologically in human consciousness from the beginnings of civilisation, then institutionalised as a means for regulating conduct through its moral discourses (Foucault, 2007). Debord wrote: “The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion” (Debord, 1967).
Rapidly evolving technologies mean those who own the means of production can replace the idea of God, who has seemingly failed to protect us from evil, with a god-like system that uses surveillance technologies as the structure of an all-seeing eye, which in many ways positions the Internet as the mind of God. Satellite angels covering the four corners of the globe and everywhere in-between complete the picture with their capacity for omniscience. This omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent deity is always under construction. It is in a state of constant flux, ready to shape shift into whatever appearance the masses will accept and endorse. Its survival and growth requires the participation of the masses, which are now dependent on it. The World Wide Web has been cast. The many have put their knowledge together and collectively given power to the new system, a cyberspace that functions like the mind of God. I am not saying this is a bad thing – it is as good or bad as the intentions of the people who are using the technology, and the direction it will take is yet to be determined. However the struggle is clearly apparent and looks for all purposes to be a struggle between good and evil.
The networked Tree of Knowledge
The Internet has always needed produsers (Bruns, 2007) and open participation to build the Internet’s knowledge base and has simultaneously created a data-based crystal ball into the hearts and minds of humanity. Bruns described Web 2.0 or social software as part of an important paradigm shift that would profoundly impact upon social practices, legal and economic frameworks, the media and democratic society. Back in 2007 this shift was poorly theorized and understood (Bruns, 2007). The excitement and positivity with which some intellectuals and academics have approached the new world order of things is admirable however the intellectual elitism that plagues some of the brightest minds of our time is democracy’s Achilles heel. While basking in their own brilliance, complex theories and terminologies, they seem to be ignoring the dark undercurrent of neoliberal opportunism and a quiet militaristic supremacy, which is whisking humanity toward its new dystopian destiny. State protections industries are not just protecting their citizens or their established geographical borders, but also the state’s ‘economic interests’.
Surveillance is a key component of intelligence and espionage. The Internet was spawned from a military communications technology called ARPANET, a prototype for the Internet that began as a memo nearly 50 years ago (DARPA, 2017).
It is said that no one owns the Internet – but that depends on the definition of owning – i.e. if I had free access to all the data generated through the Internet, and if I could decrypt and store that data or capture it before it was encrypted for later reference, then in a sense I would own the Internet. Then there’s the access that gatekeepers such as Telstra control, if you don’t pay your bill then you have no access to the net. The greatest value of the Internet is in the information it contains but also in its capacity for the capture, communication and dissemination of that information and the ensuing influence of ideas.
The whistleblowers of our time are in great danger and for good reason. Governments do not want people focusing on that side of our global system operations, however, information settles in strange and fascinating ways in the human psyche and the effects of the panopticon works in both directions. The focus can also go from the many to the few. In countries like China, where slavery is rife (Global slavery Index, 2016) and the memory of revolution is relatively fresh, media and online censorship is a priority (Muller, 2004). Naturally, western capitalist governments, as directed by the private political elites and their corporate agendas, periodical push for Internet censorship citing citizen safety and national security. The Demiurge does not want us eating from the Tree of Knowledge or spreading our own ideas too freely.
The mirror reality
(to be completed)
Afterword
We have never lost the desire or the drive to create a utopian society, however, what is heaven for some is hell to others and all attempts so far have been at the expense of truth, freedom and individual privacy. Despite resistance there is also a loss of authenticity, because any individual or group that resists oppression by the dominant ideology is also in danger of being cast as the enemy other or worse, becomes mesmerised and lost in the plethoric distraction of information.
The Internet is the manifest appearance of the mythical Tree of Knowledge, placed at the centre of our societies with networked branches that reach around the globe. As we awaken from the dream, what we do with the knowledge of good and evil will determine our future and the future of our planet.
ref:
Bruns, A. 2007. Produsage, generation C, and their effects on the democratic process.
Bruns, A. 2007, ‘Produsage’, Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI conference on Creativity & cognition pp. 99-106. ACM.
Caluya, G. 2010, ‘The post-panoptic society? Reassessing Foucault in surveillance studies’, Social Identities, vol 16, no. 9, pp. 621-633.
We had an s-shaped grove of Celtis Australis in the middle of the city, just five minutes from the CBD and we fought to protect it. That’s how I met her. Saving the trees.
