Questions and Arseholes

The other night students interrupted the live broadcast of Q and A, a panel show moderated by one of those little boys you see on a historical water fountain, Tony Jones. The audience is permitted to ask questions of the panel and it’s all a bunch of skull-imploding bullshit with very little bearing on anything other than my fucking nerves. I stopped watching months and months ago to lower the risk of my window shattering outwards as a TV sailed into the street. This show is infuriating in it’s smug denial of any person or thing outside the world of people Tony Jones could lunch with comfortably.

I don’t want to make this a Tony Jones hate fest, he’s got a job to do and that is to act as a gate keeper of democracy. This was made very clear when the protesters made only one person angry: Tony. The politicians on the panel betrayed no stress or sense of outrage, only Tony was put off, derailed, angered and told the protesters they weren’t doing their cause any good. Why is that the moment stuck in my mind? Why is it that Tony’s spouting of this judgement is so frustrating? It really shouldn’t bother me at all, because a supposedly impartial figure inserted himself into the frame in a way that gave the game away.

The game is that Australians despise protesters. It’s not true, but that’s the game as it is played by people who have the odd belief that they are normal, in touch with reality and practicing common sense. It’s a view held by people who are exactly irrelevant to the protesters. Protesters aren’t talking to the gate keepers, they’re going around you, Tony. An appeal to you is an appeal to fuck all. Why try get stage time with you? Be open to questioning by you? What for? You will in a workmanlike manner present queries as a front man for powerful lobby groups. Perhaps this is unfair, but then in the interest of impartiality asking questions from the point of view of groups who would see the protesters up against the wall is hardly fucking helpful is it now? It’s of no use to people fighting for a cause to present themselves for interrogation by proxy, questions geared to beg the question, the question being, “Why are you protesting when you are wrong?” Fuck that shit, fuck off Tony.

Impartiality as it is practised by journalists is a nightmare for people fighting for causes. Then again who are Tony Jones, Emma Alberici, people who interview motherfuckers on TV? What is that job? What light is being shone on what? Who is learning what? Why are any of these people talking? We are very deep now into the Climate Change reality tunnel, no light at the end of it, so what were these interviewers doing for the last twenty years? What was the point of all that? We’re more fucked then we were then, Tony, Emma, what were you doing?

Another example: 9/11. The supposedly impartial, objective, thoughtful ABC regurgitated anything the war machine had to say. Speakers who absolutely stood to profit from war were trotted out first, then again, then routinely, as if you guys lived in an alternate universe, which you do. In the universe of Tony and Emma it’s not the point that a fact is the truth, it’s the point that whoever is powerful sets the agenda. Reality is not what the scientific method and our senses show us, reality is what powerful people say it is and you would be a fool and an engineer to think otherwise.

Powerful people decide our reality, that is the world we live in and that is why the protest on Q and A was a success. Power must be interrupted, there is no bargaining. What happens with Q and A is a powerful representation of our supposed powerlessness. It’s so castrating I stopped watching years ago. It is a running joke about the impotence of the common man. You don’t politely ask the cutting to stop, you start flailing.

You will now say that protesting on a show that is fake is itself fake because you have been trained to think in a way that is very neat and tidy and awesome for talking your way out of any possibility of leading the charge for justice. The students want justice as they see it and I’m not going to argue the pros and cons of their cause, I’m only going to say that they believe they have no choice but to whip up support any way they can. If you think you are now with-holding support because of the nature of their protest let me set your mind at ease: you were never going to support them. No you weren’t. Hush now.

Protesters are often not cool. They spazz out and their voices go all funny, but their job is not to put your mind at ease. These are not spokesmodels selling you anti-ageing cream, they are often frightened people staring into a future they don’t even want to put into words, because they feel they will lose the audience completely. And Australians are easily the most complacent audience on Earth, protected by America, far from danger, we are compartmentalised, we could have been wanked into being in a Vatican thought experiment. Or wank.

Protesters in Australia have a tough go of it, your work is cut out for you when the Capitalist Nonsense Wealth that insulates people from reality in one sense fills them with subconscious guilt in another. These fuckers don’t want to face reality because they know their luxury items come at the price of slave conditions in places like the Philippines. Australians have many reasons to not rock the boat. That’s why it’s not only that what Tony Jones thinks about the protesters is irrelevant, it’s also the case that what most of the public thinks is irrelevant. The protesters aren’t talking to Tony or to you, they’re talking to other protesters. 

That’s what resistance is, guys: lonely.