Firstly a few posts ago, I made a prediction that "The Acolyte"'s mystery box would turn out to be Carrie Anne-Moss, having watched nothing of the show. I called it wrong, the reveal was "some guy in a helmet" although the Freakazoid sub-show "Toby Danger" which predated "The Venture Bros." of adult swim was intending to be both brilliant and funny. The moral is, I was wrong. Anyway...
On June 14th 2024, popular youtuber "The Critical Drinker" released a video titled "The Acolyte Episode 3 - I'm Done And So Is Star Wars" in which he suggested that he had reached a threshold in which he wouldn't watch nor presumably review the show anymore.
On June 27th 2024 The Critical Drinker released a review of Episode 5, and a review of Episode 6 on July 4th.
For me, Disney is more a fascinating business case study that has gone through multiple eras and iterations, for example its "Golden Age" when Walt was Alive, then the Disney Renaissance kicked off by "The Little Mermaid" and late 80s Disney Cartoon TV.
Disney isn't the only culprit though, Netflix greenlit "He-Man Revelations" or whatever, and a live action "Cowboy Bebop" and I think a Resident Evil TV series all of which somewhat bombed. Amazon of course made maybe the most expensive TV show ever in "The Rings of Power" and also "The Wheel Of Time"
But Disney spent big money to acquire nerd properties Marvel Comics and Lucasfilm.
Then right, I think at this point it is overdetermined that Disney among many other media companies got self-conscious about its messaging.
I for one, think Frozen worked, and both critics and the public seemed to agree. There was stupid shit in it to be sure, but it is good messaging to ridicule Ana falling immediately in love with a stranger, and then having the ending be about sisters working it out.
Disney was making fun of itself in a manner that reminds me of a less fondly remembered Sprite commercial:
Which was featured in some documentary I was shown in my marketing degree, where it was pointed out at the time "ha ha, yeah, but that's what you are doing, so where do you go from there?"
The Critical Drinker probably achieved some degree of prominence by referring to all the overt messaging as a new phenomena in media as "The Message".
The point of this post is to make an analogy of "The Message" to Type-II diabetes and what I shall call Nerd Properties as Obesity.
I guess, this analogy was prompted by learning today that the Nielsan ratings revealed "The Acolyte" was the second least watched Disney Star Wars TV series barely ahead of Andor. As such, the Youtube content now dedicated to "The Acolyte" strikes the same nerve as the coverage of the LA Lakers in NBA press.
The succinct headline would be "After bad run of bad Star Wars movies and shows, Disney release a show that looked bad, was expected to be bad, turned out to be bad and continues to be bad."
"The message" is real, and it will probably be attempted again and again so long as humans keep producing media. Not necessarily the same message, but some form of social engineering riding on the notion that media effects are powerful and genes are weak.
On the one hand, studios have introduced DEI officers and what not all over the shop whether you are making a $170M film or a local news feature. On the other hand, the reason the message is injected into Timelords, Marvel and DC superheroes, Starships and Jedi orders, Middle Earth, Witcher-Earth and The Wheel of Time is because the IP fanbases make captive audiences of themselves.
For some reason two people can go out on a friday night and enjoy the intoxication of alcohol, but where one might enjoy such occasional tipples another one will develop (or already have) real problems controlling their consumption of alcohol, coming to depend on it to structure their lives.
Just so for some reason two people can go out on a Christmas weekend and enjoy Peter Jackson's "The Lord of The Rings" and one sufficiently entertained goes on with the rest of their life, but the other one will develop (or already have) real problems controlling their consumption of LOTR, coming to depend on it to structure their lives.
Or Harry Potter or MCU, DCU or a galaxy far far away.
Fandom The Underlying Symptom
So what's better: The theatrical release LOTR or the DVD extended cuts with additional footage? You really loved LOTR all three of them, didn't notice the 3 hr runtime and are ravenous for more. How about an additional ten minutes? But where? Ten more minutes of spectacle? Ten more minutes of Golem's monologue/dialogue? Tom Bombadil?
If not ten why not twenty? thirty minutes more? why not an interval and an additional 3 hours? If the Hobbit a concise well paced novel can be padded out into a tedious trilogy of films, why couldn't LOTR be padded out into twelve movies? Each scene a movie? Why not a prestige TV series with budgets over $20M per episode?
Seinfeld probably had the legs to go an additional season, how about two? Three? Four additional seasons of Seinfeld?
How many Bond movies are good and how many are bad? Did "Quantum of Solace" even need to exist? How many sequels are even "okay" in quality?
I find an analogue in Michael Jordan. The 90s was clearly the peak popularity of the NBA. Basketball has gone on to become a world game, but it appears it is a game played by people all over the world enjoyed by less spectators. From the NBA's perspective Jordan ageing out of the game posed an existential threat. Even Jordan ageing at all, his Washington Wizards seasons were not the draw his Bulls dynasty was.
Suppose now that Stanley Tucci came forward with super soldier serum to essentially render MJ immortal and indestructable, and he just kept playing at his peak...well the first person to get bored would be MJ. He retired three times already. Inevitably though, with no other intervention the world would have started cheering against MJ.
Even if he stacked up 12 championships, 12 MVPs and 3 more DPOY as some point it would become meaningless. The scarcity of MJs career is what made it valuable. The fact that there was a last dance.
LOTR where it takes twelve books instead of three for Frodo and Sam to walk to Mount Doom and toss a ring into lava is not superior to doing that in three books.
Telling the story of the Rebellion against the Empire in five acts instead of three is not superior to the first Star Wars trilogy. I'm not sure "Return of the Jedi" even warrants a whole film. We know an entire "Heroes journey" can be told in 90 minutes. Could Star Wars have been improved if there was less of it?
Sequels are notoriously expensive and reliably disappointing. Long running series like Bond or Batman, Saw or Spiderman tend to norm themselves in terms of quality and produce enough that their instalments can be compared to each other.
They may serve a role in terms of generating profits that can be used to fund riskier studio projects, but it's a fine line as the case of Pixar demonstrates.
The line between healthy appreciation and toxic-fandom probably can be drawn at "trailer breakdowns" when you are picking over the carcass of a two-minute teaser trailer to try and extract more content, you have a problem.
Okay, the movie is going to come out, and the movie will contain everything it will contain and you can decide on whether you like it or not without an advanced college degree. In practice it is very rare for the audience en masse to be wrong about a film, such as a deep dive and a community made wiki can turn a sack of shit into a string of pearls.
It's okay to get excited about something. It's less okay to be excited about something that is two years away from release. It's a problem when you are shelling out $30 to see a movie where what you really want to see is a 30 second mid credit cutscene that promotes the next film, which by the time it rolls around you will be most excited to see the teaser for the next thing than the film itself.
At this point, you have become obese in the sense of being a big fat target for your predictable consumer behaviour. You are going to generate free press and overspend.
That's why they are targeting you.
The Overlying Symptom
Not sure that overlying is even cromulent, the overlying symptom is also a disease of compulsion. It seems to come from rejecting all evidence that suggests media-effects are relatively weak. Which is to say, what you see on TV is less predictive of whether a child will become a doctor, lawyer or action movie actor than whether the child's parents are doctors, lawyers or movie producers.
I think the reason is simple, the idea that the way the world is is contingent rather than almost arbitrary is quite frightening and the idea that there are huge levers by which the world can be changed for the better is quite comforting.
At this point in mid 2024, both the fandom rejecting "The Message" and the production companies continuing to promote it should both be ashamed of their pattern recognition skills. Albeit, I have more sympathy for the group pushing "The Message" not because I agree with it, but I understand the emotional investment, the compelling reasons to fall into denial and seek infinite recourse in the hypothesis that failure is down to a lack of commitment.
I'm less sympathetic to Dr. Who and Star Wars fans simply because they should have been tired of the IPs before they went woke. These are people who could be forgiven for thinking someone could do a better job than Lucas could do with the prequals, but should have been done with "The Force Awakens" and like, Dr. Who was played out by the tail end of the Matt Smith era, the scales should have dropped from a fan's eyes that Dr Who was not a formula for infinite content when Moffatt demonstrated he was going to beat his angel statue monsters and Dr River Song like a dead mule rather than show us anything new. By the time Peter Capaldi was attempting to revive interest by having Sonic Sunglasses or whatever, I felt ashamed that I was still watching. "The Message" was injected into a medical cadaver that was colonized by fanatical nerds.
In a sense though, that media-effects theory is overestimated in its strength can belie another failing of "The Message" that I suspect is almost incidental. "The Message" suffers from the streetlight effect. It is targeted at nerds because they are the most dependable audience in the world. In the same way a general limitation of psychology as a social science was that almost all its experimentation historically was carried out on college students particularly in the US, simply because they are the most available test subjects.
Are nerds more likely to be racist or sexist than fans of "Entourage" "Top Gear" or "Ballers"? "Madmen" "The Sopranos" or "The Wire"? Nerds are probably a large working class who reliably fork over disposable income for garbage entertainment.
