Kodos '08: Democratic Self-Flagellation and the Strange Mentality of Conscientious Abstention

Three times in the last couple o' days I have read people say "this is why I don't vote" in reference to some douchebag or other who is running for political office.

They're all players in some grand, supernatural Jewish conspiracy anyway.

Don't get me wrong, I understand where peeps are coming from with this, and - unlike the Australian Electoral Commission - I am actually cool with people not voting if they don't want to. Whatever you wanna do, man. I do hear ya: the lesser of two evils is still evil... that is true.

Given the choice though - and you are actually given a choice - what are you gonna do?

Option 1: Evil. The massive right-wing bigot with an irrepressible lust for power, no scruples and access to incomprehensibly large political coffers, unlimited PR and ubiquitous support from influential media barons, old money, royalty, clergymen, finance industry sociopaths and almost every trusted corporate brand known to mankind since Keating first floated the dollar.

Option 2: Lesser Evil. Back when they were young and idealistic, the former student unionist joined a party that used to be left-wing. They now keep their ideals a closely-guarded secret, publicly hovering somewhere around the middle of the political spectrum, at least when the press is looking. They are under the advice and very-watchful eyes of hack staffers who are always on the phone to the Gallop Poll crew, endlessly trying to suss out which particular bigoted contradiction the public expects them to uphold in any given week.

Option 3: Third Party. Choose between paranoid lunatics, religious zealots, and activists whose records you used to buy in the 80s but you're not so sure about them anymore because Option 1 and Option 2 have told you they're bad for the economy so many times that you're starting to actually believe it - but it's not like anybody votes for them anyway. Besides, the notion that politicians might stand on principle seems utterly preposterous. They are definitely either lying to you or to themselves, and sharing their blog posts on social media will result in your immediate ostracism from your work colleagues, brother-in-law, your former school chums and anybody else who still watches A Current Affair.

Option 4: Do Nothing. Sleep in on election day, have a really long shower, fire up the Xbox and make nachos. Drink heaps of liquor. Adopt a sense of smug superiority. If anyone brings up the vote count throughout the remainder of the election period, or if they mention the result in any way, make them feel as uncomfortable and self-conscious about the whole thing as you possibly can. When Option 1 gets voted in and outlaws the consumption of nachos and enforces mandatory church attendance on both days of every weekend - under penalty of corporeal punishment - remind everyone that you didn't vote anyway and that the situation is therefore not your fault.

To my mind, Option 4 is the shittest option, and if you read on now I'll tell ya why.

...and here's why I can't go for that.

Surely it's better to prevent the Biggest Jerk from having their Finger On The Button, even if it means voting for a career politician who in your opinion is not one hundred percent perfect.

In other words, surely you'd want to go for Options 2 or 3 as they are the most likely to keep Option 1 the fuck out of power - thereby increasing your chances of not being arrested for pursuing Option 4.

In the long run, this is very fucking important. When someone is allowed to take office, society allows them access to fucking guns, and funds, and manpower - entire armies of soldiers and cops - all out to prove themselves, all contractually obliged to follow the orders of politicians. Think about that. It's terrifying.

As a white male member of the pacified majority, it might be technically possible to drop out of the whole pantomime at the moment... but how often do you wake up one morning to find that yet another fucking thing that you used to be able to do is now illegal? In Australia it happens all the time.

Think about what you're tacitly endorsing here.

Ten or twenty or a hundred or four hundred or fifteen thousand good people who are just over it abstaining from voting cause they're all crooks m8 - or because the Lesser of Two Evils doesn't offer an absolutely flawless solution, or whatever - could easily be the difference between...

Damn straight! Al Gore vs. George W. Bush

Sure, one of those guys was an arsehat politician with very questionable family members who were the active enemy of free speech and artistic expression throughout most of the 1980s. He was a journalist - they can't be trusted - and he once scored a scholarship from the Rockerfellers. I'm referring of course to Al Gore. Sound the alarm.

He seems nice enough but frankly I don't know enough about Gore to call whether he would have been a very good president or not. And, especially given Tipper's record, he could have been a jerk even despite his apparent best intentions re: global warming and social justice and the fact that he, unlike his opponent, actually rocked up to work during the whole Vietnam thing.

Still, I doubt he would have made his way into the All-Time Top Ten Presidents list. It is possible to argue that he would not have been perfect...

"...and those who harbor them."

But the other guy? You have got to be fucking kidding!

