Melbourne Cinémathèque: Paul Verhoeven's Starships Troopers [1997] and Robocop [1987]

I saw my first film on DCP in 2009, so it has only been ubiquitous a few years, but already 35mm feels evocative of an earlier analogue age. The imperfections on the print seem to smell like popcorn, though there was none in the cinema at ACMI for the Melbourne Cinémathèque screenings of Paul Verhoeven's films Starship Troopers and Robocop.

The films have similar intentions, depicting a militarised and propagandised society, with Starship Troopers being considerably more extreme and less subtle than its predecessor. 

Starship Troopers is set in a globally unified 2197 in which everyone has American accents and knows who the bad guys are: the bugs. Nationalistic propaganda is depicted with overstated irony and we seem to be in permanent war with the sub-human and sub-intelligent beasts, whose territory we may have arrogantly encroached upon. 

But no matter, because the battle against evil unifies us as a society and citizenship (as well as voting rights) is the exclusive privilege of those who have served in the military. Even as millions are slaughtered in futile battles, more are recruited in hope of serving the society that entirely encompasses and protects them. 

Despite all the political satire, the film is not to be taken too seriously. It wields Hollywood cliche, bad acting, elaborate special effects and video game-like violence to the purpose of pure movie fun and thrills, tensing up at the threat to our heroes as we laugh at how ridiculous it all is.  The film wants it both ways: to satirise American military chic and "freedom", as the ability to choose to die for your country (or planet), and to totally relish in the thrill of the Hollywood science fiction action war film, with its big budget, special effects, exciting music and editing and pretty actors, and it mostly succeeds.

Starship Troopers is a bit thin on the irony though, and Robocop is a more successful and satisfying film in every way.

Robocop is set in the nearer future, in which the Detroit Police department has been contracted to a private company with some pretty nefarious intentions.  Now that the Police have been privatised, the next step is to mechanise the cops themselves and so crime can be fought by programmed and emotionless machines without human error, but perhaps with the type of error that only machines, psychopathic corporations and fascism can offer.

Robocop can be interestingly compared to Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises (2012) with very interesting implications.  I have already written about how Nolan's film supports the fascist notion that the masses are dumb and helpless and must be saved from evil by psychopaths in uniforms and masks.  Nolan's Interstellar (2014) also presents the idea that the masses must be lied to in order to save them from what they're not capable of understanding.  And Nolan's films are presented without irony or humour.  We must trust in our great institutions and we must not question them because we are ignorant to the complex manner in which they will save us.  This seems to be the ideology of the 21st century Hollywood machine.  The '80s and '90s were different.  Rewatching the four Batman films released between 1989 and 1997 there is an astonishing lack of any ideological underpinnings in all except one of them, Batman Returns (1992).  This film chooses Catwoman and Penguin as the villians, but in both cases the real villian is not even the dim, charming and manipulable mayor, but Max Shreck (a vampire?), the corrupt corporate executive who is responsible for traumatising both Catwoman and Penguin into the dangerous freaks they become.  The film is ultimately feminist and anti-corporate and causes us to question the powerful institutions that do not necessarily have our best interests at heart.  Quite contrary to Nolan's suggestion that we have blind faith in them to save us from evil because we are inherently ignorant.

Verhoeven, in Robocop, plays with both of these elements, fascistic violence overcoming crime, and the vapid money-obsessed corruption of our corporate class, with considerable wit and fun.  The technocratic violence is effective against crime, but only when it is combined with a human element, as in the half-human/half-robot, but it is ultimately doomed to failure because of the compromises of the perverted intentions of the executives running the institution.  And although the masses are not necessarily depicted as stupid in Verhoeven's film, they are saturated with an incessant and compellingly stupid media pumping them full of inanity as coke-driven criminals and coke-driven executives unleash violent crime on their vulnerable city.

