David Burchell, and time to read a newspaper through a glass darkly while pondering fetishist images of St. Sebastian ...

“Stupidity is infinitely more fascinating that intelligence,” Mr. Chabrol once observed. “Intelligence has its limits while stupidity has none. To observe a profoundly stupid individual can be very enriching, and that’s why we should never feel contempt for them.”
(here)

Well he's dead and gone now, but Chabrol would be enormously relieved to know that while his cinematic intelligence has left the world, stupidity (and his finely observed movies) can go on ceaselessly enriching our lives.

Meanwhile, and on an entirely different plane, we have the inestimable David Burchell, delivering up such joys as Backstage at pantomime of modern politics, which offers this pearl as an opener:

As private citizens we are condemned to experience politics in much the same fashion as St Paul believed.

In the beautiful, lambent words of the King James Bible, we experience this vale of tears "through a glass, darkly".

Um, is it wrong to insist that biblical exegesis should properly insist that Corinthians in this passage and those thereabouts, is on about a partial and incomplete understanding of god, a poor reflection in a mirror, and that in the future we will know everything completely? Come pie in the sky time? (here).

It seems that Burchell fancies himself as something of a counterpointer, or a counter puncher, hence his monthly appearances starting to unfold amongst the cardigan wearers on Michael Duffy's Counterpoint. But if he's going to do that to biblical metaphors, rumours might spread about how he's a kind of anarchist tearing up the bible, and we know what kind of trouble that can cause.

It's actually a relief to find that others find Burchell's musings to be tenuous and largely incoherent. (Interpreting the Classics). That's how we've always found him, befuddling and incomprehensible in a way so mystical and marvellous it becomes jolly good fun.

Watch, marvel and wonder at how he continues to abuse the meaning of Corinthians for his own ends:

As members of the polity we all exercise our universal right to political prophecy.

Yet were we to keep a rigorous audit of our prophecies (which thankfully we never do) we would find that our grand efforts at divination mostly fall flat. Through the bright artifice of television we persuade ourselves that we are viewing the political actors and events face to face, in their pristine immediacy.

It's enough to make the pond think that when we were children we spake as children and understood as children, but once we grew up, we should put away childish things ... and Burchell's scribbles.

Never mind. It's too much fun, the sort of thing that makes small boys grow hairs on the palms of their hands.

It seems somehow that Burchell thinks some antipodean thinkers have conflated former chairman Rudd with god, and future paradise:

Ever since Kevin Rudd lost the prime ministership in June, many of us have entered into a kind of collective fantasy-world, a vast cathedral of mirrors of truly Pauline dimensions, and one from which it's hard to imagine some of us departing of our own volition. Like St Paul, Rudd truly did make himself all things to all men: he became a white marble bust which we were all free to paint in our own gorgeous colours.

Many of us? The ones that voted down the Labor party and voted up the greens and the independents? Or the ones who voted for Tony Abbott?

So now he's a white marble bust just like St. Paul?

Only in Burchell's fevered imagination, or his own lunch time. I actually have no idea who Burchell is scribbling about, or what fantastical free form drug has inspired his rhetorical imaginings of how we might imagine former chairman Rudd:

To some he was the philosopher-king, projecting a new nation-building future paved with fibre-optic cable. To others he became a quasi-friend discovered out of the quasi-reality of breakfast TV.

To still others he became the voice of the nation, for voicing an apology to indigenous Australians that so many seem to have viewed as an act of bravery, when surely nothing could be easier than to apologise for the actions of some distant, discredited ancestors.

Which no doubt explains why John Howard took such an easy course of action, and dissed his distant discredited ancestors.

But then my immediate reaction whenever I read Burchell is to wonder what he's on, what he's been taking. I mean, I want some of it, because it's bloody good stuff, at least if you judge it by outcomes:

For those who treat politics as the raw stuff out of which to weave their personal life-journey - and who travel to writers' festivals and the like in order to forge an emotional bond with the authors of the books that move them - Rudd seems to have played the role of a kind of imaginary kinsman.

WTF? I mean seriously and with all due respect, WTF? The former chairman as imaginary kinsman? For people who attend writers' festivals?

He was someone who felt as they did, had evolved as they had, and who shared the same company as they would dearly love to have done, with authors and actors and other gleaming public personalities.

People of this kind had experienced former prime minister John Howard as a kind of personal demon, a man whose mere existence constantly reproached them for their own imperfect, conservative pasts. To these people Rudd brought peace and deliverance, a settling of their personal moral ledger.

WTF? I mean seriously and with all due respect, WTF? Who are these people? Are we talking about the gabfest summit? Did everyone who attended have some kind of imperfect conservative past, having worshipped at the feet of John Howard, who turned into a kind of personal demon, a constant reproach, all settled by former chairman Rudd who brought peace and deliverance and the settling of a personal moral ledger?

Or is this the closest to mere meaningless gibberish that Burchell can get without resorting to an imitation of Jack Nicholson, endlessly typing out "All work and no play makes Kevin a dull boy"?

All of us, regardless of our training and upbringing, are capable of experiencing politics as the simple exhibition of human pathos, and here, too, the Rudd-fantasy offered succour. The image of the desolate former PM, stripped naked of all the armour of state, his fondest life-illusions gone, drifting through a disembodied personal testament at a press conference on the artificial lawn of Parliament House, was surely more than most ordinary TV viewers could easily bear.

Um. He's the Minister for Foreign Affairs, god help us and our fishnet stockings and our foreign affairs. Can we just move along?

What the heck is all this about, where's it leading? What the fuck, if I may be so crude and cajoling, is the point, as we learn that one of Burchell's students proposed that Julia Gillard had made a grown man cry?

Yet the intensity of this reaction itself seems somewhat unreal. Were our own life-partners to be reduced to an abyss of self-pity by losing their job - a job that, in Rudd's case, was only loaned to him by his party, and which he occupied only in their service - we would probably tell them, sympathetically but firmly, to get a grip on themselves and to remember that life goes on.

Indeed. Is it wrong to suggest that Burchell, who seems to be lost in some continuing emotional mire with former Chairman Rudd, should get a grip on himself, remind himself that life goes on, and get to the bloody point. The point being?

Another version of the Rudd-fantasy appealed to politically disengaged young people, for whom ideologies and parties are now quaint indicators of some lost world, like the railways, or the Soviet Union, or vinyl records.

Rudd's own engagement with young adulthood was doubtless rather superficial and mediated through the untypical enthusiasms of his sleep-deprived office staff.

Yet if your nearest analogue to politics comes through the virtual friendships of the digital world (where complete strangers bombard you with appeals to your supposed friendship) or the emotional simulacrum of reality TV (where tear-struck evictees and almost-pop-stars mimic the routine defeats and occasional victories of real life), you might be grateful for the effort.

Here we go again! WTF? I mean, and with no disrespect, WTF? Ex-chairman Rudd as a vinyl record or a steam train? Being a marble statue of St. Paul isn't enough?

No doubt Rudd did not seem exactly real. But he may have seemed no more unreal than a host of other public personalities.

Strangely, eerily, Rudd suddenly feels more real than the quest to find meaning in the scribbling that Burchell tosses out into the world, like a host of commentariat columnist personalities who imagine the mention of television gives them pop culture credentials ...

But hang in, this is where things just start to warm up and we must now endure an entirely fantastical narrative, spun from gossamer thoughts, offered up as insight, and proposed as rapidly hardening national fact:

We are now in the curious situation where we have entire fantastical narratives - spun out of the ether and woven into elegant curlicues - that are rapidly hardening into the status of national fact.

Pretty soon it will impossible to enter into a conversation in which at least one other participant does not envision Rudd as some modern-day St Sebastian, tied to a tree and enduring the arrow shafts with a gaze of heavenly transport.


Remember this image for your next discussion. Former chairman Rudd as St. Sebastian. Who'd have thunk it, outside the rich fetid imagination of David Burchell?

But also remember if you do indeed compare chairman Rudd to an arrow-filled sadomasochistic catholic St. Sebastian, people are likely to look and you and go WTF, and murmur quietly behind your back as to the best time to ship you off to the funny farm.

Or where at least one participant does not attribute Rudd's martyrdom to a cabal of "faceless men" - men of such exquisite malign skill, it seems, that they rendered it impossible for Labor's partyroom even to cast a vote.

Oh for the sweet dear absent lord's sake, can we just move along. It's done and dusted ...

Presently Gillard has no option but to maintain her attitude of stoical silence in the face of the Rudd-fantasy.

Well that should make for interesting foreign affairs. But hang on what's this? Rudd forced to back down on Timor:

One of Kevin Rudd's first tasks as Foreign Minister will be to negotiate with East Timor to establish a processing centre for asylum seekers there - a policy about which he had deep misgivings when prime minister.

The Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, affirmed yesterday that while she and Mr Rudd would work together on foreign policy, along with cabinet, she would be the ultimate authority.

''Ultimately, of course, I'm the leader,'' she said.

Golly, so much for stoical silence. The hissy prissy thing claiming she's the leader, not realising that we're all still worshipping at the shrine of St. Sebastian, painting our white marble in acid Ken Kesey colours, through a glass darkly.

But now and at last we finally come to the nub of all the fantasies about Kevin Rudd and the lessons that Gillard must learn from Burchell's rich fantasy life about his fantastical perceptions of the former PM:

Most people, when they attempt to divine elemental political truths, are stumbling in a world of scraps, hints, innuendos and third-hand guesses.

They need to be told stories about a government's ambitions that accord with reality as they themselves experience it, and which enable them to construct a version of events that at least makes logical sense.

The danger otherwise is that, deprived of the information that makes our political lives go round, we'll all slip back into the much more pleasurable world of fantasy.

And this time around Labor's goose really will be cooked.

Mmm, what's that I smell? Is that the smell of cooked goose? Why yes it is, but it seems to me that the goose that's cooking, stewed in his own verbosity, laden with his preening portentous ponderings, coated in his succulent St Sebastian and Corinthian comparisons, and reduced to a rich glaze of nonsense and tripe, is Burchell himself.

But now you've read the thoughts of David Burchell, time to get the T-shirt.

It's essential you wear it while reading the man in The Oz, or listening to Counterpoint, so that you can constantly remind yourself of why you emerge completely befuddled by the experience: