Utopia

The Chain and Ball baseness of Politics.
Now, please don’t run away (yet), just a few words about the recent drama leading to a change of our Prime Minister. Her name is Julia Gillard. We had for the first time a PM that was and still is a female, but not anymore our country’s leader. Six years ago she was lauded as a future Prime Minister.

We had Kevin Rudd for three years first, after which fate decided a time was right for a female prime minister. We were so happy to get a change from an 11 year long stifling conservative government doing its best to keep us within the set of boundaries that ensured a solid maintenance of the status quo and cups-o-tea.

Of course, some now say, “The conservative government between 1996 and 2007 were our best years.” Sorry, but I am vague what the achievements during those years were. Was it the involvement of Australia in the Iraqi war or keeping refugees away from our shores? Was it the fondness of the PM John Howard in his love of a foreign Queen and cricket while wearing raglan sleeved pullovers…?

I remember his way of assuaging latent or not so latent xenophobia with his rant about how ‘we will decide who comes to this country and the method whereby they come’ followed up with ‘the children overboard’ lie. The slogans were received like honky-tonk to the ears of the red necks. “Let the boat people drown, they deserve it,” was his real message. “Teach them a lesson,” while rocking back authoritatively on his immoral heels. He knew it all.

As his tenure unfolded over the years, history, as it always does, spewed him out with his unpopularity resulting in only the second time around of a PM losing his own seat. Can you imagine? Yes I can. Nothing lowers everything to a level of baseness than politics.

My idea of a Utopia would be no politics and no Government. Go back to yeomen, carpenters and roof thatchers, jesters and clowns deciding issues with a fair exchange of goods for labour, a bartering for books on papyrus, wheel barrows or axes and with families around the communal fire or water-well. Poetry reading on Friday conversationally aided by the lubricant of an honest ale and strong coffee with snacks of calamari soaked in butter milk with some pepper.

There will be discourse on the weeks’ comings with fireworks and building giant slippery dips contemplation with dancing and hop scotching by others. Hurts would be heeled and soothed made better with hugs and kisses. Almonds, char-grilled and coated with chocolate would be currency and goats would give us cheese and much joyful bleating. Barking dogs and purring cats bouncing at the feet of leaping children, skipping using flaxen ropes and slapping rounded twiggy hoops round and around.

Music and singing for the just and last alive lingering up to a heaven still imagined during the final moment of a joyful departure. Incense burning to a loving memory never to fade or forgotten by kins and friends. Fresh daisies with five leaf clover on our dear beloved, so still now, yet buried below warm embracing sands.

That’s a Utopia that may one day find itself on the shores of our salt encrusted shores, smooth worn by pounding waves on rocks.
It is so much better than the present chain and ball politics.

The Rage of a Man

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Now that millions have watched the video clip of ex Prime Minister K. Rudd exploding in not finding the right words to translate something in Chinese, we might try attempt understand why men seem to lose the plot so much more than women. I am talking about this uncontrolled Nikita Khrushchev-like blind desk thumping rage, not the kind of nagging anger that perhaps some women are better skilled at.

Is it all due to sex and hormones?

No-one expected him to be perfect at his job, but that so ‘losing it’ over such a seemingly trivial matter is not all that uncommon by men. The travel by men away from wife can’t be easy on the marital conjugals, can it? Can we still not remember Fraser and his early morning wandering around the American Hotel lobby sans pants some years ago? What a plight he found himself in! What a sweet story that was. Still, he never was caught having a blind rage. He made amends ever since, not least by having resigned his Liberal Party membership. Which ex Australian PM can boast that achievement?

This blind rage is why, they, us men, wage war. War is nothing much more than massive lemming-like collective going totally over the board raving nuts by fruitcake men. How can killing make life better?

Now, women generally don’t make war and rarely suffer from blind desk-thumping rage. However, it is not uncommon that just prior to their monthly hormone changes they can get quite stroppy and are known to even have committed murder. Indeed, a defense on those hormonal grounds is sometimes still taken in consideration. There have been cases where PMS has proven to have turned women in behaving like raving mad animals. Part of the acquittal of a woman of a serious crime was that she had to undertake a strict regime of Court ordered progesterone treatment. http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/previous%20series/proceedings/1-27/~/media/publications/proceedings/16/easteal2.pdf

One woman had stopped taking the Court ordered hormonal medication and within days hurled a brick through a window. She again used her hormonal imbalance successfully to be acquitted once again.

While men are at the mercy of producing millions of restless and angry sperms every second 24/7, (year in and year out), all of those millions of aggressive squirming desperate sperms are meant to get ejected outside or inside somewhere, let’s not forget women are just as subject to their physical and hormonal proclivities as well. Are they also not held at ransom by their, just as volatile, ovaries?  However, the business of ovaries is only monthly and during pregnancy even gets a bit of a well earned holiday. While with men it is often vented through blind raging Victa-lawnmower pull starting fury and hopelessly losing the plot.

We men can’t just make wars or stand above the hand-basin wanking day and night, can we?