Bronwyn Bishop, pinko trendoids, and printing the legend because the truth gets in the way ...

(Above: proud patriot Bronnie, back in the days when she took temporary possession of paintings in the parliamentary collection, and outrageous ratbags made a Call for Bishop to surrender Gallipoli artwork).

Where would Australia be without The Punch, which provides ... for free ... the thoughts of Australian politicians ... written for free ... as a way of promoting the very best conversation?

Now now, don't go all oxymoronic on me. Politicians and best conversation go together like a horse and carriage, or perhaps more to the point, like a jumbo shrimp, the living dead, and a happy depression.

How my heart lifted and sang - soul clap hands and sing, as Yeats once wrote - when I saw that Bronnie was back, scribbling furiously Where's a good whistleblower when you need one?

Most of the Bronnie outburst is a standard litany of outrageous Chairman Rudd follies, which has seen Australia reduced to a post John Howard dark ages, a kind of primitive pagan leftist trendoid world which has seen coffee elevated to the drink of choice.

There's the outrageous way Australia avoided the major effects of the world-wide recession. Then there's the pink batt affair, funded by borrowing:

The most likely source of the borrowing is China, just as the installation product had to be imported from China. Some stimulus for Australia. Not.

Um, actually Bronnie, there were only two products from the United States that met the appropriate Australian insulation standards. If you got anything else, you were taken by a boondoggle as the private sector made hay rorting the government, right up there with the way private contractors rort defence in the United States.

That's why our ally was so pleased with our efforts to help out the US economy. The wise did their shopping with Uncle Sam.

But do go on, and not just about private sector shonks. Ah yes, there's the matter of climate change, in which of course Tony "climate change is crap" Abbott can hold his head high. And dearie me, I see you manage to get in "great big tax on everything", followed by "the destructive ETS big tax on everything". Once you teach a cockatoo to talk, it's amazing how they can grasp complex issues, and reduce them to one insightful formula. If only Einstein had known about the GBTE.

Panic and hysteria. The two favourite devices in politicians seeking to cultivate the best conversation in Australia. If the greens have Clive Hamilton, whether they want him or not, then loon pond has you Bronnie. Whether we want you or not.

But what really moved us most of all was the poetic outburst you saved for the end.

Meanwhile, the left wing ideologues are at it again. Lying dormant for a dozen years or so under a Coalition Government they rise up under Labor to attack the essence of our nationhood, which binds grassroots Labor, Coalition and other voters together in nationhood. That is our pride in our forefathers who served to protect our new nation and gave their lives in so doing.

Oh dear, yet another burst of that old lie dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori. (Wilfred Owen, for those who missed it last time around). No doubt it's important you have a flock of white feathers to hand around to young lads who fail to understand their duty. As if there was no ambivalence or a better understanding of the true nature of war amongst those who actually did the fighting (or so I gather from those who did the fighting in our family, whether on the Somme or in New Guinea).

But do go on, I suspect the sordid hand of the chardonnay swillers at the ABC are somehow involved:

Gallipoli and all it stands for is now under attack by the rejuvenated yet antiquated lefties – Germaine Greer, Henry Reynolds and university lecturers of a left wing bent undermining the ethos of the ANZAC tradition and heritage by denigrating the worth of our soldiers.

Oh yes, indeed. Got it in one. It's Q&A, that degenerate creator of noise and heat and its Anzac day special, which featured Germaine Greer and Henry Reynolds, and the outrageous transcript and episode for viewing is available here.

It seems that some in the panel denigrated the worth of Australian soldiers by noting that somehow we lost to the Turks at Gallipoli, when truth to tell, we won. Why Alan Bond himself noted how we gave them a good thrashing, marched up through the Dardenelles, seized control of the straits, resulting in Churchill's promotion for a vigorous well managed campaign, and cutting a good year and a half off the war.

Well not quite, but we did win:

Despite the fact that we landed in the wrong spot at Gallipoli, Australians still scaled the murderous cliffs and captured Lone Pine.

Yep, there might have been a little wayward navigation, but we captured Lone Pine. Winners. Talk about steel springs in our legs ...

Ah there's nothing like a Bronnie view of history, as she mightily smotes the heretics and the treasonistas:

The historic record made by Charles Bean, the official historian in World War I is attacked and undermined by a pathetic leftie academic ageing without the grace of wisdom – one Henry Reynolds.

Go Bronnie. It just so happens I have a rare early edition of Charles Bean's twelve volume Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-18, including the picture book that makes up the last volume, and if some mug thinks it remains the only viable history of the war, its price is likely to keep on going up.

In distinct contrast to that wretched Chris Lindsay who lobbed Henry Reynolds a patsy:

CHRIS LINDSAY: ... my question is to Henry Reynolds. C.E.W Bean, who laid the foundation of the ANZAC legend with his official history of World War I, has been accused of excluding the negative aspects of what Australian soldiers might have done, for example desertion or mistreatment of prisoners. Doesn't this, at best, make the ANZAC legend a half truth and, at worst, make it a lie?

... HENRY REYNOLDS: Well, certainly a half truth.

Outrageous. Flens him Bronnie, flens him like the wallowing whale he is:

ANZACS according to him are to be derided not honoured, to be seen as pawns who were manipulated and acted badly; not heroes who gave their lives, 8700 of them from a country of just under 5 million people.

And remember, they took Lone Pine!

Funny I seem to remember that it was 8,141 deaths and 26,111 Australian casualties (so you got that wrong Australian War Memorial), but after all, history is best seen as a form of inexactitude, and never mind that the British and the French lost more soldiers. Come to think of it, never mind the way Reynolds attempts to look at the reality of Bean's world:

... I mean one of the things that is not understood is just how strict the censorship was, that people in Australia learnt little about the realities of the conflict, particularly once it got to the Western Front. Now, Bean himself was part of this. He felt it was important, indeed, to present a picture of war which was heroic, that left out much of what was unpleasant, and certainly there was never any talk in the official propaganda about, indeed, the Australians having a reputation for being particularly brutal; that is, killing prisoners and bayoneting the wounded. So all of these things were quite obviously left out and Bean himself felt that he had to present a story that could be read profitably and happily by Australian families. So therefore he was an official war historian. He wasn’t an independent, critical journalist, and therefore what he presented was, indeed, a very, very much distorted picture but, as I say, remember this was a volunteer army. There was no conscription in Australia. They had to present a picture which would encourage people to go on volunteering and that’s part of the reason why Australia got a fairly distorted picture of the conflict.

Eek, block my ears, how dare this deviant wretch talk about the actual history of the times, when what we need is a flag, and a mob of simpletons dressed up to salute it, and perhaps also celebrate the way we still have the Union Jack tucked in the corner.

No wonder Bronnie is outraged at the way these trendy leftoids won't leave the legends alone:

The image of Simpson and his donkey or the fact that those who survived Gallipoli went on to serve on the Western Front leave those on a mission to destroy the ANZAC legend apparently unmoved.

The image of Simpson and his donkey. Ah, here we must turn in irony of ironies to that wretch Eric Butler of the extreme right wing Australian League of Rights (here):

... what really motivated Simpson? Correspondence provided by his sister revealed him as a political radical, a non-Christian believer. He was no "God, King and Country" young man, a revelation which so upset well known Melbourne churchman the Rev. Irving Benson that for a period he refused to hand back the Simpson correspondence to Simpson's sister. Perhaps Benson was making the same mistake as those who criticised Christ for associating with prostitutes and similar people? (here)

Indeed. Butler still manages to find that Simpson is a real Christian, with Christ-like chivalry, but truth to tell, this good samaritan, as well as being a cheerful ship jumper, deserter and willing brawler, was a unionist who scribbled home that "what they want in England is a good revolution", who enlisted to get a free return passage home, and instead in ways typical of NSW public transport, got dropped off at Gallipoli. (Gallipoli's Shadows).

Chances are, if Bronnie was a man, and Simpson met him in a bar, there'd be a good old punch up once he (which is to say Bronno) mentioned how much he hated the unions and Simpson took up the challenge. As usual Mosman toffs don't have a clue ... not that we're in any way insinuating gender politics into Bronnie's world view. Hush Germaine ...

