Happy New Year, You Cock

Well, population health then. 2013!!! Pop your cork and congratulate yourselves, tooth Social Justice Warriors. What a bumper year you’ve had looking up at shiny objects while just below the scope of your happy self-hypnosis, physician the world turned to shit apace!!! Tie your naked self up in an Awareness Ribbon and bare your breasts FEMEN-style and prepare to receive the precious pearl necklace of a dirty-old liberal democracy artificially priapic on the drug of capital!!!!!rainbow_vomit_by_panda_P0P

Highlights of your year included:

1. Not really being interested in the great interest Snowden revealed the NSA has in us. This year, concern for online bullying outshone concern for privacy. Because, hey. It’s important to feel empowered online! Even if every moment of perceived empowerment is illegally recorded and held in a hundred underground databanks.
It’s IMPORTANT to HAVE A VOICE. And the enemy of your expression (itself generally a poor xerox of an expression already uttered multiply yesterday) is not a colossal organisation that stores all your secrets just, as Snowden says, because it can.
No! It’s mean TROLLS! Stop the trolls! And let the NSA continue its abuse of Australian data sovereignty unchallenged.

2. Worrying more that FOI hero Chelsea Manning receives the courtesy of the feminine pronoun and less that she was sentenced to 35 years in prison for telling us the truth.
Free Chelsea. And not from the gender binary.

3. Devoting the finite resource of human passion (and don’t give me that your activism is infinite, you fibber) to marriage equality. Usually on the unproven grounds this (current) political impossibility will “stop youth suicide”. Once, we campaigned to house at-risk queer kids Now, we figure they’ll be fine when turfed out of their family homes just as long as we marry them off. Nice emphasis, the “Left”!

4. Allowing a schism to develop between the Stop the Boats and Let Them Come principles of asylum seeker policy. Both sides believe themselves to be compassionate. Neither side is fully committed to a solution that would save the largest number of lives worldwide.

5. We look at the atrocities of Manus Island and ask “How did this happen?” and we answer “Because Scott Morrison is evil”. And we forget that it is a bloody, cruel and recent history that allowed this to occur.
We have been rehearsing atrocity in this nation for 225 years. We have been doing this for a long time and that is why we are good at it.
To hold the idea that we are customarily a just and easygoing nation that champions a Fair Go for all is little short of an insult to the Australian Aboriginal people who have had their land stolen, their children taken and their dignity and lives systematically destroyed.
Manus Island is not without precedent.
If you want to know how Manus Island happened, you can content yourself with saying it is the work of evil representatives of a party for whom we did not vote.
Or, you can man up and admit that it is the engine of history that led us to a terminus that is as unsurprising as it is tragic. Get the fuck on board.

Or. You can continue with the ostensibly sensitive chic you’ve worn all year. You can continue with the smarm; the revulsion for individuals and not the ideas they espouse; the “movement” that now so regularly promises the paralysis of “safe space”.

I’ve heard a lot about “safe spaces” in 2013. You know, the term didn’t always mean “an assembly of dills committed to say nothing even mildly provocative”. Now, it is used to advertised readings of awful feminist poetry and end-of-year performances for remedial Circus Arts graduates. Back in the eighties, a “safe space” quite specifically meant medium-term lodging for kids turfed out of their family homes due to their queer orientation.

Remember them? They were the beneficiaries of queer activism BEFORE you got all excited about “gay marriage”. Remember them? You think a few weddings and the emergence of a new-normal is going to make their lives more bearable?

OF COURSE YOU DO.

It was no surprise that leisure-progressives stole “safe space” away from homeless youth and used it as a way to describe “room full of people who will uncritically applaud reeking word turds”. Leisure-progressivism has the habit of co-opting a sense of terror. For the endurance of, say, a poem by Maya Angelou, fear of something worse than the poem itself is necessary.

I mean. Maya. This woman is the go-to laureate for all sorts of progressivism-tinged major events from Clinton’s inauguration to Oprah’s last show. Goodness, the occasional verse she wrote for Oprah was especially awful. My memory of it is that she repeated “Everyone gets a car! Everyone gets a car!” in that gravitas-enriched Stateswoman voice.


I know why the caged bird sings too, Maya. It’s trying to drown out the sound of your adjectival retching like.

“Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can’t touch
My inner mystery.”
(Phenomenal Woman – Maya Angelou)

Yes, I know that Angelou works in poetry’s oral tradition and we can’t expect the James Earl Jones of doggerel to look as good on the page as she does showered in the credulous ejaculate of progressive appreciation. But, bugger me: someone has to say it: Maya Angelou was a wonderful activist but is a genuinely terrible poet and I want to break her pencils. Or, better yet, at the next State occasion she threatens to ruin with her rot, I want to hack the tele-prompter and replace her nonsense about “summer puffs of wind” or whatever with the words from the Mentos ad. Her voice is wonderful but her poetry is no nobler than,

It doesn’t matter what comes, fresh goes better with life,
and Mentos is fresh and full of life.
Nothing gets to you, staying fresh staying cool,
with Mentos, fresh and full of life.
Fresh goes better, Mentos freshness, fresh goes better
with Mentos, fresh and full of life.

2013 was the year of the “safe space”. The “safe space” confers value on the valueless. In so doing, it also crashes Angelou’s stock as a figure of no little historical significance. Get the woman up to chat about Malcolm X, systematised racism or MLK. Do not, under any circumstances, let her humiliate herself and the poetic tradition. We are afraid in the safe space to say the obvious thing: Maya really should get a job writing jingles.

My wish for 2014 is that those of us sincerely troubled by a lack of justice commit ourselves to its redress with the full force of our reason. My wish is for a way out of “safe spaces”.

Sometimes in liberal democracy, we have the habit of looking at shiny, disposable things. Look next year, even if only for a minute, at the dull, hulking engine of history.

It’s not pretty viewing. But it is the only route to real justice.

Your feelings are for you alone. Your understanding is for everyone. This space in which we seek real justice was never supposed to be safe.

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