not the motorcycle diaries

Speaking of Australian political apathy, I hadn’t realised until I had made this little Journey To Another World just how much I was affected by it. I stopped engaging substantially in ‘political work’ (I was involved in campaigns against things like the Youth Allowance and Third World debt, I worked as a research officer for a youth organisation, and then for a student organisation, and then again for the same youth organisation, not to mention a whole lot of other leftesque bleeding heart type things) at the great age of 23 - chiefly, I now believe, because I really needed a rest. I needed that rest because of how demoralising it is to do political work when the vast majority of the population you are working with is not just resistant, which at least would imply some kind of position on the matter, but completely and utterly uninterested (or perhaps disdainful, if pushed). This was the clincher - I could cope with the small and oft-threatened income, the overwork and the strenuous negotiation of the moral imperative (after all, like any good activist all of this just adds to my sense of heroic self-righteousness ;-)) - but to organise public forums that nobody comes to, to write letters to the editor that nobody reads and to have dinner guest conversations tactfully re-directed from detention centres to the footy score - well, there’s only so much of that any leftesque do-gooding sort can handle, at least when they’re young and earnest and idealistic as I was (and still am, to an extent ;-)).

To put it simply (and in so doing not wanting to deny any of the manifold problems associated with this reality), it is different in Brazilian culture. For better or worse, it is a politicised culture where political participation is a firm value. Take, for example, the recent Worker’s Party (Partito Trabalhisto, or PT) corruption scandal, which goes all the way to President Lula, the long-time working class hero. This has done little to weaken people’s faith in the PT’s actual vision. As was pointed out to me a few weeks ago, more members than ever turned out to vote for the PT President this month. Whilst the upper eschelons of the party have been exposed as weak (is this not the story of any large political organisation?), the grassroots members which made the PT such a political force (such as the participatory budgeting process initiated during their 12 years in local government in Porto Alegre, which still continues even though they are no longer the governing party) continue to bring this vision forward. It is no reason for apathy or hopelessness - just for returning to the roots of the vision.

This cultural thoughtfulness about politics and governance was pre-empted for me in a conversation in the kitchen at the seminario. I spent a lot of time hanging out in the kitchen because that’s the only place I could talk to other women, who worked in there of course (meaning that I felt all the while like The Idle Rich as I watched them cooking and cleaning, and they continually asked me if they could get me any more bread rolls and coffee). One of them asked me one day about the Australian government - is it a military dictatorship, or a democracy? (I was surprised by this, but of course this is a really normal question to ask if you’ve grown up in Latin America!). I paused. “It’s a democracy, but….”. I tried to think of a way to explain myself further in my limited Portuguese and ended up saying “Well, our Prime Minister and George Bush are good friends!”. She said, “Oh, a democracy“, doing the inverted-commas sign at the same time. I wondered how many Australians would be politically cluey enough to make that kind of analysis off the top of their heads.

It is in being amongst this sensibility that I have realised how much the apathy of Australians had gotten to me. I had unconsciously decided that there was no point in political work, because no-one gave a shit, and I might as well redirect my efforts to solely thinking and writing about it (and enjoying a few years of a decent stable income and a community that shared my values, like reading books and going to anti-war rallies). Being here has taught me that it does not have to be this way, that the Australian comfort-eating culture of political stupefication has been manufactured as much as the next culture, and that therefore it can shift.

I feel it in my bones, more and more - the crime of the love-in between capitalism and neo-liberal governments in the First World is the production of lymph-like apathy in the veins of its rich publics. This love-in produces a dictatorship of its own - it doesn’t imprison and kill bodies, but it makes its populations completely uncaring about the dictatorships that do. The logic is to keep ‘em comfortable, soporifically consuming their KFC in front of 98 cable TV channels, buy their compliance for the price of a few fictitious interest rate points. And the stunning beauty is that at the end of the day there is no-one to blame for this but themselves.

Can you tell I’ve been reading Eduardo Galeano? ;-)