What is it about left wing ideology that needs to tear down the memory of those who have served our nation and made the ultimate sacrifice in order to assert their own relevance?

Yep, it's hard to repress a chuckle, as Bronnie berates historians for tearing down the memory of those who served the nation, while forgetting the nature of those did the serving.

When the legend becomes truth, print the legend - John Ford.

Keep printing the legend Bronno, we have no need of the truth. And vale Alec Campbell, the last Gallipoli veteran to die, republican, peace activist and fellow-travelling trade unionist, who talked of going to Spain to fight the fascists.

There's more to the world than is concealed in Bronnie's beehive brain.

And now, because time with Bronnie can be wearing, a little more of that Yeats' poem Sailing to Byzantium (in full here):

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

(Below: more Nicholson here).

Janet Albrechtsen, yawn, South Park redux, and a bit of even handed militant atheism ...

(Above: offered only for the purpose of irritating any stray militant Christian).

Like a dinosaur lurching from a primeval swamp, roaring like a rather dull 2D CGI from an old Spielberg movie, Janet Albrechtsen has at last discovered that she loves South Park.

When all but rusted-on fans think the show has settled into a grove and become a trifle sedate in its attempts to offend everyone - frequently accompanied by a saccharin moral at the end of the show in quintessential American sitcom style - Albrechtsen has come to the belated conclusion - 200 episodes down the track, long after everyone else has gone to bed - that the US animated sitcom is biting, funny, insurgent humour that rips into everyone and every group.

Surely this means South Park is nearing the end of its run. If it's lost the capacity to alienate and offend Janet Albrechtsen, then what the fuck is the point of it? How long can you be an adolescent, trying to mix the insights of Mad magazine with the subtlety and nuance of Thunderbirds Are Go, and then end up with the undying loyalty and devotion of a Janet Albrechtsen? Eek, head to the nearest casino and cash in the wildly offensive chips, and perhaps settle for a yard glass of margaritas ...

Yep, the mammoth of critical thought has suddenly discovered in May that there was a fuss back in April and in South Park gag makes a mockery of freedom of expression, she trawls through the talking points with such a convincing thoroughness that you have to conclude she's either a dedicated swot using a cheat sheet, or she's just an automaton programmed to recite glib arguments from a conservative PowerPoint presentation.

The glibbest is this one:

Parker and Stone made legitimate fun of the claim for special treatment by some Muslims. Remember that the claim is not for an equal playing field. Those who want Mohammed fenced off often have no qualms about launching assaults on Christianity. That hypocrisy caught the attention of the guys at South Park. And for that they ought to be supported, not suppressed.

Oh Jesus, it's the long suffering Christians regularly assaulted routine yet again, while the Muslims are spared, and it's so unfair. Cue crocodile tears.

Sweet Jesus, spare me, or perhaps better, tell me exactly who "those" are who are amongst the "those who want" fifth columnists who regularly assault Christianity but want Mohammed fenced off.

What devoted atheist likes to ring off any religion? Could it be Christopher Hitchens? No, here he is in Slate in 2006 making The case for mocking religion:

Islam makes very large claims for itself. In its art, there is a prejudice against representing the human form at all. The prohibition on picturing the prophet—who was only another male mammal—is apparently absolute. So is the prohibition on pork or alcohol or, in some Muslim societies, music or dancing. Very well then, let a good Muslim abstain rigorously from all these. But if he claims the right to make me abstain as well, he offers the clearest possible warning and proof of an aggressive intent.

Could it be that other militant atheist Richard Dawkins who routinely upsets conservatives? Nope, here he is in Times Online in a crusade of an intellectual kind: Professor Richard Dawkins wants to convert Islamic world to evolution. Well good luck with that - try converting a southern Baptist who voted regularly and with piety for George W. Bush, and the maintenance of creationism as a way of life. Which leaves dinosaurs like Albrechtsen in a bit of a pickle or a mugwump swamp.

Could it be Bill Maher? Hardly ...

Here's the unexamined assumption. Much of the ignorance, superstition, prejudice against women, anti-gay hostility and desire to censor is shared equally between Islamic and Christian fundamentalists. In the end, there's not much difference between a twit like Sarah Palin and a twittish conservative Islamic politician.

But of course Albrechtsen desperately wants to blame liberals for all the problems, conveniently forgetting that Glenn Beck is a Mormon and that Jesus is from Missouri.

They (Parker and Stone) also ripped into the West's cultural weakness, the supine appeasement that flows from self-imposed censorship. If we were to plot a graph representing how we defend freedom of expression, the line is heading south towards self-censorship. Each time we step down from defending Western values such as freedom of expression, our retreat signals a weary acceptance that Islamic rules apply by default.

But hang on, South Park is now an aging cartoon desperately trying to assert continuing relevance, a bit like The Simpsons continuing long after it reached its use-by debate (even if for the first ten series it was one of the best shows going around).

Is this the best we've got to hang on to regarding freedom of expression, instead of a weary acceptance that Islamic rules apply by default?

What about Miranda the Devine's rage at the greenie message in Avatar in Hit by the leftie sledgehammer? Should we be agitated by her intolerance and rage?

I keed, I keed. How can we defend blue people?

Well as usual Albrechtsen starts hot out of the blocks and then begins to falter:

Seattle cartoonist Molly Norris suggested May 20 should be "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day". What began as a joke - Norris drew the prophet as a box of pasta, a tea cup and a domino - became a viral campaign to do exactly that in a few weeks.

Uh huh. So let's keep the viral routine keeping on:

Uh huh. Comes the Albrechtsen faltering in the face of humour:

Others are yawning. Just another silly grassfire we should not fuel with debate, they say. But instead of sleepwalking our way towards cultural capitulation, we should debate this.

Debate it? What's to debate in a cartoon? You can either do it, or you can't. What a gherkin.

Discussing the boundaries around free speech is key to defending Western values in a civil society. Start with "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day". As a cartoon, it was mildly amusing. As a campaign, it's crass and gratuitously offensive. That doesn't mean resorting to the law to ban the idea. Instead, a sophisticated society can condemn and ignore it. As James Taranto wrote in The Wall Street Journal, "We would not endorse or participate in an "Everybody Shout a Racial Slur Day' or an `Everybody Deny the Holocaust Day'."

Oh dear. Condemn it and ignore it, while celebrating the lame South Park. WTF.

The Wall Street Journal. James Taranto. Just another conservative neoliberal git. And entirely lacking in a sensa huma. Just like the righteously indignant Janet Albrechtsen. Suddenly a mildly amusing cartoon somehow becomes a crass and gratuitously offensive campaign, while South Park, a crash and gratuitously offensive cartoon series, is somehow under dire threat.

How can you debate or discuss such things with gherkins?

How on earth could you find a campaign to draw cartoons of Mohammed gratuitously offensive and crass if you think we should all be cutting edge like South Park? After all the original Danish cartoons, which are always evoked in these discussions, are about as cutting edge as a dish cloth and as aesthetically pleasing as a kitchen sponge. While it's nice if dissidents can display the satirical wit of Alexander Pope in iambic pentameter, perhaps in closed couplets, sadly few of us are up to the job.

But should that stop us from aspiring to South Park? Albrechtsen seems to be a tad confused, first suggesting we should leave it to the professionals offering cutting-edge commentary, before then allowing that atheists might be able to swear.

Here she is, showing her benign tolerance:

... defending those who expose, debate and even poke fun at all of our cultural faults and foibles is altogether different. Whether you like it or not, South Park offers cutting-edge commentary on Western culture. Muslims are entitled to adhere to their religious rules. No one is forcing them to draw the prophet Mohammed. But that does not mean Western societies built on freedom of expression must do the same. It's like saying atheists can't take the Lord's name in vain because good Christians choose not to.

Sweet Jesus, thank the lord for that.

