Contemplating the current state of national politics has drawn me back to one of the masters of 20th-century literature, Kurt Vonnegut, who would quip he was “committing suicide by cigarette”.
The champion of absurdist humanism indulged his love of Pall Malls with the same melancholy fatalism he viewed his world’s manifest follies, shrugging it all off with the wry aphorism: “so it goes”.
The opposition appears to be taking Vonnegut’s credo literally. The Nationals are leaning into big tobacco’s last-ditch attempt to replenish its dying enterprise by vowing to block laws to stop a new generation taking up new generation cancer sticks.
Their message to our youth: forget about the inequity of a broken housing system and the deferred costs of climate inaction – the Labor government is taking away your right to suck on addictive candy-flavoured pieces of plastic.
This week’s Essential Report shows that while the argument has some resonance with younger voters, the majority have not fallen for the libertarian smokescreen.
Vonnegut’s wisdom extends to the Coalition’s broader operating model: ignore any thought of future consequence for the simpler pleasures of getting through the political day.
Rejecting a climate armistice that was struck after more than a decade of trench warfare, Dutton has reopened hostilities by announcing he would trash Australia’s commitment to net zero by 2030, effectively pulling us out of the Paris climate accord.
Breaking the consensus that industry yearns and the public deserves, Dutton is proposing to keep burning the dirty stuff for the foreseeable future with a vague commitment to start planning a yellowcake withdrawal in a decade or so.
Like smokers outside the hospital, it won’t end well. But the refusal to confront the long-term impacts of a dangerous vice, turbocharged by the funds of another industry desperate for one more payday, could deliver Dutton the short-term hit he so craves.
These findings reinforce the fact that when future targets for emissions reduction are the centre of the contest, support is split down the middle. It’s only when the choice is positive between building renewable capacity now or deferring action on nuclear until later, that there is a big shift towards action.
What seems like a massive political misstep by the opposition has a specific target: the actual target. When the future is reduced to an abstract number it’s so much harder to bring it to life and make it consequential. So it goes.
Vonnegut’s literary tour de force was Slaughterhouse Five (the Children’s Crusade). Rereading the book sheds some clarity on the other, more immediate horror that is unfolding from beyond his grave.
Vonnegut was a PoW held in the German city of Dresden as the second world war was coming to an end when the Allies unleashed a barrage upon the city, incinerating up to 135,000 souls. He emerged from the eponymous abattoir bunker to confront the carnage.
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Later, trying to explain why he was writing a book about Dresden to people who didn’t want to know, he recalls the following exchange: “I happened to tell a University of Chicago professor at a cocktail party about the raid as I had seen it and the book that I would write … and he told me about the concentration camps …
“All I could say was ‘I know, I know, I know.’”
Deep down we all know what is unfolding in Gaza is an affront to our humanity and that no amount of equivalence or outrage can cloud this simple truth.
Collectively we are being moved in our attitudes to the deaths and maiming of thousands of our fellow humans, with the shift since April representing a growing consensus that Israel’s military operation must end.
Vonnegut’s message is that we can’t fully bear witness to the trauma being perpetrated by another until we also see the trauma being imposed on them. Looking past the inexplicable dehumanises everyone.
To make sense of the horror of Dresden, Vonnegut bends history, running the bombing raid backwards so that flying machines can extract fire and metal from broken people and make them whole again, before these weapons of war are reduced to their raw components and returned to the earth.
Like most of Vonnegut’s work, Slaughterhouse Five lacks a simple conclusion and this column will too. But I would note that on all the things discussed here, people see the choices being offered by the major parties and find no discernible difference.
It is on the battleground of “no difference” that the upcoming federal election will be fought. The onus is on the Albanese government to show there are consequences in changing course. That there is substance beyond the ongoing pox infecting both houses.
Do we allow the next generation to poison themselves? Do we urgently move to cool a warming planet? Do we look away as children are slaughtered? Do we rouse ourselves out of our comfort zone or are we content with committing suicide by cigarette?
These are the choices we can only make together at the ballot box. They are the ones that define us as a nation and more, fundamentally, as a people. So it goes.
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