Heists

I am a big fan of the pleasures found in heist movies, though I like escape films better. Heist films tend to assume access to the best people and gadgets: "This here's Billy. He's the finest safe-cracker in seven counties!" - that kind of thing, which is to say they assume wealth. That wealth isn't always current, but it's at least anticipated. A heist movie tends to revolve around the idea that if a bunch of highly-skilled people either get paid by someone rich or work for free, they'll be repaid with a share of things that don't belong to them. Which, y'know, is an idea that hasn't exactly had wonderful results in our society JUST SAYIN.

Escape films offer the same pleasures but don't assume the same privilege. An escape film is like a heist film but the only resources are patience and careful observation and trust and collaboration and the ability to turn what one has into what one wants.

What are the pleasures they share? Finding the weak points in systems of control - gaps in routines, and the sleepiness those routines induce in the people - guards, say - who have to carry them out. The pleasures of MacGuyverism and bricolage, of seeing the new uses objects and surfaces can be put to - the way the leg of a prison bed can become a screwdriver if you take it off and squish the end flat and so on. The pleasure of being part of a gang, a secret society, of planning together. The pleasures of spectacle and diversion; the associated pleasures of choreography and theatre, of dressing up, of impersonating part of a system of control so as to subvert that system and escape its clutches, to seize something it prevents us from having.

So I like those things. I have a basic anxiety about film though, which is that so much of it is cathartic in the old-fashioned sense of the term. Old-fashioned catharsis is when a drama gives you the feeling of having done something when you have not - it's a discharge of energy. That's great when the energy being discharged is murderous or jealous or otherwise nasty, as in the old Greek tragedies. It's a problem when that energy is the energy required to challenge systems or escape systems of control. Like, watching a film I identify with the ones who resist, with the ones who plan, the ones who escape. I watch The Shawshank Redemption and I feel those feelings of planning and resisting and escaping. I watch Star Wars and I feel like I helped blow up the Death Star. Those feelings are, and that energy is, discharged. Do you, gentle reader, after watching these things, go on and resist and escape? Or do you, like me, feel happy and satisfied, like you've already participated in doing what needs doing? Yeah, that's what I thought.

With all that in mind, you can imagine what a good time I had last Wednesday.

I got up at 6 and put on a suit and went to an anonymous little bit of park near ANZ's international headquarters. There were about seventy other people there all dressed up in suits and frocks, laughing at each others' corporate disguises. Reader: we looked great. We planned the final details of how to drift in to the building in dribs and drabs, what the signals to converge would be, reminded everyone what would happen once we converged again, got the phone numbers to call in case of trouble. And we heard from Mikaele Maiava and Raedena Solomana, Pacific Islanders who'd come to Australia to confront the machine that threatened their homelands through sea level rise and drought. This was their day.

WAIT, DID YOU SAY ANZ BEFORE? I hear you ask, and I'm like YEAH, ANZ IS AUSTRALIA'S LARGEST LENDER TO COAL AND GAS PROJECTS, to the tune of $6.75 BILLION lo! these last few years. And you're like O RLY? and I'm like YES WHAT DO YOU THINK I KEEP BANGING ON ABOUT ALL THE TIME.

We split into groups of six or so, who'd look out for each other and converge together. We told each other why we were there that day. For most of us it was about justice. The idea that our rich country was helping dispossess the people of poorer countries because we weren't prepared to stand up to fossil fuel companies and the people who lend them money made us sick; the chance to create a space where people from those countries could speak to the power that was dispossessing them made us excited and we wanted to be a part of it.

We talked about whether we were prepared to get arrested or not. About three in my group were; I wasn't. That was all good: there was plenty of fun to be had by people who didn't want to get arrested.

Each small group had a key contact: we'd be watching them for the moment to mass together. That sorted, we left and sauntered in that morning light, under that pale blue sky, a sky gradually thickening with carbon. About a minute from the building we split into ones and twos and quit talking about climate change and started talking about television and renovations and such.