It all sounds rather serious and intense the way I am describing it, but it is actually constantly fun and funny, thrilling and stupid, offering you the dumb thrills you learned to love as a child and the clever irony you need as a thinking adult.

Both of Verhoeven's films draw you into the dumb violence of Hollywood and its fascist ideology of redemptive violence led by all-powerful institutions, but they also ridicule its grotesque consequences and the ludicrous propaganda supposed to convince us of its efficacy.

But if you're in the right mood, they're just fun too.

Freedom

I used to be free.

I guess that doesn't sound remarkable. We're all free, right?

Apart from being wage-slaves, debt-slaves, rent-slaves, apart from the violent and coercive state enforcing its arbitrary laws regardless of our consent, apart from generations of trauma making us terrified of each other, terrified of our own bodies and most terrified of all of being powerful and free.

So, what if that fear were to disappear, would we then be free, or more free? No. Not theoretically at all. Only in practice. It is utterly meaningless unless it is in practice.

What is freedom in our culture? A furniture store. A word abused by the Bush regime to justify imperialistic violence. Not slavery. A feeling of exhilaration and excitement. Ability to travel easily.

Janis Joplin said, “Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.”

And I was free. I had no home. I had no money. I was young and wandering around the stolen continent.

I didn't need money.  I slept outside.  I made friends easily, they invited me into their homes. I always brought food with me to share; dumpster-dived, shop-lifted; rich, healthy, expensive food in abundance for everyone.

You should've seen my body.  I was toned, slim, lithe and strong. I was brown all over from always being naked and my hair was bleached by the sun and swept back by the salty ocean breeze.

I was fiercely intelligent and my thoughts were uncluttered, clear and focussed, communicative. I was intensely present, I fell in love easily and felt everything profoundly and momentarily.

I had nothing but the pack on my back. I had everything I needed and I took what I needed with skill and confidence. I was not careless, I placed respect where respect was due.

As I said, I was free.

What happened? How did I become a clothed and respectable man, with a smart phone and a tram card, my feet sweating in shoes all day, supporting multi-national corporations?

Why am I living in the city, where freedom is at best naïve, at worst a cynical tool of political manipulation?

Why did I give up my values?

The life I was living previously maybe wasn't as free as the one I just described, but it was free enough. I was living on a farm in far-north Aotearoa, atop a hill overlooking the ocean, the harbour and the sandhills across the harbour. I had my own house right by the bush, living with an elderly couple, dogs, pigs, chickens and horses, as well as many wild birds, possums, hedgehogs, rabbits and rats. I didn't pay rent, but helped out around the property.  I could collect food from the ocean, tend the garden and gather from the local fruit trees. I could swim naked, I could invite friends to visit and I could come and go as I pleased. I could hitchhike everywhere easily and in this way meet the locals.  I could write in peace, but didn't, friends wouldn't visit often enough, and I would have love affairs with unwilling German teenage wwoofers. I had all the time in the world to entertain and educate myself with all the cinema, literature and pornography I wanted. I was pretty much free, though unbearably lonely and bored.

But wasn't this the life we were all dreaming of and talking about on the road when we were truly free? When we were wandering around, homeless and empty-handed, always together and always following the sun, weren't we talking about getting our own land; a garden, a supportive local community, clean, stable and predictable? Isn't that what we all wanted?

So, I had an opportunity, I pursued it and I lived that life. I invited others to join me. Some people would stay a week, some longer, but mostly people would say they were coming and never come.

Maybe I should have stayed out there on the road, on the beach, and of course I would be up in far-north Queensland right now, following the sun and my fellow sexy vagabonds. I would find some beauty and I would pursue that beauty. Someone who will let me fall in love with him, someone who will selflessly offer me the opportunity to give him all my love and all the gifts of my love and will accept them graciously.

