Plot Twists and Politics

After speaking with friends last night I’ve decided that the world needs a little more bushlawyering – the inchoate, half-formed offering of unsolicited, unqualified opinion. The term dates back to the days of Banjo Patterson when jolly swagmen camped out by a billabong discussed the relative merits of defenses to property torts while eyeing off passing jumbucks.

The topic of conversation – as is everyone’s at the moment – is Trump, and the antiquarian notion that people vote in response to their best interest, or even their perceived best interest – the political pundit’s favoured hand waving for disaffected workers in the Midwest shaking up a stable system with the political equivalent of a couple of paddleboards, a jumper cable, and 50ccs of pure adrenaline stabbed directly in the heart, in return for increased protectionism.

There is little reason to suspect that people do vote in self-interest, or even misguided perceived self-interest. An important result from public choice theory shows that ‘rational’ voters should be indifferent to voting for all ballots except those in which they might carry the crucial 50% + 1th vote. Taking all other votes as given, this follows from adding 1 to an absolute majority on either side – in which the individual’s vote will have no true effect on the outcome. This is known as Down’s Paradox. The ‘rational’ voter will care about their vote only so much as they believe they may carry the winning vote by probability (and it is found that voter turnouts increase in perceived marginal electorates).

The question then becomes: why do people vote? And why do people care about how they vote? The answer is often explained as a form of social signaling: by voting an individual can send a signal to their friends, families, society in general, and self-identified in-groups on their stances on certain issues (e.g. marriage equality, taxation, the fiery bob cut of Gillard, or the pugilistic frown of Abbott). The anonymity of individual votes, and the necessary homogenization of disparate political issues under two broad camps (e.g. the social progressive pushing for radical trade liberalization) raises some doubt on this explanation.

Recent electoral results offer a more interesting reason: people vote because it is fun. Carl von Clausewitz once famously wrote that ‘war is politics by other means’, but politics is entertainment by other means: it’s the one topic of conversation guaranteed to generate heated excitement in any situation after the weather. And certain candidates are far more exciting than others.

Take for example:

• Pauline Hanson née Pantsdown 
• Clive Palmer (the Titanic building, dinosaur resurrecting, CIA-conspiring, radio-twerking billionaire) 
• Boris Johnson (the affable mop of straw-coloured hair mascarading as a Foreign Affairs Minister)

Donald Trump demonstrates this stage-stealing characteristic perfectly. From the tabloid insanities of the election, one moment stood out clearly: at the first debate, he invited a supposed mistress of Bill Clinton front-row-centre to Hillary. It could have come straight out of House of Cards. The move was petty, provocative, disrespectful, and unnecessary – but within minutes it had hit national newspapers around the world, reaching audiences in the hundreds of millions who read it eagerly – responded to it, decried it, analysed it – and asked themselves: what will he do next?  

Trump is the definition of a walking cliffhanger: an entertainment hairpiece with a Twitter account. Building a wall with Mexico was once a punchline plot-line in Arrested Development. Now, it's a $21.6 billion policy proposal. In a world where voters are mathematically indifferent to their vote and divorced from the political process - especially in the electoral college system of the US that rendered millions of votes truly worthless - is it any surprise that voters might turn to the quick guffaw that putting ‘Trump’ or ‘Clive Palmer’ or ‘Leave’ for Brexit at the top of their ballot? If everyone else is rational – if the system is rational – couldn’t the innocent burst of amusement for voting for the class clown of politics seem appealing? And where a proportion (not necessarily large in percentage terms) of the population vote based on the criteria of entertainment and popular zeitgeist, events once described as laughably infeasible (such as Brexit, Trump, Clive Palmer, the resurgence of One Nation or Front National) can sprout dangerously into reality. 

Three episodes from the last week in Australia illustrate the sitcom shift of politics – Turnbull’s simpering sycophant tirade, Bernardi starting a ‘bring your own streamers’ party for one, and Scott Morrison proudly depositing a lump of coal in the chamber, like the sclerous Santa of parliaments past and present. None of these actions had a great deal of political substance, but all were highly entertaining. Each were shared eagerly shared by supporters and detractors; memed, satirised, and hagiofied. In today’s politics, as in advertising, one rule rings true: there is nothing worse than being not talked about.

ABC screens the current season of politics. The next will be streamed live on HBO. 

The Market Sneezes

In a concrete bunker 50m underneath Sydney, Glenn Stevens stood behind a chair with a face as dour and deflated as Japan’s economy in the 1990s.

“Gentlemen, I assume you know why I have called you here today. Times are tough – inflation has been worrying and there has been nothing but trouble from the New Zealand dairy industry. I’m afraid that we may need to use monetary policy.”

There was a gasp around the table. Anthony Dickman began to sob quietly.

“But this not all bad news – monetary policy has come a long way since the days of trying to hit multiple targets with one blunt instrument. Our team has been hard at work, and I think that we’re ready to reveal our greatest innovation of all.” He pressed a finger onto a dashboard, and a wall swiveled to reveal a line of tanks. Inside each was the unconscious form of a man – a series of tubes trailing from bodies and up through a murky green fluid to the ceiling. The tanks gurgled softly in the stunned silence of the room.

John Akehurst was the first to recover “Is that…?”

“Yes. Milton Friedman. Cloned after the recession of 1991. Bred to be concerned with one thing, and one thing only: the steady and continuous growth of the money supply. These tanks are connected to a giant Phillips Hydraulic Computer stored deep underneath Pitt Street. The fluid running through their veins has circulated through models of the economy for millions of iterations. This is only the first batch – in time we hope to expand the program to include other economists such as Keynes, Tobin, and Tinbergen. But for now these Friedmans represent the forefront of central banking weaponry.”

Philip Lowe licked his lips, but raised a shaky hand. “But will this be enough?”

The Governor of the Reserve Bank permitted himself a rare smile. “Why, yes. We plan to equip them with helicopters.”

Punintended Consequences

Occasionally - rarely - about as often as being struck by lightning on a blue moon while Led Zeppelin announces a comeback tour - people ask me why I stopped blogging. And whether I'll start again. 

For the first question: honestly, I ran out of things to say. My metaphors became mixed, and not mixed enough. I forgot to water my garden (path sentences). My thesaurus was getting cracked, and an entire section from E-L was stolen, for the good of humanity. 

To the second - well, I'm here now, aren't I? 

Like the last blog, this one will focus on nothing of importance - which is, of course, everything that's important to me. Crunched up in bed with the flu, I'll keep this one short. My nose is flowing fast enough that it could power a small city, if only we could find a turbine small enough. I've had a very hot Valentine's Day. 

I had nothing to start this blog with, so I'll end it with one of my favourite movie scenes. It's from Freaks, by Tod Browning - a pre-code horror film from the 1930's which was enough to kill Browning's career, and spawn countless parodies, homages, and references (including recently in The Wolf of Wall Street). Freaks tells the story of a trapeze starlet that seduces, and attempts to kill Hans, a member of a carnival sideshow and heir to a large fortune. The core themes are of the humanity, kindness, and community of the physically-deformed sideshow members; and the inhumanity, cruelty, and awfulness of the physically attractive, but intrinsically evil starlet and her lover the strongman. While Freaks has occasionally been criticised as exploitive, it stands alone as a singular and startling look at the fickleness of appearance, the cruelty of humanity, and the superficiality of physical beauty. 

The scene I'm interested in is where the Cleopatra, the trapeze artist, and Hans celebrate their wedding night with the rest of the circus. A loving cup is presented to Cleo as the sideshow members accept her as one of their own. Arrogant and horrified at being accepted by a group she and her lover disdain, for a marriage she sees merely as a means for making money, she insultingly rejects them. Freaks came out towards the end of the pre-code era of Hollywood films (a licentious period of early film which played heavy and fast with gender-norms, sex, drug-use, and violence in films such as the original Scarface (1932), Red Dust (1932), and Possessed (1931), before being stripped out in a wave of moralisation and censorship), and has continued ever since to be divisive for its presentation of people with physical deformities, with opinions divided over the portrayals as either exploitative and sensationalising, or sympathetic and compassionate, with the true 'horror' of the film being the cruelty of the attractive, seemingly 'normal' villains. Despite these controversies, the film has undeniable iconic importance, and has remained a cult-classic since the 1950's and 1960's. For more on the background and debates surrounding the film here, here, and here are good places to start.