Briony Reed lived in a bedsit behind my place back when the old Hackberry trees were still standing. We could never accept that leaf-free guttering and flat pavers were more important than fifteen-metre trees, or the owls, the magnificent owls. We spent the good part of a decade protecting the trees. They called us the ‘tree ladies’. She wrote the petitions and got them signed. I wrote emails to Land and Housing Corporation (LHAC) and the council. I exchanged information with the Powerful Owl Society too. We did our best to stop LAHC from chopping them down. We held them to account at every turn. You needed signed approvals and council permits to even trim a tree in our vicinity. But in the end, they got them.
Powerful Owls need a twenty-five-kilometre hunting radius and an old growth habitat to mate. A pair of them began using the grove as a stopover between Centennial Park and the Botanic Gardens. Our trees had matured enough to suit the owls and we had a rat plague that year.
Great rat-hunters owls. The first time I saw one I was woken at dawn by a cacophony of birds desperately mobbing the apex predator outside the bedroom window. I heard a woeful ‘woooo-hoo’ in the dead of night a few times but never figured out what made the sound. I was surprised to see an owl perched in the Celtis, its branches stretched over the kitchen roof. I lived in an 1850’s two-storey terrace and the kitchen was added to the back of it some time in the sixties. I could climb onto the roof from my bedroom window. I wanted to protect the owl under the mistaken belief it was in danger. The owl’s eyes were closed as it rocked rhythmically from side to side. With lightning speed it snatched a magpie that got too close with one talon, broke the magpie’s neck, and dangled it over the branch until dusk. They don’t eat until dusk. For the rest of the day the birds squawked and swooped from further out. I sat in awe of that stunning bird for hours, its golden eyes looked into my soul with apparent disdain. I liked being on the roof. We had a solid wooden stepladder that leaned against the back of the house. I acquired it when Land & Housing Corp (LAHC) closed a split-levelled community garden. It took two men to carry it over.
I didn’t go to paddy’s market – that could wait. I didn’t work on my series of abstracts, which I named Palimpsest, not from any sense of cleverness but because I couldn’t afford fresh canvases. I’d sanded back some failures and worked over the top of them. I took a large sketchpad, a brush, some ink, and made an attempt to catch the beauty of its lines, but every stroke failed. I’d been painting for twenty years but I couldn’t capture the essence of an owl.
At dusk, the owl devoured the magpie. It left a small pile of feathers on the roof. They fell one by one, landing with a gentle turn. I watched its eyes widen when a couple strolled past in the laneway with their small fluffy dog. I watched it extend its enormous wings and dive from the branch – gliding without a sound after sunset. It turned a full slow circle. Owls really are like cats with wings; the way their feathers are designed and arranged they make no sound at all and move like shadows. The owl looked big when perched on the branch but in flight it doubled in length. The Powerful Owl grows up to sixty-five centimetres long and its wingspan is one hundred and sixty five centimetres.
Briony asked for a detailed description of the experience. In the days that followed she asked me to tell her again and again, reacting each time as if it was the first. She knew it was rare; she knew how privileged we were to have an old-growth micro-forest next to our homes in urban Sydney. She blamed the loss of it on our nasty old neighbours, who complained endlessly about the dangers of trees at community meetings. These unfortunate souls are terrified of tripping on an uplifted paver, slipping on leaf mulch or of being hit by a falling branch.
‘Mavis nearly fell over her walker last week’
‘The roots are lifting the pavers, I tripped over one.’
‘And what with all the storms we’ve been having!’
‘If someone gets hit with a falling branch there’ll be hell to pay.’
‘Why don’t you just dig a hole now and get in?’ Briony was the master of the upward eye-roll.
It was around midnight. I say around because the fact that it was right on midnight sounds too far-fetched. I was at my computer, about to surf for articles on the mythological significance of owls when I heard an unusual sound, a cat-like screech. The Internet was dial-up then and the connection began with that wild modulated tonal sequence that let you know if you were successful or not. It was dead on midnight. The back door was open. I wasn’t sure of what I’d heard but I got up to check and heard it again.
We had a very tall cactus halfway down the courtyard, and perched on the very top of it was an owl. Not a Powerful Owl, a much smaller one, with a white heart-shaped face and eyes bright as fire. I didn’t want to frighten it. I took small slow steps and sat down less than a metre away. It was an Eastern Barn Owl. I sat there admiring the lovely creature, talking to it. They have a different gaze to the Powerful Owl, there’s none of the disdain. It had an intense warmth and curiosity to it’s stare. I was transfixed, and had the heightened feeling of presence you get when something special is happening. There was no doubt in my mind. It was a significant metaphysical event and I was not a stranger to meaningful coincidence. The appearance of another owl of a different species and this time at night, took me by surprise. What were the chances? I crept back inside to grab the camera but by the time I returned the owl had gone. I went back to my computer. An owl’s call is believed, in some cultures, to be a bad omen.