Actually, that's what happened. Up in far-north Queensland I fell in love with a wildman, a Brazilian, a qualified psychologist interested in the I Ching and the Mayan Calendar. He was my equal, we were born on the same day, one year apart, with only the South Pacific Ocean between our baby bodies. We met at a tribal anarchist freedom gathering in the wilderness and were startled to discover each other, we travelled together for one month and though the separation was painful, our time together was complete and totally satisfying.

You should've seen me, naked and free, living my values instead of just talking about them like we all do now.

I followed my friends' invitation to live with them in a house near Nimbin for a few months. A friend came to visit and brought some other men with him. One of them was just 18 years old, I was 27, and I saw something in him that moved me deeply. I saw, within a scared, slumped and mousy exterior, a being of beauty and luminosity, a huge heart, a latent absorbent intelligence, a young body of infinite potential. And most of all, he had come. He had abandoned his life in Melbourne to come to Nimbin and whether he knew it or not he had come to my house and looked into my eyes and begged me to set him free.

And thus, my life had focus and I had the freedom of something to give. The world was making demands of me that I was precisely and joyously able to fulfil.

I am sick of apologising for my love. I am sick of cowards whose eyes beg me to liberate them with the revolutionary and chaotic impact of my love and who are then too scared to engage with me, who pull back in fear at the moment where they lose control or feel something real.

This one wasn't afraid of me, he wasn't afraid of life. He was nothing and nobody, a blank slate, he was open, he was engaged, he was ignorant, credulous and willing to learn. He was willing to be transformed, he was willing to be shaped. He was free in a way you don't have any concept of.

And I was in love with him. And I had something that he thought was valuable. And I was totally willing to give him everything.

We lived together in a remote valley with 100 people for a month where it was warm all day and night. Most people preferred to wear clothes most of the time, but he and I were perpetually naked, free to be human, to sleep outside curled up together, to make love beside the fire and to dance. We danced like my ancestors haven't danced in thousands of years.

I'm often overwhelmed with the beauty in this world, but nothing and no one compares in the living memory of my huge, hot, blood-pumping heart than the beauty of that man at that moment at that gathering, leaping around naked, in love with every little window of opportunity, his body channelling such incomprehensible beauty that I perceived rays of light emanating from every pore on the surface of his skin.

You should have seen us dance.

Why was he able to dance with such delicacy and elegance?

Because he was given the opportunity, the environment allowed it. Not only did we enter a space where nature accepted and welcomed us, but we accepted and welcomed each other. We created a temporary family of 100 lost souls and we expressed ourselves cos we felt safe to do so. We were free.

We had to leave this temporary paradise where a chaotic perfection is so easy and go back out into this world. I wanted to give him everything I had to facilitate the freedom I now knew he was capable of. I wanted to love him with every atom of my flesh. I wanted to lay my body down on his earth so his roots could consume all my minerals. I wanted to sacrifice myself on the altar of his beauty so the scent of my burning flesh would waft up and satisfy the Yahweh in his sky. I wanted to possess him, contain him, consume him so his essence would remain in my body for eternity.

I wanted to keep him for myself and share him with the world, but most of all I wanted him to be free.

I had finally found something... but he wasn't something, he was a person, he is a person.

“Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.”

Were we free together and therefore more free, or did I now have something I didn't want to lose?

I couldn't believe I deserved such a rare and precious jewel, but I knew what I wanted, and I invited him to travel with me.

He said yes.

And then somehow the world changed. Everything I had grown up with that I was supposed to care about, everything I had invested my passion into that failed to satisfy me, everything I had rejected and no longer cared about, all the freedom I had discovered with such grace and ease, that the world really had nothing for me, except the ambient beauty and joy of life itself, all that was gone because now I had found something real.

Many times I had walked out of the stupormarket with a bag full of groceries without paying. I didn't feel guilty. Ever. I rationalised that I am a terrestrial being and like all terrestrial beings I am free to take sustenance from my environment. I did not care at all for the morality that forbade it. I took these gifts out into the wilderness to share with my friends, my lovers and my tribe.

