Christopher Pearson, a soupçon of Michel Foucault, a dash of Abbott and Gillard, and dropping a tab at Zabriskie Point ...

(Above: Michel Foucault, and Christopher Pearson. Spot the similarities).

Okay, I take it all back.

The United States has some wonderfully surreal moments, touches, people and places, but there's no way any of its try hard wannabe poseur eccentrics can match Christopher Pearson.

How else to approach Club Sensible is casting its eyes over Julia and Tony?

Club sensible? Oh club me to death with a feather.

The front of the piece is the standard berating of Kevin Rudd, and a back handed slap across the face tribute to Julia Gillard, and the obligatory praising of Tony Abbott, and forgiveness of his sins (no doubt accompanied by the rosary, a few lord's prayers and the odd hail mary), but it's the self-congratulatory sting in the tail which says more about the pompous portentous Pearson blow hard persona than any critic could evoke.

Do go on:

Some of my readers on the Left may demur at the suggestion, but this week I feel like Michel Foucault.

Oh it's a show stopper, that line. The whole whirly gig comes to a halt, the cackle comes from deep down in the bowels, then erupts, then comes the gasping for air ...

Not that I'm from the left, but the notion of the conservative Latin-chanting Pearson donning the intellectual garb of Michel Foucault is surely a deeply post-modernist post-ironic jest.

What next? Occupying university buildings with Maoist students? Dropping LSD at Zabriskie Point in Death Valley, to get the best experience of your life? (Ah Death Valley, I miss you already). Death by AIDS? A new way forward as a Nietzschean neo-anarchist? Or perhaps a chance to become a truly contradictory creature, a Catholic atheist?

In 1971 postmodernism's darkest star formally took his place as a professor of the College de France.

He said at the time that he would have preferred a seamless transition, moving inconspicuously from the lecture hall's benches to the rostrum, as one more voice in a ceaseless, scholarly conversation. He also told his audience that he feared he might be something of a cuckoo in his new nest.

Moving from a sedate spot in the Inquirer section to a position among the pundits in the front part of the only national broadsheet is a comparable promotion.

Oh now I get it, it's just a feather display, a preening piece of pomposity and unseemly boasting about a positional move in a newspaper that fancies itself as a broadsheet, when really all you need for an outback dunny is a well torn up tabloid.

However, my expertise is not primarily in conventional political analysis but in publishing and editing poets and novelists. My preferred tools of trade are satire and counterfactual speculation rather than crunching the latest Treasury numbers or Newspoll.

Satire and counterfactual speculation?

Well surely if there was a Murdoch circus in town, Pearson would be one of the leading clowns, but is an ability to do pratfalls a sign of satirical talent? Sadly, it's likely if Pearson got into the ring with Jon Stewart, he'd be eaten alive, with no feathers or bones left, just a well-digested owl pellet, and equally sadly, there's no chance of it happening, not when Stewart can do a song and dance minstrel routine to nail Bernie Goldberg to the floor.

As to counterfactual speculation, at least Pearson got that right. Let's leave aside the obvious meaning, which is running contrary to the facts, and get into the logical aspect of the word:

adj
(Philosophy / Logic) expressing what has not happened but could, would, or might under differing conditions
n
(Philosophy / Logic) a conditional statement in which the first clause is a past tense subjunctive statement expressing something contrary to fact, as in if she had hurried she would have caught the bus. (here).

Yep, that's Pearson alright. If in fact he had hurried, he would still always manage to miss the bus.

Again, I share the view Foucault rather surprisingly announced at that inaugural lecture: that "society must be defended", mostly by the art of paradox.

Foucault and I have at least one thing in common, in that we're both high-profile homosexuals. I'm neither as intelligent nor (thankfully) as vain and dysfunctional as he was. He and his deracinated Maoist lover were identified early on as sacred monsters of French letters, in the tradition of Andre Gide.

Oh dear. Feel the self-love. In a most unvain way.

Pearson is a high-profile homosexual, just like Foucault? That would be the same as the man described as the most cited intellectual in the humanities in 2007 by The Times Higher Education Guide? (here). Surely this is an example of satirical counterfactual whimsy of the highest order? So it turns out:

The only person who has ever spoken of me in those terms was Peter Coleman, the long-time editor of Quadrant and intellectual godfather of Australian conservatism, and I'm pretty sure he was joking.

