So I wandered over to the Guardian Australian website again last night, for a distraction mainly. I’ve gone all year without watching a single episode of Q&A and the strain is showing. I would really like to see and hear the theologian Miroslav Volf articulate his well developed grasp of the Gayby film, and give a theological reflection thereon – surely this would invite some learned public discourse on Aristotelian, if not Thomistic, metaphysics – but even with that delicious prospect in mind, I just can’t do it. Since my self enforced Q&A ban, my health has improved and alcohol intake diminished, to the extent that a Pentecostal preacher could claim me as a healing miracle. But I’m wandering from the point, which is… the supra-normal, parallel world, the veritable twilight zone, that is the Guardian Australian website.
Not content to merely report the news and offer opinion on the perfidy of the nation’s government, the Guardian Australia are now swimming deep in the sewer that is Twitter – like Q&A in fact re. #Abbottlovesanal – and fishing in the dirty pond that is social media. A new app, and a dedicated webpage, invite readers commentary on a range of social and political issues. What joy to find this enticing topic prominent among them – “Tell us your experiences with Australian Border Force or immigration officials.” I clicked through in excited anticipation to that page, expecting to be regaled and reviled by tales of cavity searches on the steps of Flinders Street Station, by uploaded photos showing swastika wearing coppers, and by hastily taken video of burly border police sending in the dogs on bystanders too slow to produce their photo ID.
Instead, I found this… Nada. Donuts. Nothing. Not a single contribution. Was it too early in the day, at mid afternoon, for the angry students burning effigies on the streets over this just last Friday? Was there an especially long line at Centrelink? Or is this, in fact, just another left wing media beat up, with the Fairfax pres and the ABC once again giving a loudspeaker to, and acting like a publicity agent for, Socialist Alternative, the Greens, the Unions, and Fee Help and Austudy sustained students; who, once the tear up is over and the grab filmed for the news, really don’t care enough about the actual issue to invest the time and mental energy required to link together verbs and nouns into something resembling a sentence of text on the issue. I mean, it’s hard work and all, reading the Union talk sheets and working out where the apostrophe belongs on “Nazi’s” if it’s being used in the plural. Bugger it. Some mindless chant with a word rhyming with ‘truck’ is so much easier.
By all means go to the Guardian site if you can be bothered, and see if you can add your story to the hell that is the modern police state of Australia. No wonder some of our youth are attracted to the gentle regimes operating out of places like Raqqah.
Source: Tell us your experiences with Australian Border Force or immigration officials – GuardianWitness