George W. Bush was the most dangerously apathetic, incompetent boob in the 223 year history of the US executive office. He was a third generation drunken jerk - the Idiot Son of an Arsehole Son of a Nazi Sympathiser - a foolish elitist, a one-time deserter, a warmonger, suddenly in control of the most powerful empire the world has ever known.

Gore, for all I know, might also have been vulnerable to top level corruption. I don't know. Everyone has their price and he was, after all, a politician. However, Bush actively facilitated what happened next. His election by such a preposterous minority was one of the worst things that has ever happened.

America's going to be suffering the consequences of Not Voting For Al Gore for decades to come.

Bush did irreparable damage to East/West relations.

Worldwide we've all had our freedoms curtailed by simpering Allied governments.

It was the corporatocracy's finest hour.

Now, this analogy may not be watertight. I don't know whether Gore would have gone the same way in the aftermath of That Event (You Know The One)... but I doubt it - not the same as Bush did. The Powers That Be went to considerable effort to rig that 2000 election and it worked out very well indeed for them.

But I'm pretty confident that if every disillusioned left-leaning liberal who said fuck it, I'm not voting for either goon had actually turned out instead and voted for the Lesser Dickhead, then the Republicans simply wouldn't have had the numbers to pull off their swindle.

(Unless said liberals accidentally voted for Ralph Nader, but that's a whole other thing.)

So there you go!

Have a think about that whole thing, I guess.

You don't have to vote, but if you're saying this is why I don't vote because of douchebags playing the same old power games, well that's understandable - but be aware that sometimes democracy is simply about kicking the biggest jerk out on their hole before they get a chance to ruin things for everybody.

So, I suppose I am more NOFX than Propagandhi on this one... and that's the reason why I'll grit my teeth and go with Option 2 if there's no suitable Option 3, every time.

The Ravings of a Dangerous Lunatic

This should really surprise nobody.

It's no accident that she's dressed up like a princess.

(source: ABC screen shot)

We have the ability to raise the Third World up to join us as prosperous benefactors of the combined work of the world but no - Miss Piggy wants us to sink down to living as impoverished serfs.

Talk about the House of Hancock.

There's only one class war going on here, and it's the rich trying to compress ordinary people - the working and middle classes - back down into a trench of servitude.

Fuck Gina Rinheart.

She can talk about wanting to create wealth in Australia all she likes, but the truth is she is a noxious traitor.

Descending into a dark, dank, dystopian Wind In The Willows?

NB: For the first time ever, you can read along while streaming me ranting this shit, to a bloody good soundtrack. Production's a bit rough but it's early days folks, and this shit is free. Enjoy!!

I wouldn't be the first person to notice a distinct similarity between the physical appearance of our state premier and that of the one high-grade Colombian export that has managed to make it as far as Western Australia in recent years.

The Real Douchebag: Why we shouldn't humour Bob Katter

He's been around for wayyy longer than many people realise, his head is too large for his body, his hat is essential to daily life, and it doesn't take a genius to work out that he must drink enough liquor every night to knock out an eight-metre saltwater crocodile.

He's also been part of the music scene on at least two non-consecutive occasions.

(source)

But there the similarities between cosmopolitan music industry personality Molly Meldrum and socially-backward Federal MP Bob Katter end.

Now that he's managed to wedge himself a disproportionately influential slot in Federal Parliament, Bob Katter seems to be sniffing around on the periphery of just about everything.

Last week, for example, he decided to weigh in on the Queensland State Election by running a smear campaign against conservative candidate Campbell Newman, accusing him of the heinous crime of supporting gay marriage.

Hot topic right now, of course, mainly because the majority of Australians support it. But, much to the chagrin of the entire nation, the whole thing has resulted in Bob Katter being fucking everywhere again... and his seat isn't even up for grabs.

To be clear though, the Federal MP's new novelty political party does actually have candidates running in the Queensland election, so it wasn't totally out of line that he be involved; but Australia could surely have done without the nauseating effort Katter puts into avoiding the shit out of every single bloody interview question he's asked, and the affected indecipherable lunacy that accompanies it.

It's also frustrating because it seems such a no-brainer - and that Katter is simply being a pain in the arse. Again. But like far too many conservative politicians, it's more serious. He is an opportunistic religious hypocrite who has built a career out of the fears of others. He's not quite Pauline Hanson, but at least she was upfront about what she was doing and didn't keep dodging the fucking question.

Bob Katter's rise to national influence - from a belligerent backwater irrelevance to a sought-after Federal chess piece - has revealed his archaic social conservative agenda to the nation. And naturally it's totally out of touch with the nuances of urban life. That's a fact he will happily admit.

