Monarchy

Enough is enough. It toils me to empty my two cents’ worth on the media compost heap surrounding the impending life sentence of celebrity servitude to a well-groomed young man and his bride to be, but the sheer squabble by all and sundry for this Soggy-Sao of a story defies common sense and good taste. This young man is charming, has fantastic people-skills and is the personification of a new generation of British Monarchy – but the future William V will remain our Head of State and we will remain his subjects.

For the sake of disclosure, this is not a protest about Australians not receiving a day off today on account of the royal wedding – although as a member of the empire, a public holiday seems the least we could receive in exchange for watching another inbred German’s three chins gradually develop on our coinage over the next fifty years. Nor is this a reaction to our national broadcaster’s pitiful cowardice regarding the gagging of the Chaser’s satirical coverage of the big day.*

What belies this observation is the stark contrast between the English Kings and Queens of old and the tabloid obsession into which they have morphed. Our monarchy has a truly torrid history; containing enough sordid titbits and hot-pokers of intrigue to hold anybody’s attention. Even your author has to admit a certain sense of royal nostalgia and Shakespearian wonderment: be it the chivalrous victory of Henry V over the French at Agincourt or the way the despotic Henry VIII changed an entire nation’s religion just to get his privileged royal end in.

"I say, I don't think I've been in this room before?"

People eventually got fed up with absolute monarchy and started cutting off heads. Granted, England didn’t last long as a republic, but the Glorious Revolution of 1688 saw William of Orange (a Dutchman) become king – on the proviso that drastic reductions were made in the power of the monarch in favour of parliament. Once the German, George I, became king in 1714, further reforms left little power for the monarch at all. His grandson, George III, saw the American Revolution and the French Revolution not long after that – which made all monarchs glad to still have their heads let alone their silk stockings.

For once, I daresay, the Americans got it right. Thomas Paine, the great pamphleteer and revolutionary, asserted in Rights of Man that being the son of a mathematician did not make you a great mathematician, so why would a prince be fit to rule simply because his father did? Considering the monarchy lost its power in Britain, the only reason for its existence was to remain a figurehead in times of war and to throw a good coronation or wedding every now and then. Little has changed in the last two hundred years – except the empire is no more and the fairytale is all that remains.

Perhaps people like a fairytale though? A projected audience of two billion for the wedding tonight would suggest so. Consider the fact that if each one of those viewers paid $2.50 to watch the wedding, the dent in Britain’s economy would still not be paid for – then there is the ongoing cost of palaces, horse guards, carriages, processions, dresses, suits, planes and security. There is, of course, the tourism; the only foreseeable reason for maintaining this charade of privilege and royal supremacy. Let us hope that one day Australia can choose its own representative, instead of trembling at the knees before a well rehearsed smile or dainty handshake because we took Disney movies too seriously as children.

Ask yourself one question: Would you call Kate Middleton ‘Your Highness’ tomorrow if you saw her on the street?

* Thankfully, the BBC has given a green light to ‘light-hearted’ coverage from cultural icons, Wanko and Jizzmop on Network Ten.

Celebrities

We have all done it – a sneaky glance at the trashy magazine of the person sitting next to us on the train. We ignore the groan from the intelligent side of our brain while our idleness craves to alleviate our mediocrity by investigating the hot and/or the not. Our sensible initial reaction of Why do I care? shifts, almost unnoticed, into Pfft, she’s not even talented before hitting rock-bottom with OMG! Look at those SHOES! Before you know it, you are reciting the names of every plastic Kardashian.

Whether you are fashion-conscious, a stickybeak or just too gutless to buy porn, gossip magazines are a perpetual source of fairytale wet dreams. Even the simplest of minds can notice a certain freedom with the facts, yet our predisposition to such floury fluff knows no bounds. Take the dedicated Woman’s Day reader who, when asked if she cared that the account of Kate Ritchie’s wedding was completely fake, answered: “It wouldn’t bother me that much because it’s the media.” Who is faking who exactly?

