The violent bear it away

Peter Dutton, Donald Trump and the coming Coalition of the Awful

I had a few days alone before Christmas, before Tanya returned from a stint of work in Darwin, and before we hit the road for Christmas in Canberra and Sydney, and I watched a few episodes of a new TV series starring Billy Bob Thornton (an actor I like and wonder about). It’s called Landman and is about a freelance oil man managing—on behalf of some rich dude played by Jon Hamm—a series of smallish wells somewhere in Texas.

In the episodes I got through, the dominant theme that stood out for me was the complete disregard for worker safety, a situation taken for granted by every character in the series. The general vibe was that this was a job that required real men, and real men aren’t going to do anything lame like manage risk.

Die young, stay masculine. It’s the zeitgeist, I suppose.

There is a pervasive sense of violence that underlines the lives of these people, from the wealthiest to the poorest, and such violence is the reality against which everyone measures themselves and others…