Christopher Pearson, Club Sensible, a changing climate, and the Latin mass is 42 ...

(Above: this is an example of misdirection. There is no 42 in this piece, and no understanding of life, the universe and everything, or Douglas Adams. You can find that a kind of DA blawg nonsense here).

This week Club Sensible seems to have been forgotten by Christopher Pearson, and it's time for a standard piece of baby seal clubbing, or if you will, since the idea of Kevin Rudd as a baby seal is trifle bizarre and offensive, it's out with the pins and stick them in the Chairman Rudd voodoo doll.

Survival comes first these days is the header, and Pearson is rampant with glee, because he has the answer, and it's 42, or so Douglas Adams and that Aussie electoral guru Graham Richardson say, and so the days of Chairman Rudd are numbered.

But if you'll forgive my newly learned American, there's something worrisome, something momentarily strange and tortured about Pearson's logic when it comes to climate change. Could it be this?

Here's Pearson rabbiting on at length back in November of last year in Malcolm's sensible solution is WWJD ... what would John do?, in which he berates Malcolm Turnbull for having kittens over a double dissolution and the possibility of losing seats:

It's a judgment call that tells us a lot about his relative inexperience as a politician. The 20 extra seats loss scenario was plausible six months ago, but the politics have changed. Not many of his senior colleagues now believe that Kevin Rudd is keen to call an early election. Public sentiment on the dangers of global warming has shifted in the past two years.

As Nick Minchin and Tony Abbott have argued, a negative campaign modelled along similar lines to Paul Keating's opposition to the GST would avert an electoral catastrophe and might even win the next election.

Might even win the next election ...

Sic transit gloria to all that, as Pearson berates Cheryl Saunders and Gerard Henderson for daring to suggest that Labor technically might not have been able to use the ETS legislation as a double dissolution trigger:

As Saunders conceded, the deadlocked provisions are clearly robust enough to overcome any problem with minor Senate amendments mischievously calculated to pre-empt their use by a determined government. The other halfway respectable argument is for Labor to claim it may have lost the election. Of course, now we'll never know, though all the polling suggests that a campaign focused on the ETS would have resulted in a comfortable Labor victory, given the solid but now dwindling majority who say they support action on climate change.

A campaign focused on the ETS would deliver a comfortable Labor victory ...

Yep, in the world of speculation it's terribly easy to shift from a possible win to the Liberals to a comfortable Labor victory. Or as we say here on the pond, 42.

I always found jousting with Jesuits produced the same kind of angel dancing on the head of a pin routine when it came to firming up the exact location of the absent god ...

What makes it richly amusing of course, is that Pearson is firmly in the 'climate change is crap' camp, and so it takes a very convoluted kind of logic to relish the irritation of the 'true believers' for Chairman Rudd having abandoned them and climate change action.

But really how is it possible for Pearson to sit straight in front of his keyboard and not chortle into his chardonnay as he typed the following?

Even conceding the element of risk in any national poll, the question must surely be: if not now, when?

The unceremonious dumping of its commitment to the ETS was unspinnable, except by blaming a recalcitrant Senate, and it was plain to almost everyone that the government had the means, at a time of its own choosing, to reconstitute the chamber so that it could have passed its legislation at a joint sitting. The upshot is that the electorate now knows that Kevin Rudd's main concern is not a policy agenda but clinging to power. Survival matters more to him than principle.

You see, the government had the option to call a double dissolution - at which a tremendous negative campaign by the likes of Nick Minchin and Tony Abbott spouting off Barnaby Joyce's great big new tax mantra like cockatoos driven mad by the climate changed mid-day sun - which would have given the negatavistas a good chance of winning, or so we were told, and now instead the cynical government has cynically decided to cling to power.

As if politicians were above cynicism. As if Abbott has no cynical desire for power ...

No truly, he doesn't ...

Abbott has consistently put Turnbull's interests and the party's ahead of his own. Had Turnbull heeded Abbott's advice more often and taken a more conciliatory approach, the Liberal Party would not have become as rancorously divided as it is.

