Lockdown Missive #11
Wednesday 11 November 2020
Hello all,
After nine missives and 18,226 words, here we are at the end of all things. Well, the end of the lockdown as we know it here in Melbourne anyway. To our friends and family in the mother country, we’re thinking of you and hope that the mop-haired buffoon’s half-hearted ‘lockdown’ keeps the NHS from COVID inundation. Alas it looks like it won’t do much more than that.
After this missive, these things are going on an indefinite hiatus. This, I think, is a good result given that their whole raison d’être is no longer.
Get on the beers
Like every Victorian, I fervently wish this to be the last lockdown I experience in my lifetime. And not only because of the restrictions of freedoms but because of the amplification of anti-science, anti-reason and anti-human voices from the loony right (Business lobbies, Peta Cretin et al.) that has occurred in the media during this time. I’m not one of those people who blame ‘the media’ for everything but I feel they’ve done themselves a great disservice over the past few months, propagating the screeching voices of a wretched few above the vast, VAST majority who have been abiding by the rules.
There’s something very wrong with some ‘journalists’ today who seem to be under the misapprehension that having two opinions on a story means having two ‘equal’ sides that must be covered 50/50. This is how we’ve ended up with a narrative dominated by conspiracies where, say, paleo Pete Evans is as good a source for medical information as Professor Brett Sutton, or that Holocaust denial and anti-vaccination have the same weight as, you know, reality. The execrable voices of the Murdoch press, baying for “Dictator Dan’s” blood if he didn’t re-open the state, only to turn around and complain that “businesses only have 2 days to get ready to reopen!” when the Premier did finally announce the expected reopening of retail. The cognitive dissonance of some in the media is excruciating and if it’s a marker of where we’re going as a society, I’m not sure I want to be a part of it.
Things that are happening elsewhere
I started writing this missive last week, prior to the US presidential election. I began to write “…as we breathe a ginormous sigh of relief as a sane person is returned to the White House…” but stopped myself, not wanting jinx the whole thing. I consider myself a reasonably rational person but it’s hard to shake some little superstitions. Well, I was probably right to do that. It’s been an exhausting few days if, like me, you’re interested in the ongoing existence of democracy (and humanity) on the planet Earth.
When all is said and done, it looks like it will be a reasonably large Biden win in an impossibly divided nation, even though it certainly didn’t feel that way in the moment. Indeed it looks like Biden’s going on to win the same number of electoral votes as Trump did in 2016 with a much larger share of the popular vote—the largest number of votes in US electoral history. So much of this ‘uncertainty’ narrative is driven by the media and by the Toddler-in-Chief peddling his dangerous mistruths about the democratic process in his own country, to the detriment of both.
The electoral systems (plural because the presidential election isn’t one national election, it’s 50 different state elections with differing methods and processes in each) of the United States are far from perfect. They are prone to political interference from within and without but the public servants across the country and across parties who run these systems seem to be in it for the honest-to-god results. The only reason some loonies are crying ‘FRAUD!’ is because some votes were counted at one time and now some are being counted at others. And that’s before we consider the anti-majoritarian structure of the Electoral College (I won’t go into that here because it’s another 600 words at least but suffice it to say America talks a big game about ‘democracy’ but their mechanisms were established to curtail the will of the demos at every possible turn). That Trump continues to flout democratic norms should not surprise anyone—if he's going down, he's taking the nation with him.
I don’t know about you but this whole thing has made me feel very thankful for the existence of the Australian Electoral Commission, an independent statutory authority that ensures free, fair and consistent elections across the country. Every electoral issue that’s a major flashpoint in the United States (apportionments, redistributions, voter enrolment, absentee voting etc) is handled independently by the AEC in Australia. We just don’t think about it…and that’s such a good thing. Where Trump is encouraging armed supporters to menace public servants at the doors of vote counting facilities, we here in Australia scrutineer without an issue, poke fun at those from the opposite parties (perhaps even grab a beer if he or she is not a Sky News ‘FRAUD!’ loon) and go our separate ways, confident in the results and the system.
We don’t toot our own horn about these things but Australia’s done pretty bloody well with democratic elections since the 19th century—after all, the secret ballot is known as the ‘Australian ballot’ in the United States—and hopefully, this gives some of us pause to celebrate that. Of course, it could also give pause to the right-wing nutters on Sky News (Alan Jones et al) who are crying ‘FRAUD!’ for some reason about the US election to start doing the same here when things don’t go their way.
Things that are happening here
Jeez, it has been a while, hasn’t it? My highlight of the past couple of weeks has been following Dan Andrews’ advice and getting on the beers. The first week this was permitted Dan (Binns, not Andrews) and I did indeed get on the beers on a radiant Wednesday afternoon at his place. What a delight.
I also bought a Boeing 747-400 mug on eBay—that was pretty cool. It’s in its house colours from 1989 (picture adjacent, I know you’re excited about it). Aside from that, I haven’t much else to specifically report.
Speaking of planes, the final flight has left my beloved Berlin Tegel Airport with the new Berlin Brandenburg Airport becoming the city’s main international terminus. Why am I mentioning this? Aside from my love for Berlin, this is a milestone worth mentioning as this transition has occurred 8 years late and billions of Euros over budget.
When I wrote about the calamatous clusterfeck that is the construction of Berlin Brandenburg Airport in 2015, the still-empty airport was €4.6 BILLION over-budget with the latest news being that 600 walls would have to be reinforced or ripped out and rebuilt to meet fire resistance standards. If you really believe in ‘German efficiency’, it’s worth taking a moment to read about Berlin Airport’s history of price fixing, bribery, corruption and sheer incompetence on my interwebs blog or engineering.com or Deutsche Welle.
Many restrictions have been lifted but not much changes. We’ve gone on our walks with the kids, visited playgrounds and seen diggers. Fun stuff. This weekend, I even ventured into the city with the kids (on two non-contiguous trips; one in the morning, the other in the afternoon). We took the tram to Camberwell and walked up to the train. Finn was gasping at virtually everything—it was all new to him. The dozens of high-rise cranes in the city, the endless procession of trams down Swanston Street (‘ning ning!’) and the deep darkness of the City Loop. Such wow. Archer was somewhat less impressed but we still had fun.
Work continues from home and unlike the single, self-absorbed management consultant types with their 4.45 am yoga, lemon water, stretching, foam rolling and Five Tibetan Rites (yes, that is a verbatim quote from the above link), I can’t wait to have a commute and an office away from the constant hullabaloo of home. I’d like to think I’d be able to get back in the office for one day a week before the end of the year but we’ll have to wait and see.
So with that done, here are some photos and such. Quite a few, in fact. Like I said, it’s been a while.
Conclusion
Well, the end of another period of time. Hooray. Congratulations for doing that thing.