But when I invited this luminous being out into the wilderness with me, and when he came with the same ease that my stolen bag of groceries came, I felt anxious.

I knew that he really is my equal, he is a person, he came willingly and my love for him is pure, as much of a gift as his graciousness and beauty. But also I felt something irrational. I knew I didn't possess him, I knew I hadn't stolen him from the museum, I knew he wasn't a precious diamond that was too valuable for me to get away with, but still I felt that anxiety. I've gone too far. Surely I'm too free. Surely this must be illegal. Surely the authorities are going to come and find us and take him away from me. Surely he will leave me. Surely I don't deserve him.

Freedom camping, hitchhiking, fare evasion and shoplifting are illegal, but it had never bothered me before, and I had never attracted Police attention for these activities before, but now I allowed the paranoia to overcome me, that I couldn't possibly get away with this. And the Police and quasi-police did harass us occasionally, to little effect of course, but still I allowed it to destroy me. I welcomed self-destruction. I demanded and facilitated the emotional breakdown I needed to leave me empty-handed again.

I am sick of apologising for my love. I'm sick of cowards whose eyes beg me to penetrate them with my love and then they're too scared to feel something real.

But he wasn't scared, was he. He let me love him. He accepted every invitation I offered him and then I freaked out cos neither of us had any boundaries and I didn't know how to stop.

How could I give up the only thing in the world worthy of my attention and go back to being lonely and free? Force him to reject me? A nervous breakdown?

I don't know. I have a powerful rational mind but I am fundamentally an irrational animal. I created my own debilitating paranoia that caused me to leave the country. He offered me the necessary lie that he would follow me across the Tasman at a later date but of course he never did.

And then I stepped out of the unreality of the airport into another land, disappointingly familiar, but as tangibly real as the one I'd left. Actually, I was still strong, actually I was still calm and resourceful and I guess I was still free.

Or was I more free now; now that I had nothing more to lose again?

I had homes in which I was welcome, I had a book to write and I had my hilltop paradise to return to. But was I free?

I gave up my hilltop paradise to come to Melbourne, to wear shoes, to engage with money, to write and perform my way into the hearts of the gentle and sophisticated.

Am I less free in this racist Police state, under the cult of Capitalism, surrounded by pollution? Or are we all secretly free in this mess cos we can gather in rooms together, choose how we want to communicate and how we want to interact?

My beautiful friend and lover and companion does not emanate light from his pores or dance like that anymore. He lives in the city and he goes to university. He wears underwear and shoes. He is studying filmmaking cos he wants to express himself like he did when he danced naked by the fire under the full moon with our tribe in the valley.

He chose all this? Is he scared of feeling all that freedom and strength again? Was it too much? Does he have to transform his passion into two-dimensional images now cos it's too much to contain in a body that's not free enough to dance like that?

What about me, transforming the best communication I can contrive into words, into paper, into little sounds I make with my mouth? Do these mouth-sounds make me free? Is this my technique for alienating and abstracting the intensity of experience into a contained and knowable form? Or is this a deeper freedom?

Have I carefully compromised a few superfluous values to be able to create something that communicates with as many people as possible with my utmost integrity? Or am I just going to start getting old now, and slowly withdraw from the world, the freedom, still just an arm's reach away?

I am a delicate flower, rich in colour and scent, and when the light of the sun shines on my body I will open my petals and shine back with everything I possess.

I guess I'm as free as any plant, to fling my seeds across the landscape, to attract birds and bees to my fruits and my flowers. I'm this bursting lunatic, somehow restrained in a human body as long as entropy will allow my heat to be contained in this delicate physical dimension.

I reach out to you in the darkness of incarnation.

I'm so far from free it used to be terrifying.

Come save me from my isolation for a moment and I'll do the same for you. I guess we can't expect much more than that from each other, but that's enough for now.