There's just one thing wrong with all this. Painting South Park - as in its two hundredth incarnation it runs yet again through familiar tropes and memes, offering up the standard shock and awe routines about all and sundry - as providing cutting edge commentary on Western culture suggests that Albrechtsen needs to get out more, perhaps switch off the Foxtel and partake in cultural life.

Positioning yourself in a permanent attitude of defiant adolescent teenage rebelliousness, replete with fart jokes, doesn't always produce a cutting edge commentary on Western culture. Or any other culture.

Instead down the track the show is likely to end up like The Young Ones. That blast from the past is currently getting an outing on ABC2 and wow is it now of a period. Last night Vyvyan, the medical student, took an attitude to The Good Life.

Vyvyan: [Ripping up the introduction to The Good Life] NO, NO, NO, NO! WE ARE NOT WATCHING THE BLOODY GOOD LIFE! BLOODY, BLOODY, BLOODY! I HATE IT! IT'S SO BLOODY NICE! FELICITY "TREACLE" KENDAL, AND RICHARD "SUGAR FLAVOURED SNOT" BRIERS! WHAT DO THEY DO KNOW? CHOCOLATE BLOODY BUTTON ADS, THAT'S WHAT! THEY'RE NOTHING BUT A COUPLE OF REACTIONARY STEREOTYPES, CONFIRMING THE MYTH THAT EVERYONE IN BRITAIN IS A LOVABLE MIDDLE CLASS ECCENTRIC, AND I! HATE! THEM! (yes, the caps are necessary for effect).

My partner merely looked bewildered. Never seen The Good Life. Didn't have a clue at the rage embedded in Vyvyan's outburst. Hopefully at some point down the track, we'll reach that point about all religions, but it's a faint bloody hope.

Meanwhile, what have we learned from Albrechtsen?

The effect on our culture is chilling. After the South Park controversy, CNN reported that the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art decided that its upcoming Islamic art exhibition would not include any depictions of the prophet Mohammed.

Ho hum. So stand up to them Janet, de-chill. You know, at the least provide a link to a repository of Mohammed images. Here. Perhaps run one of the upmarket artistic images done by earlier Muslim artists in less problematic times:

(The Remaining Signs of Past Centuries by the Persian scholar al-Biruni, here).

Or are you simply giving us an example of your own self-imposed censorship, a weary retreat, because such things are crass and gratuitously offensive?

Well in the usual way, van Gogh and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are dragged in to round out Albrechtsen's column with a burst of defiance, with the West reasserting itself as a confident culture, capable of defending freedom of expression.

So that South Park can go on its tedious adolescent way?

No, so we can publish atheist cartoons. Phew, after all that Islamic bashing, time to have a go at the Christians:

And here as an aside is a clipping I enjoyed, from the Detroit News, March 25, 1931, as published here.

Atheism's come along a little, but if South Park is its current exemplar, there's still a way to go.

Gerard Henderson, big Mal, big Julie and the wretched latte sipping idealistic press gallery ...

(Above: the sordid truth about the press gallery).

After Gerard Henderson's sterling, impeccable advice to Malcolm Turnbull last week - stay retired big Mal, you're party doesn't need you - under the prescient header Stick to your guns, Malcolm, the party doesn't need you - we wondered what pearls of wisdom the prattling Polonius might manage this week.

After all, within days of hitting the presses, and barely before the seagulls had tromped all over the Henderson ink in search of left-over fish and chips, big Mal had reversed his decision, and next thing you know Chairman Rudd's popularity in the polls had dropped like a lead sinker in search of a Murray cod ... which instead cops a bony carp for its pains.

Perhaps Hendo - we like to think of Henderson as Hendo sometimes, since he cares so much for the battlers of Penrith and hates the inner west eastern suburbs chattering elite - the good digger Hendo might suggest to Tony Abbott that he barely seems to mention "great big new tax" enough, and repetitive braying like a donkey imitating a cockatoo will be a certain way to keep big Mal's eye off the the golden chalice and the throne.

Perhaps he might suggest to jolly Joe Hockey that talk that appeals to the lower north shore about anti-terrorism legislation and the internet filter is simply a waste of time if he wants to beguile the punters in Penrith. You know, on the principle that political expediency and a complete lack of principled talk or logical positions is anathema to achieving power. Oh wait, he did that while telling big Mal to stay sulking in his eastern suburbs garrett.

Sadly, after having stuck his neck up above the parapet, clearly our very own Polonius has decided he needs to retreat behind the arras. Even if that might lead to tears:

HAMLET: [Drawing] How now! a rat? Dead, for a ducat, dead!

Makes a pass through the arras

LORD POLONIUS: [Behind] O, I am slain!
Falls and dies

QUEEN GERTRUDE: O me, what hast thou done?

HAMLET: Nay, I know not:
Is it the king?

QUEEN GERTRUDE: O, what a rash and bloody deed is this!

HAMLET: A bloody deed! almost as bad, good mother,
As kill a king, and marry with his brother.

Or almost as bad as telling big Mal to stay buggered off just as he returns to the castle triumphant, if in a mute, modest way, and with an election still to face before he can realise his dream of becoming Lazarus with a double bypass.

But hang on, we haven't even touched on the latest Hendo whitterings, which you can find in Admirers suffer a Rudd awakening.

With a pun like that as a header, you can see why Hendo sees himself as a match for Shakespeare when scribbling on political and country matters.

This week, it seems the lefties in the press have done a turn, and that's why Chairman Rudd's poll numbers are down.

It seems Kevin Rudd has become a significant disappointment to many members of the parliamentary press gallery. Quite a few environmentally conscious journalists agreed with the Prime Minister that human-induced climate change was the greatest moral challenge of our time - and they expected him to put Australia in the front line of those nations wanting to take action to save the planet.

Oh you significantly disappointed lefties in the press gallery, we know you run the country in your own latte sipping, environmentally conscious way, but look at what you've done!

Not only has Chairman Rudd failed on an ETS, he's failed on tax reform, and he's failed to call a double dissolution, which since the fuss over the Melbourne Storm has slowly died away, means newspapers will continue losing circulation!

All this is eminently satisfactory to our éminence grise, not just because Rudd acted sensibly on the double dissolution matter and the ETS and taxation reform (or so Hendo says), but because in the process he clearly shafted the pundits and the commentators expecting widescale reform.

Take that you gherkins in the press gallery. Yep, Chairman Rudd's dissembling is wise, forthright, and Hendo approved. Which inexplicably has led to a sharp drop in the Ruddster's poll numbers. Oh you deviant fickle press gallery types, frumiously fuming at the chairman as he follows Hendo's sage advice. We know the polls you run are famously conducted amongst yourselves and never represent the opinions of the people of Penrith ... or Hendo ...

And it wouldn't be a Hendo column if once again we didn't have a little trawl through history:

It is too early to judge the Rudd government. Yet it is fair to say in its first term, Rudd Labor has not matched the reform determination of the governments led by Hawke, Keating and John Howard.

You see, all those busy commentators busy judging the Rudd government ... it's too early! Never mind that there's an election upon us and soon we must all judge the Rudd government by way of a vote.

But at least we got in a mention of John Howard. Ah remember the good old days when you could get five or mentions of John Howard in a single Hendo column, enough to mount a decent betting competition.

But stay, what's this? It seems that there has been one outstanding reform, managed by Julia Gillard, thanks to a simple informative website which has discovered - astonishing news - that well heeled private schools get better educational results than derelict public schools catering to students trapped in a mire of poverty. Talk about a revolution ...

Her agenda is in the tradition of the historic concern by social democrats for the education of children from low socio-economic groups. If Gillard prevails, this will be the most significant reform of Rudd's inaugural term.

Yep, which is why the Rudd government keeps shovelling cash down the throat of the well heeled private schools. As we like to say in the United States, go mules ... go muckers ... go hornets ... go revolution ...

But then an ominous thought came to me. If Julia Gillard gets an approving nod from Hendo, and on this basis, mounts an attack on Chairman Rudd for the throne, how will it go?

Perhaps as well as Hendo's splendid advice to big Mal?

