Bumping Geese 3: Monster Blood

 I had a dream I met R. L. Stine. He had heard about my endeavour to read all the Goosebumps books, to review and to analyse them, to catch up on a part of my childhood that never was. He was pleased by my decision and asked if he could help me. I told him he could give me a copy of all the books I still had to read, save me the cost of buying them all. He said he would, but they're out of print and he has no control over that. I thanked him, anyway, for his encouragement.

That's one of two Goosebumps related dreams I had this week.

At the start of the week, I began to receive questions about how far I was along with the next book, when this blog would be written.

So I guess this is just my life, now. It wouldn't bother me so much except, well... Friends...

'Monster Blood' sucked.

Nothing within the book resembles what is depicted here

'Welcome To Dead House' was a pleasant surprise. Flawed but engaging and creepier than I expected from a childrens' book. 'Stay Out of the Basement' was genuinely frightening and a marked improvement over the first book. 'Monster Blood' is what I was worried the series would be when I started reading it - uninspired childrens' adventure fiction masquerading as horror comedy but sorely lacking in both horror and comedy.

'Monster Blood'  is the story of Evan... Evan Ro.... Even Robbins? Roberts? Hold on.

Evan Ross. The Goosebumps wiki tells me his name was Evan Ross, which is handy, because apparently I've already begun the process of purging everything about this book from my memory.

Anyway. 'Monster Blood' is the story of Evan Ross, a young lad who goes to stay with his great aunt Kathryn while his parents look for a new home in Atlanta, where his father is being transferred for work. Kathryn is an eccentric crone and completely deaf. She also doesn't speak sign language or read lips, so she mostly just talks at people and to herself. And to her cat. She's a childless widower and Evan takes a quick dislike to her and her home. He is forced to sleep in a camping cot set up in her office, she has no TV, no toys, and Evan isn't interested in any of the books on her shelves. Worse still, her cat is a mean spirited animal that provokes Evan's pet dog Trigger, prompting Kathryn to force Trigger to stay outside for the duration of their stay. Topping it all off, Evan quickly gets the attention of the neighbourhood bullies, the Beymer twins.

The only respite for Evan is found in a friendship with Andy, a high-spirited girl from the neighbourhood. Andy shows Evan the town and takes him to a local toy shop, where Evan finds and purchases an old can of toy slime - basically silly putty - called Monster Blood. Evan and Andy have a good time messing around with the goop on the first day. While they're playing, Trigger steals a chunk and eats it, to Evan's chagrin, but the dog seems okay. The following day, though, Evan notices that the Monster Blood appears to be growing, and it tries to consume anything that touches it, including people. Trigger also begins growing at an alarming rate, eventually becoming the size of a pony.

Evan tries to conceal the sinister growing goop from his aunt by storing it in a series of increasingly large containers, even gives a chunk to Andy to take home. But Andy faces the same problem with her share of the Monster Blood. Eventually Evan tries to ask his aunt for help, writing a plea for assistance on some note paper, but Kathryn thinks it's a joke. Evan and Andy try taking the Monster Blood back to the toy store, and to the shifty shop-keeper who seemed reluctant to sell it in the first place, but the store has closed in the few days since they visited.

The novel climaxes when the Monster Blood, now as large as a large man, seems to come to life and begin terrorising Evan, Andy, Kathryn, and the Beymer Twins, consuming anything and everything it touches, trapping it in the depths of its slimy, oozy, bouncy core. And it sure is bouncy. The climactic scenes see the Monster Blood shape itself into a bouncing sphere so that it can chase down the protagonists.

And then, somehow, it gets even more ridiculous. Spoilers.

In the final moments, it is revealed that Aunt Kathryn put a spell on the Monster Blood when Evan and Andy brought it home. She bewitched it so that it would drive Evan away, or kill him in the process. Why? Because Kathryn herself is also bewitched. She is under the control of Sarabeth, her pet cat, who is actually an evil shape shifting witch who has been dominating Kathryn for decades, and wanted Evan gone because she feared Evan would find out.

It's all sort of unfortunate because Evan is as thick as a stack of bricks and would never have noticed if Sarabeth didn't send the Monster Blood after him. So that, and the pony sized Trigger, become Sarabeth's undoing, and the Monster Blood ultimately consumes her, undoing all her magic and ending her reign of terror over Kathryn. It is a twist that comes out of nowhere, feels completely out of place, makes no sense, and makes everybody involved seem like kind of a dunce. It also immediately creates a lot of questions and narrative inconsistencies that the book never bothers to answer.

I can't help but feel that whole summary reads as kind of dry and boring, but in my defence, that's what the book is. So far, the Goosebumps books I have read all have a similar narrative pace, and that pace is a slow burning fuse on a tonne of dynamite. The books start slow, drip feeding you spooky scenes, fake-outs, and foreshadowing, then it all comes to a sudden climactic peak of frantic and tense action and confrontation with the horror.

But 'Monster Blood' falls flat by being not scary or tense at all. In 'Welcome To Dead House' the first and second act are slow, and not much really happens, and there's a lot of quiet mystery about the house and the town, but that mystery presents as spooky ghost children and mysterious voices from the closet.

In 'Monster Blood' it's just dull scene after dull scene of Evan watching the Monster Blood grow bigger and nothing else happening.

But that's not even the biggest problem I have with 'Monster Blood'.

The biggest problem is that I had to spend 130 pages with Evan Ross, who may just be the most unlikeable protagonist in any book I have ever read. This little shit is ungrateful, judgmental, and condescending to everyone around him. He is utterly miserable from the first pages. While Andy is a delight - funny, caring, honest, personable, assertive - Evan seems to go out of his way to bring her down. Really, Andy deserves a better friend and Kathryn deserves a better nephew.

I hated every moment I had to spend with Evan. 0/10. Would not recommend. Would not inhabit his point of view again.

And yet...

And yet I do feel a touch of sympathy for Evan.

Evan may have opened the can of Monster Blood, may have wilfully bought it and played with it, but he didn't create it. He didn't set it upon the world to grow, consume, and destroy. Evan was a victim. But worse yet, for a long time, Evan was the only one who could see that the Monster Blood was an issue.

Kathryn doesn't believe him. Andy, for a long time, thinks it's maybe weird but no big deal - or at least not her problem. There's a scene in which Evan takes Trigger to the vet and the vet, seeing this over sized dog, declares it to be unusual but perfectly healthy. The vet runs some tests, but decides to wait and see if there's anything to actually worry about.

