Christopher Pearson, and quick, someone find the Laxian key before we drown in grey verbal sludge ...

(Above: the good old days, or how we kept Australia free of dangerous ideas).

Here at the pond we were reminded the other day of Robert Sheckley's short story The Laxian Key.

It's about a couple of interplanetary fixers and shakers working for the AAA Ace Agency planet decontamination service, and one of them picks up a gizmo called a Free Producer at Joe's Interstellar Junkyard. Part of the pitch is that the machine runs forever, takes its energy out of the ether, and doesn't need servicing because it never breaks down.

Naturally one of them can't resist and switches it on. Next thing you know the machine is turning out a completely useless gray powder - Tangreese - which sadly isn't up there with unobtainium. That's when they discover there's no off switch, and the only way to stop the machine from flooding the universe with grey goop is to find the Laxian Key.

That's a roundabout way to a plea for somebody to find the Laxian key that'll stop Christopher Pearson flooding the world with incoherent nonsense and an assortment of irrational prejudices.

How about this for starters?

The gap between the party's elected representatives and its traditional support base has been emerging as a given since the Keating era. Accordingly, Labor hardheads such as Gary Johns, Keating's special minister of state, and The Australian's editor-at-large, Paul Kelly, have often waxed eloquent about the electoral prospects of seemingly entrenched mainstream parties that stray too far from their origins.

Gary Johns? The man who spent almost a decade at the Institute of Public Affairs, swimming contentedly on the pond with a wretched bunch of neo cons, and who runs around as the President of The Bennelong Society, and soon to offer up a challenging book Aboriginal Self-Determination The Whiteman's Dream.

The notion that Johns is these days a Labor party hardhead is defamatory of Labor party hardheads, and delusional. Johns might once have been of the Labor party, but these days he's a right wing ratbag ... in much the same way as Michael Duffy started out an anarchist before joining the ABC and Pearson an idle Adelaide leftist before becoming the most conspicuous Australian Catholic in Murdoch land.

Nothing wrong with any of that but when it leads you to labelling Paul Kelly a Labor hard head, it means we're all in la la land, the grey powder is rising and there's no one with a key.

But it gets worse, as Pearson takes a piece by Dennis Glover, Visit the burbs, and be surprised, uses it to unload his own peculiar prejudices. Including the strange notion that the Liberal party, because it's full of diverse souls, is out there to protect the workers ...

Glover's thesis, based on an entirely meaningless sample of people he knew, was that the suburbs weren't overly fussed about some issues, including gay marriage:

Gay marriage is now a mainstream issue in suburban Australia. In fact, it's becoming a non-issue, for most at least. Like so many conservative hot button topics, opposing gay marriage is a vote winner only in the minds of out-of-touch culture warriors and cynical factional operators. In large part, working-class Australia is immune to the orthodoxies of the Left and Right.

No surprise there, because the little polling that's been done has suggested a swing in the national mood, with Galaxy polls, here, suggesting some 60% in favour of recognition, and in an October 2010 poll 78% supporting a conscience vote on the issue.

Cue out of touch culture warrior Pearson's Very few working-class votes in gay marriage, which leads him to some extremely odd memories:

In my experience, prior to the late 1970s men of all classes were markedly more inclined to adopt a live and let live attitude than women, especially if they'd served in the war or done national service. What would at the time have been called respectable working-class people of both sexes were generally more disposed to stern judgment than their middle-class counterparts until well into the 90s. An at-least-notionally relaxed attitude was a marker of upward mobility from the mid-60s and a default position for most university graduates from the 80s.

What on earth does it all mean? Stern judgment? And women to blame? Or university graduates? Presumably detached from their parents ...

Or is it just more verbal Tangreese flooding the world? Glover of course wasn't talking about the nineteen sixties - oh the shock and horror and consternation in Tamworth when the band leader was caught in the hotel room with another man (or come to think of it the consternation, shock and horror when the Catholic priest was caught cutting a swathe through the parish's married women).

He's talking about the here and the now of life in the suburbs, not offering up the peculiar notion that war service led to tolerance. Maybe it did - unless you happened to be flogging a Japanese car to my relatives - but what's the point and where's the relevance?

As I see it, what lie at the heart of post-war working-class Australia are extended family and tribal bonds of attachment. Anything that's likely to impinge adversely on family life, in the way coming out openly as a homosexual so often does, is apt to be perceived as a threat.

Uh huh. Paranoia and threats, the staple diet of the right wing shrieking cockatoo commentariat class. Is homosexuality these days perceived as a threat?

No doubt there's ongoing prejudice, but in the random sample of working class and rustic friends and relatives - most by nature conservative - there's been a bit of a sea change, as they meet people unafraid to out themselves, people unwilling to be subdued by the paranoid fears peddled by the likes of Pearson ...

Then there are all the households of every social class where religion plays even a residual part. I doubt that Glover or most of the self-styled progressives could imagine what the sacrament of marriage means to them and the strength of their opposition to same-sex weddings.

Could we hazard a guess? Seeing as how one in three marriages end in divorce and almost 29% of Australians never marry, and during the past two decades Australians have started to marry less and divorce more, and about one third of children are born outside the traditional marriage (and more jolly divorce statistics in Australia here).

I guess if playing the role of out of touch cultural warrior, it's important to ignore what's actually happening by way of societal behaviour. Where most of the men I meet will raise an eyebrow and make a joke of it - why on earth do they want to join the unholy institution of marriage and get hitched to a ball of strife - the joke carries the usual Australian implication of okay, whatever, if it doesn't pick my pocket or break my leg, it's no harm to me.

Okay that's Thomas Jefferson, but Australians of my acquaintance tend to be Jeffersonian. And Jefferson was making that point in relation to freedom of religion, and the way that if his neighbour believed in twenty gods or no gods, it was no harm to him ...

But religion is the last refuge of the scoundrel and the out of touch cultural warrior:

It is worth spelling out that none of the mainstream churches sanctions homophobic behaviour - not even the Sydney Anglicans - these days. That doesn't mean that they don't or shouldn't take a hard line on homosexual activity. They mostly do.

The churches should take a hard line on homosexual activity? And they mostly do? And the Sydney Anglicans led by the Jensenist heresy are the least likely to hold the line?

Yeah mate, but who's gunna win the footie this year?

But Pearson reserves his best for last.

Glover says the rest of his friends, and especially the women, "instinctively grasped that gay marriage is about justice . . . This shouldn't surprise us, because people such as Oprah, Ellen DeGeneres and Elton John have made gay equality a given."

Uh huh. The way Australians fawned over Oprah in her brief junket was truly remarkable. How to respond to that?

I give working-class Australians far more credit than that. They didn't need foreign television stars and singers to teach them about equality in the first place and most of them will rely on far more discerning judges when the pros and cons of gay marriage are debated.

Yes by a bout of sniffing, condescending, tut tutting snobbery of the kind these days you might associate with a parochial New Zealander distracted by furriners coming in with their fancy attitudes and sending up their beloved sheep ...

You can almost hear the hoity toity disdain in Pearson as he clucks about "foreign" television stars and singers ... and fancy him getting out an aerosol pack to quarantine their dangerous ideas.

Instead it seems the working class - ever so humble, may I tug my forelock sir - will rely on far more discerning judges when it comes to gay marriage. Perhaps Christopher Pearson himself, though he's as inclined to be as 'umble as Uriah Heep?

There are people enough to tread upon me in my lowly state, without my doing outrage to their feelings by possessing learning. Learning ain't for me. A person like myself had better not aspire. If he is to get on in life, he must get on 'umbly, Master Copperfield!

... When I was quite a young boy,' said Uriah, 'I got to know what umbleness did, and I took to it. I ate umble pie with an appetite. I stopped at the umble point of my learning, and says I, "Hard hard!" When you offered to teach me Latin, I knew better. "People like to be above you," says father, "keep yourself down." I am very umble to the present moment, Master Copperfield, but I've got a little power!

Yes I know it doesn't have much to do with the matter at hand, but I felt like a little Dickens, because the likely reaction of the average Australian to Pearson carrying on about foreign movie stars and tugging the forelock to discerning judges above them, and offering them sage discerning advice, is more likely to be fair crack of the whip you wanker, are you up yourself or what ...

And if you're not sure of what fair crack of the whip means, here dredged up from Kel Richards and ABC News radio:

...This is an Australian expression first recorded in 1924 in the Sydney Truth newspaper, where it appears with the explanation "just treatment" - and if an explanation was needed then the expression must have been fairly new at the time.

Five years later "fair crack of the whip" can appear without explanation in Katherine Susanna Pritchard's novel Coonardoo.

None of the experts offers any suggestion as to the origin of the expression, except to say that it's one of group of sayings all of which capture the Australian principle of a fair go.

Since the idea here is about fairness, "fair crack of the whip" may have come from the notion of a horse drawn wagon or coach, with the idea of treating all the horses fairly - cracking the whip over each equally. (here).

As for the meaning of the term wanker?

Just think Christopher Pearson, and for the love of the absent lord, someone find the Laxian key or we'll be flooded in a morass of meaningless dour grey paranoid words ...

(Below: and a few more Australian concepts relevant to Christopher Pearson, and all certified as suitable for bumper stickers while travelling in the dead heart).