School of Mine

I'm generally quite proud of my school, despite the fact that it is unlikely to be proud of me. But this fact is neither here nor there - I'm proud to have been a part of it, proud of the outstanding education they delivered to us, and immensely proud of the school's broader ethos, which unlike so many others, has evidently carried over into the later lives of its alumni, even in my case, where the uptake of its values was delayed until far too late in my life.

I was not an easy child. Underhanded, sneaky, dishonest, vindictive, occasionally violent, and sometimes flat out criminal. I remember my first detention was handed out in my first week of year seven, for lighting a fire in a bin. I'm pretty sure the only reason they held onto me for as long as they did was my academic ability. But this is not to say that the school was without its own problems. There was a distinct issue with bullying, in which I both participated and was a victim of. Elitism and arrogance are the besetting sins of all schools like mine, and there was quite a bit of our student culture which would now be condemned as toxic.

And it's not as if my memories of school are un-mixedly happy. Failures on the part of staff and other students to understand certain aspects of life which I felt to be obvious, and critical failures on my part in the area of character, made for a generally troubled and turbulent school life. Every time a form master appeared at a classroom door, there would be a chorus of, "That's for you, Lake," - and just like in Greek tragedy, the chorus was generally unerringly accurate.

For all that, however, I still think it was a sterling institution. Whenever I speak to our alumni, a fondness comes over their faces when we talk about the old school. This is in stark contrast to the boys who went to other schools in our cluster - the Knox and Trinity and Riverview boys, who wax contemptuous about their school culture, faculty, impacts on their subsequent lives. For the vast majority of the old Aloysians I speak to, the days of our schooling exist as a pure and bright cul de sac of time-softened recollection. A place where values mattered, and where the old connections are still upheld to an extent I have never encountered anywhere else apart from the military.

Tutor Group, with Idiot circled in red

So it was with pardonable complacence that I heard the news of the Royal Commission into Institutional Child Sex Abuse. My own personal memory could only conjure up a handful of incidents, disturbing enough in themselves, but relatively innocuous. A form master who once disciplined a student by strapping his bare backside - the strap was an ubiquitous punishment in my day, and I personally was strapped an average of twice a week, on the hands. A dubious relationship between one master and a student who, when it comes down to it, weren't that dissimilar in age. Dark rumours of faculty sauntering through the showers insisting that boys should be comfortable being naked in front of each other, but no corresponding action. Just the normal idiocy and weakness one expects in an institution, and which I'd always assumed was rigorously policed to prevent harm.

So it was with a mixture of quite unexpected emotions that I heard, through an old boys group, of the sentencing of two of our faculty for serious sexual offences. One was worse than the other, and both appeared to have taken place outside of our school at affiliated Jesuit institutions, but even this extremely peripheral view of the cancer of paederasty is disturbing enough. I remember the men in question. One was a Brother, actually wider than he was tall, so fat was he, who had a grating nasal voice and a habit of petty tyranny combined with the somewhat ridiculous habit of falling asleep at his desk in front of the class. It didn't take us long to figure out that leaving silently to pursue our own leisure was, in fact, the perfect crime. The other one I principally remember for a scathing thirty minute critique, mostly justified, of my character and morals, delivered at volume into my face in a small room. It's interesting to think of this in the context of the thousands of pornographic images of children he was subsequently convicted of possessing.

A picture of me, clearly thrilled to be in Concert Band, and unaware of the camera.

And that's the thing - the corrosion of my memory of the school has left me furious. Sure, I wasn't exactly its proudest son, but how dare these maleficent petty tyrants taint all of our recollections with their own sordid evil. How dare they. Not only have they done incalculable harm to their victims, for whom I cannot express enough sympathy, but they have also pissed on the childhood memories of thousands upon thousands of boys. Their gross betrayal of the credo that they themselves were the foremost in promoting is entirely unacceptable, and coupled with this is the chilling inference, given the delay in exposure and conviction, of the steps the school and church authorities both took and signally failed to take.

There has to be something positive to take from this, and to my mind it's a simple lesson, applicable across all areas of society, the state, and at every level. Never wink at evil to protect any institution, however great. This is not the first mass exposure of predatory behaviour in large and well respected institutions (though it might be the biggest), but it's down to all of us - every single one of us - to make it the last. If we're to learn anything from this, we must, I think, learn that this sort of thing cannot be allowed to stand.

Vote For The One You Don't Like

People often ask me why I hate populism so much - surely that means I hate the people, right? Surely the people are smart enough to know what they want, and how their country should be run - right? Right?

Well, possibly. But who, in fact, are the people? Are they the urban latte sipping elites whose top priority appears to be banning anything and everything which offends their delicate, Guardian driven sensibilities? Or are they troglodytes from Far North Queensland, demanding a ban on immigrants whom they have never encountered or had to live with because some idiot has asserted with no evidence whatsoever that their culture is under threat? Or are they the middle citizens, the quiet ones who are generally too busy being the engine of the whole damn country to have or understand political opinions, and who will generally vote based on whatever their mass media of choice tells them is the right way to vote?

This is the biggest issue, really. The people, en masse, are, in fact, critically stupid. Not because of average IQ or educational level - these are generally quite high - but because of the necessarily inchoate nature of a polity deliberately made up of disparate and competing interest groups. 

And that's the biggest problem with populism by far. A canny populist - one who knows what they're doing - will generally pick the biggest and/or most coherent interest group and tell them exactly what they want to hear. It's telling that in the Anglophone world, this group tends to be the xenophobic reactionary middle. But that's not the point - the point is, that they'll pick that one. A crap or incompetent populist will try to please everyone, resulting in the ridiculous situation where they'll be applying ten year gaol sentences to strawberry fiddlers one day, bringing children off Nauru the next, and then announcing vague plans to cut immigration while increasing immigration (WTAF) the day after that. The biggest single problem with populism is that it's a signal failure of leadership.

