Sex, Drugs & Electoral Rolls Part V: The Pop-Culture Wars

"We know things are bad. Worse than bad - they're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is: 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.'

Well I'm not gonna leave you alone! I want you to get MAD!"

- Howard Beale, The Network.

One of the most insidious trends in our modern Pop-Culture today, is the active drive towards depoliticization of our media and personal spaces. It might have started out as that pithy (if objectionable) maxim about refraining in polite company from discussing religion, sex or politics at the dinner table (which, as an associate pointed out, often leaves precious little of substance to actually converse about) ... but the creed has since taken on a life of its own, seemingly cropping up wherever mere mortals congregate to interact or to exchange ideas.

Perhaps we're afraid of having our own beliefs challenged. Or possibly, the sheer vast weight of the task at hand of changing our extant political status quo which strangles the polis and economy like a many-tentacled eldritch abomination, causes us to balk at discussing how we might accomplish a meaningful alteration to our circumstances. Maybe the constant and continual buffoonery of our political classes and erstwhile champions has caused a collective feeling of revulsion wherever and whenever their clammy, vote-grasping paws and faces turn up unexpected, unannounced and apparently unwanted.

However it's happened, and whyever this might have transpired ... the result is the same. People make active attempts to forcibly get the politics out of their pop-culture.

I first noticed this sad and sorry trend on one of those pages which agglomerates humorous images from Tumblr, and the like. Somebody had mashed up the images of widely reviled Harry Potter petty-tyrant Dolores Umbridge with a well-known political figure. I think it might have been Donald Trump (although I've also seen local renditions featuring Paula Bennett and Anne Tolley). People were going a bit nuts about this, claiming that the image represented something of a defilement. Not merely because an odious association with a real-life arguable villain apparently was viewed as unbearably tainting people's perceptions of a fantasy bete-noir ... but because the integration of politics and somebody's pet fantasy milieu represented a CONTAMINATION of that series' integrity, and ought to be put a stop to forthwith.

Now, a moment's consideration of this situation will reveal a number of obvious absurdities therewith.

First up, the Harry Potter series is eminently political. The characters encounter more Ministerial staff per novel than are habitually run into every episode of The Thick Of It. Aspects of civil society, the civil rights movement and civic organization are lovingly invoked and semi-satirized through features like Hermione's "Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare" (S.P.E.W.) Neoliberal educational "reform" by meddling bureaucrats is directly invoked with the aforementioned Umbridge. An active promulgation of the highly political values of egalitarianism and anti-racism to a generation of kids is what these books represent.

Ultimately, trying to claim that politics would 'contaminate' this milieu makes about as much sense as suggesting that the fresh water from a stream might mar the mighty salt-water ocean.

But it's not as if it's merely an issue confined to the Harry Potter fandom, or the insipid depths of Tumblr - and those who comment on same. Pretty much everywhere I've been, the same problem emerges.

To take a fictional universe with which I'm rather more directly familiar (never having finished the Harry Potter series myself), I encountered a similar phenomenon within the (much older, more beardy) 40k fandom. Because apparently, aficionados of a setting wherein one of the lead apocalyptic threats to the wellbeing of humanity is an explicit Margaret Thatcher expy - the Ork warlord Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka - apparently heaven forbid someone attempt to make political jokes with the source-material.

Of course, the danger with this active-depoliticization/antipoliticization strain of thinking isn't merely to be found in attempting to create nonpolitical 'safe spaces' in our popular culture where people can be free to enjoy their apathy unmolested.

No, it's worse than that.

The next stage in this insidious agenda is the conscious depoliticization of works and spaces that were previously, eminently political. The best example for this that I can think of off-hand is probably the way John Constantine's stories are now written in the Hellblazer series of comics. If you're unacquainted, suffice to say that right throughout the series' late 80s and 90s run, Hellblazer basically ran on politics almost as much as it did magic, trenchcoats, cigarettes, and cynicism. As one reviewer put it: "There were bankers as literal demons, aristocrats hunting the poor on horseback [...] Ellis used his all too brief run no the comic to savage the crushing disappointment that was New Labour and it was glorious, if painful."

"Strip that element away and you're left with a vaguely interesting, sarcastic wizard who calls people "mate.""

And that's what happened, as an effective act of literary vandalism. The comic's latest incarnation (imaginatively titled "Constantine: The Hellblazer") eschews political content in favour of slumming it with the rest of the DC universe's stable of superheroes.