The cult of the celebrity is cyclical in shape and self-perpetuating in nature. Oprah once said, “If you come to fame not understanding who you are, it will define who you are.” Although the Daytime Queen sums up contemporary hero-worship perfectly, she readily bestows fame on all that she touches – even nations. A celebrity bloodbank, Oprah can donate her stardom to those deemed worthy; the plasma of which quickly regenerated by the wide-eyed adulation of the masses.

"I don't think there's ever been anyone like me that's lasted. 

And I'm going to keep on lasting." Paris Hilton

Royalty is the best and oldest example of hero-worship for its own sake. One need only contemplate the endless public admiration of a spoilt rich girl named Diana Spencer. While it is inaccurate to compare Diana to Justin Bieber*, she certainly had a way of capturing the imagination of the public. Great imagination it takes indeed to convince ourselves that she was anything more than a privileged, media-savvy opportunist who suited magazine covers and had poor taste in men. Such is the fascination with the ‘People’s Princess’ who embodies our childhood nursery rhymes to this day.

One cannot deny a lurid curiosity in the travails of the festering snatch that is Paris Hilton. Even Dianna seems palatable in comparison to this septic discharge of a woman. She is the best and worst of celebrities; famous for being famous. Reducing stardom to pure simplicity, Paris lives up to Oprah’s maxim. For a new generation, recognition has become the reason for existence, not the occupation, passion or talent that once preceded recognition. Examples of this phenomenon are too numerous to warrant discussion.**

Our appetite for juicy gossip and hero-worship shows no signs of slowing. The ancient Greeks loved their gods and heroes; not because they were infallible, but because they had faults, often quarrelled and were constantly sleeping with each other. Celebrities today have a similar power. The desire to know intimate details about stars’ lives makes us feel closer and more involved – like we know them as friends or nemeses. The projection of the perfect and the popular on a luminous pedestal reflects the childlike desires for acceptance that lurk in our collective subconscious.

* The latter being the only one with any discernible talent or ability

** With the exception of Dogman

Meat

The moral predicament of meat goes beyond the good animals that give their lives for our pleasure and sustenance. A carnivorous quandary rests comfortably at the back of our minds while the flesh of the problem sizzles before us on the barbecue (so rare is a pun well done). While passionate meat-eaters see vegetarians as the root of all evil (no more, I promise), there are bloody tidings we try to ignore when dealing with the rump, the wing and the ham.

One can safely say that human development and civilisation would be not be where it is today without eating animals; increased brain size being the most notable benefit of a high-protein diet. By the end of the last ice age however, nomadic hunters started keeping animals around for more than just meat. Through domestication and selective breeding cattle, sheep, chickens and horses started being used for things like milk, wool, eggs and transport. Known as the Secondary Products Revolution, animal power saw the first sedentary communities with large-scale farming.

While meat and fish gave us brains, cereals and vegetables gave our ancestors much needed calories, improving their size and body odour. Farming allowed human skills to be specialised beyond simply hunting and gathering – resulting in carpenters, masons and blacksmiths*. Meat became a luxury; as the worth of a hen’s eggs to a peasant family was much more than a Sunday roast. Only recently has that changed. In 1960, the average Victorian ate 4.4kg of chicken each year, whereas in 2009 the figure catapulted to 37.2kg per person.

"Did you bring the salad?"

We could blame McDonald’s and KFC for this eventuality; in fact, why not? Fast food chains have the most market power in driving down the price of burger mince and rasher bacon. Although it’s true we are eating more chickens and cows, livestock grows much faster and reaches much bigger sizes than it did a generation ago.** Ethics are quietly smothered when it comes to pleasures of the flesh; both from the industry and the customer. Does this make me like beef or chicken any less? Of course not – one needs only learn to accept the reality.

When employed by one of Australia’s biggest poultry producers, I remember a co-worker describing why he only ate whole chickens. During his time rounding up the bloated birds at the chicken farms, the workers had competitions to see how far they could boot the animals across the dank sheds. Those chickens, he told me, were still salvageable as nuggets, chicken burgers and schnitzels – processed products showed no signs of steel-caps. Distancing oneself in this way is necessary to deal with the reality of mechanically processing ten of thousands of chooks each week.

Should we stop eating meat? Many a vegan would argue that the protein of beef and pork cannot justify the conditions in which animals are raised, and the disease risks of industrial farming. Quite frankly, I would rather be impaled on a turnip than to stop eating meat. As a compromise: take responsibility of what you’re eating; visit your local butcher and ask where your food comes from; and avoid shrink-wrapped supermarket fillets that never, I repeat, never looked like the happy swine on the packet. Oh, there are also vegetables, but let’s be realistic…

* Not to mention politicians, armies and priests.

** Watch Robert Kenner’s excellent documentary, Food Inc., which gives a summary of the eerie transition from farms to factories.

Prison

Apart from an extensive DVD backlist, my firsthand experience of gaol is rather lacking. While Tom Fontana’s confronting prison series, Oz, is a remarkable eye-opener to the daily struggle for survival in such institutions, no dramatisation can accurately capture the experience. Studies inarguably demonstrate that prison, more often than not, increases the chance of inmates reoffending. Bunching the ‘bad apples’ of society together has proven much more effective than the public school system – turning petty thugs into criminal graduates of real promise.

Statistics are not my favourite reference, but they are the only practical means to imagine the sheer scale of the American prison system. The USA contains five percent of the global population, yet it has twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners. With a population over 300 million (frightening I know), that equates to one in every hundred Americans living behind bars.* Broken down by race, the figures are even more alarming: 10.4% of black men aged 25-29 are incarcerated compared to 1.3% of white men the same age.

How did things end up this way? Consider the economic benefits of reducing unemployment figures with all those inmates – not to mention the money to be made. Many prisons in the US (and Australia) are private businesses, run by managers and driven by profits. Take the efficient example of California, whose gaols have a capacity for 100,000 inmates, yet manage to hold over 170,000. Then there are the benefits of the restored slave trade; with prisons producing commodities from military uniforms to office furniture – all with exceptionally cheap labour costs.

Be sure to buy free-range prison furniture.

Prisons are a relatively new invention. Humanist thinkers during the Enlightenment argued that punishment was better aimed at reform, rather than retribution. From the late 18th Century, the encouragement of personal responsibility and individual redevelopment was far more beneficial to a burgeoning industrialised economy – in dire need of factory workers – than the capital punishment of medieval times. This new consciousness is best shown in Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, a prison built in 1785, where inmates never know whether they are under surveillance or not.

This rational, utilitarian approach to prisons has mutated into a counter-productive hindrance to society. Today in the US, social problems are dealt with by incarceration rather than community involvement – the ‘three strikes’ laws being the best example of this managerial efficiency. Consider the grocer who continually sold rotten vegetables in medieval English village. The community would have locked the grocer in the stocks where he was subjected to a few days of humiliation, often as his rotten produce was vigorously returned to him. Compare that to the fate of Santos Reyes, a petty thief from California, who is currently serving a life sentence for cheating on a driving test.

The out-of-sight-out-of-mind attitude hardly solves the woes of society or hold perpetrators of crime responsible for their actions. Naturally, there are psychopathic and sociopathic members of society who reject rehabilitation and are blind to their own indifference, but putting petty criminals behind bars serves neither the state nor the individual. Community involvement, education and empowerment can, at the very least, turn a selfish bastard into a conscious bastard. All prison can do is turn a drug dealer into a drug dealer with a lot more contacts and expertise.

* Australia runs a respectable 6th in this race with 124.5 prisoners per 100,000 people.