Most people - the vast majority of people, I'd be willing to hazard - are politically indifferent or politically moderate. Right up until the moment you ask them to state their position, at which point they vote Brexit not expecting it to pass, vote Trump in protest against the political establishment in the full knowledge that he's a fucking moron who won't fix anything, engage in flame wars about vaccines, corporate tax, international trade, or any other of the myriad issues which they know exactly nothing about, and generally just act like crazy people until the rush passes momentarily and they go back to work in the system which, once they've finished mindlessly excoriating it, they rely on for their livelihoods and well-being. 

So given the incoherent and frankly mindless nature of populist discourse, all a populist leader can actually do, in terms of concrete action, is address how people feel about an issue. Actually fixing it is an impossibility. Because the truth of issues like population, trade, or foreign affairs - the stuff people get really het up about - is that solutions are slow, complex, and usually highly counter-intuitive. So a populist solution is almost always good in the short term as it rubs everyone gently on the bum and tells them how smart they are, but disastrous in the long term, as such gains need to be disproportionately paid for in the world system. An excellent example of this is the trade deficit. Given our position in our region, it's both expected and desirable to run a deficit most years, but every single election both sides of the house will campaign on reducing or eliminating it, whilst shamelessly conflating it with the budget deficit. And we swallow it, for reasons I still can't explain. 

I understand that these arguments are probably not going to sway anyone in the populist camp, probably because they're reasoned arguments, and pay scant attention to how the people feel. This is because I don't give a fuck how the people 'feel' about the Iran deal, trade tariffs, price elasticity of demand, or any of the other innumerable things we shout about without knowing a damn thing about. We're really not supposed to know these things. What we're supposed to do is demonstrate at least as much sense as the average family dog, and vote in our own self interest rather than for some idiot who's clearly following us around and trying to stoke irrelevant outrage. Populism is to politics as a three year old child trying to live on sour candies is to healthy lifestyles. 

If I approached you in an alley in King's Cross and offered to sell you a diamond ring for a hundred bucks, and then spent the next few hours assiduously agreeing with whatever you had to say, however stupid, you wouldn't then decide to put me in charge of your household finances and career prospects. Or if I lobbed up next to you at a bus stop and started blaming all your problems and mine on mythical outsiders and 'the deep state', or a media conspiracy, I doubt you'd ask me to participate in decisions affecting the welfare of your small children. So please, for the love of all that's holy, can we please apply the same principles to selecting our political leaders?

The Magic Eye

When I first watched Training Day, I was a much younger and less experienced person. One concept which resonated, however, was the concept of 'the magic eye'. This was presented as a sort of eye for 'the street', a way of looking at things which would reveal that which is hidden, that layer of existence which lies beneath the manicured and regulated stream of ordinary life. Of course, Training Day being Hollywood, the proof of this was that the young police officer was able to spot a rape in progress, which is something I don't actually believe anyone needs a magic eye to achieve. But then, for a mass audience, the obvious needs to elevated to the level of the arcane.

Having said that, the magic eye does exist, and people who have it recognise each other. It's very hard to explain, but there's a few ways to look at it. The most basic and simple is to notice the way people look at people. This creates a different kind of look in the eye of the observer, and somebody who is looking at the way other people look at things, will become noticeable to someone else who's doing the same thing. This is how it works at the lowest level, and I generally remember it mostly from my youth, with recognition generally taking place amongst other youths. When older people would notice and comment on this to me, they would generally loom up out of nowhere, surprising me.

As we move forward towards inevitable death in that process we euphemistically refer to as ageing, habits of life and thought harden and submerge such that they are pursued both imperceptibly and ineluctably. Now, it looks utterly different. Instead of individuals connecting across a crowd in a sort of freemasonry, it is now a matter of scenery versus protagonist. The eye flicks over a crowd of people walking up and down a footpath, and the vast majority of these people have a gaze which is internalised and, to all intents and purposes, blind. It can be easily seen that what they are seeing is at least half made up of things inside their own heads, rather than that which is around them. These people fade into a kind of moving backdrop, interesting enough in and of itself, but rather like the sky in that unless something extremely unusual is happening with it, it's not exactly of immediate importance.

But then there are the others. The man who stiffens and moves his bag whenever someone comes within half a meter. The other man, next to him, who turns his right hip away from whoever he's talking to. The girl sitting on a wall whose glance goes from waist to hands to face, in that order. The woman who makes a point of looking over her shoulder every fifteen paces. Or the man who does the same thing, only instead of looking back, he looks up at the windows and rooftops above him. The people who are scanning the crowd and who lock gazes as soon as they encounter one that's doing the same thing - lock and dismiss when there's no threat detected. And in that split second between lock and dismiss is a sort of recognition. Not the happy or hostile recognition of youth, but rather a more matter of fact, sometimes quite sad acknowledgement that here is another person who is just as damaged, frightened, alienated, or just plain suspicious as themselves.

In my old neighbourhood of Manly, after the gentrification, I could go for days without seeing such a look. Where I work now, in Lane Cove, there's a grand total of three people (in Lane Cove you see the same people every day) I've seen with this look over the whole of the four or five years I've been there on a daily basis. But in the street where I live, which is not more than twenty minutes away, I see that look every time I go outside, multiple times. What is it about the street on which I live, that so many of the people walking up and down it have been sufficiently smacked around by the world to have the magic eye? It's not as if I live in a particularly rough neighbourhood - in fact, it's so not rough that the idea is laughable. I don't know, but as soon as I'm able to convince one of them to stop and talk to me about something that isn't the weather or the transit system, I will post that conversation up on this blog.