‘It’ happens
People say ‘shit happens’. Well why can’t they say ‘it happens’? Why do we have to state the obvious worst? Why must people be so unkind? Would it kill them to silence the ‘sh’?
How many of us must harbour guilty memories of toilet-training and incontinence, that eschatology so silences articulate discourse? Don’t you overhear it in the streets? Humourless brutes aping the cutting edge comedians of last century with punchline pointing profanities. Ebullient abuse of the F-word makes you Funny … not.
Everywhere people pretend to be what they are not. Not only in the Federal Liberal Party. Not only in the NSW ALP. Not only among Clover’s self-funded retiree Independents.
And most of these egregious Pharisees are so self-deceiving they have not the slightest idea they are wrong. WRONG WAY GO BACK emblazoned on red signs greenlights them through the thrilling wreckage of their journeys.
And what of those who support these tyrants – pimping polling booths with graven images, pushing the dirty postcards that are ‘how-to-votes’ and serving promoting poseurs.
The petty bourgeoisie. The narks. The neighbours ringing the cops rather than knocking on next door and pointing out it is difficult to get an infant to sleep through trance dance track downstairs at 11 on the volume dial. The residents of the block who think common property should be a De-Militarised Zone.
These are the squeaky wheels of NIMBYism pushing to the front with bogus claims to represent the interests of others.
And the representatives we elected at various levels of government, corporation or local activist push, all when we were not paying very much attention to whatsoever they believed in but sufficiently beguiled by their pretensions to probity that we gifted them . And so the self-interested spirit past the gatekeepers and into the gamekeeper’s lodge the better to poach what they will.
And we moan long and low: ‘shit happens’ and cop it anyhow we get it, at our expense, from our chosen people.
by Peter Whitehead
