COVER -> RECOMMENDED DAILY REQUIREMENT
THE JET SKI & THE DEVIL - I'm sitting on a rock at Magic Beach. It's a beautiful little cove, sandstone cliffs covered in ti trees, a few houses discreetly tucked away among them, some romantic ruins on the shoreline which look like Roman fortifications but -- because this is Australia and we have no buildings older than two hundred years -- are actually lime kilns abandoned in the 1920's.
The boys are diving one hundred metres away around the half submerged rocks in the gently heaving blue water, two black heads with spouting snorkels and two pairs of blue and yellow flippers flapping occasionally behind. Gab has just speared a fish which shall be tonight's dinner, and now they are trying to get another before the rising tide and swell make it impossible.
An idyllic scene: blue sky, calm seas with just the occasional gull's cry and the splash of a wave to break the silence. Two happy boys and me on a Saturday afternoon. Then I become aware of a new arrival. Two hundred metres along the beach at the boat ramp a white utility has pulled up. Behind it is a trailer with a bright yellow toy-like object: a jet ski. Two figures struggle into wet suits, the trailer is backed to the waters edge, there is a whine, a roar and the thing is screeching about in tight circles in the middle of the bay, churning the water white.
The boys have given up their hunt, are swimming back to the beach. I'm a little anxious; last summer a jet ski rider ran over a kid in a similar setting and killed him. But there are no dramas. As we get into the car Gab's friend says "Did ya see that jet ski! It was sooo cool!"
The other rider has taken it out now and is zipping back and forth well away from the beach, beyond the four cray boats swinging gently at their moorings. I think: Well, at least he's showing some consideration.
The beach going population in Australia divides into two categories: those who think jet skis are cool, and those who see them as a pox. Among the adults, these divisions coincide pretty well with that between tabloid readers and broadsheet readers.
Our great Australian public mystic, the saintly Michael Leunig, whose cartoons have graced the fronts of refrigerators in middle class households for the past twenty-five years, produced the devastating "Ode to a Jet Ski Rider", one of his best efforts.It gets reprinted every summer.
"Jet ski rider, selfish fink
May your silly jet ski sink
May it hit a pile of rocks
Oh hoonish summer coastal pox.."
As we rattle away from the beach up the corrugated gravel road, I'm thinking it's difficult to find a leisure toy with fewer redeeming features than the jet ski. It pollutes, it's noisy, it's a menace to other beach goers. The purchase of scores of them increases still further our enormous foreign debt. But how does it rate in the overall scheme of things? Is the problem with our life on this planet going to be fixed by a few education programs aimed at dickheads - a few modern sumptuary laws?
There's not much public discussion of such issues. No real public discussion of the appalling lifestyle and transport choices which contribute to the greenhouse effect. Everyone knows who David Suzuki is; he's some sort of gloomy environmental saint, but has anything he or others like him have said had any real impact? I don't think so.
Just take the argument about sensitivity to the environment.
How different is the insensitive working-class jet ski rider from the doctor/lawyer/ architect who mocks him -- while winging his/her way to Nepal to receive a karma polish at the Dalai Lama's soul laundry, using as much aviation kerosene for the trip as an Indonesian family needs for a year of cooking and lighting?
And to take the social justice tack, while we deplore the exploitation of the third world workers, who benefits from a system that keeps our relationship to them just distant enough for us to never be really sure where those cheap shoes come from?
There is been no real alternative to the two headed political beast that runs our western democracies - the two branches of the corporate party. We elect a conservative government when we are scared of the adventurism of the left wing. We elect a left wing government when the narrowness, meanness and self interest of the conservatives becomes too much to stomach. Both sides broker the balance of power between the major institutions that run the show. There is a difference in emphasis, but no one in mainstream politics or media dares look at the fundamentals.
Why? Because the middle class, the decision makers, the creators and controllers of technique who are at the heart of our society, benefit from the whole mess, but won't look at themselves. The First World middle class have been the beneficiaries of an ideology that puts the consumer at the centre of politics, and which has destroyed the prosperity of producers in every country by making them bid against each other.It's so easy to blame someone else for the ills of the system - politicians are a favourite - or to project it onto the Other: the corrupt Third World governments, the fundamentalists, the ignorant poor, the petrol head workers or rapacious corporations.
It's just so morally convenient to live high on the hog while shoving all the dirty work down the line or offshore. I know how it works: I spent a year in Indonesia building oil rigs where cheap local labour working in slave-like conditions kept the oil flowing for the First World. Or you can get the most recent arrivals to your shores - the illegals in many cases - to exploit themselves for your benefit, picking the vegies, cooking the food, making the clothes.
Expend your moral outrage on some teenager in the Middle East who gets her throat cut. It's cheap, and relatively painless. And reinvent some impossibly remote society as the ideal. How about Tibet?
Bad faith, a schism of the soul, the compartmentalisation of functions: a reductionism that produces unhelpful dichotomies which conceal more than they reveal: left/right in politics, economic rationalism versus economic irrationalism, victim versus persecutor.
No wonder the young, trying to integrate themselves in a world that puts the soul through the blender and wants your hand, eye or brain without a person attached, fall victim to smack. Only to those prepared for spiritual surgery will receive the keys to the kingdom.
Of course we have some improvements. The War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague, the consensus that racism is evil, a vague belief in the eventual triumph of democracy. The Africans will probably get the cheap AIDS drugs, once a deal is struck with the drug companies. And you Norwegians and Japanese: don't you touch them whales!
But it's all is pretty damn peripheral.
Twenty years ago we all knew about house design for low energy. What have we got now? Vast new suburbs with ridiculously inefficient houses, each with an air-conditioning unit on the roof to cope with our record summer heat. Here in Victoria, Australia, our new left-wing state government wants more freeways. Motorists want petrol taxes reduced. Who sets the agendas for all this? Who makes the policy and the rules? The middle class.
Like Kevin Carey, I agree that so many problems arise from an inability to take any responsibility for the world which afflicts us. And I also concur with the concluding paragraph of his article.
"Of course this present mess will end in tears. The only question is when."
In the meantime, a little less blaming of others and a little more soul searching (if you can still find one of your own), O Middle Classes!
But I still hate jet skis.
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WEB SITE PICK OF THE DAY: Thanks (and a tip of the hat) to Ric Williams in Austin, TX, for sending us the link to this great page of Computer Enhancements some of us really, really want. It's a hoot!