Club sensible reverts to proper form, as club cheerleader.

Which is how Christopher Pearson comes to be terribly distressed and concerned at the terrible distress and concern shown by climate change true believers, confronted by the fickle and perfidious Chairman Rudd and his henchperson Penny Wong:

Last week marked another turning point in the political cycle. ABC1's Tony Jones, presenter of the panel show Q&A, was repeatedly dismissive with Penny Wong, the Climate Change Minister, accusing her of evasiveness in answering questions. Jones is a passionate believer in anthropogenic global warming and - while he was incensed at the Rudd government's policy backdown on the emissions trading scheme - nothing about his previously deferential treatment of Wong had prepared us for last Monday's performance. It was noteworthy because Wong was more animated than I can recall her being on camera, but to no avail.

Q&A is (rather clunkily) interactive and, while Wong was equivocating, a tweet flashed up demanding that someone ask her why, if Labor still believed in climate change, they didn't take the country to a double-dissolution election on the issue. It was the question of the week, of course.

Well actually, and it almost goes without saying, of course, the question of the week is how the coalition can currently think its stance on climate change is a vote winner. And how rabbiting on about double dissolutions means anything to the average punter, who doesn't give a toss for Canberra's machinations, as opposed to actually doing something ...

Malcolm Turnbull thought human influenced climate change real, and got shafted for his stance. Tony Abbott is an unbeliever, as are his acolytes and supporters. He put up a fake, insincere token policy which had all the credibility of a snow flake attempting to carve a path through hell. Where will the votes of the true believers go? Or the middle ground, a tad worried about the way the world and the weather is behaving? To Tony Abbott?

If Turnbull were still around, the Liberals might have a credible alternative, someone who thinks the environment is worth action by government ...

Oh wait, he is hanging around, and he's still banging on about climate change. The difference is, where Pearson has been a denier, Turnbull can at least say he has had some consistency:

Mr Turnbull says his decision to stay in politics will not cause a rift between him and Tony Abbott over climate change policy.

Mr Turnbull says while he supports an emissions trading scheme (ETS), he also supports Tony Abbott as leader.

"People know what I stand for. But the party has a policy... for climate change. The Labor Party has nothing," he said.

"We are only months away from a federal election and we have a federal government that has no policy on what its leader describes as the greatest moral challenge of our times."

But Treasurer Wayne Swan says Mr Turnbull's backflip will not please Mr Abbott.

"I reckon that Tony Abbott wouldn't be popping any champagne corks tonight," he said. (here).

I doubt that Club Sensible will have anything to say about that, and might prefer to stay indoors with a post-prandial port and a game of billiards.

Meanwhile, Club Sensible spends the last few pars fighting a valiant battle in the name of all the miners carving up Australia and shipping it off in job lots to Asia.

But I'm wondering just how long this bleating and squawking and threats to move off shore to Canada or perhaps Antarctica will last, up against the treasure chest of purchasing power the tax offers, and which can be used as an election campaign bribe.

That's the true cynicism of Labor, that's the WWJD, what would John do, solution that they've hit on. Pick on the big guys and use the windfall to bribe the electorate. And can the electorate be bribed, while Tony Abbott bleats about the fate of the big miners and this big new tax, and the craven Anna Bligh joins in the anvil chorus?

Well we know what John did, and a fine career he carved out of bribing the middle class, and small business, and punters in marginal seats.

Club Sensible might wring its hands about predictable and reputable jurisdictions suffering as the poor miners are taxed, and can only make off like bandits with a few squillion, but it suddenly makes an alternate scenario a possibility.

Chairman Rudd squeaks get back in, and gets taken out by Julia Gillard, and Tony Abbott, a beaten leader, gets sent to the back bench for recreation leave and rehabilitation ... leaving someone else to pick up the shattered Liberals. And who might that be?

Well, it's as credible as Pearson's cheerleading speculations, dressed up as insights, and like him, I can change my opinion next week to suit any new situation that comes along.

But here's the real problem with Club Sensible taking on the job of Club Cheerleader and trying to write seriously about politics as if astutely observing the flow and flux of the game, and even quoting Paul Kelly as a way of confirming that the tedium quotient is now elevated to a high level of refinement.

Yep, it's tedious. A respectable Christopher Pearson, respected political commentator du jour? It's worse than tedious. It's a waste of eccentricity.

We were so upset we immediately had to go in search of decent, vintage Pearson, not some quaffing tawny port, but a decent rich plum blackberry cigar flavoured vintage Hardy's port from the nineteen fifties.

How about Christopher Pearson: Spring of the Latin Rite vintage 2006?

There that should keep everyone happy for a little while wandering down the greatest hits and memories.

The way forward is the Latin mass, no doubt about it, and let's not have any nitpicking about whether we mean Latin:

Latin, until recently a universal language, was prized as such, the sign of a universal church. It wasn't a serious barrier to popular understanding because parallel texts were, and still are, freely available. Had Vatican II simply authorised the Bible readings in the language of the people and left the fixed unvarying parts of the mass in their familiar, ancient forms, as was originally intended, a great deal of anguish and bitterness could so easily have been avoided.

You see! Latin, until recently a universal language, much more loved than Esperanto ... that's what we hunger for here on the pond, a love of Latin. There's more, much more, as Latin back in 2006 was set to sweep through the church and change everything for the better:

Along with the return of an ancient ritual language, the restoration of church music is likely to remind even casual visitors of the sense of the supernatural and the presence of the sacred in ways our grandparents took pretty much for granted but that are often almost unimaginable to modern sensibilities. This is going to have an almost immediate influence on the "high church" liturgical practice of some of the Lutherans, Anglicans and even Uniting churches.

There will be a lot more jobs for organists, cantors and church musicians generally. It's also on the cards that it will make choral singing, especially for schoolchildren and undergraduates, as popular a pastime as it was in the early '60s.

In one stroke, Latin solves unemployment for musicians. How did the economy survive the great recession without it?

I did dig up one response which I'm afraid was a tad killjoy as it was full, not only of evocative memories, but sensible opinions - Latin killed the Romans and now it's killing me.

The mass was in Latin until I was about twenty. All my childhood in country NSW the mass was said in a mumble we could not hear or understand. We knelt and quietly read our St Joseph’s missals, and the old ladies said the rosary. We had jokes about the Latin, ‘Me a cowboy, me a cowboy, me a Mexican cowboy, ‘and ‘Will you play dominos with me? Yes I will play dominos with you’, for instance. There were many priests who said mass badly. Almost none of them, even those who said mass well, spoke or read Latin and few of them pronounced it well, even church Latin. There were notable exceptions of course. I did not experience the Latin mass done consistently well until I entered a monastery where we had good musicians and singers and priests who could say mass well all the time. Even there we had the occasional priest who was scrupulous and could not get through the words of consecration. One came to consecrating the wine, went ‘Hanc, hanc, hanc, hanc’ and could go no further.

To read people like Christopher Pearson you would think we all heard Palestrina, Haydn, Mozart, Monteverdi and the like Sunday after Sunday when in fact we heard wheezy melodeon or harmonium style organs played slowly and badly and the music that was played was no better than now.

Ah memories, and a fun read.

Now is clearly the time for a letter writing campaign to The Australian, demanding that Club Sensible be immediately abandoned, and in its place Club Eccentric be immediately reinstated, on pain of sacking.

The pond has few enough loons who have earned the right to be cherished, and membership of Club Cheerleader is a ground for being exiled, like Cicero, to a faraway place, and since Thessalonica is a little far to travel, it could well mean Wollongong ...

Never mind climate change, not when Latin might yet change the world ...

(Below: and now a cartoon for big miners worried about revolutionary radicals speaking up for the poor and chastising the rich).