The Religious Right vs. The Modern World

There is a vast cultural divide in the United States of America between the family values of the Religious Right, and the social values of the Liberal Left. The Religious Right is characterised by such priorities as: having creationism taught in schools alongside scientific biological theory; the teaching of ‘abstinence’ preferred over education about contraception; the right to bear arms; abortion viewed as murder; support for the death penalty; and a desperate need to preserve traditional America- the middle class, white, heterosexual, married family unit- which, by extension, means maintaining control of minorities and fringe elements.




The left fights against the status quo. It has laboured over and given birth to every piece of social progress throughout the history of the USA: civil rights, affirmative action, women’s liberation, Roe vs. Wade, the separation of church and state, and gay rights, to name a few. The battle for equality is still raging in each of these fields.




The seeming inconsistency of the Religious Right’s stances on various issues raises questions from outsiders. What does an anti-abortion stance have in common with gun legalisation? Why does someone who is pro-life support the death penalty? Why does someone who is pro-family argue that gay people should not be able to raise families? Why do we get the “war on drugs” from the Liberty-Bell ringers? And why does the predominantly Christian right appear to have little in common with Christianity’s central tenets of compassion, mercy, pacifism, equality and rejection of materialism, all of which are now accepted as the ideals of the secular left? As Barbara Ehrenreich so astutely points out in her book, Going To Extremes, “Policies of pre-emptive war and the upward redistribution of wealth are inversions of the Judeo-Christian ethic”.




It is not just the political positions of the Religious Right that are upside-down; even the results of those standpoints appear to be having the opposite of the intended effects. Recent studies show that “family values” are destroying the family. Conservative states in America have much higher rates of teenage pregnancies and divorce, and a lower percentage of university graduates than liberal states. One vivid example of the family values-style of “sex-ed” is the bizarre spectacle of the “purity ball”: an evening where teenage girls in ball gowns waltz across the floor in Daddy’s arms, and pledge their chastity to their father. In return, the father gives his daughter a “purity” ring, only to be removed by her future husband, who will replace it with a wedding band. A study has found that while these virginity pledges do not stop teenagers from having sex, the teenagers who do break their pledge and have sex are more likely to suffer from feelings of guilt, yet less likely to use protection against STIs or contraception, presumably due to a lack of information. Once the abstinence “method” of birth control fails, pregnant teenage daughters of conservative Christian parents often feel they have no option but to marry the father of their child, and these too-fast, too-young marriages often result in divorce. Sarah Palin, perhaps the world’s most vocal spokesperson for family values, illustrates this trend better than any statistic ever could, through the very public pregnancy of her single teenage daughter, Bristol. Bristol, carrying on in the great family tradition of unconscious irony, is engaged as a travelling spokesperson for abstinence and against teenage pregnancy, earning somewhere between $15,000 and $30,000 for each event.




In a desperate battle for self-preservation, Christian America occasionally employs brainwashing strategies that would not be out of place in one of its numerous cults. At the more fanatical end of the scale, there is the “Jesus Camp”, where Christian children are drilled in a militant hatred of all non-Christians. Add to that the re-writing of Texas school curriculum history books in an effort to promote Republican ideologies, the establishment of “Creation Science Museums” so that Christian children never have to hear about the “theory” of evolution, banning Ethnic Studies in Arizona, and the dubious reporting methods employed by Fox News, and you have all the ingredients for producing an ideologically homogenous demographic. Surely, family values should be safe.




Somehow, though, all of this control doesn’t manage to achieve the desired effect; stories of conservative Christian political and religious leaders who are exposed for illicit affairs - sometimes homosexual ones – are as much a part of the regular evening news as reports of child abuse by the Roman Catholic church. In-between scandals involving the juicy indiscretions of religious or political leaders, the news returns to the staple diet of fear-mongering and dishing out delicious details about those enemies that everyone loves to hate. Terrorism, the decline of the family, the impostor president, and crime (especially black crime) stories are mother’s milk; and perhaps, on some level, all the fear is justified. The United States as a whole boasts the highest rate of fire-arm related homicides in the developed world, the greatest inequality of income among wealthy nations, and the highest percentage of its own people incarcerated of any nation, including China. Within the USA, most of these statistics are concentrated in the “red” (Republican) states; Texas in particular. The states that most vigorously defend the private ownership of firearms for “self defence” are the places where the most people are killed by privately owned firearms. The cause-and-effect circle is running backwards.




The Religious Right’s Joan of Arc, Sarah Palin, is as much loved by her people for her folksy ways as Barack Obama is resented for his ivy-league education. She shines as a beacon of anti-choice, pro-gun, big-business ideology. A bulwark against the ever-rising tide of humanity demanding equality. A lone voice crying out against socialised medicine and big government. Sarah has recently announced that, as a matter of fact, the blame for the horrendous oil spill in the gulf of Mexico lies squarely with… environmentalists. Yes, she said that. As a matter of fact, Sarah would make the perfect queen for the teabagging movement- a grassroots protest fringe that owes much of its success to emotional Fox News personality Glenn Beck.




