The Best Australian Essays 2014 (29 page)

Like many such afflicted people, Rodger's world-perception seemed to go wrong pretty early: he records that from the age of eight he was having great problems connecting with other children, attaching, simply being lost in activity. Whether that was actually the case when he was eight is less important than that he had come to believe it was. His record of friendships from that age is coloured by this lack of attachment – and then by the beginnings of narcissism, the overvaluation of self, to compensate for the perceived disdain. Rodger's narrative is a meticulous record of the way in which such a narcissistic shell forms: he becomes increasingly approving of his own appearance (he was blessed/cursed with being conventionally attractive), and then by stages masculinist, racist and snobbish. What developed early, it seems, was a haughtiness – a belief that people should come to him to be friends. When adolescence hit, that was extended to girls. By the time he had passed through five years of the daunting US high-school system, he had lost all capacity to connect or to make a way in the world. By the time he was eighteen, these failures had left him delusional about his own status. He was not recognised as great and a superior mate, so all women must be fools, animals; all men who were not Eurasian as he was were crude and ugly (he seemed to take pride in the received notion that Eurasian men have ‘elegant' features); two roommates, geeky types assigned to him by his college, show him friendship, but are ‘obviously' too low-class to connect with. And so on.

As a record it is loathsome, it is pathetic, but above all it is deeply, deeply sad, for it is a record of someone locked in a prison of self, of the eternal defence of a bounded self. In the culture we have now, it is an easy trap to fall into.

Sadder still, however, was the reaction to the killings, and to Rodger. Though he had said he would kill women for their slights against him, he killed more men than women. He was a classic ‘universalist' killer, not greatly different from the McDonald's mass killers of the 1980s and'90s, the school and cinema killers of the 2000s. Yet because of his writings, his act was quickly recuperated as a misogynist killing – a simplistic and self-serving interpretation. The act, evil, futile and despairing, was given a meaning it did not possess, in service to a set of social causes. Cause and effect were reversed. Being narcissistic-disordered, Rodger had gradually acquired various hatreds, which explained to him why he felt so rejected. But anyone reading ‘My Twisted World' ought to see that the original thought was not programmatic. There was just pain and then hate as a way of transmuting it.

You would not have known this to read the reaction to the event and to the writings. One of the things that was most shocking was the annihilating disdain directed at Rodger – or at his meme, the man himself was dead – as a way of dealing with his atrocious act. Because he had thematised his general killing spree as particular – said that he was killing women, when he in fact killed more men – he was dismissed as a ‘loser', ‘garbage' and much more, on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere. People tried to outdo each other in heaping abuse on his memory. There was also a counter-reaction – men on bodybuilding and ‘pick-up artist' sites lauding his dark existential act. Everyone seemed eager to construct a general killing as specific, for their own cultural-political ends.

This served several purposes. First off, it was atavistic, like the mediaeval practice of putting dead people on trial for their misdeeds and rehanging them. No five-minute hate session directed at this very disturbed human being was going to bring back the people he killed, so what of it? It was designed to deal with our anguish – especially the anguish of Americans at a process they cannot control, because violent, disturbed people can get handguns. There are any number of Elliot Rodgers walking around London, Sydney, etc., today, seething and bubbling with hate – but they do not live in a culture that is both violent and which offers easy access to the means of delivering violence.

But there was another purpose to it, far from consciously perceived, and that was the advancement of an ideology – that of a cultural-political elite focused on highly branded oppression. Rodger's sin was against the six people he killed, but the chaotic randomness of his acts makes less of a story than that it was a specific killing, for misogyny. The lesson drawn is that insistence on the ‘wiping out' of misogyny, and on a sort of heightened self-vigilance about one's negative thoughts, would serve to lessen the violence.

As Jeff Sparrow suggests in a perceptive
Counterpunch
piece, that is to mistake the specific for the general. One could add that it would also be counter-productive. The idea that dark, murderous and irrational impulses can be legislated out of existence, and that this is the lesson we should take from the event, is not only ludicrously misplaced, it also has a narrow class agenda. The people imposing such a specific cultural order, such a regime of good thoughts, are the essentially the people who run the higher levels of a post-industrial society, the controllers of discourse. Their particular ideology – which they regard as an eternal truth – is that all racist, sexist, etc. thought should be wiped out at the level of thought rather than at the level of public discourse and action.

