Paul Sheehan, and Captain Grumpy goes west young man, westward ho and ha!

Patience, young Amyas! Thou too shalt forth, and westward ho, beyond thy wildest dreams; and see brave sights, and do brave deeds, which no man has since the foundation of the world. Thou too shalt face invaders stronger and more cruel far than Dane or Norman, and bear thy part in that great Titan strife before the renown of which the name of Salamis shall fade away! (and more Charles Kingsley here if you have a strange taste for this sort of stuff).

Ah nostalgia for wild frontiers.

It's twenty years, give or take a day or two, since I first ventured online at thirty bucks the hour on CompuServe, and with useless tech support to boot, damn you CompuServe, damn you.

Oh wait, they're already damned, and lost forever in the fast paced world of the full to overflowing intertubes, which makes reading Ken Auletta's story about Tim Armstrong's bid to revive AOL, You've Got News (sorry, it's behind the paywall), such a strange flashback.

Still, (spoiler alert), here's Auletta's conclusion to his usual impeccably written study of the problems of dinosaurs struggling for reinvention in the new age:

... AOL does not seem to be saving journalism, and journalism does not yet seem to be saving AOL.

As Steve Jobs and Apple showed in the nineties, tech companies can survive and prosper after near-death experiences. Perhaps Tim Armstrong will manage to make AOL rise again, but there's a much more common path followed by digital companies - like Wang, DEC, Starwave, Excite and Lycos. They rise, then they sputter, and then they crash.

Don't forget CompuServe, Ken! But thanks for reminding me I have two Lycos email accounts even the spammers have forgotten about ...

AOL was that funny American thing, a kind of gated online community, and now too many punters have broken down the gate.

But what, you ask, has this to do with pond business, seeing as how on Monday, it's always Captain Grumpy (aka Paul "Magic Water" Sheehan, aka Paul "Hate the Islamics" Sheehan, aka Paul "Won't Someone Think of the Christians" Sheehan) day. Truth to tell, it's got sweet bugger all, though paranoid gated communities always resonates as a theme ...

It's just that reading Sheehan is always guaranteed to be a wade through a whinge and a whine.

But we know our duty, and so on we trudge with heavy heart to read his latest vitriolic, chicken little hysterical, the sky is falling in, we'll all be ruined outburst, under the header Biting the boom that feeds us.

And yippee, we won. You see we regularly have bets as to what will inspire Sheehan to scribble, and sure enough a new way to bash the Gillard government came up.

I suppose it's a bit of a cheat, it's such a broad and reliable category, but the GGB industry is an important mainstay in our commentariat manufacturing base, which is of course vital to our industrial sector.

If only Lotto was an equally sure bet ... It'd be by by the pond, and eat my dust, Captain Grumpy.

This time Sheehan has opened what might be termed a western front, and I see only two solutions: Sheehan must decide to go to Western Australia to live (thereby ending the need of the Herald to put his sacred texts behind a paywall) or he must actively help to campaign for the secession of the west. Or preferably both ...

You see, the sandgropers feel unwanted and unloved, and it's Sheehan's painful duty to act as megaphone for their many grievances, so that the deaf, insolent eastern staters heed their plaintive cries.

For a start there's no water:

Imagine the uproar if this were happening in Sydney or Melbourne. Yet WA's water crisis is almost invisible to the eastern states. When the federal government, the Canberra bureaucracy, the eastern media, and thus most Australians, look west they see only a mining boom and wealth.

Actually the water crisis gets plenty of mentions but a lot of the notes are in the context of climate change, a subject we know from Sheehan is the subject of much religiosity. Take Water supplies could halve in two decades:

Perth's water supplies could dip by nearly 50 per cent in 20 years in the worst case scenario, Climate Change Minister Penny Wong says.

A CSIRO report has projected a marked decrease in river flows and water yields in Western Australia's southwest by 2030.

It said under the best case scenario surface water yields would decrease by four per cent and in the worst case the reduction would be 49 per cent by 2030.

Penny Wong? What a strange blast from the past ...

Colin Barnett, as well as bringing new coal stations on line, has responded by proposing a nuclear power plant (but not in WA's backyard of course, because the state system wouldn't be able to cope. No put it somewhere else and everything will be hunky dory).

But where were we? Oh that's right in the middle of immense Western Australian suffering:

WA is experiencing chronic shortages of water, land, workers and cash, a cascading shortfall that is compromising the greatest resources boom Australia has ever had. Mismanagement by Canberra has a large role to play. This tension is increasing since the Queensland floods and the massive rebuilding required. The pressure on WA in the competition for skilled workers and government investment can only intensify.

Uh huh. Those naughty, wicked Queenslanders, arranging those floods to make things hard for the humble sandgroper.

