Angela Shanahan and how Chris Mitchell and The Australian are messing with our minds ...

(Above: Angela Shanahan, and sweet absent lord, she must be a member of the cardigan wearing leet, she's been on the ABC's Q&A, here).

Talk about utter consternation and bewilderment.

There we were at the Opera House last night, with a big red bulbous mysterious variegated "O" on the bridge, and various bits and pieces of a circus littering the forecourt, including a stage and big clunky HD cameras (and inside James Ehnes playing the Tchaikovsky violin concerto in exemplary fashion), and of course the circus was all for Oprah Winfrey, and we made - in our usual inner suburban sophisticated tertiary elite sneering snide way - jokes about how her demographic most likely consisted of the 78% of the American population who'd never obtained a passport - that's right, only 1 in 4.5 Americans can even visit Canada, let alone visit Australia, a land best known for stingrays that kill Steve Irvine - and of course our idle chatter got around to the schizophrenic world of The Australian, edited by Chris Mitchell, the tabloid journalist who once ran The Courier-Mail, and to his eternal discredit was involved in a story revealing that Manning Clark had been secretly awarded the Order of Lenin which proved the dead historian, unable to fight back, was a Soviet agent of influence and a communist and responsible for the decline and fall of western civilisation, except the story was wrong (Media Watch, I Spy With My FOI), and how the wretched rag he was now editing was supposed to be appealing to the A-B demographic, but actually in its mind set was somewhere around the D-E demographic, at least in its editorial policies, oh and the night was bright and free and we chattered gaily, inspired by the music, and the night air, imagining we were in an endless Joycean sentence, or had perhaps imbibed the spirit of Noel Coward along with the hideously expensive raspberry gelato, and thanking the absent lord we had no need to turn up next week to watch a government funded taping of the Oprah Winfrey show, if only because while Americans blather about government funding being socialist, they still seem to know how to stick out their paw for a little of that socialist grease ...

And then dear sweet lord we woke this morning to find ourselves in the company of Angela Shanahan, scribbling Worrying signs of a power trip:

The opinions of a certain American television personality are not high on my list of things to think about before I die.

Frankly, I am so elitist that until recently I still pronounced her name as "opera" and it has taken about 10 years and the ridicule of my children for me to remember the correct pronunciation is O-praaah.

Perhaps I am one of those people referred to in The Australian's December 8 editorial: "The instinct to mock anything that could be considered popular is an unfortunate trait of the self-styled sophisticates who dominate much of the media debate here."

Sweet absent Jesus, has it come to this?

Is Chris Mitchell fucking with our minds or what?

First we find Miranda the Devine finding some kind of affection for the work of Julian Assaaaange - oh okay it was in the tabloid Daily Terror, but all is one beneath the giant Murdoch umbrella - and now there's Shanahan mocking The Australian for its clap trap about self-styled sophisticates ...

It's roughly equivalent to some surreal Bunuelian scene, where one might be trapped in a room unable to leave, with a bunch of incompatible guests, or perhaps singing along to the Latin mass, cheerfully accompanied by Christopher Pearson, and beneath you the floor begins to quiver and buckle as the anti-Christ rises from the deep, and Arnold Schwarzenegger is nowhere to be found to save you ...

As well as having a go at The Australian, Shanahan is given the space to take hefty side-swipes at Winfrey, like a snide, sneering inner city elitist:

It is not Winfrey per se that I don't much like. Winfrey is probably a charming person. Indeed, she would have to be to have done what she has done. It is the Oprah Winfrey, oracular guru, with the sort of influence that makes fans exclaim, "Oprah has made such an impact on my life", who worries me. There are her lifestyle ponderings - really just the usual simplistic exhortations to eat right combined with practical morality - her intellectual advice (as in: read this book) and, of course, her spirituality-lite combined with the arm's-length do-goodism as evidenced by her somewhat botched African girls school venture.

Oh no, say it ain't so. And how about a rousing finale?