The obvious effect of trying to achieve this is that such thought comes to be regarded as more authentic the more it is suppressed, giving it a gloss of liberation. The past thirty years or so have been shaped by this extended culture/class war, whereby fractions of the diminishing working and lower-middle classes have reacted to their loss of power through a sort of deliberately crude cultural resistance. You can see how this bubbled up in popular culture, especially in stand-up comedy, which acts as a social release valve. The more people insist on a no-tolerance policy towards ‘rape culture', the more stand-ups, male and female, gleefully fill their set with rape jokes. So it goes. In this class war, which often has a faux proletarianism about it, Elliot Rodger is treated as a scapegoat, to be loaded up with the sins of society and sent into the wilderness. The overall purpose is to deny that social processes produce such tormented, and very, very occasionally violent, individuals.

But the plain fact is that if you have a hyper-individualist society, you will produce people such as Elliot Rodger. His account of his life is illuminating because it is such a record of cultural emptiness. Rodger lived in a world of placeless suburbs, decommunalised schools and screens, screens, screens. It is our world, the one we have made, and one whose overwhelming characteristic is atomisation. The passage from childhood to tweendom to adolescence today is one in which, to a historically unprecedented degree, people must be ‘entrepreneurial subjects' – they must assemble their own social context, rather than being able to rely on given networks of family and neighbourhood/culture, something that people could rely on (and be stifled by) until the 1960s. Thus, for every three or four people who succeed at this, there will be one who fails – and as society becomes more disconnected, the ratio will become more brutal.

Jeff Sparrow gives a Marxist account of this, suggesting that the market form creates the alienation that feeds – in very rare cases – the murderousness of an Elliot Rodger. That is only half the story. At the root is a deeper cultural problem: the atomisation of a high-tech (a)social life, the disintegration of the self that cannot project. Trying to talk about this is difficult, because one effect of this atomisation has been a diminished capacity for people to think about individual selfhood as a social product. As common sense, everyone knows this to be true – any classroom of kids will produce a bell curve of nerds, geeks, drones, normals, outlaws and freaks, and they will essentially define each other into the roles – but for a couple of decades now we have been blasted with the liberal ideology that we are somehow self-choosing sovereign minds.

It is an utterly incoherent idea – who would choose to be as fucked-up as Elliot Rodger? – but it is powerful because it dovetails with notions of consumer choice. Thus the resulting problems of social subjectivity – increasing numbers of children who become dysfunctional and unhappy in adolescence – can be seen as at first a failure of will, and then a brain malfunction, and treated with drugs. In a final move, this connects with narrow thought-policing notions of anti-sexism, and anti-racism, and so on, by which a deeply disturbed person can be dismissed as human ‘garbage' on the same grounds – that he could not maintain a mental sovereignty which would allow him to exercise restraint over his most violent urges. It is another example of the way in which an ostensible progressivism serves as an ideological cover for a neoliberal triumphalism. Sheer self-interest suggests that such simplistic notions be knocked on the head.

Toxic narcissism is to our current social order what rickets was to nineteenth-century capitalism – pervasive, so common as to be half-hidden, a byproduct of the system itself. Your child is not going to gun people down – such symbolic, grotesque acts are vanishingly rare (and fifteen women in the US have been murdered in boring, unremarkable fashion by their partners since the Isla Vista massacre happened) – but he may be the one who falters, at the age of eight, eleven, thirteen. It is more likely that this will happen to him than it would have been thirty, fifty, 100 years ago. It is more important than ever that we think about subjectivity and selfhood as a complex social process rather than simply ape the winners-and-losers model pushed on us relentlessly by the culture we are being shaped by. And that we still extend, to even the most destructive among us, the notion of a shared humanity, and the possibility that things could have been otherwise.

Crikey/Daily Review

May Day: How the Left Was Lost

Christos Tsiolkas

It is May 2013, a week after Orthodox Easter, and for my final night in Athens my cousins have taken me out to dinner at a taverna in the working-class neighbourhood of Kipoupoli. It is a warm night in the Greek capital, the alcohol is flowing, and after finishing our meals we all take out our cigarettes and puff away under the English-language no-smoking sign.

I have spent a fortnight in Greece, and every day has been a reminder of the social death brought on by the financial crisis and austerity measures: banks of homeless people sleeping on the streets near the university, the sullen and resentful faces of the refugee prostitutes soliciting clients behind the markets in Omonia, police in riot gear congregating on street corners in the Plaka, teenage heroin-users sharing needles in the parks, a pensioner blowing his brains out at Syntagma Square because he could no longer keep up with his bills. But tonight I am drinking, and I am reminded of the hospitality and anarchic spirit of the Greeks. Tonight, just for a few hours, in food, drink and song, we can forget the cuts to wages and the pensions, the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Central Bank – that bloody Troika and its austerity. Tonight, I can feel proud of my Greek heritage.