The uniformed vigilantes

Having sat through over 50 films in the New Zealand International Film Festival I have taken a walk a few metres down the road to the Imax cinema to see the The Dark Knight Rises.  There were 150 films screening over 2.5 weeks and the festival closed yesterday.  Having seen so many films with so much variety it must be asked, why do so many people want to see instead want to see the new Batman film?  It also must be asked, why did someone decide to bring a gun and shoot up one of the US screenings of the film?

There were 100s of screenings as a part of the film festival here in Auckland and at none of them was there any fatal violence.  I did happen to be present for a minor terrorist threat at one screening about a Russian journalist who had been murdered.  I was the usher and so when a well-dressed middle-aged heterosexual couple exited the theatre they talked to me.  "We're probably just being paranoid," they told me, "but it's not worth the risk."  It was shortly after the Batman shootings and the nature of the documentary was political and there was a man sitting in the front row with lots of bags.  "I don't know what he's doing," they reported, "but he's not watching the film."  Wearing my volunteer t-shirt and my official staff card around my neck I quietly approach the front of the auditorium and sit behind the old man in the front row.  He has something on his lap, what appears to be a pad and pen and he is asleep.  It seems the real threat has left the building and it was middle-class paranoia.

Why should the middle-class be paranoid when they have the authority, power and moral conviction of Western Civilisation behind them?  I have just watched 50 films of various styles, various subjects and various perspectives.  Some of them I agreed with more than others, others I opposed; some offered me exuberance, others solemn revelation.  These films were mostly produced independently of the major studios that produce the multiplex popcorn accompaniments.  They were produced by passionate filmmakers who had something to express to the world, whether it was the loss of the death of their lover or the potential loss of the last pristine ocean on the planet.  These films were produced, selected and screened to overcome the persistent illusion and apathy that is overcoming our culture.  Who do they serve?  Most of them make little or no money.  They are not being shown at the multiplexes because they do not serve the culture of consumption that keeps the multiplexes alive.  I hesitate to suggest that they serve truth because "truth" is a word that has been rendered meaningless by politicians and their media allies.  But truth persists amongst illusion and the truth we can receive with our perceptions and process with our brains is manifest in this world in myriad forms which may appear sometimes to contradict each other.  The film festival does not select one three hour film to hand over to the masses for its consumption; it offers 150 films from many different nations representing many different truths; uniting the truth is the passion of the human beings who decide to dedicate their lives to manifesting the images in their head on the screen.

Down the road, despite rapid and widespread news about one lunatic shooting up a screening, The Dark Knight Rises screens in multiple cinemas all day every day and the masses march in to see it.  What does Warner Brothers have to offer them?  Gotham City is New York City and its period of peace is about to come to an end.  The terrorists hit first Wall Street to steal all the fake money.  They hate rich people.  Eventually they occupy the city spouting rhetoric about how they are going to give the city back to the people and throw the rich onto the streets.  They disempower the police and take over the city with uncompromising violence, advanced technology and synchronised hierarchical organisation.  Their tactics are those of the military, their rhetoric is anarchist and their intention is to serve their deranged and ugly leader.  The masked vigilante is of course an outlaw, but he has two things in common with the police; one, he is good (as opposed to evil) and two, he wears a mask (aka uniform).  The masked vigilante and the uniformed police serve the same purpose, to save the precious city from the terrorists.  In Imax the city glistens like the jewels of the rich as it is filmed from helicopters on 70mm film.  We see these shots throughout the film and towards the end it is described as "beautiful".  The film never leaves the city, except for one brief moment when Batman emerges into some middle-eastern wilderness before suddenly appearing back in the city.  The unmasked anarchist terrorists block off the Manhattan island from the rest of the world and no one leave or arrive; they threaten to destroy everything with a nuclear bomb inadvertently built by the heroes.  It is basically inevitable that this bomb will explode and kill 12 million Gotham New Yorkers but of course it does not because the uniforms and masks are placed upon the human bodies of the heroes of this city and they restore the city to its rightful rulers, the police.  Eventually the bomb is taken from the city as it is about to explode and in its final seconds hovers above the ocean.  Batman, serving the city that he loves, sacrifices not only himself, as is made explicit, but the ocean, a blue nothingness possessing neither a face nor a mask and the mushrooms can be seen by the Gotham New Yorkers sprouting out of the ocean that they may not realise is the blood of the planet they live on.

