David Burchell, and a goodly dose of Aristophanes and Bottom ...

(Above: Henry Fuseli evoking the artisan way, here).

Here at the pond we're determined to make David Burchell a star, a legend in his own lunchtime, a nattering nabob of the first water, a commentariat commentator up there with the best of them.

In fact, in terms of wordsmithing, as a prattling Polonius given to the pompous and the portentous, he makes the likes of Gerard Henderson look like a novice, a neophyte still waiting a year before he makes his conversion to preening prattishness complete.

How's this as a gambit in PM attracts the scorn of the ages:

When our political leaders seek to launch a public debate, you might speculate, they probably have one of two purposes in mind. They might be aiming for a tete-a-tete with their fellow savants in the political class. Or they might be attempting to initiate a wider dialogue with the general public, in order to placate their fears. Of course, for the political class - that sundry assemblage of commentators, opinionists and all-round passers of wise judgments, who take it as their day job to do the electorate's thinking for them - it stands to reason that the first objective must always be more interesting and urgent than the second.

Who would not wish, if they could choose it, to discuss the niceties of foreign relations with a select audience of accredited greybeards, rather than waste the pearls of their wisdom on the hoi polloi, that great disorderly mass of the uninformed, the apathetic and the inattentive?

Indeed. Who knows what it might mean, except perhaps that we should pay attention to that accredited greybeard Burchell, part of that sundry assemblage of commentators, opinionists and all-round passers of wise judgments who parade and pose before the hoi polloi, or at least those who fail to Think. Again., and so end up buying or absent mindedly clicking on The Australian.

Even better is Burchell's self-righteous opening, which in a delightfully smug way quotes Aristophanes sending up the likes of Socrates. Truth to tell, if Aristophanes alighted on Burchell, he most likely wouldn't be able to believe his luck, since it's only ever so often that you can find pomposity and impenetrable purple prose and sheer opaque density mingled together and ripe for satire.

Take this:

Yet now the sages, like Icarus with his waxen wings, have tumbled to earth. Thus too the choleric anger presently directed against the new PM from all quarters of the political class. People who have spent decades airily professing to be pro-feminist - just as they were pro-everything that made you seem cool without exacting any negative consequences on your career - now openly mock the PM's dress sense or her hair colouring, the provenance of her pearl necklace or the timbre of her speaking voice, as if this were the most delicious possible form of revenge.

Let's pause for a moment and wonder. Who are these people who have spent decades airily professing to be pro-feminist, who mock the PM's dress sense, hair colouring and pearl necklace?

Burchell seems curiously reluctant to name names. Does he perhaps take his stable mate Christopher Pearson for a pro-feminist type? Perhaps it's his other stable mate Janet Albrechtsen? Such a strident radical feminist. Or perhaps any of a half dozen other commentariat commentators stabled in The Oz, who get agitated by her accent or her red hair or her pearls? With not a pro-feminist amongst them ...

Could it be that Burchell simply loves the sound of his own voice, and actual sense and meaning is a secondary issue?

On and on he prattles in the same ode to a Grecian urn vein, but sadly he lacks a little of the Keatsian quality:

And yet in truth there is nothing very arcane or underhand about the political method followed by Julia Gillard since her elevation a few weeks ago. The electorate - spurned by Rudd as he gazed at his own gorgeous reflection in the river - had ceased to take seriously anything the government was saying. There was an urgent need to reconnect, to reassure, to start a dialogue.

Moreover (as will happen once a romance has soured), anxiety, disquiet, even low-grade paranoia were washing across the land, like a tempest in a wine cup, as the ancients liked to say.

Oh the epic failure in that scribble if we're catering to the hoi polloi. Surely this should read like a storm in a tea cup, as the drinkers of Billy tea were wont to say.

Oops, there I am, acting again like some unwashed member of the hoi polloi.

But no doubt you're wondering about the greater meaning, the deeper implications, and frankly I'm at a total loss.

Once it seizes our imagination, political paranoia has an endlessly creative genius: it delights in joining up one neglected issue to the next, in an endless sequence of cause and effect.

Soon enough we fear that the politicians must have dark reasons for wanting to swell the population, despite the overcrowding on our motorways and in our hospitals, and, in order to do so by stealth, that they propose to spirit additional immigrants in by the back door, out of a flotilla of leaky little boats.

