David Burchell, and a new low in political policy analysis reaches a Shakespearian high ...

(Above: hark, is this a ham I see before me?)

Scanning through the National Times section of the SMH today, it seems clear that Paul Sheehan has hoofed off to another part of the world, and decided to deprive the readership of his splendid insights.

The feeling was of instant relief, as if suddenly ending a monotonous self-inflicted pounding on the head with a baseball bat, or the lifting of the dull pulsing throbbing of a toothache.

Yet the desire to keep on with the pounding, a perverse kind of masochism, knows no limits, and so naturally it was off to The Australian, where the ever reliable David Burchell offers up Stubborn reality a lesson for Labor.

How's this for a thought?

It is true that in political commentary, the policies rather than the person should be the issue.

No, it's not, at least if you're a prize gherkin like David Burchell. Here's his opener:

The other day, after I'd been musing aloud to a patient audience about the federal government's calamitous fall from public grace, some kind soul- perhaps with an eye to stimulating a column such as this - suggested Shakespeare's gallery of tragic heroes must surely contain somebody whose personality and predicament could be fitted to those of our Prime Minister.

Dear lord, it's worse than I thought. People actually listen to Burchell, and worse they're patient. No rioting, no hurling chairs in the air, no abuse and catcalling of the kind that greeted Stravinsky's Rite of Spring on its first appearance, no fistfights, no chaos, no famous people storming out, no turning the lights on and off to calm the audience? (Premiere).

Musing aloud? Why forsooth that ponderous pomposity, worthy of a Polonius deserves a chair in Burchell's direction:

King: O Villains! Vipers! damn'd without Redemption!

Dogs, easily won to fawn on any Man!

Snakes, in my Heart's blood warm'd, that sting my Heart!

Wou'd They make Peace? Terrible Hell make War

Upon their spotted Souls for this Offence! (Richard the Second)

Yes, it's that most dreaded and fearful combination, that A. C. Bradley-ian stew of Victorian insights and Shakespearean rhetoric, David Burchell in his own words, sent to wave his hoary dreadlocks at us. (and more of A.C. Bradley on Shakespearean Tragedy here).

What's worse of course is that Burchell fudges the entire column. How on earth could you reverse the notion that Chairman Rudd is simply a bureaucrat elevated above his level, the favourite meme of chattering commentariat columnists everywhere, and arrive at him as an elevated Shakespearean tragic figure? Why he's merely a Mr. Pooter of politics.

This doesn't of course stop Burchell from indulging in some near intolerable musings. Always with the musings. We've had the Freudian approach, psychoanalysis a la Albrechtsen, and mere common sordid abuse mixed in with it. Why not Shakespeare?

Out of the catalogue of personal virtues, none was more exalted by the classical moralists than constancy. If you are as you appear to be, they told their readers, your actions will have a kind of seemliness and grace that will compel affection and respect.

Oh dear. Shakespeare as a classical moralist? Only in the world of Victorian theorists, I'm afraid, but never mind, the play's the thing in which we'll catch the king:

Shakespeare developed his notion of tragedy out of the paradoxes of this image of character. Our character is the expression of our best aspects, which we hold on to through life's vicissitudes. By the same token, tragedy comes out of the discovery that our ruling trait, followed so faithfully and for so long, no longer serves us. Our constancy ceases to carry us forward, and acts instead as a dead weight on our heels. We stand at cross-purposes with the world.

How extraordinarily quaint. Suddenly A. C. Bradley appears amongst us as a modernist. Can this kind of laboured pondering, this musing, always the musing, stay the course?

And yet the sense of pathos that accompanies Kevin Rudd at present as he lashes out at anybody in his path - from too-elegantly dressed reporters to youthful aides with thinning thatches to mining executives in mufti - in a frenzy of confusion, resentment and imperfectly concealed self-doubt, is altogether un-Shakespearean.

Ah at last, it's at an end. This is what is known as the columnist's double ploy extended play.

Here's how it goes. Reading David Burchell's columns reminds me of reading Sartre's Nausea. Follow this with an extended analysis of Sartre, his deeply troubling existential meanings for modernists, as much as columnist or reader can stand. And then triumphantly conclude ... and yet reading Burchell's frenzy of confusion, resentment and imperfectly concealed self-doubt is altogether un-Sartrean. QED, as Macbeth was wont to note, nothing is but what is not.