In a way, for a lot of the story, Evan is very much alone in conflict with this terrifying unnatural force of destruction set on infinitely growing and consuming everything it touches.

And here in the year of our lord, 2020, I suspect there's a lot of people who can relate to that.

And those people are Marxists.

Yes, it's that time.

When I first mentioned that I was considering reading all the Goosebumps books, I was asked for the Marxist take on Monster Blood. Why Monster Blood specifically? No clue. But here we are.

If you didn't pick up on the very subtle analogy I was crafting above, the Monster Blood bears some striking and frightening similarities this capitalist hellscape we've all come to understand as the world we live in. Its only goal is to grow and consume, and the only way it can do that is to destroy everything it touches, to treat nature, people, objects all alike as food. And it doesn't matter that Evan opened the can, that Kathryn set its growth in motion, that Sarabeth thought she was in control of it - all of them would ultimately suffer as the Monster Blood's victims. Likewise, it didn't matter that Andy and the Beymer twins really had nothing to do with it, that they were bystanders. Everybody. Everybody is in the Monster Blood's destructive path.

And Evan knew. And he tried to warn everyone. He was the first to suffer. He was the proletariat at the receiving end of exploitation, understood what was happening to him, saw what would happen to all, and tried to warn the world of the terrible future ahead.

In the year of our lord 2020, we can now see that the end game of the class struggle is the destruction of the planet. Capitalist exploitation and the pursuit of infinite growth will not only continue to cost the workers their lives, it will inevitably turn back on the capitalists and destroy them. All the wealth in the world won't save them. They can own every piece of property on Earth and none of it will mean a thing when the Earth is a dry, burnt, lifeless husk. In class war, there are no victors.

And maybe, just maybe, the only solution here is revolution. We Marxists must unite as... A giant bewitched dog... And we must crash tackle a shape-shifting capitalist witch into a blob monster... You know. The blob monster that is Capitalism and that's... Currently threatening our deaf great-aunt who... I guess is... Middle-management? Also, now she can lip read, even though we made a big deal of how she couldn't before?

And then after the revolution, Andy... Who I think is, like, a politically unengaged liberal... Wants to take a piece of the capitalism home as a souvenir but when she goes to pick it up, it has mysteriously vanished...

Okay, fine. Look, it's not a perfect metaphor. What do you want from me?

'Monster Blood' is a boring book with a miserable protagonist in which nothing happens for too long, and when it finally does happen, it's a farcical non-sequitur both narratively and tonally. Sure, I can make a Marxist analogue out of anything, but even Bob Ross would produce an occasional sub-par landscape if all you gave him was a palette of Cadmium Yellow Shit.

Whatever. I'm going to go read 'Say Cheese And Die.'

At least I never have to read a book about Monster Blood ever again...

Bumping Geese 2: Stay Out Of The Basement

When I was young, I happened to see the original 1960 Little Shop of Horrors. I'd seen the 1986 film adaptation of the stage musical, and I was a fan, so seeing the original film was an exciting novelty.

The 1960 film and the 1986 film have very different endings. Spoilers. In the 1986 film, Seymour electrocutes the plant and it dies and then Seymour and Audrey live happily ever after.

In the 1960 version, the plant just fucking eats him. And then the monster plant's flowers open for an expectant and excited crowd, and the flowers have the faces of all the people the plant has eaten.

Little Nope Of Horrors

That shit fucked me up. To this day just the thought of it gives me chills. Looking up that image on Google, it occurs to me that my mind has probably made the whole thing a lot more horrific and convincing than 1960 film effects actually allowed, but, you know, I'm happy not to go back and double check.

Anyway.

Goosebumps book #2, 'Stay Out Of The Basement' is some creepy shit about about monster plants.

Nothing good has ever happened in a basement

Oh, and this one is also weirdly damp. A lot more wetness going on. Anyway.

'Stay Out Of The Basement' concerns the Brewer family - mother, father, son Casey and daughter Margaret - and the strange goings-on in their basement. The Brewer family live in California, and the father, a doctor of botany, has just lost his job as a researcher at California Polytechnic. Rather than get another job, he decides to hide himself away in the basement for hours on end, conducting botanical experiments on his own, continuing the very work that got him fired from the university.

This obviously puts a strain on his relationship the children and Mrs Brewer. Then Mrs Brewer's sister in Arizona is hospitalised, and Mrs Brewer must go to assist her sister, leaving Casey and Margret in the precarious care of their now estranged Father.

Margaret immediately notices strange new developments in her father's worsening state. Not only is he cold and distant, but he stops eating with his family, a wound on his arm never seems to heal in the weeks they are alone with him, and eventually they even discover his hair has fallen out and he is growing leaves from his scalp. At one point a visitor comes to see Dr Brewer's work and seems to vanish completely, never leaving the basement.

Several times, Casey and Margaret sneak into the basement to look at what their father is up to, and see their basement has been almost completely transformed into a rainforest of bizarre new plants. They find evidence of the missing guest and hear strange, human-sounding noises coming from a locked supply closet. Attempts to get their father to open up are met with vague half-truths about his attempts to splice plant and animal DNA to create a new kind of life form that is both animal and vegetable.

Pokemon. Dr Brewer is just breeding Pokemon.

In the book's finale, Margaret's worst fears are realised when they break into the supply closet and find their father tied up and gagged, apparently locked away by a plant monster that has replaced him. Or perhaps this Dr Brewer in the supply closet is the plant monster copy, locked away for being a dangerous abomination? In the end it is up to poor Margaret to decide which is their real father and which one gets the axe. Literally.

And it seems she chooses right, when the closet-father speaks warmly to her in a way the plant monster never did. Most of the remaining plants are destroyed, and the ones that are less creepy are moved to the garden. The family is reunited, safe again, and it looks as though Dr Brewer may even get his job back. Apparently California Polytech has changed its position on funding mad scientists playing God. Makes sense.

But then, in the final moments, Margaret is outside amongst the strange new plants when she notices one of them seems to be trying to get her attention. And that little flower appears to have the face, and voice, of her father!

What a twist!

And also.

WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK RL STINE

I've heard that Walt Disney once said children are resilient enough to handle anything so long as there is a happy ending.