I find myself in an intense and exhilarating conversation with a nineteen-year-old law student. Dimitri is intelligent and erudite. He offers a devastating critique of both neoliberalism and social democracy, arguing that the global financial crisis has extinguished the post–World War II consensus between capital and labour. For Dimitri, the ideologies of the past century have little relevance and they no longer offer any social or economic value. His contempt not only for Greece's parties of the centre-left and centre-right, PASOK and New Democracy respectively, but also for Syriza, the radical left coalition that he dismisses as social democracy cloaked in Marxist rhetoric, is matched by his distrust and abhorrence of the European Union. As I listen to him, I tell myself that even though youth unemployment is scraping sixty per cent, even though his generation is one that free-marketeers, social democrats and economists have collectively forsaken as ‘lost', this cohort will defy the bankers, bureaucrats and politicians. I interrupt his impassioned flow to ask a question.

‘What does the European Union mean to you? Do you feel European?'

He is taken aback. I have asked this question of cosmopolitan Germans, Brits, Dutch and Danes. Publishers, academics, human rights activists and artists, they have answered me with conviction, that yes, they are European and for them the EU is the future. But not for Dimitri.

‘Do you want to know what the EU means to me?' He points his cigarette towards the no-smoking sign over my shoulder. ‘The EU means anti-smoking laws and copyright laws. That's what the EU cares about. It doesn't give a fuck about the people hungry in my country. It doesn't care that my generation won't know what it means to work.'

I ask him another question. ‘So who did you vote for last year?'

There is no hesitation this time. ‘Me? I voted for the Golden Dawn.'

He voted for the Fascists.

*

*

My mother and my father, Greek immigrants to Australia, were Paul Keating's ‘true believers'. Their commitment to the Australian Labor Party was unshakeable. For years I used to boast that I went to my first demonstration when I was ten years old. It was outside Melbourne Town Hall, where the governor-general, John Kerr, was to attend a function not long after the dismissal of the Whitlam government. My father took me along with a bag of tomatoes to throw at the miserable royalist dog – his words. It was only recently that my mother informed me that this wasn't my ‘first' demonstration, that when I was still a toddler she had taken me to one of the anti–Vietnam War marches. Thinking those protests the preserve of students and the radical Left, I expressed my surprise at her involvement.

‘Don't be an idiot,' she responded curtly. ‘I had two young sons. Of course I marched against that stupid imperialist war.'

Unlike my generation, my parents had first-hand experience of war. First there was Germany's occupation of Greece during World War II, and then the wicked testing ground of the emerging Cold War that was the Greek Civil War in the late 1940s. Those two calamities destroyed the rural peasant class of Greece, the class to which my parents belonged. Their families were on opposite sides of the tragedy, my mother's Communist and my father's anti-Communist. But though the tragedy of the civil war arguably poisoned Greek politics for three generations, my parents both believed that in the ‘new world', whatever the cost of exile, those differences could be put aside and replaced by an affirmation of a political party, the ALP, that took seriously their status as immigrants and as workers. Both my parents were denied education – that was the privilege of the bourgeoisie in mid-twentieth-century Europe – so they did not speak in the language of social democracy. But their faith in the ALP centred on that party's commitment to public education, to public health, to industrial rights for workers and to its opposition to imperialist power.

The neoliberal economic reforms ushered in by the Hawke and Keating Labor governments were never explained to my parents and their peers. They extended a faith in both Bob Hawke and Keating, a faith in the ALP, that these reforms were necessary and would not undermine their conditions as workers. But these men and women, who supplied labour for the so-called ‘unskilled' textile, car parts and manufacturing industries of the post-war boom, distrusted the language of competition and globalisation that accompanied the reforms. In the late'90s, I interviewed my father and a few of his colleagues, long after they had retired, and all of them expressed a preference for collective bargaining, for a system of arbitration that negotiated between capital and labour as equal partners. It wasn't that they assumed
all
bosses would be mercenary and unjust but they knew that plenty
were.
My father could never understand the logic where the shareholder took priority over the worker; he saw the share market as analogous to the gambling table upon which he and his mates used to play poker or manila. People who moaned over losses on the stock market made him laugh. ‘It's gambling,' he would say. ‘You win some, you lose some.'

I emerged a relative winner in the era of globalisation. I had to confront the enervating reality of recession in the early 1990s, but by the end of that decade I was part of a cosmopolitan, educated professional class that assumed mobility and flexibility in work, education, living standards, technology and travel. I didn't say it to their faces, but I thought the old people's anxieties and concerns were merely nostalgic, and that they were too uneducated to understand how Keating had saved us from descending into a ‘banana republic'.

What I didn't understand then was how crucial that extension of faith from working-class constituencies had been in opening up our markets and ushering in the globalised era. This ‘faith' was extended to social-democratic parliamentary parties across the Western world. Towards the end of his life, my father lamented how the public education and health systems had been undermined, and he mistrusted the consensus among democratic parliamentary parties to privilege productivity over equity and the market over civic and community life. He believed that the faith he had placed in the ALP had been betrayed.

