The Brown Stain On Abbott's Soul

I WROTE yesterday about Tony Abbott’s cavalier attitude to the sacrifice of an Australian fighting person and the scatological commentary he shared with genuine military types. Well, I have been thinking more on these two points and it seems to me that the incident provides a profound example of two grave deficiencies in the character of the Coalition’s current el supremo.

The first is that he is fixated on excrement. Katherine Murphy writes of the Opposition leader’s potty mouth tendencies in The Age, which no other paper notices and which gives us one more reason to celebrate the best news and commentary source in this country. It is “shit this” and “shit that” with Tony  Abbott and we can only wonder why  the infantile fascination with poo exerts such a strong influence on his words and thinking. One possible explanation – a supremely obvious one, actually – is his Jesuit training.

Abbott was raised and suckled at the breast of the Catholic church – ultra-religious home, all-boys school, “manly” hobbies like surf lifesaving, boxing and country fire fighting, a stint in the seminary and then into conservative politics, where female participants can only get ahead by culturally “de-gendering” themselves. If you want an example, look no further than Julie Bishop, whose very chromosones must be screaming in protest at the XY template she has had to jam her XXs into. No real woman could sport that laser stare, which is the same look you see on construction workers mentally undressing every woman who passes by.

There is nothing wrong with what Victorian medicos used to call "inversioon", but Julie Bishop does not fit naturally into that category – that her “I can see you in your underwear” glare which so unsettles female members of the government has become a fixture of her political repertoire says it all. In some sort of sick, parody of maleness, she intimidates by means of  the oppressive eye.

Abbott’s issues would seem to be more ingrained, deeply steeped in his personal narrative. Where Bishop has adopted maleness, Abbott has been its exploitive victim. Think here of the endless scandals that surround the church and weigh the probabilities that, like so many hundreds of thousands of young Australian men, he was at one time sexually abused by a priest, probably many priests. Damn the coy language! Let’s call sexual abuse what it really is: sodomy.

I think that explains quite a lot about the fascination with shit. In the eyes of a young, exploited boy, the traces of his own post-coital excrement on clerical abusers’ pudenda were the confronting evidence of his own weakness, his powerless and, as the juvenile “bottom” in those boarding school buggary sessions, his limp impotence. His needs, his right to sexual fulfillment, were ignored; it was the abusers’ orgasmic imperatives that were satisfied. And it was Abbott who carried that legacy forward into his political life.

 When Abbott says “shit” it is not just a dirty word, it is a manifestation of the excretory stains that were forcibly imprinted on his character as a child. So, too, the enthusiasm for boxing. Like the flagellants his creed reveres, he mistakenly adopts pain as the path to redemption.

Which brings us to the second great character flaw. Just as Abbott was victimized, so he now attempts to victimize others – one of the very first things any of us who have studied psychology come to know and understand. Every utterance of “shit” is nothing more nor less than a pathetic attempt to share that shame, to project it onto a wider audience and thereby dilute its psychological toxidity.

Think about it and think, too, of Katherine Murphy’s insight in picking up on this hallmark of a suppressed, self-hating homosexual. There is more, much more than male parts jammed into those appalling Speedos. There is guilt, fury, and a silence more profound and far deeper than those excruciating 24 seconds of silence that the helpless bully obliged Mark Riley and Channel 7 viewers to endure.

While we can -- indeed, must -- detest Tony Abbott,  anyone imbued with a concern for justice and empathy must also feel deeply sorry for him.

Mr Crusader Rabbit Shows His True Colours

WELL, as if we didn’t expect this reaction from the paid conservative apologists in the Murdoch press.

The most reactionary Liberal leader in living memory manifests his core belief that individuals are no more than cannon fodder, that Diggers’ deaths are just part of their job description, and then he disgusts every decent person with a dismissive obscenity – except Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt, who would not know decency if it bit them on their bought-and-paid-for arses.

“Shit happens” Mr Rabbit shrugged when discussing the latest Australian casualty in America’s imperialist occupation of Afghanistan. Read The Age account of Abbott's indifference. That paper gets it right, as usual.

Shit happens indeed!

A Digger’s death is “shit”, apparently, to be scraped off Abbott’s conscience like dog dirt on a shoe. It is a shocking, deeply disturbing moment in the Mad Monk’s gaffe-prone gallop across the stage of Australian politics.

Unforgiveable. Inexcusable. Appalling. Cringe-worthy. Disgusting.

They are the personal traits and characteristics that define the Liberal leader, a musclebound extrovert who delights in disporting his six-pack and bulging groin in those infamous Speedos. He is an actor, egomaniac and poseur, a man who goes bush to “help” Indigenous communities, but only if the TV cameras are trailing along to record his every noble act – and an act it is.  Now he has made those deficiencies of character the defining “qualities” of the party he leads. If his Coalition spear carriers do not come forward, speak up and demand that Abbott step down, the Liberals will forever be condemned as the heartless bastards we have always suspected them to be.

How could a man, an aspiring national leader, describe a dead Australian soldier as “shit”? It boggles the mind, but the explanation really isn’t that hard to find. All we have to do is look at Abbott’s dominant Catholic philosophy and the historical precedents his faith provides for dismissing human life as less than worthless in this existence. The value of human life comes only after death, in the Abbott view.

It is a perspective that is a time honoured tenet of Catholicism and it puts our crusader Rabbit firmly in the tradition of his spiritual guide, the Inquisitor Arnaud of Poblet, who was unleashed by the Pope against the peaceful Cathar “heretics” of Southern France.

"Kill them all. For the Lord knows them that are His," was Arnaud’s advice to a general who was wondering how to tell Cathars from Catholics in a town about to be put to the sword. Today we translate this doctrinal wisdom as “Kill them all and let God sort it out”, which is exactly what the Pope’s butchers did.

Now Abbott has donned the bloody armour of the anti-humanist papal legions of old. It is a good fit and he slips it on as easily as his Speedos.

As Bolt and Blair whip up their red-neck rabble (they have no shame; their followers have no brains), remember the truth about Abbott – the timeless truth about his disregard for human life (except in the womb) that his faith has woven into his political DNA.

FOOTNOTE: The link with the Cathars resonates through the centuries. The Cathars believed in equality of the sexes, non-violence, community property and every person’s right to commune directly with the God. Is it any wonder that Abbott finds their murderers’ sword fits so neatly into his callous, blood-stained hand?