And Then Everything Went Haywire

Botanic Gardens, Sydney

Here in a new spring we had a new Prime Minister, yet another one, and trust in government was at all time lows. 
Strange things were happening and there was only one recourse: to hide. 
He could see time flowing across the suburb, solid, cold, winding through the lives of a mammalian species, here, far below. 
Strange that the things we feared from the gods, that they were all powerful, that they knew everything, that they had little care or concern for humans, that they could read our puniest, grottiest, most misbegotten thoughts, was the same things we feared from AIs.
As if they had already evolved somewhere else, and were now back here, at this conjunction in history, sorting out somebody else's mess, or their own mess.
The gods who had run astray. 
Already history was being written, and already it was old. 
Way back in June, in the midst of winter, when every day had already begun to feel like a century and he had abandoned journaling in favour of hiding out in the ordinary, he had written: 

Perhaps all places are remote, but this place felt more remote than almost anywhere.
"The country is broken," photographer Dean Sewell said on the way back from Ben Hill's wake.
The government was failing at all levels.
The Prime Minister looked worse by the day, not just physically, not just in the polls, but as if karma was really working.
Labor was working "the politics of envy", and it was working.
That 32 companies, or whatever it was, in which Malcolm Turnbull had millions invested would benefit from the $85 billion corporate tax cut was just the kind of factoid that went running through the country's diminished meeting houses.
His protestations that...
Not only were his policies atrocious, his media management woeful, but the bones of hypocrisy were etching into his face, day on day, press conference after press conference, at every little turn as he tried to bully the world into complying with his wishes.
Lucy and me.
What the fuck did Lucy have to do with running the country?
Everything, the rumour mill went.

Well there it was, already prophetic.
Fast forward three months, and Malcolm Turnbull, the worst robber baron Prime Minister in Australian history, was hiding out in New York; joining the almost as deplorable Kevin Rudd. 
These former rulers who, having plundered the country of their birth, having treated its citizenry with a profound contempt, could now use their plundered wealth to protect themselves from scrutiny. 
Turnbull, the man who had once been in danger of trampling five year olds in his rush to get in front of any television camera he could find was now hiding out from the few cameras persistent enough to pursue him into the heart  of the bustling world.
There was nothing to be gained from following him and they shed all instincts. 
Old Alex was done with the fate of nations and the deplorable condition of hs homeland. 
There was no reward for compliance, he had worked that out. He was expected to comply because that was what everybody else did, because they were a military mindset, because they did not understand the citizenry. 
Because the shadowed buffoon panda eyes that ballooned along the horizon were not actually a threat, they were just waiting for something else to happen.
There is a a wise saying: stay out of it.
Stay out of the results.
Rebirth. 
The strange thing, he thought, was just how resilient the species, as he gazed across younger generations, families in parks, gargantuan women with their already obese children at the local pool.
Despite the best efforts of an incompetent government, despite all the idiot propaganda and chronic mismanagement of the bureaucratic caste, people still hoped for a better future, and thrived in that hope. 
There was illusion from his location, a seaside town, a place in the sun, the tradies busy as money spilled down from the bursting-at-the-seams city, a future being written even as they frolicked in that very hope, a natural born optimism, while he, another spirit in another part of life, working with a different kind of cuneiform in a different era altogether, run by algorithms and machine consciousness, could barely see his way through the thickets. 
Out to sea, the grandfather of a whale pod moved south to their summer feeding grounds in the Antarctic, carrying with him all the wisdom of a long life.
Old Alex could feel him pass, and waved, in a sense, as the grand old man passed by. 
In that world we had all known, if only we were enlightened enough to see. 
Out in this strange world.  

THE BIGGER STORY: 




Days after Malcolm Turnbull lambasted two former Australian prime ministers as “miserable ghosts”, the ex-liberal leader has copped a trademark bruising critique from Paul Keating.

Mr Keating who led the Labor Party government from 1991 to 1996 condemned the recently ousted PM for turning his back on the fight for a republic and an unproductive three-year government.

Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald, Mr Keating said Mr Turnbull had “failed dismally” in championing the cause of the Liberal party during his time in office.

It comes after Mr Turnbull labelled former prime ministers Tony Abbott and Kevin Rudd “miserable ghosts” for remaining in politics after losing partyroom ballots.

But Mr Keating said Mr Turnbull was not fit to dish out such brutal criticism because of his lack of leadership, describing the former PM’s remarks as making “you choke on your Weeties”.

“His capitulation to conservatives on the republic says all that needs to be said about Malcolm’s wider ambitions for the country,” Mr Keating said.
He attacks Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott as ghosts, yet if you needed to know what Malcolm Turnbull truly believes in, what he would die in a ditch over, you would need a microscope to help you find it.”