But with that ploy ended, more ploys must follow. Perhaps a dash of existentialism and the ancient Greeks, venerable in their eternal wisdom?

Watching Rudd on the ABC's The 7.30 Report last week as he struggled through a veritable PowerPoint presentation of the government's efforts, in seeming oblivion to the actual purpose of the interview, was like experiencing a mysterious private agony, the exact nature of which is still obscure to us.

Which of course allows Burchell to be equally obscure to us.

Character - or, as the Greeks like to call it, ethos - is supposed to be moulded out of the consequences of our actions in and on the world. It thins our locks, furrows our brows with cares and lines our faces, sure enough, but it also produces in us some mellow appreciation of life's comedy and its vicissitudes. The present personal torment of Rudd, by contrast, seems motivated chiefly by his evident sense of bewilderment that, after subjecting itself to his command, the world inscrutably has turned on its axis and, instead, is beginning to bear down on him. This - the diminution of our sense of self, which comes from becoming the object of the world's actions rather than the author of them - is what the Greeks meant by pathos.

Or perhaps hubris? If you don the wings of waffle and fly too close to the sun, do the verbal waxworks melt and fall to earth with a resounding thud? Oh assuredly so, but not before we explore a little Christian mythology:

And yet, because Rudd has assembled his public personality out of his perceived need to be all things to all men - a Jew to Jews, a gentile to gentiles, speaking to the weak in the language of the weak, as St Paul beguilingly put it - it's hard to discern the character on whom this tragedy is being enacted. Instead, we feel a curious sympathy towards some hidden Kevin Rudd, to whom we have never truly been introduced and from whom he has gone to extravagant lengths to protect us. This is not the experience of a character subjected to a momentous tragedy, but rather of a roll of wool which, tumbling to the floor, has begun unravelling and knows not how to stop.

And is then Burchell a little kitten who stumbles across the tumbling roll of wool (we prefer the term ball of wool) and plays with it with innocent pleasure, as it unravels and he knows not how to stop rambling on and on and on ...

Yes, it's at this point that Burchell produces his capper, that in political commentary policies rather than persons should be the issue, but by this time, he'd reduced me to silent gasps of amazement, and mute admiration of his infinite capacity for irrelevance.

So we must pass over his few pars on actual policy in silence, since they introduce a tawdry and unsettling hint of reality and real world politics and politicians, totally at odds with the arcane spirit of his spurious column, and draw attention instead to his final metaphor, which somehow reminds me of an academic commenting on the world:

... if Labor limps back into government on the basis of the opposition's evident inadequacies, it won't be enough simply to remove the person of the Prime Minister. Like an individual under profound stress, the government will be required to forge a new character for itself, one moulded out of the chastening effects of worldly experience rather than the brittle over-confidence of the talented undergraduate.

Better the brittle over-confidence of the talented undergraduate than the fey over-confidence of the cynical academic standing on the sidelines sneering in cynical fashion at the talented undergraduate who threatens to topple Mr. Chips from his throne?

Oops, I should know better than that kind of snidery. It shows there's a Burchell infestation lurking somewhere in the system. Out damn spot, out.

To return to the main theme, now that we've learned Chairman Rudd is not a Shakespearian figure, why there are hundreds of authors to whose characters he might not conform. Why he might lack the resoluteness of Biggles, the inclusiveness of Enid Blyton, the potential for comedy of Billy Bunter, or the capacity to fix the the world's problems like an American superhero.

Ah well, in the absence of Sheehan, it's as good a way as any to start off a Monday, since tommy rot and nonsense is always its own reward ...

(And as for the origin and meaning of tommy rot, here's a starting point).

O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—
It's so elegant
So intelligent
'What shall I do now? What shall I do?'
'I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
'With my hair down, so. What shall we do to-morrow?
'What shall we ever do?'
The hot water at ten.
And if it rains, a closed car at four.
And we shall play a game of chess,
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door. (here).

(Below: yes and the writer of The Wasteland led to Cats the musical. Where on earth will David Burchell's musings lead us, except to a lolcat with a ball of wool, or a fuzzy TV picture?)