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!