(Above: a scuttling, scurrying Canberra figure?)Here at the pond we spent the weekend in elaborate tortured ethical debate.
Is it appropriate, when spending time in a third world country, in an expensive hotel, to appropriate the soap and shampoo as recompense?
As an addendum, one of the debaters revealed a policy of purloining Gideon's bibles, and removing them from circulation, whenever found in a room. Not to destroy them - no book should ever be destroyed - but to remove them from circulation, on the grounds that a child might stumble upon a bible, and be exposed to its tawdry tales of a vengeful god delivering a holocaust via a flood, not to mention an outrageous attitude to shellfish.
This miscreant said that he'd do the same if hotel rooms contained Karl Marx's Das Kapital or Chairman Mao's little red book, but that communists didn't have either the means or the madness of xtians going about the business of spreading their nonsense. When challenged, he agreed he might remove any poetry or other attempt at literature found lurking in a hotel drawer, if only that this kind of letter bomb should not be made generally available, but, like the bible, should always be kept under plastic wrap with an MA+15 rating, and require a special trip to the back of the shop behind a couple of flap wing doors.
It was at that point that I realised loon pond was more than just a state of mind, it involved an awesome universal insanity.
Which is just as well, because the Monday scene is remarkably quiet. With Paul Sheehan off somewhere in the ether - perhaps contemplating whether to boost his bathroom supplies by pocketing the soap and the shampoo - the Sydney Morning Herald has lost its main resident Monday eccentric for the moment. We'd like to be able to say we miss him, but only in the sense that bashing our head with a baseball bat on a Monday is a pleasurable activity.
Remarkably the Herald now has at the top of its opinion pages a piece by Gerard Noonan suggesting that the mining companies could afford to cough up a little more (Sovereign risk? No, superannuation is at risk, thanks to mine bosses). If they keep up this revolutionary socialist thinking, they might drift somewhere near the centre.
So it was off to that reliable source of ratbaggery, The Australian, but even that font of froth and foam disappointed. It was as if the appointment of Julia Gillard had taken the wind out of their sails.
Oh sure, there was Dennis Shanahan getting dire and muttering and shaking his head in Work looms for hard heads who executed the 'unelectable', but it was a dull, tedious outing.
All he could do was mutter about Labor becoming delusional and succumbing to hubris, and a reliance on Greens' preferences being fraught with danger, and so on and so forth, and that the distraction of personalities be kept to a minimum, and real economic and political issues dominate the debate ahead - at which point given The Oz's demonisation of Chairman Rudd and his personality this past year, I simply had to chortle - but damn it all, the polls have shifted, and now all Shanahan can scribble is how it's the biggest gamble and there's a close and fascinating contest ahead.
Never mind, there's good old Henry Ergas maintaining the rage in We'll pay dearly for this NBN folly, like Ebenezer's ghost roaming around in the back rooms reliably rattling his chains.
Henry has a fondness for quotations, this time offering up Pyrrhus after the battle of Asculum, and di Lamedusa's The Leopard, with if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change. I suspect Henry's been visiting the wiki here, but I remain resolute in my preference for Everything must change in order to remain the same.
Pyrrhic victories aside, all the prattling Henry can do is cast dire spells, talk of regicides, and warn of nasty shocks ahead. We're all still doomed sums up the mood, but perhaps is too short and pithy and to the point for a newspaper column.
But perhaps the biggest disappointment is David Burchell, whose florid style can usually be relied upon to set Monday morning ablaze with classical fetishism.
Oh he tries in Real people don't get besotted with prime ministers, but I'm reminded of Richard Nixon growling about what people might find to do once they didn't have him to kick around anymore. With Burchell's bete noir former chairman Rudd gone, there's a sense that without a voodoo doll his pins are quite lifeless.
The metaphors and the references, and the straw dogs, take on quite a desperate air:
Gillard as Eve in the Garden of Eden, as Lady Macbeth, or Augustus Caesar's wife Livia? Rudd as a golden-locked political innocent, lost in a dark forest thick with factional wolves? Truly?
Truly, only in the fervid mind of the Burchell, since I can't remember anyone else writing this kind of Augustan tosh. Who else to blame?
One of most curious aspects of the past three years has been the yawning and ever-growing gulf between the universe of the political enthusiast -- the blogging savants, the convulsive Facebook oracles, the haiku poets of the Twitterverse and their motley followers and hangers-on -- and the reality of those who have to grind their lives away in the dreary vicinities of power.
Actually one of the most curious aspects of the past three years as been the growing rage of The Australian's punditocracy, on the pretence that they somehow represent the interests of ordinary Australians, as opposed to big mining and Chairman Rupert.
After an extensive amount of time trying to decipher the runes, work out what the oracular I Ching is saying this morning, it seems that we'd invested too much in chairman Rudd, and that his replacement by Julia Gillard is a good thing, provided ...
... she strives to set a new tone of modesty and lucidity in public affairs.
Lucidity as a demand from David Burchell?! Did the stars just shift a little in the firmament?
Which brings us to his final par:
What on earth does it mean? Who are those busy, shadowed figures scurrying around behind? Are they like the white rabbit?
It was the White Rabbit, trotting slowly back again, and looking anxiously about as it went, as if it had lost something; and she heard it muttering to itself ‘The Duchess! The Duchess! Oh my dear paws! Oh my fur and whiskers! She’ll get me executed, as sure as ferrets are ferrets! Where can I have dropped them, I wonder?’
Is Burchell preening about his part in the decline and fall of former Chairman Rudd, when let's face it, the miners, the polls, Tony Abbott, and dozens of Chairman Rupert's minions played their fair part?
Or is he modesty allowing that he's a shrewd political commentator, though lest it be thought he's a preening ponce, only with the genius and insight which any intelligent and observant citizen might possess?
Yes, yes, all that I suppose, but you see these days, though it might not occur to Burchell, he's read on screens around the land - well those with far too much time on their hands - and screens make his thoughts available around the entire world, though it's heartening to think that the citizens of Lubbock Texas couldn't give a stuff about what the man is saying.
His resentment of the bloggers, the Facebook oracles, the haiku poets is charmingly backward looking, like almost all the nonsense that Burchell scribbles. Because you see this is supposed to be his killer line:
... there was a desperate need to persuade Gillard to stand for PM, no matter how deeply it ran against her long-established political habits, instincts and personality. And all the while the political enthusiasts everywhere have been weaving their own beautiful tapestries with the same knitted brows and oblivious, self-important air as Addison's upholsterer.
What was that about the need for lucidity?
We'd just settle for brevity instead of long winded pomposity, together with a recognition that there were more than a few people who couldn't stand Chairman Rudd (and let's not go into his Christian posing or Senator Conroy's great big new internet filter right now). Yes let's hear it for unmarried barren atheists (Gillard is doing it for all the unmarried barren atheists).
That said, we are indeed in favour of lucidity. And the day that Burchell demonstrates it is the day we'll declare a holiday on the pond.
Meanwhile, we're standing by for the day that Burchell suddenly discovers that the appointment of Gillard was a heinous mistake, as first foreshadowed by a charming parable by Joseph Addison, and that she has failed his rigorous demand for lucidity. Early betting around the pond is for next Monday's column ...
Meanwhile, the most important issue of the day - the appropriation of hotel soap and shampoo, and the removal of Gideon bibles from hotel drawers - must go unresolved for the moment. Is it true that the bible represents a danger to children? Should one be proactive when confronted by this kind of danger, or simply turn the eye the other way, or perhaps the cheek?
What's the good of the punditocracy when they pay no heed to the crucial moral dilemmas of the average ethical punter?
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