Japan

In today's DDW’s Complete Generalisations About Other Cultures, we tackle a people who always say please and thank you, but cannot say no. Japanese are as complicated as they are endearing, traditional with a strong sense of self, yet endlessly inventive and high-tech. Only in The Land of the Rising Sun can you embark on a sandal-clad shuffle to the bathroom along creaky, wooden floorboards, admiring cherry-blossom painted silk walls – to then encounter a toilet with more buttons, modes and options than a Jaguar X-Type.

One need only turn on the news in recent weeks to admire both the staunch pride and endless humility of the Japanese – a social attitude difficult to understand for the average westerner. Take the words of Yuji Arai, the Tokyo Fire Department Chief, while addressing firemen entrusted with hosing down the damaged Fukushima reactor: “The reputation of Japan and the lives of many people rest on your actions.” The priorities of the nation can hardly be listed more accurately.*

Japan has always been torn between its own unique culture and foreign influence. From roughly 500-700, the ruling Japanese clans adopted Chinese practices as a means of increasing their status, including writing, architecture, a Confucian constitution and, most importantly, Buddhism – a religion that was used to unify the populace. While Japanese artistic culture evolved to its peak, lavish courtiers lost track of the growing power of their professional warriors – the Samurai.

As time passed, the Japanese obsession with food

became one with the warrior code.

From then on, Japan was a feudal state under the control of the Shogun, who spent the next few centuries fighting off Mongols and knocking off family members. When the Europeans landed in the 16th Century, Christian missionaries brought trade and the word of god. The Tokugawa Shogunate decided to keep the guns and the tempura**, and kill the Christians instead. Japan was then effectively isolated from the rest of the world until the Meiji Restoration in 1868.

A rapid cycle of modernisation followed, again Japan demonstrated the ways of the enemy by invading Korea in 1903 and sinking the Russian fleet in 1905 – until then no European power had imagined an Asian nation capable of such a thing, as propaganda of the time suggests. The expansionist, Emperor-worshipping state that we know and love from Hollywood soon evolved – admitting defeat only after the nuclear destruction of two densely populated cities.

Such is the price of Japanese honour; a price they are willing to pay. This quiet dignity is the nation’s most notable characteristic and often clashes with the values of the new generation. A contemporary Japanese account of Portuguese traders in the 1540s rings true today: “They show their feelings without any self-control.” Watching the reaction of recent earthquake victims highlights this mantra and reminds the rest of us how the unassuming nature and generous hospitality of Japanese keeps their society together in the face of crisis.

* To be fair, the west likes to list things in order of importance too. Take George W. Bush in his State of the Union address in 2002: “In every region, free markets and free trade and free societies are proving their power to lift lives.”


** From the Latin, tempora, meaning ‘times’. Used by Portuguese missionaries to refer to Lent. In effect, fried fish time!

Elections

The morning light penetrates the curtains and a deep sigh heaves past your lips as you clamour out of bed. Vegemite on toast is no consolation, nor is the warm breeze and singing birdlife that greets you at your doorstep. Reluctance renders your thighs incapable of movement, before a forced step sets you on your way towards the local primary school. You regret that last hesitation at the front gate, as energetic pamphleteers drown you with the same stupid grin as the glossy posters of their respective masters. Not far to go now; Election Day is almost over.

With such joy do we celebrate our occasional democratic duty; savouring those few weeks in which everyone voices their two bob’s worth. While the blood of the passionate boils and the tongues of the ignorant wag, it is tough for the average voter not slump into lukewarm indifference as the standard of our discourse plummets. Amplified by the noise of anonymous user comments on news items and social media stand-offs, one cannot be blamed for being sick of it all.

When Simon de Montfort defeated King Henry III’s army and instituted the first elected English parliament in 1265, he became a poster boy for democracy and remains so today. Sadly, for de Montfort, progress was going a little too fast for the aristocracy and the church. Within a year his allies changed teams, the King was restored and his dismembered corpse was displayed on various pikestaffs around England. Although quartering has gone out of fashion – our current political crop bears the same ill-mannered fruit.