I walked in with Deborah Hart. We were like, "Let's get into some debt, baby!", and the machine that creates debt opened its doors and let us in. We'd made it hungry! I knew how it felt: I was hungry too. I bought a croissant from the staff cafe and put bits of it in my mouth. It was flaky and good.

People got coffees and sat around looking at their phones or reading the paper or having fake meetings. In time I saw my group's contact stand up and wander over to the centre of the lobby. Casually, but without wasting any time, a whole bunch of meetings around the lobby came to a natural end and people wandered over as well. There was a gradually thickening group of us, chatting and drinking coffees. I ambled in and stood there eating my croissant.

A minute later we sat down and got our signs out. Wouldn't you know it - we formed a stage. We were a thick circle, around a smaller circle of five people linked together with white PVC pipes they'd smuggled in in bags; they'd been locking themselves together while we'd stood around casually, providing cover. In the centre of that smaller circle were Mika and Aaron Packard. Their shirts were off and their chests were painted; Mika's paint made the point that ANZ IS FUNDING THE DESTRUCTION OF MY COUNTRY.

And then there we were. Mika did most of the talking after that, though the rest of us did a bit. His voice echoed through that vaulted space like it was a canyon. He thanked everyone. He apologised for the disruption, but made the point that it was tiny compared to the disruption caused to his homeland and culture by digging up and burning coal, and that ANZ was one of the more powerful forces in the country helping that happen. He invited the folks on the top floor to come and give him a hug.

Can I just say, gentle reader, what a joy and privilege it was to be that bit of political theatre? To turn the giant atrium of that headquarters into a machine for amplifying a voice? And to keep at the centre of our circle someone our current way of doing things would rather was on the periphery, always over the horizon and invisible so we can't see his homelands flood with the king tides, see the salting of their earth? To tear up that horizon for a few hours and unsettle the polite silence evil requires?

Because it was a joy. It changed me. I recommend it. X

Things I'm grateful for this morning: hands

Things I'm grateful for this morning: hands, feet, eyes, ears, a working nervous system. Not being paralysed. Not being bombed. No-one I love died while I was asleep. Water at the turn of a tap, a five second walk from here. This water won't make me sick. It has no shit in it, no fracking chemicals, nothing radioactive enough to worry about. I can't set it on fire. Connected to those taps are reservoirs with water in them; it's years since the last drought.

No gas or oil or coal underneath my home. No coal trains in breathing distance. No nuclear power anywhere nearby either.

A fridge full of food. A cupboard full of food. Discovering, thanks to Charlie Wood, a sweetener that doesn't give me hellish despairing mood swings, and which therefore grants me the ability to eat cake mm cake. I went twenty years pretty much without eating cake, so I appreciate it. Cake is fucking good. So is hot chocolate.

= excuse me a moment while I go and make a cup of hot chocolate =

A window from which I can see the sky. The sky itself, huger than thought, huger than the huge clouds in it. The sun poking through those clouds. Life. LIFE. Billions of years of ancestors successfully cheating death and fucking each other and giving birth to each other and then to me. Thanks guys!

Having lived in places full of mice or flies or ants or cockroaches, I am grateful that right now I do not. I'm also grateful that snakes don't come in unannounced.

Having been taught to read. Having been taught not to believe the first thing I think. Having been taught to write. Having been taught to play drums in a world where everyone's looking for a drummer, and therefore finding a path out of the weird loneliness of high school. High school. Primary school. Kindergarten, even though there was that weird girl who said her dad was a cop and he'd shoot me. There were pieces of fruit cut up bite-size and we got to have naps on the floor.

Having experienced loneliness, anxiety, despair, depression, confusion, directionlessness, heartbreak: suffering. It makes you less arrogant, and it's so easy to be arrogant. Suffering is the bridge that lets the world in over your weird walls. I'm grateful though not to have so much of it that I can't think.

My lovely daughters Mei and Alaska Drenth. My lovely partner Hanna Tai, who puts up with me. Friends and family, without whom I'd have, and be, nothing.

People who try. The gloomier the news gets, the more grateful I am to the people who try anyway. The labor movement. The women's movement. The peace movement. The environment movement. Thanks to the love and sacrifice of these good people I get to have a decent life and so do many of the people I love. Thanks to these people I can imagine something other than destruction and despoilation.

OK there is much more but this is long already. The rest can wait for other days. X

Lik

Electricity

1. I GOT UP and opened the door. The world outside seemed real, so I stepped into it. The resolution was amazing, the framerate too. I took a few steps - the ground held. 

2. THERE WAS ELECTRICITY inside the house, which pulled on me like gravity. Why leave the house, when all the stories in the world are available to you through the magic of electricity? I left anyway. Gravity is addictive but so is escape velocity.

3. THE SKY WAS radiant grey with a jagged white smirk, probably because from the looks of things it had pissed all over everything while I was asleep. Pretty childish really, but what can you say to the sky? Anyway, sky-piss cleans the dust off everything and if you drink it it cleanses you too. Some places it was traditional that the local visionary would eat something hallucinogenic and everyone else would drink their piss and partake of their visions, and the sky is the ultimate visionary, no? She sees everything. So it follows that drinking that stuff lets you in on what the sky sees.

4. I WALKED TO the creek and then ran up the path beside it. Everything was wet there too, everything drunk on sky-piss. The trees swayed gently side-to-side like Woodstock hippies. The grass lay on the ground in a wet stupor. We let each other be.

5. THERE WERE TALL electricity pylons running up the creek like me. They looked like wire-frame drawings of church spires, which made sense: this all happened in 2014 when electricity was some kind of religion. Because why leave the house? Why not stay home and commune with electricity &c &c.

6. THE CLOCK HAD fallen off one of these spires and turned into a football field. I could tell it was a clock because when I ran past it the other day there was a runner turning slow regular circles around it like a second-hand. The hours and minutes had turned into seven humans and seven dogs. The humans chatted and swayed affably like trees drunk on sky-piss. The dogs ran happily around like quantum weirdness. Today time had apparently stopped-

7.

8. -BECAUSE THE FIELD was just ecstatic grass, staring wetly up at the sky. Anyway it was fine with me if time stopped a bit, because this was 2014. In 2014 we'd invented this demon called climate change, and it was freaking me out. It was like a fist around the throat of my unborn daughter. I wanted to unclench that fist even a little but I had to talk other people into it too. This was a problem because I'd woken up in a death-cult: everyone had agreed secretly that we were going to kill ourselves and now no-one wanted to talk about it. They just kept smiling like amusement park clowns. It was creeping me out.

(I kept running.)

9. AND SINCE IT was all a trajectory, a certain movement through time, time stopping suited me just fine. It gave me a moment to think. I had this inkling there were gaps in how the death cult operated, a thermal exhaust port on the death star a skywalker could fly down, and that language had something to do with it. I thought if you could just find the right words they'd be like a bomb thrown down to the heart of the death star and the whole thing could be blown open.

10. THE HOLY SKY got cheeky and started pissing on me. I took it like a benediction, wet drops blatting on my red rainjacket. The trick was to cast a spell, that's what it was. There were demons all through us, they'd colonised us, turned us against ourselves. The trick was to shake the demons up but it was delicate. We had the guilt of an occupied people. If you said things wrong people thought you were attacking them, trying to make them feel bad, and they hardened against you and defended their right to die and the spell was wasted.

11. I TURNED FOR home, back where the electricity was, where I am now, typing. Electricity is good but it's good to remember your family name, and that's easier outside. Your family name is LIFE and so is mine. Our family is four billion years old. It made us. Thanks LIFE! You're the best. I am too small to find the spell but you are not. I am your sometimes-humble servant, drunk on the glowing world. Speak through me. X

'Noble Consumer' arguments are bad arguments

1.If you spend any time in online debates about climate change - and don't, it's all just spittle-flecked men in knee-high socks shouting at each other - you come across some dumb arguments. One of these is the Noble Consumer argument, a name I just made up but which is as good as any.