It happened quickly. I got home one afternoon and the trees were gone. I wept like a baby. I went on a rampage. I called every person I thought relevant. I wrote angry emails demanding explanations. I stomped around with a copy of the city’s tree policy and guidelines, waving them under the nose of anyone who’d listen. Briony comforted me. She was the stronger one.
We heard the workers grinding the stumps at the roots and feeding fresh cut limbs to their chippers. It was a moment of total defeat for us and the owls were foremost on my mind. I didn’t think every sighting of an owl somewhere was an omen but I knew my sightings were.
In one day our world had changed. Our sight-lines altered forever, birdsongs and the soothing rustle of wind through leaves obliterated.
The new light was harsh exposing grim neglected buildings and brickwork. The drawl of addicts arguing over deals in the laneway replaced birdsong. Domestic arguments and brutish cackling reverberated from wall to wall into our windows. The smell of sawdust angered me, and there was a terrible silence that night. Briony called it a void. We heard possums bickering over a lone Jacaranda. We sat silent and still over a pot of tea in Briony’s bedsit. Without the trees, her windows looked directly into my bedroom, ‘Fuck. We can have conversations across the lane now. Save money on phone calls.’
‘Great idea! We’ll use our Tibetan bells to get each others attention’ she murmured. I said the idea had a nice ring to it. She perked up a bit. We spent so much time together in that bedsit. It was filled with paperwork. Petitions, reports, photocopies of emails, letters of support, peer-reviewed articles on vulnerable species, articles on trees and wellbeing, on trees and the reduction of violence. They were stacked on every available surface representing years of futile effort and commitment. Our friendship had been bound in it.
I walked into an empty night and pushed my hand deep into the hole where a tree had been. I pushed my arm in to the elbow and cried bitterly. It was still hot with the spirit of the tree. It stayed warm for days. I saw less of Briony without our common goal, though I still dropped in for tea and a chat and to play with her mice from time to time. She bred fancy mice of every colour in generous cages on her patio. She’d take one out in the basket of her motorised wheelchair. She was very fond of the silky inquisitive creatures. I took a liking to a black and white spotted pair though I could never trust old Hazzy-Bear around them. He’d already eaten a few but Briony was a good sport about it.
‘It’s his natural instinct’, she’d say, ‘cats can’t help it’ and then give the remains a decent burial. She wore mice on her shoulders like brooches and let them snuggle in her long auburn hair and nestle in her pockets. She’d bring one out mid-conversation, nuzzle it lightly nose to nose and speak in a twee mouse-like voice.
Briony had lost a leg. She was a professional masseuse when a large drunken client fell and crushed her knee. It turned gangrenous. She had four surgeries over twelve months, each one took a little more of her leg until it reached the top of her thigh near the hip making it nearly impossible to be fitted comfortably with a prosthetic limb. She’d given up trying. She said her whole spine was out of whack, that her entire skeletal structure was gradually coming apart. She found it harder doing things and getting around. It was painful. Especially the missing limb, unbearable at times but her tiny friends distracted her from pain. She didn’t like taking pain medication, ‘it dulls the mind’. She said she’d rather die than end up in a nursing home.
I remember asking about the man in the dusty photo frames on her shelf. It was her former fiancé who broke their engagement and vanished when she lost her leg at the knee. They were an attractive couple that loved to jog, climb, swim, sail or go kayaking. He was in finance. They spent their holidays scaling cliffs, sailing his yacht or rafting remote forest gorges. Briony was an exceptionally beautiful woman back then; tall, lithe, graceful. I wondered if that made the situation harder to bear. At forty-five she was still beautiful, just a little overweight from being wheelchair bound as there were fewer home services then. She couldn’t afford private care and was estranged from her family. Briony could be difficult, belligerent, and her family had distanced themselves. I knew what that was like. My family was more trouble than I could handle, taking the opportunity to torture me every Christmas – My father who lives in the past in a state of perpetual disappointment. My sister with her habit of misinterpreting everything I say because she never listens. Mum, off with the fairies and my brother busy chasing his kids around the backyard. Every Christmas Dad whinges that I never visit, yet I can count the number of times they’ve visited me on one hand.
With the trees gone I helped Briony pack paperwork into boxes. We stacked them against a wall. She draped a long piece of silk over them and put a statue of Vishnu on top. Two wooden lotus bowls filled with coloured glass were placed on either side.
She gave me two of her favourite books, Musrum and The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin. I still have them with her name hand-written in the cover. Briony was generous by nature but I felt something was wrong at the time. I said, ‘You’re not thinking of killing yourself are you?’ She laughed too heartily and said she didn’t have the guts to. I remember standing at her front door, old books in hand, looking at her. She was at her table leaning on her crutch wearing one of her long Indian skirts. It was black and burnt sienna and had elephants printed around the bottom.
‘Don’t be ridiculous ok? See you when you get back.’
I couldn’t wait to get away from the city – I was keen for a south coast adventure. I took Hazzy-Bear who was pretty good at travelling for a cat, though he preferred not to. I had to sneak around packing the car when he wasn’t around and never made it obvious I was packing – or I’d end up losing an hour looking for him.
The owls had forewarned the loss of the trees so I was taking The Gnostic Jung away to read. I was tired. I’d spent most of my life trying to stop bad things from happening; trying to hold the world together with varying degrees of success. It was as if the minute I let my guard down, it was taken apart piece-by-piece by an unseen force that lurked behind every mundane series of events. Exhausting.
‘Sometimes you have to let go’, Briony would say, ‘just let go.’
I was on the beach looking for smooth stones and unusual shells when Briony took a massive overdose and taped a plastic bag over her head. I’d been back for a week, meaning to drop by and say hello. Flashing lights on my bedroom wall woke me from a light sleep. I saw an ambulance, and a few police officers milling around in the garden of Briony’s building from my window. There was no siren. I knew it was her.
After she died, strangers cleared her belongings, they took anything worth taking. The rest got thrown in a skip. No one claimed her body for months. I made elaborate plans with pseudo-accomplices to steal her body from the morgue and give her the bush cremation she always wanted. Of course, this was not possible. By the end of summer, the local Baptist church claimed her.
Summer was hotter that year. The trees had sheltered my house from the midday sun. Their loss had raised the temperature by up to ten degrees. Sun cooked the roof all day, it hammered the east-facing bedroom in the mornings. In the long afternoons, brick walls on all sides absorbed heat causing a heat-bank that radiated outwards at night turning the bedroom into a sauna. I could see straight into Briony’s old bedsit. A couple of junkies moved in. I bought thick block-out curtains from Spotlight.
I found one of Briony’s small wooden lotus bowls thrown out in the street and took it home. I put a candle in it and left it burning on the day of Briony’s cremation. I came home and found the bowl burned to a perfect ash lotus, which crumbled at my touch. That same night my lover Gabriel had dreamed of a woman wearing a voluminous pale blue gown dotted with tiny silver stars. She was standing in the doorway smiling at us. I knew it was her.
Briony Reed had been dead for months but her coloured mice were everywhere. She must have opened the cages and set them free. Her pretty mice invaded the neighbourhood, and the cats were having a field day.
“Historically, whenever a culture is on the brink of stepping into a new paradigm, members of that culture react quite predictably. As the old paradigm begins to disintegrate, people attempt to reinvigorate or reinforce the paradigm in order to try and preserve what is known and therefore safe and secure, while resisting the forces of change for fear of facing the unknown” (Noble, 2010)
I set out to examine Intersexuality as one of the invisible battlegrounds for postcolonial assumptions of a sex and gender binary set against the mythical backdrop of Australia’s postcolonial whiteness, our patriarchal culture and an idealised national identity, which continue to infuse the Australian national consciousness (Lopez, 2012).
The construction of sex, race, gender, and the Australian national ideal
The construction of sex and gender is closely related to the construction of race through claims of biological determinants and factors, which also maintain the notion of white racial supremacy (Glenn, 1999). These social constructs are deeply embedded in Australian culture through its historical narratives and maintained through powerful institutional structures, hence it has been difficult to detach from the beliefs that have no basis in reality, yet continue to profoundly inform and shape the social experience (Hall, 1997). Lopez writes that there is a lack of theory on colonial whiteness particularly in the exploration of the relations between whiteness and the continuance of colonial power through institutional discourses. The patriarchal nature of colonial rule and the rigid binaries set out for both its colonists and the colonised remain embedded in Australian society to this day (Lopez, 2012) and perhaps it is the invisibility of whiteness that ensures it maintains its power and keeps its sexual stereotypes alive.
