Month: May 2025

A Brief Inquiry into the Rise and Fall of a Political Party

Farewell, Trumpet of Patriots – we barely knew you.  Gone are incessant YouTube ads that yelled a series of random thoughts; the kind you might expect to hear when you choose the wrong seat on the late bus home but not so much from a political candidate.  Goodbye spammy text messages that randomly pinged on phones across the country – and when I say ‘random’ I mean that I received a sum total of ‘zero’ texts, whilst the 12-year old I know, received a steady stream.  They will not be missed.

All we will have to remind us that you ever existed are redundant billboards by the side of our major freeways and traffic arterials which will linger until they’re finally replaced by adverts for hair replacement clinics and pet food.  But for these hulking expressions of misplaced optimism, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was all a dream.

In times like these – namely, in the immediate aftermath of a Hindenburg-style disaster of epic proportions, it’s appropriate to take stock, reflect and, possibly, leave the country entirely.  Not to blow my own trumpet (patriotic or otherwise), I feel I can offer some advice.

So where did it all go wrong?  Let’s start with the obvious – Trumpet of Patriots were, to the best of my knowledge, the only political party to use their platform to promote a musical instrument.  But did they choose the wrong instrument?  I strongly suspect they’d have secured a larger share of the primary vote if they’d named themselves after either the tuba or the glockenspiel.  Suffice to say, I’d have a hard time not voting for an organisation called ‘Kazoo of Patriots’. 

Perhaps their failure at the ballot box is the first time in Australian electoral history that the result can be chalked up to musical differences.

Weirdly, in all the adverts I saw on YouTube (and, my goodness, there were a lot of them), not once did I see one of their spokespeople playing a trumpet.  This was an inexplicable strategic mistake to say nothing of a squandered opportunity.  If you start talking about franking credits, there’s a good chance that half your audience will immediately fall asleep – unless, that is, you have a trumpet.  Announcements on housing (PARP!), immigration (PARP! PARP!) and the instant asset write off (PARP! PARP! PARP!) would all be far more compelling if communicated by trumpet.

The Greens are more DJ people.  The Coalition and Labor candidates were, without exception, brass averse.  The inexplicable reluctance of a party name ‘Trumpet of Patriots’ to actually put a trumpet front and centre of its campaign will have to go down as one of the more confounding political miscalculations of this or, indeed, any other era you care to name.  But even worse than the failure to blow their own or anyone else’s trumpet, was the lack of originality.

I appreciate that voters don’t often reward originality at the ballot box, but I have to say there were times where I felt the Trumpet of Patriots might be getting their ideas from elsewhere.  Put simply, I have a sneaking suspicion that ‘Make Australia Great Again’ was not an entirely original concept.  Copying other people can be such an unedifying spectacle.  Indeed, it’s that kind of brazen mimicry that saw people (well, me at any rate), refer to them as the ‘Trumpet of Parrots’ instead. 

Based on the thousands of billboards I passed, the Trumpet of Patriots were seeking to position themselves as purveyors of ‘common sense’ solutions.  Which is why the accompanying photo, in all its twenty-foot-tall terrifying bigness, was so utterly mystifying. 

The picture featured two men, one of whom I believe was one-time Fox News host, Tucker Carlson and another man who was not.  The former’s face was screwed up as he laughed so hard that he appeared to the untrained eye to be ever so slightly unhinged.   Presumably this boisterous display of near mania was a direct result of something the other man either said or did.

For his part, the other man had his fist raised in the air, as if either punching an invisible bat or sticking the landing after a calisthenics routine.  It did not so much scream ‘common sense’ as it did ‘pull my finger’.   It’s like applying for a job but stapling a photo to your resume of the time you tried to fit an entire container of baby cucumbers into your mouth at once and later wondering why you never got a call back.

Elections are funny things.  I have to admit that I felt somewhat disengaged by the process as it seemed positively boring in comparison with events elsewhere.  Then again, maybe the fact it was largely dull and uneventful is proof of a democracy in rude health here.  That said, I wouldn’t mind a few more big ideas next time.  And fewer big billboards.  So long Trumpet of Patriots, but don’t hurry back any time soon.  PARP!  PARP!

(Un)Kool Thing – My Life as a Try Hard

I was having lunch with friends.  Between courses, one of my lunchmates said that her favourite song in 1989 was ‘Teen Age Riot’ by grunge rock pioneers, Sonic Youth.  I wanted to agree.  Indeed, I longed to say that, I too, believed ‘Teen Age Riot’ was, by some considerable distance, the very best song of 1989 and that the album from whence it came was a masterpiece that captured the essence of Generation X in its dissonant squalls and alternative tunings. 

I wanted to say anything at all that would suggest that, in 1989, I had any idea the song ‘Teen Age Riot’ existed or what a ‘Sonic Youth’ was.  But I couldn’t.  Because in 1989, I was tragically and irredeemably uncool.

Saying you liked Sonic Youth in the 1980s is the equivalent of claiming that you liked the films of Ingmar Bergman before he went commercial.  It’s an impossibly hip thing to declare.  Knowing me, I probably thought that an ‘Ingmar Bergman’ was something you ordered from IKEA.  To my great shame, I was totally clueless about anything cool.  That’s because I was hopeless unhip throughout the nineteen eighties.  I wasn’t cool for a moment, not even by accident. 

It wasn’t for a lack of trying.  Actually, my lack of coolness was a direct result of trying too hard – overreach was my enemy.  Bleach-blonde mullet, pierced ears and home-made acid-wash jeans, I was packed to brim with uncoolness and positively pulsating with daggy energy.  Not that I realised it. 

In 1989, I had my own band and wrote my own songs.  This is, without doubt, incredibly cool.  Or, at least, it’s incredibly cool until you listen to any of the songs in question, after which it’s very much something else altogether – most likely a cry for help.  Matters were made worse by my voice, which was an atonal squawk that’d have seen John Cage handing his ears back, expecting them to be put out of their misery.  It was not pretty.  It certainly wasn’t cool.

I had a denim jacket, though, which I used to think was cool but, in retrospect, was a couple of sizes too small and when I wore it, I looked like I was trapped inside a jacket borrowed from a much smaller person.  It was, by some margin, the best jacket I ever owned.  That year, I was gifted a leather jacket which – again – sounds like it could be cool, except that it had been procured from the Dattner House of Leather.  It had the kind of shoulder pads more commonly associated with gridiron.  So uncool.

Come to think of it, my life has been a series of failures involving jackets.  In a rush of blood to the head that then flowed to my wallet, I once bought a suede jacket at a warehouse sale.  It was large, cumbersome and totally impractical.  Like the Death Star, it was beautiful to the eye but had a fatal flaw – it was allergic to rain.  Jackets that can’t be worn in inclement weather are of little use.  Bizarrely, I still chose to wear my suede jacket to a football match at which, by some miracle, it did not rain but, just as I was leaving, a seagull whom I can only assumed had been carb-loading all afternoon decided to let it rip.  It was ruined.  I never went to the football again.    

I had a skateboard in the nineteen eighties which, on its face, is kind of cool.  Until, of course, you realise that I lived on a farm in Tyabb and the only place to ride that skateboard was on a gravel driveway.  If you’ve never tried to skateboard on gravel, I don’t recommend it.  More than uncool, it’s downright dangerous.

Somewhat perversely, some of the things we had then that were considered uncool have now well and truly come back into favour.  We had a record player and a lot of vinyl records.  Which is all well and good until you realise that we also had my parents’ record collection which largely consisted of LPs from record clubs.  (I assume that, at some point in history, ‘record clubs’ were a thing.  I’ve never heard of them.  That’s because, presumably, the first rule of record club is that you do not talk about record club.)  Suffice to say, no-one plays a record entitled ‘Great German Marching Songs’ and expects to be thought of as cool.

In 1989, I had strong opinions about everything – music, fashion, German marching songs – you name it.  And I was completely wrong about almost everything.  During the recent election, some broadcasters profiled young voters before hysterically lamenting the naivety of today’s youth.  Not me – I look at today’s young voters and then picture myself at the same age, before realising that today’s new adults are just fine and superior in almost every respect.  Dare I say it – they’re cool.

My friend was waiting for a response.  I cleared my throat before being honest – in 1989 my favourite band was probably ‘Mike & the Mechanics’.  For me, there was no Teen Age Riot in 1989.  Just a gravel driveway, a useless skateboard and a denim jacket that didn’t fit me very well.  Things, I feel, are much better now.