David Burchell, homeric singing of Chairman Rudd, and a grey bearded loon stoppeth one of three to talk up the Delphic oracle ...

(Above: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, handily available on the full to overflowing intertubes - here and elsewhere - if you want to celebrate grey-beard loons with glittering eye and skinny hand).

The unravelling of the mind once known as David Burchell continues apace, and it provides such an abundance of pleasures of a delusionary, rambling kind that it's more than a rough equivalent of the ancient mariner stopping one of three.

Does Burchell have a long grey beard? Perhaps a glittering eye? Perhaps a skinny hand? It would certainly help in the making of what sense there is in Sing, muse, sing of Kevin Rudd:

"By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?

The bridegroom's doors are opened wide,
And I am next of kin;
The guests are met, the feast is set:
Mayst hear the merry din.'

He holds him with his skinny hand,
"There was a ship," quoth he.
`Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!'
Eftsoons his hand dropped he.

He holds him with his glittering eye -
The Wedding-Guest stood still,
And listens like a three years' child:
The Mariner hath his will.

The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone:
He cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner.

Well why not start that way? Burchell starts with a throaty exegesis on Homer, weaving in a reference to Joseph Addison as Horace's modern follower, which surely means we now live in the most post modern of post modernist times. Was it only yesterday that the eighteenth century was modern?

Never mind, after devoting a fine flurry of purple prose to Homer, our modern scribe discovers, alack and alas and to our ruination and loss, that we no longer live in Homeric times, and that deploying Homer is in fact useless and a waste of time when contemplating the sordid wasteland of contemporary life, and its uncomprehending students:

Our public life, on the whole, follows the pattern of those later uncomprehending students of Homer, only sliced-and-diced ever more finely. Our public figures are mostly models of self-discipline and self-abnegation. They shape their personalities to the needs of their various responsibilities, and parcel out fragments of personality-trait in bite-sized portions. Meet modern politicians in the flesh and often the first thing you'll notice is -- an astonishing discovery this! -- how strangely ego-less they appear. It's not that they've become less human. It's just that their ego has taken itself into harness.

Oh dear. No space left for Homer. And I guess watching Eric Bana in Troy doesn't do it either.

If there's any space left for the Homeric hero in the modern world, it survives only at the glistening apex of the political pyramid, where the light is more dazzling, and the air is thinner and presumably more godlike. Even as ministers and functionaries have become more cipher-like, presidents and prime ministers have come more and more to resemble pure personalities, displayed on the screen of public opinion like the spectral presence of Hector in Achilles' mind's-eye.

Or perhaps it survives in Burchell's prose which daily becomes more dazzling, and the meaning thinner but presumably more godlike as pronouncements are hurled from above like lightning bolts of bile and spleen and shattered dreams and disappointments so many they are countless?

Who can we turn to in these tortured troubled times?

Once federal Labor could rely on Curtin and Chifley and Calwell, those humble party-servants, to exhaust their life-energies in its service. Latterly it's had to cope with Whitlam, Hawke, Keating, Latham and now Kevin Rudd, each of whom has palpably believed, like the Homeric hero, that their life-energies are augmented by command, and that authority ought to be a kind of elixir.

Arthur Calwell? He of two wongs don't make a white fame? The man who resolutely snatched defeat from victory at every possible point with his gravel-voiced density? Oh can't he play on the Troy side, please?

Oh dear, I feel that I'm being a tad frivolous when much portentous portent is being delivered, in a way that expiates on deep issues in much the same way as the Delphic oracle:

It's perhaps no accident that we invest more emotional capital into our leading political figures, the more their subordinates retreat into the modern twilight-world of mundane issues-management, administration and spin. How much, after all, did Homer bother to tell us about the foot-soldiers who won the siege of Troy?

Who truly cared about their personalities?

Oh indeed, and shattered we are that Homer failed to detail all the work of an actual army in action, including thumbnail sketches of the thousands of combatants. What a failure as a poet, but not the sort of failing you will find in the world of Chairman Rupert, vigilant in his inspection of the national psyche and its leaders:

Over the course of last week this newspaper conducted what -- whatever its original brief -- amounted to a character-audit of the Prime Minister.

We learned that his strengths of character are founded in self-discipline, intellectual energy, and what the ancients would probably have called 'spirit'. And that his vices have their seat in anger, pride, and that attitude of disrespect towards those under our sway, which was what the Greeks really meant by hubris. (Achilles dragged the fallen Hector's body through the dirt. Rudd exalted over his exhausted public servants: "I've got news for them: there'll be more!")

I have a hunch that the PM chooses not to read unflattering assessments like these.

Huh, typical. Wasting a good comparative study of ancient Greek scribbles on the uneducated mugs who run the country today. Why my own extensive comparison of Chairman Rudd with Hamlet, Marc Antony, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, King Lear and Othello, as written up by old Bill Shakespeare, has also fallen on deaf ears.

Talk about hubris! And me the perceptive Delphic oracle, casting my muse out into the world, and the pigs treating it as swill rather than pearls of wisdom, shaped from a sow's ear.

After all, what good would Homer's heroes be if they paused to gaze inwardly, or allowed themselves to be gnawed by self-doubt? You might as well send Achilles into therapy.

Indeed! And we know where therapy leads you. To the nervous introspective lack of decision and action that the pundits can moan about in President Obama. Damned, it seems if you do, and damned it seems if you do nothing.

Ah well I feel a surge of Delphic oracle damnation coming on, a prohecy that will rent the air, and tear apart the invisible cloak of righeousness that surrounds Chairman Rudd, and will doom him to destruction:

Yet this incapacity for self-reflection is the gate that opens the path to a hero's self-destruction. What if instead of mastering the media you were merely frittering away your energies in its service? What if instead of developing policy you were merely developing your own personal train of thought? And further: what if, having gotten into these habits of behaviour, you had left nobody standing who was brave enough to tell you how to get out of them again?

In the final years of his prime ministership -- prostrate, like the expiring hero on Troy's rubble -- Tony Blair became an increasingly rueful figure. On his departure from office in 2007 ("still standing", as he put it, with an awkward note of self-pity), he gave a valedictory address on the modern media, depicting it as a kind of "feral beast" that ranges ever more restlessly for its succour.

Yep, it seems it's not that Blair, the simpering idiot, spent his time lining up his policies with that simpering idiot known as George W. Bush that's the issue. It's something to do with Homer rather than the war in Iraq, which was homeric in its implications, or perhaps had something to do with Richard the Lionheart, that coeur de lion.

But hush, we mustn't talk of conservatives and their delusions when beating around the bush in search for meaning, and only finding the hot air of a self-important seer and self-inflating blowhard:

Along the way, Britain's PM paused to acknowledge his own personal "complicity" in this process. And yet this glimmering of self-criticism, this sunburst of self-recognition, hardly seemed enough. For who ever fed that ravenous beast more assiduously or with a loftier sense of command than Blair? Aside from our own PM, that is?

Or George W. Bush? Or Dick Cheney? Oh for the love of the lord, can we just get on to the bit foretelling Chairman Rudd's doom and destruction, his smashing into bits and pieces like the Colossus of Rhodes, his eradication from the earth like the city of Carthage, a scorched blackened heath, flattened like Ozymandias, while the few remaining true believers wail and howl in the wilderness wind:

If Rudd should some day tumble from grace in like manner, a victim to his own urge for mastery, his seizure of the day, no doubt he will have similar chastening stories to tell: about the tyranny of the 24-hour news-cycle, the seductive powers of breakfast television, the 140-character attention-span, and so on.

If he does, I fancy he will tell those stories without the merest hint of irony or self-directed humour, those un-heroic sign-posts to self-understanding.

In which case he will surely conform to the Homeric delusions of Burchell, a man who can write gibberish without the slightest hint of irony, self-reflection, or humor, whether self-directed or outwardly designed to fetch a laugh. Because of course Chairman Rudd is likely to join Peter Costello on the board of the Future Fund. So it goes these days.

If this is self-understanding, give me a cup of tea, a slice of toast, a good lie down, and a whack of weed.

Now I know this might leave you wondering. Who is this man and why on earth does The Australian keep publishing him?

Well for that you'll need to consult the Delphic oracle, because it passes my understanding ... but then I always thought that people who believed in the golden age of Homeric times, up against any current age of lead in the past few thousand years, were a bunch of tossers ...

(Below: the Delphic oracle. Rumors suggest that the oracle's lips may have been loosened by the present of gas vapors, here, which might explain much in the peculiar case of the oracle Burchell. Below the vapor sniffer image is John William Godward's 1899 portrait of the Delphic oracle, provided for stray readers of The Punch who can't find Zoo Weekly on the intertubes).