Despair at the invincibility of John Howard has got me rereading Michel Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island. Here is the book for anyone fed up with the wilful ignorance, if not outright stupidity, of the human race.

"What you must do … is have the rabble on your side. With the rabble on your side, no one can get at you." p.29

John Howard has the rabble on his side. Or at least they aren't on anyone else's side. Having him as a vague "leader" is enough to allow them to retreat into apathetic disengagement. A tautology? I think not. It's one thing to be disengaged from something, but to be apathetically so describes the greater Australian electorate.

Discussing the book Underground with a friend, we were nonplussed at the silence surrounding it among people whom we thought should be discussing it everywhere. The author, Andrew McGahan, is something of an Aussie Solzhenitsyn. Yet, no one is discussing his book. The reason, it would seem, is that even the Howard haters are disengaged. The little twat has disabled the entire nation.

We are all of us simply too content with our economic situation to want to know why we are so or what will happen when it goes. Contentment is the enemy of evolution. Which is fine with John Howard, for whom evolution represents the bogeyman at the back of his largely unused mind.

That John Howard's smallness is resonant with so many is perhaps why there is a nationwide shutdown regarding ethics or a sense of justice. Houellebecq talks of "an authentic horror at the unending calvary that is man's existence."

To any impartial observer it appears that the human individual cannot be happy, and is in no way conceived for happiness, and his only possible destiny is to spread unhappiness around him by making other people's existence as intolerable as his own…" p. 43

Houellebecq quotes Schopenhauer:

"No one can see above himself," writes Schopenhauer to make us understand the impossibility of an exchange of ideas between two individuals of too different an intellectual level. P. 58

This is a sad realisation we all come to at some point in life. Once realised, conversation is generally reduced to triviality. I am unable to comprehend the vast consciousness of a Tibetan Rinpoche I once encountered. Similarly, what I have experienced and learned in this miserable life makes John Howard and his henchmen appear to be men and women of astounding ignorance. We are all above some, below others.

Speech, which was basically designed for controversy and disagreement, [is] still scarred by its warlike origins. Speech destroys, separates… p. 60

And that is why most communication is reduced to sport and other trivia. Ideas can rarely be investigated between individuals whose minds have been nurtured on the one hand, or left to desiccate, on the other. Such attempts at communication inevitably frighten and enrage. And then there is the question of the ultimate isolation, the cut-off between us and everyone else.

To be continued …

-- Olney Garkle