Capitalism

.. been levelled and replaced by a housing estate. We’d played the
gig, which was bizarre enough, with our performance being repeatedly interrupted
by stinking trucks laden with doomed cattle driving in between us and the
workers listening to us stony-faced in their blood-spattered work clothes,
when we were asked by a union official if we’d like to tour the facility.
I have an overactive imagination at the best of times and had no desire to
lose my taste for meat, but for some unaccountable reason, Bill decided to
go on the tour.
He came back ashen-faced and has been a vegetarian ever since.
The giveaway to me is that we’re quite blandly referred to by the media
as ‘consumers’. It’s been in vogue for more than a decade
now and, while it doesn’t seem to bother everybody, I personally find
it repugnant and a bit Orwellian, although I don’t remember George Orwell
actually employing the term in Nineteen Eighty-four. He did use the term ‘proles’,
(short for proletariat), but ‘consumers’seems so much more contemptuous.
So, is it just because the exploitation by the few of the many is inherently
so unappealing that the nuts and bolts of Capitalism are so under-discussed?
If that’s not it, just why is it that the average student leaves school
not knowing how to cope with the most important decision he and/or she will
have to make within just a few years of drinkin’, barfin’ and
generally misbehavin’ on ‘schoolies’ week’? Of course,
I’m talking about Buying Your First Home.
(In fact, I think there’s an argument here that there’s a generation
growing in our midst who will never own their own homes. They’re the
so-called boomerang kids we’re starting to read about (See The
Age 30.7.12) that have to return to the nest until they can save enough
to buy their own home. There’s something forced in the smiles of both
the parent/s and their cuckoo children as they contemplate another decade
or so coping with each others’ generational idiosyncrasies. Perhaps
it’s even more instructive to look to Italy, where there’s a generation
or more of young men who have no intention of ever leaving mama to get married
and where the birthrate is dropping below parity).
But, returning to the central motif,. I don’t remember much about going
to the local Bank of New South Wales (as Westpac used to be known) to borrow
some money to buy our first house, except I suspect that it was at least as
nerve-wracking as many years later appearing in Ringwood court on cultivation
and possession charges, as you do.
The point is, I had no idea how it all worked and, what’s more, I suspect
the banks actually count on this lambs-to-the-slaughter mentality.
There’s a parallel with first-home buying in the music business when
a band signs its first record contract. We were told that our contract was
a ‘standard’ industry contract. The first thing we found out –
after we’d signed it, of course – is that there’s no such thing
as a standard contract. (I should point out that Spectrum had no advisor or
manager at this early stage in our career, so we really were behind the eight-ball).

Because we were such novices, signing the contract was an act of faith, no
doubt influenced by the general euphoria of having somebody – a real
record company that everybody has heard of – actually interested in
us and prepared to invest in us.
In those days, whilst the record company financed the recording sessions,
packaging etc. they didn’t pay advances and the artist got bugger-all
by way of percentages. Think The Beatles celebrated 1962 contract with Parlophone,
a subsidiary label of EMI. The royalty initially payable to the Beatles was
one penny per song on 85% of gross sales and half that rate outside of the
UK. (Hey! Come to think about it, that’s about what you get from legal
downloads today).

I’m starting to get disheartened with all this talk of money and contracts.
Let’s talk about the Olympics for a moment.
It occurred to me just before the Opening Ceremony that the Olympic Games
could be mankind’s most conspicuous folly. Humans are patently the world’s
most pathetically endowed species in all but one area; that is the actual
organising of huge spectacles like the Olympic Games celebrating our feebleness.
Think about it for a moment. If you could persuade almost any animal with
four legs to run in a straight line for a hundred metres on cue, a lazy ninety
percent of them could out-run Usain Bolt – then eat him afterwards as
a post-race snack.
The thing is you couldn’t get any sane animal to run in a straight line
for a hundred metres on cue, which immediately confirms the correctness of
my thesis, whilst also suggesting that mankind is some kind of deluded loony
species.

I’d like to finish up with a moment of embarrassment for a household
pet with whom most of us are familiar. We all know that cats like to snooze
for most of the day, saving themselves for those odd moments when they need
to react with blinding speed and ferocity. Or jump from one window-sill to
the next. You can almost read the thought bubble after the realisation that
Plan A has come unstuck. ‘Uh-oh. Paraglide..’

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