The shape of politics
Sunday Star Times April 22, 2018
The big winner at the Oscars this year was a film I thought I would never watch. Everyone was raving about it, but I couldn't get past the description: a mute woman falls in love with a creature who lives in the water. ZZZZZZZ.
Oh come on. How can that possibly be interesting for more than a minute?
Reader, I watched The Shape of Water last week because I was on a plane and bored. I loved it.
Mute woman falls in love with water creature. Strictly speaking, the label was accurate. But it doesn't come even close. In those terms Saving Private Ryan is about young Americans who visit France and have trouble sleeping. The Godfather is about a family man having a bad day when he goes to get oranges, and Jaws is about things you see when fishing
It's an enthralling story, a sumptuous piece of art, a visit to the mid-20th century where men were men and also they were bigots and bullies and thugs and in charge of everything. The charming hero is a woman who cannot speak. She meets a creature in a water tank in the secret laboratory where she works. That's just the start of it.
This impatient age of ours asks for everything to be wrapped up, morselised and handed to us as chicken nuggets. We pay a price for that, which you will know if you have eaten chicken nuggets and also real chicken.
It infests our politics. Politicians, policies and parties get labelled, reduced to morsels of ideas, and insults and invective and the lobbing of monkey excrement: lefty, virtue-signaller, wingnut, neocon. To what end? To satisfy yourself that you told him, you set her straight? Does any opinion ever get shifted in that kind of exchange?
Meaningful debate hardly stands a chance, and it's not at all aided by a certain sort of political commentator or reporter, racing from one election to the next. Nothing is analysed in substantive terms. The question every time is: how will this affect their election prospects? Or the next best thing, a leadership spill. "Well, Jacinda's in trouble now. National just won the 2020 election." Sports reporting, but without the insight.
Who'd be interested in politics? Who'd be interesting in having their mind changed?
My view of progressive left-leaning politicians is warm and favourable. I tend to agree with them when they say that we can make things better for everyone using the power of the state, and I look at Roosevelt's New Deal and our first Labour Government's welfare state and I think: that worked pretty well, didn't it?
But I'm also open to arguments suggesting otherwise. Seriously. When you show me studies that suggest that whether you intervene or not, the course of our economic fortunes doesn't seem to alter all that much, you bet I'm interested.
Likewise, I'm interested when you tell me that even though neoliberal economics have caused discomfort and dislocation to many people in prosperous countries, the benefit to millions, perhaps even billions across this new globalised world has been so great you'd have to argue it was worth it.
Happy to talk about it all day long. But if you just want to call me a libtard, we're not going to get very far.
Why does the labelling happen? Is it because everything comes out in shades of grey and compromise and we think politicians have lied to us and let us down? Are we prepared to accept anything other than crisp and clear-cut and dried black and white?
That kind of stunted thinking leads you sooner or later to Trump, and who can tell where the nuggets end and the piles of monkey waste begin? This week he was railing about immigrants: "There is a Revolution going on in California. Soooo many Sanctuary areas want OUT of this ridiculous, crime infested & breeding concept."
Breeding. What an unlovely word. Always with the dehumanising labels, this guy. I wonder what the Trump family would have been doing in the 1940s if they hadn't left Germany.
And then I see the photo of our Prime Minister in London, radiant in gown and korowai and I think, there it is: humanity. Someone should make a movie about it.