The Australian Bureau of Meteorology today made a commendable move by spotting a media opportunity (and symbiotic public interest), gathering recent weather data, and compiling it for media consumption. What has brought this on? Well, if you haven't noticed... um... it's hot, outside. Really hot. And it's Winter! Not even Spring - but Winter!  And I, for one, have been thoroughly enjoying it - you too, right? But, should we be? Today’s media reports admittedly give us a reminder that even some of the most cultured of us probably need to keep in mind. “Um, hello?” says the concerned scientists at the meteorology bureau; “Something is wrong, here!” Climate change, anyone?

 

Laughter can be cruel. We all know that – I’m sure every single one of us, at some point in our life (for some, many points) have been laughed at. To remember it, is to remember the emotional wound – whether brief, or that lingering, subconscious kind. And it really does come down to that cliché conceptual division, between laughing "at" someone and laughing "with" them. Truth be told, we don’t laugh with each other nearly enough; but it’s lovely when it happens - a true empathetic kind of joy, and decidedly healthy. Very different, of course, to laughing at someone. That is sadism. We find it first in young teens, who, in their evolving socialisation, take a brutal, blatant pleasure in the misfortune and chastising of others. Some would say it’s a kind of developmental phenomenon, a by-product of the mechanism of empathy being something we are not born with but grow into – as if sadism should become slowly eradicated, as we learn it is “wrong” on the basis of understanding how it makes its victims feel. Or, perhaps, it is a reactionary phenomenon, a kind of cornered or threatened mechanism, a way to attack those who we feel attack us in some way. At times, it’s probably either or both these dynamics. But human beings are, there’s no doubt about it, seemingly challenged when it comes to empathy for others, as well as rather territorial. And “comedy” – the process of eliciting laughter – has long been a favourite weapon for threatened societies who are unable to transcend the divides of that perception of threat. In the war years of my Great Grandmother, beautiful everyday Aussies sang the most horrendous comedy songs about the Asians they fought against in the war (cultural or otherwise). “I like Chinese” – bizarrely destined to be rewritten as the commercial theme for an electronics retail giant owned by Chinese Australians (“I like Bing Lee”) – was a crass tune punning the advent of the Chinese restaurants (how bizarre to think that these symbolised the perceived invasion) with literally eating Chinese people. Racism meets cannibalism – charming. And this week, all these progressive years later, we had the Chk Chk Boom Girl™. Wogs of the world, beware; we’re not that much further than 1955 as you would think.