SATIRE: The Queensland Floods -- Drowning in asylum seekers

SATIRE: The Queensland Floods -- Drowning in asylum seekers

I was thinking that  inasmuch as  tolerant creatures on this planet go I can be a patient soul.

I'm not into martyrdom  but up to a point I will grin and bear it.

So here: watch this, I'm grinning. And again, here's another mental image of me bearing it...

But those mental shots  are yesterday's me. Today I'm  more of  a gritted teeth sort of guy.

Why? I've had it up to here with immigrants!

Perhaps you have assumed that recently Queensland, the state in which I dwell,  was drowning in a massive flood tide. Water everywhere. One big inland sea from our sandy  beaches to Woop Woop.

But this massive volume of fluid only has the appearance of water. If  you interview each droplet of H20  that fell upon this dry brown land north of the Tweed you'll get a very different story.

They're "asylum seekers" -- a bunch of so and soes whose only interest they will own up to is  to sneak past our girt-by-seaness and precipitate en masse. Up north they may have been happy enough floating around on the surface of a warm tropical sea somewhere but  they would  tell you (if they could speak)  that it got too hot for them to stay put.

So they  smuggled themselves  on the first cloud out of there.

All that fear of the  Yellow Peril or the Red Menace is just silly paranoia -- 20th century thinking. Bigotry. Racism.

This invasion  is colourless.

It's water.  

Buckets of the bootlegged  stuff. A vicious, unrelenting floodtide that no amount of processing on Christmas Island can protect us from.

(Give a me a drought any day.  I much prefer human flotsam or any neighborhood immigrant to this! )

But here's the rub, the big joke about Queensland:

A main aim of the state's recovery from the floods is to reopen the coal mines...

• so that Queensland can supply more fossil fuels to emit more carbon into the atmosphere 
• so that the oceans around us can be  made even warmer 
• so that even more water can be evaporated to be dumped on  Queensland to swamp the coal mines...

So with these asylum seekers, no matter what  form of mandatory detention we use  -- dams, flood walls, levee banks, umbrellas -- they are just gonna keep on coming in bigger and bigger waves -- aboard storm front or cell...

...until the coal mines drown (along with  the rest of us).

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Psychosis, barbarism and politics: the Arizona assassination

Psychosis, barbarism and politics: the Arizona assassination

The strict mental illness narrative may be relevant to 'explaining' the Arizona assassination  but in my experience of working with psychotic individuals -- including murderers and the like -- it is not very useful to divorce a persons' mental state from the broader social (and political) context.  In this case, the linkage to contemporary politics is self evident as it was  a political event with a history of some bitternes leading up to it.

If you compare this shooting  with the slaughter managed by Martin Bryant in Australia the context is very different   despite how psychotic both guys were at the time of the killing.

While people can brew a quite mad cocktail in their own heads it is difficult to imagine this event at a political rally occurring anywhere else outside the US except in a war zone.

And the US has to be seen as a war zone. 

If a Islamist walks into a Baghdad market place and blows himself and 30 others up -- he is as mad/as pathological  as this guy in Arizonia. If Sarah Palin calls for the assassination of Julian Assange (as she has) she's fuckin mad   too...

At some point you have to look upon madness as an ideology embraced by both individuals and groups -- political currents and otherwise -- regardless of how much it is accepted as 'normal' discourse.And in the US 'normal' does no longer exist. Barbarism and psychosis are really one and the same head space.

It also seems to me that a lot of the response needs to face up to the fact that violent politics is as American as apple pie...and to defer too much to the individual case of mental illness argument merely lets the whole filthy capitalist mix off the hook.

Mental illness, even psychosis, is not a fast track sentence to murder . 

After the Bryant massacre  there was debate here on the left about gun ownership in response a massive recall of weaponry in private hands. Similarly Bryant was later sent to a mental institution ...and not executed as we had mass campaigns here against capital punishment way back in 1965/67. 

The last person hung in Australia was Robert Ryan in 1967

The fortunately rare instance of serious political violence in Australia, -- the attempted assassination of the ALP leader Arthur Calwall in 1966 -- has the epilogue that its perpetrator Peter Kocan has just won  Australia Council's Writer's Emeritus Award for poetry. 

So in that sense the sort of step back we need to adopt has to be genuine and generous.

Like the argument in  this post.

It has to be about adopting the moral high ground the exploiting the opportunity to foster reflection.

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