If you want to change the world by spreading a message that early colonists deprived indigenous people of both property and a way of life that still effects them today, do you target that message to the niche audience that watches a period drama about the state of surgery at the turn of the 20th century like "The Knick" or do you target the vast numbers of people that will watch anything with a dragon or light-saber in it?
PROVE THEM WRONG! They put a lightsaber in a non-sensical show that comes off a run of poor quality nonsense shows and they flock to it as helplessly as the moth creatures that have been criticised.
This is a tale of comorbidity, just like Covid was not pleasant for anyone, the people that really suffered had pre-existing health problems, including, sadly, being old. Nerds are going to suffer "long wokeness" though, because they keep feeding the disease and that in turn is their disease.
Here's something you can do. What year were you born in? Then punch that year and append "in movies" to the end in a search engine and start watching. If you feel a bit young, pick the years your parents were born in. Pick a genre you've never understood like the Convoy genre, and plug into a search engine "best convoy movies" and start watching.
Look away from the lightsaber, from the point ears and dragons and just try something else.
I recently watched "The Crying Game" a movie possibly now forgotten in time and one I associate mostly with Mayor Quimby of Springfield.
Forrest Whittaker makes some interesting choices with his accent, but the film...I don't know it works, without my necessarily understanding it. It does feature prominently the story of the scorpion and the frog and may be where Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y know the fable from.
The fable is ostensibly an argument for jailing people with Anti-social personality disorders, or just psychology 101 - the best predictor of future behaviour is past relevant behaviour.
This is an emphasized point though, because the scorpion doesn't just kill the frog but itself in the fable, indicating the strength of a persons nature.
I keep coming back to trying to understand "what are people?" as the essential question of sociology. Certainly they are no one thing, and here's something non-ubiquitous that I've noticed.
Some people have what I'll tentatively call a "contract mindset" but perhaps, because I'm not good at grammar, perhaps it could simply be called "contractism" which is elevating a contract to some magical status.
Predating the modern concept of contracts, we can look at oaths and swearing. People giving testimony in modern legal systems often are sworn in on a bible or other religious text, you will be familiar with the cliche "may I remind you you are under oath."
If someone is an atheist, well I'm told back in the day, they couldn't serve on a jury because they couldn't be sworn in. I assume these days, they take the oath and you just remove the religious paraphenalia.
Why? Well, because swearing to tell the truth is not a magical process. People who place their palm on a holy book are still physically capable of lying. In another early 90s cinematic darling "Fried Green Tomatoes" Reverend Scroggins provides false testimony in a murder trial that alibis two murderers. The reverend later reveals he was able to do so because the bible he provided was actually a copy of Moby Dick, so no problem with perjury then...YES it's still perjury, because entering a contract with the court isn't based on magic, the (only good) commandment is "Thou shalt not bare false witness" it's not conditional on whether the book is used or not.
The old system of the 18th century or earlier was based on belief in belief. The new system has rendered holy books redundant because it is based on negative reinforcement - if they catch you in a lie you're in big trouble. It relies on risk aversion.
I'm not an expert on how people get scammed and defrauded, but I suspect a big part of it is an excess of faith in contracts.
People who heard someone promise, on their childrens lives, no less that they were good for it. When their integrity was questioned, they got upset, their feelings hurt. People witnessed them promise. Everybody heard.
How could somebody possibly, just not deliver on what was promised?
I'm not talking about escape clauses and loopholes in the fine print. I'm talking about people thinking that some performance of sincerity can attain an exception to someone's propensity to lie, misrepresent and renege.
Most commonly is probably the election cycle, where people vote on non-information that they perceive as information despite often a literal lifetime telling them this is not the case.
Another common area are forecasts, which people can treat like contrasts despite nobody claiming they are. Probability statements treated as promises with no scrutiny as to how that probability was determined.
There is a misattribution or paraphrasing of Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov most often expressed as "without God, everything is permitted." and not to be too on-the-nose atheist, what you will find is that whether it is the Buddhist cycle of rebirth and Buddhist hells or Christ dying for the sins of man, Dostoevsky is exactly wrong - generally under religious notions of existence everything is permitted in the moral sense.
Without god, yes, your only constraint is reality so you may find yourself capable of lying, stealing, raping and murder. Not everyone is, though they may appear physically capable. While yes, people can, and do, do these things regardless of their religious convictions, there's only so much they can do before running into consequences.
So from here we can move into the conclusion: Yes the only crimes people can persist in doing are the ones they can get away with. People can probably steal as many paperclips as they like from the workplace stationary cupboard. Some people can get away with murder for years, but they cannot for example just keep murdering every relative they stand to inherit money from. The most "successful" serial killers in terms of amassing victims without being convicted tended to have to target people they had little or no connection to at all and had to go to extraordinary lengths to render those crimes unsolvable.
In the same way, contracts don't work via magic, which is why there's a difference between a written and signed contract that both you and your attorney have copies of, and a verbal promise made in front of yourself and your friend.
Society enforces contracts, and it requires you being able to persuade a stranger that the contract exists in the first place. Furthermore, there are going to be a bunch of contracts where the cost of enforcing them exceeds the value of the contract in the first place.
A lot of the population however, remain vulnerable due to a naïve belief that making promises that one doesn't intend to, or cannot know they, can keep.
The economy is retracting, automation made you redundant but just when you were facing the hobo life you land a job at a Soy Sauce company.
You are a "batch controller" in the Quality Assurance department and you are being trained on the job by Mark. He walks you up to a vat, instructs you to get a clean teaspoon, taste the batch of soy sauce and Mark tells you "Yeah. This batch is too salty, so you need to add a little water." and then he pours water in.
Now this analogy is flawed because this job and process almost certainly doesn't exist, but I'll press on.
You think "Sweet. Easy peasy. Saltiness is bad. Just add water." so Mark leaves you to it, and you go around adding water to every batch to ensure they aren't salty.
Your error is an easy fix in this analogy. When Mark checks in to see how you are going, he tastes some of the batches and remarks "Oh! No, I'm sorry. These are two watery what we need to do in this case is reduce them, evaporate some of the excess water until the flavour is right." and Mark gives you a patient smile while he turns the gas or whatever up.
By the end of the first day, you have adjusted your schema to understand that the job is not as simple as "just add water" but in fact you need to train your palette to recognize what adjustments need to be made.
Above is Monty Python's Dennis Moore sketch, a period-sketch for that era of highway banditry. If you can't be bothered watching it, here are the bones: Dennis Moore is a silly bandit that robs flowers from the rich to give to the poor. The poor point out to Dennis Moore that flowers aren't really helpful, and ask him to steal something they can use. Dennis Moore takes note and starts robbing the rich of their wealth and giving it to the poor, then paradoxically, he crosses a threshold where he is now stealing from the poor and giving to the rich having totally redistributed the wealth.
The sketch may seem ridiculous, but the mid-to-late 70s were a period where labour unions were so strong that capital went on strike. The incidence of stagflation is what lead to the Neoliberalism of the Reagan-Thatcher 80s. At the moment, the working class is too weak against the asset owning class, but the point is, it's not as simple as just add regulation it may not seem like it, but capital needs to be able to collect a risk premium to have any incentive to invest. That's the cliff-notes version of what began to happen in the 70s. You had scarce labour supply meaning if a company grew it's revenues by 4% the workforce could strike until it had secured a 4% pay rise. At some point, the people investing in the firms were like "what's the point of building a firm that employs people when I can just park my money in a government bond and earn a risk free 3%?"
This issue of calibration is what is so frustrating for me, trying to find people to stimulate me intellectually. Many people are capable of identifying real problems, but then posit oversimplified solutions, likely because of what Stephen Fry said at the beginning of the current culture war era on Dave Rubin's show: "People want things to be simple but they aren't."
A job is much less stressful if all problems are identical, and the solution is something you can just add more of until it is fixed. There are many that can point to the excesses of the left or the right, both of which are just plain radical and generally trying to implement old ideas with disastrous track records whether it is Marxist Utopias or Theocratic Orthodoxies, there are fewer who don't then prescribe leaning hard against the guard rail on the left or the right.
Those guard rails don't exist. There's nothing you can figure out today, that will absolve you of needing to recalibrate tomorrow. The fundamental nature of the Universe we live in, is that it's dynamic. Circumstances are changing.
I'm sorry, but you can't just do. You are also going to have to think.
It appears the Acolyte has been a huge moneymaker for Youtube content creators watching it in order to pan the series to people with no intention of watching/not watching it.
Having said that, nothing I've seen convinces me that at any point in time "The Acolyte" has been unfairly treated. Unless we take as the first premise of the case of unfairness, that it is fair to allocate a budget of $180 million for eight episodes of a show intended for an incredibly small target audience.
I would put it to you, that it would be forgivable to say that either such a large investment should target the largest possible return, or in the interest in reviving interest in an IP, several smaller bets could have been made to see which one sticks.
Anyway, I haven't watched the show, have no intention to watch the show and am resolutely in the camp that I would prefer there to be less, rather than more star wars content. Given that that is physically impossible, I would settle for Star Wars content to simply stop. I am not hanging out for a return to good star wars, given that I don't think it has ever been achieved.
