The summer of 2009 seemed long for both the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress.  Facing falling polling numbers and increased outrage at its health care reform proposals, Congress adjourned and returned home for the summer to find angry constituents organized in vocal opposition to the administration?s plans.  While polls continued to illustrate that the public was broadly in favour of health care reform, representatives faced bitterly divided constituencies and increasingly vitriolic rhetoric.  Right-wing media figures accused the Obama administration of trying to enact a radical socialist agenda. Congressional coalitions that had once held promise now fractured. The bipartisan “Gang of Six” on the Senate Finance Committee split down party lines. The momentum gained by the new administration slowed.  Yet as the leaves started to turn, and Congress returned from its break, health care remained on the agenda, bloodied, but not beaten

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Rest assured, though, Naysayers will continue.  I have a wonderfully compelling post on the glory of Gilbert Blythe that is about to burst out of me after reading this post at Pursuit of Harpyness.  Most of my US-centric stuff will live over at USSC, but everything else will remain here.  I highly recommend you check out USSC, though, because Jonathan is posting there as well, and his insights are waaaay better than mine anyway.

Also, I started a silly, fun Tumblog, called Raindrops on Roses, where I just post about things I like. It’s not much of anything, but it’s there, in case you’d like to take a look.

So yeah, that’s the state of my internet life. At least for now….

Five days in, I’m hooked.  It’s an amazing platform.  One of the things that strikes me, after playing around on it for a while, is how difficult it is to describe.  My strong suspicion is that it will forever change the way digital cultures work.  Why, exactly, is harder to explain.

I think it’ll be because the user has a hub in which they receive and share information.  Currently, the information exists, the user accesses it and sometimes creates it.  Here, you have a single interface in which you access and create, and the information comes to you.

While I’m a geek, I’m certainly not overly techy, so understanding much of Wave’s capability is beyond me.  But even the little things I’ve tried out- like the twitusername app that automatically links any reference to a twitter account to its feed- are amazing.  It feels like a system that works intuitively, while giving the options to customize it to exactly what I need.

Obviously, it’s still early days.  I’m sure it’ll integrate with Google Reader in some way, but I don’t have the vision to figure out how.  I also think it’ll be different when my friends are on there- it’s hard to actually understand how it will change the collaborative process when you’re not using it as a collaboration tool yet.  But the combination of the public and private web in one place, of conversation and information distribution, just makes sense.  I suspect that, once everyone is on there (and I really think everyone will be on there), it’ll be the one window you keep open all day. Everything you need, in one place.

It’s an amazing, intuitive system. It doesn’t take long at all to get the hang of it, and it just makes sense: to have a single piece of information that people access and develop, rather than an exchange of pieces of information. I really don’t think email will last much longer, in its current form…

Yeah, I’m ranting, but it really is genius- and utter common sense- at the same time.

PS I’ve been using this list of Wave extensions. Very useful. I’m rather in love with the word poetry one.

Anyway, over the six months she told me she’d started to follow this system of beliefs, I’ve watched her. Watched her participate, and make choices, and become more and more involved.  I’ve also spoken to her at length about it.  It’s been frustrating at times- it’s been frustrating often. But it’s also been a real learning experience.

Despite all that time, it was only last week that it truly struck me what I’ve learned through watching her: her religion seems to be not a way to understand the world, but a system of dealing with it.  It’s a way to make rules and boundaries to attempt to control life.  It takes all the mystery out of it.  It applies rules and guidelines and boundaries. It tells you if you do this, X will happen, and if Y happened, well, that means you must have done that.  it’s a way not of understanding the world, but of explaining what happens in it.  It’s almost descriptive.  When you buy into this system, you buy into their explanations for everything: for health, for poverty, for tragedy, for wealth. And you buy into them fully- you can’t assess and decide on various things.  There’s no room to move.

It struck me, then, the temptation to do that: to adopt a system that makes sense of everything.  Rather than continually struggling to figure out what the truth is, one adopts a set of truths and applies them to all circumstances. In a way, it’s the ultimate self preservation, because it protects the participant from doubting, from wondering, from the struggle of figuring things out.

But after watching it for a while, I can see both the appeal and the tragedy of such an adoption.  It may protect you from the worst of life, but it also shields you from the best.  It’s a way of making life something to be managed, rather than something to be experienced.  It’s probably cliche, but I think life is only real when you run the full gamut of experiences.  What is joy without suffering?  What is relief without fear? Love without heartbreak?

I don’t want to find a way to manage my humanity. I don’t want a system that makes things easy, or a way to make sense of everything, but rather, I’d prefer to continually be looking at the world and trying to understand it- and being wrong as often as is necessary.  I want to ask questions.  Because my faith isn’t my own if it’s handed to me, whole, sorted, with a bow on top. It needs to be something I’ve struggled through, and tried to understand, and been wrong about, and been right about, and with which I’ve been frustrated, plain and simple.  Because that’s a faith, and not merely a system.

The crowd in Tiergarten Park, Berlin, gathered to hear Barack Obama speak during the 2008 campaign.

So I hopped in the lift today at work, hours before Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize, and there was a news story on the little screen.  It told of how the Dalai Lama didn’t mind that Obama was avoiding him during the Tibetan’s tour of the United States because of possible jeopardy to US-Chinese relations. And looking at it, one thing occurred to me: how funny that we trust him.

And it kind of struck me. We trust him.  We give him the benefit of the doubt.  We want to give him room to move because we trust him.  When he does things that seem a little unfair, we trust that he has a plan, and that he knows what he is doing.

So, tonight, after he won the Nobel Peace Prize, I started asking around.  And weirdly, the people around me echoed similar ideas.  Largely because of his character- but also in part because of his history- we trust he will act well.

What a remarkable thing this is: to trust the leader of the most powerful country in the world.

Oh, we know he’s not endlessly trustworthy, or immune to internal pressures, or anything like that.  But generally, we believe he’ll act in good faith and do what he can.

That makes me a little more comfortable about the world in which I live.  A world in which there a horrible problems, no doubt. But I am happy to give Obama as significant chance to solve them.

What is peace if not confidence, assurance, hope.  Granted, he may not have negotiated a Middle East peace treaty, but he has made a real difference to the way many people think about the world, and what’s possible in it.

And that’s more than worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize.

Yet in reading some of the American reactions to the skit, I feel a defense of Australia rising in me.  Not a defense of the act, by any stretch of the imagination.  But many critiques of the public’s reaction are quite culturally unaware and fail to understand any of the nuances of the Australian experience.

Some of the reactions have been very dismissive of the “we didn’t know” explanation.  While it may sound absurd, there’s something to it. Most Australians have no idea of the United States’ deep scars caused by slavery, Jim Crow, and racism.  This isn’t an excuse, but it does make the reaction slightly more understandable.  I lived in the US for 3 years when I was younger, I’ve traveled there many times since, but it was only when I took the amazing Stephen Robertson’s Key Issues in American Culture- a masters level course- that I truly understood, for the first time, the centrality of race to the American experience.  Many of those responding to the performance would genuinely not understand the significance of what was presented.  It seems odd to accuse Australians of ignorance for not understanding American history: truly, when would they have had that chance? And why is an understanding of American history to be expected of Australians?

But beyond that, American commentaries on the incident demonstrate their own ignorance by fail to understand the role of class in Australia.

Class is a central part of the Australian experience.  While good public education, and public university education that is affordable for all* ensure that it’s comparatively easy to move between classes, Australia has very distinct working versus professional class groups. And there are very much regions that identify more strongly with one area or the other.  Consequently, you have whole areas that are a sort of insulated experience of that one kind group.

There are, naturally, cultural associations that accompany being a member of the various classes.  The term largely used to refer to that working class culture, “bogan”, is both derogatory and celebratory. We have a strange habit of celebrating this culture- which is part of the reason “Kath and Kim” was a cultural phenomenon here, while it didn’t last past a season in the US.

So a show like Hey Hey it’s Saturday (or Today Tonight, or a considerable number of other Australian-produced shows) is designed to appeal to this sensibility and this audience.  It’s part of “bogan culture”.  When it was on in the 1980s, it was part of bogan culture, and now it’s back, a kind of naff bogan nostalgia.