The rest of us could probably do without it, but apparently shit flows only one way, and Bob Katter keeps turning up for work regardless.

Son of another bloody politician who had the same name as him and also appears to have also been keen on Rome's Jesus, Bob "The Mad Hatter" Katter has spent his life-long political career operating in the middle of Queensland's Gulf Country. His electorate is nearly 600,000 km² big with ~0.15 voters per km².

Hanging out with his other constituents

(source)

In other words: almost no other cunts live there, and those that do are hardly likely to be authorities on matters of social intercourse. It's a distant land that, even today, remains frontier country.

Katter and his party are having a sook because they reckon that marriage should be between a man and a woman.

The rest of the Western world have totally agreed to do that, and of that 'rest', the majority of us are all like 'hey dudes, we should let gay dudes and lesbians etc marry as well cause, if that's what they want to do, who gives a fuck anyway!?'

As has been pointed out a million times by the entire fucking Internet, marriage equality offers only opportunities for people - no disadvantages.

With the whole equality thing, NO ONE IS OPPRESSED AT ALL and nobody would take anything away from anybody else. Not rights, not money, not any of the things people care about.

Unless they're a bigot with too much pride and zero empathy.

On this issue, Bob Katter is being a total fucking bigot, seemingly just for the sake of it, and he is happy to publicly fall out with his own brother over it, but still have "family values" as a core policy and justification for his opinion. Right.

It is almost certain that the more Katter acts like a total wanker, the more votes his novelty party will get from the other socially-retarded bigots on the electoral roll in Queensland. Ultimately they pay his salary. The system works!

And indeed, history has proven the sheer number of redneck voters available and ready to go to the polls in that state to be nothing short of astounding. There is a booming market for baffling idiocy in Queensland.

Irony: Do you speak it?!

(source)

It's all a bit of a drag, really, especially for those of us left-leaning legends who were initially piqued by some of Bob Katter's other policies in the wake of last year's election - in particular, his economic outlook almost seemed progressive. What the fuck?

Initially there were suggestions that it might be amusing, even handy, to have a boorish good-ol'-uncle from the Gulf Country in the headlines, diggin' out old socialist economic ideas that nobody had the balls to talk about lest Rupert Murdoch's vicious reactionary machinery launched a relentless McCarthiest assault in their general direction. (It wouldn't be the first time!)

It is, for example, increasingly becoming apparent that the Australian community would have done better to hold onto particular sovereign assets, rather than relinquishing them all willy-nilly in a full-pelt rush to compete on global markets.

Katter's old school. He is all for standing up to privatisation, he wants a moratorium on coal seam gas (but hates the 'greenies' of course), and he's a fan of collective bargaining. He seemed to be a baffling mix of economic justice [protectionism actually] and social disruption. With a big fucking hat.

Sadly though, the novelty of Bob Katter: Flamboyant Über Hick evaporated pretty quickly once the cold reality of the man's old school settler colonist outlook became clear. It's all the wrong kinds of Jesus - and it's easy to forget that the early Australian Labor Party, with whom both Katter and his old man had links - could certainly devolve into a pack of racist cunts when they wanted to.

It's a little-known fact that the whole 'bourgeois' thing was actually an international conspiracy orchestrated from Peking by a small group of interstellar reptiles, cunningly disguised as 19th Century Chinese smack fiends
(source)

With this in mind, it's entirely possible to suggest that Bob Katter's seemingly 'progressive' return to community-based economic policy is in fact not a 'return' at all. He has all the hallmarks of a massively conservative Stubborn Fuck mentality whose ideas haven't changed since the 1940s.

Perhaps the banks, while they were swindling the rest of the world with neoliberalism, just didn't really bother going all the way out to Cloncurry to argue with people who hung out all day in 50°C heat with nothing but their cattle, their guns and their seemingly infinite hectares of infertile soil.

Or... maybe they figured they could just go out there a couple of decades later and start extracting natural gas from right underneath the farmers' noses, on their own lands, without even having to ask their freakin' permission.

But look, if we're being honest with ourselves, the economy, in whatever form, is nothing without quality of life - and that is what Katter is vigorously striving to deny others through his relentless opposition to marriage equality.

And, of course, Bob is more than happy to bandy around his electorate's truly epic suicide problems as his pet local sob-story whenever it suits him.

The Internet has done my work for me
(source)

So yeah, despite all his rhetoric about the importance of marriage and family stability, he seems oblivious to the idea that happiness and security in relationships is in fact a... oh, dare I say it - 'pro-life' stance.

By which I mean, 'pro-' the actual meanings of life. Like being happy and fulfilled and all that.

