The Australian's tilt towards John Wayne and cowboy boots continues ...

(Above: little boxes, little boxes, some to the right, some to the left. Wait, what's that on the right, a factory spouting hot air and carbon gases. Could it be perfectly safe to consume, like soda water? And so science is a really good ideological battle ground?)

“John Wayne’s parents’ first home was in Waterloo, Iowa and he was from Iowa and of course the main point I was making are the sensibilities of John Wayne, which is patriotism, love of country, standing up for our nation, that positive enthusiasm is what America’s all about... And that’s of course my main point.”
Michele Bachmann (more here).

You chose your screen heroes as you find them.

As it happens, I was trained by my father to like westerns and so John Wayne movies - The Searchers is by far his best film - but it's always worth remembering that Wayne avoided war service, preferring the fantasy life of a screen hero (Was John Wayne a draft dodger?).

He had his chance, and he let it pass. He was also married three times, divorced twice, a serial fornicator (with Marlene Dietrich amongst others), and a mean drunk. Naturally this cuts him out as a Republican hero, given the way people are prone to confuse reality with screen fantasies. Plenty of positive enthusiasms in that long movie life, along with a hearty indifference to race and class issues (wiki).

Having been too close to too many actors, trust me, if you take an actor as your moral compass, you're up Stanislavski shit creek without a Brechtian paddle.

Eventually John Ford, the man who made Wayne a screen myth, got around to making Cheyenne Autumn, as an apology for the random insults delivered in movies featuring Indians. It didn't feature Wayne, but rather James Stewart, who actually managed to fly combat missions over Germany. Say what you think about the bombing strategies of World War II, but it was a dangerous place for air crew wanting to learn about Catch-22.

Of course if you like wild men, you might happen to prefer Lee Marvin. He went off to war and copped a bullet in the bum from actual real machine gun fire (you may, in polite company, say buttocks). It severed his sciatic nerve, and gave him an anecdote for life. (wiki).

Of course Marvin liked marriage so much he tried it twice, and so he might well be on the way to being a Republican hero with appropriate personal values. Sadly he turned into a liberal Democrat who opposed the Vietnam war and supported the gay rights movement. Ah well, at least he was involved in a notorious landmark palimony case, and so in a way supported respectable Republican values ...

What's this got to do with anything, even including Michele Bachmann's capacity for confusing John Wayne with John Wayne Gacy?

Well bugger all, truth to tell, but at least it helps me get over the culture shock of being back in Australia and seeing, while absent, that The Australian has run out a new advertising campaign, which bugger me dead is worse than the one featuring Phillip Adams and other self-regarding thinkers - could such a thing be imaginable, even as you 'think. again' about that campaign's monstrous stupidity?

Right now the new effort might be responsible for savaging your eyeballs like a vampire's claw, but if you think you're as tough as John Wayne, you can scoot off to see more at Campaign for The Oz to focus on hot issues. (Is that header a sick joke about its climate change coverage?)

All this is no doubt a softening up of consumers to buy into online delivery, but the pond is already hardened to the loss of its favourite commentariat commentators.

Worse still, after a week far way in another land, there comes the dreaded moment of actually reading the insights on offer in this wretched Murdoch rag, blessed with sordid pretensions and hollow hypocrisies, and so well on the way to enduring Republican values of the kind affected by actors who find it easier to act war hero than to be one (don't get me wrong, I approve of cowardice, I just disapprove of cowards disapproving of cowardice).

Sure enough, there's the anonymous editorialist delivering yet another homily from on high in Happiness is a land called Oz, as predictable as a speech by Napoleon in Animal Farm:

Those naysayers who lament rather than laud our decades of prosperity will have to look for a new way to argue their case for turning out the lights and slowing national growth. Time for a reality check, for example, for academic Clive Hamilton and the thesis he expounded in his book, Affluenza, that Australians labour under, rather than love, prosperity. It always looked a limited analysis, one forged in the world-weary, middle-class, inner-city suburbs rather than across the broad spectrum of Australian society. Now we see how niche such thinking really is.

About as niche as The Australian's target demographic perhaps, but since I promised to scream the next time the anon edit did a rant about the inner city suburbs (now world weary, and seemingly ready to top themselves), please take a step back from your computer screen.

There, that's better.

Now if you want complacency about the national well being, what are we to make of this proposal by the anon edit?

Politicians of all colours must constantly look to expand the economic pie in ways that ensure everyone gets a bigger slice.