There is no doubt that intersex births challenge Australia’s normative stereotypes, exposing the remnants of colonial discourses on sex and gender. The most enduring remnant that continues to inform Australia’s historical discourse is that of the mythical heroic bushman as the ‘Aussie’ pioneer and the working class battler (Bellanta, 2012). This vision of Australian masculinity, which emerged at the end of the colonial era, signaled a shift from the patriarchal sentimentalities of British Imperialism to that of a ‘tough but honest’ national ideal that persists as the national image of Australia. The great Australian stereotype is the all-Australian bloke, who works the land and never complains. Each night, after a drink with his mates he makes his way home to his subservient but loyal wife and adoring family, satisfied with a job well done and ready to work for the good of the nation. We all recognise this image because it is still informing the Australian national imaginary. The Australian Legend, written by Russell Ward and published in 1958 is the enduring postcolonial interpretation of Australian-ness (Davison, 2012) and it is this idealised notion that battles against the reality of Australia’s true colonial and indigenous histories and also against the non-binary reality of sex and gender. Australia’s colonial past informs the discourses of Australia’s dominant institutions together with the assumption that; sex exists within a natural stable framework in a white heteronormative society. To renounce this belief would destabilize our patriarchal social and political systems. However over the last three decades, Australia’s assertion of white masculinity struggles to retain its cultural supremacy (Bellanta, 2012).
The ‘all-Australian’ imaginary and intersexuality
The Australian contemporary understanding of intersexuality is deeply flawed as is the notion of what it means to be Australian; limited by the normative experience of a white male/female gender binary, which forms the central framework and context for both a personal sense of self and the construction of an Australian national identity (Murrie, 1998). One of the legacies of colonialism is that this established power dynamic continues to undermine anyone who does not fit the ‘Aussie’ masculine/feminine ideal. This has effectively erased the voice of the intersex community, which is heavily marginalised through its biological ambiguities and routinely defined through medical discourse (Bing, Bergvall & Freed 2013, p.8). Discussion of Intersexuality is a social taboo; it has been kept hidden and has no place in the national imaginary. If we add being indigenous to this equation, then we have a multi-marginalised experience as constructions of sex, gender and race come into play (Glenn, 1999). Aboriginal friends who identify as gay or transgender have expressed to me that in their early years of coming out, they were rejected by both the indigenous and non-indigenous communities and perceived themselves to be on the lowest rung of a heavily stratified society and this is confirmed many times over by indigenous members of the LGBTI community (Sisters & Brothers NT, 2016). Without minimising the experience of other sex and gender variant individuals, I discovered during my research that the intersex individual has been hidden deep within our social, sexual and racial hierarchies; invalidated, surgically or hormonally assimilated into the dominant binary order and then more recently, burdened with the responsibility of leading society out of its hetero-normative limitations (Holmes, 2008, p.16).
Defining Intersex: alternative genders and the missing Intersex
It is important to concomitantly clarify and reclaim the term ‘intersex’ as distinct from the more generalised understanding of terminologies associated with alternative genders, particularly if sociological research is to be effective for addressing intersex marginalisation. Intersexual persons are routinely mistaken for transgender. Put simply, the difference between intersex and transgender is that transgender has to do with ones gender identity and intersex is about ones biological characteristics. The term intersex applies to a chromosomal, biological phenomenon and Intersex births are not as uncommon as most people think. One in two thousand births are considered intersex, however 1 in 400 births show some kind of hormonal and sexual anomaly that does not fit neatly into the ideal male/female binary. One in 4,500 are born with both male and female genitalia (Fausto-Sterling, 2000). Sexual dimorphism has been to date a dominant area of research in studies on sex and gender with definitions of sex variant and non-binary genders including persons born carrying a combination of XX and XY chromosomes (Organisation Intersex International Australia, 2012). The number of intersex people worldwide is estimated to be 1.7% and may be as high as 4% of the world’s population if we include people born with “unacceptable genitalia” (Fausto-Sterling, 2000). Clearly there is a human sex spectrum that has always naturally occurred. This is not some recent mutation or abnormality; nor is it rare, therefore it is important to examine why we still find it difficult to distinguish intersex from transgender as they have always been a part of human biological history. On deeper investigation, they have not been included as part of Australian social or cultural histories, which have been constructed around colonial and postcolonial perspectives and I sought to investigate whether there was a time when the intersex individual was recognised or socially accepted, relative to Australia’s colonial past.
