David Burchell, and that's not an elaborate cathedral of caricatures, this is a labyrinth of insights ...

(Above: a bronze age labyrinth in Galicia. Hah, that's nothing. This is a labyrinth).

Week after week here at the pond we valiantly lobby for David Burchell to be elevated into the inner circle of commentariat commentators.

But it's bloody hard work. Reading Burchell reminds me of a friend from university days, whose synapses snapped in totally different ways to mine. Put simply, I couldn't understand a word he said whenever he led a theoretical argument or debating point, and likewise if I spoke, I could see his eyes glaze over with incomprehension. We still speak occasionally, and life has worn off the edges a little, so we've both moved away from complete autism, but every so often we still go huh, what the fuck was that?

Okay so now you know the theme's incomprehensibility and how better to discover mutual incomprehension, than read Burchell's Revenge of the nerd on capital hill and wonder what the fuck it's all about.

Try some of these gems on for size:

Ask any harassed high school teacher in any stressed, close-to-the-edge outer-suburban or provincial school and they'll remark to you about the curious sense of destiny that seems to have overtaken classroom gender relations in recent decades.

Yes, yes, but most Australians live in dense congregations in urban environments. Is the wisdom of outer suburban provincial schools applicable to eastern suburbs schools, or private schools, or classy public schools? Is this a parable about the sense of destiny Riverview gives you?

Just wondering ...

While girls - ever since the doors of compulsory schooling were opened to them, after a short delay of a couple of millennia - have learned the value of at least pretending to be good, where goodness is defined as orderliness, self-discipline, a bright smile, minding your tongue and (perhaps most important of all) feeding back to the teacher those predictable, accredited sentiments they so evidently yearn to hear. Girls have, in short, been making up for lost time in a pragmatic, even ruthless manner - all the while evading the endeavours of the wild boys to disrupt their best efforts. Now even the prime ministership is within reach.

Sorry, words fail me. Will a simple WTF do?

It seems we're doing caricatures, so can we do a few more caricatures, and then apply them society-wide as a kind of vapid, impossible to prove, impossible to disprove, meaningless talking point about which nothing can be said? Sure thing:

At the same time, these counterposed roles have hardened into caricatures. A few very talented boys still soar in an idiosyncratic, if at times irritating fashion, and others are becoming better disciplined, while more and more seemed reconciled to their self-created fate as social dinosaurs. The strange effect of all this - as Tolstoy may have appreciated - is that all good girls seem to be good in the same familiar way, whereas all bad boys are bad in a style of their own choosing.

Yes and all seeming truisms wrapped in their own banality are bad in a style all of their own choosing. Much like platitudes or prejudices, as indeed Tolstoy may have appreciated. As indeed Fyodor Dostoyevsky might have appreciated ...

But wait, surely we can do better than this. Let's reduce the the notion of the world to the idea that it's a high school ...

Further, as politics has become more and more like an elaborate replica of high school - where the cleverest kids feel a rigid entitlement to lord it over their less-gifted classmates for the rest of eternity, in an endless replay of the Revenge of the Nerds ...

Great, that's more like it, though what a pity, what a tragedy that politics didn't take a better movie, like Fast Times at Ridgemont High, or display the kind of wit and humour to hand in Alexander Payne's Election as the role model to elaborately replicate.

I'm not sure what it all means, but I do love high school flicks as a sub-genre, even if recent blessings like Assassination of a High School President have been somewhat mixed. Still, where would the world be without Principal Skinner, or that evil dean in The Simpsons ...

Oh dear, I see I've been distracted, and so digressed, but the Burchellian metaphor keeps on rolling along. Let's pick it up again ...

... so many of the unloveliest features of high-school life have also seeped into politics, rather like the evil-smelling residue of a failed science-lab experiment wafting through to the classroom next door.

Oh yes a rotten eggs hydrogen sulfide joke. Take that you evil dean ...

But steady, an important point is being made.

Nowadays in the schoolroom of politics the most important virtues are: orderliness, self-discipline, a bright smile, minding your tongue and feeding back to the electorate those predictable, accredited sentiments you believe they yearn to hear.