Lordy, lordy, that sounds dangerously like socialism of an inner city kind.

In the meantime, here's to our unashamed embrace of the lucky country.

Yep, and our unashamed embrace of meaningless blather in the editorial section of a paper pitching itself to the elite demographic (check the circulation of the rag in your rural town or outer suburban newsagency now).

Meanwhile, over in the opinion pages, Greg Sheridan is urging Tony Windsor to pay attention to US Republican congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, in More sense from Jim Sensenbrenner than from Ross Garnaut.

Windsor would get more sense and honesty from a half-hour with Sensenbrenner than from a year with the government's many carbon propaganda arms.

Or he'd get a half-hour's worth of climate science denialism, since Sensenbrenner is a well known oil-share owning denialist, who at various times has claimed that solar flares are the culprit, that in any case the planet is cooling, that there's an international conspiracy of scientists, and in one particularly fruity outburst talked about how Mars was warming and no evidence of internal combustion engines on Mars had been found.

Sensenbrenner has earned a place on the pages of Skeptical Science, here, and it's typical of Sheridan not to pause for a second, or weigh Sensenbrenner's unbridled opposition to anything to do with climate science and its implications for the future or for good governance. Still, we did love the defence of Sensenbrenner to be found here under the header Jim Sensenbrenner's probably not a crook:

The congressman has been on the wrong side of science, the law and common sense more times than anyone can count — on issues ranging from global warming to civil liberties to immigration reform.
That may make him a jerk — indeed, his record suggests that, rather than a “jerk of the week,” Sensenbrenner is a more a “jerk of the year” or “jerk of the decade.”
But he is not necessarily a crook who has been bought by the special interests.
It may well be that the congressman simply is not the sharpest tack in the box.

That was in response to the Milwaukee Express labelling Sensenbrenner 'jerk of the week' for being in the pocket of big oil and coal, here, and if you want more inspirational moments, Sensenbrenner has even generated an adoring blog, Sensenbrenner Watch.

It seems Sheridan is slowly drifting into the deeper realms of John Wayne-ism, but hey since climate science is a conspiracy and/or a myth, feel free to don your cowboy boots and get down to some yeehahing with him. Just remember that Sheridan's not the sharpest tack in the box when it comes time to replace your leather ...

And if that's not enough, why you can always spend time with Dame Slap, as she scribbles Sacred cows get diced by reality.

Yep, Janet Albrechtsen is furious yet again with (though not necessarily in this order and including but not limited to) Malcolm Fraser, political clowns, linguistic acrobats, the Labor party, Fairfax, the ABC, snooty Elizabeth Farrelly, Lindsay Tanner, Doug Cameron, and bashers of The Australian, a rag which allegedly chooses to run a diverse range of views and takes an unapologetically centrist editorial position.

Except of course in relation to the matter of inner urban elites, where it takes an unapologetically eccentric editorial position.

By extrapolation from her targets, we can conclude that Dame Slap is fiercely opposed to gay marriage, thinks climate change is a load of bunkum, and deplores the mealy mouthed mamby pamby soft-hearted Nauru solution being proposed by Scott Morrison when the tough-hearted rattan cane Malaysian solution is right at hand.

Enough already. Bring on the paywall now, spare us any more advertising, and feel free to make The Australian an outpost for some of the more bizarre lunacies of the Republican party.

After all, John Wayne Gacy was just a struggling SME entrepreneur and Jimmy Carter supporter, and we know where that led him. He also probably had an affinity with Norman Bates in Psycho:

Norman: ... You know what I think? I think that we're all in our private traps ... clamped in them. And none of us can ever get out. We ... we scratch and claw, but only at the air ... only at each other. And for all of it, we never budge an inch.

Marion: Sometimes we deliberately step into those traps.

Norman: I was born in mine. I don't mind it anymore.

Marion: Oh, but you should. You should mind it.

Norman: Oh, I do (laughs) but I say I don't.

Is that why The Australian scratches and claws at the air, caught in its own private trap? Who knows, and in the end, who cares ...

(Below: which brings us back in that peculiar circular way we often discover in life, thanks to The Australian and Michele Bachmann, to thoughts about the sanctity of marriage and genuine conservative values as exemplified by a right wing rag whose advertising agency sees a conundrum between biblical values and human rights. Can I have a John Wayne or perhaps a John Wayne Gacy with that, and don't forget the fries?)