Paul Sheehan, Dennis Glover, and how about a little physician heal thyself?

(Above: a couple of Savage Chickens to get the show on the road. More Savage Chickens here).

There's something quite moving about projection and transference.

Let's take it from the top:

Psychological projection or projection bias is a psychological defense mechanism where a person subconsciously denies his or her own attributes, thoughts, and emotions, which are then ascribed to the outside world, usually to other people. Thus, projection involves imagining or projecting the belief that others originate those feelings. (and more here at the wiki).

Now here's Paul Sheehan, setting it all out for the shrink in Nothing splendid in all this isolation, as he broods about attending a conference on the Great Barrier Reef, and the way it was a golden marital age in the fifties and sixties when women were trapped in marriage by custom, circumstances and at fault divorce provisions:

While at the resort, I kept seeing a man who dined alone. He was plain and portly, about 40. When he asked for a table he was polite and timid. Each day I saw him sitting alone at the beach, staring at the sea.

He prompted the same feeling I usually have late at night when I pass people waiting in bus shelters.

Of course the plain, portly, timid, polite man might well have been staring out to sea, contemplating the koan supplied by his Zen teacher the night before:

Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.

Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full, and then kept on pouring.

The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. "It is overfull. No more will go in!"

"Like this cup," Nan-in said, "you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?" (and more of our favourite koans here, as that's just 1 of 101).

Forget it, Zen master, Paul Sheehan is full of his own opinions and speculations - especially when it comes to long lost supposed golden ages - and as if somehow there's no pleasure to be derived from being alone or being solitary, or occasionally eating by oneself, even if a stranger travelling in a strange land, surrounded by suspicious, intrusively staring Paul Sheehan types:

There's something deflating about bus shelters at the best of times, but especially late on a winter's night. I want to scoop those waiting people up, put them in a taxi, and get them home. Because these are people of humble means and necessary patience.

Actually they might be solid, upright citizens, completely afraid of sharing quality time with a psychotic Sydney taxi driver, or perhaps greenies who believe in the virtues of public transport, and if they copped Sheehan coming at them with a warm blanket, a cup of tea and a rich vein of condescending sympathy, they'd run like hell. Or call the cops. Or tell the silly bugger to sod off, and keep his eastern suburbs wanking to himself. You know, like a cheerful cockney, enduring the bombing of London.

Luckily, it's unlikely to happen:

But I don't. Mostly we keep our distance. Mostly we seek a balance between empathy and self-absorption, with self-absorption usually victorious. Though, as every parent knows, selflessness has been thrust upon them - whether they feel noble or not.

Uh huh. Well at that point, I think we can let the psychiatrist get to it, and leave Mr. Sheehan alone with his thoughts, while quietly muttering thanks that he likes to keep his distance.

Oh okay I'm being mean, but really Sheehan's morose, indulgent mood piece really does take the end of the week commentariat cake for complete flatulence, brooding and sulkiness.

At least we now know why he routinely writes about the end of the world on a weekly basis.

No doubt he does his writing by taking his lap top to a cafe and posing as plain, portly, timid, polite man staring out to sea while wrapped in deep thoughts, and worrying that, if he doesn't get his copy in on time, he'll have to catch the bus home with humble, patient folk lost in a wilderness of despair without a Sydney taxi driver.

Hell is, after all, other people, or perhaps oneself ...

What is hell? Hell is oneself.
Hell is alone, the other figures in it
Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from
And nothing to escape to. One is always alone. (T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party).

Oh dear, this is getting out of control. Calling Dr. Jung:

Just as we tend to assume that the world is as we see it, we naively suppose that people are as we imagine them to be. In this latter case, unfortunately, there is no scientific test that would prove the discrepancy between perception and reality. Although the possibility of gross deception is infinitely greater here than in our perception of the physical world, we still go on naively projecting our own psychology into our fellow human beings. In this way everyone creates for himself a series of more or less imaginary relationships based essentially on projection. Jung "General Aspects of Dream Psychology" (1916). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P.507 (more Jung quotes here).

Enough already. Well if you see someone being solitary, project away, but whatever you do, don't disturb the moment by rushing up to them and asking them:

Are you sad? You look so sad and alone and forlorn, and I can't stand it anymore, can I get you a taxi somewhere, anywhere?

Sure you'll get them a Sydney taxidriver and he won't know the way, and he'll ask you if you know your preferred way to the city from the airport and if you say you're from Melbourne, he'll take you via his special Palm Beach short cut, and by golly then you'll feel sad ...

Oh stop it, there's blindness in the air. I can feel my psychiatrist friend breathing down my neck, along with memories of my hippie Jungian days ...

