Whenever I walk outside at night I like to take the time to
stare at the sky. I am lucky where I live to be afforded with a clear sky that
is abundant with stars. A lack of light pollution presents a wonder above that
is easy to dismiss yet hard to comprehend. The lights we see above us are
impossibly far away and yet can be so bright to our eyes. Without wanting to go
full Neil DeGrasse Tyson, from our simple vantage we can look millions of years
into the past.
This strange angle of reality has hit home for me recently
as I have seen a weird personal story morph into minor online notoriety. Many
if not all of the people reading this will know, I saw Mark Latham wearing a
dirty polo and oversized shorts at the PM’s XI in Canberra three years ago. This
statement, on its own, means almost nothing. It is a happenstance in a single
person’s life. Yet sharing this personal moment brought a certain level of joy
to some people. And repeating this moment through increasingly different or
politically relevant lenses brought the moment to a greater audience.
I know how wanky it is to refer to twitter followers but it
is very weird to me that on the back of a single joke, however differently
expressed, I have gone in the space of less than a year from around 300 followers
to nearly 3,000. Having this larger audience has made me think more about what
its value is if your only contribution is a (very) short story about seeing a
public figure looking less than publicly acceptable. It’s so dumb, and endlessly
surprising to me just how much people have bought into it, but in light of
recent events I hope it has a lasting value.
Mark Latham is now a member of the NSW senate. There are so
many people that are more qualified than myself to comment on his shortcomings
on race or sex or sexuality or religion. I know enough to know that he falls
short on each of those things and that I’m not the guy to call it out. Yet with
my very minor reach I hope that I have made enough people aware of his strange indiscretions
of public fashion that it makes it difficult for him to express himself publicly without someone reminding him of his sartorial choices at a cricket match in
Canberra on 20 January 2016. If my posts have any success at all, the man
himself will feel apprehension before considering going to any cricket match at
all because someone will ask him about the dirty polo. I hope this otherwise
inconsequential decision will continually have consequences for him.
Mark Latham has a level of power now that he hasn’t wielded
for well over a decade. There are avenues to take on his views that are far
more direct than the tactic I’ve taken. Barring some disaster, he will be a NSW
Senator for the next eight years. It is impossible to predict what sort of
destruction he will cause through his anachronistic views in that
time. What I do hope is that there are
enough people that follow me and spread my posts about him that there will
always be a level of criticism and cynicism and silliness that follows him
everywhere.
As far as I know I am one of the few people he has ever
blocked on twitter. It wasn’t because I was overly aggressive or abusive toward
him. It was because I got under his skin. More than being abused what he hates most
is being humiliated. He will never stop being an awful person, but he can be
diminished by enough people continuing to remind him of what a small and awful
person he is.
The stars in the sky might appear to be impossibly far away.
They may seem completely out of reach. But you never know how big your reach is
or how bright those stars are until you test it. Mark Latham wore a dirty polo
and oversized shorts to the PM’s XI in Canberra three years ago and don’t ever
let him forget it.
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