A “training school” run by NSW Young Labor last year, one of the Right’s annual recruitment events, featured the Health Minister, Reba Meagher. Neglecting to focus on policy issues, she… informed those attending of the need to pursue power above all else. She later regaled the new members with tales of the perpetually disgraced NSW minister Joe Tripodi vomiting from a car window after eating too many “twinkies”.

The image of a (presumably) young Joe Tripodi blearily wiping wind-blown chunks of vomit off his face with the back of his hand, straining out the back window of a cream-and-rust 1981 Honda Civic packed to groaning with guffawing pimply proto-hacks of the NSW right on the way home from a party function, is now with me forever. Bless.

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Dr Berry said that some kinds of social participation were good for the community but not necessarily for the individual. For example, people who were involved in community activism reported worse mental health, as did those who rang radio talkback shows and wrote letters to the editor.

I don’t believe that this is causal, although many people within the Left are prone to consider that being a ‘caring’ person is a very stressful past-time. Rather, lonely and unwell people are attracted to trying to ‘make a difference’ in non-committal ways requiring little research or forethought. The difference between dialing up at 7am to rant at/with Alan Jones about teh immigrants, and chanting FUisms in a band of seven people outside the US embassy to protest Globalisation, is marginal; the fact that the former is an activity of the elderly and the latter an activity of the young is largely reflective of mobility issues, willingness to brave public transport, and degree of access to a platform of dissemination within the mainstream media.

I have for many years felt that I would make a wonderful elderly person. One’s elder years, I feel, are a golden time where the sorts of behaviour that would otherwise be attributed to antisocial tendancies can be waived off as an endearing sign of age; I have long had plans to wield a shillelagh at small children and live bra-less an a mu-mu eating cake mix out of a bowl. I will make constant crank calls to whomever I please, and because technology will have by that time caught up with my dreams, I will be able to do this in full holographic representation, nude, my rubenesque belly painted up with lurid slogans.

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