I too experienced a betrayal, years later, but for my peers and myself the betrayal was the result of the party's vacillations over asylum-seeker policy and its muted response to climate change, especially when contrasted to the urgency and passion of the Greens. It wasn't that I thought education, health and industrial rights were unimportant – far from it – but in some sense I took them for granted. Unlike my parents, I hadn't known a social order in which they hadn't existed. And as I took them for granted, they were no longer the focus of my political belief, my political commitment.

*

*

In 2007 I escorted my mother to the Greek consulate in Melbourne. Her sister was involved in a property dispute in Athens, and my mother needed to sign an affidavit of support, to be witnessed by a member of the consulate staff. We were eventually ushered into a small office where a young Greek man obsessively texted throughout my mother's appointment. He had a bulky gold watch strapped across one wrist; his shirt was neatly pressed and clearly expensive. He hardly said a word to my mother, and I had to stop myself leaning across the desk, grabbing the phone and throwing it against the wall. At one point, my mother, in an attempt to be friendly, asked him what part of Greece he was from. The question made him look up at her for the first time.

‘Why? What does it matter?'

My mother, humiliated, mumbled a response.

‘I'm Athenian,' he answered shortly, returning his gaze to the screen.

My mother started telling him of when she was a young woman in Athens in the early 1960s, of how hard it was to leave and migrate to Australia, how much she still missed the city. He interrupted her.

‘Look, that was a different time,' he said. ‘I really can't be bothered with all these old migrant stories. We're European now. The Greece you are referring to doesn't exist anymore.'

My mother and I were both so shocked at his rudeness that we were speechless. She was shaking as we left the consulate.

‘They really don't care about us, do they?' she said to me, meekly, and meekness had never been something I had associated with my mother.

A year later, when the global financial crisis had hit, and the news of the human cost of the turmoil in Greece began to filter through to Australia, my first thought was of this young man with his expensive shirt and his gold watch. I wondered if he still had his job. I wondered if he was still proud of being European.

The political tumult of contemporary Greece cannot be separated from the economic turmoil across Europe. But unlike those of Iceland, Ireland and to some extent even Italy, Portugal and Spain, the crisis that Greece now finds itself enduring is also existential. There is a language of retribution directed towards the nation, an accusation that the Greeks had it coming. Stories of wholesale tax avoidance, overly generous pensions and a moribund and bloated public sector have been integral to the reporting of the crisis and its effects. In Australia, it doesn't matter how much I attempt to steer conversations towards questions of Eu culpability in blindly bankrolling the Greek state, of how decades-long deregulation of financial markets precipitated the economic collapse, of how social cohesion in Greece is being destroyed by the Dublin Regulation of 2003 (a directive that forces asylum seekers to be returned to the country through which they first entered the Eu, which has meant that the countries of southern Europe have had to deal with a disproportionate number of asylum seekers and refugees). In the end, I am always challenged to defend the culpability of the Greek people themselves.

There is a peculiar dissonance between, on one hand, this understanding of the Greek character as lazy, entitled and culpable for the economic mess they now find themselves in and, on the other hand, Australia's recognition of the hardworking Greek migrants who helped build and transform our nation. Is it the challenge and experience of migration itself that defines the Greek Australian? A recurrent cliché of multiculturalism is that migrant communities, wrenched geographically, linguistically and temporally from their homes, maintain a nostalgic and an ahistorical conception of their cultures of origin. When I first returned home to Australia after visiting Greece as a young adult, I crowed mercilessly to my parents that the stories they had told me were no longer true, that the history that had formed them had now vanished. My cousins in Athens had laughed at me when I called older people
théa
and
théo,
auntie and uncle. They saw this as residue of an old peasant and rural past that was irrelevant to their highly urbanised late-twentieth-century nation. ‘You're stuck in the past, Mamá and Papá,' I insisted. ‘Greece has moved on.'

But just as the Greeks in Greece have changed over the last quarter of a century, so have the Greeks in Australia. The successive waves of immigrants and refugees who came to this country over the past fifty years didn't
bring
multiculturalism with them. Multiculturalism emerged as a consensus within the body politic of the nation, as it negotiated the changing demographics once the White Australia Policy, and the legacy of colonial nationhood, had begun to be dismantled. Multiculturalism has had an impact as much on migrants and refugees as it has on indigenous Australians and Anglo-Celtic Australians. Whatever the contest over what the concept means, whatever the petty or serious racisms still expressed in our country, it's a given now that we're a multi-ethnic society home to numerous religions.