Clearly, there are artistic-aesthetic consequences and casualties to be had as a direct result of this quixotic drive for depoliticization. One could only imagine how much more pedestrian and two-dimensional (if creative and pretty in their linguistic artifice) the works of Shakespeare, say, might be if shorn of their political context and sensibilities.

So what does this lead to? What's the overall and all-up consequence of this relentlessly creeping paroxysm of confining and constraining political symbolism and dialogue to the darkest, most out-of-sight fringes?

Apathy. Enforced, inculcated apathy wherein taking a side or holding an opinion which might run the risk of playing your part in changing the world ... is drowned out by a stuttering, whispering susurrus of silence.

Works of literature and kernels of pop-culture help to inspire and to motivate "the masses" (and, for that matter, people who like to imagine themselves to be among "the elite", into the bargain). We help ourselves to feel different feelings, see different things, and examine the world differently when we take in the perspective of great authors (or illustrators) and their fictional character contrivances alike. Garbing important ideas - or sentiments worthy of transmission - in the clothing of our favourite figures and enmeshing them in the semi-whole cloth of fabricated universes where we like to play is thus less a 'defilement' than an 'apotheosis'. A recognition that the value and worthwhileness of these characters and settings is of such sufficient importance that they can and should impact our tangible, real world outside the confines of their pages or celluloid screen-frames.

In an age wherein the neoliberal assault on both democracy and our fundamental cultural cornerstone of caring about politics is more rampant than ever before ... it has never been more necessary than it is now to adopt and use symbols and narratives that people actually care about to try and influence them towards those things which they should have regard for.

Because I somehow severely doubt that the profoundly apathetic society will be any less inimical to the creation of great art and pop-culture than an archetypal totalitarian/money-driven one.

Sex, Drugs & Electoral Rolls Part IV

The vagaries of deadlines and print-schedules mean that somewhere in the vicinity of ten days will have passed between when I set finger to keyboard crafting this column and when it turns up in your cold hands and weary eyes at some point midst lectures early Monday morning. This makes it more than a little difficult to comment upon pressing present issues or current events with any semblance of temporal relevancy, and is one of the reasons why I've instead tended towards more personal musings and reflections in this here publication.

But every so often, a flashpoint comes up ... and I find myself compelled to write about it.

On Wednesday March 9th, just such an emergent event occurred. Four police officers were shot down near Kawerau. Two - at the time of writing - remain hospitalized, one seriously.

The culprit was a man of Maori extraction. A Maori Police Liason was sent in almost twenty two hours after the start of the armed standoff with police to negotiate with the offender. Forty two minutes later, Rhys Warren peacefully handed himself over into custody. Immediately prior to this, members of Warren's family criticized the Police operation for failing to include Tikanga Maori.

By Friday the 11th, the controversy had well and truly percolated out into the commentariat-sphere, with a Maori academic appearing on TVNZ's Breakfast programme and stating that "if a cop knocks on the door, he'd better be Maori or I'm shutting the door and asking for an Iwi liason officer."

The backlash towards this entire sequence of events was predictable. The talkback radio brigade swung into action both out on the airwaves and in their new hunting grounds amongst various media outlets' social networking pages. Twitter expressed a minor flutter of interest. Coming hot on the heels of news stories about members of the NZ Police allegedly racially abusing New Zealanders of African extraction with terms more commonly associated with rogue (or, alternatively, establishment, depending upon your point of view) members of the LAPD ... there was always going to be a conversation about "race", "reverse racism", and relative privilege (or lack thereof) in the enforcement of Her Majesty's laws here.

But these specific spikes of media interest are not what this column is directly going to be about. Instead, they're a springboard, and an invitation for you to re-examine your own perspectives about the issues they've raised. Remember: way back almost a month ago when I kicked this column off, I stated that one of my intents in writing it was going to be to use my own personal experiences in order to broaden minds and help you University students to see things a bit differently.

Odds are that many of you reading this column are from reasonably settled backgrounds. You probably don't regularly associate with criminals, and it's highly unlikely that the majority of you have ever been arrested, let alone seen the inside of a cell for a protracted period of time, or found yourself subject to the confines of the dock down the District Courts.

From that position, it's quite easy to take what you might call a "colourblind" perspective on reality - one that eschews some important nuances and shading in favour of seeing things as nice, neat and black-and-white (or, if we're talking racial issues, everyone-as-white - sort-of).

In practical terms, that perhaps means that when issues of "privilege", or what the Police delicately refer to as their own "subconscious bias" come up ... you might be tempted to roll your eyes and assume that this is just simply what happens when overserious sociology students get loose into the public consciousness. In other words, not to take the charge nor the concept too seriously.

