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August 9, 2010
Everybody has been hanging during the election campaign out waiting for that unscripted moment of excess that bursts the boundaries of the tightly controlled election campaigning, with its set pieces, talking points, controlled glossy appearances and media commentary concerned with the candy floss surfaces and the the repetition compulsion of politics as soap opera.
An excess in the form of a touch of wildness that ruptures the surfaces and shows the tensions and seething passion that indicated the political unconscious of politics. This tension threatens politics as soap opera and by exceeding it, pushes politics beyond itself thereby opening politics up.
Bill Leak has made a couple of attempts at representing a transgressive excess to a politics as a carefully manufactured marketing reality. He highlights the madness and violence that gestures towards sacrifice as a central social gesture:
Bill Leak
The postmodern moment of excess for me is Mark Latham's stage managed intervention as a journalist for Channel Nine. Insignificant in itself, that moment of physicality or bodily intrusion has opened up the expression of the fear and loathing of politics for us to see.
We need to historicize the narrative constructed around Latham, because Latham is a creative/destructive energy force in Australian politics. The texts about Latham and his outrage to common sense come to us as already read and interpretation weaves between previous interpretations in the public sphere. This narrative is one in which the Canberra Press Gallery has little love for Latham after he bagged them in Latham's Diaries.
Latham called Laurie Oaks (Jabba) a kindergarten commentator whose primary role as a conservative commentator was to bag the ALP on Channel Nine for Kerry Packer. His criticism was that Oakes was a Packer company man who was the most biased television reporter in favour of John Howard. Latham also exposed how Rudd ( 'Heavy Kevvie' ) consistently used Oakes as a feed when the ALP was in opposition during the Howard regime.
What Latham highlighted in the Diaries, which were part of a larger body of work, was a cracking open of an inner sanctum of the political realm to revel that the Australian political system has been reduced to falsity, treachery and showmanship - and that the media interface between that system and the Australian people, supposed to serve each of those, is even worse. The response from those in the politics/media club was that Latham was merely unloaded his bile from the bitterment of losing the election.
Their revenge narrative is that Latham had lost it (afflicted by the violence of madness), and the Canberra Club's strategy has been to demonise Latham. Oakes, for instance, in his review of Latham's Diaries used descriptions such as "poisonous," "bucket of bile," "weird and ugly mind," and "vulgarity" and "horrible". Peter Hartcher in the Sydney Morning Herald describes The Latham Diaries as the most vicious piece of political filth and sociopathic slander ever written in Australia.
Now that's an "unconscious" eruption that shows the political unconscious of the Canberra Club to be a teeming, active violent space of discontent. Latham has to be sacrificed to ensure the logic of a manufactured politics in the neo-liberal market place.
Few will embrace Leak's reference to the persistence of sacrificial elements at the centre of culture--let alone acknowledge their desre to to seek out and savour the disgorging of a force that threatens to consume. It is too disconcerting to acknowledge the desire for sacrifice as part of the sacred. Some may be more willing to accept politics as a sublimated form of sacrificial violence.
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You have no idea the relief, following initial anger, this writer felt when tabloid Nine and Latham did that intrusive humiliating, sickening attack on Gillard.
Shades of the notorious Howard Latham handshake of 2004, but this was far more base-leve putrid. What a waste of an individual Latham has become, from such a promising start.
For it appears that Rudd and Gillard were canny enough to exploit the gaffe, using ht smoke to "escape"; to patch up their own quarrel, finally having apparently realised what the electorate is telling them re cooperation and the right mindset for supposedly adult, responsible government leaders, in the polls.
Other wise they are "out", even if it means Abbott.
Labor can't blame the electorate, after the treachary of Bligh and Iemma over privatisation and no doubt the dagger will end up in our backs any way, but I can't imagine that Abbott can be any better for our country, even than Rudd or Gillard.