JE SUIS MONIS

"This was a defining moment for me now. If I agreed that Monis was the stooge of some ‘hidden hand’ or secret Cabal, I would, reflexively, become Tajour’s stooge as well. In the kingdom of the bland, the one idea man is king, and I resisted the simplistic solution as I resisted a girl giving up her seat for me on a Melbourne tram. Until now, I’d never given much thought to the Lindt café siege circus. Yes, it seemed like a kindergarten diorama to showcase a contained ‘show-down’ between ‘crazy’ fundamentalism and ‘virtuous’ capitalism, with just the right amount of terror – not too much (that would invite accusations of laxity), nor too little (that could not then justify draconian measures of control). If it looks like a turd, smells like a turd, well, chances are, it’s a turd.
But there was something else going on with that ‘siege’ – something altogether more human and desperate that didn’t fit the false flag signature. For one thing, there was the compelling venue – Martin Place was the site where Queen Bee commerce swept into her mandibles the harried drones that fed it. The corporate insects emerged from the subway to face the implacable forces that defined and ruled them – the Banks, the Stock Exchange (cruelly placed at the end of the mall), and, on their right, they might be granted a squinting glimpse through the filtered sunlight of the glass canyons, the cathedrals of the Law, as they soared, mercilessly crushing any thought of rebellion. The only refuge here as they clamber out of their dazed confusion is to the left – the Lindt café – a haven in this confluence, where the modern financial sector was to confront the still-born teratogenic creature it had itself birthed, in the manner and sly ironic slant of the 2001 Wall Street ‘attack’.
Abbott, had, absurdly, made it all about the disruption to the ‘average Australian’s’ morning coffee break, appealing to the common man’s need for respite – the only nectar of human scale habitat to be savoured between the Harbour and hard labour, between Botany and the Beast, between the Rocks and a Martin Place, was the café. The café, opposite a TV network HQ, was the perfect choice for an unfolding melodrama that pitted the inept against the inert, the pathetic against the pitiless, the idealistic against the idea-less. Monis, it seemed to me, had simply snapped, and his rage against the machine was as heartfelt as it was agnostic, in a way, as he sought to localise and hold down all the anonymous forces that impinged on him and rendered him ineffectual and powerless. In this way, he had a chance to extinguish them for a time, or at least suspend their operation on his psyche for one prolonged gasp, so that, for a sound-bite at least, his adopted country might acknowledge its deepest insanity, turn back and forgive him. In this he was Everyman Monis, and his religion largely irrelevant, as clearly, his religion held no answers; the Arabic script on a flag precariously held up at the café window no match for the typographic eye-candy and scrolling commentary that gilded the newscasts.
In the beginning was the Media, and the Media was with God and the Media was God.
If Monis had achieved anything, it was that for a moment, we could all see that one man was not satisfied, was not content, was not sanctified by the unctuous ministrations of the Beast, and that the thing that gnawed away at our souls was something no draughts of coffee or proffered treats or chocolate titbits could ever assuage."

From 'Je Suis Monis'