Can Batman die?  When I was a child I watched reruns of Adam West as Batman on TV.  At the end of every episode Batman would be in some inescapable situation that he would promptly escape from at the beginning of the following episode.  When I was a child a series of four Batman films was released between 1989 and 1997 that told the story with much more sophistication and violence for a more sophisticated and cynical world.  In 2005 a new Batman rose with considerably more sophistication and certainly in these latest three films an increasing degree of violence which finally erupted from the screen and into the cinema.  Batman is a symbol the film keeps telling us, and we all know that symbols cannot die.  It doesn't matter how many police the baddies kill, there will always be more.  Even if Batman is blown up by a nuclear bomb he, having served his people, having sacrificed his fortune and his life for them, receives eternal life, in the only way our secular minds can understand, happily ever after; in other words, marriage, heterosexual monogamy and financial stability.

Why would someone choose to bring a gun in and shoot up such an inspirational story?  Is it because screen violence provokes real violence?  Or is it because the same mythical tendency that makes violent gods appealing in violent times is exactly the same tendency that makes "superheroes" appealing in violent times?  When the people began to realise that their religious institutions no longer served them, when they were under the impression that even God worked for the synagogue, a man stood up and moved the power of God away from the religious institutions that served only the maintenance of their own power and returned it to the earth and the people of the earth.  Eventually the teachings of the revolutionary anarchist were manipulated by another religious institution that merely strives to maintain their own power.  What can we do if even God works for the church?  When these comic-book superheroes emerged they suggested that power can emerge from outside of the power structures.  They had no faces, they were like gods.  They fought crime though they were not a part of the police force.  It is 2012 and everybody knows that all our institutions are now corrupt.  All we have are the independent filmmakers, the vigilantes, those who exist outside of the system that not only is corrupt but corrupts those who enter into its mechanisms.  What can we do if even Batman is on the side of the police?  Why would we fight for the revolution, though their propaganda makes more sense, because, as this film proves, they are much more than the institutions, much more violent, they are literally evil.

What can we do?  We can submit to this film; considerately, for us intelligent masses it is much more sophisticated and therefore convincing than any similar film that has preceded it, though it maintains the sound-effects of punching and shooting violence that has become a gentle purr, the soundtrack of our modern lives.  If we submit to the film we realise that even in the most extreme circumstances, against insurmountable odds, we will be saved, poor helpless masses that we are.  The baddies that oppose the status quo will be stopped by our heroes in uniform and the nuclear bomb that our best people produced will be dropped into the vast ocean that will forgive us all our mistakes, even our nuclear mistakes.  Those who wear masks and uniforms are not weak like us because they overcome their humanity with their uniforms.

If our world consists only of what we see in films like this, and this is undoubtedly one of the more sophisticated examples on offer today, if we do not have access to a great film festival or some other culturally rich and diverse source, what do we do if the thesis of the film fails to overcome the pain inside us?  What do we do if the certainty of wrongness swelling up inside us is no longer able to be ignored?  It used to be that the ultimate image of powerlessness we possessed as a society was self-immolation by dowsing oneself in petrol and burning alive.  This image is outdated.  Today our primary image of complete and utter powerlessness is a killing spree with a gun with the certainty that you will not make it out of the school or cinema alive.  How could we be so hopeless?

The Christmas Spirit

According to the soundtrack,
  "The weather outside is frightful
   but the fire is so delightful."