Apparently Mr Goosebumps has a different philosophy, which is

FUCK THE KIDS, HERE'S SOME TRAUMA

Okay. Look. Plant monsters creep me out. This book reads like it was written specifically to scare me. Like the first book, the horror is well delivered. The tension is real, the scares are effective. I didn't notice any major inconsistencies in the narrative like in 'Welcome To Dead House' and there were fewer jump scares.

Jump scares, by the way, don't work well in books. In films they're over used and obnoxious, but they can at least get the heart racing. In books, they always - ALWAYS - fall flat.

So in every way this book is an improvement on the last. Better written, creepier, an even more imaginative set up with even more frightening monsters. Dialogue is still a bit awkward. But, look, this review is coming out on a Monday because I was so surprised by how much I enjoyed book #1 that I could hardly wait to get to book #2. That's praise enough on its own, right?

But 'Stay Out Of The Basement' also made it clear why these books were a success and why, decades later, I can read them as an adult and still get pulled into them, still have them tug on all the right emotions, can overlook that I outgrew this reading level a long time ago.

The best horror serves as an exploration of humanity's common and real anxieties. I've said this before right here in on this blog. A haunted house is never just a haunted house. A slasher is never just a slasher. A zombie is never just a zombie. Beneath the surface of great horror is something all of us feel in our daily lives. 'Stay Out of The Basement' is about creepy plant monsters, but it's also about a father who loses his job and retreats from his family into an unhealthy obsession to try and regain his pride. It's about a husband and wife who become estranged from each other and in doing so, from their children. It's about grown up problems shaking the foundations of grown up lives, and it's told from the view of children who don't quite get it, who see the problem, but the adults won't talk to them about it. Their parents try to protect them by keeping them at a distance, but in doing so only expose them to new danger.*

The Brewer family is in crisis, and that manifests as a plant monster that replaces their loving father and fills their house with a dark, primal, prehistoric dread...

And then it has a creepy as fuck ending because, again: fuck the kids, here's some trauma.

*No Marxism this week. One analysis is enough.

Bumping Geese 1: Welcome To Dead House

I - and you may know this already - am a crazy person. Sometimes I have crazy ideas. Sometimes I vocalise those crazy ideas and then my friends encourage me. This is what happened when I said recently, apropos of nothing, 

 "Hey, I never read any Goosebumps books when I was a child, even though I'm totally the kind of person who would enjoy them." 

And then I said "Well there's nothing stopping me from going out and reading them now, as an adult, who is probably still the kind of person who would enjoy them. Hey, why don't I read EVERY GOOSEBUMPS BOOK EVER."

And because I am friends with a bunch of enablers, I was encouraged. Thanks, friends!

So now I'm going to read every Goosebumps book, in order of release, one a week, until I finish them. Or get really depressed and give up on life. We'll see. And maybe I'll find a way to turn my reading of spoopy children's books into Marxist propaganda, because that's another thing I like to do.

I mean, not just spoopy children's books specifically. I can turn almost anything into Marxist propaganda. I know this because I said I could, one day, and again, I am friends with enablers of my own personal madness.

Anyway. So the first Goosebumps book ever released is Welcome To Dead House, first published in 1992. I think I read some kind of later edition, though, because stuff is mentioned as happening in the early 2000s and nobody mentions how that's weird or in the future, so I guess the dates were goose-bumped forward a bit for later audiences? I dunno.

Magenta is definitely the spookiest colour

'Welcome To Dead House' is the unusually moist story about Amanda Benson and her family - brother Josh, mother who I don't think gets a name, and father Jack - who are notified that their father's great uncle who he has never heard of has died and left him a whole house in his will. Jack, sees nothing unusual about this and, presumably between sending money to exiled Nigerian princes, packs up his family and all their belongings, quits his job, and moves them to the small town of Dark Falls and into their new, totally free, totally not haunted mansion.

But it turns out inheriting a random house in a random town from a random relative you've never met is a little suss, and indeed the whole town of Dark Falls is a little suss. It's very dark and cold, there's lots of shadows but not many people around, and the Benson family pet dog Petey, normally a well behaved little guy, seems to hate the town and everybody in it he meets. 

Pro tip for you all, in case you ever find yourself in a horror movie or novel, if your normally well behaved dog starts barking a lot, GTFO ASAP. Always trust dogs.

Amanda struggles to sleep, has bad dreams when she does sleep, and keeps seeing mysterious children running around her new house and hearing disembodied giggles and whispers. Frequently she finds her clothes have been moved or scattered about while she's not looking. Between the disappearing children, ghostly whispers, the one time the kids in the neighbourhood do what looks like an attempted murder, Amanda thinks maybe Dark Falls is a bad place.

Unfortunately for Amanda, everybody around her has yet to unpack their brains from the move, and her parents gaslight the shit out of her every time she says something, until even she begins to doubt her own experiences. Turns out she was right, though, and everybody in Dark Falls is a zombie ghost (or maybe a ghost zombie) and every year they con some random family into moving into the Benson's new house before killing them. And then that family also become ghost zombie zombie ghosts and the vicious cycle continues... for reasons.

But don't worry. Amanda and Josh manage to murder the fuck out of every zombie in the town and then move back to their old house. And it all ends happily ever after. EXCEPT MAYBE NOT OMG TWIST ENDING.

The ending reminds me of the Christopher Nolan film "Inception". You remember how (SPOILERS BEGIN) Leonardo DiCaprio finally reunites with his family and before he hugs his children he spins his little top thing and it wobbles but doesn't fall and the film ends and you're meant to be all "Is he still dreaming after all?! WHO CAN TELL." (SPOILERS END) and it's a terrible scene and the movie should have stopped before it wasted your time with that ambiguous nonsense?

'Welcome To Dead House' pulls that same shit.

And it's bad.

The prose is nothing special, of course. But this is a spoopy children's novel for children, so I really can't judge it for being simple and using small words like 'if' and 'it' instead of big words like 'Constantinople' and 'Timbuktu'. There are also some minor errors of continuity which aren't huge but definitely made me stop and go "Huh?" and that made the narrative feel a little clumsy in ways that "It's for kids!" isn't a valid excuse.

Also, as mentioned, the book is just bizarrely moist. Every other page something is being described in terms of how damp it is. As far as weird fixations of horror authors go, I prefer reading about wetness than, say, the way Stephen King gets weirdly hung up on describing what character's penises are doing, but, still... Why? Why all the fluid?

All that said, it was still enjoyable. The tension at points genuinely had me gripped and some of the frightening imagery was surprisingly intense and scary. Graphic macabre body horror is not something I was expecting, but, hey, I'm always onboard for body horror.

