Cul de sac

Life's a road, as so many song-writers like to say. And yeah, we travel on and we eventually come to the end, and in between all that we take a pile of turns based on a mixture of feeling and experience. And sometimes circumstance leads us to a place where the road stops but we don't. Dead end or cul de sac? Depends on how you feel I suppose. I'm in a cul de sac. I'm stuck for a while. Certainly not a dead end. Just sitting here wondering what I can do or say, as Dylan wrote and sang. But I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything, not even myself. The cul de sac is semi-circular and comfortable. And I'm not sure what to do. Or say. I'm just sitting here thinking about someone I lost: my dear old Dad. Not a drastic end, in truth a very graceful one. Lived to 95 and slipped quietly away a few weeks ago. And all my loving sisters, nieces, nephews, cousins, aunts and uncles came to join with friends, 'to pay respect' is how it's put, but really to share some love around. And it was glorious, that love. But now they've gone back to their lives and I'm here in my cul de sac. “Do I look forward or do I look back?” might be the next rhyming line. What do I do? Cry, drink, walk, swim, eat, sing, cry again, swim and cry. Tell myself I'm not alone coz it happens to us all, and for some it's sudden and drastic and people are left in a sink hole of disbelief. But I am alone. And that's not so bad. I got my my guitar, my harmonica and my books, and they all fit pretty neatly into my cul de sac. I'm in his home, the one I looked after him in for the last three years after mum died. It's a lovely home and it's full of things that were his and hers. Right next to this desk, hanging on the wall, is his dagger – the one he was issued when he joined Z Special Unit, a secret group of naval commandos who went into enemy-occupied territory during the war. He was one of the luckier ones; being a good sailor, he mostly stayed on the boat (snake boats, they were called: done up to look like native fishing vessels). So he came back, got married, became a doctor, raised a family and had a terrific life. Sometimes he was down – deep as can be – be but mostly he was up. Not only was life his oyster, he had the full dozen with champagne, caviar and dancing girls thrown in! 

Lucky guy. But now he's gone, and I miss him. I miss him more than you can miss anything. If you stood right next to a barn door and fired a bazooka or an Uzi or a cannon at it, and you missed! Well that's how much I miss! Him! Death took him when it probably should have, and as we've been all telling each other, he got the end most dream of: slipped away quietly like the Z Man he was. Brief suffering. And yes death is inevitable, but inevitability, as tragedians show us, is no solace really, unless you're a Buddhist or someone who's really okay with impermanence. I'm not okay with it, it's fucked that things have to finish. My grandpa – Mum's Dad - felt the same. Just before he died he said he felt cheated, life was great and he didn't want to just give it up. Yeah, fuck oath old fella, I'm on your side! Not that I believe we should struggle against death in the old 'Do not go gentle' crap espoused by the Welsh drunk. It's just that it...oh I don't know, it's hard. WAS HERE, NOW GONE. Dirty rotten magic trick gets played on us by that rotten motherfucker called fate or circumstance. Funny old word that circumstance – literally means to stand around. “Those of you who are waiting for something to happen, please go into the room marked 'circumstance'. There are no chairs. Just stand around and something will happen. Those of you who can't wait, well there's no special room for you. You can do stuff: build, work, run, scream, fight, fuck, whatever, you'll still end up in the room marked circumstance.” But standing around is what I'm doing, lying round too, holding a pillow marked grief. (Old French – burden). Maybe that's the name of my cul de sac: Burden Street.

The houses in Burden Street are old, inside there are treasures and pain, there'll be love and romance and sweet things, but nothing will ever remain. No, nothing remains in any street, any reality. Only crap novels and stories with happy endings. Eventually the degradation leads to a full stop.

I'm back in his house again after a delightful 5 week holiday to Scotland – where his relatives originated – and where I wandered and drove and rode and sat on hilltops in the highlands, thinking about him. I cried and I breathed. I also swam in the coldest water ever, but what a marvel it was to plunge into the Atlantic, to gasp and yelp and suck air in like I did sixty one years ago. Like he did ninety five years ago, and no doubt like he did when he trained to be a naval commando. This house is full of his and mum's stuff: paintings, photos, coats, pens, medals, membership badges, his old doctor's bag (which I use for props!), and yes, the dagger on the wall. The dagger which he posed with – holding it between his teeth! - in an old photo on the River Snake, the naval vessel he served on, disguised as a junk, with nine other blokes. In the photo he has a full beard, like many of the young men we see today. He's handsome, small, happy and fit. Really fit, as are all the guys with him. They are beautiful muscle-bound men, all smiles, all ready for action. All gone now.