Consequently, when the show is criticized for being racist- which it definitely was, make no mistake about it- it can feel like a criticism not just of the skit, but of working class culture more broadly.  We professional liberals are good at telling the working class how to act- and I’m certainly guilty of it.  Consequently, a legitimate criticism like this can be lost among the countless others. It feels like an attack on bogan culture.

And the divide is only highlighted by news media outlets,  some of which are excellent at highlighting the divide cultural gap between the working and professional class,  and turning the working class individual into the glorified Australian “battler”.

Which is one other important thing the US commentaries on the incident got wrong- they failed to understand that we too have a variety of media outlets, much the way the US does, that appeal to different segments of the market. Again, the segmentation is probably more class-based than in any way reflective of political ideology.  So a News Ltd online poll is about is indicative of broad public opinion as a Fox News poll.

Yes, the skit was racist. Yes, it was especially culturally insensitive. Yes, the producers should have known better. But reactions to the Australian public’s reaction have been largely off base demonstrate a lack of sensitivity to our own culture and history, in which class plays a central role.

*The government pays upfront, and the cost is deducted from income at a reasonable rate only after graduates start earning over a set amount- around 4% at 50k through to 8% for over 80k

Image by flickr user fafou

Earlier this week, I made a very quick post about three things I think Australia could borrow from the US in order to improve our democracy.  One is to scrap mandatory voting.

Granted, that’s not really something stolen from the US: most of the rest of the world does not have mandatory voting.  Just 32 countries worldwide have mandatory voting, and only 19 actually enforce it (in Australia, this comes by way of fines if you fail to vote).

There are several fundamental problems with mandatory voting.  The first is that it pushes parties to the centre. Rather than needing to moblise their bases, they simply have to appeal to the small portion of the population that swings, in the small population of districts that swing.  Consequently, policy is shaped in a way that is designed to offer advantages to those small, swinging populations.  It also means that governments can become lazy in the way they govern.  They aren’t accountable to the base, because the base has nowhere really to go.  Perhaps, if Australia had a genuinely strong third-party, it wouldn’t be such a problem.  But we don’t, and the Greens claims otherwise are absurd.

But beyond the practical outworking of mandatory voting, there is a fundamental problem: mandatory voting ensures that people who are not interested in the political process, and do not engage with the political process, significantly effect the outcomes of elections.  Australia has a very low standard of political reporting, virtually no political blogosphere, and generally, a low level of political engagement.  I have no empirical evidence to support this, but my suspiscion is that the Australian apathy toward politics is in part due to mandatory voting, much the same way I’ll happily read a book until it’s assigned to me for uni, in which case I’ll resent the fact I have to read it.

It’s especially absurd that one is required to vote in local council elections.  With the quick decline of local press, and with minimal reporting on local issues, how can one make an informed decision?

Mandatory voting, rather than ensuring all people have an equal say, ensures the status quo is maintained.  It makes it exceptionally difficult to challenge our two dominant parties.  And the current state of the NSW government bares witness to the fact this is a fundamentally bad thing.

It’s okay to have scars, they will make you who you are
It’s okay to have fear, as long as you’re not scared of coming here
And in the middle of the night, just call if you wanna talk
‘Cause you know that I wanna talk too

and also this:

I like the way that our arguments stop when we fall asleep
And the way that your body feels when it’s wrapped around me
And I’d like it if you made it to mine by Christmas Eve
So you can hold me
And we’ll watch Christmas TV

All together now: Awwwwww.

As Jonathan said somewhere on the internet earlier this week, it’s been an odd week, ’cause I’m blogging about music and he’s blogging about politics. But it’s nice to have a brief foray into this before I get stuck into my Health Care Reform essay this weekend.

Well, that and Taylor Swift, but I’m not supposed to admit to the Taylor thing publicly.

It was also through Black Cab Sessions that I discovered The Duckworth Lewis Method, an indie-pop group with a concept album about cricket, which may actually be the best thing in the history of the universe.

Also great are Creature Fear by Bon Iver (also featured in Chuck) and longtime Naysayers favourite, Lykke Li.

But, seriously, have a look around. It’s an awesome site.