2. The crux of this argument is that you're not allowed to ask for changes to public policy around climate change unless you've attained some kind of purity as a private consumer first. For example, if you ever travel by plane, or ever drive a car, or use electricity generated from coal, you're not allowed to speak about - oh I don't know, just to make something up - a price on carbon, say, because you're a hypocrite. You should get those things in order first, then you're allowed to speak.

3. There's a few things going on in this argument. They're all wrong individually and together they're a kind of pie of wrongness: mmm, pie. Let's take them in turn.

4. First, it ignores the influence of political decisions upon markets. For a local example, here in Victoria citizens can veto a wind farm within two kilometers of their homes. As you can imagine, this skews the playing field against wind power somewhat, so there's less of it and it's more expensive. According to the Noble Consumer argument, you don't get to complain about this or try and change it until you're getting all your energy from renewables; if you can't afford to do that it's just a sign that you don't care enough. Bad you! You just ruined Christmas.

5. Second, it fails as a theory of change. In the above example, riddle me this: how many individual consumption decisions will it take to change that law about wind farms? The answer: those two things are profoundly disconnected, and it doesn't matter how many nice decisions you make as a private consumer. That law exists because of a political decision; getting it changed will require another political decision.

6. (That's not an argument against making changes to your personal consumption, by the way. It's just being clear about exactly what things your personal consumption can affect and what it can't.)

7. Third, and related, Noble Consumer arguments rely on a too-narrow idea of politics, which is the idea that we should understand our society only as a market and ourselves only as consumers making decisions in that market. We certainly are consumers, and we have power as consumers - witness the consumer boycott - but the idea that we're ONLY that strips from us all our other kinds of collective identity - as citizens, as members of communities and of ecosystems. That way of thinking of ourselves isolates us, turns us inwards and makes us feel individually bad for problems of collective action we could solve by doing the opposite of isolating ourselves. So let's fuck that idea off once and for all.

8. Fourth, making more-consistent personal consumption choices and paying attention to politics aren't mutually exclusive. The idea that you have to do one of them before you're allowed to do the other is full of shit. The idea that unless you're doing everything right, doing one thing is a waste of time: also full of shit.

9. Anyway! All of these things equal the Noble Consumer argument. Me I say it's just bullshit blame-shifting, designed to make you feel individually bad for your choices in a field skewed against you; it tries to take the political energy you'd use to level that field and change it into self-blame and guilt. It also blames you for not being able to afford what political decisions have made more expensive, which has the additional nasty side effect of making the poor feel worse than the rich, who can still afford the Nice Things or buy carbon offsets or some shit.

10. But when you're in a system where the choices you want to make are harder to make, or prohibitively expensive, because powerful players have stacked the deck against you, you don't have to blame yourself. You can, and should, try and level the playing field. And if you want to do this before, or instead of, fixing every little bodgy personal consumption decision you've ever made, you have my full support. Put your energy where you think it'll do the most good, and don't let the muppets bait you into feeling glum or beating yourself up any. Beat them up instead. (What? It's just a figure of speech.)

11. This has been a public service announcement. Have a nice day! X

Superhero movies, climate change and popcorn: a listicle in twelve parts.

1. Having the preoccupations I do, I end up having conversations with a wide range of people about where, in their heart of hearts, they see All This Going. It's instructive.

2. One thing I hear a lot is overwhelm, a desire not to engage with things on the scary scale of climate change and the forces driving it, to instead narrow the scope of one's concern to something manageable. I call it building a walled garden.

3. A walled garden can be physical: a little place somewhere you can retreat to, chuck some panels on the roof; or it can be psychic: drawing a line around a bit of the world and deciding, "this is all I'm gonna care about".

4. I empathise with the urge, because the world is big and problems like climate change are big and we feel small. I also think quite a lot of people in the world have the right to rely on it.

5. If you live in Kiribati, say, it's reasonable that you'd be preoccupied with finding somewhere to live that isn't covered with water. Kiribati has done jack to contribute to climate change, and is beginning to feel the early effects of it; folks in Kiribati got a right to look after their own. All they can do else from that is ask people like us to give a shit.