Why that sounds alarming. Surely this is a metaphorical play explaining that rough boys have been ruled out of politics and it's all the fault of young women?

And so the accession of a new generation of able, efficient young women in the parliamentary Labor Party, and the disciplining of public life by our contemporary army of advisers and minders, have melded together in a curious fashion. Just as schoolgirls learn how to be good at seeming to be good, female Labor ministers are particularly skilled at grinding out mechanical, rehearsed, meaningless responses in deceptively personable, human-sounding ways.

Why yes, they're just like trained puppies, all blonde, and worst of all female. Just like a bunch of girls. Worse, just like a bunch of school girls. Ambitious and scheming and full of flirtatious wilful wiles and so difficult for young boys to handle. The southern Belle will yet rule the world, and frankly it's important to give a damn.

But wait, don't give up, because misanthropy can cut two ways:

Of course, in politics as in the schoolroom we still find those outsize male personality traits that give high-school teaching so many of its piquant challenges.

Who, after all, does not remember at least one driven, obsessive, unsociable boy who demanded all the attention for himself, was able to relate to other people only through the process of dominating them and forcing assent to his every thought, and whom, on account of his general odour of strangeness, nobody wanted to sit near in the playground? Didn't we always fear that, in the end, some boy like this might break through the self-created cocoon of his own disordered personality and thrust his way ever onwards in the schoolroom of life until he became prime minister?

Uh huh. And who might that be exactly? Tony Abbott? Kevin Rudd? Paul Keating? John Howard? Bob Hawke?

I don't know, I give up. Who is it?

And then again, wasn't there always some other boy - usually more adept on the sports field than in the classroom - who managed to combine his naturally demonstrative personality with a quirky, slightly manic and yet vulnerable charm, in a way the girls would find strangely attractive and repellent at once? And then as now, could we ever really be sure: would the exposed heart and the quirky charm carry him far enough, or would he be forced at last to domesticate that crazy, wayward will?

Uh huh. And who might that be exactly? Tony Abbott? Kevin Rudd? Paul Keating? John Howard? Bob Hawke? Malcolm Frasier? Bob Menzies? Gough Whitlam? Billy McMahon? John Gorton? Ben Chifley? John Curtin? Earle Page?

I don't know, I give up. Who is it?

Sorry, Luke, this is not the way to feel the force. The whole point of the game is never to actually say what you mean, or explain what you mean, or use examples to illustrate what you mean.

Instead let's go off on another high school metaphor tangent, preferably with a kind of right angled rhetoric:

Right now it's easy to picture Julia Gillard in the role of the stoic school captain. She has been forced through circumstances to adopt the demeanour perfected by school captains since time immemorial: dealing with unpleasant situations in a dignified manner; protecting the school's good name; dealing discreetly with scandal. We know the Prime Minister must have a ruthless streak - or else she would not have advanced nearly so far, despite her reported periodic bouts of hesitation. Yet she evidently feels constrained not to exhibit this ruthless streak in public - lest the school captain's dignitas and her good-girlness both be lost.

Dearie me, I wonder why? Could it have anything to do with the Liberal party and the commentariat comparing her to Brutus or Judas or a knife wielding back stabber on a more than daily basis?

Yes, for that kind of nonsense, why not troop off to Alexandra Carlton's attempt to promote a wretched magazine while slagging off Julia Gillard in 'I want to sledge them': Jess Rudd on her Dad's demise, exemplary proof that The Punch is by far the most fuckwitted conversation in Australia.

I would’ve broken ranks and yelled, “He f—-ing got asked to step down all of you f—-ing idiots. I’m Rudd’s f—-ing daughter and he did not f—-ing resign. Gillard is a selfish piece of shift [sic], who cares about herself and not the f—-ing Labor Party. Have fun with the country, I hope to never vote for this god foresaken party every again [sic]. F—- all of you.”

Yes, that's what passes for a clever satirical flourish in the lucky country these days. And how about this for a nice little backstabbing of that selfish piece of shift (sic):

It’s unfortunate Julia Gillard doesn’t have kids – not because it makes her less of a woman or gives her a diminished understanding of families. But because we could wedge them under a microscope and prod indelicate outbursts out of them that would give us a much clearer insight into the woman herself.

