Gerard Henderson, and time to unleash the hounds ...

Second day away from the commentariat at The Australian, hidden behind that damned paywall, and it's getting hard. There's the sweating and the shaking and the stomach cramps, way worse than what William Burroughs suffered writing Junkie.

Oh sweet absent lord, I need a fix, I need a hit bad, some of that sweet uncut commentariat doom saying and doom neighing, shooting, gushing into the vein like a dose of brown sugar ...

What if western civilisation or the European economy or the Australian lifestyle were about to collapse, and the pond missed the news?

What's that you say? There's always Gerard Henderson scribbling away at Fairfax ...

But Henderson is just the methadone of commentariat writers, a total bummer, delivering the glazed eyes and the sense of numbness, but without the euphoric kick, the rush, the high where you can touch the sky ...

What's that Monty? Release the Henderson hound?

Oh okay, Henderson it is. After all, who can forget his incisive demolition of the antipodean Tea partiers, and their incoherent, confused, incandescent rage.

Henderson rightly pinged the partiers for copying their thoughts and memes and stylings from the United States, attacked Tony Abbott for trading off on their anger and maximising their sense of grievance and entitlement, mocked them for being a bunch of old farts, derided them for driving around in trucks tonking their horns like a Beijing taxi driver, condemned them for electing Alan Jones as their spokesperson to amplify their childish paranoia, and berated them for waving insulting, simple-minded, childish placards ...

Don't remember the piece? Strange, the pond seems to recollect something of that quality being published on April 1st, and immediately thereafter, stripped of all credibility, the antipodean Tea party faded from view.

Oh okay, we keed, we keed, Mr. Henderson has always been kind to the tea partiers, seeing them as a democratic movement entitled to behave like ratbags.

Where some saw an inchoate rabble, confronted by a demonstration in Canberra, Mr. Henderson could find plenty to love.

The protestors in the Canberra convoy may not be sophisticated in many ways ... but they're tremendously sophisticated in others, which happens to include agreeing with Gerard Henderson and Tony Abbott and their attitude to climate science, especially as the mob looked like one-time traditional Labor voters who'd jumped the shark and nuked the fridge ... (Road to ruin for traditional Labor - warning, forced video at other end of link).

So it goes. You see there are good demonstrations, and there are bad ones, and now properly primed, you're in a position to make the most of today's Henderson piece positioned below the painfully punning header Placards aplenty at protest but it's hard to see the good for the pleas.

Yes, carrying a pen and a notepad in order to take notes, intrepid, vigilant reporter Henderson attended Martin Place in Sydney, and discovered that the Occupy Sydney protest involved young people with a shameful, shocking sense of entitlement. As opposed to those truckies entitled to drop 10k to attend a protest in Canberra ...

Now here's how you spin your reporting. In relation to Canberra, when the demonstration was small, Henderson scribbled:

What was striking about the "Convoy of No Confidence" that rolled into Canberra yesterday was how many protesters looked like one-time traditional Labor voters. Not many employees or independent contractors can find the time or the money to travel to Canberra for a demonstration and the turnout was not large.

Uh huh. A solid bunch of workers. Now here's how you write about the Martin Place gig, and remember to recite it with a condescending sneer:

When I asked why the number of demonstrators seemed small, the response was that many went to work during the day in the IT and other industries and returned to the protest site each evening. The group assembled that morning appeared to be students, unemployed young men and women and a few pensioners, all of whom would probably have been receiving some government-funded payment or subsidy.

Dear sweet absent lord, IT geeks and nerds, helped out by bloody welfare and dole bludgers, students who should be studying, and pensioners who should know better, and perhaps should be hanging around waiting to die in a nursing home instead of disturbing Mr. Henderson's peace of mind, poise and equanimity.

Worse still, these young and old bludgers are resorting to mixed messages, of the most presumptuous kind. One young woman:

... claimed to have no problem with the Reserve Bank or indeed capitalism. It turned out her real interest was climate change and she wanted huge increases in government subsidies for alternative energy projects. Now.

Oh the outrageous scamp. Compare this to the Canberra mob:

On ABC radio yesterday, Deborah Cameron described the convoy as "anti-everything". This misses the point. Sure, elements of the convoy oppose the carbon tax and/or the ban on live cattle exports and/or the proposed restrictions on gambling in licensed clubs and/or same sex marriage. But what united the convoy is that - to a man and woman - all the protesters want an election. Now.

Yes, you can be anti-everything - hey, who cares about climate science - but it's important to remember that everything should result in Tony Abbott's election. Now.

Oh well that was back in August, nowhere near April 1st, but it did have the standard sneering reference to inner city types - it seems it takes an inner city Sydney Institute heavyweight to be able to spot deviant inner city types - and it wouldn't be a Henderson column if the current effort didn't conclude with a sneer:

One of the Occupy Melbourne organisers acknowledged that the demonstration did not have a point. Narcissism, however, is a very contemporary attitude.

Yes indeed, and thank the absent lord it seems narcissism was entirely absent in Canberra. Except if you happened to spot television starlet Pauline Hanson ...

In much the same way as self-awareness or a sense of irony or a capacity for reflection seems entirely absent in Mr. Henderson.

Still we're pleased to learn that the Australian banking system is incredibly robust and well regulated, thanks to Peter Costello, so it turns out there was simply no need for former Chairman Rudd's theatrical grandstanding back in 2008, as outlined in Rudd's $700 billion bank guarantee ...

Well what's a little bit of loose change amongst chums.

And being a Henderson piece it wouldn't feel right unless there was a little bit of self-pity, since it seems these days self-pity is all the go in the commentariat:

Western democracies offer numerous opportunities for protests. The likes of Bandt and Moore take a soft attitude to this occupation of public places, but would be most unlikely to adopt a similar approach if the protesters constituted Tea Party imitators opposing a carbon tax or militant Christians opposing abortion or homosexuality.

Indeed. Why weekend after weekend militant Christians staged a demonstration outside an abortion provider just a few streets down from the pond, until they drove it out of business and shut it down, and it was most impressive the way that Mr. Henderson joined with the occasional feminist street side in opposing their outrageous antics ...

Which is why, like Mr. Henderson, the pond was shocked and horrified by images of narcissist truckies, Alan Jones, and plump well fed Australians making life terribly difficult for Canberra public servants, and why we savaged them mercilessly for daring to protest in such a public way, clogging the roads with their mayhem ...

Get thee to the domain, we said in unison, and spruik your hot air safely out of sight, and avoid defiling that temple of capitalism the Reserve Bank (except of course as any tea partier knows, we should Choose Gold, and Abolish the Reserve Bank).

Even now, that April 1st column by Mr. Henderson perhaps still stands as the most magisterial and heartfelt denunciation of narcissist truckies and wayward Canberra demonstrators carrying on like clowns in the parliamentary gallery, and foolish tea partiers wanting to abolish the Reserve Bank and return to the gold standard to be found in the Australian media ...

Just don't go googling for it. Could be a long and futile hunt ...

(Below: as a break from Mr. Henderson's musings, the pond was amused to stumble across, for no particular reason, a 1986 tape of a Geoffrey Robertson Hypothetical, and now presents, for no particular reason, a couple of snaps from said tape. Warning: we have more. Throw a brown envelope filled with a large sum of cash into the nearest loon pond, or else ...

O tempora! O mores! or if you will, tempus fugit).