Christopher Pearson and the usual woeful distortions of history, mingled with peculiar secularist nonsense ...

(Above: an early portrait of Tony Abbott dating from Roman times, seen going about his daily duties as a combative thug. Note that the noble warrior hides his face in this picture, making the identification suggestive but also tentative and inconclusive).

You can always rely on Christopher Pearson. The giggles he sets off can make you fall off a chair.

Take this wrap up to his usual paean of praise to Tony Abbott in Thanks to Tony Abbott, we don't need a Tea Party. (Please take it and use it to wrap your fish and chips, especially if you have any prepared by Pauline Hanson).

It seems that we don't need a Tea Party because Tony Abbott is a Tea Partier par excellence:

No doubt that's why Arthur Sinodinos, in his opinion pieces in The Australian, has taken to referring to Abbott as Spartacus and likening the Coalition's resurgence to "the revolt of the slaves".

Tony Abbott as Spartacus, leading the slaves in a revolt ...

Now if that doesn't get you out of your chair, and rolling down the aisles with the Jaffas, I do so worry about your sensa huma ...

Pearson has never had much regard for history - that's how you get to write Historians will back coalition with a straight face - but it takes an extraordinarily straight face of the most inordinately stupid kind to scribble how Tony Abbott is some kind of modern day Spartacus ...

At least Arthur Sinodinos gets away with it on the grounds of a satirical nod and a wink, a cheeky smirky nudge nudge and say no more.

But Pearson actually seems to take it seriously:

Thankfully, Australia is unlikely to have a movement like the Tea Party in the foreseeable future. The main reason is obvious. While Labor seems hell-bent on tearing itself apart over progressivist issues such as gay marriage and a carbon tax, which have no appeal to its traditional support base, candidates in the parties of the centre-right tend to understand the values of their electors and take them seriously.

The drift of socially conservative blue-collar votes to the Coalition, for most of the Howard years and at this year's federal election, is suggestive.

Suggestive? Actually if you read anyone who's bothered to crunch the figures, you discover The fairytale of Howard's battlers, and if you want to go a little deeper, you might care to read Howard's Battlers: The Electoral Evidence (here as a pdf).

But of course "suggestive" is one of those "evocative" Humpty Dumpty words, handily designed to hint, and provoke but not deliver - a bit like imagining Christopher Pearson doing the dance of the seven veils, but baulking at the last couple of veils. (Yes, yes, I know, a suggestive image designed to sear into the brain and destroy minds).

Anyhoo, let's give thanks that Australia is not going to have a Tea Party movement any time soon because we've already got one - the Liberal Party - with its very own Tea Party leader, the said Tony Abbott, leading the slaves in revolt. Down with the banks, down with big business, down with capitalism, onwards slaves to a glorious new future ...

It tells us that when voting is compulsory people will ignore the tribal claims of party and vote for whoever seems to them to represent most closely their values and aspirations. It also tells us that the Liberals have managed to shake the perception that they're the party of big business, at a time when state and federal Labor's links with the big end of town and with property developers are damaging the party.

Uh huh. The Liberal party isn't the party of big business, it's the party of Spartacus and the slaves, and lordy how big business suffered and was burned at the stake and roasted like a suckling pig (yes mixed metaphor man we're still in business) during the Howard years.

Actually if you want something interesting and intelligent to read about conservatism, that reminds me that in its December issue Harper's has published Corey Robin's musing The Party of Loss, which is behind the Harper's paywall, but which you can find here in pdf form in its original version Conservatism and Counterrevolution.

Allow me to quote the concluding pars, which lightly fries the notion of conservative as revolutionary:

Unlike the reformer or the revolutionary, moreover, who faces the nearly impossible task of empowering the powerless—that is, of turning people from what they are into what they are not—the conservative merely asks his followers to do more of what they always have done (albeit better). As a result, his counterrevolution will not require the same disruption that the revolution has visited upon the country. “Four or five persons, perhaps,” writes Maistre, “will give France a king.” For all of its demotic frisson and ideological grandiosity, for all of its insistence upon triumph and will, movement and mobilization, conservatism is ultimately a pedestrian affair.

For some, perhaps many, in the conservative movement, this knowledge comes as a source of relief: their sacrifice will be small, their reward great. For others, it is a source of bitter disappointment. To this small subset of activists and militants, the battle is all. To learn that it soon will be over and will not require so much from them is enough to prompt a complex of despair: disgust over the shabbiness of their effort, grief over the disappearance of their foe, anxiety over their enforced early retirement. As Irving Kristol complained after the end of the Cold War, the defeat of the Soviet Union and the Left more generally “deprived” conservatives like himself “of an enemy,” and “in politics, being deprived of an enemy is a very serious matter. You tend to get relaxed and dispirited. Turn inward.” Depression haunts conservatism as surely as does great wealth. But again, far from diminishing the appeal of conservatism, this darker dimension only enhances it. Onstage, the conservative waxes Byronic, moodily surveying the sum of his losses before an audience of the lovelorn and the starstruck. Offstage, and out of sight, his managers quietly compile the sum of their gains.

It's a damn sight more penetrating and to the point than Pearson's tosh about Tony Abbott as the Tea Partier from hell, delivering a revolutionary savaging to Rome and/or big business.

It is of course one of the more splendid bits of rabbit hole logic that the likes of the Koch brothers have bankrolled the Tea Party in the United States (Covert Operations), on the basis that the needs and desires of billionaires somehow conform to the needs and desires of the slaves, and never mind that the disparity in wealth in the US has blown out in the past decade in the most remarkable way.

Pearson of course is just regurgitating and recycling the American line about America's ruling class and the perils of revolution, as if somehow Obama exhibits Olympian disdain and the Republicans are down wit it, and he somehow manages to extract from the American situation - after extensive, lazy quoting of a piece by Angelo Coedevilla which makes my quoting of Robin seem restrained - the quaint notion that Tony Abbott isn't part of Australia's dominant elite.

Instead he's waiting in the wings to lead the local version of Coedevilla's "country class", one and the same as the ruling class (just flip the coin), with the distinguishing characteristics being marriage, children, and religious practice.

Proving triusms can be placed at the heart of any tale.

Whether such a diverse grouping can hope to construct the common cause and congruent agendas it needs to make headway against America's ruling class is a vexed question.

Indeed, so thank the lord we have Pearson to vex away:

But the parallels with Australian politics are as instructive as the differences. It's worth noting, for example, that comparisons in local media between the Tea Party and Hansonism are misleading, because the former can't be described as racist and the latter's agenda was secularist.

Secularist? As in the notion that government or other entities should exist separately from religion and/or religious beliefs? (Secularism)

Perhaps that's why Hanson back in 2007 welcomed a new religion wherein Muslims and Christians can pray together:

The former One Nation leader, who is having another tilt at politics, said she was wary of allowing Muslims to settle in Australia.

But she would welcome some Muslims, she said.

"There are Christian Muslims - there is no problems about that," she told ABC radio yesterday.

"But if people believe in the way of life under the Koran, that concerns me greatly."

Well I guess that's a fiercely secularist agenda. Keep Oz Christian is about as secularist as you can get. A bit like Hanson speaking in the Senate:

"[These things] Australians of Anglo-Celtic and European origin value: a fair go, fighting against corruption and community spirit. Along with these goes a commitment to Judaeo-Christian values and ethics, an honest system of justice and government, and education based on English law." Pauline Hanson, Hansard, 1996, p. 8091.

Misleading?

No doubt Hanson was more a fish and chips woman than a true believer in the style of Pearson's conservative Catholicism, but the notion that she had a secularist agenda is such a quaint misuse of the word that you have to think it was deployed only for the sound, and not the sense - so that the Tea Party phenomenon could be denied the racial aspect that runs through its extremes like a blonde streak in a vulgar hairdo, while Hansonism's relentless ethnically orientated campaign for old fashioned dinkum Aussie values (not held by blacks, foreigners and immigrants) could be dubbed secular.

Now that's misleading. So much for Judaeo-Christian values ...

But then I guess the whole point of reading the love lorn, star struck Pearson is never to find out the realities of what might have actually been said and done in the past (since history is merely an ideological tool), or to understand language, since it is all ultimately deployed disingenuously and solipistically for one purpose: "please elect Tony Abbott, he's ever so spiffing, and such a Spartacus and a Tea bagger."

There is, as it turns out, a fair historical argument that Spartacus and his mob, removed from the sentimental freedom-loving revisionism of Stanley Kubrick and Hollywood, wasn't that interested in abolishing slavery, or reforming Roman society, and that far from being a radical idealist, Spartacus was a leader caught in a factional split between those who didn't mind a life spent plundering and raiding southern Italy, and those who wanted to escape over the Alps to an uncertain freedom. (here in his wiki)

My own thought? Put Tony Abbott down in the faction that doesn't mind a lifetime spent plundering and raiding and pillaging ...

Jokes, and Laurence Olivier talking of oysters and snails to Tony Curtis aside, what's the odds that poor Spartacus is at the moment revolving furiously in his grave, wherever that might be, since his body was never found, and it was the 6,000 survivors of the revolt who were crucified and lined the Appian Way from Rome to Capua ... and so quite possibly his corpse is whirling at 6,000 rpm, in indignation and outrage at the constant comparisons in the wretched Oz between him and Tony Abbott ...

On the other hand, maybe things will work out for Tony Abbott as well as they did for Kubrick's fictional Spartacus:

Here's hoping.

Speaking of Spartacus, the local free throwaway rag City Hub had this riff on the "I'm Spartacus", "No, I'm Spartacus", "No way, I'm actually the ridgey didge Spartacus" routine in Kubrick's film as its front page on its Xmas season edition:

And turns out that rather than being Spartacus, Tony Abbott might actually be Julian Assange, because the latest Morgan poll shows after Julia Gillard dubbed Assange illegal and the goose McClelland threatened to take away his passport, the party managed to drop four percentage points (Labor suffers in WikiLeaks backlash).

Proof that Tony Abbott is yet another anarcho-Marxist Fellow Traveller with Assange?

Well maybe, if you believe that Abbott, once elected, would immediately embark on a campaign to bring big business, big banks and big management to heel ... in which case, did I mention that I've got a jim dandy bridge for sale (and I'll throw in the Opera House for free) ...

Meanwhile, this being awards as well as holiday season, we're thinking that Christopher Pearson is coming up fast from the rear, and is now the hot contender in the Commentariat Clown of the Year category ...

(Below: radical Tea Partier Tony Abbott, ready to get in touch with his inner helot and slave, and lead the poor benighted helpless masses towards revolution, or at least a lifetime of joyous serfdom).