Sensitive readers, does every glimpse and mention in the news of Donald Trump make your flesh creep, turn your stomach, deepen your fear and loathing of the USA and cost you sleep?
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If you have answered a shuddering heartfelt "Yes!" to any of that omnibus question then is there a case, in this presidential year, for your ignoring/avoiding/quickly turning off all news mentions of that malignant, sociopathic man?
But wait! To do such a thing will make you that much-researched creature the "news avoider", a piece in the growing phenomenon of "news avoidance".
News avoidance research finds some of us avoiding all news all of the time and some of us practicing "selective avoidance". Sensitive reader, if you are a selective news avoider, what sorts of news has you ducking and weaving and switching-off?
As a career journalist and a slavish news lover I am quite shocked at myself for even thinking of selectively avoiding news of Trump.
But the troublesome trend of news avoidance is a great giant squid of a thing now and it should come as no surprise to find oneself reached by some of its umpteen tentacles.
It is a worldwide phenomenon and Google (just type in "news avoidance") can take you to oodles of statistics of its growth and might.
Here in Australia, the University of Canberra's Digital News Report Australia 2023 found 69 per cent of Australians reporting they avoid the news, occasionally, sometimes or often, marking a 12 percentage point increase in news avoidance among Australians since 2017.
Researched "avoiders" give all sorts of explanations for their avoidings, including of course the ways in which terrible news of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and of our poor climate-monstered planet coming to the boil leaves us horrified and fearful.
"What is the point," avoiders respond, "of being well-informed about horrors we can do nothing about?"
Inexplicably (but perhaps because I am a slave to news) while I dream of blotting out news of Trump it would never occur to me to avoid news of wars and of climate catastrophe. I have a vague sense of there being a kind of duty, perhaps a duty to democracy, to be as well-informed as possible about as much as possible.
My selective difficulty with Trump news is that I find everything about Trump and the Trump phenomenon (millions of his Christian supporters believe he has been sent by God!) harmfully disgusting. It has impacts on my health (the sight and sound of him sets up gastrointestinal sensations quite like food poisoning) and seems harmful to my soul.
Avoiding all news of him would make me feel better in mind and body. And yet that selective avoidance would bring with it ravages of guilt about not being well-informed about a momentous matter, this US presidential race with its ramifications for all mankind. What to do?
Perhaps this particular dark night of the soul would not be so dark and despairing for an Australian if Australians were entitled to vote in US elections. Then, able to vote for anyone, anything but Trump, we might not feel so helpless.
And since we, Australians, are so poodle-loyal to the US and so caught up in what the US does (and our joining in the AUKUS pact plonks us deeper in the US's warlike lap) we surely should have a democratic say in the choice of the president who is bound to exploit our shameful poodleness.
While on the subject of votes and voting (and I look forward to consuming, voraciously, even the tiniest titbits of news of the forthcoming ACT election) I return to this column's recent, intellectually-acclaimed suggestion of an ACT electoral reform.
To recap - exposure to the arts so improves, tenderises and educates a citizen (as I evangelised after coming away thrilled and enthralled from the National Gallery's Emily Kam Kngwarray major exhibition) that he or she becomes a special asset to their city. Certainly he or she, humanised and arts-tenderised to everything in Life, becomes a better voter.
ACT governments should reward this. One reward could be the giving to proven arts-goers two votes in ACT elections.
MORE WARDEN:
I mention this brainwave again, now, because I am counting the sleeps until next Sunday evening I bustle into St Paul's church in Manuka for a performance of J S Bach's Cantata182 Himmelsknig, sei willkommen (King of Heaven, welcome).
My point is that just as going to the Emily Kam Kngwarray exhibition made me a better person and hence a better voter, the overtly spiritual experience of going to a Bach cantata (and in an actual church), will further burnish my character. It should help entitle me and all similarly qualified arts-aficionados to exert an influence on ACT public life more commensurate with what the improving arts have improved us into.
It is time to overthrow the tyranny of the arts-abhorring majority, those philistines who wouldn't know a Bach cantata if one popped up among their Chicken McNuggets (said to be philistines' staple food).
The bad democratic habit of one man one vote has failed us. Just look at the sorts of people it elects! Let the progressive ACT (where other sorts of elitism and meritocracy already deservedly flourish) usher in the concept of, yes, one common man one vote but one cultivated man two votes - at least.
Ian Warden is a Canberra Times columnist
Ian Warden is a Canberra Times columnist
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