The ghost zombie zombie ghosts were also a neat idea. I call them that because they don't really fit into either category. They're very much their own monstrous thing and I give points for creativity to horror authors doing something unique with their monsters.

So that's that. All in all, a fun time. An enjoyable novel, goose warts and all.

One Goosebumps book down. I don't even know how many there are, or how long this will take, but I'm genuinely looking forward to reading more and continuing with this random exercise in not-nostalgia. Join me next week as we bump more geese with 'Stay Out Of The Basement'.

Have A Go (A Let It Snow parody)

If I might borrow a phrase...

Hello Internet

It's December. It's the holiday season for many people around the world. And as the year closes, it is tradition to look back at the year gone and try to process all that has happened. I don't know about you, but I have personally had one of the shittest years of my life. But I'm trying very hard to process the world through the lens of positivity. I have been looking for all the good in the world this year.

And I have been failing.

Because there is a lot... Just so much shit going on in the world right now. I can barely get past the bullshit around me in Australia to begin to comprehend how bad it is everywhere else. And so to help me process this, I wrote a song. Well, a song parody. I shared it on Facebook and Twitter this morning, and now I'm sharing it here. I present the new holiday anthem for Australia

"Have A Go (A Let It Snow parody)"

Oh the fires outside are frightful
But the cricket is so delightful
In the Land Of The Fair Go
Have a go
Get a go
A fair go

The police show no sign of stopping
So children's pants will keep on dropping
Everyone fear the Popo
Have a go
Get a go
A fair go

Now the bosses are all in awe
Because the workers walked off of the job
But the unions will be declawed
Because there's so many wages to rob

Human rights are slowly dying
And MedVac is no longer flying
But we gave LNP a go
Have a go
Get a go
A fair go

And now, like any good joke, I intend to kill this one by explaining all the shit I've been sifting through in my search for joy and good vibes.

Australia is on fire

Australia is a hot place. It's also a place with a lot of bushland and rain forests. And right now it's on fire. Australia is on fire for a decent chunk of every year, but this year we're approaching record levels of damage from bush fires and a major problem is that it has been hot and dry on unprecedented levels. These fires spread across multiple states, have claimed people's lives and homes and have caused the air to become dangerously toxic. It's bad, yo.

Meanwhile, our federal government has spent an awful lot of time twiddling its thumbs. The prime minister thinks the cricket season should be enough to cheer up those who have lost their homes to fires. At the suggestion that volunteer firefighters who are taking time off work to fight fires should be compensated for their bravery, our head of state also suggested that's a silly idea since the volunteers want to be out there fighting fires.

Oh, they're also under-equipped for this ongoing disaster and so the fire service has begun crowdfunding for replacement gear. Important things like face masks. Sources below.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/16/nsw-braces-for-severe-heatwave-as-bushfire-threatens-blue-mountains-homes
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/nov/22/australia-bushfires-factcheck-are-this-years-fires-unprecedented
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/10/sydneys-air-11-times-worse-than-hazardous-levels-as-australias-bushfires-rage
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/something-to-cheer-about-scott-morrison-slammed-over-bushfire-cricket-tweet
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/12/firies-and-fury-exhausted-volunteers-decry-pms-claim-they-want-to-be-there
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-11/nsw-bushfires-firefighters-raise-money-to-buy-face-masks/11790096

Police Strip Searching Minors

The New South Wales police force has faced harsh criticism recently for a series of full body strip searches conducted at a music festival. This particular music festival is an event run exclusively for teenagers (age 13 to 17), so these strip searches were conducted on minors. Regulations for police require that any minor being strip searched by police must have a guardian present. In more than 20 cases, this didn't happen. Strip searches also shouldn't be happening outside a police station unless there is an imminent and serious threat. These searches were conducted on site. Oh, and they didn't find any drugs or weapons or anything at all that would be a threat or, you know, illegal.

The state commissioner of police defended these searches, despite them appearing to be in obvious violation of regulations. He also said that people should be afraid of the police. That's a thing that happened. I could spend more time unpacking this but it's kind of sickening and I don't want to think about it much more. Sources below. Look for yourself to see the depth of this insanity.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/02/nsw-police-told-15-year-old-lift-your-balls-up-strip-search-no-adult

https://www.sbs.com.au/news/they-need-to-have-respect-nsw-police-chief-defends-strip-searches

Job Walk-Offs and Union Busting

In Sydney, port workers, construction workers, and electrical workers have walked off job sites and refused to work while exposed to the dangerous levels of smoke in the air because it is hazardous to their health. Obviously. That's just how it works when the air has become poison. Obviously employers are not happy with workers putting their health and life ahead of profits.

Meanwhile, the federal government has been trying to pass a bill that gives more power to the courts to interfere with workers unions. These powers include terminating the employment of union officials or de-registering a union as a union. What horrible crimes would a union need commit for these punishments? Poor administration. Errors of paperwork. You know, the big issues. The bill is called the "Ensuring Integrity Bill" but basically everybody recognises it is about trying to weaken union power.

But that's not the only front on which our government wants to empower business owners over workers. While the coalition says it will come down hard on wage theft and introduce harsher penalties, they're making sure those penalties won't apply in situations where it was just a mistake. Of course it just so happens that "We accidentally underpaid our staff millions of dollars" is the favourite go to excuse for people like George Colambaris whose company was found to have failed to pay more than 7 million dollars earlier this years. Apparently it was a mistake because paying people is so hard to figure out. Anyway, the Australian Council of Trade Unions has described wage theft as a systemic problem in this country. Sources below.

https://www.smh.com.au/environment/sustainability/docks-halt-electrical-workers-stop-work-as-sydney-s-pollution-worsens-20191205-p53hbr.html

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-28/ensuring-integrity-union-busting-bill-senate/11745678

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/government-edges-closer-to-passing-union-busting-legislation-20191126-p53e8v.html

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/sep/19/wage-theft-coalition-says-tough-new-penalties-wont-apply-for-genuine-mistakes

Medvac Repeal

Sigh. I don't even want to talk about this. But anyway, the federal government has just repealed the 2018 medical evacuation laws that empowered doctors to arrange for immigrants in off-shore mandatory detention centres to be transferred to hospitals in Australia if they need care. At this stage, the government holds the power to universally and without question veto any such suggested treatment.

