First up, this is purely a rant. Highly personal, at best garbled and of no intrinsic value outside my need for a catharsis. With little or only marginal coherence and not one iota of new information to assuage, enlighten or ease the complex feelings of recent events. So please proceed with caution and at least one full shaker of salt.
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I really don't give a fuck what people think my politics are. If only for the reason that in the past I thought I'd had people pegged and smugly pigeonholed and they surprised me; either often as not with horror, or on the rare occasion with overwhelming humanist delight. Nor am I a skilled polemicist, orator or even debater. So had this been a live broadcast, I'd be the first to crumple into a foetal ball and weep till the auditorium needed life rafts.
I'm simply trying to come to terms with a sensation I get when I see warm, thoughtful, compassionate and through and through humanist people by the hordes self-flagellating over the win by that pale Berlusconi, Trump. Everyone I hold dear is gnashing their teeth, renting their garments and taking birch switches to their delicate 21st century skin in a public display of automutilation that unsettles me immensely. And not one of them has a right to do so. It haunts me and I find it scary. Every bit as scary as Trump and his cronies and formative nepotocracy. BECAUSE THOSE I LOVE HAVE DONE WHAT THEY THINK IS RIGHT WITH THE FACTS AS WE COLLECTIVELY UNDERSTAND THEM.
And I have a small voice inside me that screams, "THIS CUNT IS NOT ABOUT FACTS! HIS VOTERS ARE NOT ABOUT FACTS! FACTS ONLY ADD FUEL TO THEIR APOCALYPTIC PYRE!".
And I really don't know if any of the above is true. But everywhere I look I can draw no other conclusion. People don't vote in the Trumps, or the Mays or the Berlusconis or the Le Pens or the Haiders or even the Abbotts, based on any solid and workable facts. (Let us not even dwell on Putin and his beloved Night Wolves). These voters can't get behind global warming or bee deaths and colony collapse or plastic in the oceans or oil spills or extinction of fauna and flora. Not because they're all bad or even stupid or that they vote against their best interests out of some misguided clanishness. They base it on fundamental and fundamentally flawed syllogisms. "I don't have a job - therefore Democrats/Labor/Labour/the Left/queers/Latinos/Blacks/Asians/Other/Other/Other are to blame!". They vote on a mood alone. An ugly and insidious mood. And even these preceding statements would have absolutely no meaning to them.
They don't blame the companies that ship the work overseas or the governments that offer historically unprecedented bargain prices for land to foreign powers (given the cultural displacement and resentment so often nested in any the economic or commercial dividends). Should they? Perhaps. To a certain extent, yes. But to my mind, history is a profoundly uncaring monster. Please feel free to jump in and correct my often over-imaginative trains of thought but at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, assembly lines were set up in the Hall of Machinery to demonstrate the efficiency of the future. The spire of the newly completed Eiffel Tower hinted at the spirit of the Indian summer of the belle epoch and the celebratory focus was fixed firmly on commerce and manufacturing. The future was coming and it would mean the death of the artisan. Indeed, if I recall rightly, there was a Craftman's Guild decree drafted and displayed that went to great lengths to point out that the future would benefit many but at what cost?
In short, if the Trump supporters or anyone else thinks that this boorish opportunist of a man is going to make America or any country strong and give them all employment, then they are delusional. The landscape of work as we understand it is changing. Potentially irrevocably. And the world leaders are every bit as powerless as the disenfranchised as the unemployed themselves. We have to start thinking of work in a vastly different light. Even here in Australia where coal is our prime export, we live with this horrific cognitive dissonance - on the one hand we are killing the planet and ourselves (to mention nothing of indigenous displacement) AND we somehow think this deadly gravy train will continue forever, or even for the foreseeable future. And we too have started to see the rumblings of the pained and blindly disenfranchised voters who also voted in an 'alt right' figurehead (albeit mild by comparison with Trump) who was mercifully knocked out of the prime-ministership in a mid-term leadership spill. Perhaps the only consolation in these - surely the strangest days for many, many decades.
