Dances and Dust

The poem below, written by me in 2018, was originally inspired by long reflection on the condition of 'Aboriginals', whatever that term-without-boundaries might still mean, and the vexed and even vaguer (if that were possible) issue of 'race', which is today culturally executed in the politically very explicit manner of Humpty Dumpty, in Lewis Carroll’s, ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’.

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

'Racism' associated particularly with aboriginals, along with ancillary denial-of-agenda categories such as 'prejudice', 'bigot', 'denier', 'hate' and 'phobia', has been colonized by such toxic, prejudicial and malicious ideological intent, it has become almost impossible to have honest and normal conversations around this subject.

That is a totalitarian stratagem now used by our current social institutional rulers for controlling discourse and thought; i.e., consciousness itself.

'The Voice' campaign (a 2023 referendum to give Indigenous Australians an entrenched institutional voice within the national constitution, which was decisively lost) has prompted me to update the original preamble to the poem, and to refine my hostility to its proponents, whose effect on the architecture of social discourse has moved from ordinary civil disagreement and debate, through the somewhat dated left/right ideological trope, to the emergence of an off the wall asylum grade hysteria that has breached the traditional boundaries between knowing fantasizing and unknowing delusionality, between faith 'narrativizing' and rational thought, and between open conversation and closed monologue, whether talking about sex, civilizational roots or ethnicity.

They and the humanities trained postmodernism they cleave to have abandoned notions of ‘objective’ rationality that might provide sufficiently cogent and concrete approximations of reality to determine its boundaries at all, and prevent the arbitrary, evasive and consciousness controlling ideological fudge (category conflation), crib (meaning overstretch), fluff (hyperbole) and bluff (hardballing) that lack of strong reality boundaries invite into our almost wrecked capacity to genuinely talk to each other about anything more controversial than the weather.

This cultural garbling has enabled marginal minorities to be whipped up into ideological trumps that now overwhelm what were once the majoritarian civilizational centres of modern societies in a welter of self condemnation (guiltkrieg) 'inclusion' (colonization and takeover) 'empathy' (uncritical feeling that trumps thinking) rights’ (indulgent consumer entitlements) and solipsistic narcissism and moral exceptionalism that thinks ‘judgemental’ others ‘can’t understand’.

Oh yes they can….

In the still semi-tribal areas, aboriginal society faces triple ruin:

The first is the trauma of very old, 5-8 thousand years out-of-time, inertia driven and atavistically reactionary hunter and gatherer bands losing their wanderments and economic licenses to overwhelmingly more sophisticated modern systems. These not only immediately rendered their way of life drop dead obsolete, but put them in such a radically asymmetrical relationship with the new paradigm, even its goodwill and the hand of friendship could arc and burn them...let alone their taking the awful risks and inevitably terrible consequences, of entering into conflict with a giant that could crush them with a wink.

Second, and because of the above, there has been a general aboriginal unwillingness since the first European colonizing fleet, to fully engage with modern ways, and in particular, their educational and cultural offerings. Compare and contrast with all our Asian and Pacific neighbors who variously did. They could see the empowering value of what modern people brought to the table, and wanted to get their hands on it, which they all, eventually, in some measure did.

And the third is 50-70 years of indulgence driven deregulation and privatization of the social system that has turned liberty into disinhibition and rights into consumer entitlements, for which the responsible adult moral agency and training has been removed…with disastrous long term consequences.

These factors in combination have laid waste to substantial parts of outback aboriginal society that has gone openly feral this year (2023) in unprecedented displays of lawless and inchoate violence and sexual/gender misbehavior. On-the-ground aboriginal institutions have displayed a shockingly feckless incompetence in the face of this, followed by a deafening silence as to the abject failure of their miserable so called 'governance'.

These chronic deficits required some politically noisy diversion, like a referendum for instance…to maintain, increase and then bloat the aboriginal industry’s already enormous budgets, stipends and perks, prestige projects, institutional power and empire building...as well as justify the ongoing excuse intensive and defeatist conversations about helpless historical victimhood and the indefinitely extendable institutional arrangements that will keep them that way….. using anti-vilification laws, human rights legislation and blunt force aggression to suppress truthful discourse that might falsify these self-serving ideological narratives, within a larger economic system that has similarly severe and urgent sustainability and reality processing issues across all its other platforms, as well, like climate change for instance.

This poem simplifies a fundamental problem to its most basic existential element. It is dedicated to calling the bluff of the current ruling beneficiaries of the status quo, as they troll, shout down, threaten, legislate against, censoriously delete, deplatform, disemploy and defame regime criticism of, or non co-operation with, its shameless race hustling, authoritarian aggression and ultimately ruinous ideological gaming of the system.

Colour and movement,
dances and dust,
didgereedooing*
‘till it all goes bust,
debauched by welfare and idle hands
can you stand me a drink to return to my lands?
for dreams are my waking
and waking my sleep
As I lift up my spirit
And swallow it neat…

till I drown and I drown
to the end of the town
with the end of the world at my feet….

*Didgereedo: An Australian aboriginal base note drone vibrato woodwind instrument
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUGytDzsgew