Democracy is Dead

 

Image by Andrew Martin from Pixabay

To say that Australia is a democracy is not a lie, it’s not the truth either.

Has democracy failed us? No, it can’t have. We built our democracy; it did not build us. If we think that our democracy has failed, we could look to the media for blame. We could look to ourselves with our fascination for loud political leaders. Nowhere more have we seen this fascination come to an ugly head but in the rise of populism and through its banner carriers.

Populists claim to speak for ordinary people. But we’ve seen the results of these types and the damage they have done to the people they say they represent.

However, the media, with its opinion columns, its hard-right/hard-left commentators, its ideologically driven viewpoints, its financial backing and its column inch support for political parties, the media would seem the likely culprits.

President John Kennedy (no relation) once said that “The press is a valuable arm of the presidency”. In Henry Porter’s 1984 book, Lies, Damned Lies and Some Exclusives, he said, “In pursuit of an easy life journalists have progressively relegated themselves to the status of mere instruments of government propaganda”. That is not true of all journalists, but it is true of the popular media. The kind that most people read, watch and listen to.

Do you think that today’s press is an information provider or an opinion creator? Why are there conservative broadcasters, green presses, right and left-wing publications? Are they all just in it for the money? Are there political journalists that you read and others never? Why is there a twenty-four-seven news cycle?

In my old university library, there is a whole bookshelf dedicated to one man, Rupert Murdoch. Not one of these books praises Murdoch for doing good. Not one offers a view that his publications are fair and balanced. He alone has raised up and brought down more governments than any other individual in history. Ownership matters.

Competition matters too. This Guardian article tells you the sorry one-sided story of media ownership in Australia. Australia's newspaper ownership is among the most concentrated in the world.

If political stories are told from one angle, with an agenda or ideology behind them, and most people consume and believe these articles, democracy dies. But who is to blame? The compliant media or the government?

If governments redact and hide their actions and their motivations, democracy dies. Your right to know is not greater than the governments' laws that say they have a right to conceal; and there’s nothing you can do about it. But most people are not interested in doing anything about press freedom. Because you can’t read about the things that are hidden, so you are not aware of them. Just as a large part of the press does not report on government actions. They hide their deals from scrutiny; so, you lose, and democracy dies.

Governments can bully and intimidate anyone. Any journalist and any publication that tries to expose their corruption will find themselves in a secret trial. Look at the Bernard Collaery case.

When governments stoke the fires of division, democracy dies. When governments spin every story, democracy dies. When governments turn their back on people, democracy dies. When we have a Labor opposition that does not react, condemn or stand up against the removal of rights and constant lies, democracy dies.

We have let all these things happen to our democracy. How can you not say that democracy is dead?

The ABC and Me and You

 

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) has been with me my whole life. I’ve been listening to ABC radio since I was a baby. My parents always had ABC radio on; classical music and local ABC radio were on the whole day in our house. At night we sat down to watch ABC news and programs on television. The ABC filled our house with the arts, education, news, and entertainment; it still fills my life.

For me, and many other Australians and people in our neighbouring region, the ABC is vital. Because it provides services, information, education, and entertainment that are not accessible from anywhere else in the world.

I’ve been lucky enough over the years to have worked with a few people from the ABC. My first collaboration with the ABC was in 2003. PoeticA, was a National Radio program that ran from 1997 to 2015. It provided a weekly resource of poetry readings and happenings from around Australia and the world. PoeticA was like a religion to most Australian poets and poetry lovers. The poet and presenter Mike Ladd and producer Krystyna Kubiak were the heart of PoeticA. They were both wonderful and helpful people to work with.

The program, Ekphrasis, that I organised with PoeticA, aired on Saturday 22 February 2003 at 3:00 PM. You can listen to that program here, of course, copyright restrictions apply to all content.

The second time the ABC and I developed a program was again, for PoeticA. This time the program was about all things poetically Astronomical.  Here’s the ABC blurb, “A feature on the poetry of the cosmos including classical works as well as poems by contemporary Australian writers. Based on an idea by Robert Kennedy, the program grew out of a project called “A Poetic Journey Into the Cosmos”, a series of readings held last year at Sydney Observatory”. They aired Astronomical on Saturday 27 March 2004 at 3:00 PM.