It’s clear why Glenn Beck would want to act in the best interests of his boss Rupert Murdoch, but the teabaggers themselves? Why do they protest against policies that are designed to give them health care and help lift them out of poverty? They seem to be so afraid of “Big Government” and public spending that they are willing to give up their chances of having permanent, comprehensive health coverage for themselves, their children, and their entire nation. What are they afraid of? George Lakoff believes he has the answer. Lakoff defines the Christian conservative worldview as the Strict Father Family Model, as opposed to the liberal worldview, The Nurturant Parent family model.




The Strict Father model links morality with prosperity. It is immoral to give people things they have not earned, because then they will not develop discipline. (Lakoff, 2004)




Lakoff reminds us that conservatives are not against all government. “They are not against the military, they are not against homeland defense, they are not against the current Department of Justice, nor against the courts, nor the Departments of Treasury and Commerce”. He has a point. Certainly, the Republicans were not complaining when George Bush initiated the 726 billion dollar war in Iraq or the 275 billion dollar war in Afghanistan (although at the time, of course, nobody could have imagined the cost would run so high). What they are against, according to Lakoff, is social programs and healthcare. Giving help to people who haven’t earned it in some way undermines the strict father model of society.




The strict father model is the blueprint for God’s relationship with His children, the government’s relationship with its citizens, America’s relationship with the rest of the world, and humankind’s relationship with nature. All are relationships based on dominion and submission. This is Lakoff’s explanation for why the religious right cannot accept gay rights- gay men have given up their role as the head of the household, because they have rejected the subordinate female, who, by her presence and acceptance of the order of things, gives the man his authority. Gay women have rejected the male head of the house, and thus have rejected God. Public acceptance of gay marriage threatens to unravel the fabric of society by replacing the strict father model with the nurturant parent model. The nurturant parent model, which is typified by open, equal, fearless dialogue between parents and children, is the model on which unions and welfare programs and the United Nations are based. The religious right instinctively sense this, which is why they fight so hard on every issue that threatens to change the social order.




Fortunately, there are sometimes sparks of hope in even the darkest bastions of right-wing ignorance. For example, It turns out that all along, George Bush’s wife Laura was secretly pro-choice and pro-gay marriage throughout her husband’s conservative presidency. One could speculate that perhaps Laura’s quietly tolerant private views made the difference between the outcome for her daughter, Jenna (who, after working for UNICEF, went on to become a children’s teacher and reading coordinator), and that of Sarah Palin’s daughter. If only Laura had found the courage to be a strength to the entire nation’s sons and daughters while her husband was in office (young gay people commit suicide every day at four times the rate of heterosexual teenagers because of the lack of acceptance they feel from society) her voice may have saved some lives. Her husband George, who recently stated that he condones the use of torture by America on its war prisoners, seems determined to continue to inflict damage on the planet even as a former president, while Laura continues to play the role of submissive Christian wife, maintaining the Strict Father model in both her family and the wider community.




With such fundamental world-view differences, what does the future hold? Will the two sides continue warring? Will religious conservatism become irrelevant, or will its usefulness to big business as a means of maintaining economic stratification ensure its survival? Will progressive thought be discredited in the minds of the public by such a large and powerful voice? It seems that the conservative voices in the media are growing ever more strident and some of the progress toward equality is slipping away.




If modern Western society were a person, one might say that the ‘50s was its innocent childhood, the ‘60s was its adolescence, the ‘70s was its rebellious and idealistic teenage years, the ‘80s was the career-focused young adulthood, and in the ‘90s it settled down with parenthood and a mortgage. The wild, idealistic dreams of the teenager seemed an embarrassing memory during the career years, but now, suddenly, there is the growing awareness that there was something about the seventies that has been lost, something of value. So much has been achieved, so much has been consumed, but… perhaps now it has entered its midlife crisis. Perhaps it is now the dawn of post-materialism, when society will re-discover that questioning, hopeful, rebellious youth it left behind in the seventies and make a break with tradition and the church in its maturity. One can hope.













References:




“A Comparison between the US and Other Rich Nations” from Huppi.com. accessed 04/06/10 from: http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/8Comparison.htm .




Adams, R. “Laura Bush: Pro Abortion and Gay Marriage”. The Guardian. accessed 04/06/10 from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/richard-adams-blog/2010/may/12/laura-bush-gay-marriage-abortion




Barr, A. 2010. “Arizona Bans ‘Ethnic Studies’”, Politico. Accessed 04/06/10 from: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/37131.html .




Calderone, M, 2009. “Fox Teas up a Tempest”. Politico, accessed 04/06/10 from: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0409/21275.html .




Ehrenreich, B., 2008. Going to Extremes. London: Granta Publications.




“Froomkin, Dan, 2010. “Waterboarding Admission Sparks Outrage”. The Huffington Post. accessed 04/06/10 from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/03/bushs-glib-waterboarding_n_599893.html .




Gill, A.A., 2010. “Roll over, Charles Darwin” from Vanity Fair, accessed 04/06/10 from: http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/02/creation-museum-201002 .




“Jesus Camp”, Information Clearing House, accessed 04/06/10 from: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15878.htm .




Johnson, R. “Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning Youth Suicide Statistics”. About.Com, Gay Life. Accessed 04/06/10 from: http://gaylife.about.com/od/gayteens/a/gaysuicide.htm .