Who knows, but I was suddenly dragged in to a time warp, and reminded of Wayne and Schuster's terrible radio show Rinse the blood off my toga, which amazingly you can find transcribed on the full to overflowing intertubes:

Calpurnia: ... If I told him once, I told him a thousand times, "Don't go, Julie!" I said. "It's the Ides of March, beware already. Don't go, Julie, don't Go.

Watch out big Julie. Tread carefully. Remember big Mal. Bide your time until after the election.

And that is that. Another slaying of journalists, another blow for conservative inaction, and a job well done by our prattling Polonius as he endorses Chairman Rudd's inactivity. Surely the surest sign that Chairman Rudd is in fact doomed.

If you have Hendo offering sage advice that approves of your actions, you're on the slippery slide, if not down the tube ...

Meanwhile, as the ABC relentlessly noted this fourth of May, it's Star Wars day, so may the fourth be with you.

(Below: this site assumes no responsibility for the mental health of anyone foolish enough to click on this video, even if done in the spirit of an ethnographic study of the direness of American humour back in the days when the radio and the phonogram ruled the world).

Paul Sheehan in absentia, and a flock of flyweights fuss and feud over great big new blather ...

(Above: the first modest proposal, available here).

It's only just occurred to me that the lights have gone out over Sydney, and not for some useless earth day or earth hour.

Paul Sheehan, usually the salvation of a Monday for keen connoisseurs of commentariat commentators, seems to have disappeared (no cheap jokes about fundaments, please).

There I was clicking on the Herald - well to date it's reading for nothing and the clicks are free - expecting a valiant defence of a beleaguered, besieged, hapless, helpless mining industry - only to be confronted by emptiness, a void.

This created a crisis du jour, since there doesn't seem to be anyone else around on the pond ready to deal with the crisis du jour in a sufficiently grumpy and surly way.

Sure there's always the impenetrable and opaque David Burchell, but he's busy celebrating the instant elevation to sainthood and wisdom of Gillian Duffy, labelled a bigot by that hapless git Gordon Brown.

Burchell's rant, The catastrophic cleverness of the political class, is a classic in its own right of course, as he berates the ruling political elite and celebrates Brown's humiliation at the hands of the Rochdale council worker.

Only a few short years ago, Burchell might have been writing the same guff about Sam Wurzelbacher, aka Joe the Plumber, who these days is keen to explain how John McCain screwed his life.

Naturally Joe is now a keen tea partier, doing small town gigs like a run down rock star working the hicks in the stix. Latest news is that he did a gig in downtown Toledo at an event organised by the Children of Liberty, explaining how the federal government killed the auto industry, without the help of the far-sighted executives running General Motors. (here).

Who knows what Ms Duffy might do with her new found fame.

Yep it's a tough gig when the likes of Burchell get to celebrate the wisdom of a person plucked from the crowd, and given the Susan Boyle once over, only to see the media circus move on. Is it too cruel to label Burchell as just another wannabe Matt Preston?

How about this blather for conclusive proof?

... as we learned in this country in the 1980s and 90s, ordinary folk are not economic illiterates, merely by virtue of being ordinary. They simply demand to have the unromantic reality of their country's economic situation explained to them in an unvarnished manner. The bulk of the Australian electorate is instinctively unhappy about the demise of local manufacturing; but it is even more unwilling to return to the days of tariff walls and economic provincialism. This is as it ought to be.

You see, Burchell is better than the Delphic oracle, and can divine the collective economic unconsciousness by simply plugging himself into the zeitgeist and explaining the instincts of the bulk of the Australian electorate, whether it's demanding this in an unvarnished way, or unwilling to do that in a provincial way.

This is beyond what it ought to be, what any ordinary soul might expect from anyone, even if they're a dab hand with a divining rod. This brings the art of extrasensory perception and necromancy to a new level of understanding.

It seems the state of Britain can be attributed to the electoral system, which if it were sensible and worthy of its electors would see the Labor party shattered and in ruins, supported only by the low-skilled and the poor, benefits takers, and so Labour's feudal dependents.

Damn those wretched poor people, having tremendous fun on welfare and ruining it for everyone else. Why on a daily basis you can see bankers in the city sobbing into their warm beer at the way the low skilled and the poor simply ruin society.

Time for a modest proposal from some latter day Dean Swift, Mr. Burchell?

Sadly, it seems that Britain will end up with a coalition government, cobbled together, when what is really needed is a Margaret Thatcher, slashing and gouging and grinding, or perhaps even a latter day Oswald Mosley, at last given a chance to turn Britain into a truly noble society, as it was when it built an empire.

It's stirring stuff - the vision of common people restoring the polity, whatever the alternate reality that exists outside the necromancer's vision - but still I felt an emptiness, a void.

Sure, even as I type, there's jolly Joe Hockey blathering away on radio in support of the mining industry, but that's only to be expected. Golden goose, he blathers, golden goose.

Who could truly fill the empty void of idle golden goose blather? Who could stand up this day, and explain how the mining industry is the goose which will stop laying golden eggs in a way which would appeal to the commoners celebrated by Burchell for their instinctive economic wisdom? On a par with the wise Wilkins Micawber ...

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.

Come on down Steve Fielding:

... it’s always popular to sting the big guy and not the little guy who owns the corner shop down the street. But going after the big guy can be a dangerous policy because the government is essentially taxing an industry which has propped up this country throughout the global financial crisis.

And what happens when we've dug everything remotely useless out of the ground and shipped it offshore? Perhaps it's time for a brand new political slogan? We will determine who comes to this country to dig up our ground and the circumstances in which they dig?

I keed, I keed, don't you worry about that, because today we're all just worried about the heavyweight big guy, one hand tied behind his back as he confronts an out of control flyweight corner shop owner egged on by Chairman Rudd. Was there ever a more uneven and unfair contest arranged by cunning politicians?

Fielding manages to fill up Henry: By going after the big guys, little guys will get hurt with all kinds of sage advice, but he doesn't seem to have caught up fully with Burchell's message of tough love for a wise electorate which knows that pain is pleasure, in an economic BDSM kind of way.

In the review Henry recommends providing low income families with a 90 percent subsidy for childcare. A good idea that most people would no doubt support. But as you can imagine, the Rudd Government makes no mention of helping out this bracket of people in making childcare more affordable. In fact, in Henry’s directions for supporting productivity, participation and growth he says there is a need for affordable childcare because it encourages workforce participation.

That'd be right, take money from the hapless big guys, and shove it down the throat of low income breeders (if I may be so bold as to state Burchell's thesis a little more baldly, since we know that all these poor people on welfare do is have sexual orgies fuelled by drugs on a daily basis, and then go in search of subsidised child care).

Well what's the bet that the electorate falls for the bribe cleverly devised by Chairman Rudd, proving truly that he's heir to John Howard in every significant way imaginable - Howard having regularly bribed the electorate from his own mining boom.

It's left to Peter Hartcher in It's not the economy, it's the election, stupid, to explain that it's not the tax so much as what's done with it that matters, and what Chairman Rudd and Swan propose to do with the windfall is likely to be another pissing into the wind, John Howard style.

Meanwhile, silly, hapless Tony Abbott disappears somewhere off over the horizon screeching his cockatoo mantra about a "great big new tax". Yes, he's deeply hostile to another great big new tax, except when it's on big business for a parental leave scheme - Abbott attacks great big tax on mining - but I'm afraid I've reached breaking point on rhetoric about great big taxes.

Couldn't he at least have called the strategy a great big new set of bribes? Guess not, since as a member of a government which mastered the art of the bribe, he knows what happens when an electorate is confronted with a tasty bribe, Burchell's noble portrait of a pain-loving electorate notwithstanding.

So there you have it. The crisis du jour isn't the great big new bribe being offered to swinging voters, but the absence of Paul Sheehan to explain this to the world.

Loon pond is confronted by a great big new void, and we're not sure what to do about it, since cultivating grumpiness, grouchiness, surliness and perversity in the commentariat takes years of careful nurturing, from spore on glass to fully formed mind snatcher.

