This Ain't No Disco, This Ain't No CBGB

This Ain't No Foolin' Around


Walk-Off HBP sent in this article from the SMH as if to underscore our current drought crisis.

"What I am seeing is a compounding effect," he said. "As more country is stripped bare and dried out we expose more soil. This is releasing more carbon into the atmosphere. Organic carbon levels are falling, and the soil is losing its colour. There are more fires than ever because the dry summers are adding enormous amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and creating more bare ground. So when we do get rain it will be much less effective …

"I have no doubts this will all accelerate as time passes. Pretty soon we will be able to see the great deserts from the Great Dividing Range."

We are creating deserts out of farmland. And when the rains do come, heavy rain will bring problems, not just relief. An enormous amount of topsoil is sitting dry and exposed, vulnerable to run-off.

Does anyone in the Federal Government accept the scale of this disaster, or are we going to keep handing out multimillion-dollar Band-Aids to lost causes? For the past four years, this column has asked, in every possible way, when our popular culture is going to admit that the 200-year national project to turn Australia into another Europe has been a collective national delusion:

"Face the facts" (Sep 18, 2006), "A horror world of our making" (Oct 24, 2005), "The disgrace of Cubbie Station" (Aug 29, 2005), "A new way of seeing green" (Aug , 2005), "The collapse of the wide, brown land" (Feb 21, 2005), "Riding for a fall" (Jan 15, 2005), "Continent at risk" (Jan 10, 2005), "The natural disaster in our midst", (Jan 3, 2005), "The issue that reigns over them all" (Jul 4, 2004), "Nothing but a wasteland", (Jun 28, 2004), "Dwarfing every other issue" (May 17, 2004), "Two degrees between life and death" (Apr 26, 2004), "A nation hostage to the gum" (Jan 30, 2003), "A ravaged country on the way out" (Jan 23, 2003), "Fire and water will define us" (Dec 9, 2003), "The great water crisis", (Dec 7, 2002).

The "great water crisis" was four years - and 17 columns on the subject - ago. Tim Flannery's seminal warning The Future Eaters was published 12 years ago. The crisis has since quickened and broadened. It is affecting food prices. It should soon bite as deeply on the psyche as oil prices. And it is being compounded by global warming.

Yet most people still talk about the "drought". It is not a drought. It is climate change. We changed the landscape. We cut, stripped, gouged, channelled and laid it bare. And thus changed the climate. How can we solve a problem when we can't even name it, and thus still can't even face it?

I guess if we can't call it for what it is, then it's already a compounded problem.
I remember as far back in the Mid-1980s when I was *gasp* a medical student and insisted climate change was happening, and I got soundly laughed at by my so-called colleagues. What a pack of assholes they were, but heck, you get what you buy into.
Well, who's crying now? Darn it, it's still me. :)

Plus This Thing Here
If we as a people had any decency, we would have voted the Liberals out 2 years ago, but we didn't and it says a lot about us as a people. One thing for sure, we're not very funny any more. Our leaders certainly can't take satire any more.

Ten years ago, attacks on the ABC (other than by politicians) were rare. Most Australians appreciated the ABC had things to offer we didn't get anywhere else. The assault on the ABC has been driven ideologically - for example Keith Windschuttle's appointment to the board of the ABC being hailed as an opportunity to move against the ABC's "collectivist" mentality.

A nation is a collective. Who are the ideologues making these calls and, more importantly, whose interests do they favour and/or represent?

What would be lost if the ABC were neutered or, as is now happening, dulled down? I will answer that question by asking another. How often does commercial television take on big, powerful interests? Their prey is more the dodgy washing machine repairman in the next suburb. The crooked little bloke.

And that is how we become dumb and dumber. And when we become dumber and dumber-er, we vote the idiots back in who made us dumber-er and dumber-est.