The Rollercoaster - Part Two

What a week for celebration it’s been. It started with all the pageantry and … more pageantry of the royal wedding and ended with the well deserved end of one of the modern era’s most despised figures.

Committed republican though I may be, it was easy to feel good about joining in with the celebration for William and Kate. Everyone loves a good wedding, even one on the other side of the world.

Less salubrious were the celebrations marking the death of Osama bin Laden. Images of crowds of people outside the Whitehouse waving flags and yelling patriotic chants left me feeling just a little cold. How can killing anyone, even someone as evil as bin Laden, bring us joy and celebration?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying his death wasn’t well deserved, and I’m certainly not sorry to see him go. But when I see crowds of people cheering for a person’s death, even the death of an enemy, I can’t help but feel that something is going horribly wrong.

I was recently party to an online discussion on whether the assassination of bin Laden is better classified as justice or revenge. Some were firmly of the opinion that killing bin Laden did bring a measure of justice to those who lost loved ones in the world trade centre attacks or in the numerous terrorist bombings that followed it. Others felt that it was nothing more than a revenge killing and won’t bring closure to anything, least of all the ongoing feelings of resentment against the West that fuel organisations like al Qaeda in the first place. Still others didn’t think it made the slightest difference. He’s dead either way, and got what he deserved.

In the end, I’m not sure what to call it, but I am convinced that justice and revenge are not the same thing. If those who have lost loved ones to terrorist attacks in the past decade can take any solace from the death of bin Laden, then that’s great. I sincerely wish them peace and comfort. But I’m not convinced justice is the right word for it. Surely we in the West, even our brothers and sisters in America who still endorse capital punishment, have developed a moral-ethical framework that can move beyond “You killed us, so we’re going to kill you right back”. And even if we haven’t, “an eye for an eye” doesn’t really cut it for a man who orchestrated the death of thousands, but whom we only get to kill once. And as Ghandi put it “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”.

The hard fact is that there is never a nice, satisfying way to end the hunt for a mass murderer. A sense of real justice in a post-modern world is as elusive as it has ever been. I’m as glad as everyone else that Osama is gone. But just the same, this is not the time for celebration. This is a time to reflect on the people, both good and bad on both sides, who have lost their lives for the sake of the war on terror. Or whatever the other side calls it. Osama bin Laden makes just one more.

But at least he’s one who had it coming.

Garry with 2 Rs

The Rollercoaster - Part One

As a writer, aspiring journalist and one who takes an interest in current affairs, I do my best to take in my share of news. I generally have a news website open at work (don’t tell my network admin. I don’t want to go back to that month or so where they decided blocking the news would increase productivity) and I occasionally read other opinion sites recreationally.

Unfortunately the dark side of consuming a lot of news is that for every well written, researched and properly considered piece that gets filed, you have to sift through an enormous amount of inconsequential or poorly written or unprofessionally produced garbage to get at it.

And then every so often, a weekend comes around that just sets the whole online media community on fire.

It started out with me being all scandalised and indignant about the ABC being forced to cut the Chaser’s commentary of the royal wedding on account of the Monarchy changing the conditions of the broadcast rights with under a week to go before the wedding to disallow the use of the footage for humour or satire.

I’m still pretty annoyed about that. Not so much for the Chaser, as for the fact that apparently England are allowed to tell Australian media what they can and can’t do with footage of a public event like the wedding. Sure, obviously no-one wants to go around ruining the big day for the couple. But honestly, if England thinks it can’t handle people poking fun of the monarchy, if it really thinks that people having a joke at it’s expense is something that warrants a global ban, then in my opinion there’s really only one word for that:

Coward.

Okay, there are others. I’m not going to print them here because K.Kim gets upset with me when I use mildly offensive language.

But then when Friday night Aussie time finally rolled around, I found I was compelled to turn the footage on. Prior to that, I had been planning to boycott, based largely on my antagonism for all things English and my distaste for the sort of frivolous and vacuous nonsense that goes along with the build up to this sort of thing. I was legitimately concerned about the possibility of damaging my TV by getting frustrated and throwing things at it.

Unfortunately there really wasn’t anything else to do, because every other person I knew was either working or watching the wedding. In despair I eventually caved in and switched on the ABC’s coverage, minus the Chaser.

I’m glad I did. I timed it to perfection, and managed to skip all the pre-service nonsense and fashion commentary and arrived just in time to hear the priest say “Dearly beloved”. The service itself was pretty good, and most of the music was really nice. Except of course “Jerusalem”, which by common law has to be sung at every English wedding, and must be sung in a different time signature by every person in attendance.

I really hate that ‘hymn’.

After all the festivity I was faced with brain splitting decision of whether to blog about it or not. I felt like I should add my voice to the other billion or so, but then, I also didn’t feel like I had anything really consequential to add to mountain of other inconsequential bits of royal gunk getting around. Of course that hasn’t inhibited me from writing a page and a half about it so far without any signs of slowing up, but that’s exactly the point. An event like this seems to generate idiotic ramblings like this one by its sheer weight of existence.

And that really pisses me off (Sorry Kim)

Garry with 2 Rs

P.S. You know what else pisses me off? Waiting just one day to post and then…