David Burchell, Barack Obama, and the Delphic oracle of sages and seers

(Above: Echo and Narcissus, by English nineteenth century painter John William Waterhouse, but which one is a metaphor for Obama and the other for David Burchell?)

As perhaps the only certified reader of David Burchell's bizarre rants in The Australian - would any sensible person outside the perimeter of loon pond confess to being a devotee? - Monday is now a regular source of pontificating prattle that threatens to topple Gerard Henderson from his throne as Polonius, wordy worthy exponent of needless verbosity and excruciatingly flabby analysis.

How's this for an opener for In love with his own reflection, when in fact the entire column might best have been summarised as "I don't like Barack Obama or his personality or his policies"?

Nothing could be more difficult, the ancient sages tell us, than the simple business of being yourself. For a start, others invariably know us better and more intimately than we do.

They, after all, have the advantage of observing us from the outside, and of assessing our actions and effects serially, as a kind of seamless rhythmic movement, rather like a dancing figure presented by a flicked-through pack of cards, or a character in a motion picture.

When we attempt to study ourselves from the inside, by contrast, we are condemned to experience ourselves in the romantic manner, as an endless series of presents, of momentary electric surges of impulse and intuition, the connection between which only truly becomes clear in the barren certainty of hindsight.

This is why so many of the ancient moral preceptors disavow the vertigo-inspiring business of "knowing yourself" altogether.

Better by far, they advise, to position yourself outside yourself, as others see you, and to judge yourself as an alter ego might.

Having once observed yourself in this manner, you'll be emboldened to fasten on to some fundamental facet of your outer character -- shrewdness, resourcefulness, stoutness of heart, even constancy itself -- and stick with it through thick and thin, like a solid beam of wood among the shipwreck, till at last it carries you to the comforting shore.

I quote at such admiring length, because the only response is 'what the fuck'. Or perhaps what's he on, and can I have some of it. Politics as a murky narcissistic mirror? Oi vey.

We've noted before Burchell's resemblance to the Delphic oracle, and the way that devine instrument's pronouncements might have been helped by a little gas emanating from the floor, but this piece of portentous half baked psychologizing surely takes the prize for drivel of the week.

The ancient seers and ruminants were in to Freudian pretzels about alter egos and super ids?

It turns out, if you can find your way through the closeting, claustrophobic, constricting and constraining thicket of prose - worse than a briar patch - is that Burchell didn't like Obama's trip to China, or his trip to Berlin, or any of his various policies.

Would that he bothered to scribble the same kind of metaphysical musing nonsense about the madness currently embracing the GOP and the hysteria surrounding Sarah Palin, who provides the perfect kind of flakiness and crunchiness you might expect in a cornflake. And no I didn't need an ancient seer as dressing for that metaphor.

So here's the technique, with more meaningless adjectives flung around than you might find cocks in a brothel:

All of this might have been drawn out of the pages of a Renaissance conduct-book, or a dog-eared copy of The Spectator from an 18th-century London coffee-house.

Or not.

This was not a statement of policy so much as the mantra of detachment turned into a Confucian homily.

Or not.

Building to this punchline involving the ancient sages yet again:

And so the paradox, as the ancient sages might have observed it. The same Barack Obama who at times appears to observe himself from the outside, like an impartial spectator, on other occasions appears merely self-absorbed, even self-obsessed.

And this, I suppose, is the paradox of character recast. You can't really play yourself until you know what you believe. The crucible of character is, in the end, the heart.

Tthe crucible of wordsmithing is, in the end, the heart? Perhaps a teensy weensy little bit of brain and judicious sub-editing might help?

But what if the wordsmith is a straw man or a cowardly lion or a tin man with no heart, or just a hack flack scribbling from the antipodes about a man he observes from a distance, through the wrong end of the telescope and a glass darkly?

Hey Obama's a Chicago politician, and his style drives the likes of Burchell into a frenzy. That is enough in itself, an admirable sufficiency. It stops the likes of Burchell from appearing merely self-absorbed or self-obsessed as they pontificate about their demons.

And they provide rich psychological insights to devotees of loon pond.

Because it seems that the message is that it's better to fuck up things in style, like a gung ho cowboy a la George Bush, than to attempt measured consideration of issues and events. If you're going to rush over a cliff like a lemming, make sure you do it in a rush.

You know, each week I read Burchell I think the case for Twitter grows stronger by the day. Forced to write in 140 characters or less, the capacity for blather would surely be harnessed and turned to good.

Slate currently has a straw poll going here as to which recent Twitter applications is the most inspiring, and I commend it and voting in it to you here (until of course the poll closes):

The Twitter Bible. Created by 3,000 German Christian techies, it translates the 31,000 verses of the Bible into 4,000 tweets. Formal title: And God Decided to Chill. Cool.

Twitter songwriting. The Broadway show Next to Normal asked its 100,000 followers to group-compose a song, decide who should sing it, and place it within the show. The tune recently debuted in the second act.

Twitter fiction. Neil Gaiman and his 1.2 million followers thumbed a 1,000-tweet novel over the past few weeks. The BBC will distribute as an audiobook.

Boy, did they miss the point and close off the options. Here's a fourth option:

David Burchell's musings: created by a thousand antipodean Obama haters, it translates the 31,000 verses of Burchell's siren ancient Confucian song saga by seers and sages into a seminal political psychological mumbo jumbo reference work of 10,000 tweets. Formal title: and as the ancient mighty sages might have observed and told us.

And better yet, the off Broadway musical based on this mighty work is in the works, to be followed by a 20,000 fictionalized account linking Obama to a re-telling of the Iliad and the Odyssey with Obama slated to play the role of Priam, followed by a cameo as the Cyclopes.

(Below: yep, if you want a one eyed perspective, Obama as the Cyclopes is your man).