When I was in my early 20s, the ABC took on an all-encompassing presence in my life. I was hooked. I couldn’t get enough of what the ABC offered. It seemed there was, and still is, something for everyone. I listen to and watched almost everything that the ABC produced. The ABC had me hooked even from an early age. If you grew up in the 1970s, Countdown was a music program that had to be watched. I never missed a show.

One of the things I love most about the ABC is Radio National (RN). Today they have more than 60 programs. I specifically loved the program Airplay, which aired on what is now known as RN. Unfortunately, this program is no longer broadcast, but it provided so many great Australian and international radio plays and offered the first voice to a large number of current Australian actors. Airplay broadcast from 1997 to 2013.

Before Airplay there was The Sunday Play on what was then called ABC Radio 2, or 2FC, which stood for Farmer and Company. That was the original owner of the station before the ABC took it over. Back in the early 1980s, the ABC used to produce a guide just for their radio stations. It cost 40 cents. I kept a few copies which you can see in the picture in this post. I gather they are worth a bit more today.

You will see in the photo above how I used to highlight in red the programs that I wanted to record. The rest I usually heard live.

The mellow toned voice of Jaroslav Kovaricek presented two of my most cherished ABC programs. These were Dreamtime and Innerspace. I recorded over 100 broadcasts because the music was so unique. I heard sounds that could not be found in almost any other place. I still use these recordings every week when I need some headspace relaxation time. The music on Dreamtime has inspired me to write many of my compositions.

Jaroslav Kovaricek produced hundreds of Dreamtime programs; over 500 from memory. Innerspace never ran for that long but offered a new sound experience. I recorded only a few of those. Unfortunately, there is almost no record of either of these programs today anywhere. I may be the only person that has recordings of these amazing soundscapes.

Other than the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), there is nothing like the ABC on this planet. I can’t imagine living without the ABC. Yet, the ABC might soon be gone.

Successive Liberal governments have been trying to kill off the ABC. They want to see it gone because, in the words of former Liberal party leader and former Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, they (the ABC) are not on team Australia. The hard right of the Liberal party wants the ABC to be sold off to private interests. Why? Because according to these people, the ABC does not represent their ideology.

If you don’t know what the Liberal party ideology is, just take a look at the state of imbalance, greed, political spin and lies pushed out by this unaccountable government. It’s sad to say, many people in Australia want to see the ABC gone too. They believe the Liberal party spin and follow them blindly.

If you don’t want to see the ABC sold off, or dismantled, you should do something about it. Write to your local member and ask them to increase ABC funding so it can be maintained. They need to be able to go on to provide the necessary programs that they have been creating for almost 100 years.

If you don’t want the ABC gone, start talking to your friends and relatives about how you, and they can save this national treasure. Because the ABC is as important as Uluru, the Sydney Opera House, and the Great Barrier Reef - just imagine all these treasures gone. 

Can you have sober reasoning?

If you research and study anything for long enough, you will come closer to understanding the basis of your subject. For most of my life, I had a reason for everything I did. But continually, my reasoning was based upon expediency. You see, I followed what I thought was the Epicurean pleasure principle. Not the real one, but the one that has been widely promoted in the general media.

I thought that when Epicurus said, “The end of all our actions is to be free from pain and fear”, I assumed that he meant I should avoid pain and fear. But with me, it was much more than avoidance, it was denying pain and fear. And not only in myself, but in others too.

I didn’t want to know other people’s pain or grief. I didn’t want to know my own. My main thought was, if I’m happy, so is everyone else around me. And if they were unhappy, I didn’t want to know them. If I became discontented with them, I pushed them out of my life. However, I could not escape myself. I still had a lot of pain and fear. I was unhappy all the time.

I avoided discomfort by leaving painful situations. I dodged fear by never looking at it or finding out why I had feared. I simply dismissed these things and moved on to somewhere or someone new. When I found that I was in pain or fear again, I ran away.

