Our time of testing comes every three years when we, the-people, are supposed to be interested in what the two biggest bulls in the political ring ‘stand for’. Elections are always short-term marketing campaigns, because we are encouraged to turn off in the between times, to select one of exceedingly limited choices that have floated to the surface through the churning internal wrangling and organisational conventions of the respective major parties.
A century later, Ambrose Bierce’s definition of the elector as ‘one who enjoys the sacred privilege of voting for the man of another man’s choice’ is still apposite. Nobody – not even she herself – expects Christine Milne to lead a Green government. The two men – Abbott and Rudd – are running strong-man, presidential-style campaigns offering populist solutions and punitive programs for perceived problematic societal groups, including- refugees, single parents, women who have the audacity to claim a workplace right to financial support when they take maternity leave, all those unemployed young men, and ‘feckless’ Aborigines for whose finances and family life the intervention is in demand.
What strikes me is the similarity between the political and parent-child relationship. A young child depends entirely on a nurturing parent, usually the mother, for the necessities of life. Their whole life. To that child, their mother is their whole world.
But the child is not a mother’s entire world. A child has to be ‘managed’ when they are demanding, frustrated and furiously grief-stricken because of this, when the mother cannot and will not fulfil all their wants and desires.
An infant cries first for attention: the toddler, finding more and more world to interact with and experiencing frustration, has to control their instinctive desire for immediate gratification of their needs, both loves and hates the parent who teaches them, through frustration, to learn patience, read the propensities and vulnerabilities of the powerful other.
The loving parent suffers, at first, in denying the infant’s demands for satisfaction, until that parent learns to enjoy the process. The child, in learning that he can’t have everything he desires when he desires it, or necessarily at all, learns that love and pain are just different sides of the same coin. In other words, the parent-child transaction becomes a sado-machochistic one, with the parent learning to justify and take some enjoyment from the exercise of the power they have over their child, while the child learns that the catharsis of their tantrums may yet lead to a kind of fulfilment if not pleasure in being reconciled with the frustrator.
This dynamic, I have begun to see, is one that our two would-be patriarchs are perhaps unconsciously enjoying in their public activities in these short, furious weeks. Abbott has successfully – until the second candidates’ debate at least – damped down his glee in the taunting and negativity which he aimed so cruelly at the first woman prime minister of this country, when she withdrew from the internal stoush she couldn’t win, and both he and Rudd offered to the country the most boring, stagey and value-free ‘debate’ we have witnessed since the days of Billy McMahon.
But the blokes got aggro and personal at the second – to no great accolades for either – and we had a touch of the old Tony when he asked whether ‘this bloke ever shuts up’. Hardly a great debating model.
Both of these men are explicitly Christian, though neither is behaving much like one. The ‘soft side’ of their natures is carefully posed in public appearances where they kiss babies, puppies or are flanked by their attractive, intelligent, personable wives and lovely daughters. Both Rudd and Abbott want to be ‘Dads’.
Well, my Dad wasn’t the sort of man who sacrifices kindness for some ‘greater good’. And he is my model.
I object to vulnerable people being maltreated ‘for the good of all’. In Ursula K. Le Guinn’s novella The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, the happiness and joy and prosperity and spiritual maturity of a utopian society is shown to depend exclusively on the thoroughgoing cruel treatment and eternal suffering of a wretched and lonely scapegoat child in the bowels of the City.
In le Guinn’s story, every maturing child is shown this child, and taught that its suffering is the reason for the success of the civilisation above. All are shocked and sorrowful, but know that they can destroy that society with any kindness or protest. Most accept, with a leavening of wisdom, that great prices are paid for the happiness of many and the many good things that consensus and harmony brings, and their joy has a shadow. But there are those who, after they see and hear and smell that child, fall silent and become thoughtful, and some time later, slip away from the golden city, and nobody knows where they go or what they may do.
This is an election in which the kind of a society we want has not been spoken of. It is time for electors to decline the pleasure of punitive policies, or engage in the sado-masochistic rhetoric of economics, markets, threats and ‘sovereignty’. Bierce was no democrat. He thought that the vote was the instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.’ It would be folly to ‘man up’ to the policies of fear and resentment. We should be sending a message about what a society built on care for our neighbour might look like.
Here endeth the lesson.
Moira Rayner is a barrister and writer.
Fighting bulls image by Shutterstock.