What are we left with? David Burchell? Steve Fielding? Tory Maguire? (Yes I tiptoed past her Rudd's created a "super" enemy, Abbott's got a GBNT* for fear the troll beneath the bridge might come out and eat me).

Is it time to whip up a petition demanding the return of Paul Sheehan forthwith? Or is a placid well bribed pond free of squawks, except for a few blue sky miners, a quieter, better place? As we're fair and balanced, it's up to others to decide ...

But hey, in a first ever move, who could resist the chance to quote a Midnight Oil song. Could the new super tax be Peter Garrett's final cunning revenge? Well if you believe that, you'll believe anything ...

Who's gonna save me?

But if I work all day on the blue sky mine
(There'll be food on the table tonight)
And if I walk up and down on the blue sky mine
(There'll be pay in your pocket tonight)

And some have sailed from a distant shore
And the company takes what the company wants
And nothing's as precious
As a hole in the ground

Who's gonna save me?
I pray that sense and reason brings us in
Who's gonna save me?
We've got nothing to fear

In the end the rain comes down
Washes clean the streets of a blue sky mine

PS no correspondence will be entered into regarding blue sky mining referring to asbestos mining, rather than the current heroic endeavour to dig up Western Australia and ship it in its entirety to China, because asbestos is problematic but who can argue WA would be missed?

(Below: simpleton finds the golden goose).

Miranda Devine, Justin Bieber, Regina Spektor, and thinking of crucifixions ...

(Above: in your face Justin Bieber).

Miranda the Devine is now so determinedly strange that it's often hard to know where to start.

Her latest thought bubble is Teens, tweets and twits for parents, in which she spends some time berating parents and heaping all the responsibility for the Justin Bieber fracas on to parents.

It seems it's all the fault of lax, narcissitic parenting.

And not the gherkins who decided to bung on a do at 8 am on a Monday morning on a temporary stage outside the Overseas Passenger Terminal.

... the Channel Seven morning TV director, Adam Boland, and police were nonetheless astonished by the extreme behaviour that forced them to call off the show at 5.25am after eight girls were taken to hospital with crush injuries, one with a fractured kneecap, and the riot squad had to intervene.

"It was a strange crowd. We'd never seen anything like it," Boland says.

Uh huh. Set it up so kids have to camp overnight, and then wonder why you have to cancel the show at 5.25 am in the morning. So that the pitiful show on channel Seven in the morning - I can't bear to recite its official dingbat name, with its dingbat hosts - might gain a little publicity. Which turned into notoriety, yet again ...

Whoda thunk that was a great idea?

And so it went wrong. And suddenly it's all the fault of the mothers:

Bieber's mother, Pattie Mallette, would not have been shocked. She has told The New York Times: "The mothers are the worst."

Carr-Gregg agrees, saying the mothers of today's super-entitled teens often try to relive their adolescence through their daughters, instead of placing boundaries around acceptable behaviour and keeping their children safe. They compete with other mothers to be popular, being excessively permissive in order to give their daughters the edge. The girls are swept along in on a tide of hormones and parental anarchy.

Yep, swept off to a stupidly staged event by a bunch of morning television gherkins that saw hundreds of teens stay up all night so that they could get excited about their teen idol.

The Devine suggests, in a rhetorical way, that mothers need to become the wicked witch of the west:

It's a pity more mothers weren't willing to be wicked witches on Sunday night for the sake of their children. And where were the fathers?

Sensibly, the fathers were probably off in bed, having had enough of hysteria in the days of Leif Garrett and the Bay City Rollers (since these days the pantie wetters in Beatles days are now grandparents, and we'll say no more about that, or irresponsible parenting, thank you very much).

As for the mothers needing to act as wicked witches on Sunday night? How about next time the gherkins on morning television think a little bit harder about their stunts and the hysteria they might whip up, and not have to hand a way to control?

As for the Devine, it's as if conservatives must each decade once again recite righteously indignant nonsense about parents and mothers and pop music and teenage girls, and the imminent downfall of civilisation, as if they've seen and heard and learned nothing since the Beatles toured Australia. Just like the organisers of the Channel 7 gig.

But the Devine's got one thing right. Mothers need to act as wicked witches some of the time.

How about starting with switching off the television in the morning and never watching Channel Seven's Sunrise program again, with their cynical half baked half arsed publicity ploys? Why not just enjoy the rising sun?

Because there are other ways to do this kind of gig.

Golly, there I was at the Regina Spektor concert at the Opera House last week, looking around at the middle class crowd, and wondering why everybody looked so ... young.

It was all very civilised and polite, and Spektor hit the mark (though she shouldn't pick up a guitar, not even for novelty numbers), and the crowd of young folk - with young parents - trotted off home after a generous gig that ran a couple of hours, with five encore numbers, and which ran through a lot of Spektor's repertoire in style. Using a piano no less, and a tight band.

That's how it's done. Forget the gherkins at Seven offering free as a cheap sensationalist bit of teen exploitation in a badly staged promotion. You have to pay for the pleasure of a well staged gig.

Why you could even spot John Safran wandering around in the crowd, unmolested by sophisticated concert goers not wanting to swarm around and persecute him. Just like if you stumbled on a celebrity in the streets of New York.

Sure, I had the urge to rush up and arrange a crucifixion on the spot, since anything done well once is always worth a second go, but you don't feel the need for violence this kind of well organised gig in a civilised setting.

Come to think of it, the only time I feel like violence these days, a decent crucifixion, is when I keep reading Miranda the Devine's dribble about parental anarchy and narcissistic parenting.

Well enough of blathering about the the middle class indie scene.

It's back to Mahler in a fortnight, and with a bit of luck, I might get to sit near Paul Keating, as I once did a long time ago in another Mahler feast.

Oops, that reminds me of Barangaroo ... sheesh, I must stop thinking about crucifixions.

(Below: a remorseful Channel Seven? No just David Koch, recently voted the the most annoying person on Australian television in the Bogies, as well as the breakfast TV personality you'd least like to wake up to, even managing to beat Kyle Sandilands, who could only manage biggest ego and most hyped personality. Here. What next? Most stupid tabloid quiz beat up? As if anyone could beat the Daily Terror).

Chris Berg, and a pig driven solution to the ills of globalisation ...

(Above: a giraffe fed on high fructose corn syrup. I keed, I keed, it was the mercury in high fructose corn syrup that did it, and the giraffe was just exercising its god given right to choose. Study Finds High-Fructose Corn Syrup Contains Mercury).

Amongst the more delusional outpourings of the commentariat, Chris Berg can be regularly be relied upon to deliver some beauties.

And Capitalism is ruining the planet, and pigs might fly is truly an awesome beauty.

First a confession. My house contains signs of ongoing, sometimes turbulent waste. Used tissues, which over the years have amounted to a small pine forest, pile up and are never tucked into the recycling bin; reams of paper have been printed out in what should theoretically be a paperless home office; and endless bottles of water, which usually help Coca Cola to deplete the water at Peats Ridge springs/Mangrove mountain, but have also helped deplete water in foreign lands, have been conveniently shipped to my home to confirm our trendiness. (Or our distaste for Sydney tap water).

The idea of waste is embedded in my house, and catered for by the consumer dream (as anybody who's spent time picking over the treasures in a rubbish dump will confirm).

The idea of indulgence is also considered not a privilege, but a right, or in American terms, a choice. If you've got the goddam money to hook up an SUV to an RV (and load on board an ATV and a boat and a bicycle) and cruise all over the United States on a joyous 8 miles a gallon at 65 miles per hour, then goddam it, it's your choice and your right.

And who could disagree? Personally I love to get in a car and just cruise and look at the sights. These days, what with the price of gas and sneaking suspicion that nobody's yet worked out a solution to a post peak world, it's a kind of precarious conspicuous consumption, but not so conspicuous as if I pissed the money against the wall on an Armani or a nice pair of Bvlgari sunglasses.

Indeed fashion relies on assuring people that they are constantly out of touch, out of date, declasse and in urgent need of trendiness assistance, which can be had for a price, provided all last year's clobber is consigned to the bin, or sent off to Vinnies.

Now you might think this is simply recycling - clobber sent to Vinnies dresses the poor in a way that confirms noblesse oblige - but truth to tell, that's just the well-off consoling themselves about their conspicuous vanity.

So when Berg gets entirely ecstatic about the joys of an efficient capitalism, I wonder which planet he's been living on, and whether at any time in his life he's visited the United States, home of the obesity epidemic, or California, where conspicuous waste is a way of life. Or even looked around in Australia, second home to the obesity epidemic.

Not to mention a world-wide collection of splendid garbage dumps, with New York showing how it's done by producing 25,000 tons of residential and commercial waste a day, and 3.3 million tons of residential waste a year.

Less waste means bigger profits, and that should make everyone happy.

The home insulation program has been scrapped. And the emissions trading scheme has been abandoned.

But try not to worry too much. We are all a lot more environmentally sustainable than you imagine. Just look what happens when a little piggy goes to the market.

Uh huh. Don't worry about the big picture, or the oil pouring out in the gulf right now. Contemplate the way pigs can be used in all kinds of imaginative ways. It's the Homer Simpson solution - is there anything pig can't do?

Homer: Are you saying you're never going to eat any animal again? What about bacon?

Lisa: No.
Homer: Ham?
Lisa: No!
Homer: Pork chops?
Lisa: Dad, those all come from the same animal!
Homer: Heh heh heh... ooh... yeah... right, Lisa. A wonderful... magical animal.

Here's Berg doing his Homer impersonation:

The bladder becomes the skin of a tambourine. Haemoglobin goes into cigarette filters, and is added to ham to enhance its appearance. From pig's bone fat we get antifreeze, floor wax, toothpaste, crayons, anti-wrinkle cream, make-up foundation, and hair conditioner.

And even bullets. Gelatine from pig bones helps move gunpowder into shell casings.

Cigarette filters! Coffin nails with piggy class. Pig that enhances ham so that the packaged pig takes on an enhanced appearance ... of ham. Now with enhancing honey glaze!

Anti-freeze, for use in improving the taste of wine!! Anti-wrinkle cream, essential to mental stability and the smooth running of society! Wrinkles after all are the cause of an immense loss in productivity. And best of all bullets, the bigger the better as the gelatine slides the gunpowder into the shell casings. Handy for a holy war against Islamic fundamentalists.

Why I can't imagine anything better than pig, unless it happens to be high fructose corn syrup, which is highly beneficial to the body, on the same principle that all greed is good.

It seems like Berg regularly sips on high fructose corn syrup as he contemplates the marvels of modern waste-avoiding capitalism.

We've been taught that we live lives of reckless, wasteful consumption. We're told we have ''affluenza'' - an illness of consumerism with symptoms that include high credit card bills, environmental degradation and moral soullessness. Australia's affluenza theorist, Clive Hamilton, has written that ''consumer capitalism loves waste''.

Well of course Berg is relying on an immediate automatic response against the lonely asceticism of the likes of Clive Hamilton (who nonetheless seems to like to get on an aeroplane every so often) and his acting out a monk in the cave routine, as if he's in a Robert Bresson movie (say Diary of a Country Priest, where a little bread and red wine is all you need to keep body and soul together).

But while Australia has shifted away from credit cards to debit cards, we still as of February this year carried $3,250 in debt on cards - and paying interest on the sum at rates that amount to usury. (here). And we continue to degrade the environment, and without wanting to sound like the Pellites or the Jensenite nepotic heretics, surely there's a little moral soullessness at work in the win at all costs mentality of the Melbourne Storm (and every other professional sport in the country).

Just observing this doesn't automatically turn you into Clive Hamilton, or show signs you must buy Shaker furniture (too expensive anyway), or reveal hints of Amishness, or suggest that the Puritan tradition is buried deep in your DNA.

Nor does it mean you have to meander back to the days when bread and milk and ice were delivered to the door, and you took your own shopping bag to the grocers because you purchased goods on the day for consumption that day.

Nor does it mean you have to get terribly excited like Tim Blair about the attempt to get rid of plastic bags:

Australia has been struggling for some time with its 6.9-billion-bag-a-year habit.

That’s how much the community hates plastic bags. Imagine how many we’d use if we liked them. (here).

But then Berg, in his ecstatic rapture about a Scrooge-like, waste not want not beneficial capitalism, doesn't even begin to follow the strands of his own logic. Here he is berating wasteful natives:

... every school child learns that the Native Americans used ''every part'' of the buffalo they killed. Often they did - that's subsistence living for you. But sometimes they herded them off cliffs (''buffalo jumps'') thousands at a time.

One 19th-century explorer, Meriwether Lewis, saw tribes killing ''whole droves'' of buffalo, salvaging only ''the best parts of the meat'' and leaving the rest to ''rot in the field''.

Even at their most frugal, earlier societies could never match the resourcefulness of the global marketplace.

Oh yes, you naughty failed over consuming Pandorans.

But um, I wonder if it occurs to Berg that we still manage to pick the best parts of the meat and fish and chook, but now we leave the rest (with bonus vegetables) to feed millions of cats and dogs so that we can indulge ourselves by having live fur, purring and doggie barks for company? And to hell with the starving millions in other parts of the world?

Only a dipstick who's never experienced poverty could marvel in this unilateral way at the resourcefulness of the global marketplace.

On and on he rants, in a vision splendid, about how Walmart is reducing its packaging, and hotels are no longer washing their linen on a daily basis (even in Vegas, in the middle of a desert, fancy that), before pausing to berate food miles advocates:

Even the globalisation of food produce is an example of market forces pursuing sustainability.

''Food miles'' advocates believe we should only eat food produced locally, that it's environmentally obscene to be transporting food across the world.

But the biggest carbon contribution of food isn't how far it has travelled. It's how efficiently it was produced. And efficiency is caused by things like climate. So a British government report found that importing tomatoes from Spain was more sustainable than growing them locally. A study by three New Zealand academics found that the same was true for apples grown in New Zealand and sent to the United Kingdom.

Uh huh. And is the same true for water? Is it true that it's more efficient for Perrier to ship bottled water all over the world so that we can console ourselves that we are sophisticated drinkers of French mineral water? Is it truly efficient, after benzene was discovered in several bottles of Perrier, for the company to recall 160 million bottles of Perrier? (here).

Is it really more efficient for us to enjoy tasteless grapes from California out of season simply so we can have grapes all year round? Should everything run on the level of infantile desire, dressed up as meaningful choice, on parade here and in the United States? Is it true that everything capitalism manages is done for reasons of economic utility, as opposed to inventing or catering to new kinds of consumer whimsy? If the world isn't in to excess and waste, why are so many of us fat?

The ecstatic Berg has no doubts:

... we live in a world where tiny bits of pig are used to produce the copper that makes up computer circuitboards, and other bits used to reduce moisture in newspaper. Globalisation is definitely weird. But it's not as unsustainable as everybody says.

But here's the thing. Globalisation means that if America sneezes, the world catches a financial cold. And so do mad cows.

Sure, globalisation is no recent phenomenon - the British practised globalisation in the nineteenth century as they ripped off the sub-continent and every other part of the world they took over as they painted the map red, and then shipped the profits back home.

But were the satanic mills of Manchester, now reinvented in various parts of Asia to build Nikes and iPads for the world, truly an unencumbered blessing? How about some products helped along by child labour? Are they truly an unmixed blessing? No matter how efficient they might be?

I guess they are if you like to wear Nike at a modest price, but perhaps not if you happen to be a twelve year old in a factory in one of the more remote provinces of China.

Okay, globalisation, as much as the tower of Babel allows, is ongoing and unstoppable, on a cultural level by the web, and on a physical level as transport increases connectivity (unless we run out of the means to fuel that connectivity). And there's nothing wrong with that, in the sense if you can't stop the flow, you perforce go with it.

But you might at least recognise the mixed blessings, and not try to build a mountain of bliss out of a dissected pig. Perhaps even try to organise and regulate it.

You don't have to be in the grip of Thomas Friedman's unctuous optimism to realise that in many areas The World is Flat. Or getting flatter. But flat doesn't always mean svelte.

A blithe assumption that all is well, with a couple of anecdotes trotted out as evidence to support the notion, and the argument that globalisation, as practised now, is sustainable, relies heavily on the ability of technology to provide sustainable upgrades to the way we currently do things.

It's hard to imagine six or nine billion people living at the level of waste currently indulged in by the United States or Australia, without a huge amount of boxing clever. Tragically of course a lot of conservatives tend to the superstitious and technologically luddite, incapable of imagining the need to change the way we do things. After all, if the rapture is just around the corner, why worry about a ravaged earth.

I suspect that I'm like many people when it comes to waste and conspicuous consumption. Occasionally moved by guilt, but also in love with the pleasure of a giant plasma screen, and even now thinking about an upgrade to a giant 3D plasma screen.

Can this level of indulgence continue?

If you read Chris Berg, sure thing, we're just like pigs in a field of mud. But what if special pleading and joyous rapture isn't so much an argument, or even an observation of the way the world works, but a deludedly optimistic state of mind?

(Below: and now a joke about pigs and the conspicuous consumption of Fox news).

Piers Akerman, the perfidious Chairman Rudd, and the pleasure of hypnotised chooks ...

(Above: a Labor party die hard in training at the hands of an Akker Dakker acolyte.

Stupidity is the devil. Look in the eye of a chicken and you'll know. It's the most horrifying, cannibalistic, and nightmarish creature in this world - Werner Herzog).

What I love most about the commentariat is the regular deployment of "when did you stop beating your wife" rage.

Akker Dakker, lovingly celebrated on these pages as the yaroop garoah fat owl of the remove of Billy Bunter fame, provides an excellent example in PM's political ticker has ground to a halt.

Having relentlessly campaigned for days, months, weeks, years against an ETS, he is now outraged that the ETS will not come to a vote.

You see, it doesn't matter if you stop beating your wife, because that doesn't show a new civility, it just shows a lack of manliness, of courage, of ticker.

Never mind climate change, it doesn't exist. Never mind the environment. After all as the immortal Rush Limbaugh says, Oil-covered birds on fire. Another name for dinner. Or to give you the full and proper quote: RUSH: Oil-covered birds on fire are just another way to describe dinner. It's called barbecue pits. Grills. (here).

But back to Akker Dakker and his rage that nothing is being done about global warming when he's spent all this time explaining that nothing should be done about global warming:

Since he came to office in 2007 Rudd has been using the threat of a double dissolution to bludgeon the Opposition but his lack of political courage has shown that menace to be no more than bullying intimidation.

It worked against former Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull, a political naive, but it hasn’t resonated elsewhere and appears to be just another gutless attempt at coercion.

Indeed. Drill baby drill, or should that be fucked baby fucked.

Akker Dakker spends his entire column ranting and railing at Labor's spin merchants and broken promises, and since the list is entirely predictable and familiar, we pause only to ponder the way he achieves ecstatic levels of abuse:

Labor figures from Rudd down uniformly speak in monotones, sound authoritative even as they deliver nonsensical phrases, maintain a flow of conversation with their interviewers and avoid hesitation at all costs, even though their answers bear no relation to the questions.

Where this leaves the likes of Julie Bishop and Bronnie Bishop (the clerical liberals) or the braying Sophie Mirabella I'm not quite sure - could it be that all politicians uniformly speak in tongues, while Akker Dakker celebrates the monotone chant of Tony Abbott rabbiting on about great big new taxes? Except when he urges his own great big new tax on business.

This is the problem with the one eyed barracker, from Akker Dakker to Manly to Collingwood supporters. A dull monotone would be a relief ...

Well happy days Malcolm Turnbull is back and he still believes in an ETS! Strange days indeed, and if Tony Abbott's sullen response on camera to the news is any guide, things might turn a little ugly down the track.

Never mind, there was one thing that struck me as piquant, and that's Akker Dakker's flourish in this line:

Labor’s spin merchants, Hawker-Britton, seem to have hit on a formula to keep the die-hards mesmerised like hypnotised chooks.

It reminded me of the good old days back in the bush when one of my father's few party tricks was to hypnotise a chook.

It was only when I saw Werner Herzog's The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, which features chook hypnosis, as does his film Signs of Life, that I realized that this was a world-wide phenomenon.

It turns out that Herzog has a deep seated, irrational fear of chickens, in much the same way as Akker Dakker has a deep seated, irrational fear of Labor party chooks. What this says about their upbringing - in a Freudian or Jungian way, take your therapeutic pick - must remain a mystery, but it does produce a bizarre level of hysterical rhetoric.

I'm indebted to the geeks at QuickSilverScreen for this list of Herzogian chooks:

* Game in the Sand centers around a chicken
* Signs of Life features a chicken buried up to its neck in a mound of sand
* Signs of Life and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser feature chicken hypnosis
* Aguirre, The Wrath of God chickens are thrown over a cliff
* Even Dwarfs Started Small features cannibalistic chickens, and several sequences of dwarfs throwing chickens
* Stroszek ends with a long shot of a dancing chicken
* Invincible features a tale about a man who thinks himself to be a rooster
* The White Diamond features a Guyanese man who adores his pet rooster and wishes to bring it up with him when offered a ride on an airship

Sadly when I recently watched Herzog's re-make of The Bad Lieutenant (sub-titled Port of Call New Orleans), wherein Nicolas Cage chews up drugs and the scenery, I didn't see any chickens, though one astute critic has claimed that the hallucinatory iguanas are actually a stand-in for chooks.

Could it be that Herzog is cured of his fear of chickens? Is it possible that Akker Dakker might at some point be cured of his irrational fear of and phobia for all things left of Genghis Khan?

Who knows, but truth to tell, writing about hypnotized chooks is way more interesting than writing about Akker Dakker scribbling furiously about Chairman Rudd.

And as always, Wiki comes to the rescue with an item about chicken hypnotism.

Now what I suggest is the next time you meet up with a member of the commentariat at a party (as you regularly do), you hold his or her neck down to the ground, and then continuously draw a line along the ground with a stick or a finger or a piece of chalk, starting at the beak and extending straight outward in front of the commentator chook.

Alternately stroke the commentariat commentator while making soothing clucking sounds, and if this fails, take the commentator's head and tuck it under its wing (nee armpit), while gently rocking the wild bird back and forth. (My father's guaranteed way to produce a result).

The result? A party blessed with silence, as the garrulous one contemplates their navel or their beak or a mysterious line in the dust leading off to the infinite void, in a manner of speaking.

While there are plenty of hypnotised chicken routines available on YouTube - yes it really does work and you haven't lived if you haven't seen a hypnotised chook or commentariat commentator - I thought it better to end with Herzog's dancing chook sequence which wraps up

Stroszek.

Somehow it evokes the effect of reading too much Akker Dakker.

Stupidity is the devil. Look in the eye of a commentariat commentator and you'll know. It's the most horrifying, cannibalistic, and nightmarish creature in this world - Werner Herzog.

Christopher Pearson, and after a post-prandial port, time to shout "I'm Tony Abbott" ...

(Above: we have our eye on you. And now it seems the partisan Liberals have adopted the sign of the mighty American dollar, formed clubs and turned mason. Read on ...)

Truly, reading Christopher Pearson gets better by the minute, provides even richer reading for the garden mulch by the hour, provides a haven for surrealistic thinkers anxious to drop a little acid by the day, and proves that Lewis Carroll lacked imagination when he shoved Alice down the rabbit hole.

How's this for an opener for Spin and bad timing obscure silver lining:

Last Saturday I introduced readers to the Club Sensible, a discreet freemasonry that extends across the political class in Australia. Its members are conspicuous for a bipartisan approach to policy fundamentals, shared perceptions of the national interest and a conviction that duty and friendship should normally trump party and sectional advantage.