What falls into my lap, is an opportunity to ask myself the question: What makes a hack writer?
And film critic youtubers "Film Threat" published a video with the following thumbnail:
I haven't watched the video, it asserts, and I don't even know if this is the case, that the Acolyte like many streaming service content contains a mystery box. My hack test is can I deduce the contents of the mystery box from minimal evidence?
So exhibit one:
Importance to story as a function of layout.
Exhibit two:
Carrie-Anne Moss dies in first scene, allegedly the first seven minutes.
If we all haven't deduced that Carrie-Anne Moss is the most likely candidate to be the guy in the mask, the prize in the mystery box then I don't know what to say. In the above picture you can see the namesake "Acolyte" weilding something like a butterknife to attack Trinity.
So bonus Xibit:
Apparantly the first on-screen instruction the master gives the Acolyte is: "If you kill a jedi with a weapon they won't die." or something.
The prediction reads thus: If the writers of the acolyte are indeed hacks, then the master will take off their mask to reveal they are Trinity from the Matrix.
What I'm willing to concede now, is that if the hood doesn't come off to reveal it is the expensive high profile actress given prominent position on the series promotional material juxtaposed to the character she is disguised as in the same way, what I understand to be the identical twin protagonists are juxtaposed, then it is a clever bluff, red-herring etc. making novel use of star power to throw us off the scent. I don't know what would be a satisfying reveal though, because the opposite of foreshadowing is deus ex machina.
Like when in Psych series 5 finale when fraud psychic detective Shawn Spenser finally sees the face of nemesis serial killer Mr Yin, there's no "reveal" beyond the fact that they got Lance Reddick the actor who played Robocop to cameo as Mr Yin. The reveal is like "ooh did they get Lance Reddick to cameo?"
By contrast, the reveal of the antagonist in Umberto Eco's "In The Name of The Rose" is incredibly satisfying because it makes total sense of a confusing and complicated mystery even though the plot is discovered too late to prevent any deaths but William of the Baskervilles and his student Adso, the detectives in the mystery.
In real life, if you find a series of prostitutes murdered via strangulation and dumped in the woods, we might infer that the killer is likely a male acting alone. Beyond that, it could prove to be almost anyone. If one were to make a documentary miniseries on Gary Ridgeway it likely could not be structured as a mystery, because it doesn't lend itself to a parlour scene where the Poirot deduces which of the suspects is indeed the murderer. Poirot would at first conclude that the killer was a man with a car and likely a drivers license. After gathering half the population of the state in a train carriage, there's no real way for Poirot to point to Gary Ridgeway and say "but because you sign your cheques with a looping 'y' I knew it had to be you!"
Indeed as the identity of Jack the Ripper is most likely to be. But if you are watching a mystery like the very well-made non-hack 'Broadchurch' Olivia Coleman in the opening scene walks down a street where we meet every single suspect including the killer, so it is all foreshadowed for a satisfying reveal.
A film that would be misconstrued as a mystery is "Anatomy of a Fall" where the premise demands a mystery to set up a situation where a child has to decide if his mother is a murderer or if his father was suicidally depressed. There is no answer nor reveal to the mystery, though the director and writer choose to open and close the film with the dog, whose ball is never scene beyond the opening shot of the film, suggesting that the ambiguity arises from everyone overlooking the possibility that the dad slipped on the dog's ball and fell out the window.
These are all good pieces of foreshadowing. I put it to you, that a hack tries to tell us who the mystery box is as soon as they can, then try to get us to look the other way. Ideally, you do so before you reveal there is a mystery that begs an answer. You get people to rule out a suspect by faking their death.
That's hack foreshadowing 101.
One of the best reveals, with foreshadowing paying big dividends can be found in the movie "Hot Fuzz" where the writers went to serious effort to create two superimposed plausible conspiracies supported by evidence. Simon Pegg figures everything out, with the one failing of not crediting how insane the conspiracy could be.
So I think 4 episodes of The Acolyte have been made available as at watching. I am yet to watch "The Last Jedi" though I did watch "Solo: A Star Wars Story" on a long haul flight.
Should it turn out Carrie-Anne Moss was just a bait-and-switch purely for the spectacle of killing off a big star in a single scene give or take a flashback at some point. Then, I mean. Well whatever, it doesn't make The Acolyte good, or worth making, or interesting. Just less predictable.
If however, people have to eat their hats because they didn't see Carrie-Anne Moss being revealed to be "the big bad" then I will simply be disappointed in the human race.
I experienced culture shock, it wasn't pleasant and it was the worst culture shock I've experienced in my life. Even worse than my brief stay in Mumbai where I was increadibly ill and struggled with how over-the-top in your face amazing India is.
So I know, I haven't been a fucking picnic since I got back, and likely at some point if you read this post you'll think "if you hate it so much why don't you do us all a favour and fuck off back to Mexico!" And I'd be lying if I didn't say I want to, and it's still where I see myself being, despite all the places and people I love everywhere else.
I share because I think what I share is of value. The impressions that drove my culture shock contain valuable insight. Right. It's feedback and it has always been my attitude that all feedback is a gift.
I also acknowledge that the sentiment is widespread that Australia is going wrong. That first-world problems are in fact real and concerning. Some are even contemplating voting for Dutton over Albo, because they are becoming disillusioned and don't understand how inflation works.
I've caught up with people since I've been back that are less happy to be here than I am, and I'm the guy who has had a picnic of a time as a stateless non-citizen living on a shoestring budget in Mexico for three straight years, and on many fronts I'm inclined to agree and again, why coming back hasn't been easy.
First Impression
If I recall correctly, the first thing that struck me in the face upon returning to Australia, was correctness.
Now, Australia is a big country, and not all of it is a port of entry, I returned to Australia at a specific time and place - Sydney's Eastern Suburbs, two weeks prior to "The Voice" referendum. That is important to keep in mind, I did not anticipate enjoying my return to Australia. I was not excited to return to Australia, nor if I'm honest, even that curious to see what was up.
It is good, in partings that are such sweet sorrow, to find an intermediary place to transition through, a place in which to feel safe in feeling ambivalent. Ambivalent is a term that has been skunked into a synonym of indifferent, but I mean it in the original usage for which we do not have a good alternative - to feel contradictory passions.
Of course, somewhere like Bondi is not going to be the place for me, this is not Australia's "honest feet" but ground zero of Australia's natural manifestation of the "Jevon's Paradox" where Bondi is so naturally a nice place to live, it attracts a lot of awful people, so awful one of the scariest things to contemplate is the possibility that people who live in Bondi may not even be the worst people in the world. If you are a fan of the Netflix psycho-drama "You" a season could be set in Bondi. It is the carefully curated face of Australia, performatively concerned with Australia's foot disease.
I love my sister, she has a great dog with her own adorable idiosyncrasies, Australia has cheese varieties and Fish and Chips, although harder to find, can still be found and are great. Australian great with Dim Sims and Flake, not Cod and mushy peas. There's the song of Magpies, Whale watching, people who speak at a tempo suitable for when you aren't about to shit your pants and need to wrap everything up as quickly as possible in order to get to a bathroom. There's also abundant and accessible parkland and running trails, even in Sydney. And of course, consistent with Jevon's Paradox, there's no two ways about the intrinsic goodness of not seeing homeless families on the streets, though I suspect why Australia doesn't have this and Mexico does and how good that is, is more complicated than first blush.
And this is probably going to be my first attempt to explain something unintelligible: what I mean by Australian "correctness" that so slapped me in the face about the culture. Mexican's are first and foremost Mexican, even factoring in the aspirations of the middle and upper class to be some new kind of sophisticated cosmopolitan Mexican like rich people everywhere always.
By contrast, and a contrast I felt particularly strongly, Australians are just a few purchases away from being correct.
For some reason, perhaps no reason, I had a hankering to draw a piece about Mexican movie "Ya No Estoy Aqui" (You are no longer here). I mean just given the title, it's a pretty obvious reason I'd be thinking about that and writing this. Here's the trailer:
Now, what I'll say is, I don't think it's a movie that an Australian could watch and just understand something about Mexico. I'm not even confident I understand what the film is about. I forced my parents to watch it with me, and I don't think they enjoyed it. I suspect they were largely bored, and my parents aren't your grandad's parents who found pre-ground pepper spicy, knew tuesday night was for chops and wednesday night was sausages and thursday was steak night and friday was fish and chips out of some vague deference to Jesus, and sunday was a lamb roast. My parents are cosmopolitan adventurers, if anything bored by the prospect of yet another foreign culture.
Which is to say, I'm not sure I'd recommend Ya No Estoy Aqui for your "to watch" list because there's a high likelihood you'll experience it as a slow, tedious movie with an insufferable protagonist in which nothing really happens and nobody learns anything. This is a pretty lucid reading of the text, and I'm not a believer in subtext, I don't think subtext exists, at least in any objective sense, and perhaps not in any intrinsic sense. Fittingly, I think once the text is written, the subtext is no longer here.