Take that shit away and the desire to live decreases. It's a fucking no-brainer. These 19th Century social mores that Katter is spruiking are inherently intolerant, therefore they decrease the value of life all round.

And, really, who gives a fuck about the economy, or anything else, if you're not gonna be happy either way?

ANYWAY folks reward yourself with this:

PS: just in case you missed it at the beginning.... BOB KATTER EGGED THE FUCKING BEATLES. And he brags about it. What a douche.

It's not that you're smarter than Whitney Houston or Michael Jackson fans, it's just that you're a miserable bastard, dead set

Alright cynics, because you're so smart, what's this 'we' business I keep hearing about?

CONDESCENDING WONKA > YOU < HOUSTON/JACKO FANS

(image source: meme)

For instance;

Oh, yesterday 'we' were 'all' ragging on old Houston over there for being on drugs and having a stupid husband and being in that awful show and now everyone loooves her - this always happens. **

'We' yourself. I've never seen that show, and I don't read celebrity magazines or any of that fucking garbage, and I don't want to.

Quite frankly, yesterday I was sitting around not caring about adult-oriented pop divas, and tomorrow I will be sitting around not caring about adult-oriented pop divas.

Today though, I might consider - maybe - giving an Internet high-five to an entertainer I remember from when I was a kid who was quite an impressive singer, if you look at it honestly, and has, y'know, JUST DIED.

Of course everybody is going to be talking about Whitney Houston today, because everyone over the age of fifteen knows who she is. At the very least, there is a strong collective memory of hearing That Song From The Bodyguard butchered at karaoke - over, and over, and over again.

Like it or not, Comic Book Guy, Houston is a memorable part of the Western capitalist community's collective psyche - ie. pop culture - and she could, let's face it, perform that song better than anyone either of us have ever met.

'So what?' you ask belligerently in response, 'diva pop sucks arse and it gives me a headache. Why don't more people watch 80s B-Grade horror films on VHS? There's a decline in the popularity of marijuana,' and then you will inevitably go on to indicate in the general direction of Michael Jackson.

But Jacko simply serves to consolidate my point.

When Michael Jackson died, did you really want people to sit there going...

DEAD? GOOD! I READ MICHAEL JACKSON WAS A WEIRDO! I SAW IT ON TELEVISION AND IT WAS REPEATEDLY PRESENTED TO ME AS A PLAUSIBLE POSSIBILITY. HE LOOKS UNUSUAL TO ME, AND AS SUCH I'VE VERY LITTLE DOUBT THAT HE FUCKS CHILDREN AND FOR THAT REASON THEY SHOULD JUST DUMP HIS BODY SOMEWHERE AND EVERYONE ON FACEBOOK SHOULD SHUT UP AND STOP FAKING IT - AND THAT'S WHAT HE GETS FOR SINGING ABOUT PEACE ON EARTH ANYWAY - VOTE GINGRICH!

...is that actually what is expected?

Because for those people with functioning brains and an actual hubris-melting butter knife, it's probably more like...

HOLY SHIT, THAT GUY!! HE DIED ALREADY?! THAT'S MESSED UP, MAN, I THOUGHT HE WAS GONNA BE AROUND FOREVER. I GREW UP WITH THAT GUY, HE WAS THE BEST. REMEMBER HOW HE WAS BLACK AND THEN HE WENT WHITE, AND THEN HE PUT OUT A SONG CALLED 'BLACK OR WHITE'? WTF. HE INFLUENCED A WHOLE GENERATION! DO YOU REMEMBER HOW RAD THRILLER WAS? IT'S THE LARGEST SELLING ALBUM OF ALL TIME AND THE CLIP'S LIKE A MOVIE; HAVE YOU EVER SEEN ANYONE DANCE LIKE THAT EVER!?! HOW DID HE PERFORM LIKE THAT? WTF. NOONE CAN EVER ASK HIM THESE THINGS NOW. NOT THAT THEY COULD ANYWAY. IT MUST NOT HAVE BEEN EASY, POOR GUY, NO CHILDHOOD - HIS DAD WAS THE WORST JERK TOO. I BET ALL THAT PAEDO STUFF WAS MADE UP BY TRASHMAGS. I'M GLAD I'VE STILL GOT HISTORY ON CASSETTE... I DON'T CARE WHAT ANYONE THINKS - I'M'A PUT IT ON TO CELEBRATE THEN I'M'A GO OUT DANCING WITH 250 OTHER PEOPLE MY AGE WHOSE LIVES THIS GUY ALSO INFLUENCED!! (and hopefully we will all get cute Instagram shots and have group sex with peeps from WAAPA)

Do you really want to take away people's ability to empathise with someone who spent the majority of their life as a cog in a machine that ultimately crushed their spirit entirely? All for other people's amusement and material gain, mind.

