(Image: Tom Red/Private Media)

The simplest proposition one could put about the last few months of the COVID crisis would be this:

One, the federal government failed to create a rapid and comprehensive vaccination plan when it was clear that this was the only thing that would get us clear of this thing.

Two, we remain thus, perpetually on the edge of lockdown, and will be for some time.

Three, the situation is clearly and absolutely the federal government’s fault. I state the bleeding obvious here, because what should follow that undeniable sequence hasn’t: a widespread, multi-partisan, deep-running anger at the federal government.

Yes, I know they’ve taken a hit in the polls. But it’s a 53-47 sort of hit, not even close to a repudiation of the government itself. Even if you responded that that is a judgement on the opposition, not the government, well, where’s the anger, the basic first order reaction? I mean I’m not asking this rhetorically, or in some feeble attempt to rouse people to action. I really mean, what could possibly be the reason why there hasn’t been some sort of unitary anger at this failure?

I know that the above verges on the bleeding obvious, but sometimes a restatement of the most basic facts is a necessary thing. This is not a question about voter apathy on “important matters”, which usually turn out to be matters of structural governance far beyond the comprehension of many. This is the prospect of a year or more — more — of being locked down every time more than half-a-dozen cases arise in any given location.

It’s the prospect of being far less prepared — not only for the Delta variant, with its evolved capacity to get around our pre-vaccine measures, but the prospect of the sigma, tau, rho, epsilon and alpha alpha variants (we’re already up to lambda), which will have their own special tricks.

These are our lives we’re talking about, and lockdown is a temporary form of what’s called “bare life”, the notion that the state can just flick the switch and turn the full life of citizenship into the mere life of living on. True, there is something karmic about it happening to Australia. We’ve pioneered the use of bare life as a form of existential torture, and now we have had to turn it on ourselves. Far lighter in many ways, but the essence of such torture is that the only thing to do with the wasted time of your life is to contemplate the wasting time as it wastes.

So why aren’t a large number of people at a pitch of anger about this vast failure, this wholly unnecessary futility? Why instead are the only active protesters the ones who specifically reject the means by which their freedom — both liberty and freedom from harm — could be achieved, preferring a fantasy notion of a society of “pre-scientific” bodies, bounded, separate and uninvolved?

The acceptance of pre-vaccine lockdowns was simple, rational stoicism. One could question specific measures (was an 8pm curfew really necessary, or just policing?) while committing to the whole. The lockdowns now — one can feel their pure superfluity, in absolute terms. There is a clear cause and effect relationship between the government’s failure and our plight. Politics involves the mass act of connecting cause to effect and taking action accordingly. Why isn’t it happening?

The abstract separation of cause and effect could be one explanation offered. This isn’t like being locked out of a workplace or seeing the cops beat someone up. There’s vaccines, there’s not vaccines; there’s lockdowns, they all happen separately. But then, classes and parties have always been able to make that connection.

Reading a bit more into the 1961 credit squeeze for last week’s Megalogenis review, one is struck by the steady build of the reaction, from the point at which interest rates start to climb, and there is a realisation that the government has stuffed it up — and done so through a mix of ham-fisted incompetence and lack of care. The reaction builds all the way to the election and the Coalition survives by the barest whisper.

But that simple cause-effect relation underpinning politics appears to cease at some point. If I had to guess a moment when it happens in Australia I’d have to say either the 2007 sacking of the Howard government, overwhelmingly for imposing WorkChoices; or, as a lesser final moment, of Rudd-Gillard in 2013, for the imposition of a carbon tax that had, arguably, not been flagged in the 2010 campaign.

But the 2013 moment is far more provisional than the 2007 moment. And after 2013, it really starts to go kablooey across the world. The rolling PMs in Australia, Trump in the US, Brexit in the UK. Demonstrative politics in one way, utterly symbolic in another. Is this an era in which mediation has become so layered that the practice of linking cause and effect, as politics, is buried?

Does a mass anger and protest not emerge because the Labor opposition has not made the case? Were the mainstream newspapers and TV news to have a full front page/first story labelling the vaccine rollout “a failure, a disgrace and a betrayal”, would Labor have then taken that line? But of course we now have a 100% right-wing, large-scale private media. So that would only happen against Labor.

This surely represents a new degree of the disconnect between politics and society, and the further atomisation of the latter. Is this something COVID has done, with its socially atomising effects?

Or is COVID the first major event to have occurred in a time when events themselves have ceased to be understood as such?