The world is a vampire...

...but not one of those sparkly ones with the '80s rock band haircut and a thing for unremarkable white trash goth chicks.

Don't panic. I'm not interested in jumping on the Twilight-bashing bandwagon that trundles noisily around the Internet every time a new movie gets released, the stars appear on Letterman or the guy who plays the werewolf takes his shirt off again. I've seen two of the movies (the first was watchable but not my thing, the second was as much fun as herpes) and I've cracked the cover on one of the books. I got no further than page five, but I'm more of a Cormack McCarthy kinda reader than a Stephenie Meyer guy. So that's more about preference.
What really interests me is how a thirty-something mum in a conservative corner of the United States managed to turn one of fiction's most terrifying monsters into an object of romantic fantasy. And not just a Hugh Grant kinda romantic hero with his "er, um, I rather, you know, ah, that is to say" waffle, but one they can really get weird about.

Seriously, women completely lose their luggage over this stuff. Some just read it and move on, but others start websites, get tattoos, stalk the actors and generally act like teenagers seeing Justin Bieber for the first time (and for the BieberHaters out there, he's no more or less annoying than Justin Timberlake, N-Sync, David Cassidy or Leif Garrett in their day. This too shall pass). There are T-shirts available in little girl sizes with logos like "Forget princess, I wanna be a vampire!" There are screaming hordes of women in their thirties wherever the stars of the movies make an appearance. Someone made women's underwear with pictures of Edward the Vampire's face printed on them as a gag, and was immediately deluged with requests to buy them. Call me conservative, but THIS. IS. NOT. NORMAL.

But is it really about vampires?

Such is the pervasiveness of Bram Stokers original tale that people now know more vampire lore than they know their own national history. Everyone knows how to finish a vampire (stake through the heart), keep one at bay (crosses, garlic, running water) or kill their physical form (silver bullet). And if you're thinking "Wait, isn't that werewolves?" I think I just made my point. Since one of the earliest film versions in 1922 ("Nosferatu", an unauthorised rip of Stoker's book), we've been exposed to vampire mythology through hundreds of films. Dracula was famously played by Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee, such that both were identified with the character most of their careers. The 1970s saw the Count Yorga films, a slightly different interpretation of vampires but still close to the original tale. Salem's Lot and The Lost Boys gave two different takes on the genre in the '80s (notably introducing the "hip young vampire" cliche), while Interview with the Vampire in the '90s brought us the idea of "Vampire as victim" with Tom Cruise's sympathetic portrayal. Woven through it have been innumerable other angles, including comedy ("Dracula: dead and loving it"), race ("Blacula"), gender ("Vampyres", about two lesbian vampires and no, it doesn't get any better than that), martial arts ("The legend of the Seven Golden Vampires") and action-adventure (Buffy and all her spin-offs). This overexposure has made vampires part of global culture, more familiar than any other character besides Elvis (though had he survived, no doubt he would have done a vampire film uh huh). Any fear we might have had of vampires faded long ago, powerless before Buffy's gag-a-minute dialogue, Leslie Nielsen's slapstick goofballery and the devastating tag-team power of Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise, turning the Monster into the Object Of Desire one smouldering look at a time. And if you still doubt that the vampire myth has been completely de-fanged? Just watch One, ONE Wonderful Episode of Sesame Street, ah, ah, ah.

Dracula wasn't the only monster brought to life by western literature. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was one of the earliest horror tales that made its way into popular culture. Written by Shelley at just 19 years of age, it's now better known than anything her more famous (at the time) husband Percy ever wrote. In its day it was a tale that played on people's fears of the Industrial Revolution, and the first inkling of the fallibility of religion. It's called "The Modern Prometheus," a reference to the fashioning of the first woman from clay. The idea that Man could bring life to dead flesh horrified people, not just for squeamish reasons but because it called into question the very idea of God.
But what is it best known for now? Herman Munster, and Lurch, the butler in the Addams Family. Time and overexposure has turned fear and loathing into goofball cliche.