Lakoff, G., Don’t Think of an Elephant. Melbourne: Scribe Publications.




“List of Countries by Income Equality”. Wikipedia. Accessed 04/06/10 from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality .




MtJoy, R, 2010. “Purity Balls: Disempowering Young Women with Help from their Dads” Women’s Rights. Change. Org. accessed 04/06/10 from: http://womensrights.change.org/blog/view/purity_balls_disempowering_young_women_with_help_from_their_dads .




“Palin Blames Environmentalists for Oil Spill”, 2010 from The State Column, accessed 07/06/09 from: http://www.thestatecolumn.com/blog/2010/06/palin-blames-environmentalists-for-oil-spill/ .




“Prisoners Per Capita (Most Recent) By Country”. Nation Master.com. accessed 04/06/10 from: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_pri_per_cap-crime-prisoners-per-capita .




Rauch, J., 2010. “Do Family Values Weaken Families?” from National Journal Magazine. Accessed 04/06/10 from: http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/st_20100501_5904.php .




Rendall, S. and Hollar, J., 2004. “Still Failing the Fair and Balanced Test” from FAIR, accessed 04/06/10 from: http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1187 .




Tamkins, T, 2008. “Virginity Pledges Don’t Mean Much, Study Says” from Health magazine, accessed 04/06/10 from: http://edition.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/12/30/virginity.pledges/index.html .




“Texas Textbook Massacre: Ultraconservatives approve radical changes to state education curriculums”. 2010, The Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/13/texas-textbook-massacre-u_n_498003.html .

Personal Ad

Personal Ad

One girl who gardens and dreams
of Marxist utopias is seeking
someone who prefers
witty literature to foreplay
and mind-blowing ideas to orgasms.
Someone to share dark and demented films with,
and it would be nice
if that person
also liked classical music
and reading, like I do.
And if you think this sounds
girly
please be advised
that I can eat more chilli
and drink more beer
and quote more Tarantino lines
than you. Just sayin'.
We can settle this with a thumb-wrestle
which I will win
did I mention my fingers
are extraordinarily long?

Someone with a geeky sense of humour,
who will laugh with me
until we are crying and squatting
and clutching ourselves
trying not to pee.

I shower and wash my hair
before I go to sleep and upon awakening.
I know, it’s only bed, not surgery,
but hot water is my favourite bread
for sandwiching the day.
I only have coffee for breakfast,
but if you prefer an omelette,
will you make it yourself and let me have a bite?
I will happily cook dinner every night
if you will help me with the dishes.
Sometimes, I sit quite still
for twenty minutes or so
to study a leaf or a photograph
for no reason at all.
And at other times I can talk
as if I were some great orator
with access to all of the mysteries of life -
please, feel free to tell me to shut up.

Morning Drop-Off

She pulls her arms away
from my grabbing hands
and kisses me and smiles
while I scream and arch my back.
She smiles also at the person
who is not my mother,
who uses my hand to return
Mother’s good-bye wave,
who answers my screaming rage
with cheerful chatter
in a room so blue,
red, yellow and purple
with animals on the walls and
not a single empty space
on the floor
to just lie still
and feel the plainness
or listen
to very little sounds
like at home.
The sounds in this place
that is not my home
are never little
and there is no plainness.
But I am very little here.

A review of one of my favourite films ever...

Donnie Darko is that rare and valuable find: a truly original story told with meticulous attention to detail, honouring the viewer’s intelligence, while still being generous with the fun. It touches the deep, inquiring parts of the viewer’s soul, while throwing a few bones to our baser instincts, allowing us to delight in a little wanton destruction.
Set in a sleepy suburb in Middlesex, Massachusetts in 1988, the film opens with the teenaged Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) waking up in the morning on an empty highway overlooking a beautiful valley. Donnie sleep-walks and wakes up in strange places, an affliction that proves most fortuitous the next morning when a jet engine falls from the sky above Donnie’s house and crashes through the roof, landing on Donnie’s empty bed- while Donnie wakes up on the local golf course.
Donnie lives with his liberal, upper-middle class parents, his older sister Elizabeth, and his younger sister, Samantha. Real-life siblings Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal play Donnie and Elizabeth, bringing a delightful authenticity to their on-screen relationship. Donnie is seeing a court-ordered psychologist due to past delinquent behaviour, and, as the movie unfolds, it becomes clear that Donnie’s mental condition is much more serious than anyone realises. Donnie sees –and hears– what he describes, rather inadequately, as “a giant bunny rabbit”: his imaginary friend, Frank. Frank is the most grotesque and frightening figure that could possibly be described with the word “bunny”, with a face that vaguely resembles a rabbit’s skull, who continually gives Donnie a running count-down of the days, hours, and minutes left until the world comes to an end; and, in the meantime, provides a series of destructive tasks for Donnie to carry out.
Donnie’s white-bread suburb, with its Christian school and small-minded denizens, is the perfect canvas for Donnie’s acts of filth and vandalism. The New-Age, self-help guru (Patrick Swayze) and his sycophantic fan-girl (Donnie’s insufferable female gym teacher), are the perfect victims of his antisocial behaviour, while his unorthodox, drool-worthy English teacher (Drew Barrymore) and ridiculously supportive and cool parents are the perfect allies. Here, Kelly turns the traditional teenage movie formula on its head: Instead of the emotionally-absent, materialistic, one-dimensional parents that ‘80s films were so fond of, Donnie’s parents are cooler than he is. Yet, still, the angst and the rebellion are there. With no apologies.
Donnie is very much an ordinary teenager. He spends most of his time “thinking about fucking”, is rude to his family, and awkwardly asks a girl if she wants to “go” with him (“that’s what we call it here, “going together”). When not experiencing hallucinations, Donnie debates such deep topics with his friends as whether smurfs have genitals. There are none of the usual witty, acidic lines delivered dead-pan by teenage versions of Oscar Wilde that we have come to expect from teenage comedy. The humorous and realistic documentation of the ordinary in this film feels like Napoleon Dynamite, combined with the opacity and ambiguity of Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and the quirkiness of Jonze’s Being John Malkovich.
Donnie Darko is a film that is stylistically ahead of its time. Young audiences, used to enduring the cheesy and trite offerings of Hollywood in return for a couple of hours of entertainment, won’t know what hit them. It satisfies on every level and demands repeated viewing.