Pretty sure? Absolutely sure? Or as I've learned to say in America these last few weeks, very uniquely sure? It's only a joke? Or perhaps embedded deep within it is some folk wisdom from the right? Oh okay, it's just a joke, a jolly jape amongst chums. So we elevate the risk level to definitively sure? So it goes with satirical flourishes:

One leaf I hope to take out of Foucault's book is an unconventional approach to how political power is mediated, the ways it ebbs and flows and how, especially in the lead-up to the federal election, power (like nature) abhors a vacuum. Another is to see the solemn taken-for-granteds of the zeitgeist through the prism of the comic and the absurd.

Uh huh. Mediated power. The zeitgeist. Give that freshman ponce a clip around the ears.

Well as a prism of the comic and the absurd there's no doubt Pearson is a mighty fine prism.

Now here's a few examples of Pearson's prism of the comic and the absurd. First he comes in praise of Julia Gillard, as if to show he knows how to bury Caesar in style:

One of the many good things to be said about Gillard is that Lindsay Tanner, her old ultra-leftist foe, was prescient in wanting to block her route to a safe seat. He said she was "a conservative careerist". Quite so. That's why people warm to her, despite the bottle-orange hair, the still-grating voice and the 1980s Carlton feminist collective values to which she still intermittently clings.

This is Foucault?

Then he goes on to praise Tony Abbott in tandem with Gillard, in a way that would leave Alexander Pope breathless, though perhaps not from admiration:

As people, both of them are clearly devoted to their parents, good with siblings and very fond of their nieces and nephews. It is a welcome change from the Rudd household, all of whom seem to me a bit strange and affectless.

Well bugger me dead, ain't that a profound neo-anarchist Nietzschean insight.

Gillard enjoyed the usual female advantage in terms of early social maturity, while Abbott as an undergrad had his famous attempt to bend a lamp-post during a drinking session with rugger mates.

That said, he was entranced early on by the Jesuit ideal of public service and "being a man for others" at a phase when our Julia was pretty clearly concluding that (solidarity notwithstanding) "it's every girl for herself and the devil take the hindmost".

The young Tony was an incurable romantic, not only with his first girlfriend but in his crusading zeal for lost causes and his personal devotion to Bob Santamaria, whom he once described as "the greatest living Australian".

No, surely not, surely this isn't Foucault, or even a slice off the arse of Foucault's rump, unless you accept Jean-Paul Satre's view of Foucault as "the last rampart of the bourgeoisie". Being a conservative Catholic stamps you as an incurable romantic? Sheesh, give me Carlton any day, or perhaps Smith street.

Do we really need to know the gormless Pearson's views on the personalities of politicians, and their domestic lives, not to mention the standard slurs about carrot tops and feminists? Or is it okay to have a go at Pearson's physical appearance?

Indeedy if I wanted this kind of idle speculation about personalities and the private lives of politicians, I'd be better off reading the New Idea or Woman's Day or the Women's Weekly.

But here's the capper:

Space doesn't permit a consideration of either candidate's more recent history at this juncture but readers may contribute to the conversation via my email address at the end of this column.

And why doesn't space permit? Because the doofus wants to spend time talking about how much like Michel Foucault he is, and how he got a promotion in the rag best known as Chairman Rupert's lap poodle and refuge for ratbag right wingers.

Well at least now I can spend each week contemplating The Australian and wondering when Pearson might jump the shark, like Louis Pierre Althusser, who was a mentor to Foucault, and who wrapped up his life by strangling his wife while giving her a neck massage.

Some neck, some massage.

Oh it's a funny old satirical prismatic counterfactual world, and the way that Pearson manages to inhabit a bizarro world all his own is Hieronymus Bosch at his finest.

Dream on America. You might have your David Brooks, your William Buckley, your Stephen Colbert ... great conservative thinkers ... but we have Christopher Pearson, punching out of the post-modernist, post-structuralist, post-satirical, post-ironist, pompous post-prismatic corner. I feel ever so European ...

Bring on that bloody paywall Chairman Rupert. Bring it on now!!

(Below: here's how to do it in a post ironic way. Head off to Death Valley, find Zabriskie Point, it isn't hard, drop a tab of acid, and then do it, in a primal way, in the dust. Hey, the worst thing that could happen is you end up thinking you're Foucault or you're in an Antonioni movie).