Intersex in the pre-colonial era
I was surprised to find that “17th century England recognised two genders but three biological sexes: male, female and hermaphrodite” (Moore, 1998). Intersex persons were socially acknowledged and accepted, provided they chose one of the binary-gender identities and either married an opposite gender or entered the church for a lifetime of monastic service. This was in adherence to church law and the religious belief that sexual relations were for procreation between a man and a woman. Also interesting to note is that attraction to the same sex, although considered a transgression was tolerated as long as the status quo was maintained and people continued to be married as man and wife. It was between 1690 and 1710 that this attitude radically changed. It appears that during the pre-colonial Enlightenment era the secularists sought to delegitimise religious authority. As we entered the colonial era, the move toward individual autonomy developed and these changes became the “ideal prerequisites for modern masculinity” (Moore 1998, p.4). Consequently, what we term as the ‘alpha male’ was coming into his dominion. Through colonialism with its white racial ideal and masculinity, it became the central figure for Australian national pride.
The normalising society
While Australian society has in recent times become more accepting of trans/sexuality our medical institutions continue to define those born with both male and female chromosomes; and more specifically those born with ambiguous genitalia, pathologically (Fausto-Sterling, 2000) and perhaps this is because they represent a scientific challenge to the status quo. Intersex infants are routinely assigned a gender at birth, with many subjected to surgical intervention from infancy and nearly all receiving hormonal intervention as pre-pubescent children despite irrefutable scientific evidence that a male/female sex-binary does not exist in nature (Ainsworth, 2005). Biomedicine has come to recognise intersexuality as a naturally occurring anatomical and sexual variant but defines it as pathology rather than a natural difference (Holmes, 2008, p.20). Hence the intersex body from birth is subject to the laws of a particular mode of living, centred on the acceptable appearance of human genitalia in order to conform to social expectations and be suitable for life in a binary system (Guidotto, 2007). The histories of sexualised bodies and sexualities are formed within a political and cultural framework that continues to deny the instability of sex. Our biomedical institutions act as agents for a heteronormative society and legitimise the assumption of a stable sex binary, by altering the bodies of healthy intersex infants. This invasive, violent body shaming has emerged as a serious human rights issue (Wilson, 2012). It is hard to accept that we live in a society that gives up its intersex infants as the subjects of a personified medical discourse on sex and gender (Holmes, 2008) to satisfy the systemic belief in a sexual binary.
Why intersex? : Postcolonial bio-politics in Australia
As Intersex persons have existed throughout human history and are about as rare as redheads (Barnes, 2013) I was motivated to explore why healthy Intersex births continue to be defined as a chromosomal disorder, an abnormality or a medical problem and I determined that colonial constructions of sex and gender are deeply embedded in contemporary discourses, which have controlled the topic of intersex through largely medicalised terms. Foucault found that power operates within the institutional apparatus and uses knowledge to regulate the conduct of others (Hall, 2001). The relation between sex, race and gender as historical, social and cultural constructs began to make some sense to me at this point (Stoler, 1995). The dominant system has rules and these rules regulate behaviour and physical appearance until they are in line with its social norms:
“ It is taken for granted that sexual and racial difference are inherent qualities of the corporeal, and, moreover, that male and female bodies, black and white bodies, may each respectively fit a universal category” (Price & Shildrick, 1999).
There is little sociological research that deals specifically with intersex invisibility, or the deeper systemic implications of the taboo nature of their existence. They have almost no protections under Australian law as intersex people; in fact a paper that consolidated federal anti-discrimination laws was 60 pages long yet the word ‘Intersex’ was not mentioned (Wilson, 2012). It is curious that this would occur despite extensive feminist scholarship on the construction of sex and gender and a substantial history of medical research on hermaphroditism. Gender seems more deeply engrained than race in biology; through reproduction, sexuality and the body itself. Women of colour for example have historically born the bulk of the burden as household laborers for the middle-classes in colonial and postcolonial societies with the added emotional responsibility of rearing white middle class children hence freeing middle class white women to pursue cultural activities and later take up careers, which ironically facilitated the feminist movement (Glenn, 1999) and initiated debates on human rights and equality. While Australian political discourses about equality and human rights are convincing, they have their limitations and partialities.