Only, dare we say it, if you were a complete gherkin, and read too much of The Australian.

But as always when people gather and mutter darkly of political paranoia, the thing to observe is not the actual meaning but the finery of the phrasing. And cumulatively there is no need for sense.

You see Burchell takes a moment to roundly berate the 2010 Summit:

This marriage of minds, this gentle coupling of policy-wonk brains, this Socratic dialogue between bearded sage and eager acolyte, is surely what political debate was really invented for. If you doubt it you have only to recall the grand 2020 Summit of blessed memory, which hoisted the best and brightest together up into some luminous space among the stratocumulus for a vast celestial chitchat about their own personal hobbyhorses, to the exclusion of everything and everybody else. No doubt we are yet to witness half of the brilliant ideas that came out of it.

Uh huh, and then he has this to say about Gillard's gathering of one hundred and fifty citizens:

What we're presently observing is not so much a policy debate as an implied public conversation, carried out by means of rough policy signals, out of which Gillard evidently hopes to win back some grudging fraction of the electorate's trust. And yet, scorned and with its self-esteem bruised, the political class has winched itself back up into its basket among the clouds. The asylum-seekers discussion and the sustainability talk are treated as juvenile and absurd, when clearly they are meant to signal a promise that Labor will struggle towards an honourable compromise that most citizens can live with (although this will take longer than a few weeks).

The Citizens Assembly is wilfully misread as if it were a grand philosophical experiment in deliberative democracy, a miniature Athens, when clearly it is meant only to signal that the government is engaging with climate-change confusion in a Hawke-like spirit. (Surely the fact that Bob himself, that ancient calmer of nerves and flatterer of our collective self-esteem, was wheeled out to spruik it should have given the sages some kind of clue?)

What on earth does it mean? Could it mean Gillard good, Rudd baaad? Could it mean a gathering of elites baad, but a gathering of ill-informed dunderheads good?

Could it mean that Burchell fancies himself for a role in A Midsummer Night's Dream, but not as one of the nobles, perhaps more as an honest artisan, a Nick Bottom ready to wear the head of a donkey?

Who knows? Would it have been too naked and revealing to say "I'm in favour of the citizens' assembly and think good things might come of it."

This is his column's final par, and the mystery remains:

That rattling noise you hear from the heavens at present is not the thunder of the gods. It is the sound of the political class balefully observing the new PM's disgraceful inattention towards them, and collectively stamping their little feet.

Yes, but what does Burchell actually mean? What is he saying? What is the import of his message?

Is it too much to urge him to forsake metaphors, and speak, in a Sir Ernest Gowers way, plainly? Is it too much to recommend Plain Words to him, or perhaps a correctional course involving reading the complete works of George Orwell? Or perhaps just the ones available at Project Gutenberg?

I know he's stamping his foot about something, but is wilful obscurantist rhetoric and bizarre parables the way to do the stamping?

Whatever, the pond remains awestruck at the capacity for so much blather and indiscriminate wordsmithing, wherein actual meaning and point making is obscured in a way that even Polonius himself might find more than admirable ... more like breathtaking ...

We'd like to agree or disagree with Burchell, but for the life of us, it's so hard to work out what he's saying that agreement, or disagreement isn't a possibility. Guess it's time to rejoin that great disorderly mass of the uninformed, the apathetic and the inattentive ...

And head off to the TAB to make a bet. Which is that within a nanosecond, a week, or at the outside a fortnight after the Citizens' Assembly meets to consider Climate Change, it'll be done over by the likes of Burchell in the same way they did over the 2020 gig ... and "climate-change confusion" will continue on its merry way ...

Same as it ever was for the wise greybeards scribbling for The Australian ...

And the basis for the bet? This is what Burchell had to say about climate change way back when in No logic in Liberals' climate of paranoia:

Since no ordinary citizen can really assess how compelling the science is, all any of us can hope to say is that the best course of action is the more prudent one, and hence the one that promises less future damage to the planet.

Why there, no need for an assembly at all ... since the hoi polloi don't have a clue and Burchell has spoken for them ...

(Below: the Three Stooges in their homage to Aristophanes titled Hoi Polloi).