PHFEN SHOCK: THE MYSTERIOUS YEARNING FOR THE CHASM
Dingos hanging from a dog tree in the Barrington Tops. Nick O'Malley
Phfen Shock. The phrase kept repeating through his head, although he could find no definition, no logical reason. He found himself perched above a strange valley. House sitting a farm. Two useless dogs, three donkeys, four chooks. And a rooster.
Instead of being industrious, he just went into some sort of profound shock.
There were times he could hear them thinking, out there. And others when his mind rooted around for threat, and they gathered there in their bored ranches, more worried, like all good public servants, about their contracts than the target or the task at hand.
Days passed without pen in hand. The record broken.
A massacre in Afghanistan. 53 dead on first reports. Promptly disappeared from the consciousness of all but the immediate families and neighbours. In a land used to tragedy.
Pedestrians were mowed down in Toronto. The mayor promptly claimed the city proud of its diversity. More lies. The same as Australia. Lie after lie after lie to defend a failed theory. Until those who knew the truth, how this engineered debacle had come about, had all died, been eliminated, or were in retreat.
Now, the machines were difficult if not impossible to detect. Invisible drones. Micro-cameras. Who knew if they had given up, or simply withdrawn to a safer distance.
Once they set the inflammation in place, it remained, even if the disease, the mismanagement of the nation, the mismanagement of the agencies, the brutal assassinations, the misuse of power, the persecution of the people, no longer presented in his immediate life.
But there it was, a mystery. His mind swept across an unmarked valley. Primordial in nature. Fabulous in intent. Complex as only machines could be; as if they, too, had sown organic machines across the galaxies and this was just one fine reach, far, far away.
Giant wombats, larger than most he had seen in other parts of the country, romped in the fading light. Rabbits picked across the disappearing pastures. A few lichen coated apple trees, remnants of the orchards from a century ago, still survived. Around, the deep forest.
It was the shock of somewhere new, somewhere different. Where, when you entered a new valley, even a neighbouring valley, it took time to determine where the threats lay. Unseen. Lurking. Ready to strike. Born in dangerous times in a dangerous world.
He was rising from the ether. He was marking out territory. He was defying the worst the society had to offer. He was carried through his own mysterious yearning. And then away, away, as if he could not focus, as if he could not stay intent on one narrow grievance, as if the gods were welcoming him to a safer place.
While all around lay a mysterious injustice. A place where no one cared. No one took any pride. Where the shops were dilapidated, as the country sank into Third World status.
On a trip to Sydney, that morning, the only Australian accent he heard were the housos checking the value of stolen Ray Bans on their equally stolen iPad.
And all around, no one hoped. Sydney had become the worst city in the country. Crowded, bogged, grasping, vicious, and they were led by the greediest, shallowest, most vicious leader the country had ever seen.
He drove, like so many, straight back out of town. Back to the primordial valley. To be watched, he assumed, by the surveillance machines. The bastardry of this government knew no bounds. And most mysterious of all, as the country drove ever more rapidly backwards, was that nobody cared.
THE BIGGER STORY
RICHARD FLANAGAN
There are no saviours of democracy on the horizon. Rather, around the world we see a new authoritarianism that is always anti-democratic in practice, populist in appeal, nationalist in sentiment, fascist in sympathy, criminal in disposition, tending to spew a poisonous rhetoric aimed against refugees, Muslims, and increasingly Jews, and hostile to truth and those who speak it, most particularly journalists to the point, sometimes, of murder.
Around the world we see a new authoritarianism that is ... hostile to truth and those who speak it
And yet this new authoritarianism is resonant with so many, acting as it does as a justification for rule by a few wealthy oligarchs and corporations, and as an explanation for the growing immiseration of the many.
In Australia though we feel ourselves, as ever, a long way away. We feel we are somehow immune from these dangerous currents. After all, we have had routine forays into populist extremism from the mid 1990s with the likes of Hansonism without it ever threatening our democracy. Our politics may be dreadful, a black comedy pregnant with collapse, its actors exhausted, without imagination or courage or principle, solely obsessed with pillaging the tawdry jewels of office and fleeing into distant sinecures as ambassadors or high commissioners, or with paid up Chinese board posts, while outside the city burns. But it is all very far from a dictatorship.
Our society grows increasingly more unequal, more disenfranchised, angrier, more fearful. Our institutions are frayed. Our polity is discredited, and almost daily discredits itself further. The many problems that confront us, from housing to infrastructure to climate change, are routinely evaded. Our screens are filled with a preening peloton of potential leaders, but nowhere is there to be found leadership.
Holderlin, the great 19th century poet, wrote of the “mysterious yearning toward the chasm” that can overtake nations. Increasingly, one can sense that yearning in the overly heated rhetoric of some Australian politicians and commentators. That yearning can overtake Australia as easily as it has many other countries, damaging our democratic institutions, our freedoms and our values.
Politics, which ought to have as its highest calling the task of holding society together, of keeping us away from the chasm, has retreated to repeating divisive myths that have no foundation in the truth of what we are as a nation, and so, finally only serve to contribute to the forces that could yet destroy us. Or worse yet, openly stoking needless fear and, with the refugee issue, a xenophobia for short-term electoral advantage.
The consequence is a time bomb which simply needs as a detonator what every other country has had and we have not: hard times. But hard times will return. And when they do what defence will we have should a populist movement that trades on the established scapegoats arises? An authoritarian party with a charismatic leader that uses the poison with which the old myths are increasingly pregnant to deliver itself power?