On the day he died, when Sylvie - his daily carer - invited me to wash and dress his body, I saw once again the tattoo on his arm. The one he got when he was a naval cadet, no doubt drunk at the time, and doing it to fit in. A black swan swimming amidst a few rushes. Stretched beyond recognition. “Wow! Your Dad's got a tatt” was often said by friends of mine and my sisters when we'd all go swimming. In those days only prisoners and bikies had tattoos, and Dad was never proud of it. But I thought it was cool.

Edinburgh is a deluge. Tonight it truly is, as the rain is pouring

Disaffected and Disenfranchised

With the rise of fascism – and that's exactly what Trump, Hanson, Brexit and Le Pen is – there's a couple of words that are really being trotted out: disaffected and disenfranchised. The second can be dismissed as an absurd exaggeration; no one is being told they can't vote. The only recent time this happened in a Western democracy was when thousands of African Americans in Florida were blocked – by deliberate road blocks – from getting to the polling booths, thus giving George W Bush another term.

But people still claim disenfranchisement, as if the term's meaning has some connection with being left out of decision-making because of colour and class, the inference being that lower middle class white people are more left out than other groups, including blacks, South Americans, Muslims and Asians. While we know this is simply untrue, it's also important to stick to the meaning of 'disenfranchise': (OED) 'To deprive of civil or electoral privileges'.

One of the greatest weapons of fascism and totalitarianism is language, in particular the twisting and morphing of meanings of words. Some of the great totalitarian regimes had this down to a T, to the point where names were invented that sounded the exact opposite of what they were: During the French reign of terror The Office Of Public Safety was a department that arranged the arrest and execution of suspects without trial. In the USSR the term mokre dela or wet affairs referred to the process of killing and torturing suspects. Idi Amin borrowed from the French with his Public Safety Unit, in truth a torture gang in Uganda in the mid-seventies.

This outrageous twisting of meaning is almost a kind of psycho-social magic in that we are deceived precisely at the point where we think we aren't. This is a common trick of magicians. When a magician says, “I don't know what your card is” that is most likely the time they will take a peek at your card as it sits on the top, bottom or marked point of the deck. We're fooled by this because we're not trained to deal with that much audacity.

When US Democratic politician Richard Blumenthal lied to the public in 2010 about serving in Vietnam and being captain of the Harvard swimming team (He was a Marine Home guard and wasn't even ON the Harvard swim team) he said, “Sorry, I misspoke”. Some people laughed and a few journalists wrote about it, but this didn't stop Blumenthal from being elected as a senator in 2011. How the public forgot about this, and how they seemingly accepted his use of such absurdly twisted language is of great concern, but understandable given my point about magicians. It's almost as if the public and the press get too tired to keep checking the veracity of things, and thus just allow it all to slip. In his book Thinking Fast and Slow, psychologist Daniel Kannerman calls this 'cognitive bias', based on his theory that we have a limited capacity to really analyse things deeply (what Kannerman calls 'slow thinking').

To think of the word 'disenfranchised' as anything other than to do with voting is an example of this cognitive bias. We're allowing speech writers to get away with the misappropriation of language because we have a limited ability to be intellectually vigilant. Somehow we've allowed 'disenfranchised' to mean uneducated, lowly paid, not treated kindly, ignored. While these things are negative attributes of Capitalism and class (and also things in dire need of attention in many Western nations) they have nothing to do with enfranchisement.

The other word – disaffected – is being used in an even more elastic fashion. The OED has 'disaffected' as: 1. Evilly affected; estranged in affection or allegiance, unfriendly, hostile; almost always spec. Unfriendly to the Government. 2. Disliked, regarded with aversion.

When pundits from the Right talk and write about Trump and Pauline Hanson voters, they refer to their disaffection as though it's entirely one way, ie happening to the disaffected. There is no sense of them having anything to do with it; they are passive receivers of disaffection. The second meaning above is much more appropriate to this. So, are we simply throwing away the first meaning, which to some is just as valid but far implies active responsibility on behalf of the disaffected. The same double meaning occurs with the word 'Affected'; a person who is affected is sometimes one who is acted upon by another force, but also, and more commonly used, is the active definition whereby the subject has chosen to be a certain way.

The Right wing commentators would have us believe that little choice is involved in Trump and Hanson voters process of disaffection. The implication here is that they've been ignored, left to fend for themselves, and 'regarded with aversion'. How much truth is in the assertion that lower middle class Americans and Australians have been treated thus while the other socio-ethnic groupings have been somehow given better treatment?

That is a question I leave up to anyone with better economic and socio-political credentials than I. I'm simply interested in the way we use and abuse language. Perhaps we could see the reintroduction of a very old (1664) meaning of the word 'disaffected': (OED) Affected with disease, disordered.