Some men were born to lead.

By the early 1700s, the two-party, legislative system evolved in Great Britain. Over the next hundred years, a brood of distantly related, fat, German kings sat upon the throne; power gradually shifting from the monarch to the parliament. The Australian colonies soon adopted this system, before creating the Commonwealth Parliament in 1901. Since the emergence of the Liberals in 1946, two familiar shades of grey preside to this day. The other being Labor which was founded in 1891. 

The contrasting agendas of the conservative, royalist Tories and the progressive, reforming Whigs of 18^th Century British parliament have, in Australia, evolved into little more than a managerial bickering between two indistinguishable groups of technocrats. By technocrats, I mean the caste of managerial politicians who revel in the endless one-upmanship, knowing that saying nothing is much more effective than saying something imaginative or controversial. Both sides feed off each other’s mistakes – turning a statement made in jest or an admission of fault by either side into childlike gossiping while we – the hungry pigs – snuffle at the media trough, greedily devouring mud disguised as apples.

When you stand there at the entrance of the primary school, take the time to observe the compartmentalising of our common sense and intelligence into bland slogans and bleached smiles. Compare it to the nothingness that wafts from the talking heads that are experts in not answering questions and playing it safe. Know that a politician, by any other name, will still smell as repugnant. Ponder the days where they once contemplated the people who gave them their position and take comfort that plenty more are in line to take their place.

Election Day is our day to speak. Don’t worry too much – you are already spoken for.

The Enlightenment

After a month spent collecting my thoughts (playing too many computer games), the time has come for the whinging wheels of wisdom to roll once more. Why, you may ask, did I choose a condensed version of 18th Century philosophy in order to ease you all back into the routine? The reason is simple; the Enlightenment defines many of our modern virtues and shortcomings, a movement which online soapboxes like this could not live without – though few of us even discussed it in the classroom.

The Enlightenment (or Age of Reason) is a vague term to describe a cacophony of philosophical, scientific and political changes in thought. Put simply, a bunch of shit-stirring Frenchmen thought that human qualities, such as reason and inquiry, might benefit mankind over the ignorance and superstition encouraged by absolute monarchies and the church. Values such as freedom of speech, social contract, logic and democratic representation came to the fore – just like that old Greek stuff.

While aristocratic landowners powdered their wigs, an educated, literate and prosperous European middle class grew and sought reform. By the end of the 1700s, the whole Divine-Right-of-Kings-thing got a bit too much for most people; King George III lost America and King Louis XVI lost his head. The American Constitution captures the spirit of the Enlightenment; free thinkers – some religious, some not – turning their back on Europe and forging a democratic nation, where church and state are separate, and individuals are rewarded for their own merits.

I may disagree with what you say, but lampoon my wig and 

I'll shove this quill where the sun shines not.

From Descartes (‘I think therefore I am’) to Voltaire (‘A witty saying proves nothing’), Enlightenment thinkers explored mankind’s ability to question, doubt and reason with the world in which we live. The bi-product of this was the Scientific Method - the objective gathering of evidence to support a hypothesis. However boring it sounds, this is the cornerstone of modernity; abandoning revealed truths in favour of the painstaking study of the unknown and the pursuit of knowledge.

If it is so important, why are we taught so little about the Enlightenment? Why does religion have such constant airtime when these philosophers do not, especially in America where it was once so fashionable? Again, the reason is simple; scientific inquiry and freedom of speech are now inherent values of our society – values you and I take for granted and part of our everyday lives.

This might sound like a plea (mainly because it is), but I beg of you to remember the importance of doubt and inquiry, to constantly question what you see and what you read. If anybody says they have the 'answer', make sure they are the last person you trust. Thinkers of the Enlightenment embraced this fact and demonstrated that humans have the capability to explain the world for themselves. If you prefer the life of a pious and illiterate peasant, please accept my apology.