We’re all like Golems condemned to life stuck in an Overton echo container with Hanrahan
Sep 24, 2024
Counting down the months til the next Federal Election, it’s hard not to feel totally depressed. Anthony Albanese and the gang have obviously been hard at work, pursuing change on a broad range of issues behind the scenes, trying to clean up the mess left by the LNP. But there’s no joy. No sizzle to the democracy sausage.
Not just because ordinary people are doing it tough, and many of us wish for more ambitious policies and programs. It’s the depressing spectre of facing more of the naysaying and negative hysteria that the Coalition and mainstream media see as the “meat and three veg” of contemporary Australia’s compulsory political diet. And the resulting gutlessness of the party of Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating in the face of this shallow fearmongering.
And the latest advent of the “Libertarians,” or antipodean MAGA equivalents, successfully taking a small foothold in local government elections, suggests the federal “No Voters” and campaigners will be out in force again, backing another nasty, narky political bitchfest.
Meanwhile, “the people of Australia” are trapped inside an echo chamber container, walled in by “the Overton Window”, a concept developed in the 90s by the American policy analyst Joseph Overton, who proposed that an idea’s political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within a certain range of acceptability (thanks to Wikipedia here): “According to Overton, the window frames the range of policies that a politician can recommend without appearing too extreme to gain or keep public office, given the climate of public opinion at that time.
“Another political commentator Joshua Trevino postulated that there are six degrees of acceptance of public ideas: Unthinkable; Radical; Acceptable; Sensible; Popular; and Policy. Overton’s window helps to identify the ideas that define the spectrum of acceptability of governmental policies. It says politicians can act only within the acceptable range.
“Shifting the Overton window involves proponents of policies outside the window persuading the public to expand the window. Proponents of current policies, or similar ones within the window, seek to convince people that policies outside it should be deemed unacceptable.
“The most common misconception is that lawmakers themselves are in the business of shifting the Overton window. That is absolutely false.
“Lawmakers are actually in the business of detecting where the window is, and then moving to be in accordance with it.”
So you’ve probably guessed where I’m going with this line of thought. Labor spends more time trying to predict where the window is located, and trying to fit into it, rather than trusting its policies and bringing the people and the window with them.
They’re also terrified of “the Hanrahan Effect”, a particularly Australian phenomenon, captured by the Coalition over the past few decades.
Whenever something is suggested as a possible new approach, the LNP’s Murdoch megaphones scream, “We’ll all be rooned!”
This pessimistic echoing refrain comes from the old bush poem “Said Hanrahan” written by the Australian bush poet John O’Brien (pen name of Roman Catholic priest Patrick Joseph Hartigan), first published in July 1919 in , then appearing in 1921 in the famous anthology Around the Boree Log and Other Verses. It’s a time honoured cry of those who always predict the worst. Now an LNP way of life.
The real question is, what is Labor so afraid of? Do they truly believe we’re still in a Groundhog Day of the 2019 Election? What kind of people do they really think Australian voters are?
It seems they might think most Australians are welded to lives in a permanently superficial culture. As the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano described it: “We live in a world where the funeral matters more than the dead, the wedding more than love, and the physical rather than the intellect. We live in the container culture, which despises the content.”
I hope to God that’s not true of the Australian populace. But I have to confess to being very nervous about “who we really are” anymore. I can’t get a strong sense of the Australian voter anymore. And that lack of identity leads into dangerous territory, as the plant medicine exponent Terence McKenna said some years ago:
“Not to know one’s true identity is to be a mad, disensouled thing – a golem. And indeed, this image, sickeningly Orwellian, applies to the mass of human beings now living in the high tech industrial democracies. Their authenticity lies in their ability to obey and follow mass style changes that are conveyed through the media. Immersed in junk food, trash media, and crypto-fascist politics, they are condemned to toxic lives of low awareness. Sedated by the pre-scripted daily television fix, they are a living dead, lost to all but the act of consuming.”
According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, “The Hebrew ancestor of the word golem means ‘shapeless mass,’ and the original mythical golems started as lumps of clay, that were formed into figures and brought to life by means of a charm or a combination of letters forming a sacred word. In the Middle Ages, golems were thought to be the perfect servants; their only fault was that they were sometimes too literal or mechanical in fulfilling their masters’ orders.
“In the 16th century, the golem was thought of as a protector of the Jews in times of persecution. But following its entrance into English, golem acquired a less friendly second sense, referring to a man-made monster that inspired many of the back-from-the-dead creations of classic horror fiction. These days, the word golem is frequently used in the gaming world for a variety of foes and beasties made of materials ranging from ice to iron to even, in one game, candy.”
It’s chilling to imagine ourselves as this gormless bunch of golems, filled with the stuff we’re fed by our media masters. But the repetition of campaigns like Law & Order, and Lower the Age of Criminal Intent all signify this kind of shallow outcome.
As Celeste Liddle wrote in the Guardian recently, about the Northern Territory Election result, and its implications for the likely repeat of the horror that happened to Dylan Voller in the Don Dale Detention Centre, it seems we’re stuck in a toxic cycle.
“Dylan Voller’s photo should have served as a stark warning when it first hit the public – one that meant no children should ever be subjected to this ever again,” Liddle wrote. “A warning that building communities and providing alternatives were desperately needed.
“Instead, it was doing the rounds to show people that nothing was learned by the disgraceful saga that was Don Dale, and the NT is falling over itself to repeat these abuses. In reality, the only ones who won the election were the fearmongers, the outrage press and the regressives. What a shameful state of affairs.”
Is this who we are? Gormless Golems listening to nothing but “we’ll be rooned!” catch cries from the LNP Murdoch machine?
I hope to God Labor can find its way out of the Overton Echo Container into fresh open ground for a hopeful second term of true reform.
Robbie Lloyd
Dr Robbie Lloyd is a Social Justice Facilitator with the Justice and Peace Office of the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney. He has specialised in working in the fields of community mental health, alcohol and other drugs support, disability and ageing support, as well as being an educator passionate about Lifelong Learning. He has worked with First Peoples across Asia Pacific and Australia for over 30 years.
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