Miranda Devine, Steve Fielding, spelling and as any fule now

Here's Peter Hartcher on the 4th July 2009 under the header Lessons from OzCar for everyone from PM to Senate dunce:

The Family First senator, Steve Fielding, on crutches, hobbled across to reporters in a parliamentary courtyard last week. The media was not there for Fielding. The clutch of reporters had just finished listening to the Senate's other loner, South Australia's Nick Xenophon, and were about to leave. So Fielding rushed into his opening gambit:

"G'day, there's a bit of concern about whether or not I've got swine flu or not. I haven't, I'm actually on Tamiflu tablets. The last thing I want to do is shut down Parliament but this week is too important to actually miss, and I certainly didn't want to take a sickie with my crook ankle or with potential swine flu."

The journalists took a step back, but remained to quiz him. One asked: "So you've put all of our health at risk?"

Fielding: "Look, you may want to stand back a few paces, a couple of people have got their scarves over their mouths at the moment, and if you provided me with a mask I may even put it on. They wanna gag me, people have said in the last few days I haven't got a leg to stand on, I think that's pretty heartless knowing I've got a very sore leg."

Since arriving in the Senate on July 1, 2005, Fielding has had trouble coping with the pressures of his position. His foolish antics, his nonsense speeches, his erratic behaviour have all marked him out as a man unsuited to structured thinking, rigorous analysis and complex decision-making under pressure. His fellow senators, of all parties, regard him as a buffoon.

A buffoon? Well Hartcher goes on further, but let's pause, and see where recent developments have taken us.

Here's Miranda the Devine today under the header Bullies seize on slip of the tongue, mounting a poignant, vigorous defence of Senator Fielding in the policy arena:

Fielding's tormentors should at least be honest about their motives - if he were a climate change catastrophist or didn't represent a Christian party, none of this would have happened. Such treatment of Bob Brown would be unthinkable. Anthony Albanese mangles every word that comes out of his mouth, and no one mentions it.

It is precisely because Fielding holds fast to values unfashionable in the Canberra establishment that he is being pilloried, even after he revealed his learning disability.

Well no, not even that. It's not the spelling, nor even the values.

The observable facts - long before the revelation that Fielding had a learning difficulty in relation to spelling - was that he was out of his depth in the Senate. Elected with a very small percentage of primary votes, thanks to the ill-founded arrogance and incompetence of Victorian Labor, he's since spent his time in clownish attention-seeking behavior which has done little to advance the cause of good government or sound policy in this country, all the more tragic because he's in a key position of power though the luck of numbers and the draw.

Naturally Fielding has turned his inability to spell a word into another way of getting in front of the public, most notably in Lost for words: my secret battle with language.

Well he might say tomato and I might say tomato, and Dan Quayle might spell potato as potatoe, but of course the argument about spelling is a distraction from policy - not to mention Fielding's ongoing, still current campaign in the senate to obtain some relevance by acting as a lone ranger spoiler on any number of issues.

Perhaps his best and most classic farrago of nonsense to date has been his rambling about binge drinking while refusing to endorse an increase in the price of alcopops via taxation, until he finally retreated and let the change through. Culminating with his offer not to introduce prohibition. A dance on a pin by a pinhead.

But of course the Devine doesn't want to go there. Instead she does a little Green bashing (for calling out "spell it" as Fielding rose to speak in the Senate) and a bit more in depth axe handling of Crikey writer Bernard Keane for a grammatical error (effects rather than affects), as if that's somehow a crim.

Well if Fielding can get away with righteous indignation about a number of matters (such as climate change, where he waved a graph as if he'd discovered peace in our time), why can't Keane get away with an abuse of the English language while righteously indignant about the abuse of the English language.

Since we all know that we all struggle with words at one time or another - it took years for my mother to bash correct spelling into my head while I yearned for the simplified world of George Bernard Shaw - and if Miranda the Devine doesn't want any persecution of Fielding for word abuse, then why does she think poor Bernard is so hilarious? How can she get to laugh at someone for spelling abuse, when we all now it is not a crim?

Next the Devine knocks over Deborah Cameron on ABC 702, then gets upset about former Labor premier Geoff Gallop calling it an intellectual disability rather than a learning disability. Then it's on with the news about dyslexia, and history being full of clever people such as Albert Einstein who have had dyslexia. With just the slightest hint that Fielding might just happen to be one of those clever people, after getting an engineering degree, an MBA, success in business, and a high nineties score for pure and applied maths to balance his 29 in HSC English?

Well who knows, but I suspect if he'd become a politician Einstein might have proven to be only a fair average policy maker and administrator, and despite the revelations of last day or so, I'll stick with Hartcher's assessment, and with Fielding's actual record of behavior on the ground in the senate.

Devine of course wants to turn it around, and see it all as ruthless opportunism on the part of Fielding's opponents, rather than the latest twist in the Fielding saga:

The unpleasantness of the past week will have added to the silent suffering of dyslexics. But it says more about those ruthless opportunists who have kicked Fielding, than it does about him.

But Hartcher was calling him a buffoon in July, because he was acting as a buffoon. And once perceived as a buffoon, you have to mend your buffoonish ways to avoid the label in the future. Let's not let the minor matter of spelling get in the way of deeper truths.

As Molesworth pointed out long ago, there are deeper truths than spelllng:

All girls are soppy. This fact is recognised by all boys and the message is clear but seme to become dimmer as they draw on to man's estate chiz.

Eventually it fade alotgether and all is lost in a welter of SOP and SLUSH, like you get in the films they dare not show us at skool.

'How beautiful,' sa your mum to your pater. 'If only you could be noble like that ocasinaly.'

'It is only a world of makebelieve,' he repli. 'You must face up to reality.'

'Reality,' sa molesworth2, is so unspeakably sordid it make me shudder.'

He take a bullseye and pater lite his pipe. The matter is closed.

Yep, as any fule now, there are deep matters which deserve special study, especially English literature:

a thortful figure is walking among the dead beetles crushed biskuits
and old buns which litter the skool passage.
He is reading a peotry book.
Aktually it is not me it is a weed called Shelley.