The Last Page
Walzer, Michael
NOTES FROM Down Under, after a month in Melbourne: The kangaroo isn't as peculiar as the platypus or as funny-looking as the emu, but it is still a powerful argument against intelligent design....
...There isn't much mateyness in evidence...
...When people talk about "Australian values," mateyness is what they mostly mean...
...America, Iraq, and Palestine seem to account for the differences...
...Comrade" and "citizen" failed to establish themselves, but "mate" is widely used in Australia and enthusiastically defended...
...Mate" is the only term of address that has succeeded in standing alongside Mr...
...The chief means of public transportation in Melbourne is the tram, which also sets the pace of life in the city, moving slowly through streets that it shares with thousands of cars and several million pedestrians...
...A couple of months ago, a security guard at the Parliament House called a conservative MP "mate...
...The opposition Labor Party is as weak and divided as America's Democrats are, but the divisions are more sectarian...
...Of course, there is a counter-argument, according to which the kangaroo proves that the Designer isn't only omnipotent and omniscient, but also whimsical and witty...
...Reports of the MP's protest brought a great popular uproar...
...That's definitely matey...
...they are sociable creatures, bouncing along in what look like communities...
...I think that's a pretty good response, though I should note that the complaining MP is a member of the ruling Liberal Party (the local Tories), which is busily enacting a neoliberal program whose inegalitarian effects are also, definitely, not matey...
...The Liberals have won the last four federal elections and have been pretty successful in weakening the union movement and expanding the income gap...
...We were instructed by Australian friends that when traveling alone by taxi, we must always sit up front with the driver...
...The people of Melbourne love their trams and also, presumably, the lifestyle they represent and enforce...
...Still, the Liberals, in power for more than a decade now, are still running a national health system that would lead Republicans in the United States to call them radical leftists...
...Modern technocrats insist that this isn't an example of intelligent design, but all their efforts to tear up the tramlines and build subways have been defeated...
...The party's opposition to privatization is frighteningly ineffective...
...The new inequality is a neoliberal design...
...This is the customary behavior of a once-egalitarian society that is changing at a rate considerably slower than that of the United States, but in the same direction...
...though, strangely, a month's newspaper reading brought little enlightenment about what local issues divided the hard and soft left...
...and the new regulation was quickly rescinded...
...Mateyness evolved over a long period of time...
...112 DISSENT / Fall 2005...
...Newspaper reporters and columnists regularly talk about the party's right and left factions and report that the left faction is divided into the "soft left" and the "hard left...
...He is a mate, giving us a ride, for a fee, of course...
...The MP indignantly protested against the informality and, as it appeared to him, the irreverence...
...Primaries and caucuses are bitterly contested on factional lines...
...It is hard to hurry...
...Like other Australians, they are matey...
...Although a herd of kangaroos is called a "mob," they really aren't moblike...
...Whenever my wife or I consulted our maps of the city, people clustered around offering help, and when one tramdriver didn't recognize the cross street where we needed to be dropped, she pulled out her cell phone and called the people we were visiting to get directions...
...Hence the first response of Australians when radical Islamic preachers told their young listeners that Muslims must choose only Muslim friends: "That's not matey...
...Certainly, a trip on board a Melbourne tram is nothing like traveling on a New York subway or bus...
...but still, he isn't a chauffeur...
...and its feminine equivalents...
...The police issued a regulation requiring more formal address...
...there was much mockery of the compliant police officials on radio and television...
Vol. 52 • September 2005 • No. 4