Our human rights discourse once excluded anyone who fell outside of the white, middle class, male classification and emphasised particular values and meanings as comprehensive and unanimous. These values, which are a legacy of Australia’s colonial past, remain engrained in our culture and within our language (Weedon, 2002) and continue to support Australia’s social hierarchies. The Patriarchal construction of gender is not based on natural difference but on the inherent view of women as the frailer sex, which is conversely in possession of an unknown and threatening source of power. Most alternative genders still function within this binary framework and do not challenge it, however I believe the intersex individual has been isolated for special treatment precisely because they do. The intersex individual’s biology contradicts the patriarchal domestic order; based on the mistaken assumption of a natural sex binary, yet today this assumption cannot be supported by scientific evidence (Moore, 1998 p.6).
We can easily imagine the social, political and legal upheavals, which intersexuality poses for Australia’s patriarchal systems, particularly for the assigned roles within our society and for the actual language we use since they challenge the established order of ‘man or woman’, ‘black or white’ and ‘heterosexual or homosexual’ by occupying a space in between and standing as physical evidence for what modern biology has confirmed – that the binary is not natural but a social construct that serves to support a patriarchy and its colonial legacies (Moore, 1998). It is therefore a bio-political assault that otherwise healthy intersex persons are medically defined at birth and treated to conform to a binary system. Our medical institutions are enduring symbols of patriarchal authority and power and as such they practice bio-politics on the population. Medical discourse and its discursive subcategories demand submission to biomedical surveillance, authority, diagnosis and treatment (Turner, 2007). The regulating power of medical discourse is particularly relevant for parents who give birth to an intersex child with ambiguous genitalia, which is seldom anticipated (Organisation Intersex International Australia, 2012). Many parents submit to medical authority, which intervenes quickly to change the intersex infant’s body (Chase, 1998).
The postcolonial gender imaginary: binary personal pronouns
By the end of the 20th century, postcolonial theories of sex and gender were being questioned. Exploration into previously unchallenged social, moral and biological assumptions prompted new discussion about the influences that have shaped mainstream views on gender and sexuality (Noble, 2010) particularly as British colonial literature and scholarship had featured sexual domination as symbolic of European supremacy (Stoler, 1989). The structure of the English language was therefore key to colonial power and control, and continues to support the assumptions of a sex binary and anyone who does not outwardly conform to the accepted gender stereotypes are marginalized or excluded. It has been suggested that the binary pronouns of he, she, his and her, forcibly impose the normative binary system in support of the assumption that non-binary genders must fit into either the male or female gender category and this is profoundly relevant to the intersex individual (Wayne, 2005). As far as the English language is concerned there are two sexes, two genders and two sexual orientations. Modern attempts to address the missing reference to a non-binary sex and/or gender are admirable and may take hold in the future, (Corwin, 2009) however what is interesting is that a pronoun for the third gender has never existed in the English language besides the derogatory ‘it’ even though intersex individuals have been a part of humankind since the dawn of time. Consequently the intersex individual is easily overlooked and excluded from the national histories of Australia and the cultural adherence to a gender binary, which is embedded in our social and political discourses and supports the continuance of the colonial puritanical imperative on the intersex body (Hester, 2004).
Supposition
Australia’s national narratives are bound to both a white racial ideal and a patriarchal sex binary that do not exist. The struggle for liberation becomes the location for an ideological battle yet it is also the point of departure; where we can cast off the unnatural assumptions and beliefs that dominate Australian culture.
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Chase, C. 1998, ‘Hermaphrodites With Attitude: Mapping the Emergence of Intersex Political Activism’, GLQ: A Journal of lesbian & Gay Studies, vol.4, no.2, pp.181-211, Duke University Press.
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Stoler, A. L. 1995, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, Duke University Press., pp. 19-54
Turner, B.S., 2007, Medical Power and Social Knowledge, Sage, London.
Valentine, D. and Wilchins, R.A., 1997. ‘One percent on the burn chart: gender, genitals, and hermaphrodites with attitude’. Social Text, vol.52, no.53, pp.215-222.
Wayne, L.D., 2005, ‘Neutral pronouns: A modest proposal whose time has come’. Canadian Woman Studies, vol.24, no.2.