ANZAC

Having a child is one thing that is guaranteed to connect an individualist personality like mine with the rest of society. With parenthood, there is school, and friends, and sports, and parties, and all the other things that come with children, dragging even the most reluctant parents along in order to facilitate their child’s emergence into the wider community. And this week it is ANZAC day, and my son’s school is having a special ceremony, which he begs me to attend. I decide to go and see what it’s all about. Being a fierce pacifist, I respect ANZAC day as a day to think about the senselessness of war and all the needless death and suffering, and how very sad and barbaric it all is. But what does ANZAC day mean to most Australians, and what is being taught to my son about war? I suppose I should find out.
The ceremony is very beautiful. The children read various texts, and I find myself bawling behind my sunglasses at a letter from the Turkish general to the mothers of the Australian soldiers who died at Gallipoli. “You, the mothers, who sent their sons from far away countries, wipe away your tears. Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well." The whole story of Gallipoli seems especially senseless. I suddenly remember a movie from my childhood, Quincy’s Quest. Quincy is a reject doll on a mission to save the other rejects, and, on his way, he becomes mixed up with the soldier toys, and is commandeered into the war. He is told that the whole point of it is that he fulfil his duty to be “smithereened”.
“We are here because of them”, the guest speaker from the RSL is incanting, while the children place candles for the soldiers of the wars of the past two centuries, including the Vietnam war, and the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind, beautifully and purely sung by 200 primary-student voices, is my undoing. Yes, how many deaths will it take till we know that too many people have died? The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.


I decide to really engage with my fellow Australians this ANZAC day, by attending the dawn service. I’ve been to the parade plenty of times, but I want to find out what it is that people get out of bed for -and even travel to Gallipoli for- year after year. So, at 5:00 AM on Sunday morning, My son, his father, and I are climbing the hill to King’s Park. It’s a strange sight- they could bring film-crews here and get great footage for a movie like War of the Worlds, or perhaps a zombie flick. Like refugees, thousands upon thousands of people -grandparents, middle-aged, young adults, and children, bundled up against the cold, are silently marching in the dark, through the bush, climbing the hill toward King’s Park. Nobody speaks. I had expected moving speeches and music to educate me -to spoon-feed me the ANZAC fervour- but there are none. We stand in silence, multitudes of us, much too far away to hear or see the service, for one hour as the sun rises over the city and the river. The view is exquisitely beautiful: the lightening sky holds copper and rose along with the receding violet, silhouetting the Eucalyptus trees in black, while below, the city lights are still twinkling; but the glorious vision is unacknowledged by the crowd. This is so strange. Later today, these reverent mannequins will be back to their laid-back, hedonistic, iconic Aussie personas: watching the ANZAC football match, drinking beer, and roaring in support of their teams. But now, in the eerie stillness, their devotion to ANZAC day astounds me; I have never seen anything like it. What does it mean for all these people- especially the young people, who are, incredibly, sacrificing their long-weekend’s partying to be here? Like the kiss lurking in the corner of her mother’s mouth that Wendy can never get, I am aware of something special that is just beyond my reach. The crowd stands to attention until the bugle call, and then disperses as respectfully and silently as it came. My co-parent notices, with a trace of self-consciousness, that his is the only non-white face at the gathering. “I could never come to this alone,” he whispers. Is that it then? Is the intense, almost religious respect on every face about nationalism? I suppose it is. But even so, there is no reason for this man, who gave up his original country and threw himself into being Australian with a passion, who built up businesses and contributed substantially to Perth’s economy, to feel like an outsider. He whispers, “thank you for taking me here. Today I really feel that I’ve become Australian.” I reply, “And today, I feel more like a stranger in my own country than I ever have.”