I've lost count of the number of intelligent, caring people I've met over the years who're fine with believing that there's the occasional racist cop (or, more rarely, judge) - but who'll balk completely at believing the justice system all-up actually tends to treat people differently based on their race or class.

I must admit that I went into law school feeling pretty much the same thing: that while there might be some bad apples out there, if you didn't commit the crime, then you weren't going to find yourself subject to the criminal justice system (occasional outliers like Arthur Allan Thomas excepted). Disparities in arrest-rates, conviction rates and incarceration rates along race or class lines looked largely like they might be the result of there simply being more crime to deal with in more marginalized socio-economic areas (with their accompanying different populations).

Being arrested - and suddenly working my way through the criminal justice system myself - changed all that.

All of a sudden, I came up face to face with the differences between how I'd been treated pretty much all my adult life without realizing it ... and how many other citizens of this fair nation experience the long arm of the law on a daily, potentially discriminatory basis.

At every step of the process - from how the cops treated me during my arrest and after through to being out on bail within a few hours, and even my ongoing bail applications not being seriously opposed at court ... I got off easy.

I know I got off easy, because both my first defence lawyer and an array of my more ... nefarious associates all told me so. Based upon their own experiences - on whichever side of the dock and counsel-client relationship - they'd been expecting a much, much harsher degree of treatment for me. In fact, I've been straight-up told by people in a strong position to know that if I'd been, say, a brown kid from Otara rather than who I am ... I'd right now be wearing an anklet at minimum, and quite likely a guest of Her Majesty otherwise.

The reasons for this aren't entirely easy to quantify, and not all of them have exclusively to do with what you might term the 'fixed stars of my birth' (i.e. my "privilege"). Some of my choices (for example cracking up literally every cop I came into contact with with a string of one-liners, and having a positive political discussion with the arresting officers in the back of the cop car all the way to the station) definitely helped. But I wouldn't have been in a position to make those choices in the first place if the cops had, say, decided to treat me like a young hoodlum in the first instance rather than engaging with me as an intelligent, articulate - even eloquent - human being.

Now this isn't me taking half a column to "apologize" for my privilege or condemn other people for being similarly lucky. Because that's not what the concept of "privilege" is for.

Instead, I'm using it as intended - as a tool to try and better understand the world around us and my own experiences within it.

And it's in that spirit of "understanding the world" a bit better that I have some empathy for beleaguered academics saying prima-facie incendiary things about how they'd refuse to speak to cops not of their own ethnic group.

Because I recognize that for many of their people, their experience with the police - and, for that matter, the churning rest of the criminal justice system - hasn't been, and isn't likely to be so positive or even-handed as mine was.

Once you start using the concept of "privilege" to see the world differently - and perhaps come to understand that not everyone experiences our civic institutions in quite the same way you do - it gets a lot harder to simply write off anti-police prejudices or the like as entirely unfounded "reverse racism" or whatever the talkback anti-tumblr brigade's classing attempts at securing equitable treatment under the law as today.

In any case, if we want a better society ... it first falls to us to see what the one we're already in is actually like for ourselves. Empathy allows us to do that. Handily, as applies this scenario, without having to be arrested nor charged first.

Sex, Drugs & Electoral Rolls Part III: Let's Get Metaphysical

'Metaphysics' and 'Politics' are two words you don't often hear in the same sentence. In the West, this isn't always regarded as a bad thing - the pernicious influence of the "prosperity gospel" creed (wherein wealth and a reasonable standard of living are the result of God's grace ... so economic intervention is heretical) within American politics does a handy job of showing why we're often wary of putting these concepts together.

And while the related doctrines of neoliberal free-market economics often seem to be turning on avowedly similar principles, that doesn't have to mean that every single intersection of political action with metaphysical guidance has to be a ghastly negative travesty.

Indeed, the conscious eschewment of metanarratives, guiding principles, and tried-and-tested 'instruction manuals' for political being and agency is actually one of the things that's lead fairly directly towards this nihlistic neoliberal politico-eco-socionomic muddle we're all in today.

But it isn't nihilism, the spirit of this age. Not properly, anyway. That would imply a complete rejection of even the possibility of other ways of thinking in the face of the cold, drab and grey flat intellectual plain which now comprises much of our political spectrum.

Instead, it's the absence of a meaningful and engaging set of things in which to believe ... the space where one might grow, rather than the yawning gulf of the howling void.

It's in that spirit that I'd like to take the time to introduce you to two concepts that help make my political world go round - and, for that matter, fundamentally changed the way I viewed politics and my place in it once I discovered them.

