The Hollow Persons (With Apologies To T.S. Eliot)

     

     Let’s do this
     Let’s keep moving

     I

We are the hollow persons
Inflated with hot air
Hanging together
For fear of hanging separately. Cut!
Our empty promises, when
First we make them,
Are far from empty.
We are inflamed by the thrill
Of passionate sounds,
Like Boomers watching porn,
Mistaking the image for the deed.

Policy without intention, sincerity without truth,
Activity without consequence, politics without effect.

Those who have moved on
From office to retirement, that powerless state,
Understand us best – see us clearly – not as lost
Treacherous souls, but only
As the hollow persons
Inflated with hot air.


     II

Eyes I dare not meet in studios
Or the Green Room
Thankfully do not appear:
There, all eyes blaze
Like television lights
There, lips curl cruelly,
And nostrils flare
In eager anticipation of
A broken political career.

I will not go again
To that dream factory
I’ll wear no more
The deliberate disguises of
Commentator, pundit, expert
In my field
Holding up a finger to discover
The prevailing political wind.

No more fulsome greetings
In the shallow money trench.


     III

It is a wavering realm
Guided by autocues
Raising statues of flesh
To receive each morning
The offering of last night’s ratings
Restoring a twinkle to fading stars.

   It is not like this
Outside the make-up room
Abiding alone
In those hours when
The camera’s tenderness
Is removed
And all earpieces fall silent.


     IV

There are no eyes here
No prying eyes
In this valley of abandoned dreams
This valley of hollow victories
Strewn with the broken bones of promises

   In this place of suspended hope
We cling to one another
Avoid commitment
Try to swallow the crumbs of official praise.

Paralysed, unless,
From somewhere,
A choir of cast-off heroes,
Voices from history,
Sing solidarity songs
To gather-in our lost flock
Of empty persons.

     V

This is the way we wash our hands
Wash our hands, wash our hands,
This is the way we wash our hands
Of everything left in the morning

  Between the Caucus
And the Treasury
Between the promise
And the press-release
Falls the shadow

               For this is the Empire of Neo-liberalism

  Between the Mosque Massacre
And KiwiBuild
Between the stamping out of Covid-19
And the ending of child poverty
Falls the shadow

               It’s only a three year term

  Between the Politics of Kindness
And the MSD counter
Between the promise of transformation
And maintaining business confidence
Between the loyal working-class
And the fickle middle-class
Falls the shadow

               For this is the Empire of Neo-Liberalism

For this is
Only a three year term
For

This is the way Jacinda ends
This is the way Jacinda ends
This is the way Jacinda ends
Not with a pang but a simper.


Chris Trotter
2020

This poetic parody was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 19 November 2020.

Gainful Employment: A Cautionary Tale.

Transformative Politics: The idea is to turn each recipient into an unwitting accomplice in their own transformation. From interested observer to hyped-up activist, sharing our messages promiscuously with ‘friends’. You’ll be part of an ever-expanding circulatory system, Jennifer, for the ideas that will win us the election.”

JENNIFER SKITTERED her chair back from the workstation and sighed. Three more hours. And then what? Pick up something to eat and back to the flat. A glass of wine and bed. Life. Wow. She’d been expecting more.

Not that she didn’t value the job. It wasn’t all that taxing and the pay was great. But is this what a degree in Political Science and English Literature got you? Managing “Paulabots” in a National Party troll farm?

It was her old school-friend, Toby, now high up in the Young Nats, who had asked if she was interested in making some easy money for a couple of months. Some friends of his, he said, major cyber-geeks, had spent months fashioning a vast army of bots, priming them to swarm, on command, all over social media. Their content favoured raw emotion over reasoned argument and was micro-targeted. “Wake-up calls”, Toby called them, designed to provoke a visceral response.

“That’s where you come in”, Toby explained. “You’ll have a hundred or so of these bots to manage. The moment someone responds to one of them, it’ll look exactly like an ordinary account, you’ll reply – keep them talking. You’ll have all the day’s talking-points in front of you and the links to be sent. The idea is to turn each recipient into an unwitting accomplice in their own transformation. From interested observer to hyped-up activist, sharing our messages promiscuously with ‘friends’. You’ll be part of an ever-expanding circulatory system, Jennifer, for the ideas that will win us the election.”

Jennifer wasn’t sure that she agreed with those ideas, but she knew enough to appreciate that this was now the way a modern political party communicated with the electorate – or, at least, with the key demographics its pollsters and the focus-group moderators identified as being potentially receptive to its pitch. Toby called them “The Persuadables”: voters who, if stimulated correctly, might be moved off “Undecided” or “Not Voting” and into “Definitely Voting”. Or, as her old PolSci lecturer used to say: “Off the sofa and into the polling-booth.”

And that had to be a good thing – didn’t it? Better than letting all those thousands of people, once again, sit out a general election. Young men in the past had fought and died defending Democracy. So, even if the means might be a bit dodgy, the end, lifting voter turn-out, more than justified the dissemination of little bit of fake news – didn’t it?

Ooop! That was another ping. Another person responding to the “A Hand Up – Not A Hand-Out” bot. Jennifer screwed up her nose as she read the commenter’s racist screed. She checked her cheat-sheet and rattled-off the relevant stats regarding welfare fraud. A little voice in her head was objecting that the stats she was using couldn’t possibly be true.

“Not your department”, her supervisor had told her, very firmly, on her first or second day on the job. “Stick to the talking-points provided. We’re not paying you to be a fact-checker.”

The commenter came back immediately. Those numbers she just sent had nailed it. Exactly what he had always thought! Did she have a link? Jennifer smiled. Do I have a link? She sent it off without hesitation. Telling the little voice in her head to STFU.

Even so, it wasn’t easy, not altogether. Surely there was a moral question here? Ethics – that was the word. Was she behaving ethically? Jennifer gave her head a little shake – as if she had a twig caught in her hair. She recalled some lines from T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

Coffee is what I need, she told herself. A nice strong cup of coffee. She wandered up distractedly between the neatly arranged workstations – their grey carpeted walls illuminated by the soft glow of the monitors – towards the expensive coffee-maker.

“S’it going, Jen? Alright?”

“Yep, all good. Lots of responses.”

“Tell me about it. This latest one has triggered all the nutcases!”

Jennifer sat down and sipped her coffee. J. Alfred Prufrock put in another appearance.

For I have known them all already, known them all –

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons

Much later. After a bus ride, a microwaved risotto, and a glass of wine, the doorbell rang.

The man on the doorstep seemed a bit ancient to be out after dark, knocking on doors. He wore, of all things, a cloth cap. In his hand he clutched a clipboard.

“Excuse me, young lady, I’m sorry to trouble you so late. My names Gerald, and I’m canvassing on behalf of the Labour Party. I was wondering, are there any Labour supporters in the household?”

Jennifer stared at the old man for a few flabbergasted seconds and burst out laughing.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 1 November 2019.