35 Years, If I'd Lived
So, today, as it should appear to be whenever you’re actually reading this, marks what would have been the culmination of three and a half decades of service to the Commissioner and, more by tradition than fact, the Commonwealth. In real life, however, it’s December 31st and it has taken me more than a month to sit down and write even this small paragraph.
Why?
It certainly isn’t the relentless grind of making fifteen excuses an hour for why people don’t have their money yet or explaining ad nauseam that just because we sent the money doesn’t mean your bank has to let you have it. Goodness knows, it isn’t that. Anyway, those two things are part of the ol’ durance vile.
The elephant in the room, which nobody can shut up about, is the COVID. We have now been at this prevention idea, with its ramifications for personal freedoms, or at least what were perceived to be personal freedoms, the gradual arrival of a combination nanny/police state as we have to identify ourselves everywhere we go, advise the government of when we do it, and can’t even flee the country even if we’re not citizens. That was all 2020’s thing. This year, now that vaccines are ‘available’, we’ve been handing executive powers to unelected officials, letting the State government call things pandemics without having to show any evidence for doing so, and realising just how dependent we are on tourism in Victoria. Hospitality is a fine way of generating GST for the Federal government, but if nobody’s working in it because everyone is under house arrest for fear of passing the disease on to an already highly-vaccinated population, there’re no wages or GST for the Feds to tax, and no payroll taxes for the State. When I was actually part of an inquisitorial system that could and did pry into people’s lives daily, I used to dread the approaching Orwellian state, but thought I wouldn’t live to see it. Now I’m not so sure, and my life expectancy is not what it once was, due to a bloodstream that’s 7% fairy floss and 3% alcohol most of the time.
It’s the rapid onset of the thing that’s scary. No anonymous purchases, house arrest on suspicion of having the virus, the use of the information gathered by the State government in administering Federal law (not to mention what commercial concerns might get it-remember how quickly the ‘No Call’ register details were sold to American Express?-and now the new ‘emergency‘ powers which allow the Premier to declare an emergency before it’s even arisen. The important thing is that people now know that what they thought were their freedoms actually aren’t, and in a plague, you can kiss any of your rights goodbye, provided you let the government know where you were when you did it.
People have often said that if we had a Bill of Rights, just like the Americans have, in our Constitution we could solve these problems, just like the Americans have. But that’s a Constitution their Supreme Court says can be waived at any time, such that your right to bear arms doesn’t include the right to carry them. Although, that appears to be changing.
But of course, a Fascist state wants to see human rights codified so that they can produce exceptions to them. When I was at the ol’ workplace I used to say that ‘it all goes out the window when there’s money involved’. That’s also true where there’s a virus involved.
Which is what the ‘rise of neo-Nazis’ is all about. The swastikas on the Shrine of Remembrance aren’t about the rise of neo-Nazis. Neither is this thing Richmond got all upset about. The conditions that allowed and promoted the rise of Nazism just aren’t around anymore. Fascism had such control in Italy in the 1940’s the Nazis had to invade the place to get a foothold. But here the State government, and the Federal for that matter, can create a similar Fascist state that would crush the neo-Nazis once it took them even slightly seriously. The Victorian Constitution guarantees our right of free association, but if there’s a virus on? Forget it. What the swastikas are about is warning us that we are perilously close to a Nazi state from the government we’ve elected. Don’t rely on the Federal government for help, either. Not once they realise the value of the jackboot economy.
But there are more interesting things going on than a medieval terror of a virus that is so far less effective at killing people than heart disease and breast cancer. On June 6th I got an email from the good people at Mystery Weekly saying that they loved my story, ‘The Purloined Pachyderm’ and would like to publish it in their anthology Die Laughing. They paid me $AUD58.47 for it. My first ever sale! (The money came via PayPal, so as soon as I got it, I found that I couldn’t sequester it away, and thus immediately blew it on pizzas, but I did declare it as income and then deducted the cost of the software I used to write it.)
The story itself came from an analysis of “The Purloined Letter” by Edgar Allan Poe. After analysing that for a week or more as part of my never-ending course at Fed Uni, I vented my spleen and wrote a humorous (well, they bought it, right?) story with every Romantic reference I could cram into it. The actual anthology is not yet available on the Kindle, and I didn’t get a contributor’s copy, but I will patiently await its Kindlisation and get it then so I can read the competition. I can now say I’m a writer and at least have something to back that up. The next stop is a novel, which my darling Kelvatari and I are currently working on, and for which she has an in with a legitimate publisher. In the meantime, subscribe to Mystery Weekly and tell ‘em I sent you, so they will buy my next story.
Ballarat continues to be increasingly expensive, but it has had a pernicious but good effect on my social life. I went down to Melbourne for the Beakmeister’s birthday, and I realised then that most of my social circle consists of people from Ballarat Writers, that excellent Victorian incorporated association that seeks to and succeeds in promoting the interests of writers in the Central Highlands. Ah, well, for less social occasions with friends I have Facebook, but the main point of contact now is Discord, on which I can be found most days bitching about something or expressing the ennui that happens when people get near to being within a decade of the ol’ Biblical threescore years and ten.
Indeed, for those of you who’ve been following along, the threescore years is coming up. I hope to hell that I can get to Orlando in time to celebrate it with the aforementioned Kelva, and her birthday, too, but that all relies on the viral panic that COVID has not so much caused as justified.
And what for 2022? Well, it’s the 100th anniversary of 1922, so that’s something. We have a Federal election somewhere between March and May, the possibility of yet another form of ID being brought out to keep those safe for the Gesundheitspolizei (Health Police) and the general public, and then a Victorian one in November if it can’t be shut down because of the Pi variant, or what4ver the fuck we’ll be up to by then.