Since QE2 passed away I’ve been watching the telecasts of the news with a kind of dread. One black suit, black tie, black dress after another seated at a desk where the conventions of royalty are pored over with the same concentration and enthusiasm as a panel of football experts discussing the relative severity of a crash tackle. Will the player be sent off? If he isn’t and he scores a try has the referee inexcusably skewed the game’s outcome?
We love the minutiae of sport just as we love being the first person in the Twitter feed to expound on the origins of the name “Hansard” or to explain why the new House Speaker pretends to go resisting to the chair at the front of the room. QE2’s sudden demise has powered our love of rules into an obsession and we wonder at the Proclamation, gape like schoolchildren at the King gritting his teeth in frustration when a tray of pens gets in his way as he’s signing some arcane document – you mean you still don’t know? – and watch enraptured as the Queen’s coffin (we’re still talking about her as though she’s alive) makes its way through the Scottish countryside in a hearse.
I was listening to the news the other night and for a change the story had nothing to do with QE2, in fact it was about a safety mechanism they’re installing in cars in Europe to prevent drivers going over the speed limit. The discussion was taking place in the light of a crash that killed five young people southwest of Sydney. But how would this work? What would happen if a person modified their car so that this mechanism was disabled? Would police then have cause to stop and investigate every car they suspected was so modified? More rules, more distrust of police, less confidence in the ability of the State to responsibly regulate our lives.
It seems that we take every opportunity available to allow political operatives and their henchmen to apply new rules. We seem to love rules more than anything, just as we love to join the queue to watch the latest Netflix blockbuster, or listen to the most popular pop tune on the popera station in the car as we’re driving to a shopping centre to buy the most fashionable new black dress. We need to conform and we’re using politics to do it now in a way that Xi Jinping must certainly approve of.
Next we’ll nationalise Twitter and say that it’s because of flame wars that cause people to suicide never thinking for a moment that it’s instead because we’ve lost the ability to regulate out own expressions, we’ve given in one too many times to the instinct for the kill, for the apt phrase that’ll silence for once and for all that pesky opponent. Go in hard and go in often, it works in rugby league as in social media. Hit ‘em hard and listen to their cries of pain as they crawl off to recuperate alone.
R u ok?
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