Time for a little solid commentariat fare before the weekend, and who better to supply that kind of swill than Dennis Glover, peddling the News Corp line in Time to publish or be damned.

Glover is exceptionally happy to swim in a bifocal, bifurcated world of left and right, and extraordinarily happy to explain why News Corp can go on being a raging right wing dream factory keen to spin the world in favour of billionaires.

We shouldn't expect this hump-backed beast to change its spots, and so what's the solution?

What's the answer? Labor could tack back to the Right, but it would potentially lose even more of its base to the Greens. This is a short-term solution only. If Labor's capacity to advocate for social-democratic change is to be revived, it must do something about the make-up of the media sea in which it swims. Not by excessive regulation or manipulation -- something that has no place in a free society -- but by competing more strongly in the marketplace.

Uh huh. Competing in the marketplace with an organisation that controls some seventy per cent of the print media in the antipodes.

How to do this? Perhaps by presenting ideas and policies for fair and balanced reporting?

You mean like explaining to The Australian the truth about recent events in relation to the NBN, and the sheer stupidity and ignorance of its stirring in relation to the hacking incident?

And being newspaper professionals, they'll recognise the stupidity of their reporting, and provide a correction, better still, a flurry of corrections, perhaps even an apology?

Absolutely not, because you see Glover is busy channeling Chris Wallace in the infamous smackdown by Jon Stewart of the failed fact-checking crybaby insane attitude to news displayed at Fox News (Jon Stewart Rips Chris Wallace, Fox News 'Crybabies' For Not Responding To Fact Checks).

You see, rather than expecting fairness, balance, truth (and even justice and reporters faster than a speeding bullet, able to jump tall buildings) and an absence of spin in coverage of the day's events, Glover wants more unfairness, imbalance, distorted truths and even more spin, only this time from a leftist perspective.

Where are the Left-inclined entrepreneurs willing to start new publications, radio stations and television channels? Where are the potential radio hosts and columnists to be nourished? What audience is Labor not reaching?

Back in the good old days, the Labor party heeded this kind of nonsense, and way back in 1925 Emil Voigt persuaded the Labor Council to establish Sydney's 2KY (history here).

Naturally the punters weren't interested in political messages, 'public debates and matters of educational value', and so in the course of time, 2KY became a broadcaster of thoroughbred, harness and greyhound racing (with its wiki here).

Perhaps that's because what punters of a non-horsey kind want is a straight-forward exposition of the news, without a singular, simple-minded left or right wing spin, and a consideration and discussion of all kinds of viewpoints.

Dream on in the world of Glover:

The next generation of Labor leadership aspirants should turn their minds to this. The one with the strategic vision necessary to redress this and other problems Labor faces would be a worthy heir of the Labor leadership.

Uh huh. So News Corp can go on being the dream factory of right wing delusions and monstrous distortions, painfully abusing anyone and everyone (including Fairfax and the cardigan wearers at the ABC), and Glover's solution is for entrepreneurs to establish a dream factory of left wing delusions?

I swear, you could only read this kind of monstrous nonsense in a News Corp rag. In much the same way as you could only get this kind of coverage in The Australian (screen cap, no hot links):

Meanwhile, if you want to understand a little more about why:

(a) Tony Abbott doesn't have a clue about the NBN, though you probably already knew that; and

(b) why the News Corp mob maliciously seized on the hacking incident to rage against the NBN one more time, though you've probably had enough of that; and

(c) why various security companies came out of the woodwork to suggest the sky was falling in, unless the government used their own favoured network security systems, you could do worse than start with Stilgherrian's Media's internet cluelessness is unacceptable and they will die.

It's behind the Crikey paywall, but of late Crikey has been carving out a handsome niche explaining the distortions and untruths running rife through the News Corp press.

Not because they present a left perspective, or necessarily have it in for those of a right wing kind, but because they occasionally, with limited resources, look at the truth of various matters in the news, and examine the relentless spin and distortions to be found in The Australian, allegedly a broadsheet of the considered kind, a reputation now tattered and torn and pissed into the wind.

At the moment, News Corp has disappeared up the fundament of its own bias, with truth the first casualty, and salivating right wing spin the par for the course.

So let's turn Glover back on that problem:

The next generation of News Corp leadership aspirants should turn their minds to this. The one with the strategic vision necessary to redress this and other problems News Corp faces would be a worthy heir of the current wretched News Corp leadership.

There, that feels better, even if the old saw, physician, heal thyself, covered it a long time ago.

And now in the ongoing desire to help out Paul Sheehan, a poem, as Henry Gibson used to say:

To make a prairie

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few. (Emily Dickinson, here)

(Below: and we've always wanted to run Jung and a mandala, in memory of the hippie days, found here).

Oh okay, one more Savage Chicken.