Adrift

Hard To Identify With Anything

I'm keeping it simple today. I was reading some magazines from Japan in the last few days and surfing blogs in Japan. And I have to tell you I just don't identify with the tenor or spectrum of politics over there at all. I don't know if I ever did, but I used to have a handle on it. Now it feels like the children are running the kindergarten, and there are a lot of emotionally immature people in charge of institutions both public and private. And it's really quite alienating.

Be that as it may, I feel really alienated by Australia as well. I know I've tried to just live with it and get on with it, but this Abbott Government has to be the most alienating government in Australia I've ever experienced. I thought the John Howard years were pretty awful, shameful, pathetic and on the whole hard to bear, but 7months in, this Abbott Government just creeps me out. And with that comes my deep alienation from the idiot mainstream that thought voting for this was better than voting for Kevin Rudd's ALP.

So here's the thing. I've tried to be a grown up and talk about things that matter in between writing about movies and music and whatnot, but I just can't get my head around how bad politics has become around the world. Even the USA has turned into a place I can hardly relate to, and so even pop culture has become a spent refuge. I can't hide there any more. I've tried the bread-and-circus routine, but I don't want to spend the rest of my life in the bread-and-circus tumble-drier of cultural flotsam.

But today, is the day I'm saying I don't know what to tell you that is both meaningful to me and meaningful to you. It's insane. I don't know how I've ended up here. I don't know how the world has ended up here. It's seven years from the GFC, employment growth is returning but we keep exporting jobs to Asia, the government keeps lying to us about inflation; real wages are not going up, they're stagnant or going down, but the government wants us to believe our productivity is falling so we should all take pay cuts; but they'll go into debt hard even while they vilify debt; they'll print money and make it easier for the rich to do business but they've locked a generation out of housing in many parts of the world; there is no future, there is no revolution, we're sort of at the precipce where we go from 'Brave New World' into Orwell's '1984' (I kinda wish it was Van Halen's '1984' - at least that would rock).

It really is a terrible world, and these politicians really do suck hard. I'm surprised we're not occupying places and throwing up barricades. I'm not advocating it, I'm just surprised we're not there.