Glad for you, glad I’m not you

This is my vomit face.

Politics makes my medulla oblongata hurt.  I never liked you in high school, I don’t know if I like you now.  But I am getting to know you.  And the more I know, the more I want to know, and the less I like you.

For now, this is about Penny Wong.  (I don’t know if I would ever write about politics again.  It depends on how much punishment I can take before I projectile vomit.)  The knee-jerk reaction to her agreeing with her party’s policy is one of outrage.  That’s normal, and even after my disgust subsides, I realise it is the right response.  This is me trying to explain how I get from A (rage) to Z and then all the way back to A (fauxrage).

In the game of politics, the players are there because the spectators can’t or don’t want to play the game.  We love them, we hate them, we hate them more often than we love them but we love to hate them.  We’re just glad that we’re not the ones playing, glad that we don’t have to be hated, glad that we don’t have to compromise our integrity to play.  It is the players’ job to play and part of that job is to be hated.  They understand this before they start playing the game and they prepare themselves for this.

I don’t honestly think that Penny Wong is against same-sex marriage.  In everything that I have read, I haven’t come across her personal opinions (please enlighten me if I have missed something).  Even in this latest statement she uses the words “party’s position” and “party’s policy”.  It is easy to assume that if you support your party, and if your party supports discrimination, you, too, are publicly and privately discriminatory.  But it is also easy to see that she is playing the game.  Even if you don’t understand political theory, you should understand that if you fuck with your caucus (I think they’re a group of players that get bitchy if you aren’t loyal), they’ll fuck you right back and kick you off the field.  The caucus thing doesn’t apply to Malcolm Turnbull apparently.  Don’t ask me why, I don’t know, it just doesn’t.

So Penny said what she said so that she could stay in the game.  But she also knew that if she said it, the hypocrisy would be palpable.  She prepared for it.  In the locker room, the coach slapped her across the face a few times with a glove full of needles after the pep talk and sent her out into the stadium so that all her adoring fans could throw rotten tomatoes into her callous-covered face.  That’s her job in this game; she knows it.

Players like Penny are necessary.  We need to be grateful for her.  But it doesn’t mean we have to proclaim our unconditional devotion for her.  On the contrary, we need to burn her at the stake like the bwitch (fake public bwitch, not real bwitch) she is playing even if we know she’s secretly trying to tear down the man from the inside.  The why is coming up, I promise.

Penny is playing a two-faced game on one side of the boundary lines.  As spectators, we too have our own two-faced game to play on the other side.  Despite the glacial pace of the players’ game and their fucked up rules, our role is to pretend to play (not as players) the unhappy campers.  Nothing will satisfy us.  We want more blood, more tears, more distress from our players because that is how we change the rules.  The players understand the need for external pressure, and so should we.  The players plead “we’re doing our best, we need to make everyone happy, it takes time” and the spectators retort “rah, rah, not good enough, more, better, faster, now!”

Penny is making the most of a bad situation.  But if spectators supported her and in turn supported her “party’s policy”, it would do nothing to change that bad situation.  She wants to foster change just like everyone else.  If she didn’t expect to be criticised, she would have kept her mouth shut, or instead, run as an independent.  If we all supported her stance to support her party’s policy, her unpopular stance would have been all for nothing.  The caucus would think they are right to discriminate and the balls that Penny had to craft from her unused ovaries to shield herself from the barrage of gay tomatoes would have been wasted.  Don’t let her unused ovaries go…unused.

Penny has to deal with her caucus.  It doesn’t mean we have to.  We are free, and should remain free, to be horrified at her because, like Bob Brown, we have nothing to lose.  If nobody hated the players because everyone understood the game (and didn’t want to play the part of fauxrager), there would be no spectators, just players.  Then everyone loses.

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~ by Al on July 27, 2010.