And Stoker's original Dracula was a story of equal power. The vampires didn't glow, didn't form happy, functional familes and get around in period costume, and they certainly didn't fall in love with misfit teens. What they DID do was treat humanity the way we treat cows or sheep; with a casual contempt for life and freedom. In Stoker's tale, the arrival of Dracula in London was a calamity, more akin to the coming of the Black Death than the appearance of a nice young chap with an eye for dull schoolgirls. The heroes of the story are the mortals who try to fight the menace in their midst, risking their lives to stop a monster they barely understand, and cannot hope to match. Yet anyone will tell you that this tale is the seed from which Twilight sprang, right?

Wrong.

Consider this simple plot:

A terrifying menace appears in distant lands. People are violently killed; survivors realise the menace must be stopped before it reaches civilisation. They race against time to prevent a catastrophe.

What's the story? There are a hundred answers or more: it neatly describes Alien, Outbreak, 28 Days Later, Life Force, The Swarm, Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain (or just about any other Michael Crichton story), Them, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and countless others. It's a popular theme, and one that will no doubt stay with us as long as there are cinemas.

Now try this one:

A powerful but lonely man falls in love with an unremarkable but good-hearted woman. Circumstances force them apart, but the strength of his love for her sees him fight through all obstacles, defeat a rival for her affections and win her heart.

Sound familiar? It's Bridget Jones (and its sequel), it's Pretty Woman, Cinderella, Snow White, My Fair Lady, An Officer and a Gentlemen, Pride and Prejudice and probably every trashy romance novel ever written. It's no less popular a theme than the whole 'uh-oh, apocalypse' story above (though perhaps with a different audience), and has kept the Mills and Boon crew making pink-covered books for a long time.

You can see where this is going. Bram Stoker's Dracula fits squarely into the first category. The original Count Dracula is a malevolent evil, determined to reach the fertile feeding grounds of 19th-century London, where he and his kind can feed on humanity forever. There is no love around the vampire character, no romance; he is the darkness in a story with precious little light.

And Twilight? If you picked it as plot number two, help yourself to a prize from the second shelf. It's a teen romance film, about a powerful figure who devotes his life to protecting a fairly innocuous woman because (I am reliably informed), she smells nice and he can't read her mind. I've seen guys fall in love because the girl owns an X-Box, so I'm not about to criticise. The hero can be Snow White's prince, Elizabeth Bennett's rich gentleman-about-town (ever noticed nobody seems to have jobs in Jane Austen books?), the fighter pilot of An Officer And A Gentleman, Julia Roberts' billionaire businessman (oh look, Richard Gere again) or Bridget Jones' well-connected diplomat chap, it matters not: he simply needs to be strong and influential and willing to devote his valuable time and resources to the unlikely focus of his romantic desires. Perhaps the story's popularity reflects every woman's desire to be loved for simply being herself. Or maybe it reflects a desire to have a strong protector, or to be fought over by weirdly, implausibly, air-brushedly handsome guys. I dunno.

None of this really matters here, because the point I'm trying to make is that Twilight is Not A Vampire Film. There might be vampires in it, but that's incidental. It's a Lonely Hero/Girl Next Door tale, same as thousands that have gone before. Stephenie Meyer's master-stroke, inadvertent though it may have been, was to build on the portrayal of vampires as Romantic figures cursed by their immortality, and to weave it in with the simplest elements of every little girl's dream of being carried away by the handsome Prince/Knight/Lawyer/fighter pilot/other masculine figure. Decades of exposure drained the horror from vampires, and made them as good a hero figure as any, a concept unimaginable when the myth was first presented to our eyes. Anna Paquin and her many half-naked co-stars in True Blood have completed the emasculation, solidifying the idea of vampires as simply misguided, in need of nothing more than a good woman to set them straight.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it. People like these books, and more folks reading can hardly be a bad thing. I'm simply saying that sparkly Edward and his girl troubles are a long, looong way from the bleak castle in Romania where we first met a vampire.

And if it still doesn't seem strange? Imagine replacing the vampire in Twilight with the Scary Monsters of our own time. Putting Bella in the arms of Edward the Vampire is like putting her in the arms of Ridley Scott's Alien. Or if the species gap makes this seem a bit strange, try putting a zombie from 28 Days Later in the role of romantic hero. If Twilight's anything to go by, you'll only need to wait fifty years or so for the first zombie romance movie.

That's enough democracy, thank you

Apparently Winston Churchill once said "Democracy is the worst possible system of government, except for all the others." He was a persuasive chap, enough that he was able to convince most of Britain to put down their teacups and croquet mallets long enough to fight a six-year war. He couldn't pry enough people away from Facebook to do it again I suspect, but hopefully the other side will have the same problem, so we should be right.

Now that Australia finally has a government again (apparently the country was on cruise control for a while there), we can look back on the democratic free-for-all of the last few weeks and ask ourselves, "Wait, what?" Several questions pose themselves, such as how the hell the Labour mob can get 38% to the Liberals' 49%, yet still end up running the show. Or how two guys from electorates where NOT voting Liberal/National will see you taken behind the woodshed can side with Labour. And most of all, how often we seem to end up with 149 calm, rational, reasonably intelligent people in parliament and one screaming, ranting, poo-flinging nutbag with the deciding vote on everything. We should be allowed to take back our votes if we see our elected members acting like chimpanzees after they're elected. Maybe we could call it the Katter Clause.
When we vote, it's a bit like when we install stuff on our computers. There's a pretty picture, then a "Would you like to install this thingy?" message, then we click yes and we get this wall of text come at us with a "Do you agree?" message at the bottom. It's called a EULA, or End User Licence Agreement, and it tells us what we're agreeing to when we say yes (the EULA for Windows 7  gives Bill Gates ownership rights on one of your kidneys and a fairly solid claim on your soul I believe, but hey, have you seen the interface on that thing!? The colors, the patterns! Hell, I got two kidneys, sign me up!) Voting is a similar sort of thing; even though all you have to do at the ballot box is put a couple of ticks, you're agreeing to a process that's so complicated even the government had to phone the helpdesk after the last election.

Worryingly, there's nothing in that manual about what to do when we can't tell who's won. Last time it happened, everyone just sort of stood around looking at each other and glancing uncertainly at the big office in parliament. The previous prime minister still had his stuff in there, so everyone agreed to just wait a bit and see what happened, so he wouldn't have to go find a box to put it in. This time round they said they were following "unwritten constitutional conventions", which is NewSpeak for "making it up as we go along."

It's a bit odd that they haven't already covered this in the constitution (seriously, that thing is huge), especially since we've had hung state parliaments 1968, 1989, 1991, 1995, 1999, 2002 and 2008. We had a federal hung parliament in 1940, which was awesome timing; with the Japanese heading our way to get rid of all that democratic election nonsense, the government of the day didn't have time for any Oakeshotting at press conferences. They put something in place quick smart and got us back into the fight with not a moment to spare, barely getting troops to Singapore in time to join the surrender. We were (and still are) involved in a foreign war at the last election, but unless the Taliban have a half-dozen aircraft carriers in a cave near Kandahar, I'm guessing they won't be menacing Port Moresby any time soon.
Not being threatened with invasion gives us the luxury of deciding at our own pace. By which I mean the independents' pace, and you better believe our friends Katter, Oakeshott and Windsor hung on to the limelight as long as they could. Waiting for their answer was like watching some dunce on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire decide whether cupcakes were traditionally decorated with a) icing or b) rat poison. And they'd already Asked The Audience; that was what got us into this mess in the first place. They got there in the end though, and we seemed to get along just fine in the meantime, despite the apparent lack of a government.

So how the heck did we end up with a system like this? It can't happen in a lot of countries; our friends in the United States elect one person, who then gets a bunch of his mates to help him decide what to do. They don't even have to be voted for; he can choose ex-generals, academics or even former rivals. France does something similar, although their president has to pick a prime minister from the people who actually got elected. In both cases, there's a bloke at the top (and so far it's always been a bloke) who gets elected by the people, then chooses a crew to run the place. We can't really do that because (technically) we're run by the queen, and we don't get to vote for her. Might be interesting if we did; my guess is Her Majesty would be politely moved along to make way for Kylie.
So why don't we go with what the Yanks and the French do? The answers pretty simple: they had to go through a whole world of hurt to get to where they are now.

The United States has a constitution, same as us. After their argument with Britain in 1776, they had to find something to replace colonial oppression as a system of government. They threw something together straight away, but apparently it wasn't much good, so they got together in 1789 to try to fix it. A month later they realised it was just a mess, so they started again from scratch and wrote a whole new constitution. Theirs is pretty nice; they've still got the original handwritten version, with "We the people" in cool curly writing at the top. It covers everything from how old you have to be to be president right down to who's allowed to make coins. France did something similar; they got so sick of the king running the show that they cut his head off, then cut his family's heads off, then the king's mates' heads, the heads of people who thought cutting off heads was a bit rough, and a few more to round out the tally to somewhere between 16,000 and 40,000. This period of enlightenment came to be called The Terror; it was followed by a wonderful time in France's history in which they got power-slammed by every other country in Europe after Napoleon tried to wheel the head-cutting-off apparatus into a few other countries around the continent.

So when Australia came to build a system of government, we had a good look at the way everyone else had done it before we put quill to parchment. Nobody was keen to fight a war with the United Kingdom, though that was mainly to stop Mel Gibson making some awful movie about it a hundred years later. We weren't keen on the whole French cutting-heads-off thing either, mainly because we didn't have 40,000 people we could do without. So after a good look round, we realised that the strongest, most stable democracy around the place was the good old United Kingdom Of Great Britain.

Handily, we spoke a similar language to them back then. We also had a few ex-pats from the old country, busily expanding their prisons to make room for the next round of immigrants. Less conveniently, there wasn't anything resembling a clear constitution. The rules for running the UK were more like a first-year English essay, with lots of crossed-out bits and notes in the margin and flip-action doodles in the corners. Still, it had survived a civil war and a couple of slightly unhinged monarchs, so people still thought it was a fairly solid model. The states threw in a couple of bits pinched from the US constitution (notably equal numbers of senators from each state, which is why the whole country sometimes ends up getting run by space cadets and boy scouts from Tasmania). Minor changes aside, we're now run under the same cobbled-together patchwork system of government that's kept the UK rattling along noisily but relatively happily for the past few hundred years.

But I suspect the real reason we chose the same system is simple: we had to ask permission.

After we came up with a plan, we had to go up to Queen Victoria and ask her nicely if we could go play outside on our own. We hadn't lopped our monarch's head off, or booted him out at gunpoint, so legally we had to ask if it was okay to be a country. It seemed to work pretty well too; Queen Victoria gave us the nod, we came up with a nice flag and a suitably dreary national anthem and we were away. There was a pretty scary episode in 1975 (note the bit about the queen not wanting to get involved), but aside from that we've done pretty well under the current system. It's clunky, it's flawed, it's got holes in it big enough to drive Kevin Rudd's ego through, but it works.

And if it means we can avoid revolutions, guillotines, wars, and presidents who pronounce 'nuclear' as 'nucular', then it'll do me just fine. Bob Katter may be a bit special, but he's just one guy, and the other 149 people in there with him should be enough to keep him from declaring war on "the poof population". We're safe, we're successful, and we're blessedly free of any radical groups who might take advantage of our dodgy back-of-an-envelope constitution to take us down a less moderate path.

Democracy as we practise it in Australia may not be perfect, but if the state of the nation is any clue, then it's perfect for us.