Velia Viggilanti 13 years old Lucia Viggilanti 12 years old Pilot Episode : THE VIGGILANTI SISTERS Limited Series : URBAN GOTHIC TALES CODA: Australian migrant histories, urban communities, Karma, transformation, redemption, coincidence, time. Social satire, horror-thriller, Gothic whimsy, farcical tragedy, magical realism, historical realism, coming-of-age, A darkly funny coming-of-age, magical realist narrative – set against…
Have I ever loved anyone or anything that I didn’t consider part of me. Is that even possible. Is love a feeling, an action, a belief, or a deceptive but highly successful biological function? What about duty? Is duty a kind of love? Is it a duty to ourselves and others? Is responsibility, commitment and…
I want to be hopeful, No really I do, I want to feel grateful for everything, all the time. I don’t want to be disgusted. I don’t want to be repulsed, who wants that? I fight the descent into hatred and regret, I fight it all the way, I don’t want to resent. I don’t…
I’m not sorry. I’ve apologised for years for nothing and its over. A delusional neighbour will blame you, as the closest dumpee available, for everything they imagine is happening to them. Over time you’ll become the focus for every slight or imposition. Everything that goes wrong in their world is your fault, and despite actual…
I’m having an awesome conversation with a kid, and then the little boy looks at me with a furrowed brow and says in a matter-of-fact way, ‘my nan hates white people’ And now, suddenly aware that in his eyes, I’m a white lady his nan hates, And I say that’s ok, each to their own,…
(Excerpt from working draft novelette) Luz woke to birdsong, backed by the nascent hum of the city that seemed a stone’s throw from the open doors of her bedroom balcony. It was warm for August. The jasmine already flowering, and the crazies were out. Twitching in the streets, arguing with unseen tormentors on their way…
Prose, poems, works in progress. ……………………………………… Adrift in a sea of lies and dreams, deafened by the screaming winds of change, the tapered hungry howls, of owls that stare at rats below the trees, now winter’s freeze has ended. ……………………………………………………… Alien me I live in a playground that’s almost heaven. sometimes hell, though half the…
(from a chapter of novella in progress. Aussie metafiction, memoir, micro narratives, 2023-2024) …………………………………………………………………………………………………….. The officious frump, with the heavily downturned mouth, lives to left of me in a mirror-image, inner-city terrace. I get the impression she hates me, though I don’t know her that well. Things took a turn along the way, as they…
If Jesus had sunglasses there’s a chance he’d have never been crucified. They didn’t have sunglasses in the Middle East back then, so people had to look each other straight in the eye with no buffer. Must have been hard looking into the windows of his soul. At first they saw their own agonised reflections…
“Historically, whenever a culture is on the brink of stepping into a new paradigm, members of that culture react quite predictably. As the old paradigm begins to disintegrate, people attempt to reinvigorate or reinforce the paradigm in order to try and preserve what is known and therefore safe and secure, while resisting the forces of…
(2017) Foreword: This opinion piece looks at key interactions between surveillance, the internet, mass media and neoliberalism (economic rationalism) through a mythological lens. Particularly relevant as I write, with the Sentient World Simulation program well underway and the Internet of Things. The principles, structures and strategies of neoliberal capitalism work together deliberately and opportunistically for…
We don’t mix God with politics “Bullshit is all the reasons we give for living. If we can’t think up reasons of our own, we always have the God bullshit.” Chayefsky 1976 …
‘Sei diventata nera’ It never stops… her interior monologue on race, racism, blackness, whiteness, appearance, culture and identity. Her search for belonging is at the heart of it though she’s long stopped searching. To look at her now, you might wonder what the problem is. Why she finds it difficult to move on from her imaginary…
It’s perched on a cliff overlooking the sea, and this night the place was alive with the raps and rattles of a fierce seaborne wind. Her woeful song wailed through every gap and crevice, a crescendo of vowels fading to resolute moans that lingered in loops and climbed to spirited howls. I slid from…
ink and acrylic on canvas ‘pretty little reaper’ All is dust ‘Hey. Remember that pedo we met in New York?’ He remembered. ‘He was sucking your dick, and you tried to ignore the kiddy porn he had pinned to the walls… then out of the blue, you wrapped the phone cord around his…
‘She lights a cigarette she shouldn’t smoke. It gets stuck to her lip and rips a bit of skin off. Cloudy snapshots of last night’s dreams hover through her mind, but never quite materialise. She wants to remember but knows it brings no comfort, only confirmation of the dark places ahead. Yet another man…
A fallen self who keeps getting up (A fallen self who keeps getting up again) “The artist’s task is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. If artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found.”– Terence McKenna “To whom shall I hire myself out?…
Briony Reed lived in a bedsit behind my place, back when the old Hackberry trees were still standing. We could never accept that leaf-free guttering and flat pavers were more important than a fifteen-metre s-grove of old-growth Celtis Australis, right in the middle of the city, about five minutes from the CBD…or the owls;…
Benighted © 