American society has always been a bit of an opinionated free-for-all, but Winfrey embeds herself into our psyche and manipulates our so-called lifestyle, except for us more sceptical, unpopular, hoity-toity types who tend to simply have a life, if no style.

Angela Shanahan identifying as a hoity-toity type, sceptical and unpopular, like one of those tertiary-educated critics delivering mocking commentary, those self-styled sophisticates who dominate the media debate in Australia, who were reviled in the editorial More than just a TV star ?(and yes, let Chris Mitchell as editor take responsibility for the editorial, even if he didn't scribble it).

Stars and stripes forever, this site accused of being a rusted on den for Liberals, and now marching in lock step with Angela Shanahan and Miranda the Devine?

“The mind is its own place, and in it self

Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”
~John Milton, Paradise Lost

You see, Angela Shanahan is a Catholic conservative member of the commentariat, who lives in Canberra - what we like to think of here at the pond as the three C's, a bit like catastrophic conservative crapulence - and who could be routinely found delivering homilies about the family and such like nonsense in Quadrant, as in My parents were Welsh, and other Left excuses, a snide sneering attack on Julia Gillard based around the notion we should all live in happy families (the Catholicism is implicit), and full of paranoia about the usual matters, feminism, and abortion and so on (and there's plenty more of that in Quadrant in Human Rights and the Unborn), and when Shanahan turns up in The Australian, it's usually to write the kind of profoundly irritating tripe on view in Godless politics has gone too far for democracy, which showed all the philosophical insight and historical awareness of a brown paper bag ... or perhaps a cardboard box, provided the box is small and well-insulated from any actual insight, and so likely to send humanists into a frenzy (Angela Shanahan objects to "Godless Politics").

Agreeing with Shanahan is roughly equivalent to agreeing with the rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem:

A thick, black cloud swirled before my eyes, and my mind told me that in this cloud, unseen as yet, but about to spring out upon my appalled senses, lurked all that was vaguely horrible, all that was monstrous and inconceivably wicked in the universe. Vague shapes swirled and swam amid the dark cloud-bank, each a menace and a warning of something coming, the advent of some unspeakable dweller upon the threshold, whose very shadow would blast my soul.

-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot

Oh there have been advances - remember her sacking from The Canberra Times back in 2006 (noted with glee here) - but whenever did turn up writing a piece, she was always fodder for the pond (indeed we once scribbled about Sins of the fathers will be purged, a typical rant for the Oz about atheistic inhabitants of a looking-glass world).

And now sob, we stand shoulder to hoity-toity shoulder with her.

I've said it once, so now I suppose I must say it again. Chris Mitchell is fucking with our minds ...

This is perhaps the final link in the chain of evidence I've been compiling to prove my thesis that Mitchell's ambition is to become the Glenn Beck of Australia, and my, hasn't Glenn Beck been doing exceptionally well of late, what with his apocalyptic conspiracy theories about progressives ... (here).

I can see Mitchell now, hunched over a desk, plotting to bring about the downfall of dangerous leftie anarcho-Marxist radicals wanting the redistribution of wealth and the world scourged by black helicopters.

"Eureka," he shouts - or at least a satirical version designed to avoid a defamation suit of the kind Mitchell thought about launching for a tweet - "I know what I'll do, I'll commission a piece by Angela Shanahan sending up the editorial page and marching in lock step with inner suburban sophisticates, and it'll fuck with their minds. Next thing you know they'll be buying gold as a hedge against the coming apocalypse."

Sigh, sign me up for the gold, and no, I don't mind if it's a scam. (Fool's Gold).

And so to Sunday's readings, with Chris Mitchell in mind:

Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a heaven in hell's despair.

So sung a little clod of clay,
Trodden with the cattle's feet;
But a pebble of the brook
Warbled out these meters meet:

Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a hell in heaven's despite.

And while on the subject of god:

Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.
The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.
The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
The nakedness of woman is the work of God.
Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.
The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man.

(William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell).

(Below: how to make a city seem like rube central?)

(What ever happened to philosophical Sydney, the emerald city of enlightenment and apocalyptic insight?)