Ben Affleck or Paul Sheehan? The pond merely reports and you decide ...

(Above: but the pond will settle for a bankrupt News Corp and Fairfax)


Every so often, the pond wakes with a start, and realises the pond is full of nattering negativity.

That's what happens when the commentariat litters the pages like rabbit droppings, and all that's on offer is pindone.

But there's good reading out there, deserving of praise, too often ignored by the pond. Harper's was on a roll last issue, with a great take down of Algebra purists by Nicholson Baker, in Wrong Answer The case against Algebra II (sorry, paywall limited).

Now don't get the pond wrong. Like Baker, the pond loves geeks and maths, and a world which can deliver the H.265 codec, but you can lead the pond and a horse to maths, and all you'll get is hay.

Maths-intensive education hasn't done much for Russia, as it turns out. But historical counterexamples don't seem to interest the latest generation of crisis-mongers. We've once again gotten ourselves caught up in a strangely self-destructive statistical cold war with other high-achieving countries. The recruits are young teenagers, their ammunition the little bubbles on standardized tests. America's technological future hinges, say the rigorists, on whether our student population can plug-and-chug the binomial theorem better than, say, Korean or Finnish or German or Chinese students. The childishness of this hypernationalistic mentality depresses me, and I want it to end, and I am not alone.

And then Baker was followed by one William T. Vollmann, with his truly bizarre tale, Life as a Terrorist, Uncovering my FBI file, (also behind the paywall), in which he records how he became a Unabomber suspect.

Now Vollmann is more than a passing sharp, sardonic, satirical writer, and he sends the FBI, and its plodding agents up shitless, and it's a joy to read, but what he reveals is about par for the sort of stuff the Stasi indulged in when East Germany was a going concern - the only difference is that Vollmann had to spend money on lawyers to find out what was happening in his FBI file, rather than tearing down a bloody big physical wall.

At some point what was needed was for someone in authority to say this is a useless, completely pointless harassment of an American citizen, but of course, the minute you do that, who knows what might happen ... after all, he is a suspect, has been a suspect, and might well be a suspect in the future ... especially if the sense of constant surveillance succeeds in driving him bonkers ...

Vollmann invokes John Steinbeck, calls out the ratfink who dobbed him in anonymously on the basis of his fiction writing - spying as a form of literary criticism - and dubs the domestic spies Unamericans, a nice play with the idea of "Una".

After the "Una" affair, Vollmann kept on being surveilled and stopped at the border and even got caught up in the anthrax scare...

... I learned that to be suspect, it is enough to have been formerly wrongly suspected.

It's a great read, and Vollmann shows a lot more equanimity than the pond would in similar circumstances ...

And let's not leave out The New Yorker, and Sarah Stillman, who wrote Taken (hurry, outside the paywall at the moment), about civil forfeiture in the United States, and how the police rip off people to feather their own nests, whether the hapless victims are actually guilty of a crime or not.

The piece is now a couple of weeks old, but it's still resonating in the pond's head, because it turns out that Peter Weir's old horror flick The Cars That Ate Paris, foreshadowed the way American police in certain small towns run their business ... like a Mafia shakedown ...

It turns out Weir's small town, which specialised in derailing cars to run a spare parts racket, lacked vision and scope. The American police know how to do a real shakedown ...

But what's the end result of all this reading?

Well it's hard not to conclude that the United States is completely fucked, which brings us back to where we started, the world of the nattering negative naysayers ...

Oh well, at least the pond had some good reading along the way.

Which is more than can be said for any of the domestic garbage presented as reading material this Monday morning in Fairfax, the alleged independent rag ...

Here's the thing the pond doesn't get.

Paul Sheehan is Fairfax's go to head of its commentariat. They let plenty of other talented journalists go in their recent downsizings, but they've kept this embittered, angry old right wing zealot on, frothing and foaming in the usual way, delivering one-way sprays ...

Even worse, when they downsized the fleet, they called on Sheehan to front a couple of columns a week, and even went so far as to stick him in the Sunday tabloid, as if the daily tabloid wasn't enough.

This is a man who celebrated Lord Monckton, fellow travelled with climate denialists, mocked broadband, decried any form of environmental action if it had a green tinge,  routinely fulminates against lazy indulged people, like Celts and Greeks, displaying a nasty ethnic tone in his attitudes,  and then cheerfully writes up his own amazing junkets - junkets in the original and impure sense of the word - and scribbles in the eastern suburbs lord of the manor style worthy of a Colonel Blimp, as if Sir Warwick was still running the show, and so on and so forth ...

Is this what Fairfax means by independence? Rabid right wing zealotry, always given the spotlight, and a place in the sun? Like this morning in the usual way?

Now in the old days this used to be thought of as a clever newspaper strategy for engaging readers.

Get 'em reading, get 'em angry, get 'em involved, get 'em writing furious angry letters to the editor, and you had an engaged dialogue with the readership.

I'm the trouble starter, fuckin' instigator
I'm the fear addicted, danger illustrated ...
I'm the bitch you hated, filth infatuated
Yeah. I'm the pain you tasted, fell intoxicated.
I'm a firestarter, terrific firestarter.
You're the firestarter, twisted firestarter.

And so on. That sort of old-fashioned mid-90s Prodigy rag.

These days most people are likely to walk by, shaking their heads and muttering about how the old tosser is at it again, the senile silly old fart, the wanker beyond the valley of the wankers ...

It's only the pond and like-minded devotees with an interest in sado-masochism and mental torture that care ...

Of course the splash above is typically cute, designed to lure in readers, click bait so that mug punters turn up for the usual Sheehan trolling ...

At first glance, you might think Sheehan's going to spend a few kind words on the government. Silly you ...

Simon Bosch's illustration is the first clue, as subtle as a Ben Affleck Batman meme ...

And then Sheehan proceeds to wield the crayon.

What has the Labor government achieved? Union power, useless training scheme, unsubtle lies, boat people, "madness", professional performers in advertisements, and then quickly to Sheehan doing yet another re-hash of the comments on Facebook of a make-up artist, without Sheehan showing any sign of understanding that make-up is the centre of all gossip and controversy on a film shoot (oh okay, frocks are just as useless, and the art department full of thieves and let's not start on the grips and the gaffers or the way they charge for bulbs) ...

Anyhow it's all the usual stuff, predictable, splenetic, one-eyed, and consequently as dull as ditchwater to read.

If anything, it's even more fellow-travelling and lickspittle Abbott serving than anything the Murdochians could dish up. Akker Dakker would tip his hat in friendly homage, and the Bolter might well sense a rival for his keen sense of hysteria, exaggeration, and chicken little "worst government in all of history" routines ...

So this is how the "independent" Fairfaxians position their commentary in the marketplace? Why it's as different to the Murdochians as apple is to apple pie ...

And then the funniest thing of all? Let's just do a screen cap to place it in proper context, the last par and then the plea:

Pay to read shit?

How much will it cost for the pond just to hit its head with a hammer?

We can do it for free?

Sold.

And so to a simple message for Fairfax, in the Bart Simpson mode:

The Fairfax The

Just remember to say it in German ...

And now back to that Batman meme, which shows the same depth as a cartoon Sheehan column with cartoon illustrations ...

Second thoughts, at least the Ben Affleck meme has a point:

(Below: meanwhile, over at News Corp)