If I Ever Feel Better

I haven’t been watching The Hollowmen on the ABC up to this point.  The comments I’d heard from people who worked with me in my government days weren’t glowing and I wondered if it was a great concept with flawed execution.  But this week, a lot of people have been talking about the show going where I have been so many times - the listing of a new drug on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.

As someone who’s worked for the government on pharmaceutical issues and for Big Pharma on government issues, how could I resist watching a TV show about it?  Fortunately, the episodes are available for download and, if you’re interested, you can get an insight into what my life has been like the last three years.

Not that it’s spot on in every way.  The Working Dog guys are pretty smart and they get the process - and the ultimate solution - spot on.  The main thing that doesn’t ring true is the visit to the pharmaceutical company itself.  It’s a little bit too much like the public perception, rather than the reality of 2008 where money is a little bit tighter.

It’s just so strange watching a TV show and thinking “I’ve been in that meeting.”

In August 2004, I bought a TV.  My housemate Kerry had departed for Canada, taking with her the set she had borrowed from a friend.

“I’m not going to get one,” said both my remaining housemates.  “I never watch TV.”

So I forked out $500 for a big CRT and there it sat in our living room with my DVD player and my VCR and somewhere in there I forgot to watch it.  Mostly I found that with working full-time and trying to have a social life and reading and listening to music, I didn’t really care about the telly much.  But my housemates who “never watch TV” got plenty of use out of it.

When I moved to Sydney last year, I couldn’t even plug the thing in to the aerial socket because the cord was too short.  I watched some shows on DVD, but I never watched anything new and when it screened.

“Have you seen that new show?” I get asked occasionally.

“Nah, my TV isn’t even plugged in to the antenna,” I say.

Well, I finally bit the bullet.  Maybe it’s because Flight of the Conchords has started screening.  Maybe it’s because talking about how I never watch TV doesn’t even impress me anymore.  But I now have a TV that gets four channels of shitty reception.  Progress.

Last night I watched Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion documentary and I guess it was what you’d expect.  Dawkins writes well (his evolution books are good reads) and his public presentation is also impressive.  He has such a reasonable, likeable demeanour and his documentary is so well constructed, it must be easy to miss what a load of bullshit it mostly is.

The substance of his argument is as follows: religion makes you not think for yourself, not thinking for yourself means blindly following authority, blindly following authority leads to suicide bombings.

A small problem with this is that - especially for a humanist - Dawkins has surprisingly little faith in humanity, or at least the segment that follow religion.  It’s as if he believes the moment that someone believes, they actually switch off all critical faculties.  He’s never experienced religious faith, so he doesn’t understand it.  And he is more than willing to attribute all the bad in human nature to religion and retain all the good for rational belief.  As if every religious believer is one sermon away from jihad and every free-thinker is protected from evil acts by their superior critical faculties.

He’s quite disingenuous too: the way he interviews a fundamentalist Muslim, who converted from Judaism, and acts surprised that he doesn’t understand Dawkins’ viewpoint is barely believable.  His interview with the poor, oppressed atheists of Colorado really had me reaching for the tissues - the way they “furtively” met out on the balcony of someone’s house sure brought home the point.

And his arguments are often fluffy as hell.  One scene shows a Catholic procession and he says something like “It looks pretty harmless, but isn’t it just the start of a slippery slope to strapping on a backpack full of explosives?”  Ah yes, the old “slippery slope” - a scientifically credible argument verified by rigorous experimental data!

It made me imagine a YouTube response, in which the narrator shows a science lab, with nice women and men in white coats.  “It all looks pretty harmless,” he says, “but isn’t this just the start of a slippery slope to destroying millions of innocent lives in a Fascist eugenics experiment?”

I’m not sure how Dawkins’ plans to rid the world of religion.  The widespread teaching of evolution and enlightenment philosophy doesn’t seem to have killed it.  Banning it hasn’t worked in the countries where it’s been tried.  The problem is that it’s perpetuated by everyday people, rather than simply institutions - and short of Maoist-style “re-education” of all religious elements, I’m not sure how you’d do it.  Dawkins would have to recoil at the idea of a new Inquisition, to weed out “un-scientific” thinkers.

Wouldn’t he?

I’ve been occupying my (temporarily) unemployed self with Series Two of The Office - the US version - and it’s been a source of much joy.  In so many ways it’s the equal of the British original, even if that show holds a very special place in my heart.

When Ricky Gervais’ sitcom first crossed my path, it was 2004, my first year of full-time employment.  So it made a big impact on me, possibly bigger than on most, simply because it expressed two things that were just becoming apparent to me:

1.  How tedious and soul-destroying most office jobs are.

2.  How important your co-workers can become to you.

Point 2 was especially relevant, because at the time I even had my own Dawn/Pam figure - a girl about my age who sat a few desks away.  We ate lunch together every day, played jokes on co-workers, emailed incessantly.  We were comrades in the War on Boredom, teammates in a struggle for sanity.  And she had a long-term boyfriend.

Since then, my friendships with co-workers have involved a lot less infatuation on my part - and much more of an older brother/sister vibe.  But I’m still struck by how much of your life you end up sharing with the people who are placed (largely by accident) near you for eight hours a day.

Perhaps that’s what the US version of The Office has that the original lacked - a sense of the interlocking web of likes and dislikes and annoyances and idiosyncrasies that make up any workplace.

I wonder what my next one will be like.