What is resonant with me though, is that it is a movie about what it is to love Mexico. Unlike media producers in LA, New York or Bondi, who in making "The Blue Beatle" might want to show other white people that white people should understand that LatinX people care about family, Ulises isn't returning home to Penelope, or any of the rest of his family. When he returns home his tribe is gone, everything has changed, he's lost everything in his exile to New York, which was never his dream. And yet, Ulises is home, he has returned to Mexico.
It's my projection, but I swoon to play that trailer and hear that cumbia beat, even though my Mexican friends probably understand me to be the Australian, who doesn't get, and just plain doesn't dance. Long after Misaki and I had ceased to be a couple, when I caught up with her in Japan and showed her some photos of my life in Melbourne since she'd been gone, she cried out in nostalgia for "Safeway" [Sei-fu-u-ei] (now Woolworths) one of the two most numerous supermarket chains in Australia, something it might seem bizarre to feel nostalgia for, if you don't appreciate how different shopping in Japan is. In the same way, I suspect, I swoon for Mexico's distinctive surfaces, evident in the clip, though admittedly it can be hard to tell which scenes are shot in New York and which in Monterrey.
When I forced my parents to watch "Ya No Estoy Aqui" the thing I was most able to articulate, was just how Mexican people have the music in them.
It's the difficult thing, because I don't want to discount the social issues Australian's face. I think the wealthy nations of the world, are in a genuine crisis, the crisis faced by greyhounds that catch the fake rabbit. Equally and oppositely, Mexico is a country with real problems, from the horrific (disappearances) to the practical (drinking water and potholes) and everything in-between.
So having said that, I do believe Thomas Wolfe (or his publisher) was onto something with the Title "You Can Never Go Home Again" and it's true of Ulises, and it is true of me regarding Japan, Italy, Mexico and Australia, this is the plight of the vagabond that not even fans of the pinche hero's journey succeed in conveying.
The Big Lie: Consume Correct
So, it is important to point out that in all my time back in Australia, I have spent it almost exclusively in the affluent Eastern suburbs of Melbourne, and my first impressions upon return were formed in the affluent Eastern Suburbs of Sydney. Even when I ventured out to say Ballarat, I am likely to be catching up with friends in Ballarat who voted Yes to an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament changes to the constitution, want Palestine Freed, only vote Labour if they can't vote Greens and put their pronouns in their email signature.
Which is to say, I'm in an Australia that is a reflection of Australian media, but doesn't reflect Australia because it's that affluent demographic that is targeted for their affluence by the part of propaganda Chomsky identifies as "advertising" and this demographic largely moved in step with the advertising that surrounded me when I first got back.
This shouldn't be so surprising a thing to notice, particularly in Australia. Before I divulge what "this" is, let me give it the cultural context of the analogous discourse on "housing affordability", a subject that is nowadays sporting roughly a 30% chance of being the top story on broadsheet rag The Age/Sydney Morning Herald's landing page. (In a recent heated argument about Australian housing, my mum declined to take the bet that The Age's landing page would not feature a combination of stories about the "housing affordability crisis" and a story about how [insert demographic] purchases [insert suburb] townhouse for $3.74M! as though it is great news.)
Housing affordability, briefly, basically refers to the problem of houses being too expensive and one could be forgiven for thinking that an obvious solution would be for prices of houses to go down, that if housing were to cost less that may indeed make housing more affordable. Conversely, one could legitimately ask the question that if people are willing to keep buying houses for ever higher prices, is housing affordability a real issue? BUT the Overton window on "housing affordability" permits one solution and one solution only - increase the supply of housing, generally by cutting out red tape in the construction industry.
And I shit you not, prior to writing the above two paragraphs, I just went to theage.com.au website and pulled this straight off the top of the homepage:
By the way, it is my understanding that "thousands of homes" will have 0 impact on rents. (In fact during the pandemic, Melbourne literally produced a natural experiment where the impact of adding 100k+ new dwellings, enough for over a quarter million people, had a short term impact of a 12% drop in rents, which disappeared within a year despite a lower population and growing housing supply.) Yet, we simply cannot entertain any policy response that isn't building more dwellings.
Furthermore, if there's any thing that there's a 100% chance of seeing on theage.com.au's website, it is this archetypal story in the "Property" section:
Right. Right? First of all, how is this newsworthy? With a quick substitution it reads "Young man nabs $5 bottle of Nudie Juice in weekly special." Furthermore, a quick fact-check of the headline says a 3 bedroom house in Kingsville's median price is under $1.2 million, in which case, how is this a "deal" apart from the literal sense that a transaction took place? The property section, I can't say definitively is propaganda, but it has several hallmarks of propaganda - 1. It's typically presenting "good news" 2. Whether the market is going up, or going down, the conclusion is the same - buy now. 3. The stories featured do not really need to be covered at all, compare for example, how the share market is covered for stock investors.
Anyway, enough digression, context established. The big lie, probably not unique to Australia, but apparent to me in an appalling way, is that we can consume our way back to Eden. I've had a month or two to acclimatise and stop noticing this shit, but upon landing these missives from fantasy land just screamed at me:
So, okay, you've probably heard terms like "Greenwashing" and "Pinkwashing" and so on, that's not the point I'm driving at. The big lie is more the Overton window again, which is to say, people want problems that make them anxious, addressed, but solutions that involve consuming less are off the table because our economies are generally based on production and we measure progress in terms of increased consumption.
Much like the housing affordability discourse, it is likely for all the eyerolling about the various forms of corporate [insert colour]washing, consumers also do not want to stop consuming because the pursuit of material vanity is not all they know but all they can comfortably stomach.
For one, it is likely that consumption is part of a near daily self-soothing or self-medicating for the aforementioned anxieties. For two, to stop consuming would probably break most Australian's social contract, they work hard for their money, they should be able to spend it on stuff, and if they can't buy a house they may as well pay $20 for some mashed avocado on a piece of toast while they consume "atmosphere" that reassures them that they worked hard and made good choices. For three: a large number of people in Australia, despite its wealth, are financially insecure and a drop in consumption causing a recession would likely spike their anxieties.
I have a little more to say on this point. But the big thing, the big noticeable thing is just the constant suggestion in Australia, that there is an a) attainable, b) correct way to be was probably the singular most noticeable piece of culture shock. And it feels tense, uncomfortable. It's not a good culture to be in. It's very...
Puritan Culture
"I'd rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong." ~ John Maynard Keynes, liberator (briefly) of Economics.
So again, my general impression of people's complaints about corporate greenwashing, is that in some ways companies are cynically co-opting causes to move product.
Having a marketing background, I can't really fault companies for doing this. It is in many ways, what companies are meant to do. They are meant to go out, and figure out what people want and find a profitable way to do that. Probably the bitterest pill of greenwashing, pinkwashing etc. is that these wealthy organizations have done their research and determined that what people want is cost-effective esteem. Which is to say, they will sooner wear a t-shirt or pair of sneakers, than change their behaviour in any way that involves real self sacrifice*.
*(I actually did my best to "Decolonize my bookshelf", and my impression is that most of my friends might label me, the most right-wing person they know. Yet, I have watched "The Hate U Give" whose $35m at the box office, would suggest that less than one in ten people actually have. and often my crime is that I actually consume the material that inform my opinions. Most of my affluent tertiary educated friends are educated enough to know that you aren't supposed to do this.)
When I was an angry young man, coincidently the golden-child in my family and Grandma's favourite, unaware of what my lifestyle was doing to me physically, emotionally and psychologically (I do not have the fortitude to endure what most Australians do, yet I do not qualify for the NDIS either, and rightly.) My favourite release was to yell at the contestants of "The Biggest Loser" making my housemates laugh as we watched blubbering fatties break down over having to climb a single flight of stairs...until about week 4 when the contestants were alarmingly in better shape than we were after 4 weeks of eating pizza and watching The Biggest Loser.
The Biggest Loser had a very clear message - the path to weight loss is to stop eating shit and get exercise. Calories out > calories in. But The Biggest Loser was brought to us by sponsors that all had a very different message, often featuring popular past contestants themselves - don't change your lifestyle - lose weight through consumption of diet shakes and bread with fibre added and gimmicky machine you can store under your bed and use while you watch TV.
If Australians (and probably all WEIRD populations) could address climate change, or slave labour, by buying a coffee in a keep cup, or a trendy car, they would much rather do that than quit their jobs and reduce consumption Much like hit reality show "The Biggest Loser" is a show trying to boost the message that meaningful change requires hard work, but is brought to you by easy answers.
With this in mind, for me there is a big culture shock experienced by coming from a Roman Catholic Culture, that is an incoherent mess of a religion, which in Mexico has massive amounts of syncretism with indigenous and other local folk lore; to Australia which is a Puritan culture, a much more severe and unpleasant culture to live in.
By this I mean, it has the fatal conceit that there is an attainable correct way to be. The reassuring idea, is that if we just say, read all the books in our local library, I'd know what that correct thing was, its not that any individual has all the pieces of the puzzle, it is the perception that other people do have it based on the confident baring they have.
