The Blurt of Richard Davies

Chapter Twenty Six

January the 3rd.

I'm back in the Column for the final meeting of the campaign group before the official launch of the NRP. Typically the Consensus Party have scheduled their launch the day before ours. They have to be first in much the same way as they try to push in to the front of any queue or hog the best seats on public transport, contrary to their supposed communitarian ethos. It's a practice which has somehow become established over the years without anyone realising. Our petty seigneurs view such behaviour as a perfectly justified reward they are entitled to as thanks for the work they do on our behalf. Though whenever some little snot in a ute-suit asks me to vacate my seat for them I tell them in no uncertain terms what they can do with themselves; but many weaker-willed passengers get browbeaten by their attempts to assert their position of supercilious privilege.

Their arrogant insistence on trying to push into the lead so quickly may paradoxically be a small part of their eventual undoing. By going first they are giving us something to respond against. For example their easing of Hazel Dunn from the lead spokespersonship - their equivalent of a party leader - in favour of Lois Merck.

Yes the bitch is back. Unapologetic, unrepentant, still as bitter and twisted as ever she was, if not more so. She's spent quite some time learning to adapt to her disability, her position in the Consensus ensuring she has had the best surgical treatment available for her condition. Even so, she only has limited control over her bladder and bowel; being able to urinate or defecate at the touch of a switch thanks to a remote controlled implant. Barring a miraculous advance in medical science she will never regain any feeling in her lower body, or be able to use her legs unaided again. She can walk after a fashion with the aid of an experimental exoskeleton, which by reading her brain waves translates her thoughts into commands to the servocalipers strapped around her withered legs; but the process is painfully slow, and she finds it tiring to use for more than a short time.

Psychologically she has retreated into a defensive mental construct which has made her the ideal Connie representative. Rather than her direct experience having taught her about the realities of a life lived with a disability; leaving her humbled and better informed, it has instead only intensified her prejudices. Her insistence that everyone, no matter what their circumstances, is capable of overcoming what life throws at them and bettering themselves not only remains, but has been reinvigorated. No better example can be found than the cover image of her autobiography showing her back with the deeply indented scar just above the base of her spine: The book's title; Unbroken.

Yet she has been deeply mentally as well as physically wounded; and she copes with her loss by displacing her anguish against people who she has never met and have done her no wrong. Her philosophy of militant self-improvement is in accord with Consensus policy, so since her re-entry to public life she has been a member of the Council with a specific brief to advise on social policy.

Against such an assertive, forcefully intense personality such as Lois Merck's, Hazel Dunn didn't stand a chance. Dunn is a mousey, characterless, starchily authoritarian technocrat; perfectly suited to be one of the collective leadership of the Council. She is one of the beige people in an amorphous group who realised that regularly changing their figurehead denied the opposition the ability to personalise the movement; so providing a focus for their resentment - nay hatred - of their policies.

Dunn's short-lived student radicalism and limited experience as a Parliamentary Private Secretary; the most junior of government posts during the dying months of the last of the old-style governments, was something which could be overlooked and quietly downplayed during the mandate of the Council; but now such a record would be an obvious liability in the rumbustious politicking which is bound to come. Her links - however distant - to the discredited politics of the past fail to reflect the radical aspirations of the Consensus Party, and it was whispered that not only under her chairpersonship had the Consensus begun to drift slightly, but she was beginning to lose her grip on reality; though that isn't unusual among Council members.