"Hmmm, this newly developed worrrrm should make light work of anyone who discusses the death of Robert Smith and is not running Linux"

(image source: fuckin' televison)

Look, I haven't seen or heard anything about either Whitney Houston or Michael Jackson since the tail-end of their successees in the early 1990s - y'know, back when they were doing stuff - but the point is, they actually stood up and did it, and in both cases paid the price major league styles.

...as opposed to your achievement at, what, making people feel like shit for evaluating and celebrating another person's legacy at the point of their death?

FOOTNOTES:
** Not a real quote but a guy said basically that on Twitter and besides, we've all made this mistake at some point. YES WE ALL HAVE DONE IT
Article originally published elsewhere, Monday 13 February 2012 at 0333

LIBRARIES 'STEALING', SAYS RIGHT-WING LOON

By A VACUOUS NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD JOURNALISM GRAD, SYDNEY

IN borrowing books without charge, library members worldwide are stealing money from hard-working multinational publishing houses, a right-wing lunatic said today.

"our primary objective is to reduce the intelligence quotient of the planet to that of a pre-industrial Down Syndrome bonobo menagerie... BUT TO MAKE IT SEEM LIKE WE ARE DOING THEM A FAVOUR"

The lunatic, who has recently been totally legitimised by our relentless uncritical coverage of his specious but egoistically appealing claptrap, claims book borrowing practices endemic in Australia are undermining an equitable freemarket system, somehow causing NAB and Westpac to raise their interest rates - but only for loans, not deposits.

Such results have, he stresses, absolutely fuck-all to do with said banks - or their CEOs, who dine regularly with our editorial staff - and whose employees are all harmless smiling tellers who are responsible members of your local community and could easily be donning their maroon blazers right now in the house next door to you. They could even be your wife, or husband, or someone else related to you! Do you love them or not?!

Anyway - over the forthcoming two fiscal quarters, if this newspaper hypothetically agreed with the lunatic's theory, then we would definitely recommend that you - the reader - do the following:

• cease all borrowing of library books immediately;
• commence homo-baiting of all library members, librarians and people who clean libraries - call them totes poofters;
• use your facebook to label all library-frequenters 'fucking bludgers' - really ride the guilt trip home by quoting AM radio shock-jocks verbatim;
• if you work on site or in a warehouse, fear not, we have skin-mags avail w/ articles about the awesomeness of guns, necrotoxins and, incidentally, the homosexuality of libraries - remember, we're currently positioning gay dudes as evil, not zany-cool, that's next week's edition;
• FOUR WORDS: THEY TOOK OUR JOBS; and...
• we'll do the rest ;) - by which we mean, hypothetically we would do the rest if we agreed with this but as objective journalists we are simply prioritising the lunatic's opinion, not quoting his detractors unless we can present them as being insane, and framing headlines in such a way that the fact that the opinion is the lunatic's rather than ours is incidental to the impact upon the reader's consciousness... look, just back off, Jonathan Holmes, you trapesium-faced communist - your job is next

EDITED - OK FOR PRESS - GINA xxx

We believed the lies of arseholes and now we have blood on our hands and no info?

Oh, here we fucking go.

Look at Old Mate here galloping on about copyright protections and piracy prevention!

Yeah yeah yeah - we've heard it all before.

At least this dickhead isn't parading around talking about paedos this time.
Source: here.

Don't get me wrong - I very much value the entertainment market - but one can tell that this is not what this SOPA bullshit is about, at all, due to the fact that a CEO said he wanted it to happen "in order to provide jobs"

The minute a CEO says it's about jobs, it is almost always in the interests of ordinary people - workers and professionals - to do the exact opposite of what they say.

Employees are totally expendable.

Look at forestry. We were told for years it was about job protection. Eventually the whole thing was mechanised and now they employ like ten people and the community - ecologically, financially, ethically - has lost everything.

The same thing will happen in the resource sector. Just watch.

These corporations know very well that the Internet is a force for change and they'll say anything they can in an attempt to have it regulated Big China styles so they can keep on fucking everybody over in order to increase shareholder value for the next financial quarter.

Just cause this guy is in music doesn't mean the same corp doesn't also own chemical weapons factories - it's all integrated.

If the mainstream music industry is losing money, it is almost certainly due to the fact that mainstream music is totally, and completely, fucking shit.