Yes, what a pity she's barren, it's so hard to have any clear insight into the woman ...

But I digress, as you might expect by Carlton's early bid to win the worst person in the world award for the week.

And yes, sob, I admit it, I started to nod off while reading Burchell - it happens all the time - but we must plough on, a bit like Homer Simpson's snow plough, to reach a deeper understanding of the high school in which we all live.

It's also clear that - as the brightest apple on Labor's tree - Gillard must have reflected on the foibles and foolishnesses of the past three years, when projects were set off half-cocked in all directions, partly out of a self-created panic that the world was tumbling down, and partly out of electoral calculation.

The great global recession a self-created panic? Dear lord, who is this gibbering loon? So much for getting out of jail, and skating through, while economies crashed all around, and still might in Europe, in best lucky country style ...

She has signalled to us, albeit in low tones, that a re-elected government must cleave towards the Labor ethos of the Hawke-Keating days, when public programs were devised in a spirit of enabling the private economy to prosper, rather than as some act of spite against it. Likewise she has scratched in some cross-hatching towards a new micro-economic reform sketch, taking up where the micro-economic agendas of the 1980s and 90s left off.

Um like her school hall policies?

I keed, I keed. But isn't it interesting that Burchell lives in such a remote high school that he simply doesn't seem to have actually read any of the abuse or criticism of Gillard or her work as a Minister these past few months ...

Yet the overall effect is still too polite and discreet by far. Gillard, having become the good schoolgirl, has ceased to be a real, living personality. Further, the Prime Minister's two overwhelming problems evidently require a joint solution. She clearly can't address the former prime minister's behavioural problems without also addressing the schoolroom craziness of his prime ministership: the manic activity marred by the absence of clear strategy; the urgency combined with an incapacity to act, which led essential decisions to be postponed just as harebrained schemes were trotted out without proper thought.

Phew, at last I get it. Burchell is really just Paul Sheehan in drag, ensuring the tradition of a manic Monday continues, and he really doesn't like former Chairman Rudd ...

She will have to accept her share of responsibility for this situation, but she will also have to disassociate herself where necessary, and this will require a large dose of ruthlessness. As Machiavelli might have said: sometimes in order to deal with people who are bad you cannot be afraid of seeming bad. The danger otherwise - verging on certainty now - is that the classroom will continue to be dominated by the disruptive boy at the back, and nobody will become any the wiser.

Oh yes, now I really do get it.

Tony Abbott is the disruptive boy at the back. It's all the fault of Riverview. Sure you might have thought that Saint Ignatius' college was a rich lower north shore school for rich Catholic ponces, but you don't have a clue.

Oh wait, what's that? Hang on, what if she wins, and then what if former Chairman Rudd is the disruptive boy at the back, and I've got it all wrong.

Oh no, it gets worse. Could Sophie Mirabella be the disruptive boy at the bac?. Could it be Julie Bishop? Could it be Bronwyn Bishop? Could it be a pod or a brace of Bishops? Did they use a ruler to flick spitballs on to the ceiling, just to show the boys they were sharper and tougher and smarter?

Could it be Malcolm Turnbull? Could it be Mark Arbib?

Meltdown, meltdown, nothing computes ...

I know, I know, you've got to the end, and you're none the wiser. But that's the whole point, that's the whole joy. Think of it as being like reading or watching Alain Robbe-Grillet- Last Year at Marienbad say - or a trip into the Labyrinth built by the legendary artificer Daedalus to hold the Minotaur ...

Indeed you could waste your time reading the wiki about the various ancient, medieval and modern labyrinths built to delight or tease or frustrate, but with Burchell offering such a splendid maze of meanings and wonderful caricatures, why be picky or perverse?

And to think that The Australian offers this joy once a week, and not hidden behind a paywall. Is there a long absent lord or what?

(Below: now please return to your casual girlie lounging about ways, as shown here in Last Year in Marienbad).