Time for a new colonialism with Chinese characteristics?

(Above: a cartoon which neatly draws together the apocalypse and the apocalypse).


The pond tends to hoe a regular beat around the usual joints in search of dead beat loon bums.

But there really is a wide-eyed, bushy-tailed world out there.

If hunting loons in the United States, you can always rely on sites such as Rightwingwatch.org, or Media Matters. There, for example, you can see Fox eventually getting around to apologising for a ridiculous story about Obama funding a Muslim museum (Fox Apologizes) - setting aside the point that funding a Muslim museum shouldn't ipso facto be a crime, as a wander through the Met's excellent collection of Islamic art shows.

So many American loons, so little time.

Locally if you step away from the loons blogging away in association with the mainstream print media, you can always rely Menzies House, which routinely strikes a childish, or at best adolescent posture that would have Ming the Merciless rolling in his grave if he knew how his name was being tarnished.

And then there's Catallaxy Files where you can find Judith Sloan lurking, and where this sort of trolling -  Bring back colonialism - has been honed to a refined art.

Yes, it's astonishing stuff, quite remarkable really, to read this sort of Kipling-esque white man's burden tosh in what's alleged to be a repository of conservative wisdom:

...it is time to consider colonialism as a valid tool of statecraft. In some cases it is too late to reimpose colonialism. But not everywhere. The best places to re-impose a colonial regime are likely to be those which do not significantly affect world security. Think Zimbabwe, PNG and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Given the way the United States is conducting itself, no doubt Samuel J. would cheerfully argue that it's the colonial duty of China to take over the joint and start running it, thereby protecting its enormous bond holding in the country (biggest of all foreign governments). Or maybe not - maybe he's just a goose, a troll and a fool, all wrapped up in one tidy bundle.

Amazingly many of the comments below dutifully squawked how the British empire was the salvation of the world (try telling that to Americans) and how at least the French left decent architecture in Vietnam.

And so on and so forth, so the pond guesses the way is now paved for the Chinese to make Australia one of its colonies, it being a very old civilisation and very soon to be the biggest economy in the world and with a chance to leave a replica of the Forbidden City in the Domain ...

So many loons, so little time, but let's get back on to the mainstream beat by checking out the thoughts of Paul Sheehan and it turns out in God can't fix US's pear-shaped politics that, as suspected, he's been on a junket to the United States these last few weeks.

Now it's true that the pond was really only flicking through Fairfax to confirm that Chrome's "incognito window" defeats the Fairfaxians feeble paywall, and thus far things are looking good.

In the process, Sheehan revealed a number of things which help explain the confused, befuddled, schizophrenic nature of many of his columns: when in the US of A, he hangs around with Democrats.

Or so he says. Then in his usual "late Sheehan" style, he spends much of his column recycling the thoughts of a new acquaintance, one Malcolm Pollack.

But in the way of modern media, it turns out that Malcolm Pollack runs a blog, which you can read here, and within that blog, you will find the standard indicators that Pollack is a died in the wool gun-loving, climate science denying conservative, with the usual sort of approving links - 'limpid clarity' - to pieces explaining how the shutdown is all the fault of the Democrats (Sowell: Who shut down the government? at Rare, "red is the centre, today's conservative conversation").

Of course if you read Sheehan, you might well think that Pollack is some died in the wool Democrat:

I spent a weekend on Cape Cod among people I regard as wealthy. One was a man I had not met before, Malcolm Pollack, who, like many of my American friends (most of them Democrats), articulated a sense of unease about the pressures on the American middle class.

Is there a fact checker in the Fairfax building?

You'd swear you were in the midst of a gaggle of Cape Cod socialists contemplating these dire statistics:

Productivity has soared 60 per cent while wages have risen only 6 per cent. Corporate profits are the highest in almost 100 years. The remuneration of chief executives is the highest in history, while they cull the workforce.

Ah comrades, what to do?

Why, according to Pollack, bash immigration of course and gays and all the usual suspects:

There is an unholy alliance between big business and the Democrats regarding mass immigration. Business sees cheap labor while the Democrats eye an expanding constituency of new consumers of government services and more government employees to distribute them.

Don't forget the creeping trashing and effeminisation of the culture! And the consequent disintegration of the family!

Cue an infatuated Sheehan:

Even if you disagree with his arguments, he is a good polemicist, especially for someone not in the business. (He is a music engineer.) He exemplifies the grassroots upswell reflected in the politics in Washington, the sense of excessive debt, of the need for two household incomes just to hold the line.


Actually he's a blogger and therefore in the game, if not as a professional then as an amateur, and you can find out much more about him by reverting to his blog than by reading the dissembling Sheehan.

Which brings us to Sheehan's second borrowing, which involve the thoughts of Robert Caro, the biographer of Lyndon Johnson, whom Sheehan compares to Gibbon - who only spent twenty two years writing about the Roman Empire, whereas Caro has spent thirty nine years scribbling about the man who led the United Stats into the mire of Vietnam and paved the way for the Nixon hegemony.

Caro thinks it will take a new kind of leader exercising new techniques of power to break the sclerosis in Washington, using methods not yet seen. Asked if he thought there was a figure in Washington today who had Johnson's capacity to push through significant reforms, someone capable of breaking through the politics of impasse, his answer was as direct as it was discouraging: ''No.''

Uh huh. But Caro, blinkered by his worship of Johnson - well you'd have to like someone to keep them company for 39 years full-time - has already been pinged for his "great man view" of history.

Well the pond can rip off Americans as well as Sheehan manages, and turn it into a column, so please allow the pond to rip off Alec MacGillis's Robert Caro And Our "Great Man" Fetish:

...it’s ... been clear to me for some time now that Caro’s exhaustive, colorful depiction of Johnson’s rise to power in Washington has not exactly been helpful when it comes to our country’s weakness for the Great Man Theory of politics and history. How many times in the past few years did you hear pundits and liberals lamenting that Barack Obama was unable to get more of his agenda passed because he lacked the strong-arm, big-cojones gumption of ole LBJ? Never mind that the Congress of LBJ’s day was vastly less polarized by party (Southern Democrats had not yet flipped to Republican) or that the filibuster was reserved for only certain matters (say, blocking civil rights legislation) rather than as a matter of routine. No, all this country needs is a true ball-busting leader to save the day. It’s this mindset that’s driving these guys to search for a “radical centrist” candidate for president, and it’s the mindset that’s driven Wall Street donors to fall out of love with Obama and in love with their new hero, Chris Christie. “It’s the great man theory of history,” a former Obama administration official told me for my recent cover story on Obama and the hedge fund honchos, as he described their new infatuation with Christie. “They believed Obama was a great man, and—lo and behold—Washington is a complicated place, and they blame it all on him, and now they believe it’s going to be a former prosecutor who’s going to solve all their dreams.” 
 One could say in Caro’s defense that he should not be faulted for his books’ encouragement of this sort of thinking—he’s a biographer, after all, and biographies by definition promote a great-man view of the world. Except that Caro is also pushing this outlook in the promotion he’s doing for the fourth of the five planned LBJ tomes, The Passage of Power ...

There's more, including links - why is it Sheehan and the Fairfaxians, anxious to keep you inside their tent, never provide links? - but it's a reminder that theories derived from earlier times rarely provide an accurate or useful guide as to what to do in current events.

If you don't watch out, you can end up off the wall crazy, as Republican rep Morgan Griffith did by comparing the effects of the shutdown to the effects of the American Revolution, seemingly without realising that he was thereby proposing that America was at war with itself, since the British were nowhere to be seen (Morgan Griffith, GOP Rep, Compares Default To American Revolution).

Push great men of history theories into strong men of history, and next thing you know, you end up as barking mad as fundamentalist Rick Joyner yearning for a military takeover and martial law ( and thanks to Right Wing Watch, you can see Joyner here).

Indeed, it's typical of Sheehan to invoke God at the head of his column, but god is part of the problem. How else to explain Paul Ryan carrying on like a goose about maintaining the rage and the shutdown as a way of targeting birth control? (here).

The fiscal world is about to enter meltdown and he's rabbiting on about birth control and Obamacare?

Yep, there are a lot of pills in the United States right at this moment, and there's no point in yearning for a strong man to bang together the heads of tea partiers and sulking, petulant Republican anarchists intent on destroying the whole house because they can't get their way ...

No wonder China is getting nervous as the number one foreign government holder of American bonds (now hedging against default, and arguing for a de-Americanized world).

Perhaps the only part of Sheehan's analysis we need to remember is his invocation of Edward Gibbons Junior's immortal work of history, The Decline and Fall of the American Empire. 

Or Samuel J.'s stunning sequel for Catallaxy, The Excellent New Chinese Empire, or colonialism with Chinese characteristics ...

(Below: in a random sampling by the pond, the cartoonists of America seem to have made a choice).