What did I miss

By lukeryan on Feb 03 2010, 01:00PM

As a man who regularly spends upwards of six hours a day attached to the internet, one of the most uncanny aspects of any given travel experience the general absence of a ready data stream on which to feast. I spent the last month travelling through Southern Africa with 12 friends, and at one point I went nine, NINE days without even checking my email. Nine. I haven't gone that long without internet access since I was 14. You learn a lot about yourself when you cut away from the internet. Primarily about your horrible addiction to Twitter; every time something of consequence happened for the first ten days, my instant, almost primordial reaction was always "quick, let me twitter that". But I didn't. Because I couldn't.

And now it's as if it never happened... I need validation to live! VALIDATION!

Of course, the other thing that tends to pass you by whilst you're trapped in this sort of traveller's vacuum are the broader day-to-day happenings of the world. At the same time as I went nine days without internet access, I went a good solid three weeks without once picking up a newspaper. As a general rule, I devote more of my life to keeping tabs on the world than I do to keeping tabs on my own life so this was quite something. You start to realise you actually have an internal monologue and can communicate with other humans without the use of URL shorteners. And can use sentences that go for more than 140 characte- damn. That's Twitter again. VALIDATION!

So, I thought I'd get back on to the ol' Seventh Estate bandwagon with a brief re-cap of what I think I missed over the last month:

1. Haiti: Occurring in the middle of my media blackout, it took me 8 days to realise something had happened in Haiti. Prior to this I'd known Haiti as a) not a particularly sensible travel destination; and b) a country whose state religion was, in all seriousness, voodoo. But, good God, why do these things always have to happen to the countries that are least able to deal with them? Not that I'd particularly wish this upon anybody, but surely it's the turn of some wealthy white people to have to deal with a catastrophic natural occurrence. And no, Hurricane Katrina doesn't count. Geographically, New Orleans may be in the US, but demographically that hurricane may as well have happened in Haiti. As well, the whole affair has been illustrative of one of the more unpalatable rules of relations between the developed and developing world; namely, that in the absence of a viable natural resource base, the only way to have the international community give a shit about you is to have six digits worth of your population die. Onwards and upwards for Haiti then.

2. The Massachusetts' Senate By-Election: Watching the Americans wage politics in this day and age is like watching a child being eaten by a duck. You watch it and think, surely the child has the advantage here. He's bigger, heavier, has opposable thumbs AND teeth, as well as the ability to form complex sentences. And meanwhile the duck is nature's joke against bird-kind. But sure enough, and against all objective logic that child is disappearing into the duck, one limb at a time. And you cannot tear yourself away. With the election of Republican Scott Brown to the seat vacated by the much missed Edward Kennedy, the Republican's managed to grab effective control of the Senate despite the Democrats holding an 18-seat majority. This could well kill the US health care bill, as well as any other initiative the President could deign to suggest. Proving yet again that American democracy has evolved into a monstrous parody of itself that makes it essentially impossible for the country to be effectively governed. In the words of Kent Brockman: I've said it before and I'll say it again, democracy simply doesn't work.

3. As a general continuation of the above observation, Sarah Palin is now a commentator for Fox News. In other news, a seven-headed, ten-horned beast has arisen out of the sea, proving once and for all that the End Times truly are at hand.

4. Tony Abbott gets into the virginity debate: I'll be honest, this pissed me off not so much for the general tenor of Tony's comments (retrograde as they may be, he wasn't exactly shoving them down the throats of the populace), but rather for the completely meaningless eruption of faux-outrage and political name-calling that ensued. This single, not particularly extreme comment controlled the news for a good four days. And while I don't have colossal amounts of sympathy for Abbott, I couldn't help but feel that perhaps there were more important issues that we could be discussing as a nation. Perhaps we were all just a little under-stimulated during the parliamentary off season. All in all, another not particularly inspiring episode in the low-rating soap that is the Australian political process. If we were a TV show, we would be Passions.

Anyway, from what I can deduce, Haiti aside, it's been a pretty slow news month really. Probably for the best I wasn't actually around or I would have had to start writing human interest pieces on heroic seven year olds, or compiling a selection of my favourite cat videos. And noone wants that... or DO THEY?!