I'm afraid I sprayed the cornflakes right across the breakfast table. Club Sensible? What, a club that includes the Pellites and the Latin mass and the most retrograde conservatism running around in Australia at the moment?

And I'm afraid I can't overlook the abuse of freemasons, discreet or blatant. Not for a moment would that exclusive brethren stand this kind of Catholic tosh. The brothers at the lodge still harbour bitter long term memories of persecution by the Catholic chuch. Why not so long ago Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, as he then was known, issued this reminder:

"... the Church’s negative judgment in regard to Masonic association remains unchanged since their principles have always been considered irreconcilable with the doctrine of the Church and therefore membership in them remains forbidden. The faithful who enroll in Masonic associations are in a state of grave sin and may not receive Holy Communion." (here)

Take that, Club Sensible, and your discreet freemason secret association. You're all doomed to hell, doomed I say, and you can't even enjoy John Huston's great movie The Man Who Would Be King.

(14k symbol from the show available here for dedicated eccentrics for thirteen hundred smackeroos and no we don't get a kickback).

And don't think the use of lower case can keep you out of jail or hell. When the Catholic church (and in recent times the Anglican) sniffs out freemasonry in whatever guise it finds it, it knows it's found a useless bunch of heretics and unbelievers adhering to a kind of alternate deistic religion.

What a hoot, but then the reference to a bipartisan approach to policy fundamentals is the real cornflakes sprayer.

How's this for a bipartisan approach to the matter of smoking:

At the end of an unusually chaotic week, readers may be wondering how members of the Club Sensible are likely to have viewed the ways new federal policy and its attendant politics played out. Perhaps the first thing to be said, in the wake of Thursday and Friday's spontaneous demonstrations from smokers of all ages about the uncovenanted new taxes on tobacco, is that this is a high-risk decision and not a very sensible move in the context of a tightly contested election.

Oh you can just imagine Pearson in sackcloth and ashes. Won't someone think of the smokers, he whines, and their rebellious and fractious ways, which at least means we won't have to think of the children for at least a day or two. Unless of course the children are smokers, despite the very best efforts of tobacco companies to keep their coffin nails out of children's hands.

What a hoot. Bipartisan! But hang on a tick, even Tony Abbott, with much reluctance and a great show of concern for a great big new tax, rather akin to his desire to mount a great big new tax on business to fund his parental leave proposal, has joined the conga line of smoke taxers.

The sad truth is that the language police should be knocking on Pearson's door right now and arresting him for an abuse of language.

Calling himself a member of a bipartisan club is a shameless misuse of words. There's actually nothing wrong with being partisan - after all, who can disagree with the Greek pasans of World War 11, and sundry other partisans who pressed their case against Nazi Germany?

Trained as I am by the movies in my world view, how many times have I yelled at the screen "Go partisans" or "Go Maquis"?

Pearson doesn't do himself or the language any good by pretending either that he's bipartisan or that he's sensible. That's why he can continue with a standard nanny state rant, as if somehow he really cares about the taxing of smokers:

Taxes to impose nanny state virtues are seldom popular, no matter how plausible the health benefits for individuals and the public purse. That's why purposeful governments tend to introduce them as modest slugs, early in the term. Smoking is arguably a special case, but wise administrators take care not to be too intrusive or disdainful in interfering with people's enjoyment of licit pleasures. Tony Abbott or, as some have taken to calling him, Spartacus will be anticipating grudging backing from young, inner-urban voters previously immune to his blandishments and a firming of support in outer metropolitan marginal seats.

Hold on a second. Wind that one back. Spartacus!! Tony Abbott is Spartacus??!! But I always preferred the Roman patrician and general Crassus (played by Sir Laurence Olivier), and in particular the scene where Crassus embarks on a discussion with Antoninus (Tony Curtis) about the pleasure of eating oysters and snails. It was so hot that when they finally put it back in the restoration cut, Anthony Hopkins had to do Olivier's voice.

But I digress. Who on earth has been calling Tony Abbott Spartacus? Well it turns out it's that other fiend for bipartisan politics, Arthur Sinodinos, who back in December last year penned Spartacus leads grassroots revolt.

Tony Abbott is the Spartacus of Australian politics. No longer content to be slaves in Kevin Rudd's victory procession, the Liberal heartland has found its Spartacus and revolted.

Oh indeed, I couldn't have put it better, in a bipartisan way, myself. But I digress, let us return to our splendid Pickwick, port in hand, muttering at the ceiling in a bipartisan way about the pain and suffering of betrayed smokers:

Surprise taxes usually feel more of a betrayal than expected imposts and are most resented when they look like tax on the run. The execution was unsatisfactory because Kevin Rudd announced through gritted teeth that no compensation would be paid to tobacco companies, as though he were occupying unassailably high moral ground and even smokers shared his view that nicotine suppliers were public enemy No 1. That's not the case, of course, and those of us who enjoy a fine Turkish cigarette - let alone a Havana cigar - with their post-prandial drink can console ourselves that we're rapidly moving to a post-Kevin environment.

A Havana cigar? Has it come to this, as we clutch our post-prandial pretentious ports, in a bipartisan club, having left the ladies to whitter amongst themselves?

Havana? Do we care so little for our great friends in the United States that we should so freely embark on the consumption of goods denied them? Oh yes, in the United States, it remains illegal for US residents to purchase or import Cuban cigars regardless of where they are in the world. This means they have to go - eek, oh no, say it isn't so - to Canada for their puffing and puffery, or hop on to the Internet like a band of pirates.

So much for solidarity with our great ally, at least when feeling the need to emulating patriarchal stereotypes from Victorian gentleman club days. (here).

Never mind. Forget Tony Abbott backs Kevin Rudd's cigarette tax. Who cares if Spartacus is willing to tax the slaves?

On and on Pearson rambles in a splendidly partisan way, as he has an anxiety attack about the fate of the intellectual property rights of the tobacco companies:

Most people also know the Constitution obliges the commonwealth to compensate every person or business "on just terms" for taking away traditional rights and even impairment of brand value of the kind that plain paper cigarette packaging envisages. It sounds like another protracted, expensive legal mess in the making. Club Sensible members will be left wondering: did Rudd really need the money that badly to pay for his burgeoning, ad hoc health package now? Couldn't he have waited until a few months after the election?

Actually by this point I suspect the few remaining members of Club Sensible must be wondering why they keep on reading this huffing puffing silly billy, who purports bipartisanship in the same way that a brothel keeper might purport to simply running a matchmaking club.

There's way more, of course, in his bipartisan survey of the political scene. Ken Henry is de facto political treasurer, the electorate will be unsettled by his report, the spin doctors upset "the Club Sensible" with their guile, the sudden steep tax on tobacco is a sure sign of a government in terminal decline, the mining and resource industries are up in arms, and the dropping of the ETS, while ostensibly a triumph for bipartisanship, was in fact a clumsily executed U-turn.

So how does this bipartisan report end? Well with a hurrah for Julia Gillard gesturing hypnotically, Mandrake style, towards a voucher system for the school system, and this stirring bipartisan conclusion:

The most recent polls tell us that many of them (traditional Labor supporters) are almost out of patience with the government because of all its broken promises and the fact that in areas where they expected responsiveness it has given them short shrift.

Oh verily brothers and sisters, come on over to Spartacus, fight as helots, or slaves if that be your status, join the dark side, and earn the right to enjoy a Cuban cigar with a pompous post-prandial port. Provided you can understand that sensible might mean insensible, bipartisan might mean strictly partisan, and masonic might only be allowed if done in a Catholic way.

Is it also bipartisan I wonder to hope that Malcolm Turnbull decides to stay on, first of all to maintain the Liberal grip on Wentworth, but also in recognition that this Spartacus might be heading for defeat, and down the track, the chalice, the preciousss ring, might still be within his grasp ...

Sssh, there's bipartisanship, and then there's heresy, since the Brutus we have has no desire to see the wounded Caesar return to life.

And remember, if anyone asks of Spartacus, here's what you must do, though if you want to substitute the words "I'm Tony Abbott", no doubt the members of Club Sensible will approve: