When our dopey (as thick as two shaggy planks) but adorable dogs stare into our faces with expressions of rapt adoration we are seeing what Presidents of the USA are used to seeing when they meet our fawning, drooling Australian prime ministers.
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With the Chilcot Report so newsworthy some of are reminiscing about the shameful horrors the report politely probes. As the awfulness of the war unfolded critics of Tony Blair's and of John Howard's lickspittle enthusiasm for George Bush's war called them, Blair and Howard, "George Bush's poodle" and "George Bush's other poodle" respectively.
Wits leapt to say that this criticism was shockingly unfair. It defamed poodles because of all breeds theirs is known for its independence of thought. Like The Canberra Times, the poodle is independent, always.
No, the same wits continued, Blair and Howard were Bush's spaniels.
This columnist knows and loves spaniels (I am grieving over my English springer friend of 14 years, recently sent spinning off towards Dog Heaven). The look of unadulterated love on a spaniel's stupid, jowl-flaunting face is one of the joys of life in this vale of tears.
But when the human face is similarly aglow with adoration of another human (a pope, a US president, a British Royal, a celebrity) just because of the rank and fame of the object of their adoration, that is another kettle of fawnings. When I see it (and in my decades of occasion-attending work as a hack I have seen it often) it can make the flesh creep. My flesh got an especially energetic wriggle-on when President George Bush attended a joint sitting of our fawning parliament in October 2003.
Fawning over the famous is measured using the Spaniel Scale (to the measurement of sycophancy what the Richter Scale is to the measure of earthquakes). At the 2003 event (George W. Bush was there to thank John Howard for being a 'Man of Steel' over Iraq) independently-monitored fawnometers registered 9.5 Spaniels on the 10-point scale. Senators Bob Brown and Kerry Nettle, pluckily heckling, were the only pollies to rise above the hysteria.
There is a major omission from Sir John Chilcot's report, but for me it is the woolly mammoth roaming, with no one pointing at, in the spacious grounds of a report said to be 10 times the size of Melville's Moby Dick. The omission is any suggestion that Tony Blair's greatest wickedness was a flaw of character, the lickspittle spanieldom that moved him to obediently do a US president's bidding. All this emphasis on whether or not Blair and Howard were simply deceived by flawed intelligence on Saddam's imagined weapons of mass destruction, is misplaced.
Blair and Howard might well have done George W's bidding anyway. There is something about being taken to the bosom of the leader of the free world that the insecure, low self-esteem-plagued Blairs and Howards of the world find irresistible. It is something that they, in their insecurity and narcissism (personality disorders that may have driven them into politics in the first place) crave in ways that most of us, far less disturbed, can never know. For us the love of our loved ones (including our spaniels and poodles), on their many merits and not because of their ranks, is enough to fulfil us.
In my Australian lifetime Australia has again and again joined in every US folly the US has asked us to. The wickedness of the Vietnam War! The lickspittle wickedness of Australia's connivance! It leaves one wondering if there is any US invasion of anywhere, New Zealand, perhaps, or Tasmania, that an Australian prime minister would decline to join. The things our prime ministers and governments do for love - for love of Presidents of the United States.
Coincidentally the admirable Honest History blog has a new essay inviting us to judge the worst of the worst sycophantic speeches made by Australian prime ministers. The speeches have almost all been made about wondrous America and delivered in the presence of wondrous Americans.
Of the speeches Honest History is wondering which is the most sycophantic. It is a strong, Melbourne Cup field (Kevin Rudd's is a Phar Lap doozy). But running my fawnometer over them all the reliable device's needle flickered most crazily over PM Julia Gillard's tear-sprinkled address to the US Congress in March 2011. If the most obsequious spaniels were ever able to speak to their masters this is to the tone they might adopt. Some Australian journalists who were there to their great credit reported what a toe-curlingly embarrassing occasion it was. Re-reading her blancmangey and unAustralian gibberings to Congress I am reminded of how atypical it is of the thoughts of Australians at large but how typical it is of what becomes of Australian prime ministerial minds exposed to the (illusionary) magic of America.
Watch out, New Zealand, given our country's history of spanieldom in these things! What if President Trump gets a bee in his absurd bouffant about your nuclear-free defiance and asks us to help smite you into submission?
