Peter van Onselen, and what if the world were free of News Corp tomorrow?

(Above: more Tom Tomorrow here).

Every so often on Fox News a visionary comes along, a da Vinci of politics:

Hannity: I've actually had an idea -- no one listens to little ol' Sean Hannity. But I'm like -- I think the Iraqis, with all their oil resources, need to pay us back for their liberation. Every single solitary penny. Because we really need --

Johnson: I really thought that from the beginning. I thought that that was kind of, part of the equation.

Hannity: It should have been part of the deal.

Johnson: Should have been part of the deal.

Hannity: I think it should be now. I think they owe us a lot for that. (here).

Which got me to thinking that if Chairman Rupert paid me to read News Corp publications and watch News Corp shows - it really should be part of the deal - I could perhaps come at the idea of paying for content. I pay, and then after a period of remorse for inflicting fools, delusionistas and a massive bombing campaign based on a false premise on me, News Corp refunds the cost, with interest. (1% above prime thank you).

Otherwise News Corp content needs to go on being provided for free.

It's the only way I can rationalise my ongoing dalliance with the charms of the commentating commentariat.

I reckon I spent at least ten minutes reading Peter van Onselen's What if Costello were leader of the Liberal Party?

Which is ten minutes I could have spent reading my own exciting What if Adolf Hitler had taken Stalingrad and Moscow, got hold of Russia's oil resources, and kept Europe by signing a peace treaty with the United States?

Which is really no match for my exemplary What if Shakespeare was Queen Elizabeth the first, and Francis Bacon was a transsexual?

Have we, this close to an election campaign, been reduced to this kind of nonsense already?

On and on van Onselen rambles in a heightened state of oneiric deliriousness at the prospect of Peter Costello still inhabiting a parallel universe in which he stays on as Liberal leader and smotes Kevin Rudd's prime ministership.

Not once pausing to think that if Costello had become leader at the right time, Kevin Rudd might never have become prime minister.

What if Peter Costello had become PM and invaded Western Australia? Or Tasmania?

Like Gareth Evans thinking he was Biggles with a spy plane? (Memories).

Not once pausing to wonder that if you go back into the past, then step on an ant, thereby killing off an entire species of ants, what's the chance you'll return to a present in which ants rule the world?

Or some such, since this kind of Terminator nonsense is really only interesting when watching Arnie play a terminator.

What's even worse is that van Onselen doesn't even pay homage to the sources of his idea. He's content to label it a parallel universe:

The concept of the parallel universe derives from the notion in physics of the metaverse, a hypothetical group of universes that together encapsulate all that exists in space and time. While H. G. Wells popularised the idea of parallel universes in his book The Time Machine, written in 1895, it was Edwin Abbott who first floated the idea of different dimensions about a decade earlier.

But actually the concept of alternate or alternative history has many more diverse sources, as well as many modern practitioners, who do it in more exciting and interesting ways than managed by van Onselen.

And then there's counterfactual history, which has also been dubbed virtual history, which involves "what if" questions of the kind mounted by van Onselen.

Then there's the debate over the differences between alternate history, and counterfactual history, as explained by the wiki:

Counterfactual history is neither historical revisionism nor alternate history.

In general, the main distinguishing feature of counterfactual history is that it is interested precisely in the incident or event that is being negated by the counterfactual, and is seeking to evaluate its relative historical importance by means of the counterfactual. Thus, the counterfactual historian attempts to provide reasoned arguments for each change, and the changes are usually outlined only in broad terms, since the results of the counterfactual are not the point of the exercise but merely the byproduct.

An alternate history writer, on the other hand, is interested precisely in the hypothetical scenarios that flow from the negated incident or event. A fiction writer is thus free to invent very specific events and characters in the imagined history.

Sad to say, as a writer of fictions, van Onselen can't even pass the Nabokov Ada or Philip Roth Plot Against America test.

What's even more bizarre is that it turns out in the end that the entire point of van Onselen's piece is that Malcolm Turnbull is something of a clone of Peter Costello.

You know, like all those terrible clone movies, like The 6th Day, which inevitably features Arnie yet again, or George wanting us all to watch as he sends in the clowns in the clone wars, or the clones in Moon slowly and painfully working out that they're clones when they could have just berated the film-makers for using miniature models rather than CGIs.

But I digress, because van Onselen's plea for Abbott to bring back Turnbull right now is as half baked as the rest of his piece:

Given that Turnbull is electorally appealing to small-l liberals and has economic credibility, Abbott should bring him into the tent to help, lest Turnbull starts doing the proverbial from outside it. That is, unless Abbott simply doesn't trust Turnbull to work and play well with others.

Abbott doesn't trust Turnbull? After stabbing him in the back by one skimpy vote?

That's when I began to wonder what if van Onselen had never written his piece, and therefore I'd never been able to read it? Would the world be a safer place, or would the Martians have attacked immediately, with burning cows running down the street outside my house?

Fortunately Sturgeon's Law, sometimes known as Sturgeon's Revelation, came to mind a nanosecond before I went clinically insane:

1. "Nothing is always absolutely so".

2. "Ninety percent of everything is crud." (The last word is frequently misquoted as "crap".) (here).

Together Hannity and van Onselen confirm once again that Sturgeon's Law still applies, and despite an impression of anarchy and chaos and decay, the universe remains an ordered, law obeying time space cosmos. And that one of the rarer corollaries of Parkinson's Law still applies to anything published by News Corp:

Reading expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

An infinity of long suffering 'what ifs'.

Ah yes, loon pond, home of 'what if' science, and idle speculation by hacks beavering away to make Chairman Rupert richer by the day ...