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Copyright © Carmel Bird
2004. All rights reserved. |
Australian federal election 2004
NOTE: This story will make more sense to Australians.
THE CHARISMAGIZ
You can order the Charismagiz ($US15 plus
postage) over the Internet. It plugs into the TV and reads the
level of charisma that any image of a person emits on the screen.
Just as back in 1993 I bought my first TV so I could watch Labor
lose the election, this year I got a Charismagiz to guide me
through the meaning of it all. I should explain that the thing
doesn’t work in real life, only on TV images, so that if Oswald
the Blue Octopus were to come shimmering into your living room the
Giz would pay no attention at all, but on Sunday mornings early
when Oswald is on the box, the reading is pretty high. Marcia
Hines is extra high, but she is a woman and black and so not
really relevant here. The highest score is ten.
During the recent federal election the top readings consistently
went to the Rat and to PETA the sheep. There is something scarey,
something sinister, about life-size sheep and rats whose masks
conceal an unknown human being. And apparently people respond to
the frisson of that by being drawn to the creature. An odd thing
about PETA and the Rat, I thought, was that PETA (who actually got
the higher reading) was more frightening than the rodent, whereas
you would expect it to be the reverse. Viewers didn’t
necessarily know what message PETA was trying to get across. (The
question of live sheep exports didn’t really get an airing in
the campaign, alongside war, and refugees, and indigenous issues
and anything not nicely connected to greed.) But PETA was
unsettling, and people are accustomed to fear, and drawn to images
of horror, to the extent that they will now flock to the Spooky
One who promises to give them even more than thirty pieces of
silver and lead them to the Crusades in a handbasket.
The really interesting thing about the Giz, I think, is the fact
that it registers what it calls Negisma which is what happens
below zero. And here the score goes down to minus thirteen,
appealing to the electorate’s primitive, superstitious nature.
This is terribly important to understand. Images that are
un-interesting just flat-line on zero, as if the Giz can’t waste
time and energy on that kind of thing. So there is in fact no
reading at all for the images of Kim Beazley or Simon Crean. But
some images light up the thing like crazy below the line. On his
old image Saddam Hussein gets very a powerful negative reading
below the line, but as soon as they stuck the cotton bud in his
mouth he just flat-lined on the zero. As you might expect the
Hitler image is a beauty down there in the Negisma. Face it,
people, human beings can be fatally drawn to the dark side, can
fall at the feet of the Prince of Lies.
When it became clear at 7.30 (8.30 in
Tasmania
) that Labor had lost the election, I turned off the TV and opened
Finnegans Wake. You know
how it is possible to open, for instance The
Bible or Nostradamus or The
Yellow Pages, and light upon some very telling verse? Well I
swear that when I opened Finnegans
Wake that night my gaze fell upon this:
“This is the glider that gladdened the girl
that list to the wind that lifted the leaves that folded the fruit
that hung on the tree that grew in the garden Gough gave.” No, I
am not sure how it is relevant, or even what it means, but when I
read it I stared and gasped, and I felt the condemned prisoner’s
sense of a future hope of reprieve. I am spiralling into a
metaphor soup here, but I can’t help developing the idea of the
garden for a bit. The image of Gough, as you might have guessed,
reads very high on the Giz - a tall, tall poppy, you might say.
Likewise Hawk and Keating. But then the garden seems to have
fallen into decay, choked by weeds, bedevilled by caterpillars.
Where are the fruit trees of Finnegans
Wake? For that matter where are the trees? Well may you say
Gough save the Old Growth Forests, but who will save Bob Brown?
(Bob has had high readings in the past, but he is getting close to
flat-lining – wake up Bob.)
Incidentally, the image of Peter Cundall gets a high rating. And I
haven’t yet received a Giz reading for the image of James Joyce,
but I imagine it would rack up quite a score.
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