Public Address - Club Politique (Home)

Metics Four | Aug 24, 2005 11:43

Maybe the best way to understand difference is to first understand what it is not. Sure, there's a chance that sounds a little too zen for some, but really what I mean is understanding sameness.

You don't have to do navel-gazing to understand when you do or don't like someone. But, it's also true that you can't always tell exactly why you feel that way.

Sometimes you feel the same as people because of obvious links. Say, you both like the same music and get talking at a gig. You might be family. You might discover you both work at the same place and hate the same boss. The possibilities are endless.

Weirdly though, you might find that you feel entirely dissimilar to someone in one context, but feel connected to them in another. Aussies and Kiwis attending any particular sports match you could name will feel antipathy at the ground, but if they walk out of the stadium and into surrounds of London, they're great mates.

Sameness can it seems be relative.

It's always made me wonder then why people work so hard to foster sameness. Much of the time sameness is the product of completely ordinary events or things that you don't really notice until someone points them out to you. And all too often these exact events and things will separate you from people you would otherwise like.

Regardless of the normality of difference, it's very usual for leaders such as political figures to work very hard to foster similarity among their supporters. Not absolute sameness mind you, but sameness enough to ensure that supporters remain 'tethered' to one another.

The trouble is, among small groups difference isn't too much of a drama, usually. When disputes arise they normally have to be worked through, feathers smoothed, the necessary words spoken and so on. But, as your group gets bigger and bigger it becomes very difficult to maintain the tethers that keep a group bound to one another.

In the past, sameness was usually maintained through allegiance. Even though you might hate the clan or tribe living in the next valley, your allegiance to a higher power or lord was what prevented you from paying them an angry visit. Uneasy alliances and fear of the loss of human life were stereotypically what held larger 'groups' together.

As technology changed, what with flashy, newfangled widgets like the Industrial Revolution coming along, new ways of keeping people from hating each other had to be invented, because the groups being managed were just getting too large to handle with allegiance alone.

The idea that some guys had was to start talking about 'nations' as natural groupings of people. And it worked a treat.

What 'nations' allowed was for increasingly large numbers of individuals to be tethered together, and for older identities like tribes or clans to be superseded. The trick in this case was for people to be encouraged to identify with things they didn't immediately see.

Sameness in this case became all about people feeling attached to things they may not have any direct experience of, like their monarchy, sports events, or wars they may have heard of but not fought in. The result was that people began more and more to consider themselves similar, even though their daily lives may be completely different.

The consequence of this relatively new idea is that leaders these days spend large amounts of the public time fostering the impression of sameness among the populations of the state they govern. So even though the society they govern may well be mottled and multifaceted, the individuals themselves believe they're the same as someone on the far side of the country.

And this is why you might find that you're different to people, but similar all at the same time. It's a weird kind of nexus, in which different and similarity are intertwined and overlaid in highly complex and oft-times mysterious ways. Worse, unravelling the nexus is something of a black art, one that a writer can only really understand in small glimpses.

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Setting Myself Up | Aug 22, 2005 12:23

Thanks to those who wrote in about one of last weeks post, it was good to get some positive replies to me waxing lyrical. Especially after a friend here read it, and asked when I'd become a 'glue smoking homo'.

It ain't easy being button-pushing bureaucrat you know. There's all these countervailing pressures in play between wanting to engage in political debate, keep your head down, and still reach into one's 'artistic soul'. Ah well.

On the great news front though, I've gone and set myself up for a little embarrassment by scheduling a talk up at Victoria University. As part of the final jumping through hoops process over at Melbourne, I need to have presented the Thesis at least once in the past year. I got in touch with the kind people at the Politics department, and they've kindly loaned me a seminar room to sit and act the intellectuel bogàn.

Naturally no one will be expecting extensive preparation time, flashy powerpoint presentations or booming oratory, but it will be interesting to have to try and explain all the crazy 'stuff' that's been gradually trying to escape by brain and onto my shoulders (from where it makes a pathetic dash for freedom). Normally of course I just pass it off as bad dandruff.

All the same, high noon on Tuesday will see anxiety producing sweaty palms and a shifty gaze in Che. Academic career? History.

This means that things are coming along nicely. As of just after the election I pass from short-term contract hell into a permanent slot here in the Public Service.

It's not as bad as it sounds.

For one thing they're paying me a respectable but not ludicrous amount of money, with which I intend to pay off years of accumulated debt (including but not exclusive to my student loan). They offer me a desk somewhere and high-speed internet with which to expand my knowledge of the job I've given, and never cyber-clack. And being a newbie I'm bound to end up with a glorious view of an internal meeting room. Or maybe a vending machine. It's all good though.

But by far the best outcome will be the setting aside of a small amount of cash to go away next year to some place likely to badly sunburn me.

I'm thinking that with global warming well on the horizon I've only got a few years before half of the Pacific Islands disappear underwater, so I'd better get out there and do some decent diving before it's too late. Hopefully, the locals will take my tourist dollars and put it towards some real estate here or in Australia where they can go live when their homes are drowned.

Having said that, I just realised that jet travel is one of the great polluters behind farty animals, hydro-power schemes in tropical climates, and cars. Maybe I can sail to Rarotonga? Wouldn't that be nice… almost as good as the Bacon and Banana Pancakes at Fidels on Cuba, but I can't laze around in the sun eating brunch for four weeks can I?

Actually, here's a question someone might be able to answer me. Everyone is all freaky about cars producing CO2. But how much CO2 is produced by a billion Indians all breathing in, and out. And in, and out?

Yup, asking the BIG QUESTIONS here at Club Politique.

Might be time to cut back on a bit of the American beef taking up all that valuable oxygen to make a little more room for the Indian hot air.

Oh! And speaking of which, what with the Public Service Code of Conduct effectively hamstringing my ability to make large and potentially inflammatory comments about complete fools like Peters (note the way he likes Asian food. In Asia. Not here where it might foul his hot air. And Winston, you'd never make it in a kitchen. You are too much of a frickin 'cat'), there's a good chance the title of this blog may well have to change.

The main suggestion so far has been 'Alterantively'. It's likely this title will most reflect my commentary style anyhow…

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