Mothers and Names

My mother is, and always has been, what you might call a nameophile. She is obsessed with baby names. During my childhood, our favourite game was updating our lists of favourite names for boys and girls. She would get out the baby name book, and we would literally read the whole thing, including all the meanings. I swear we had that thing memorised. I would astonish people by informing them of the meaning of their name when I met them.
One would naturally expect that a mother such as mine would be well-equipped to give her child a name that would transport him (or her) into the upper-echelons of cool: a sexy, powerful, edgy name. But there’s one name that even the most savvy of women like to mess around with, the playground for her quirky side: the middle name. I’m not saying there is or there isn’t some sadistic pay-back involved, but the fact is that this small, screaming person who is now vomiting on the sheets yet again, has just put her through nine months of walking around like a hungry, hormonal whale with a weak bladder, followed by an experience that makes women wish they could just be burned at the stake and have it over with. One can draw their own conclusions.
Whatever the motivation (who can know the mind of a woman with baby-brain?), we end up with middle names like mine- well, “name” is perhaps too generous a description; it’s more of a chemical symbol, really. Fé. With a freaking accent mark. As a child, I tended to use an apostrophe instead, and never knew quite where the mark went or which way it pointed. The only method I know of for getting the accent mark in there when I’m typing is to go through the elaborate process of typing the word café, deleting the first two letters, capitalising the third, and Voila! A nice, neat, two-letter middle name that customs officers, upon inspecting my passport, usually take to mean FE for FEMALE.
“You didn’t have a name when you were born,” Mum would say, “and so you were just called Baby Gillis.” “At least she didn’t leave it at that”, I would think with relief. Gillis was a heavy enough cross for a little girl to bear as a surname, let alone as a first name! The middle-name decision was made on the basis that Fé is the Spanish word for Faith. One little problem with this bright idea: in Spanish, Fé is not a name, just a word. “Spanish” and “Faith”, when taken together, conjure up lovely images of the Inquisition. Nice one, Mum.
At some point, I think my mother began regretting giving me a normal, Australian first name like Kylie. Perhaps it was when that popstar princess began putting my name on the front of every magazine in the newsstands. Maybe she just thought my life was too easy. Whatever the reason, one day, as I was reading a book to my younger sister, Rebecca, and came across a picture of a skyscraper, Mum sighed. “That would have been a nice name for you, Kylie. Sky.” And right then and there, I announced that I was changing my name to Sky. She indulged me, and the alias stuck for about a year. My little copycat sister’s echoing request to change her name to Aeroplane was adamantly refused, however; Mum had standards. Never mind, Rebecca did get to change her name later. When she became ill with meningitis, the nurses in the hospital would call her Blossom. As she recovered, she believed the endearment to be her name, and answered to nothing else. Meanwhile, my mother had taken to using my middle name as if it were my first, the way my American cousins do. So Kylie and Rebecca had become Fé and Blossom. We eventually found our way back into our own names, of course, and I am still tormented by my middle name. When forced by law to use my middle name on some document, I suppress any wild thoughts of purposefully contracting meningitis, and brace myself for the inevitable question: “What’s this? Fee?” “Um… that’s my middle name, Fé. As in, Santa Fé.” I could kiss whoever named that city.

Sports

What a coincidence that the assignment to undertake a piece of sports writing fell just at the beginning of football season- a time when I, a person who shuns all involvement with sports, find myself sitting patiently in the living room reading a book while my son and his father watch the game, and on Saturday, while waiting for the Rugrat at his first day at football training, find myself penning the following (admittedly rather self-indulgent) poem for my poetry class:
Aussie Rules
Saturday morning sleep-ins
are not the prerogative
of virtuous Australian parents-
no;
to be a Proper Australian Parent, one must:
rise early on the Sabbath
to feed the troops a breakfast of champions,
clothe the little warriors
in the tribal colours
with studded shoes and tall, striped socks
(all washed and ready the night before),
and, on the wet, green field, every Saturday,
join the other Righteous Parents
in denying themselves
the beds they yearn for,
ignoring the cranial throbbing
for coffee yet un-percolated,
and shutting out the distant memory
of Saturday-morning sex
for this great and noble common goal:
the initiation of our sons
into the cult of the Australian male
(the war-paint, the brotherhood, the bloodlust,
the bonding, the validation, the identity)
so that our sons may follow
in their fathers’ footsteps
and spend their Sundays on the sofa
watching football,
drinking beer,
and being men.