Only last year, the UN addressed Australia and called for a revision of its laws after ruling that the country had breached several international human rights laws. That is obviously not happening. In fact, CIVICUS has reported that civil rights in Australia shrank this year. This fact may come as a shock to any white people in the audience and probably nobody else. Sources below.

https://www.theguardian.com/food/2019/jul/18/celebrity-chef-george-calombaris-fined-for-underpaying-staff-by-78m

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/oct/16/un-body-says-australia-breached-human-rights-laws-and-needs-to-review-migration-act

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/07/australias-civil-rights-rating-downgraded-as-report-finds-world-becoming-less-free

The fuck is a "fair go"?

The concept of "a fair go" is meaningless nationalist rhetoric used to talk about how fair Australia is. It's the concept that in Australia, in anything you do, you will get out what you put in and everybody is on a level playing field if you're willing to work hard for reward. Everyone is treated fairly. 

It's obviously not true, but it's a trope our Prime Minister wheeled out in his first press conference as head of government. There's really not much to say on it and no point to explore just how hollow and vapid a concept it is. Especially not when the below satire comic has done it fine without me.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/26/what-does-scott-morrison-mean-when-he-says-if-you-have-a-go-you-will-get-a-go

Ramble Review: Murder Party (2007)

You know what I love? Horror movies. Also Halloween. Also October. And I really love watching horror movies through October in the lead up to Halloween, at which time I... Well, I just watch more horror movies. And since I'm still of a mind to ramble about movies, let's ramble about movies. Let's start with Murder Party.

Murder Party is a 2007 horror comedy film by auteur Jeremy Sauliner. It stars Chris Sharp, Aandy Barnett, Macon Blair, Paul Goldblatt, William Lacy, Stacy Rock, and Skei Saulnier. It premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival. It is currently available on Netflix.

Sharp stars as a lonely young man named Chris who finds himself without any plans on Halloween. But on his way home, he stumbles upon an invitation to a costume "Murder Party" let on the ground. Chris decides to attend and is taken hostage by the party's hosts, a group of art students, whom reveal their intention to murder Chris for art. Shortly after announcing their plans, the group's patron Alexander (Barnett) arrives to witness the murder and decide whom he will offer a grant for their art. But the group decides to wait until the witching hour before committing the crime, so Alexander and the art students kill time with pizza, sex, video games, and a game of truth or dare aided by sodium pentothal. Chris, tied to a chair and gagged, watches their debaucherous shenanagins as he awaits his inevitable artistic murder.

The small cast play the roll of self-absorbed and vapid artists convincingly, each one a desperate sycophant hanging off Alexander, who is every bit as vapid but twice as slimy. Sharp does a commendable job performing through mumbles and facial expression, making the most out of a mostly still and silent roll.

The narrative unfolds in small selection of cramped locations that bespeak the low budget of the film more than they do any mood, theme, or style. As a whole the film is distinctly lacking in style, which is surprising for an auteur production. It is what one might describe as a journeyman effort in film craft: competent but no more. The exception to this is in the exterior shots of the New York residential neighbourhood where Chris lives. The establishing shots capture the beauty of late October superbly, and the dressing of cheap Halloween decorations evoke an authentic seasonal charm that is enough to win over any Halloween fan.

But despite so much working in favour of the film, it was ultimately a disappointment. As a comedy, the film really only has one joke: look at how vapid all these art students are. Aren't they pretentious and asinine? This joke is dragged out in various forms through the entire second act of the film and it wears thin quickly. I suspect this would make for decent catharsis if you went in with a pre-existing hatred for the art student stereotype it's using. But if, like me, you're lacking that need to see straw men suffer, it is a lot of mean spirited tedium as you watch unlikable characters be unlikable as you wait for them to die.

Beyond its premise, the horror part of "horror comedy" doesn't kick in until the end. I imagine most people will be able to predict how the film climaxes before the halfway mark and it's a promising idea: a satisfying and humorous payoff that sees the art students' debauchery and narcissism give way to violence, leaving poor Chris to watch from his place in the chair. But the film doesn't even commit to the obvious choice, and halfway through it abandons this idea for an even more generic murderer-chases-victim ending that works in a few more jabs at pretentious artists before winding up with Chris returning home.

If you watch enough indie horror films, you start to notice a few problematic trends. One trend is that the film makers seem to go out of their way to make their characters unlikable. I can only hazard a guess at saying this is to make it all the more satisfying when they meet their bloody demise. But the cost for this cynical pandering to a gore-hungry audience leaves us with 90 minutes of watching people we don't like and that's not enjoyable. Murder Party goes out of its way, knowing its characters are awful people, but offers zero reprieve. Chris is not developped enough to be a hero we can root for or sympathise with. For all Sharp's effort to make the most of his role, there just isn't enough character for him to work with.

The second trend is that the auteur will come up with one interesting idea but have no idea how to execute that in a feature length format. Long time readers might remember that this was basically the problem I had with The Human Centipede. One idea, stretched thin into tedium. Similarly, Murder Party's one gag is not nearly enough to sustain it. When it isn't unpleasant, it's boring. The premise itself earns little more than a chuckle, meaning you can get pretty much the entire enjoyment of the film by reading the synopsis.

If what you want is to watch unpleasant people be unpleasant before meeting a bloody but uninteresting death; if you have a particular hated of young vapid and narcissistic artists and want to see them make fools of themselves before suffering, then this film might offer something like catharsis, but I'm not sure it will offer anybody real enjoyment. Ultimately, it's just a boring film. Not even bad in an interesting way.

We Need To Talk About Avengers: Endgame

Internet, friends, we need to have a discussion. It's a discussion that I'm not seeing many people - or anybody, really - have, and we need to have it.

Because frankly, I'm pissed off.

I've been sitting on this for a long time because Avengers: Endgame is a big pop culture event with big implications for a big franchise and I didn't want to put any spoilers out there. If you still haven't seen it, beware that spoilers lay ahead for this and a few other pieces of media, but they're all old enough that you have had plenty of time to get caught up. Okay? Okay.

Internet, friends, we need to talk about Avengers: Endgame.

But before that, let's talk about Arrow.

I fucking love Arrow. Arrow is my all time favourite TV show. Ever. Serious. No hyperbole. It is amazing and if you don't like it you are, frankly, wrong. Don't @ me.

In season 4 of Arrow, leading lady, hacker, tech genius, and everybody's favourite gal in the chair, Felicity Smoak, is paralysed from the waist down in a shooting and becomes wheelchair bound. There had long been parallels between Felicity and the comic book character Oracle, and this was just one more delightful nod to the character.

Felicity lived with her disability for less than a season. By the end of season 4, another member of Team Arrow, the tragically named Mr Terrific, has invented a sciencey cure for her paralysis that gets her up and walking again. They revisit this once in season 5, and then it is never mentioned again. Her disability is a subplot that basically goes nowhere and does nothing. She is miraculously cured by comic-book-science and it is a joyous day for her and everybody. And, you know, why not? Superhero stories are power fantasies, and why not explore the fantasy of living with a disability and then being miraculously cured and never having to worry about it again?

Why not, indeed.

Internet, friends, we need to talk about Avengers: Endgame.

But before that, let's talk about Batgirl.

I never cared much for the OG Batgirl, Barbara Gordon. I mean, I had nothing against her, I just wasn't interested. No, the first Batgirl I was interested in was Casandra Cain. For those who don't read comics, Cassandra Cain (who you may see in the upcoming Birds of Prey movie) was a girl raised by an assassin to be a living weapon. And because... Well, because comic book reasons, this meant she was mute. The only way she understood communicating was fighting.

Cassandra Cain, aka The Best Batgirl, was introduced in a big event called No Man's Land in which she left her adoptive assassin father and joined up with Batman & Friends and became the second Batgirl. So awesome was she, that after No Man's Land, she was given her own series. In less than a year of comics, through the magic of comic-book-magic, her muteness was cured. And for a couple of issues, she struggled to fight, but then she relearned how to fight. Now she could talk and fight. Huzzah for Cassandra, right? Another power fantasy wish fulfilment. Your psychological scarring can be miraculously cured by touching a random metahuman with random metahuman brain powers. I mean, sure, it was a defining trait of Cassandra Cain, her muteness, a major part of who she was and her backstory, but now she can have speech bubbles. Yay!

Yaaaay...

Oh, and the reason we needed a replacement Batgirl is because Barbara Gordon, aka OG Batgirl, aka The Second Best Batgirl I guess, aka Babs was shot by the Joker and paralysed from the waist down in an over-rated comic that way too many people love and not nearly enough of them seem to understand called The Killing Joke. This is going to sound weird but stay with me: literally the only good thing to come out of The Killing Joke is that Barbara Gordon's paralysis. Because shortly after this, she headlined a new comic series called Birds of Prey, and Babs took on the name Oracle and became everybody's other favourite gal in the chair. And now she was always in a chair. A wheel chair. And she did tech things. And gave guidance and intel to other heroes. And helped train the second and third Batgirls. Oh, and she still kicked arse.

For real, there's this scene very early in the Birds of Prey run where Babs is attacked by some throw-away thugs and still in her wheelchair, armed with a pair of batons, beats the shit out of them all. It's great. Oracle is great. Birds of Prey was great. I fucking love it and it's on comixology and you should go read it.

Ahem.

So you might remember that in my history of the Flash I talked about a big DC Comics event and relaunch called the New 52. It basically sucked. And one of the biggest suckages of them all was that Barbara Gordon was restored to being Batgirl. In the confusion that was the vague editing of Batman canon, Babs had still been shot, still been Oracle, and then been cured through some kind of comic book science-magic. This was important because the DC powers that be couldn't just erase The Killing Joke from the Batman history. It's a Big Deal Comic (for some reason). But they also wanted Babs back in her Batgirl cowl and to be the one true only Batgirl. And because the retconning was all a bit vague, exactly what parts of the Oracle story remained were vague, essentially now unseen, off-panel events. For all intents and purposes, Oracle, the biggest and most recognisable disable character, who had remained a significant part of both the Batman & Friends story and the wider DC Universe story, had been erased.

Because, you know, it's a power fantasy, isn't it? Yaaay. Superman can fly. And Oracle gets cured. Power...

Right?

Because that's the power fantasy that people with a disability must have, right? That they be cured. Regular folks without any disability, their power fantasy is flying, or having robot armour, or shooting lasers from their butt. But the gal in the chair, always in the chair, what more could she possibly want than to be able to walk? Surely she wouldn't want to, say, imagine herself being in the wheelchair and still kicking arse. Surely...

Internet, friends, we need to talk about Avengers: Endgame.

But first, let's talk about Me Before You.

Me Before You is a novel written in 2012 and then adapted to a film released in 2016. There's only two things you need to know about this story:
1. 'Me Before You' is a love story between a man with a disability, Will Traynor, (it's paralysis again) and an able-bodied woman. The man has decided, before meeting, that he would rather be dead than wheelchair bound, and even after falling in love, he decides that he would still rather be dead and now it would not only be better for him, it would be better for his lover, because as long as he is in a wheel chair, he can't live a full life, and as long as she is with him in a wheel chair, she can't live a full life.
2. FUCK THIS WHOLE THING. FUCK ALL OF IT. IT NEEDS TO DIE IN A FIRE.

Why do I bring this up?

Because - and this shouldn't be a stunning or controversial statement - there aren't a lot of roles in our media for people with disabilities. When they do come up, they tend to be... narrow. People with disabilities are the stars of inspiring stories about how even though they have an impairment, they can do things regular people do. Or they're stories of how they miraculously overcome their disability and are cured. Or they're villains. For realz, there are a shocking number of villains who have disabilities. And a shocking number of them are faking it because nobody would suspect a person with a disability of being a villain.

People with disabilities don't get to be heroes. They are society's inspiration porn and their disability is all they are. Or they are our villains. Or their story of disability is temporary. Temporary because they are cured, or they die. This is such a recognised trend that it has its own Bechdal like tool of examination. The Fries Test. I recently learned about this in preparing to write this blog, it was invented by the author Kenny Fries. The Fries Test asks the questions: "Does the work in question include more than one disabled character? Do they talk to each other? Do they talk about anything other than their disabilities? Are the characters killed or cured by the end of the story?"

For a long time, Babs - Oracle - stood alone as a successful character who lived with her disability and who was the hero of the story. No issue of Birds of Prey I've read passes the Fries Test, but that obviously doesn't negate how significant Oracle was or mean her stories were bad, or even weren't about her. Birds of Prey might have been a team up title, but Babs had just as much - maybe more - focus than the other characters. And because of this, Oracle was important to people. Nobody else had her success, were as important as she was. And look, I can't say for certain, but I suspect that part of her appeal is that unlike similarly impaired characters like Dr Mid-Nite or Daredevil, nothing about the Oracle superhero persona negated her disability. It was always there, and it didn't stop her being awesome, being a hero, kicking arse and taking names.

But then something happened.

Suddenly, Babs wasn't alone.

Internet, Friends, we need to talk about Avengers: Endgame.

But first we need to talk about Iron Man. MCU Iron Man. We're not going to talk about the comics. They're not relevant right now.

If you haven't read it, go back a few posts and read my review of Iron Man 3 for why that movie is important. But to supplement that, let's quickly recap the Marvel Cinematic Universe Iron Man story.

Iron Man 1 & 2: The big theme here is Tony Stark, Iron Man, crawling out from the shadow of his father, making himself something distinct, something more, atoning for the crimes he has been complicit in through his company and his family name. In Iron Man 1, this means becoming Iron Man, ceasing his company's production of arms, and using the Iron Man identity to undo the harm those weapons have done in the name of profit. He completes this journey in Iron Man 2 when he finally accomplishes something his father could not, and defeats a villain who is motivated by the actions of Tony's father.

Avengers: Iron Man nearly dies. He flies into space, carrying a nuke, saving New York and all his buddies, and in doing so nearly dies. And in his final moments, he's unable to get a call through to Pepper, the woman he loves, and he sees the threat waiting beyond Earth, the invasion force coming for Earth, a foe far beyond what the Avengers have faced so far. He survives, but he is scared by the experience, and he is scarred by it. This sets up the rest of Iron Man's story.

Iron Man 3: Tony Stark is suffering PTSD after the events of the Avengers. It causes him nightmares, it causes him panic attacks and heightened anxiety, it causes him to fixate on his Iron Man suit and to cope by building more suits as a distraction. And in the end he learns to find some measure of peace through his relationships, and through being Tony Stark and not Iron Man.

Avengers: Age of Ultron: Still suffering, Tony Stark decides he wants to build an AI controlled robot army to fight the coming invasion. It goes poorly. Not much development for Tony because it's an ensemble film but he does make it clear that he knows the Avengers won't be enough, and he is still frightened.

Tony Stark is not cured at the end of Iron Man 3, he just learns to cope. Let's make something abundantly clear here: as of the end of Avengers, Iron Man has a disability. His PTSD is severe and it cripples him.  He lives with this disability. And make no mistake, just because he's not in a wheel chair, just because he doesn't have a prosthetic, just because it is invisible, does not make it not a disability. But he learns to live with it, to manage it, even though he is not cured of it.

And sometimes there is no cure. There is no cure for people who have been paralysed. There is no cure for severe mental illness like bi-polar or schizophrenia. For people with depression, they will spend their whole lives with depression. It might be treated and managed, but it is not gone. It's not a virus or an infection you can kill. There is no cure for Tony's PTSD. And even though he is living with it, managing it, it haunts him, it drives him, it's the reason much of Age of Ultron happens.

And all of this is awesome. This is the kind of power fantasy everybody else gets, so why not people living with disability and severe - one might say disabling - mental illness? Finally, some representation. Finally, a hero they can see themselves in.

Civil War: I can't even. Look, I can't. Not right now. This blog is already massive and dealing with a big topic. Civil War is a whole other thing, part of another big narrative problem with the MCU that needs its own blog to dissect. As far as Iron Man goes, it's a Captain America film, it's an ensemble piece, Iron Man doesn't move or develop much from where we left off in Age of Ultron, he's still trying to prepare for the worst, still trying to live as the best and most heroic version of himself, still motivated by his PTSD and the whole arms manufacturing thing.

Avengers: Infinity War: Oh look, Tony Stark was right. The Avengers weren't enough. Everything goes to shit.

And finally...

Internet, Friends, we need to talk about Avengers: Endgame.

So let's talk about it.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is big. I don't mean that in the sense that it includes many individual pieces of media, I mean that in the sense that it is an unstoppable monolithic franchise that looms over all pop culture, commanding our attention like almost nothing in cinema before it. No amounts of Harry Potters and Lords of The Rings and Batmans and Hunger Games can compete. The MCU is popular with basically every demographic and its audience satisfaction rate makes it immune to basically all professional criticism. It has made an unfathomable amount of money.

And right at the centre, from the very beginning, the character who started it all, the character everybody recognised, the character everybody loved, the character who proved it could all work was Iron Man. He showed up in the most movies, he had the biggest and most developed character arc, and even though more and more beloved characters, he remained the face of the franchise. Doubt me? Go look at the posters for the Avengers films. You will find him near the centre of every one. You will find he takes up a decent chunk of the poster. The only character who comes close to getting his level of focus is Captain America, except in the first Avengers film where Cap is quietly tucked away at the back. And on the Captain America: Civil War poster where he shares equal space with Iron Man.

In a big deal franchise, Iron Man is THE big deal character.

And he's a hero.

And he's a person with a disability.

And. They. Fucking. Killed. Him.

If you read my Iron Man 3 review, you'll understand why I consider Iron Man 3 to be a hugely important film not just in the franchise but in the genre itself. Iron Man the character is important for much the same reason, for the same reason Oracle was important. Representation matters, and there is nowhere near enough representation for people with disabilities in media, especially in superhero power fantasy stories.

But there's only one happy ending available to characters with disabilities. They get cured. But Tony Stark didn't get cured. His anxiety, his fear, was proven true, and then he died. He almost had a happy ending, but he gave it up for everybody. It was him before them. He gave his life so that the rest of the Avengers, the whole world, could live their life.

In 'Me Before You' this idea of disability being a burden is very much textual. It's there on the screen. You can't get around it. In Avengers: Endgame, it's meta-textual. You need to understand that nothing exists in a vacuum. Iron Man's death, within the text, has nothing to do with his disability, but in the wider landscape of our culture, he is one more character, one more person with a disability, who meets one of very few resolutions available to such people. It's all connected.

And Iron Man is the kind of character we're tragically short of in our pop culture. He's a hero, he's a power fantasy, and his disability, his mental illness was part of him, and was a part of him to the end, without being cured by comic-book-science-magic, without being compensated-for by powers. For all those nerds who want their super hero power fantasy, he's a character that an under-represented and poorly-represented group could identify with. We needed PTSD Iron Man. And for a few years, we had him. But in the end, he doesn't get a happy ending. He doesn't even get an original ending. He gets to sacrifice himself for other people's happy ending. This is why I brought up 'Me Before You' amongst a bunch of super hero stories, Iron Man and Will Traynor meet the same fate.