6. Or if you live in China, it kind of makes sense too. China mines and burns a lot of coal, but the average Chinese citizen has very few rights when it comes to changing that. China's not a democracy, and the state has a history of dealing harshly with protest. Also, even if China was a democracy, it'd be a democracy of a billion - mostly poor - people. So I understand someone in China keeping their head down and looking after their own.

7. Me I live somewhere quite different. I live in a democratic country which produces 5% of the world's coal but which has only .33% of the world's population: quite the ratio, no? Coal is one of the very largest contributors to climate change, and climate change looms as one of the very largest contributors to avoidable suffering imaginable.

8. The upshot of which is that if you're an Australian, you have more power to affect avoidable suffering than almost anyone on the planet. We're fucking superheroes compared to most people, when it comes to how much influence we could have on climate change. That doesn't make it easy, but let's have just the tiniest bit of fucking perspective here: it is easier for us than almost anyone. We have a fair amount of freedom when it comes to speech and association. Most of us are educated. Most of us have access to information and communication technology. Most of us have enough to eat. Most of us have places to live. Getting sick won't bankrupt us.

9. There's a multiplier effect in play from these things, from the simple numbers and our freedoms and how they intersect. Australia contributes hugely to climate change given its population; the flip side of that is that your efforts, as an Australian, are also multiplied. Which is to say you have power. You mightn't feel like it, just as the rich don't feel rich when they stand next to the very rich. But even though there are undeniably people with more power than us, we're pretty close to the top of the fucking heap here.

10. Me I think it'd be a terrible thing to piss that power away, given how much suffering that power can prevent. I think it'd be a grand thing to use even some of it on behalf of the people who have a whole lot less of it than we do. Because if not people like us, who the fuck is it likely to be?

11. This all reads to me like the bit of the superhero movie where the hero is avoiding Their Destiny, i.e. the frustrating bit at the start before it gets fun and the fight scenes start and there are cool explosions. Instead you listen to a lot of whiny speeches about "Aw, little old me?" slash "But I don't WANNA save the world!" slash "Not my problem, dude" slash "But I drive a car sometimes, who am I to speak to power?"

12. Me I say fuck that: let's don the capes and underpants and start flying around and kicking the villains around some. Sure our powers are not infinite - it'd be boring if they were, no? No dramatic tension - but let's use what we got. C'mon, it'll be fun! There'll also be popcorn, mm popcorn delicious buttery popcorn. So buttery. X

Twelve thoughts on the Climate Rapture and waiting for people to get it

1. If you spend time on the internet talking to people who are unlike you - and don't, they're all awful - eventually someone will tell you 'you just don't get it' regarding some contentious issue.

2. I have decided that this is code for 'You don't automatically agree with me and I can't be bothered explaining myself to someone who doesn't'.

3. I know the feeling, but it's kind of a pity when it happens. Some chance to learn something got cut short, because I wasn't enough like the person I was interacting with. But if I was too like them, neither of us would've learned anything much anyway, would we? We'd more likely have just cheered each other on in our prejudices.

4. This point is just a warning that point number 5 is going to be about climate change. This is your cue - if you want it - to go and do something else instead because fuck actually having a conversation about climate change amiright? Of course I'm right. See you next time!

5. Still here? Cool. Actually I lied, this one is about gun violence. Every so often there is horrible gun violence in the US. Each time it happens people like me think, "Surely this time people will get it! Surely they'll wake up, where 'wake up' is also code for 'agree with me without me needing to explain myself'?"

6. Reader: it never happens. Maybe it did once but even if it did the world doesn't work that way any more. What happens instead is that the event gets worked into the stories we tell ourselves about the world. People with different stories from me don't tend to suddenly drop those stories and adopt mine on the basis of a new event; instead the event gets incorporated into those stories and indeed there are whole industries devoted to that intellectual task.