Okay, so I’m a cynic. The world of sports just isn’t my world. And yet… there is something about sports movies that infects me, just for that hour, with the passion fans must feel. Our lecturer says that sports create an Imagined Community. That sounds wonderful. Am I missing out on something really, really important?
It’s not that I have something against sports. Theoretically, I think it’s wonderful that our nation idolizes such a healthy and innocent past-time. Sports are a great equaliser in Australian society; many indigenous children see it as their only level playing field with non-indigenous Australians. I truly value the community sports provide for our children- playing sports is one of the very few things a child in our culture can do that adults take seriously. To be playing a game with your parents cheering you on, and then to go to a game and see all the grown-ups on their feet, screaming with excitement, allows children rare access to be part of something that actually matters in the grown up world. I get that. I love that. But none of this touches me. What can I write about sports?
As is my habit when procrastinating on an assignment, I’m randomly surfing the web, telling myself I’ll begin after I read these cool Hunter S Thompson quotes. Following random rhizome trails, I come across this startling fact: Hunter S Thompson was a sports writer! Really? This I must see! Bless the Internet, it’s easy enough to find. http://proxy.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?id=1996511 And it’s delicious Thompson, with plenty to delight the temporal lobe as usual, but it doesn’t lure me into the fold. I gobble up the goodies and ignore the sports, which happen to be the whole point of the articles. My quest to understand is not going well.
I am not easily bored. I can sit in the garden and study ants marching across the lawn; I listen to ABC Classic FM and watch parliament Question and Answer time. But somehow, I cannot bear to sit and watch a football game. I cannot make myself care about those men in shorts chasing a ball, I cannot fathom what it feels like to care which team kicks it through the posts more times. What is missing in my brain? I think the answer was given in class, when the lecturer explained that sport is a local phenomenon. Having spent my childhood in seven different countries, raised by parents who never watched or spoke about any form of sport, I just haven’t been indoctrinated. I wasn’t surrounded with the imagined community. And to an alien like me, it really is just a bunch of men chasing a ball. No big thoughts, no clever dialogue, no artistic value. It’s a language I don’t speak, a party I’m not invited to. It’s all right. I’ve got that book to get back to.

New Uni, New City

If I thought moving to a large university in a big city was going to surround me with free-thinking, revolutionary-minded individuals like myself, I was to be sadly disappointed. To start with, The Vege Patch was not a community garden, just a café.
Well, there were posters. Red Herrings, those posters. Announcing the “Curtin Resistance Movement.” Concerned with feminism, socialism, equality, and the environment. Right. I’ve found my people. The poster made mention of connection with the guild, so I go immediately to join the guild. I ask the young girl there if she knows anything about groups, clubs, political societies, that sort of thing. She looks at me like I’m an alien, and in that you-total-freak voice only teenage girls can do, puts me in my place: “Um… most people join the guild for the discounts?” I’d been told.
The bookshop confirms what was becoming more and more of a sinking realisation: Perth is perhaps the most right-wing city in Australia. Right-wing ideology is fundamentally distrustful. With the focus on the individual rather than community, inequality flourishes and trust is lost. To enter the bookshop, you have to leave your bag at the door- and they don’t take responsibility for its contents. As you peruse the shelves, rent-a-cops walk around behind you. There are no pretences about giving you space to browse; they don’t trust you and make that incredibly clear. It’s weeks before I can bring myself to submit to the indignity of shopping there, and when I finally do, for the first time in my life, I have thoughts of shoplifting. Just to rebel. Or maybe to escape 45 minutes of waiting in line to pay.
Trust is almost a crime at this university. I leave my desk at the library to search for an item on the bookshelf, and am immediately told off by an employee for leaving my laptop unattended. I suppose it’s not my choice to trust strangers now- I must go along with the way it’s done here. Strange, in Japan you could leave your laptop anywhere and nobody would take it. People tend to live up to the trust placed in them. Which makes the likelihood of something being stolen in this university very high.
I hadn’t given up my desire to join the Curtin Resistance Movement, and found a contact email address on the guild’s website. My email request to join went unanswered.
I am very relieved to discover a Centrelink at Curtin university. As a full-time student and single mother, I am required to submit fortnightly forms to Centrelink to confirm that I am still studying. One late form, and my benefits are cut off. Centrelink like to make it hard for me- the fortnightly form is called an application for payment. I have to re-apply every fortnight. I voted labour in because I believed they’d bring a new approach to Centrelink, but it’s only gotten worse. So I go to the Curtin branch of Centrelink, only to be informed that this branch is only for students who are not single parents. Single parents must go to a regular branch. I can’t believe my ears. When I ask for an explanation, I’m informed that it’s because Centrelink needs to ask us more questions. What kind of questions? “How can you possibly afford to study AND feed your child on $650 a fortnight?” Actually, that’s a very reasonable question. I ask myself that very question every day. If they ever figure it out, I hope they let me know.
I head down to a “regular” Centrelink. It is half an hour before one person is called from the front of our queue. It seems they’re deliberately punishing us for daring to claim benefits. The line is full of people bonding over the shared outrage of the humiliating process. It’s A FORTNIGHTLY FORM. Just have someone there to take them off us, for Christ’s sake. Do we really have to spend half our day here to hand in a form? The young man behind me tells me he’s been banned from every other Centrelink office except for this one, for swearing about the amount of time he has to wait in line. “What happens if they ban you from this one, too?” I ask. If he can’t personally hand his form into an officer, his meagre payments will stop. There are no options for posting, faxing, or emailing these forms. Later in the day, there’s a social event at my son’s school, and I’m hit with the contrast between my conversations with my fellow Centrelink queuers and the wealthy parents of my son’s classmates. One of them is nearly in tears because she had to leave her mansion on the waterfront in Cottesloe behind, and now has to live in a mansion on the waterfront in Attadale. I try to be sympathetic.
I’m sitting in a lecture on International Political Economy, and the professor is praising the virtues of free trade and decrying protectionism- this is a HUMANITIES subject, not economics, so I’m slightly shocked by his stance. I raise my hand. “But isn’t protectionism about PROTECTING Australian jobs, wages, and workplace standards? It’s supposed to help us not to have to compete with nations that can sell things ridiculously cheaply due to human rights abuses and slave labour.” To my right, a boy is staring at me. “I’m a communist,” he whispers dramatically. The boy, it turns out, hails from South America, and wants to create an Australian Socialist Republic. All on his own it would seem. The next week, he slips me a book with the air of a smuggler. It’s Marx’s Communist Manifesto. I stifle a giggle. I have a copy at home as well. This boy has the fervency of an American Evangelist, this book is his bible. Oh Lord. I think I found my resistance movement after all. And he’s a cross-institutional enrolment. Figures.

