the longest time

It's been a year tonight since the old man died. It's gone so fast, I kind of still expect him to loom around the corner or something. Even though he was hardly here, both physically and spiritually, for the last 6 months of his life. Anyway, it's one of those reflective times that you get - will need to make a couple of calls this weekend to check on some of his circle.

Crikey today has a response by Guy Rundle to an article about "when did the Right lose it." In the piece, Rundle talks about a shift:

What happened? You could talk about all sorts of
surface effects, but deep down the right lost its connection with a whole middle
section of people because it lost its connection with the capacity to reason,
and the idea that you step back dispassionately from the world and analyse what
the consequences of your actions might be. In effect you reverse the
relationship between reality and thought, and come to believe that the latter
can change the former if you simply believe in it enough.

The "Right" doesn't have a mortgage on this type of process. Maliciously wounded by the language and intent of managerialism and corporate-speak, in which the medium is indeed the message but the message becomes increasingly minimal and irrelevant, political discourse has zoomed (drifted? phantamagorised?) into the ether, wherein words exist in defiance of reality. Mrs VVB went on - at length - about this last night as Mal Brough, very amateurishly, tried to respond to a revitalised, re-backboned Red Kez O'Brien. For fear of causing discomfort to gentler readers I won't go into exactly what she said, just let's say it's the language I get excoriated for when a certain alleged small PM appears on the TV.

It's got to the stage when any public figure, politician, business person or whatever, can say anything and it doesn't have to be bear any resemblance to reality. Let's not get into discussion about the meaning of the word "truth." All that matters is that pronouncements have been made.

Speaking of said small PM, some friends of mine today had the opportunity to participate in an MVA with him as the item coming off second-best. I can only assume they swerved because they want to see him flogged in the polls. Because if otherwise, I am dreadfully disappointed.

Well, back on a familiar theme and the old man wouldn't have had it any other way. He got radicalised in the sixties when he was in his fifties - going to uni and hanging about in Canberra hostels gave him the theoretical basis for what he had long believed and experienced - the rich get richer and I'm all right Jack. And who he could point the finger at for fostering such a society. "The last of the red hot socialists" I used to call him - even my economics was too dry for him - and if he were able, he'd still be railing today.