7. For an example of how well all this works, every time there's a riot in a detention centre there are people on the right hoping that this time you'll 'get it', and realise we shouldn't be letting asylum seekers anywhere near our country. Do you? Probably not, if we're friends. Perhaps like me you see things like that as the outcome of locking people up in hot places and dehumanising them and waiting to see who will crack first.

8. And so well but I can't help but notice that the same kind of wishful thinking pervades the way some of us talk about climate change. i.e., some disaster will come along and then surely people will 'get it'. They will magically start agreeing with us. Maybe they'll even apologise for being such dicks about it lo! these many years. Maybe Andrew Bolt will drop his trousers in the public square and bend over and let us all smack his fleshy Dutch arse with the dead bodies of the hundred thousand fruitbats which fell from the sky a few months back.

9. The moment we're waiting for is kind of like the Rapture, for environmentalists - the moment everyone realises we were right about the giant invisible thing in the sky we could see and they couldn't and which will now punish them for their wickedness. Except we don't get to go to heaven when that happens, we just get the satisfaction of being right while everyone suffers. Perhaps they'll install us as rulers of the world's corpse at that point? Now there's something to look forward to.

10. This desire - that the facts will speak for themselves, will step out like Marshall McLuhan in the lobby scene in Annie Hall and vindicate us and everyone will realise we were right and they were wrong - is based on a mistake, which is the idea that facts ever speak for themselves. Facts don't have mouths: FACT. They can't type either: FACT.

11. "OKOKOK so what do we do smartarse?" say you and me I say "I'm glad you asked! I think people do get it sometimes, but almost never without someone doing something. The flaw in the plan is hoping it'll happen without you having to do anything about it. That's magical thinking. If you want people to be persuaded, you may have to help do the persuading. And if you are no good at it, but you think it needs to be done anyway and that magic won't do it, you may have to learn."

12. Oh and don't get me wrong: I'd still like the Rapture to happen. I mean, I'll look pretty silly for having kept this pile of dead fruitbats if it doesn't. X

The mound

The other night I dreamed I lived in a big old weatherboard house. I was in my room, trying to work out why it felt weird in there. I looked around and looked around and then decided it was because there was a giant grassy mound twice as tall as me filling most of it. The furniture was all pushed to the side on account of the mound. Once you noticed it you wondered how you'd missed it all this time.

I woke up and decided the mound was dispossession: a burial mound: a pile of bodies with grass grown over. I decided this was the pile of bodies that haunt everything when you live in Australia, the pile of bodies you forget about because we have a kind of unspoken agreement to talk endlessly about almost everything else except that pile of bodies. You walk around and you walk around and if you're like me you have little projects and you try to make your life better because fuck yeah life etc and then suddenly the pile haunts you and it all seems like a dream, unreal.

It's like a whole country built on sand, sand soaked in blood, blood we never talk about. Like in Poltergeist. They were all like "Why is TV so fucking weird all the time? Why every time I watch TV do I feel like my soul is getting sucked out?" and the answer was BECAUSE YOUR FUCKING HOUSE IS BUILT ON A PILE OF DEAD PEOPLE YOU DO NOT HONOUR.

And me I wonder if this is why Australians are so touchy about uninvited arrivals coming by boat. The whole notion of uninvited arrival points back at the pile of bodies, after all, at the shot, the poisoned, the hung, the willfully-infected, the displaced: the dispossessed. But thinking about that would undermine our belonging, and we have no other home. We'd have to learn some manners.

And so we have this agreement to think about other things. I call it a culture of misdirection, an endless procession of - and I do hope you'll pardon my French here - bullshit. It helps us not look at the past, and how our nation got rich through through colonising the land, dispossessing those who came before. And it helps us not think about the future, and how our nation is getting rich through colonising the atmosphere, dispossessing those who'll come after. We get to live in a present that shrinks even as the TVs in it grow larger, large enough to swallow us. The radiant ghosts on the giant screens call to us: "We're heeere.. we're heeere.." with their come-hither looks and their Gold Logies and their Voices You Can Trust.

And all the while the pile towers over us, not going anywhere. Like us it has no other home. X