Show Business for Ugly People

So Johnny Howard is gone. And few will lament his passing. Australia has its fair share of selfish people who only care about tax reductions and keeping immigrants out, but even they lost interest in poor old Johnny. He had been Prime Minister for 11 years, as has Ireland’s Bertie Ahern. But he shares more than longevity with Ireland’s esteemed leader. Both follow a right wing philosophy dressed in liberal popularism. But politics these days is about style as much as substance and Johnny had about as much style as a Village People tribute band.

While Bertie pretends that he likes everyone from Trade Unions to George Bush (when in fact he likes no one except the five guys he goes for a beer with), Johnny pretends he likes no one, when in fact he is in love with George Bush.

Mr. Howard now joins his chums from the War on Terror in the dustbin of history. Tony Blair is sitting in a dark room somewhere practicing his Catherine Tate impression; Silvio Berlusconi is playing at being a Football Manager and investigating revolutionary hair replacement technology. Mr Anzar is busy lobbying the Spanish Socialist Government to award posthumous medals to dead Felangist torturers and George Bush himself is enduring the longest last dance in politics as the American Constitution does to him what the rest of the world would have liked to have done long ago.

Soon the horsemen of the apocalypse who plunged the World into a never ending middle eastern war will be gone. But it is not for the blood of thousands of Iraqis they have fallen. Consumerism has been their downfall. The Western World has surfed an economic boom for the past twenty years, built on cheap Chinese products and the never-ending thirst of American and European consumers. You would think that the politicians who brought this wealth would be cosseted by a thankful public. But in the same way that we grow tired of our two year old car and replace our plasma TV screens like we replace light bulbs, we grow tired of politicians. Johnny Howard lost the election because people were bored. The Neo cons have created a generation of dull minded consumers with a low attention span. They shouldn’t be surprised when this attention span covers politics as well.

As an Accountant, I tend look for the credit to every debit. This sounds remarkably unsexy, so in public at least, I prefer to call it the search for the Ying and Yang of life. Our leaders would have us believe that the boom of the last 20 years is a virtuous cycle of growth and more growth. The credit of course can be found in the sweat shops of Asia and the constant need for oil to fuel the furnace of Capitalism. Getting at this oil is of course why Iraq and Iran are so often in the news.

The other yang in the cycle of western consumerism is of course the Environment. Fossil fuels are being burned like there is no tomorrow (which of course there may well not be) as a consumer based boom needs oil as it’s core ingredient. The rest of the world’s limited resources are being consumed in the ravenous feast of greed. Australia is a perfect microcosm of this. Western Australia is now essentially one big mine where the holes are been dug so deep I expect an Aussie bloke with a helmet and sweaty armpits to shortly burrow through the floor of my Dad’s living room in Ireland.

In Tasmania, they plan to harvest all the trees and convert them into Big Mac cartons or something similarly hideous, while in South Australia they are domestically farming kangaroos, which is just wrong on so many levels.

But none of this caused a flicker in Australia’s recent election. The Green Party’s vote was static and unspectacular. They have hoovered up all the vegetarians and tree huggers but struggle to break through to the masses. I guess if Social Democracy is not able to convince people to look beyond their wallet for the sake of helping the old and the sick, then the Greens are going to struggle to make a selfish electorate pay more taxes to support something as intangible as the environment.

Politics has been dumbed down to the extent that elections are now just a case of swapping one group of dull civil servants for another. While I’m pleased to be finally living under a Labour Government after years of selling Socialist Newspapers and joining the incongruously named “Accountants for a Labour Victory”, I have to admit that it won’t make much difference. You couldn’t fit a red rose petal between the policies of Kevin Rudd (what other countries in the world would elect a “Kevin” as their leader?) and the outgoing Liberals. I guess we lefties just have to hope that the new regime will manage Capitalism with a slightly kinder face.

There was a time when people burned cars after elections. When they marched on public buildings and threatened to raise them to the ground. When tractors and buses arrived from the country for mass protests on public squares under the gaze of nervous riot police. When corrupt politicians and their even more corrupt wives were put up against a wall and shot. Now we just buy the Sunday Newspapers to cast a cold and disinterested eye over the election results before quickly moving to the Sport.

Nobody cares anymore. Except Johnny Howard of course. He can now go for his morning walk around Circular Quay without anyone bothering him. Even the Chasers comedy team who used to disrupt his morning walk by dressing up as Osama Bin Laden will lose interest.

Politics used to be real, vital and exciting. But sometime around the End of History, it became just another branch of reality TV. A chance to vote on something meaningless without having to pay premium telephone charges. Now it’s just show business for ugly people.