A new hobby

Who would have thought it would end up being more addicting than Facebook? When I began this activity three months ago, the idea that it could be habit-forming never even occurred to me. I wouldn’t have believed that it would occupy my thoughts even when I wasn’t engaging in it. That I would spend money and time and effort on it. That it would affect my eating habits and my family.
I started a vegetable garden.
Having grown up in generation X, gardening has never been a way of life for me. I was never exposed to the age-old occupation of growing one’s own food. I loved plants as a child, but during my careless teenage years, I internalised the hard lesson that I would only be the cause of their destruction if they were left in my care. So I didn’t try.
It was my tree-hugging sentiments that finally made me want to give it a go. The desire to be a part of my planet and my environment- to cut down on food miles, and to experience a natural connection with what I eat. Three months ago I had to choose a new rental home. And when I found one with a barren strip of sand behind the house, I knew this was the place for me. It’s so rare, when renting, to find a place you can actually DO something to! Turning that desolate mini-wasteland into something teeming with life has been the most rewarding experience. Starting with absolutely no knowledge of horticulture made it all the more exciting and adventurous.
My adventure began, unfortunately for the young seedlings, at the beginning of Perth’s longest and hottest dry spell in a decade. But perhaps it was this adversity that created the addiction. Twice a day I watered them, watching over them like babies in intensive care. At first it was just a desire to prove I could do it- then it turned into something close to love. And just like a mother is rewarded with her baby’s first smile, my little zucchini plants rewarded me by bursting into succulent, saffron-coloured blooms a few weeks in. I took pictures and posted them proudly on facebook. And the adoring comments I received would have made any mother’s heart proud. One Facebook comment, though, made me “lol”: “It’s like you’ve got a garden app.,” it said, “except real!”
It hasn’t been all joy- caterpillars attacked ferociously, and during the time it took me to find an organic caterpillar spray that wouldn’t hurt the good bugs, the zucchini developed a nasty case of powdery mildew. I searched the Internet for organic cures, and tried several, but after a long, hard battle, the zucchini finally succumbed. Survival of the fittest rules in my garden, and the eggplant is taking the zucchini’s place. What astounds me the most is the intelligence of the vines- the cucumber and peas. How do they know how to do that? They send little tendrils reaching out toward anything that can support them and latch on. I mean, I knew this, of course, but to go outside every morning and see that a new tendril has found a new place to grab is ridiculously pleasing.
And the food! I’m not that much of a vegetable eater- hate shopping for it and cutting it up, but when your lettuces are ready, you’d better eat them! And so it is that I find myself with a whole bowl of organic, gourmet lettuce in front of me that I wouldn’t be eating otherwise, and the vegephobic child who calls me Mum is dancing around in the garden with delight, squealing, “we have our first vegetable! We made vegetables grow!” He’s eagerly waiting for the cherry tomatoes to turn red so he can eat them.
Vegephobic he may be, but he has an inordinate love of creatures great and small. And so purchasing a box of worms and introducing them to their new home was akin to acquiring 500 new slimy friends- whom we never saw again. But they’re there, somewhere under the spinach and carrots, and he thinks about them when it rains, and I’m not allowed to dig where they are. Bees and wasps and butterflies have also made our garden home - the transformation from an arid little space bordered by an asbestos fence and a brick wall into a jungle of tomato, capsicum, cucumber and eggplant bushes all in flower and fruit is nothing short of a natural renovation, and I don’t blame the little guys for wanting to move in.
My cooking has changed, too. I don’t need the dry herbs in my spice rack any more, because every meal is made with fresh herbs, garlic, and chilli from the garden. I was running out of meal ideas, so I purchased a new cookbook called “Fresh and Fast”- purchased entirely for its recipe for lettuce and pea soup! Just the kind of weird new recipe I’m after to use up all these lettuces.
It seems that there is a fear, in our current Zeitgeist climate, that doing something for the environment is going to mean sacrifice in some way. Organic food and environmentally-friendly supermarket products are often more expensive, and may be of lesser quality, cycling instead of driving takes too long, or too much effort, and growing a garden- who can even do that? Who has the space and the time and the patience for it? What if I told you that you could enjoy gardening as much as you enjoy procrastinating on Facebook? What if I told you that I live with a seven-year-old boy who leaves his Xbox-360 to join me in the garden? What if I told you that the effort of shopping for fresh produce can be halved in six months? And that the time digging and breathing in fresh air and eating fresh-out-of-the-garden food wouldn’t be a chore, just a beautiful new pleasure?
Well, I’m telling you now.

