First Memories of Politics

Post-Watergate Generation - Gen-X Style

It's been bothering me for some weeks now that any time I stop to think about politics an politicians, my mind turns to preconceived cynical positions - that they are tax-spending, self-indulgent, corrupt, power-hungry, self-centered, costly narcissists, living on hefty sums from the public purse. That if you took most of the suits an expensive trappings away, you'd find naked ambition incarnate. None of it's good. And when it comes to my gut feeling about how they impact our world, I see them more as ineffectual or arbitrarily tyrannical but mostly incompetent. This is probably not true, so I have been wrestling with where these thoughts came from.

I've been chatting with Terry McGee lately, when I see him on the odd occasion, and it turns out he once ran for office. He didn't win, but he did run. In other words, he had great faith in the system. I couldn't believe it, but it's true. And he is very proctive about issues and participation. When we do chat, he seems to find my degree of profound cynicism pretty disturbing. So I told him of my political memories and he sort of smiled and said, "That's different. The worst thing then, that Watergate did was rob a generation of people their political faith; and you're just another casualty. That's probably why governments try to cover things up. They're protecting the children."
Interesting thought.
Terry says he grew up across the road from a MP, and that was enough for him to look up to politics as a noble cause. Maybe Terry is right, and we of the Post-Watergate Generation got really jobbed.

Thus I began to ponder what my first recollections of politics was about, and then it hit me. It was Richard Nixon resigning over the Watergate incident. I remember bobbing up an down in a suburban pool with some fellow kids from the primary school and the conversation was about what a bad man Richard Nixon was to have be forced into resigning as POTUS (we didn't quite use the term POTUS, but it's late night typing so...). We didn't quite understand it, but what I remember talking about was how Nixon made some people do illegal break and enter jobs - and POTUS really should not be sponsoring such activity. That was 1974 - a great year for prog rock records but an awful year for politics.

I remember watching the movie 'All The President's Men' on television at some point, and while we never see Richard Nixon himself, the film made a great impression upon me of just how crooked the man was - and while revisionist histories come an go to rehabilitate his legacy, the biggest impression it may have left is on Generation X who won't trust politicians. I'm sure I'm not alone in this outlook. My school friends certainly weren't.

Another thing that left an impression on me was the 1976Lockheed Bribery Scandal in Japan which brought down indictments against Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka. Within 2 years I had witness 2 heads of governments brought down by their own wrong-doing. After that, what can a poor boy think of politicians but as corrupt bastards? I don't think I ever got over it in the sense that I have never found any of these people admirable on a personal level.
Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, these men are all deeply flawed in my eyes. The list of Japanese Prime Minsters is even worse.

The other thing is this: my own adage about Politics has been since my High School days, 'Won't Get Fooled Again'. Why? Apart from the fact that The Who left an indelible impression my thinking back then, it really comes down the great suspicions it levels against ideologies and ideologues. In that sense, the song allows a teen to confront the unfairness of teachers, school, and even the petty boss presiding over the crappy summer jobs. So even if it's true that the new boss is the same as the old boss, as long as we practice a healthy cynicism towards politicians, it seems to me we will be safe.

When I got to University, it was a year after the Australian Union of Students had collapsed (Thanks to Peter Fucking Costello!). There was a great sense of loathing floating around University of Sydney Campus over that. What I remember most vividly is a cartoon by Adam Long where he wrote:

1. Dogs lick their balls
2. Dogs lick each other's balls
3. but there's one thing that dogs won't do and
4. that's indulge in Student Politics.

In other words, politics was shit. You got the feeling from the ambience on campus, ALL politics was shit, and it was. Somehow, these things then became the building blocks of my political perception. They were lying, cheating, power-hungry mutts with fleas, but worse.

So when it comes to the recent Obamamania, it leaves me a little cold. For heaven's sakes, he's a politician, I think. How different could he really be? How different would he be to any of his crap POTUS predecessors? When he preaches 'change', I think about Bill Clinton's campaigns - and I recall in 1992 how suspicious I felt about him too.

What does all this mean? It means that my jaundiced view is perhaps an inevitable product of the times in which I've lived and that when I do go and have a go at them and they wince, they've only got themselves to blame. :)