I thought that if I avoided pain and fear, my life would be full of sensual delights. That wasn’t the case, it was the opposite. I found that I had Agliophobia, which is a persistent, unwarranted, and often an irrational fear of pain. In every situation, with every person, I found the same old fear and pain. I had abandoned myself to a life of bodily desires and found that I didn’t actually have a life. Eventually, I got tired of running and hiding. I had exhausted myself more than anything else. It was simply too much trouble to start over again and move on, to try to escape my fear of fear and pain.

So, how did I get over my Agliophobia and achieve this miraculous enlightenment and change? I didn’t. I have not altered one solitary thing about me from the age of 20 until now in my 60s. I spent 40 years in pain and fear for no reason.

I’m still the same greedy, dipsomaniac liar that I have always been. Nothing has changed my view of pleasure or the world. Pleasure is still the goal of my life and I place it above other things and other people.

I found no pleasure in reasoning. All analysis showed me was how I had wasted my time analysing things. Because evaluating, considering, exploring, and probing only made things worse. My unexamined life gave me the pleasure I had always been seeking.

Sounds counterintuitive? Not to me. What I’ve found is that the best life is the longest life lived in pleasure. Though I avoid overt greed and sloth; they are too much trouble to attain. I have resisted the urge of the real Epicurean principle and built my own world of pleasure that is defined by my terms and no other. I don’t have that outer classic life of hedonism like a rock star or a billionaire, but inside, I do.

From the outside, people see me as a sober, calm person of caring and understanding. They see me this way because that’s what they want to see, that’s what they expect other people to be. I’m not an ancient Roman who takes what he wants and kills anyone who stands in my way. I don’t have to be a Roman, or anything else. I let people believe that what they think I am, I am.

This is how I killed off all my pain and fear. Other people did it for me. Other people granted me a life of sober reasoning, at least from their point of view I was a restrained person of logic. Regardless of how irrational and dangerous my life really is, I am seen as a soul of calm and empathy.

Maybe, in the eyes of others, the only way to have a life of sober reasoning is to be seen to have sober reasoning. It looks like Gandhi and Mother Teresa had sober reasoning, but it’s way too difficult to be like them. With the hell and trouble that other people cause you, it’s best to let them think what they want. This is how you can have sober reasoning. Let other people think what they want of you. Inside, you can be anything you desire.

If you let other people think that you are what they think you are, they will leave you alone to get on with your life of pleasure.

What's so good about Journalism?

Why Journalism?

Why would anyone in their right mind want to begin a journalism degree today when it looks like the news industry is falling apart? Why would someone who is almost 60 and was supposed to have their working career behind them start out on a new path?

Circumstances can lead you anywhere in life. But, there's one thing that has never changed for me over my life, and that's a love of the truth. That's not to say that I am always truthful and above reproach, far from it. However, as someone who as an inbuilt bullshit detector that is always on, becoming a journalist is something I should have done much earlier in life.

If there's one thing that life has taught me, it's that no one tells the truth all the time. Only liers say they tell the truth all the time.

And, that's OK. Every person who ever lived lied for all their lives. Most of the time, the lies are small, non-life threatening and are used for expediency. Why? Because no one believes the truth and it's the quickest way to get you out of trouble, so you and I think. Why is it that the truth almost never sounds real? Why do we think that even in the most minute of ways that telling the truth will make us out to sound and look like a lier?

Humans are unrealistic. We place all sorts of unrealistic expectation on ourselves and others. When we fail to meet these expectations, we lie. A lie is seen as the easiest and quickest solution to explaining why we didn't do what we said we were going to do or what we were asked to do.

Over the years of this journalism degree, I aim to turn my bullshit detector on myself and write without editing, except spelling, without pictures, unless absolutely necessary, and to never include links to articles supporting my view. I will not include comments from anyone. I don't want my writing swayed by others or taken in directions that I didn't start out heading towards.

Journalism has always been the best medium for telling and exposing the truth. Regardless of where it is today that fact has not changed. That's what is good about journalism and that's why I am doing this degree and writing this blog.

I hope this will be enlightening, informative and entertaining - now, onto the journey.

July 2, 2019.