Australians have indulged Pauline Hanson’s public career for 30 years. She’s rusted into our political establishment. Yet in all that time she has only manifested a relentlessly sour, ignorant, resentful, narrow, and miserably bigoted point of view. What in heavens does that say of us as a nation?
The Age of Trump demonstrates the value of an education in the humanities every day. It poses hourly questions of ethics and epistemology, repeatedly shows the relevance of history, demonstrates distortions of language. Even the Reflecting Pool has become a gaping metaphor in paint and algae.
A new policy I’ll be adopting in my course in the coming months: if the student uses AI to produce their assignment, I will not provide any personalised feedback.
This should become an axiom in political science: a government is beyond all hope of survival when it begins arresting its citizens for publicly witnessing a metaphor of its own corruption.
It’s a swamp. A stagnant pool of water filled with algae. Trump didn’t “drain the swamp.” He made one, right in from of everyone’s eyes.
Each year Griffith University campus becomes an arena for a struggle between males of two different species moved by bloody minded wilfulness as the hapless ground staff do battle with the male Brushturkeys assembling their incubating nests. The current score is 1 - nil to the Brushturkeys!
If algae in the Reflecting Pool is a metaphor, the removal of his name from the Kennedy Centre is an allegory.
I firmly believe that what activates ordinary people politically is not ideology, justice, corruption, hate, or even patriotism. It’s aesthetics. That is why culture wars work. It’s also why Trump is losing.
It’s is seriously beyond irony that as elected centrist governments face ever more stridently racist and fascist insurgencies, they are presiding over the wholesale destruction of universities, and making a university education prohibitive for those who most need it: their own citizens.