Miranda Devine, Col Allan, Christine Nixon, Nevada, a biker in the Alabama Hills and America hurrah ...

(Above: the Alabama Hills).

Now where was I ...

Ah yes, lost in America, the new Rome, central station for loonacy, where luckily the only open carry we saw was in Virginia City, with a couple of spruikers re-enacting the grand old days of a town where Mark Twain got his start in the newspaper game.

Amazingly there are still firearm freaks who think a return to the days of the wild west will ensure civil discourse and civic harmony, as if the ostentatious display of the personal capacity to kill any offensive bystander transcends the politics of power and fear.

But that's just one of myriad strands where the right to freedom seems to be the right to be angry and alienated and fearful and unhappy and fat (waiter, super size me with another hit of that wonderful high fructose corn syrup).

Never mind, if you head out to the back blocks of Nevada - often dubbed "fly over" country - you can see plenty of ghost towns, including Rhyolite, or be entertained by the amateur munitions museum at Hawthorne, which celebrates the ordnance work of the military's nearby ammunition depot. There's a handsome collection of devices designed to blow up things, and the genteel owner offers expert guidance to the various technologies.

The strip in Carson City is an irredeemable offering of empty vulgarity, and even the downtown state legislature for Nevada lacked a sense of stature, the only joy a hippy restaurant directly opposite the two assemblies, right next to the plaque for the pony express. Long gone in Carson City ...

But then what can you expect of a car culture - so many RVs with SUVs attached - that thinks a trip to an ersatz Paris or Venice in Vegas is more meaningful than an actual trip to the real Europe, which would perforce involve mingling with ... Europeans.

Signs of parochialism, paranoia and xenophobia abound, but perhaps my favourite was the radio preacher - the bottom of the dial is littered with preachers - who, when asked to explain how a country like Japan, bereft of the benefits of Judaic Christian culture, could still produce a low crime rate and a seemingly civilised society, had a blithe and pat answer: "Japan is a police state". So much for the grand American experiment of introducing democracy to the country after the second world war.

You have to wonder about the media. Staying in cheap motels means there's always a couple of minutes to catch up on cabal packages, which invariably offer the delusionary world of Fox. In much the same way as it's good to see Americans harping back to the world of the gold rush, it's a wonder to behold strict constitutionalists yearning for the simplicities available when its eighteenth century heroes drew up a guide for four million citizens, as if that's going to be a sufficient guide to a new and rampantly corrupt Rome rushing towards four hundred million. As if in the process the strict constitutionalists weren't the most amazing bunch of activist regressives ...

You have to wonder about the babble of the media. The most striking thing is the incessant repetitive mind-numbing advertising. There's dozens of lawyers spruiking their wares, offering all kinds of litigation, for personal injury, claims on this and that, the chance to sue someone, or the chance to go bankrupt.

There's also, courtesy of financial managers in plague proportions, a televisual chance to sort out credit card debts or mortgage repayments, or discover your abysmal credit ratings, or otherwise get back on the precarious perch of being poor in America by paying people to pay people to learn how to pay off people. Yep, you can hire financial advisors to advise on financial advisors. Waiter, super size me on that bankruptcy.

As a corollary, there's also a plague of pharmaceutical offerings, with each certain cure or remedy accompanied by an exemplary list of dangers, catastrophic side effects, possible death, until the final reassuring note that in any case, not to worry, why not have a chat with your doctor because this pill might cure everything that ails you.

My personal favourite was Goldfield Nevada, where Virgil Earp took to his death bed, an old gold mining town which at some point made a determined attempt to become tourist trap like Virginia City, but which instead has slumped into a decaying surreal eccentricity which is visually beguiling, and truth to tell, much more potent than the fake bars and eating houses hanging off the Virginia City boardwalk.

Well let's not to the full travelogue bit - digital slide shows are the most irritating aspect of modern life, filling the intertubes to overflowing with Susan Sontagian moments - but it all came together in the Alabama hills, that strangely named collection of rocks beneath America's tallest mountain, Mt. Whitney, and scene of many a Hollywood western.

(And so the bones of my father can rest in peace as I tracked back to the location where Gunga Din was filmed amongst the rocks, and the ghost of that great Tasmanian Errol Flynn can be heard laughing at Randolph Scott and life in Virginia City).

Anyhoo, a retired biker rocked up to engage us in conversation, and test our attitudes on various matters, including lesbians, hippies, liberals, sundry other wankers, and of course our love - however warped and foreign it might be - for the United States.

It shows how you can go quietly barking mad in the company of the immense and glorious Sierra Nevadas (Spanish in a literal way for snowy mountain range), but we didn't take the bait, and instead just went for a cruise along Movie road, before heading into Lone Pine for a world famous buffalo burger, while he went back on his Harley to his unimpeded view of Whitney.

It also goes without saying that if you don't actively pursue news of Australia via the internet, now that Steve Irwin is long gone from cable, you can spend a couple of weeks being blithely unaware that Australia exists. The closest we got to being reminded of the place was the odd suggestion that we were English. Sheesh, not even Austrian.

Still, as well as the joys of working class Vegas, and the surreal beauty of the various Nevada deserts (what a great place to let off a nuclear weapon), and the unnerving poverty lurking behind many small towns, bolstered only by defence work, and a cruise down Sunset Boulevard to see the rich in their mansions, there was another great upside.

The loons of America, as befits the new Rome, are way ahead of the local domestic variety (known as the common Australianatus agitatus garrulous cawing and crowing loon), and for two splendid weeks I didn't once have to think of the likes of Miranda the Devine.

You can imagine the culture shock then, after returning from America, to catch a read of her latest offering A bureaucratic child of our times.

This splendid piece divides into two pieces, and really the first bit could have been written by a biker lost and going quietly mad in the Alabama hills beneath the shadow of Mount Whitney, as she gets terribly excited about an editor for the tabloid press, and the joys of working for Rupert Murdoch - the man who, via Fox News, can almost singlehandedly be credited with the destruction of intelligent conservatism in America. As to Devine's editor?

He poked fun at phoniness and PowerPoint presentations and encouraged us to take risks, and thumb our noses at authority, whether inside or outside the building. He resisted attempts by management to drag him away from the core business of putting out a daily newspaper, and deputised process-minded underlings to such menial chores as attending marketing meetings. He would bellow and throw advertising people out of his office in a burlesque display designed to assert the primacy of editorial.

Come on down Ben Hecht, all is forgiven, hold the front page, spill some of that tabloid print on your fingers, Mark Twain get down and write a story about that ugly varmint dead eye Dick plugging Mexican Pete for having a go at Eskimo Nell. Tabloids are go! And never mind the thunderbirds:

The two news conferences he called each day were high-wire acts; we all knew we had to be armed with good ideas and detailed information if he called on us. No seat warmers, with a couple of puzzling exceptions, were tolerated. He was often brutal, and publicly humiliated people for mediocre efforts, while everyone squirmed.

But he was a great tabloid editor, the most effective and terrifying boss I ever had. No one in his conferences had any doubt about what our goal was, and that energy was transmitted down the line to every reporter and editor. As a result, the quality of reporting and writing improved exponentially.

Of course, we worked in the Murdoch empire which was refreshingly free of useless bureaucracy in the 1990s, because Rupert Murdoch himself scorned it.

In much the same way I suppose that Fox News is today refreshingly free of intelligent life and a moderate tone.

But I got to wondering. Who was this masked marvel, this unnamed hero of the tabloid world, and then I remembered that the Devine had once worked for the Daily Terror as a police reporter, before the notorious Col Allan turned her into an assistant editor and then an opinion columnist.

Yep, Col Allan, the man who led Chairman Rudd and Warren Snowdon astray at Scores, in a vain attempt either to turn Rudd into a gentleman of the old school or to tarnish his nerdish reputation and so prevent him becoming the PM we have today. (Kevin Rudd hits a strip club).

Well if you want to read more about Col, why not try Rupe's Attack Dog Gets Bitten, Keeps Barking, and keep three or four bottles of Pinot Noir handy for the read. Therein you can discover the myriad ways that Allan has attempted to reduce the collective intelligence on hand in New York city to the level of a pulp tabloid yellow scandal sheet, not far from its kissing cousins in the grand old days of the Hearst Empire, courtesy his reign at the New York Post.

May the rag go on losing money for Chairman Rupert for years to come.

The second half of the Devine piece is a hatchet job on Christine Nixon. Well Nixon can answer for herself as to why she decided to chuff off for a meal at a parlous moment during a bushfire, but what I like most is the splendid way that the Devine then manages to get in all her pet fears and phobias, as a kind of collateral damage an ordnance expert might wonder at:

And the media adored her. She was progressive! She took part in the gay and lesbian pride march! She was a woman! She was consultative! She relaxed uniform standards! She recruited women and minorities! She answered emails, had lots of meetings and set up myriad committees. She was the nana feminist, who humbled the most masculine, testosterone charged militaristic symbol of the patriarchy itself. She was perfectly chosen and trained to spend her days being busy doing her job, whatever that was. Busy, busy, busy. The truth is her defenders are right, she can hardly be blamed.

Christine Nixon is the perfect leader for our age.

Oh dear, the font of civilisation is putting out the New York Post, or perhaps Fox News, and its downfall gay and lesbian marches, and consultative women, and nana feminists.

You know, a crazed biker standing in the shadow of Mount Whitney couldn't have said it better.

Same as it ever was ...

Take it away Talking Heads ...