BLINDED BY THE LIGHT
David Hockey. Splash.
Michael had put a copy of David Hockney's famous painting Splash on his laptop as background while in Nepal. It was less confrontational, or disturbing, than the Francis Bacon picture which had preceded it, and created less consternation among the passing parade of hotel workers who viewed. In a strange way, he got up and went to work just as he had done in a previous life. He didn't really know what else to do. The strange transition from worker bee to self supporting mobile organism was only half complete; and the trees which filled Buddha Park, the flatness of the Terrai stretching towards the nearby Indian border, had all become a part of his life.
At this point in the election cycle the results seem pre-ordaned.
Everybody is expecting Kevin Rudd to be ousted.
They are sick of his carping, sick of his techno-babble, and sick of his "must be loved and admired at all times" personality.
The grand days of the reconciliation, when he was seen as the saviour of the nation's soul, reaching across the bitter historical divide to embrace the fallen, the indigenous population, were gone. The nation's conscience, cleansed of racism and hurt, could move forward into the blinding light of redemption.
But nothing happened.
Conditions on the ground remained as bad as ever, if not worse.
Redfern, where Michael lived at the time and which had its own unique Aboriginal problems, deteriorated still further. They now felt entirely entitled to abuse the European population. Reconciliation only ran one way.
Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on housing in the north of the country.
And not a single house was built.
Bureaucrats swallowed the lot.
The opposition claimed that Kevin Rudd had wasted more than 200 billion dollars of taxpayer's money.
It seemed entirely plausible, his ego was so huge.
They carried away a staunch reply: Get knotted.
Go waste your money somewhere else; your own money.
"It's the battle of the millionaires," a former devotee of Kevin declared.
For a long time Kevin could do no wrong. Now he could do no right.
Did he really care about "marriage equality" aka gay marriage?
Unlikely.
It was a popular issue amongt a young demographic; and that was it.
Why gay people would want to mimic heterosexual institutions Michael had no idea; and shrugged. The State should never have been in the nation's bedrooms in the first place.
And they should never have been in his.
He had behaved appallingly just to annoy them; and now wished he hadni't. But didn't much care. He'd made the point: fuck off. Fuck off out of my life.
Instead the jeers and the ridicule had simple escalated out of control. The Thais had tracked him even to Lumbini, Buddha's Birthplace, where, for a time, he had thought he was safe.
Nowhere was safe from the crawling reptiles who thought they ran Bangkok's underworld; who ran their businesses of thieving from tourists with impunity; besause unlike Michael most tourists only stayed in the metropolis for a few days and were left without redress over their stolen property.
The senior police who frequented the illegal casino at the bottom of the Twilight Soi knew perfectly well that the street tout Baw had stolen his laptop, his tool of trade, and flogged it at the casino for 7,000 baht. No one, police or not, had the decency to return it to him.
They circled around a wounded wilderbest, waiting for the final kill.
But the final kill never came.
Instead here he was in yet another time and place he had never expected to be, watching an election which was as distant to him as it was to most of the population.
The days when Kevin '07 had strutted the boards, had led a 100 plus officials to the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, had signed the Kyoto Protocol to great applause, and had, again, been hailed as the saviour of the world from predatory industrialists spewing carbon into the atmosphere, were gone.
The days when he had been seen as finally bringing compassion to the refugees and boat people, aka illegal immigrants, coming to the country, were gone.
The sovereignty of the country was being eroded; as thousands landed on a vast shore line. Or died at sea.
And in Michael's own life other things too precedence, such as common sense.
He hadn't wanted to come back. He hadn't wanted to be anywhere.
But he took one foot in front of another; and began to solve the problems which had threatened to envelop him.
Pining, they said, of people who had cared. But pining for what?Â
He was the one who pined the most, for a dream that never was, for people who never were, for a future that could not be. For happy days in a happy land.
Too old to learn, just want to live, had turned and bitten him just like a snake, as suredly as the people he had been generous towards had turned and robbed him, spread their nasty poison and survived, or thrived; at least for a time.
"You're out of control," a voice said, drobbing from just behind in the staggering heat of the Terrai.
And he knew the sharks of Soi Twilight had followed him even here; had no respect for people or for form. Wanted him dead.
Wanted him corralled into what they considered normality.
Wanted the foreigner to die.
Instead he returned to Australia, watched the election on television and marvelled at the massive size of the electricity bills.
If the public had been warned that their bills would soar, the price of everything escalate, their elderly relatives huddle over single bar heaters in freezing houses, that this would be their contribution to a dubious but fashionable effort to save the planet, they might have thought twice.
But they were not told.
And this time around, this election, Kevin Rudd and his "team" of backstabbers have barely mentioned climate change at all. They know the issue is out of fashion. That like so many passing fads, nobody believes anymore.Â
Redemption is not so easy. Saving our own souls is not a matter of crossing a few palms, a few gestures; a few actions done for applause, not truth. And so we wander on; into another government. Indeed into another life.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324823804579011880172936694.html
CAIRO—Egypt's efforts to end Muslim Brotherhood protests turned deadly Wednesday morning, with more than 278 people killed across the country in violence set off when police, later backed by Egyptian soldiers, moved in against two antigovernment sit-ins in Cairo.
The move to clear supporters of former President Mohammed Morsi, which had been anticipated since his ouster by the military on July 3, set off violent upheaval across Cairo. Protesters tried to storm police stations across Egypt's capital, while entire neighborhoods succumbed to fighting between neighbors on opposite sides of the political divide, an early taste of the bloodshed that has been feared for weeks by many Egyptians. Several observers worried that the violence has spiraled out of control and taken on sectarian shadings.
Egypt's interim president declared a monthlong national state of emergency to start Wednesday afternoon.
KEVIN Rudd claims there is a conspiracy surrounding the NBN. He may be right. But it is not a conspiracy in which Rupert Murdoch seeks to bring down the Labor government to sabotage the NBN. It is a conspiracy to hide from the voters, until after the election, just how bad are the finances of the NBN. And the dire straits that the NBN is in can be sheeted back to the deals done by one man: the Prime Minister.
Rudd sketched out his grand vision for a Fibre To The Home network on April 7, 2009. The project was launched with a 1000-word press statement. There was no policy paper or supporting financial analysis because Rudd, who now demands the Coalition take its policies to Treasury and Finance, asked neither department for costings. And despite the fact that the first tranche of funding promised by Rudd was held in the Building Australia Fund and by legislation could only be disbursed following a cost benefit analysis, none was done. Instead Rudd plucked figures out of the air.
The initial headline $43 billion cost was not sourced nor was there any support for the extravagant claims that the project would generate an average of 25,000 jobs a year. Rudd also claimed it would be 49 per cent private sector funded although there was no indication the private sector would come to such a hare-brained party. On average over its first four years the NBN has supported 10 per cent of the jobs Rudd claimed and the revised $37bn cost has fallen fully on the government plus a further $20bn in taxpayer-guaranteed payments to Telstra.