Captain America gets a happy ending.

Thor's story continues.

Hawkeye's story continues.

Gamora returns to the Guardians.

Iron Man, the hero with a disability, dies.

And he dies pointlessly.

Seriously. Let's look at that scene. Iron Man gets the gauntlet, all the infinity stones, and he snaps his fingers to erase Thanos and his army from the universe, but the strain on his mortal body is too much and he dies. Look, there's nothing out of character about Tony Stark taking a risk or show boating, but he has a family, a home, a CHILD that he plans to return to, something he says he'd choose over the whole world without a second thought. Also, he's a pretty smart guy. Would it really not have occured to him to say, give the gauntlet to The Hulk, who we know can use it? Or to the super powerful, Thanos-butt-kicking Captain Marvel who has proven more powerful than all of them? Or to Thor who is pretty sure he can do it? Tony has a genius solution to every problem except how to hand a weapon to somebody else.

That's why he never shared his weapons with anybody else. Nobody else got an Iron Man suit.

Oh wait... No, he does do that. Nevermind.

But let's say, for argument's sake, that this wasn't an option. It was now or never. He had to use the stones.

Why doesn't Doctor Strange, who is an actual medical doctor, who is standing less than a stone's throw away, rush in and try to do some doctoring? Maybe, I don't know, use his time control powers to reverse the damage. He has the time stone, again.

In fact, they have a complete set of infinity stones, and two or three people able to use them safely. Are you telling me the stones can erase half the living creatures in the universe from existence but can't fix up some third degree burns and internal bleeding? Is that beyond their infinite power?

Look, what's important here is that his death is not justified. It's cheap drama. The narrative of his death falls apart under any scrutiny unless you're willing to twist yourself in knots to justify it, but I'm not willing. I'm pissed off that for a while, we got a person with a disability as the face of the modern era's biggest multi-media franchise, and they couldn't come up with a better ending for him than 'Me Before You'.

Oh wait, they did come up with a better ending. It was him retiring and living out his days with his family in peace, at last finding the solace he craved. You know, the happy ending Captain America is inexplicably handed in the stupidest most clumsy way possible - but again, another digression we don't have time for.

So Tony Stark did have a better ending, a worthy ending, but it was taken away in favour of that same tragic ending so many of our characters with disabilities get. What a fucking waste.

We can do better representing people with disabilities.

We owe them better.

They deserve better.

And, now I think about it, so did Iron Man.

Stop Telling Mentally Ill People They're Dangerous

According to the above data, in 1959, 60% of people believed that there should be a law that banned the general public from owning handguns. In 2016, less than 25% of people hold that opinion.

Have I talked about gun violence before? I don't think so. Either way, I'm not going to talk about it now.

I'm not going to talk about how Scotland and Australia introduced strict gun laws and firearm buyback schemes and since then, Scotland has had one mass shooting and Australia has had zero. I'm not going to talk about how, in August 2019, the USA has had well over 200 mass shootings. I'm not going to talk about how the number of mass shootings stopped by a good guy with a gun in recorded history is zero.

I'm not going to talk about gun culture and what that looks like in various countries, about interpretations of laws, of history, about politics, or about the scare campaigns and misinformation spread by lobbyist groups. There is zero point to me talking about any of that. You want my opinion, here it is: people should not own guns. But I'm not going to go into that. That's a waste of my time and yours. The USA it seems, has decided, in large, that the right to own a gun is more valuable than the lives of its citizens. There's nothing more to say.

But people with far greater fortitude than I are going to keep having that debate and more power to you guys. Have your say. Maybe one day you'll be heard. But I'm done with that discussion. What I want to discuss is this chart:

What we see here, from a poll taken of adults taken in 2017, is that 89% of Republican and Democrat supporters (not politicians) agree that people with mental illness should not be allowed to buy guns. Only 82% of Republicans and 85% of Democrats believe that people on a no-fly or watch list should be banned from purchasing a firearm. That means more people are concerned about people with mental illness buying a gun than people who are deemed unsafe to have on a plane or are suspected of criminal activity.

Exactly what is it about the anxious and depressed that you're so afraid of?

Oh, but it's not people with depression that you're worried about getting a gun. After all, one in four people have a mental illness, according to the World Health Organisation, so if mental illness made people into killers, surely one in four people would be buying a gun and going on a killing spree. No, those people might shoot themselves, sure, and we shouldn't let that happen, but the ones we really have to watch out for are those people with mania, the sociopaths, the sadists, the delusional paranoid voice hearing schizophrenics. People with "serious" mental illness.

They're the ones doing all the killing, right?

Well, here's some more numbers: only about 5% of gun related killings are committed by people with mental illness. That's not mass shootings, that's all gun killings. The MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study found that, once accounting for substance abuse, only 18% of those studied had committed a violent act in the past year. But when they compared those results to the violence rates in the neighbourhoods and mentally healthy people in a similar environment (such as siblings) it evened out. The violence rates became statistically insignificant.

On the other hand, a study conducted by the Australian government found that 18% of people suffering a psychotic illness such as schizophrenia were a victim of violent and 17% reported self-harm.

The evidence for a causative link between mental illness of any kind and violent crime, particularly firearm related killings, does not exist. Laws that restrict mentally ill people from having firearms is at best going to reduce gun crime by 5%. That's slightly more impact on the homicide rate than a law banning the bogeyman from owning a gun.

The majority of mentally ill people are no more dangerous to you than anybody else. Mental Illness is not the reason for these mass shootings, is not the reason for gun violence. Hate is not a mental illness. Bigotry is not a mental illness. Ethno-nationalism is not a mental illness. But these are the things you should be concerned about.

Okay. So, I actually wrote this blog more than a year ago, but by the time I had finished getting the data, the zeitgeist had tragically moved on. But here we are again, so now is the time to say something. And there's one more thing I would like to say.

I don't talk much about my personal life, but I have been open about suffering from mental illness. I have lived the majority of my life with severe mental illness. And at times, if I had a gun, I would have used it. But the only person I would have shot is myself. Australia's firearms restrictions have saved lives.

But we're not going to talk about that. After all, the decision has been made. Y'all prefer having a gun than not having a gun violence pandemic. So own it. Stop putting the blame on people who are already marginalised.