At this point, you could well expect me to holler from the village bellfry, "Blame the bosses! Down with Capitalist pigs!". I can't. I like money. Wish I had more of it, in spite of the fact that it's a limited resource like all else and it goes on doing as much harm as good, in so many quarters. We can name names, we can come down from the blind mantle of history and post name 'n shame faces, addresses, emails on any and every social media weapon of choice. Yeah, we could do that. After all, each outing would clearly indicate that these wreckers are culpable at every level, to every degree. And we, the proud commentariat and clickbaiting 'netigentsia could gaze out over the wreckage, waving our flag just like Napoleon at Lodi and sigh at the job well done and make sage, stern and sonorous rumblings on all that has yet to be achieved. But I believe in the rule of law, strangely enough. And when the law fails, I have a near-Mencian belief in the essential decency of people. So no, this is not the direction I am pursuing. Nor is it a healthy use of time for anyone I can think of, short of any obfuscating, opportunistic, dollar store ideologue. I think I mentioned Trump earlier, though.
My contention is that these Trumpsters and any folks, decent or otherwise, on the right or even remotely seduced by the alt right, need other humans for the failings of humanity. For their own failings, even. They're scared. They're in pain. So the idea of blaming computers, roboticisation and technology could not, does not and will not make sense to them. Because how can the internet, this abstracted mass of ones and zeros, HTML, Java, IP and VLAN addressing, server farm high availability accessing switches, LAN/WAN/WiFi/VOIP and Cloud redundancy fight back?
But, as intimated by that guild decree in 1889, nobody could foresee in short order the leaps and bounds (and consequent fallout at every level imaginable) made with this golden age of (neo-) Fordism and the future does indeed now appear to belong to only two discernible industries: coding and service. Trades and manufacture - as well as natural resources - will still be here, though mainly to support the companies, entities and conduits who are ancillary to the age of automation, as will the workforce that comprise the bulk of said technologies. But it appears to me that this is the real heart and schism of the societal civil war now being waged. Skin colour, gender, language, lifestyle and religious preference are not the issues. The ongoing lie of free time is.
Or am I making too much of the perceived intrinsic value of the day job?
As an Australian, I am loath to praise the American voting structure. I much prefer our own, with its inherent and often parochial imperfections. A highly modified and compulsory (though, many might argue, only marginally evolved) Westminster bicameral infrastructure, where we can keep a close eye on all the crooks and cheaters, swindlers, pork barellers and gerrymanderers in one safe place - and occasionally get a useful bill through after much deliberation and backroom testosteronal dick swinging and knife fighting. Add to all of this the strange pride we take in being a country rejected so wholeheartedly by our motherland and our inherent mistrust of guns and God, and you get a more complete picture of why this comically sanctimonious exceptionalism exists, save for a small though ever expanding and contracting amorphous mass of noisy and often violent neo-Cons and would be Nazis. Hardly what anyone could call patriotism in any demagogic sense and for that I'm grateful. But we do love America. Most people the world over do. This mythic idea of safe harbour. Of progress. Of the confluence of individual and community. Of making the most impossible odds play in your favour and the most unworldly of dreams come true. So much brilliance - I suspect in spite of, rather than because of the 'roid rage that currently passes for a Protestant Work Ethic.
And it is this love that saddens us at some level, I believe. Post World War Two, and especially from Reagan onwards, we feel hurt by this capricious, imperious near-mythical lump of land that regulates so much of the globe's daily life, when a person is voted in to the highest position of power in the free world and they are clearly unsuited for the role. Or worse, they are completely unsuited AND they are a documented thuggish, misogynist, racist fuckwit. Like Trump.
And there's every possibility he will break (or attempt to sever) the bindings of NATO and possible the lesser Pac-rim and ANZUS treaties too. And those with acute hearing in America will be able to divine the screams and wailings of us apologists and appeasers who once loved and defended at the very least, the idea of the U.S. with as much vigour as any native-born, in our own tepid and foreign ways.
Or possibly he and his nepotocracy will be brought to heel by the IRS and the Supreme Court before too much lasting damage is done.
And although I'm seldom the one to be accused of pissing on anyone's parade, I think as long as we go on forfeiting our independence to the codists and adherents of automation, it clearly feels as though it's only a matter of time before this level of politics is the rule rather than the rare and toxic exception. Or conversely, in the true spirit of progress, whenever we get to these nadirs of conviction and clarity, perhaps it's actually more of a sign that those of us with any heart, compassion or even common-sense have not yet gone far enough.
I wish I could sign off on a higher note but as of this minute, the jury is still out.
Jaysus fucking wept. After three and a half decades in the IT game, I have finally touched the Luddite within.
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