Crikey

Planet Janet Albrechtsen rose over the horizon this morning, with yet another piece about disillusionment with Obama — the day he nominated a Latina activist judge to the Supreme Court.

Your correspondent was quoted with some stream-of-consciousness stuff from last year about a bit of an empathy-in with a hotel receptionist at six in the morning the day after Obama won … and I had staggered back from an impromptu eviction party outside the White House. After that there was a piece I’d written about how Obama had a bit of the wobbles. This apparently was disillusionment.

Our own Guy Rundle summed up the election of Obama for many progressives. Writing last November, he described how he and the young desk clerk in the lobby of his Washington hotel, who had just come off a 12-hour shift (“because that’s how you work in (George W.) Bush’s America”), “just held hands and wept for a minute or so, in happiness, in relief, in the victory of something larger than both of us, that contained us both”. “It is a victory for the global Left,” Rundle wrote. “These are the great days.”

More likely those were the salad days. Now, plenty of Obama’s most ardent admirers are rethinking their exuberance. Rundle has attacked the “small stuff”  — gaffes over gifts to Russians and bad jokes about the Special Olympics — and the “big stuff”: complaining at the paltry size of Obama’s $1.2trillion stimulus package. Democrats are meant to spend more. Bob Dylan, who once described Obama as “redefining the nature of politics”, is shrugging his shoulders, describing politicians as “interchangeable”.

Planet has no tear ducts  — they were removed to prevent corrosion of her metal skin, and she’s always studying the humans so as to understand how to behave like them — but I was a bit p-ssed off.

Yelling at Obama is like yelling at Collingwood during one of its usual first quarter wash-outs — it’s a sign of how much you care, not of quitting it. So I emailed The Australian’s op-ed editor Rebecca Weisser:

Interested in a defence of obama and left? 800 words 0406 XXX XXX

And got this Beckettian reply:

Out of Office AutoReply: interested in a defence of obama and left? 800 words 0406 XXX XXX

I’m in the office. If your email concerns an opinion article I will contact you as soon as possible if I can use your submission.

Being in the office I am out. I am out of being in the office. I go on I can’t go on…

Half an hour passed. So I resorted to a tested email tactic, the subject header cascade. This technique involves sending an entire message in reverse in three or more subject headers, one after the other — so that they appear as a composed text in the inbox. The receiver can’t ignore them — they’ve been read almost before they’re aware they’re there, thanks to the protean powers of the human eye …

Why not have the debate in your pages?‏

Might get you some readers.‏

Then you wouldn’t have to give it away in hotels and airports.‏

Does anyone pay for the Oz anymore? It lies around in snowdrifts. It’s like paying for a lapdance — sometimes necessary, always shaming, dirty, dirty, dirty.

Another half hour. Still no reply. Cascade number two.

Not you personally I mean…

Though that’s Campbell Reid’s Plan B‏.

Did you see that doofus on ABC last night? People will still be reading newspapers in 50 years … because of the feel of a paper, etc. The feel of a paper is like the feel of spats, or a horse carriage — it dies with those who grew up with it, and no amount of sentiment saves it. I’ve been a newspaper junkie for 20 years, yet I can choose between reading eight news sources and three video feeds on an 0.8 kg laptop which takes five seconds to boot — or I can buy Campbell’s papers containing news 10 hours old on grey paper. Good luck in telemarketing Campbell!

Oh dear…‏

Mind you, he said one thing right. Newspapers have nearly carked it because of bad decisions. Like News Ltd’s approach of turning their oped pages into dull slanted propaganda tracts. Rather than having the debate inside their pages, they’d rather have it elsewhere. Guess where?

Still no answer from Rebecca. We are all sadder but Weisser…