The first of these is drawn from the works of a man by the name of Eric Voegelin. An Austrian refugee who turned up in America after fleeing the Nazis following the Anschluss in 1938, much of his academic output was (understandably) devoted to attempting to explain the phenomenon of 20th century "political religions" like Naziism and Communism.

At their core, Voegelin believed both creeds to be "Gnostic" in form and origin, borrowing heavily from the writings and analysis on the early 1st millennium Christian initiatory cults of the same name to describe how their world-view worked.

The world, the Polis and the modern nation-state were seen to be imperfect realms inhabited by the damned, in which some primeval sin or acts of alienation was directly responsible for the present, current torturous state of modern man. In the case of the Nazis, this was the influence of non-Aryan peoples and concepts which had served to shackle and dissolve the mystical bonds of a truly German organic nation-community. For the Communists, the idea was that the exploitation of man inherent under capitalism had caused our misery.

In both cases, it was held that some radical act on the part of a prophetic, visionary elite could incite the overcoming of this "alienation" - and set right what once went wrong, thus ushering in a new Golden Age more appropriately in tune with how things "ought to be". The jargon for this is to "Immanentize the Eschaton" (loosely translatable from Academicese as "bring into our reality the ideal state of the post-Apocalypse" ... but better rendered with the Jewish phrase "Tikkun Olam" - again, translatable from Hebrew as "Make Whole The World").

Voeglin's theory is a meta-narrative. It's meta-political. ... And if you look closely, it's also quite plainly meta-physical. At least to the true-believers operating inside the box.

The reason why this was a revelation for a much-younger me to encounter was because I realized that - quite apart from explaining the root-points of origin of some of the worst regimes of the 20th century - it also perfectly encapsulated the thinking behind much of New Zealand First.

The way this works should be obvious: New Zealand had its very own (economic) Golden Age running from somewhere shortly after the end of World War Two, right through to 1984. We were number 2 in the OECD for living standards, with an unemployment rate in 1959 of 21. (That's twenty one people, by the way - not twenty one percent)

Then, following Muldoon's defeat in the 1984 General Election, one of those renegade rogue apostate Archons who could have been drawn right out of myth turned up and ruined things - particularly the egalitarian ethos which our Post-War Consensus model nation-state had striven so hard to embed and to immanentize. The name of this evil Archon was Roger Douglas. The act of "alienation" was the onset of first Rogernomics, followed by Ruthanasia. And the rest, as they say, is history.

What I was doing in New Zealand First, therefore, was seeking to set all this right. Fulfilling my part in this grand, sweeping national meta-narrative by working together with my fellow insight-blessed True Believers to remove from influence the creed of alienation that is Neoliberalism - and in so doing, restore New Zealand and New Zealanders to our true place as the economic paradise known rightly as "Godzone".

It's amazing how much fervor and hard work and effort people are prepared to pour into a cause when they've got a big story to feel like they're [doing their necessary] part of. One of the reasons why I feel Labour in particular and NZ political participation more generally is falling by the wayside, is the inability of our political classes to sweep people up in exactly this kind of metanarrative. The fact NZ First makes this its direct stock-in-trade, by contrast, directly explains why our Party is continuing to grow.

The second concept's a little more esoteric, and is a Hindu allegory known as "Indra's Net" that partially explains how Karma works.

Now contrary to the verbalized opinions of a half a hundred semi-stoned Albert Park part-time mystics ... Karma is not some sort of credit-chequing account with the universe-at-large wherein you make a deposit of good deeds in the assumption that this facilitates an extension of future-good-fortune credit. It's far more complex and subtle than that.

Hanging down from the great god Indra's palace on Mt. Meru is a gigantic net like a spider's web. At the intersection of each of the strands hangs a perfect, infinitely refracting diamond. Within each of these jewels, it is possible to see the reflection of every other jewel. Thus, the actions committed within sight of any jewel slowly ripple out in image form across the jewel-network, before eventually returning right around to the site of the original jewel.

You can see immediately how this relates back to both politics and Karma. Your actions help to create the tone and tenor of the society you live in. And eventually - what you put into the system comes back to you. Do bad things, and pay the price of living in evil times. Be a creature of civic virtue, and enjoy reaping the benefits of contribution to a positive, caring community.

Political involvement is what we make of it. We all have our own reasons for taking an interest. But in our drive for "rationalism" and "progress", we run the risk of turning into what Dr Hunter S. Thompson called "a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody - or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel."