Coronavirus: In alienation, anger is all we have left in common

We could not go to one another’s aid; now we have lost the instinct. We can’t think of anyone else; we have nothing left to offer. All we have to warm us is our anger, seething away, writes Gideon Haigh. Picture: istock

The Prime Minister has outlined a four-stage path to national recovery. It is not entirely clear where we are. Maybe at a half of one. With a favouring breeze.

What feels more advanced is the path of community response, whose fourth stage seems already to have been reached.

First there was fear, every coffee cup resembling a Wuhan laboratory petri dish, with a slightly jokey edge, where we imagined barricading ourselves against Covid with a wall of Brett Sutton throw pillows.

This was followed by stoicism, where bread was baked and board games played, phasing steadily into resignation, where board games were baked and bread played because frankly we might as well, right?

Each stage has left a residue, save perhaps on the consistently apoplectic few for whom too much hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin is never enough.

GIDEON HAIGH ON LOCKDOWNS

No gratitude, no pride, no relief: just quiet seething

As the world’s worst lockdown ‘ends’ (it hasn’t), it’s time Daniel Andrews knew how many of us in Victoria feel as we watch his sickening pivot.

In alienation, anger all we have left in common

Lockdowns prevented us from going to one another’s aid; now we have lost the instinct.

Like a commercial My Lai, we’re destroying the village to save it

We’ve all experienced the stress of last-minute cancellations, the fatigue and apathy that attends any effort not directed at simply getting through a day.

Our children are suffering the most

Something got lost early on in the fight against Covid in the message that our most vulnerable are the elderly rather than our children.

Saving old lives just to ruin young ones

Every day, Daniel Andrews sends proforma condolences to the families of people who have died in their 80s and 90s. But what about the harm to our children?

But where to now? From my isolated perch in Melbourne – where lockdown is more or less the norm, interspersed with instantly perishable glimpses of liberty – it appears that a spirit of sour vengeance pervades the land. It is as infectious as any Delta variant. Case numbers grow daily. Its most gratifying objects are not far to seek.

There’s old mate SloMo, repeating the word “Australia” like a benediction or a lullaby, except for those occasional flashes when he thinks he’s expressed something effectively, when a smirk of such ineffable smugness crosses his face that you wonder whether Billy McMahon could have been so bad.

Down here, of course, there’s King Danute, believed by his loyal online subjects to be capable of turning back the Covid tide by the force of his puffy, rubicund charisma. Best that can be said for Dan Andrews is that he’s less offensive in person than his claque of sycophants, who get massively aroused every time he imposes a lockdown, as though his premiership has been one masterstroke after another. But Andrews doing empathy? It’s like a dog walking on its hind legs.

Lastly, there’s The Woman Who Saved Australia, having fought the good fight for the freedom to buy Louis Vuitton over the woke miserabilists. Except, yeah, maybe she slightly undervalued freedom from death. What possessed anyone to turn Gladys Berejiklian into a plaster saint? Her government has a Health Minister called Hazzard. It’s like naming your vaccine Venom.

But these responses are less concerned with comparative performance than they are with the individuals’ eminent hateability.

Because why wouldn’t we hate them? They offer little but bad news, often poorly and sometimes crushingly couched. They crave credit, delegate and diffuse blame.

In the absence of any other obvious authors of our malaise they will suffice. Hell, you’d be sick of Nelson Mandela by this stage, wouldn’t you? Sure, Madiba. Robben Island, gutsed it out. End of apartheid, big tick. But could we maybe hear from you just a little less often?

We do this in Australia, of course, where our relationship with authority is such a curious mix of obedience and contempt as to beget a state of semi-permanent resentment.

But in this last phase of overlapping lockdowns immiserating 15 million people, which has swept away the mild reassurance that we were doing slightly better than OK compared with the rest of the world, the disgruntlement has grown less focused, more general, oddly random.

It’s that annoyance you feel as someone passes by sans mask, or stands a little close in a queue. It’s that discomfort you experience in fumbling for a neutral conversational topic that does not trespass on privacy.

Increasingly, an outcome of a self-focus born of long isolation, it manifests as the smouldering fury at anyone experiencing anything that looks like a privilege or even just pleasure. Don’t they know there’s a viral war going on? Nobody should be enjoying anything until everyone can.

Melburnians, for example, spy Sydney’s porous lockdowns and think: what a joke on the rest of us. The feeling is magnified on others’ behalfs, specifically our children’s. After all, has there ever been a challenge to Australians where the welfare of those over 80 has been set so far ahead of those under 25?

The indignation, fuelled by mainstream media and ignited by social media, also locks on the target du jour, who sometimes aren’t even targets, just people with troubles of their own. Australians marooned overseas. Refugees in limbo. Athletes struggling in bubbles. Academics being downsized. Artists falling by the wayside. Should we care about them? Should we heck. We have our own problems. And someone must pay for them.

Perhaps this is a peculiarity of the crisis, which necessitated our remaining apart. The disease disconnected us; now we are feeling the effects of that alienation. We could not go to one another’s aid; now we have lost the instinct. We can’t think of anyone else; we have nothing left to offer. All we have to warm us is our anger, seething away.