On Families and Guilt

It’s the little things that haunt you later. When I look back at my life, I don’t beat myself up over the big things- most of them were unavoidable; just me making the best decision I could at the time. I regret things like not letting my dad get fish and chips. I was a young, new mother, and my father visited from Japan to see his grandson and me. I hadn’t seen him in many years, so it was a big deal. One day, after driving me around, he got a twinkle of delight in his eye, and said, “You know what I’d REALLY like to have? Some fish and chips!” He’d spent the last ten years in Japan, and fish and chips was one thing he missed about Australia. As children my siblings and I had hated fish, but I had recently acquired a taste for it- as long as it was fresh, preferably served in a fine-dining restaurant. “Go and ask him if it’s fresh,” I said. My dad returned and said, “I asked him if it was fresh, and he said, “fresh frozen.” Then I said I had to check if that was good enough. I kind of felt bad for the guy.” “Well, we can get it if you want.” Dad was deferring as ever: “Well, now I’ve already left, so we can make a decision, what do you think everyone would like?” “The others don’t really like fish- how about we get barbequed chicken instead?” And that is what we did. My father didn’t end up getting fish and chips on that visit. And for years I couldn’t stop beating myself up over it. Firstly because I made him be ruder than he would have liked to have been to the poor shop owner, and secondly because I denied him his once-in-a-decade chance to taste one of his old favourites. Of course, at the time, I was planning to take him to a fancy fish and chips shop on the waterfront that served fresh fish, but that didn’t end up happening. Horror at my own snobbery is one of the facets that make this particular memory so painful, but I wonder why it stayed with me so long? I visited Dad in Japan last year, told him the story and apologised, but he doesn’t even remember it. It hurts nobody but me now, because for some reason I can’t forgive myself. Perhaps because Dad can’t remember, so he CAN’T forgive me? But it’s not hurting him now. In my mind, the past seems to exist continuously. Even if THIS Dad doesn’t remember, it DID happen to THAT Dad. I suffer similar feelings over things that happened when my son was a baby. He doesn’t remember that I had to leave him screaming with someone else- but I do. And I cuddle and kiss him excessively now, trying to make up for those days, trying to soothe that screaming baby of the past. And he’s totally fine. But in my mind, that screaming baby will always co-exist with the happy one, and the precocious pre-schooler, and the sassy boy he has now become. Time isn’t linear for me. My grandmother is still alive to me, both the one who bounced me on her knee as a toddler, and the one who I met as an adult, chain-smoking as emphysema clutched her around the lungs and took her. The one I met only through her memories is real to me too; the chic Boston girl who “had good legs and wasn’t afraid to show’m”, and who took up the cancer sticks because “everyone who was anyone smoked”. I think we truly love someone when we see all of them at once; the child, the teenager, the adult. We see the inherited traits that make them who they are. Those people never die as long as they are remembered. And so, the fish-and-chips incident is still happening, and will always BE happening as long as I have my memory. If my dad makes another trip to Australia, we’re going straight to the CLOSEST fish-and-chips shop to make it right. And leaving a tip. And my son will continue to receive too many cuddles as long as I have arms.

Full Circle

I was five years old when I first arrived in my home country, Australia. The crisp, cold, eucalyptus-filled air contrasted strongly with the jungle climates of Malaysia and Thailand I was used to. I loved it, and so did my mother. We were staying with her mother, in the house where she’d grown up, and spent our days playing in the park across the road on the same play equipment she had used as a girl. Mum would sigh with happiness and say, “Look at the ghost gums! Look at the wattle! Look at the bottlebrush! Look at the galahs!” I loved the continuity of the experience- playing in my mum’s childhood garden with her old dolls. It was very special to me. Our favourite piece of playground equipment was one of those merry-go-rounds that are an enclosed ball; you sit inside and turn a wheel and spin around and around very fast. My sister and I called it our spaceship, and we loved this toy beyond all reason- it was our version of getting drunk. The aim was to get to “scribble land”: that place where all the world just looks like scribbles because you’re moving so fast. We could never understand how Mum could resist this delight, and we would beg her to join us, but she always refused. “I can’t, I’ll feel sick!”

Life has a way of repeating itself. At the end of last year, My son and I moved from tropical Cairns to Perth. On our first day in our new house, we explored our neighbourhood together. I was in ecstasies over the crisp air, and found my mother inhabiting my body- or so it seemed, as I gushed over and over, “Look at the tall eucalypts! Look at the galahs!” Then we both spotted it at the same time: a merry-go-round just the same as the one I had enjoyed so much in my childhood. I couldn’t believe this. I’d thought the health-and-safety brigade had eliminated these things years ago. I said to my son, “I LOVED those when I was a little girl! He ran straight for it, of course, and once inside, begged me to join him. “I can’t!” I protested. “It will make me feel sick.” “It makes me feel sick, too, mum. But it’s fun! PLEASE, let’s get sick together?” How could I refuse that? So for the first time in perhaps twenty years, I climbed into the old spaceship, and Lachlan and I went to Scribble Land together.

1st Post

I'm trying to kick the Crackbook habit. And the best way I know how to get over an addiction is to replace it with another one. So, here I am, starting a blog. I hope I'll still be able to socialise with my Facebook friends this way. I think I'll kick this off by posting everything I've been writing over the past couple months.