And now for a warm bath of salts and kowtowing fawning whateverists ...

(Above: doing the rounds on Face Book).

Every so often, the pond yearns to start off with "this is an awful column, do not read this column". There are better columns on the intertubes. Columns that are well written. Columns that portray lifestyles in Penrith accurately. Columns that don't romanticise Penrith lifestyles while abusively degrading the inner city lifestyles of urban elitists. And they're free. Google is your friend. Go forth and find good columnists. And good columns. Or at least good smut.

Put it another way. The land at the top of the magic faraway tree is always moving, and if the current land isn't to your taste, another one will come along. The pond, for example, never much mentions Gail Collins, but usually reserves one of its New York Times' slots for pieces by Gail Collins. Remarkably, for an American, she has a nicely understated laconic sense of irony.

And other columnists with exceptional insights abound. How about this sort of insight?

Put simply, the Catholic Church is a male dominated authoritarian institution where orders are issued from on high and are expected to be obeyed. Therefore it is not surprising that, from time to time, the Church has readily adapted to authoritarian regimes of one kind or another (with the exception of communist totalitarianism) and has tended to be ill at ease with pluralist democracies and modern Western economies.

Oops, sorry, that's Gerard Henderson, scribbling furiously about Clerical Errors for the Australian Business Monthly in November 1992.

Yes, in the old days Henderson was something of a polymath, dealing with cultural matters and the motes in the eyes of all sorts of people, even the Catholic church.

Where did it all go wrong for our prattling Polonius? How did we reach the point now where he's suggesting no decent Christian should talk to the perverted secularists at the ABC?

I know, I know, it's naughty to dig over past columns, and exhume them, and study them to work out when the serial killer of rogue thinking once struck.

Henderson is a columnist where mindless variations, pressed into ideological servitude, are particularly noticeable.

This week for example, we cop a tedious ersatz history lesson.

Could Henderson these days ever write about China without dragging in Mao Zedong, and the deaths at the hands of his regime, or fail to write darkly about the Tiananmen Square massacre?

These are essential ornaments if you're to deliver a study of Australia-Chinese relations which is positively uxorious and fawning about Tony Abbott and his correct thinking about the Chinese comrades, as in Abbott's realistic approach to China only offends fawners.

Strange when you think about the history lesson. Why not drag in the Lambing Flat riots and the White Australia policy to explain Henderson's routine hostility to China?

Never mind, it seems that this week, we're into bashing Clive Palmer, because Clive is a classic fawner. Poor Clive got quite upset, and jumped into print about Tony Abbott's speech to the Chinese, as you can read in Billionaire Palmer slams Abbott's warning to China, and Palmer seeks to steady China ship in wake of Abbott's warning.

What to say about Clive?

Once upon a time, Palmer was defended by Polonius as a beleauguered hapless miner, under siege from that rooster turned old treasury chook Wayne Swan, who seemed to think Palmer was a billionaire activist (Swan Attacks Miners in Monthly Essay). These days Palmer's true colours are revealed:

In any debate on China, the voice of the ''whateverists'' can invariably be heard. This term was invented to describe the position, over the years, taken by many Western academics and others (and rent-seeking self-serving miners like Clive Palmer) that we should all pay due heed to whatever it is that the leadership in Beijing is saying.

Oh sorry, we inserted that bit about Clive into Mr. Henderson's text.

After all, why should the usual Henderson suspects - academics, Greens, Bob Brown, journalists, leftists, even that right winger Phillip Adams pretending to adopt a leftist mantra - cop the blame when Clive is clearly a "whateverist" and fawner of the first water.

The point of this utterly tedious exercise by Polonius could have been reduced to a few simple words. Four legs and whatever Tony Abbott says about China good, "whateverists" and fawners like Clive bad.

Polonius was most excited by Abbott's direct, forthright manner with the orientals - perhaps his only complaint was there was no sign of a big stick or a gunboat - and he thought it admirably in line with the forthright manner of John Howard and former chairman Rudd:

If Abbott becomes prime minister, his realistic approach to China is likely to be as successful as that taken by Rudd and Howard. When nations are dependent on one another, a little hard but truthful talk is unlikely to do much harm

Say what? Kevin Rudd?

Would this be the same Kevin Rudd that Henderson accused of kowtowing to the Chinese?

Rudd did express concern for human rights in Tibet during his inaugural visit to China as prime minister. However, since the onset of the global financial crisis, he has appeared to be an advocate for China ....
... Over the past year or so, Rudd has depicted China as a solution but never as a problem. (here)

Ah memories, light the corners of our minds, misty watercolour memories of the way we were, scattered pictures of whateverists and fawners we left behind when evil Gillard became PM and Rudd now needs to be revered for his political triumphs, and called up as a proposer and seconder and follower of the Howard-Abbott line ...

In this topsy turvy upside down shook up old world, back then you could find deputy PM Gillard being quizzed about Rudd becoming an advocate for Beijing on the world stage (and defending him!), and that goose the accident-prone Joel Fitzgibbon being persecuted for failing to disclose the financing of trips to China. The lick spittle fellow travelling fawner!

And you could find this from prattling Polonius:

...China is much freer today than in Mao Zedong's time when Labor's Gough Whitlam and the Coalition's Malcolm Fraser were wont to kowtow before the dictatorship in Beijing.

Not a mention of 45 million dead!

These days of course thanks to the need to kowtow before the thoughts of Tony Abbott, there must be idle chatter about fawners and whateverists, and a reminder of the evils of Mao Zedong and the horror of Tiananmen Square, and the castigating of lick spittle fellow travellers who dare to castigate the heroic likes of Howard, Rudd and Abbott when they talk about residual human rights problems in China (especially as Australia has done so well with indigenous people).

Poor old Hugh White cops a serve, as an emblematic example of the whateverists:

The Australian National University professor Hugh White normally talks a lot of sense when commenting on defence. However, in his 2010 Quarterly Essay ''Power Shift'', White went close to saying that the decline of US power in the Asia Pacific entailed that Australia should distance itself from Washington and cultivate Beijing.

Close to saying! What a heretic, what a Clive Palmer acolyte.

Marvel at how Henderson has maintained the Stern Hu rage since the dark days of 2009:

...prevailing evidence suggests the two economies are inter-dependent. China needs Australia and Australia needs China. This should be the message of the Gorgon agreement to export liquefied gas exported from Western Australia to China. (here)

Sorry, enough fawning, we didn't want to get too close to saying that Australia should cultivate Beijing, do carry on Mr. Henderson:

This does not make much sense. For starters, many of Australia's allies and friends in the region have a genuine concern about China's power. Moreover, it is far from clear what China's future will be. History suggests that one-party states do not last forever. And China faces an ageing population due primarily to the regime's one child policy.

Yep, we're close to saying that China is on the downhill slide, a slippery slope Australia should avoid.

Instead it's all the way with Tony Abbott and four legs good. Alienate the Chinese, alienate the Indonesians, bung on a do with any uppity Asian neighbours, and all will be well, because what's needed is a firm hand and a firm stand. The future of China is dark, and plucky little Australia will stand up and show the Chinese how it's done. Oh and send a gun boat to remind them of who's top gun in the region.

Or some such thing. Whatever.

(Below: which reminds us of how Australia is perceived in the United States, our great ally and firm friend. It's been doing the rounds on Face Book, so you've probably seen it already, but a good joke is always worth repeating. When acknowledging Australia was the home country, the pond was more than once asked, in the mid-west of the USA, what the ski-ing is like in Austria. NBC has since corrected its site, so no link. Click to enlarge).