But average full time earnings in WA in 2010 reached $70,210 - compare this to Tasmania's bottom of the barrel $55,103 (figures here). Only fat cat Canberrans did better, and even fat cat Canberrans marvel at the way the mining sector offers up the highest average full time ordinary earnings by industry, with a nifty $103,111 a year.

Ah but you see that's not riches, that's just more suffering, because the nasty eastern staters take all the GST, especially those devious deviant Queenslanders. It just keeps going south, except that's just a saying for the way it keeps going east, or perhaps north, or perhaps north south east.

Oh dear, and there was prime goose Kristina Keneally moaning about the flood levy and pleading for special treatment for Sydney siders and the Sunday Terror outraged as it claimed NSW to bear brunt of levy.

But forget the local whingers, it's back to the whining west. Not only does Canberra have its paws over everything - oh the irksome nature of native title - it's ruining efforts to dig everything up and ship the entirety of WA to China:

WA is subsidising every other state and territory in the country, by providing 35 per cent of Australia's export income with just 10 per cent of the population. Yet it is short of funds to build infrastructure to support the boom.

''When I tried to explain all this to Julia Gillard, her eyes glazed over. She didn't get it at all,'' Barnett said.

Sheesh, excuse me, my eyes just glazed over.

Wait a second, I get it, I get it. It's because Gillard is a Victorian and an eastern stater, unlike Paul Sheehan, who is resident in NSW but in his heart a true westerner. And no, her eyes didn't glaze over because of the incessant sound of the squawking coming from the western end of the pond, it's because she's detached and robotic and politically waterlogged, and the west hates her.

You see, it wasn't the poverty stricken billionaires taking to the streets to complain about a tax on their squillions that were raucous, it was the federal government:

''People in the West Australian business community have not forgotten that. The personal abuse. The foul language. The lot.''

Oh saintly Twiggy Forrest, oh long suffering Gina Rinehart ... but at last you get a story of the pain of the west worthy of your doubling of your stake in Fairfax Media (Gina Rinehart doubles her stake in Fairfax Media).

It seems everyone in Western Australia turned out to greet emissary Sheehan, a remote, exotic and wonderful creature from the east, almost as strange to westerners as Commodore Matthew C. Perry was when he turned up in 1854 to tell the Japanese it was time to open up shop.

It seems that people in Western Australia are so isolated and cut off from the east that they have no idea how Paul Sheehan's commentaries are viewed by sensible eastern staters. He's such a regular whingeing, whining Captain Grumpy that no one takes him seriously, but in WA he's perceived as a viable, friable conduit for complaints:

When the state's Attorney-General, Christian Porter, organised a breakfast meeting for me to meet business figures and policymakers in Perth, the breakfast was heavily oversubscribed, such is the level of frustration in the city with the east's ignorance of the west's problems. The message was uniform: WA is being bled by eastern politicians, and bureaucrats, to the point where it is self-defeating.

Actually using Paul Sheehan as ambassador at large, or chief gatherer of complaints, or emissary is the bit that's self-defeating.

And what about the tone of the whining, seeing as how it comes hard on the Queensland floods?

"The east coast is oblivious," said the Water Corporation's Murphy, and this was before the floods.

Yes, selfish inward looking east coast people, more concerned about the floods in their neighbourhood, and so oblivious to the pain of the west. The deep heartfelt never ending pain ...

I guess in much the same way as the west coast is oblivious to the Labor party. So much so that Sheehan makes a savoury meal out of the way the federal Labor party currently holds three out of fifteen seats in WA, and WA has only 15 of 117 federal seats.

The point? Someone in in Labor should care about the west?

The solution? Well as we noted at the start, there's only one solution, and that's secession. Granted WA should never have joined the commonwealth, and granted that the pond's preferred solution - WA chainsawed off the mainland and dragged to safety in the middle of the Indian ocean - is a tad physically challenging at the moment, what's needed is another referendum, just like the one so tragically won but also lost in 1933.

Here's the flag, here's the delegation standing by:

Now all we need is Gina Rinehart to revive her father's sadly forgotten 1974 Westralian Secession Movement ... Sheesh, where's Lang Hancock when the west needs someone to trample over native title ...

Yep, the 'stop the Canberra grab' was doing the rounds in the 1970s secessionist movement (here), and it's been doing the rounds since long before federation, and emissary and eastern states potentate Paul Sheehan has just discovered it ...

Talk about an eastern suburbs deep on the east coast wanker ...

Meanwhile, only the principality of Hutt River stands firm against the horde of Canberra bureaucrats.

Oh wait, His Majesty Prince Leonard 1 seceded from WA! Something to do with wheat quotas ...

Never mind, the principle's the same. WA should secede, and Paul Sheehan should secede, and just as they put up a giant gate and fence along the WA border, so Fairfax should put Sheehan behind a paywall, and we'll all be happy.

And now since it's online anniversary day, a completely irrelevant video blast from the 1994 Today Show past that's been doing the rounds on the full to overflowing intertubes.