This translates into an idea that it's okay to wrinkle up your nose and say "ugh" if someone orders the "wrong" thing for lunch. Affluent Australians are precisely wrong, veering towards being wrong with infinite precision. Australian culture further fosters the idea, (and it is somewhat true in a pluralistic ignorance kind of way...) that we are all being watched and people are noticing if we are incorrect, if we are bad puritans.
Of course, I'm talking about affluent Australia, I recently joined a gym that leaves its TV monitors on captioned Channel 9. I'm not sure I know people who watch free to air TV if it isn't ABC news 24. Maybe a sports match like the AFL Grand Final, but I really don't know anyone who watches Channel 9. Channel 9 is more or less how I remember it, though they have a wheel chair athlete on the Australian Open commentary team. Sure, why not? I only have questions about Lleyton Hewitt being on the commentary team, given that I was under the impression he could barely form full sentences.
It seems to me, that Channel 9 have embraced diversity and inclusion in the way it is generally sold. Like someone came to the producers and was like "hey there's this guy, para-Olympian plays tennis, loves tennis articulate and likeable, you know, how Lleyton Hewitt isn't, might be a good commentator for the Open?" and the producer has gone, "Sure."
This whole navigation of inclusivity could of course be argued as the very enrichment process itself. But now lets flip it. The fact of my secondary school existence, was that I didn't know anyone wheelchair bound. There were certainly not enough disabled students in any year level to supply the number of student cliques in any given year level.
I've told the story before here on this blog, of a time I went to a gig and the frontman of a band publicly flagellated himself for not doing enough to get indigenous artists in their lineup. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt that he followed up on this shortcoming and investigated getting indigenous artists and groups onto future line ups. I think he would have struggled, not just because of a year or two of lockdowns, but because in Melbourne the indigenous population is somewhere in the vicinity of 2~3%, they are quite in the minority, and Melbourne has some 60+ live music gigs on a night, probably averaging 2.5 acts a venue, and yeah if this is the only guy trying to get indigenous acts onto his lineups, maybe he could help some inspiring but marginalized artists...
Except I'm not sure being indigenous is any obstacle to getting a gig at the Tote, or The Old Bar, or The Toff in Town, The Wesley Ann, Northcote Social Club, The Espy, The Retreat, The Grace Darling, The Rainbow, The Pinnacle, The Gasometer, Yah Yah's, The Curtin... I would struggle to name a venue of any renown, where an unsigned band consisting of white people could provide anything but incidental help in getting an Aboriginal artist a gig. This is the arts sector we are talking about. My feeling is, that like George Costanza, any indigenous artist or act would most likely be doing a small unsigned indie band a bigger favour by being on the lineup than the reverse.
This diversity of friends is hard, if not impossible for most members of society to obtain. An individual's best bet is likely during tertiary education. Looking at my alma mater's stats of roughly 90k students enrolled 60% are Australian (75% of which are likely white, or of European background, so 45% white european in total) 9% NE Asian (Korea, Japan etc.) then 25% are SE Asian (that have significant South and East Asian populations themselves), so Thai, Vietnamese, Malay, Singapore etc. 3% are South asian (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka etc.) I will have to Assume China is included among one of the prior three groups, though generally I feel China and India are often referred to as East and South Asia respectively.
Basically, if you wanted a statistically representative photo of RMIT enrolees, say 5 students sitting on a lawn laughing it up, it would have 4 white kids and an Asian. So if you are a 20 something that embraces the Puritan aspiration of DEI, this is realistically the best you can hope to obtain (on a university campus). This is not even true outside of a University campus.
Taking Australia as a whole, 75% are white, not 75% of 60% and while I can't get a breakdown of ethnicities cross referenced by age brackets easily, I feel it is a safe assumption to say that ethnic diversity likely is greater for younger Australians, and lesser for older Australians. This means the Puritan ideal is exclusive of most boomers, unless making friends with your age care facility nurse counts, what I would guess is the most probable way to cross generational lines.
I'm probably trying to overdetermine the broad point, a Puritan culture is something I want no part of, and it's something I'm not used to after three years out of one. Culturally, Mexicans aren't hung up on trying to be correct.
Way back in the 2000s, probably before flight of the concords came out, my girlfriend and I went to see Arj Barker who was a big deal here if not in the US and probably from the AUNZ comedy markets, why he ended up in flight of the concords. Anyway, he had a bit about how Australian's were always telling him to "take it easy" to "chill out" (en espanol "tomala con calma" one of my catch phrases in Mexico along with "soy blanco" and "lo siento") and he'd remark that as he was targeted with this advice as he was lying on a couch smoking pot. That almost infuriating insistance that people chill-out, chillax or take a chill pill, aspect of Australian culture is as demolished as non-heritage colonial brick share houses replaced with a cheap subdivided modern apartment block currently housing less tenants.
Mexicans, for the 110k+ and counting "forcibly disappeared" people (almost 1% of it's total population), it's femicides and rapes, it's ample amputees, it's homeless families, inadequate school places, child labour etc. etc. maintain that "chill-out dude" attitude generally. A chilled out bigot is actually easier and pleasanter to deal with than an uptight puritan.
When and where Mexico attempts to "go woke" it becomes very clear, very quickly how superficially aspirational this is, because as bad as things are and have been for indigenous Mexican ethnicities from the Yaqui up north to the Mayas down south, it would still be virtually impossible to claim that Mestizo Mexican Men enjoy mestizo male privilege when they are homeless, sometimes pants-less smoking meth and getting bullied by cops everywhere. Mexico bright as its prospects are, cannot afford the luxury of being woke when you have fucking drug cartels leaving bodies for page one of the newspaper every day.
The elites of Mexico, just don't have the context in which to claim fragility, perhaps a silver lining of more pronounced wealth inequality, so it becomes clear when a Mexican talks social justice, as in plainly transparent that they are trying to pull off that affluent je nais se quois of coastal United States. Something UK, Canada and Australia can plausibly deny with their established but eroding middle classes.
I invite you now, in an attempt to get this train back on track and to the terminal station, to consider quite literally the prospect of the words "Stay Woke" which I will assert "Woke" refers to a state of not being asleep. To stay awake is not good for anyone. It literally impairs brain function, decays mental health, it is not a sustainable way of being and we think in metaphors - there are reasons we "look up to people" and find people we meet "cold" or "warm" and "staying woke" is probably having similar metaphorical impacts on regular Jos, Joes and non-binary j0z as sleep deprivation does.
Consider, as an alternative to trying to keep everyone, everywhere, all the time awake, a proposal that was likely the very foundation of primate society - watches. Trusting others to keep watch while we get some sleep, and taking our turn where qualified to do so.
"Some people don't understand that sitting in your own house, alone in peace, eating snacks and minding your own business is priceless." ~ Tom Hardy, memequote, unsourced.
It was probably a slow boiled frog situation, but I think affluent Australia's cultural cringe and desire to move away from itself, its own self image has been a tragic success. Affluent Australia in becoming what it wanted to be, has lost what was good about being Australian, a very real embodiment of the Japanese philosophy expressed in Hagakure:
"Matters of great concern should be treated lightly." Master lttei commented, "Matters of small concern should be treated seriously." ~ Hagakure.
Australia that really cares about the AFL is charming, whereas Australia that really cares about repairing historical inequity is crass. And last I heard, the number of professional indigenous AFL players was declining*, it could be because all the top indigenous prospects are now becoming doctors and lawyers instead, but I can't rule out that lifting the esteem and aesthetic of social justice may have attracted a bunch of narcissists wanting to game the causes; is proving the wisdom of the Hagakure (at least on that point).
*The tragedy of this situation may be, I don't know, that the AFL is currently facing a reckoning in the form of a class action lawsuit regarding the mistreatment of AFL's indigenous pioneers - it turns out heroes that may have inspired generations of future indigenous stars were having a terrible time at work. What is tragic, is that while I would expect the AFL to be a demographic whose social attitudes track somewhat behind the times (I mean tuning in to the Footy show in the 2000s was like seeing reruns of a show recorded in the 1950s), that it is a much better time in the 2020s to be an indigenous player than it was in the 1970s and 80s, yet the publicity of how truly awful it was in the 70s and 80s may be turning indigenous talent off playing AFL even though it is likely to only become a better and better work environment for indigenous athletes.
If I reflect upon words I said probably back in 2016, maybe 2017 regarding body image ideals post my 3 month stay in Italy, my position then was one that thought what I would then have referred to as "progressivism" was a mental health disaster - memes like trigger warnings and safe spaces, the patriarchy, white supremacy etc. (and this shit only hit mainstream news media in 2014 at the earliest) but I was agnostic as to whether the benefits would prove to outweigh the personal cost.
8 years on, abetted by culture shock that agnosticism is hard to maintain, while I feel no need to revise my belief that what is now probably referred to as "woke" politics, are a mental health disaster. The data as I can access it, appears to suggest that being woke makes the individual miserable and anxious, whilst simultaneously being counterproductive to the causes it nominally is trying to address.
So why then would I arrive in Australia in 2023 and feel like I'm swimming in a sea of Puritanical messaging whose adherents are both miserable and making things worse?
I feel it is a symptom of the hedonic treadmill. Being back in Australia, particularly the first few days running around Centennial park to work out the frustrations of being there/here, my economist nerves were tickled and I began to question the whole project of enriching the middle class. The Eastern suburbs of Sydney are quite confronting in this regard.
Bringing me to:
Fighting to Death over Macaroons/Fucking Salted Caramel - Rich with N.V. (No Vision)
"Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. ... And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point!” ~ Dostoyevski predicts the 21st century Australian social contract.
Question: do you think anyone, ever, anywhere, tasted caramel (essentially melted sugar and cream) and remarked "this is under seasoned."
Now, salted caramel is not a direct aspect of the culture shock I have experienced. It got under my skin when it appeared prior to my departure to Mexico 5 years ago. It is also, not a unique phenomena.
Just as salted caramel supposedly solved the problem of not-delicious-enough-caramel, angus beef solved the problem of not-delicious-enough-hamburgers, unless Grill'd solved the problem of not-delicious-enough-hamburgers, like Crust solved all the chronic problems we had as a society with not-delicious-enough-pizza, and Gami solved the problem of KFC-being-not-delicious-enough.
Maybe truffle-oil is your thing, or vanilla-beans solving the problem of vanilla-extract. Maybe it was the word "umami" solving the problem of "MSG" being esteemed-Asiatic as opposed to reviled Asiatic, or maybe it goes all the way back to bottled water. Salted caramel I find the easiest to explain via my senses because I'm so confident that nobody, ever, anywhere, tasted caramel and complained it wasn't delicious enough. I'm confident in fact that caramel's main criticism would be "it's too rich" and perhaps an apt description of "The Lucky Country" also.
Salted caramel is a solution to an imaginary problem. You can buy products with salted caramel as their main selling point in the local supermarket, assured that our society has solved a fake problem, in lieu of solving the real problem like the homeless guy camped out the front of your local supermarket.
What salted caramel says to me is: that if existential angst persists, double your dose.
I saw a manifestation of salted-caramel in Mexico and commented on it to my partner of the time. I joined two gyms in my time there, as I lived in two places. The first gym I joined was unisex, Mexico is already spoilt for male gaze, Mexican gyms can be too rich, even for a pervert like me. This young lady joined and she was just hopeless. Absolutely no mechanical aptitude for gym equipment with literal diagrams depicting "do this." often condescendingly demonstrating that after you lift your arms or legs or whatever, you should lower them back down. Furthermore, the gym was filled with people demonstrating constantly how to use the equipment. This young lady needed a personal trainer to help her figure out the leg press, because "pressing her legs" didn't occur to her.
Suffice to say, she made two impressions. The first was that she was beautiful, probably in the top 10 percent of tapatias, which is like being a model amongst a general population of models. The second impression was that whatever was holding her back in life, was probably emotional/psychological and she wasn't going to find the answer by growing her booty. Yet, all she wanted to work on, was something that was likely already working for her. There was basically no executive at her work, or no wealthy bachelor in the city that was going to say "when you were merely stylish and beautiful and vapid, I didn't think you were the right fit for us, but now that your booty is 20% bigger, and you're still stylish and vapid we decided you were it."
Now judgement being what it is, I could have made an analogy out of me, because I'm good at planning and strategizing and my real weakness is sales, I spend most of my energy on planning and strategizing and avoid working on selling myself like the plague. So... human after all.
I mean, I doubt Jesus was even the first thinker to assert that the pursuit of riches is hollow, can you name a philosopher that found wisdom consists of trying to be as rich as possible? Crato the Elder maybe if his "how to profit from slave labour" guide can be considered philosophy. But almost nobody who tried to figure out how to live a good life, from Buddha to the Greeks, the Lakota to the Incas ever seem to conclude hedonism.
I found a name I'd never heard before, that of Aristippus who viewed pleasure as the highest good, and perhaps founded ethical hedonism. However, his most famous phrase "I possess, I am not possessed" is not the culture of contemporary Australia. Your grandma or someone similarly annoying probably said at some point "own your possessions don't let them own you." as an anti-hedonistic piece of moral instruction. So I have to plead ignorance as to the full breadth and depth of Aristippus' views, his schools and later thinkers on ethical hedonism like Bentham, I am fairly confident that they neither advocated nor envisioned a world where people would add sea salt* to caramel to try to get people to consume more of it for the benefit of society.
*(any day now someone will add Himalayan salt to caramel, and Australians will buy it.)
And being an individual, assigned to a demographic that has on my own behalf chosen to politely listen and silently read rants about the oppressive nature of life under the patriarchy - one of my wishes contingent on magic existing, or some coincidental psychedelic trip, would be to give the gift of the emptiness of existence on the top. Margaret Atwood seems to get it, when she portrays the ruling class of Gilead the dystopian theocracy of the Handmaid's Tale as not believing in the utopian ideals that founded the new state, they are simply and cynically interested in power. On the other end of the spectrum Jordan Peterson seems to get it, when he asserts the more pertinent question than "why are men overrepresented amongst CEOs?" as "why the bloody hell* would anybody want to be CEO?"
*(god how I wish JP would just swear instead of these undignified Canadian substitutes.)
The observation that "money doesn't buy you happiness" is absolutely, positively, nothing new. It's just seemingly eternally ignored. Again, my time in Italy had me questioning the discourse around women's bodies, where the lifestyle means for women, particularly in what in an Australian context I'd call the vulnerable years of 13-35 (I should say, maybe peak vulnerable years) are not bombarded by media with unobtainable body ideal messaging, because by my estimates 1:2 young Italian women are more attractive than most (predominantly US and UK) fashion models.
On top of this, and Australian travel habits, and travel journalism suggests, that many Australian's wish they lived in Italy. Life in Italy for many people, just seems better for many Australians, perhaps preferring the pace, the community, the climate, the cuisine, the businesses, the fashion, the architecture whatever. I guess all I need is to assert, is that Australians don't find Italy such a desirable travel destination purely because of the climate, the geography, the topography etc, things that Australia could not imitate if it tried.
Yet as much as many love, or would love to go to Italy for 2 weeks, 6 weeks, 3 months, a year etc. nobody seems to suggest that maybe Australia should try and imitate the economic policy of Italy. Nobody would argue for more unemployment, less construction, more pensioners, lower economic growth and more government turnover with increasingly convoluted coalitions between fascists, communists, environmentalists and stand up comedians who formed a political party as satire.
Similarly, while life was definitely more pleasant for me in Mexico, and much of this could be attributed to a mild climate year round meaning there were less than 80 hours a year I could justify wearing an outer layer, and you know, I more or less didn't have a job, so even though I lived on a meagre budget for those years, I also, did not have the displeasure of a job, we had an 80 year old friend that lived in our local park, who had foregone housing and a government age pension in favour of washing cars and sweeping sidewalks for local residents, and salvaging junk and selling it most likely in my estimation to maintain an addiction to smoking crystal meth, a habit he'd have to kick to avoid being evicted from public housing.
And you see, I suspect he is generally happier, day to day, than many quite wealthy, even obscenely wealthy Australians.
Obviously, the comparison is unfair, I cherry pick a Mexican I cherry pick an Australian or US citizen, Trump is probably miserable despite mansion residences and private jets, Gina Rinehart too, you know both of these billionaires are probably quite stressed not because they are billionaire's per se, but because they have ongoing legal battles and deep rooted psychological issues exacerbated rather than relieved by their wealth or perception thereof.
I was in Mexico long enough to have scales drop from my eyes and as good as day to day life is in Mexico, when it gets bleak, it can get bleak real fast. Living a simple life with simple pleasures in a park is all fine and dandy until the day the police turn up and move you along, or until the day you get into an argument with your dealer or customer who turns violent.
When Mexican life gets real, it gets really real. There are things a modernizing Mexico should fix for its citizens, they should start with the 110k+ disappeared citizens who in most cases will likely not be found until a satellite can find human remains buried in a desert or under a construction development from space, but you know, they should try and stop another 1% of the population from disappearing. They should probably do something about workplace safety and traffic regulation so you aren't guaranteed to see an amputee any time you leave the house. They could get their healthcare humming, so preventable diseases are prevented and like denghi fever and rabies are eliminated.
Basically Mexico deserves for human dignity's sake, to have food clothing and shelter for all its people or near enough to, like Australia. Access to healthcare and education and an end to exploitation of child labour.
Having returned to Australia though, I genuinely question whether there is a point to going beyond that.
I mean, Australia like many wealthy industrialized democracies had that post war to 70s period where the middle class grew as a proportion of the population, the working class shrank, home ownership went up and real wages (adjusted for inflation) increased. Then from roughly 76 onwards like other wealthy industrialized democracies, some metrics started going backwards - real wages stagnated, home ownership started falling, unemployment rose and wealth inequality increased.
From '76 or whenever onwards, Mexico should not run the Australian program. I would probably concur that since the Keating Government, Australia can be characterized as having no visionary leadership. If anything Liberal or Labor the vision has been "stable macroeconomic growth driven by mineral and commodity exports" and hence we have ended up with salted caramel, sushi in the supermarket, fucking macaroon pick-and-mix in the supermarket, but there's nothing Australia is or does, even less so than the past, apart from wanting to be someone, seemingly anybody, else.
I believe it was in documentary "The Corporation" but I couldn't find it, but somebody in one of those Bush-Era late-capitalist documentaries said something like (me paraphrasing):
The whole thing is based on a truth and a lie. The truth is, that if you take a person who is naked, cold, hungry and give them food, clothing and shelter, they will go from very miserable to very happy, very quickly. The lie is, that if going from having nothing to having something makes you happy, then having twice as much stuff will make you twice as happy.
I have no doubt, that I can find Mexicans caught up in that lie. Australia has 44 billionaires (USD I assume) and Mexico has 12. I'm sure one of them has tried a dessert that had gold leaf in it, and found the experience hollow and sad and wondered if anything could cure their malaise.
All of this is to say, that I suspect Australia has a tiger-by-the-tail economy, that's why the people who solved the problem of not-delicious-enough-caramel which in turn solved the problem of not-delicious-enough-ice-cream were probably well compensated for allowing the top 20% of Australian Household Income members another hypothesis that they felt dissatisfied because they didn't have everything they need in life.
I feel it was asserted at least 20 years ago, that the Australian home was the greatest source of Australian wealth, which is to say Australian house prices are the major determinant of Australians net worth. When I say tiger-by-the-tail economy, what I mean is that if nobody turns up to tomorrow's auctions, and people just stop buying houses, the house prices won't stagnate sitting at a median price of $1.4 million in Melbourne or whatever, they will crash.
In that sense, salted caramel is a real solution to a real problem, I am somewhat incensed that caramel has been made more delicious, but there are still homeless people in Melbourne a growing number probably, but it is for this reason that I am not carrying on like an activist. We need to keep this economy moving because if it stops, the wheels will fall off. Which is a terrible place to be. A Sandra Bullock keeping the bus above 50 miles per hour economy.
I just wish we didn't have to lie about. I have a job which is solving money problems for me. It's not a job that many are passionate about, I'm happy to be professional, but what gets stressful is when people act like I should be passionate about it and working on my jump shot so to speak with Mamba mentality...holy shit the Western Conference Finals, I haven't checked the scores in hours...Mavs win!
An Unbearable Softness Of Being
You may have heard Australia described as "the lucky country" which to my understanding, was first intended as a pejorative. Returning here, it feels very much like a gated community. One of George Orwell's lesser known quotes is:
"Those who 'abjure' violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf." ~ George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism (1945)
He also commented on Rudyard Kipling's "Yes, making mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep." with:
"He sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them."
Which likely led to the misattributed quote where he was paraphrased by Richard Grenier as recently as 1993 "As George Orwell pointed out, people sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."
As it pertains to Australia, having spent a long time out of Australia, coming back to it, is like entering a gated community. I'm sure the Australian coast guard, Navy etc do an admirable job of mostly peaceably protecting the nations boarders, but the big factor being that Australia is a long-haul flight from India, and every other major continent, with our fellow residents of the southern hemisphere being South America and Africa. Our most recent existential threat in terms of needing uniformed men to guard us in our sleep, was Imperial Japan in World War II.
The Chauvinism of Xi means we have pacific neighbours in Taiwan and Hong Kong SAZ to be canary in the coal mine for the nation that is most probable to be of serious consequence to national security and they happen to be Australia's major trade partner.
Then there's the fact that Australia's economy involves growing things for export and digging shit out of the ground for export. I am genuinely unclear as to all the shit that happens in Australian cities, needs to happen at all.
Australian's are very wealthy without having to manufacture superconductors, create innovative hardware-software platforms, culture (Furiosa is not looking good at the box office) etc.
It is just a fact that while Australia convenes a body to try and end violence against women by 2050! Meanwhile in Mexico about 60 people go missing everyday. Comparing apples-with-apples is hard, in Australia 38,000 missing person reports are filed each year. The big difference being all but 2,600 are located within a short period of time, or 7 per day. Mexico's population is about 5 times the size of Australia, it's daily missing people are 9 times that of Australia.
My interpretation, and why I keep referring to Mexico's disappeared people, is that Mexico's missing persons are a more accurate indicator of Mexico's homicide rate. Australia's homicide rate contemporarily is 0.87 deaths per 100,000 per year, the US homicide rate is 7.8 homicides per 100,000 per year and Mexico's is 25 per 100,000 in 2023 down from 28 in 2022 (meaning in one year they saw a drop greater than all of Australia's homicides in a one year period, and Australia is only trying to eradicate by 2050 the proportion that is women killed by men 60/247 or 69/247 including women killed by women) however, the big thing and I've laboured this point too much, is my impression that most of Mexico's missing persons are actually unsolved homicides and I just don't know at what point Mexico presume someone dead and if they then roll that into their homicide statistics, but they are probably regardless quite understated.
Where I lived in Mexico, I would describe as safe. What happened to Ballarat mother Samantha Murphy earlier this year in Australia was always happening in Guadalajara, just instead of massive news coverage and huge official investigations coupled with massive community volunteer efforts, there are murals that highlight one particular case among hundreds of other missing person posters.
So I get back to Bondi Junction and I feel somewhat like Tom Hanks from Castaway:
I mean I'd gone from living in a nice neighbourhood of Guadalajara, with my former partner and our pets living in another nice neighbourhood of Guadalajara, with one of those charming aspects of Mexican life, my life of the past 4 years being a major freight railway intersecting the short walk between abodes where there's a community of homeless people living in makeshift housing that hop those trains and try to pull anything of value out of it.
Mexico is really nice, and Australia has its homeless, its drug addicts in every affluent suburb, you can find people sleeping rough in Australia and out the front of a supermarket holding cardboard signs. You can even see what we might call homeless communities in Australia.
What sticks out though, is simply the shear size of the communities in Australia that can debate Panini's and Lattes as if these things are in any way shape or form important.
It was really hard to cope with, and my main means of coping with just how on the nose Australian affluence is, was running around Sydney's beautiful Centennial park and up and down Anzac Parade by the SCG and Allianz Stadium working on characters of the residents of Bondi. I'll try now, to put it into words:
"Don't go to Positano's their coffee is soooooooooo baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad. You have to try the lattes at Alegrino's their coffee is sooooooooo goooooooooooooood."
It's not sidesplitting, ground breaking stuff. If anything it's pretty weak. I needed it to survive psychologically being in Bondi after three years in Mexico. And look, I'm privileged, there are so many, so very many Mexicans that if transplanted into Bondi would think they had died and gone to heaven with the Virgin of Guadalupe, Santa Muerte and El Nino Jesus Christo, right up until they saw the price of tortillas and then would go and drown in the undertow of the relatively pedestrian Bondi Beach after this end of the Pacific put them into hypothermic shock.
But the point is, they would love it I'm sure almost as much as I hate it. I'm certain Mexican immigrants to Bondi become the same horrible athleisure wearing latte sipping ***** **** ****** ***ts that Australians of European descent become living in Bondi. I'm sure if I saw Lance "Buddy" Franklin at Bondi Junction, I'd be somewhat disillusioned.
And I've alluded to the other thing that was happening to me, in my most severe case of culture shock I've ever experienced. My internal monologue used the word ***** over 1,000 times a day. It was constant: look at this *****, out of my way *****, hurry up *****, do you know what a ***** you are? I swear if I see another *****... and so on, incessantly for like the first three months until the cognitive behaviour slowly went extinct.
I felt like Genghis Kahn forcibly retired and having to live as a civilian. I literally had impulses, physical impulses to simply push people out of my way. Like place both hands on them, and toss them aside.
Again, I feel this is ordinary human psychology when you switch social environments to one in which people are taking things for granted. I also had intrusive thoughts when I, as a Melbourne veteran cyclist went to Roppongi Hills in Tokyo and would see $3,000 AUD road bikes, carbon frames and forks and everything locked up to ground floor balconies with bike locks I'm fairly confident I could have ripped apart with my bare hands. Unbidden I would think that I should steal an expensive road bike to teach the naive Japanese a lesson and had to remind myself that I'm not a theif, I wouldn't steal a bike if it had no lock at all.
But I didn't, and I haven't shoved anyone out of my way since I got back from Mexico, I didn't shove anyone out of my way in Mexico, nor was I shoved by anyone in Mexico. It just feels like shoving a Mexican is a very very bad idea, whereas shoving an affluent Australian feels like a victimless crime.
It's about time that I transitioned my culture shock from Affluent eastern Sydney to Affluent eastern Melbourne where I managed in October of last year to catch the tail end of 2023s Winter fashion:
So obviously an exaggeration, but what I feel is important to convey, is how, for many Australians you may not have noticed that you are now literally wrapped in bubble wrap and wearing cushions/pillows on your feet.
