Paul Sheehan, a detour via the merchant ship Soochow and an aerogram, and then safe harbour in the land of fear and hatred ...

(Above: the good ship the Singkiang, sailing Hong Kong harbour, sister ship to the Soochow, found here, and likely a good guide to the way the Soochow looked. It seems the Soochow was scrapped and replaced mid-1967 by the Australian-Oriental Line operating out of Swire house Sydney).

Walking the streets of Camperdown the other day I came across a battered nine cents aerogramme - by air mail, par avion - of a featherweight kind I hadn't seen for years.

It was postmarked 4.45 pm 6th January 1967, Brisbane, and it turned out to be letter from an Asian man to a woman with a distinctly British name living in 22 Brumby street, Surrey Hills. No need for their names or pack drill to be broadcast on the internets, but it turns out the man was a seaman on the merchant ship Soochow, and lived at Swire house, long gone from Spring street in Sydney.

The letter reveals he'd been on an eighteen day trip to Brisbane to drop off cargo and pick some up for the reverse trip, and would soon return to Sydney. It's written in halting stumbling English - jumping from a denial of having any girlfriends in Brisbane to a declaration of love to a desire to give up smoking just like the woman - and it's signed "from your lover", with a Chinese signature and it's dated the 5th January 1967.

It obviously meant enough to the woman for her to keep it until likely a jumbled rushed clearing of her estate saw it blowing in the wind, and scuttling across the pavement to end up lodged against the fence.

It reminded me of Love Letters from Teralba Road, and it made me think how strange and bold and brave it would have been for an Asian man and a woman carrying an Anglo name to be lovers in the sixties. Hiroshima Mon Amour and all that ...

Cynical conclusions might be drawn. Him a merchant seaman, her a woman living in a house in Surrey Hills, still there and easy to find on google maps, just surviving the building work going on next door.

But I prefer the romantic one ... because the heart can be multicultural ... and love is love, and the skin there only to be part of the loved one ...

Why write about this now? Well the alternative would be to spend even more time contemplating the bile and the love of disaster and the hatred of Hispanics celebrated by Paul Sheehan, as he takes his singular and pathetic pleasures in Obama deserves his insecurity and the disaster that follows.

Sheehan is of course a regular in maintaining the fear - he probably worries about bears as much as Stephen Colbert does.

Sheehan is in splendid negative mood, looking forward to a wipe out of the Democrats and shedding no tears. He pauses briefly to contemplate healthcare reform and the global financial crisis, but then swiftly settles in to celebrating the behaviour of Sharron Angle.

Angle has lodged in my mind as the woman who was part of a campaign to prevent a football team wearing black jerseys, on the basis that black was the colour of evil, supernatural and devilish (Sharron Angle: "Black is the color of evil").

Sheehan contemplates the cavortings of Angle with a kind of self-satisified pleasure, as it if were payback or karma for Obama. He could have written a column decrying Angle and the more rabid aspects of her policies and her political campaigning. Instead he records it with what could pass as approval:

Angle has gone for the viscera. She is running campaign ads showing Mexican gang members, in all their tattooed, menacing glory, as the personification of the failure of the Democrats to take control of the border. Territorial sovereignty is a game-breaker, and failure carries a high political penalty, as Australians well know.

Territorial sovereignty is of course in this context high flautin' words for Hispanic hysteria, and Angle has exploited the fear in the most strident way imaginable. Suddenly Colbert's appearance before a congress subcommittee on immigrant workers seem like the work of a comedian who understands how to conquer his fear of bears by helping fellow human beings willing to do a little bean picking (links to his video appearance here, and an excellent summary of his fear of bears, godless killing machines that they are, here, or below).

Sheehan thinks that as a deliverer of payback, Angle is A okay, and the way she's been backed by Sarah Palin is also good gear.

Then he plays the double switch, just in case you might think there's a racist element to his rant. No, no, no, why there's an Indian, Nikki Haley, parents born in the Punjab, running for the governorship of South Carolina.

And then there's Michelle Bachmann, who has managed to combine a career in elected politics while raising five children and fostering another twenty:

Highly telegenic, she has proved a major drawcard for Republicans nationally.

She's also a first class loon, who doesn't feature regularly in these pages because there are so many places you can read about such utterly strange, peculiar and quite loony American loons.

Amongst Bachmann's many tilts at notoriety was the time she quoted Jefferson that having a revolution every now and then was a good thing, and that Minnesotans should be armed and dangerous on the matter of greenhouse gases. "Armed with knowledge" came the hasty amendement from the office, but in reality Bachmann has been a first class ratbag for many years, the most extreme of the extreme. I'd provide links, but really she's so comprehensively out of the ballpark, you need to spend hours looking at the entire flow of Minnesotan madness. Why not start with her wiki here.

Yet Sheehan choses to celebrate ratbaggery rather than a march for sanity.

It says much for the man, as he chortles how "these women" have "proved politically seductive".

And then he finally rounds it out with a celebration of how it could all go pear shaped.

There is so much more to say about The Insecurity, but at the core it is the defection of independent voters, en masse, away from the Democrats, that could turn ''La Inseguridad'' into ''El Desastre''.

Note the clever mocking use of Mexican, so witty, so clever, so nuanced, so subtle.

So much hate and fear in the world, and Sheehan loving it. Bring on the piranhas, bring on the sharks, bring on the fear and the loathing, bring on the disasters, let's all do the stomp ...

Yet somewhere in the back of my mind, while reading the predictable Sheehan posturing, I remember that faded blue aerogramme, from a woman's lover and realise it doesn't have to be like this, it doesn't have to be like this at all ...

And now since it's Monday, on with that fear of bears, thanks to the Huffington Post - click through for the accompanying story. While Sheehan's just an antipodean ratbag of the most mealy mouthed kind, that doesn't mean we should stop the laughing and the dancing and the loving. Take it away Colberrrt: