First Look

My good friend, Robin aka Captain Bivouac, recently emailed me from Canada asking for the latest Covid lockdown news.  Robin is probably the most eccentric of my cast of fairly outre friends which, of course, makes him an absolute delight to be around . As I have frequently noted, the trouble with normal is it always gets worse and personally I try to my best to spend as little time as possible in the world of normal.

Robin appreciates a conspiracy as much as I do and has, in fact, visited the old Royal Hotel in Nelson, BC, where the Conspiracy Times originated.  Robin's son, Wolf, an eccentric character in his own right, even runs an online magazine with a mandate of promoting original thought.  

Hi Robin:

Here is the Australia report.

About a month ago we got back from a big sea kayaking trip off South Australia. It was like the old fact finding expeditions we used to mount in the West Kootenays, heading off into places unknown except instead of recording the condition of logging roads, trails and mountain routes and glaciers we were documenting launch sites, camp sites, currents, tides, islands and paddle routes.

It was magnificent; 500 kilometres in the Southern Ocean. Big seas, strong winds, biting salt spray, surf launches and landings, Sea Lions and dolphins, rolling swells, diving gulls and the unremitting South Australian sun. Apparently, we are only the fourth or fifth party to ever circumnavigate Thistle Island in a sea kayak which is mostly shocking because, although it is exposed to full force of the Southern Ocean, it is not - in the scheme of things - that hard. Mostly, it backs up my thesis that the population is getting more and more risk averse, even the youth don't seem to have the appetite for big adventures any more.

Which is the perfect segue into a Covid update as, despite the low risk of catching Covid in Australia and the low mortality rate, the dominant narrative reeks of panic. Plenty of material there for the contrarian thinker, just don't say any of it out loud as you will get twisted looks implying you're a nut-job and should be locked up for the good of society.

Prior to leaving we had to get "travel permits" to pass through Victoria - which we travelled through without stopping - and South Australia. Luckily, at the time we left, all of Australia was a "green zone" so our permits were issued automatically. As a conspiracy theorist and anarchist at heart, having the government know my movements was not particularly comfortable. However, we passed through all state borders without getting stopped despite having our documentation with us at all times.

Although we both have mobile telephones, neither of us have downloaded any of the "Covid Safe" apps, because really, if a mobile telephone kept you safe from Covid there would be very little Covid. In Australia, the federal government launched the first Covid Safe app which was rapidly labelled a $2 million failure after not assisting in the tracking of a single person exposed to Covid. That later rose to $9 million when it was revealed that a further $7 million had been spent on advertising. Clearly, throwing a few "Instafluencers" a few bucks to stand on a cliff top doing a yoga pose in a bikini would have been both more effective and cheaper.

This is pretty much the mantra of the LNP Crime Family in Federal Politics, launch some product at great expense to tremendous fan fare and then watch it fall over like a dead horse. Sadly, Scott Morrison, the politician with the most derogatory nicknames who ever led a parliament (Scuntomo, Clotmo, ScottytheFuckwit, Scoalmo, Smirko, to mention only a few), has not fallen yet and is still making announcements.

Anyway, in South Australia, the public, particularly a certain demographic known by the initials BB appeared, at least as far as we observed, to be very diligent about checking in to every store they entered with their mobile telephones held up to scan a QR code. Frankly, I don't know what a QR code is but that does not stop me about being suspicious about having my movements tracked by big government no matter the reason. Besides, I don't install apps on my mobile telephone. Strangely enough, I use it as a telephone, a quaint flashback to an earlier time when people talked to each other instead of staring at small screens.

As a conspiracy theorist and closet anarchist, I am increasingly disturbed by the intrusion of technology into our lives and the degree to which we are tracked, analysed and ultimately manipulated by marketing executives. Interestingly, the meme "the product is you" originated way back in 1973, long before the world wide web was even a theme in a sci-fi novel, when the video "Television delivers people" aired. The artists correctly, as all thinking people now realise, described how the TV viewer pays for the privilege of being sold. Now we are sold via mobile telephones, apps and social media. If I talk about this with anyone in my family they give me that crazy eyed squint and tell me how fantastically convenient it is that Google knows exactly what they want to buy before they have even thought of it themselves.

Nobody seems to mind being turned into consumptive automatons, but, the idea of catching a virus, however remote, conjures up great fear and trepidation. Personally, I am more afraid of the degree to which previously cognizant human beings are turning into lemmings than anything else.

At the start of the Covid era, my niece launched a business as an elopement photographer. Actually, the business started as a wedding planning service but with big weddings out, I guess "elopement" marketing made sense, and so she "pivoted" as the management gurus would say. Following, virtually, along on this journey has exposed me to a side of life I have never seen before, and frankly, hope to never see again. The relevance here is that she markets a concept called a "first look", which is, apparently, a "modern tradition" - although that seems like an oxymoron to any thinking person, but, as we have already established, there are very few of those left standing. Anyway, apparently selling people photographs of a "first look" at someone who they have been looking at every day for several years is really good business.

And that brings me to my final conclusion on the state of affairs in Australia. You can sell anyone anything if you give it a name, except, that is, for the Covid Safe app.