Okay, I assume you didn't notice it happening but here we are. Like evolution's island effect it is understandable that Australia, particularly affluent Australia has undergone some kind of insular-dwarfism.
Mexico's homicide rate is some 5 or six times that of the United States and hundreds of times higher than Australia even with school kids stabbing each other over Pokemon or pronouns or some shit. Mexico doesn't feel dangerous though when you are there, because in Mexico you don't become a dodo, you are aware the greatest danger isn't sore feet or even cholesterol. Most mexican's aren't fucking hardened sicarios with bullet cases for fals teeth and neck tattoos. Most of the Mexican's with neck and facial tattoos aren't cartel gangbangers, they are something much scarier - insufferable hipsters, but it is sufficient to be a mostly flightless chicken in a world with rats and foxes, than a dodo on an island waiting for the Dutch to discover it.
That Australia is safer, cleaner, more accessible etc. is not in dispute, but I would guess there's a sociological debate that goes with antifragility, acclimatization, where maybe I have a cartoonish impression derived from movies, but I can imagine soldiers returning from Afghanistan and struggling with "why did I want to give those kids in villages that might grow up to try and kill me with IEDs chewing gum and high fives, and I come back home and want to kill my own children for playing Nintendo Switch at the dinner table?"
The video above, I almost can't take, but it should be confronting for Economists, Psychologists, Poly-sci doctrates etc.
This kid receives what for me, is the equivalent of forgetting my nephew/nieces birthday and quickly ducking out to a service station to get them gifts. It's a box, mostly filled with baloons, a packet of chips and a 500~600ml bottle of coke, then a bunch of toy story masks, stickers, some colour pencils, a novelty pencil and the kid has the secret sauce - the kid is thrilled. It is the best birthday in his life.
If you are like "but Nintendo Switch, Legos, Bicycles, kid spa treatments are all way better than a box of stationary and $7 AUD worth of snacks." You are probably a rarefied idiot. We've known for years that grilled cheese sandwiches and a tennis ball to hit against the wall are sufficient to bring us joy. The question is why can't we act on this knowledge.
Everyone who watches the video understands that the kid is right. He's having a really great birthday, and that something has gone wrong with everyone else. Even Mexicans watch that video and understand that their own kids don't need the hired jumping castle and the battery powered unicorn/micro SUV to drive around their local park to be happy.
An independent student could have used the house I lived in for my last six months as a shooting location for a prison scene. Not because my apartment was horrible, but just because most Mexican residents have a bunch of barred gates and buzzers and security doors to pass through. I've held them open for people I don't recognize and people have done so for me, although as one of less than 1% of the population with blonde hair, everyone probably does recognize me, I'm the guero in the neighborhood, sometime known as guerito and sometime known as gueron.
And like, when you go to leave the safety behind those gates maybe to hit up a taco or hot dog stand when you are feeling peckish at 11.30pm, you don't tie a mirror to a stick and look both ways before you exit the security gates.
After 6+ months back, I still feel strange at how physically/materially insecure Australian households are. The other day AustraliaPost delivered a package to the wrong address and my good deed for the day was walking it up to the proper address. (One of these houses with a buzzer on their front gate that likely has a camera and intercom that connects to their phone ap.) The first time I tried there was no answer, but their front gate was wide open, I could have walked in and just dumped it on their front doorstep. I didn't and tried again later and they just told me to open the gate and leave it on the front doorstep. And that house had been broken into in the last year in order to steal a fob to steal their car.
Like for all the seeming security concern of having a smart doorbuzzer on the front gate, they don't lock that gate.
My understanding is that in Australia, bullying has gotten worse, not better much as I find it hard to imagine kids still doing swirlies and shit. I think bullying of the 80s and bullying of the 20s are perhaps two very different things, oranges and apples and it might be worse because in the 70s if someone scarred your face with a pocket knife your parents might say "what are you a **************ess?" and now if someone sad reacts to a social media post your parents get you diagnosed with PTSD, we used to be chickens, now we're dodos adapted to the dangers of our environment.
Australian commercials though are like the underappreciated 1990's movie Pleasantville where the gated community of Australia just doesn't believe suffering is a thing, and they portray as an ideal a world in which all the cool people, the mean people, the bullies, the charismatic, the people average people used to hate having to compete for resources against - are simply gone now.
Maybe, maybe that is in some way the ideal. We evolve into the soft squishy things from Wal-E and that's what we are supposed to want.
I would exit my apartment, or be on the roof hanging laundry and the little girl across the way would yell "Hello friend!" out her window regularly, where as far as I could tell this little girl only 5 or 6 didn't have a bedroom, her bed was the couch in the living room by the window. We'd chat about dogs and cats, and she'd invite me to her birthday. She wasn't scared of the scary world full of murderers outside those gates, because the world outside those gates wasn't full of murderers.
Mexico is better described as being full of toys and candy and food and music and yes, the occasional murderer. It's that hint of uncertainty that demands we actually engage with life somehow, and for some reason when you take it away, it isn't the softness of Australians that is the problem (my dogs Usma and Doki were both incredibly soft and they were Mexican dogs, they had to interact with actual junkyard dogs on their daily walks, and Doki's macho dance is seriously the least masculine thing you have ever seen), it's that that softness manifests in a way in which it is unbearable. Like please dude, tell me more about your ADHD.
Conclusion: Polite Lies
You have feelings, I have feelings. You may not believe me, but I sympathize with you when you hate someone who doesn't have anything nice to say about Australia. I don't find it particularly enjoyable to catch up with friends who then just talk about how they hate it here in Melbourne and how everything is fucked.
I'm not even that pessimistic, in fact, if I was that pessimistic I probably would have voted "Yes" to the last referendum figuring there will not be another chance. I think what critical and judgemental people like me don't do a good job of selling to others, is that the point of the criticism and judgement is in figuring things out and that this is often for me at least a font of optimism that things get figured out, people sell others on the solutions, problems get resolved and progress is made.
What I guess is hard, is the actual process of discussing ambivalence, about how we can feel both ways about something. This actually exacted a toll on my relationship when I returned to Mexico to begin my three years away. I arrived both sad and happy, both relieved and exhausted.
I'd been through a harrowing ordeal in not just the Covid lockdowns, but having to experience the worst of human nature via facebook during the lockdowns. People stuck in the equivalent of a 5 month long long haul flight, making a tough situation worse by trying to make it better.
I'd had to leave Melbourne pretty much as soon as it reopened, meaning I missed the opportunity to catch up with so many people I already hadn't seen for 2 years by that point. I left my whole family behind, and now I was with a new family.
I was glad to be back in Mexico and sad to be gone from Australia. Ambivalence.
The thing is, I didn't need to "get over" anything I was glad about. I had a great Christmas with my partner, and we went out dating again. The food was amazing, I met my buddy Doki who adopted me super quick. We went on daytrips and excursions, I settled in, got new shoes, started running, cooked meals every day for someone I loved.
And I was also sad and tired. That part needed getting over, because it made it virtually impossible to be excited.
It's kind of the same coming back. I was fortunate that my sister knows me super well, but I think it even hurts her, that you know, I'm not just glad to be back but also sad to be back, and it was super helpful that I don't have to fucking pretend with her, that I'm not sad. And that much as I like her dog Sophie, and Sophie likes me, it makes me sad that she isn't my dogs.
Also, if anything, I kind of fucked myself by functioning so well. By rights, given my circumstances I could just now have ended 6 months of barely getting out of my bed with depression, to just now sign up for centerlink payments. There are many days where I feel I could actually do with the bigotry of low expectations, instead of having to explain why I'm not the CEO of Bluescope Steel yet.
I think between you and me, pluralistic ignorance is our common ground. If we could just admit that the first world problems are real. That there's a reason we can relate to this and this and probably more to the point, that Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" had some prophetic value, even Marx. Now I will personally fight you if you suggest the answer is decalcifying our pituitary glands or pursuing a utopia.
What I think would do wonders is if we could relax the whole demeritocracy such that we can admit that maybe our job is bullshit and doesn't need to exist, without feeling an existential threat like they'll make you walk the plank tomorrow.
This is how I treat myself, like I know that I eat a lot of crap and it is crap, and I plan on stopping but probably not today and not tomorrow but sometime between now and the Melbourne marathon because I just want to deal with as much as I can handle at any given time and eating some sugar bombs helps me survive the more stressful stuff going on right now.
I don't need anyone to be like "yeah tohm, I'm going to sell my house and join your under the bridge community." I don't expect Australian's to just jump off the treadmill that really is the only viable lifestyle option you were ever presented with. But if we could just share honest opinions about the treadmill life, I think we could both relax even if we disagree.
I don't want to be a miserable ***** but sometimes the way out is through. And believe me, I also entertain alternate strategies like saying "fuck it" and getting on with it. My experiences on Job Seeker were that it was motivating to get off Job Seeker by it being such a ****** ***** ***** poorly designed ****** of ***** to deal with.
Things are difficult, for everyone as far as I can tell. Let's relax and just figure it out.