In Bondi Beach it is obviously summer, but you wouldn't know it's Christmas.  We have sun, we have sand, waves, surfing, swimming, running and walking the dog.  There is a group of four sitting on the rocks, three of whom wear Santa Claus hats, but they aren't giving away gifts, only bored stares.  In Bondi Junction it doesn't matter if it is summer because it's Christmas.  It is serious business and we see people shopping and we hear the soundtrack reminding us all why we are shopping.  I was with a friend who is not as law-abiding as I am, who does not respect the sanctity of Christmas as much as I do.  He walked into the supermarket and walked out without paying for his items, which we later found out amounted to the value of $AU17.90.  Of course he was tapped on the shoulder, of course no one ever gets away with this type of immoral behaviour and the young security man in his non-uniform shorts and tattoos took the three of us downstairs to the office in the basement with the outdated computers and the knowing stares from the lunching employees.

End the British occupation of Australia

Less than 300 years ago Australia was invaded and colonised by the British without regard to the people already living on the land. The British Crown obstinately instigated a government for a land which does not belong to them and through no other means but force and time is the government recognised today as the primary authority on this continent. There is a natural authority which is all-pervasive and undeniable, however not economically relevant. There is a human authority that is thousands of years old, developing with the planet's oldest living human culture. This is also not considered relevant because it does not strengthen the control and economic dominance of the regime.

In this enlightened age when we have massive institutions like the United Nations to make sure human rights are supported by other massive institutions with excessive amounts of power we recognise that it is not acceptable, not legal, to invade and settle any land, dispossessing, dislocating and destroying its people. However the Australian government is allowed to stay because it will be too difficult to hand the authority back to the people who possess it naturally. It has been 230 years and this institution is now an established and permanent part of this country. The previous authority barely lasted 100,000 years.

We are as arrogant as we have ever been and now is the time not to make public apologies but to withdraw the illegal occupation of this land and return the authority to the people who have walked this land for thousands of years, the people who respect and understand this land, the people who belong to this land. Whether our family has been here for five generations, hundreds of generations or we arrived yesterday, this is our world and we deserve to be here. However, we have no right, legally or morally, to then impose European law on a continent in the Pacific and use this arbitrary illogical law, which clearly does not work because it requires Police and prisons to implement it, to intimidate, control and disempower people.

Recently I worked in the cherry capital of Australia, Young, labouring in the major industry of the town, picking cherries. We were received with warmth and curiosity by the locals, contempt and suspicion by the police. We heard plenty of anecdotal evidence to back up our experience that every year when many people come into Young to pick cherries for $0.70/kilogram they are targeted and harassed by the police, who converge on the town from surrounding areas for the picking season. Our experience was of being threatened and fined by the police for committing the heinous crimes of swimming naked and not wearing a seatbelt. It is easy to recognise the deep sickness in any institution by simply observing their behaviour. The government-funded gang known as Police have targeted and intimidated economically-supportive international travellers in one particular case in Young, presumably because of the cultural diversity and sense of chaos we bring with us.

Aside from the obvious overwhelming importance of the economy, the government's responsibility is to maintain a static obedient European capitalist monoculture here in the Pacific. Any threat to this monoculture must be policied and Policed out of existence. We are not able to maintain, let alone explore and enjoy, some of the oldest and richest human cultures on this planet because it doesn't reinforce the quasi-European monoculture that we are trying to enforce and maintain at the expense of everything and anything.

We should count ourselves lucky that we live in an age of democracy and not anarchy, capitalism and not survival, regulation and not chaos. How can we possibly survive in this world if we are forced to depend upon the land, if we are forced into a culture that is fluid and dynamic? If we do not heavily regulate this land and enforce these regulations with threats of imprisonment, people will die everywhere. We will die.

What could possibly be more of a threat to our noble desperation for civilised mind-control and wage-slavery than a nomadic people who don't wear clothes or live in houses? What can we sell them if they don't recognise the concept of ownership and they eat insects and other non-processed non-packaged non-marketed foods?

God help all of us who subscribe to a democracy that must be enforced by Police.