The Rapture: Australia Undone

  There was a wormhole to another time, this time. The Prime Minister was cloistered in his plush offices down in Canberra, surrounded by sycophants, isolated from the real world. In a cascading series of comedowns, Anthony Albanese was now regularly given the hotly contested prize for worst Prime Minister in Australian history, outpacing his predecessors, first Malcolm Turnbull, then Scott Morrison. Australia had been so savagely mishandled for so long nobody ever really expected anything else. There was no integrity. There was no honesty. And nothing breached that wall of sycophants. The most scripted Prime Minister in history, forewarned of the possibility of even a remotely difficult question, the gaggle of journalists at press conferences culled and vetted. So no difficult question, no accountability, nothing ever got through to highlight the anodyne performance preceding good old Albo's rush to the nearest bar. Lacking charisma, intellectual capacity, least of all the common ...

  Water flowed over rocks. It was quiet there. Cold by human standards. The population was being poisoned, systematically, not even slowly anymore. Garbage food, supermarkets lined with non-foods.  He watched a woman making the difficult choice between two different sorts of soft drink in the supermarket aisle, clearly a difficult choice, it must have taken her a good five minutes. He encountered her again at the counter, clutching the soft drinks as if they were important, somehow. Perhaps they were for her grandchildren. Perhaps, more likely, she had nothing better to do than shop, life empty, the suburbs dry; everything drained of meaning, any sense of purpose or community. The nation itself was cold and disordered. They babbled about climate change through another cold summer; the odd hot day barely alleviating the farce for a second.  It was all BS, everything they were fed; the propaganda, the food, the meaningless aisles of chips and crackers, an entire aisle dedic...