It's David Marr, loitering beneath a streetlight!

Settle down for a little nap and, good heavens, a whole week flies by without a post. Why, there has even been a debate involving Australia's current leader and his replacement, which the Professor returned to full consciousness just in time to catch. Now it is well known that the Billabong's currents run somewhat to the right, and spectator bias should always be taken into account when reading match reports, but let it be said that all who believe last night's encounter a victory for the putz from Griffith are also quite likely to be of the opinion that Essendon beat the Eagles and only a vast conspiracy -- orchestrated, no doubt, by Rupert Murdoch -- is preventing them from cashing their winning tickets.

The smarter money, which is to say those whose grasp of reality just manages to eclipse their partisanship, opt for the more nuanced and even-handed approach: the debate settled nothing and Australia deserves, sigh, so much more.

And the really smart money? Well, just look at David Marr's thoughts in the Australian edition of The Guardian, which is so Australian it is barracking for Poms in the Fourth Test:

Marr concedes in passing that Abbott did well, but very quickly buries that admission in the tattered raiment of the man who has seen it all and can only just bring forth a weary sigh at the fatuousness of it all. To cement that impression, he also opens memory's vault to share a snatch of a little song, evidently a personal favourite.

"Towards the end I started humming a tune that took me a moment or two to recognise: that ballad from the 20s, 'Thank the Lord the whole thing's quickly over.' If only it were true. Four weeks to go."

How appropriate! How very, very David Marr! The rest of us might be reminded of a couplet coarse and vulgar, but when Marr wants to get evocative, it is Nanna's Lied by Brecht, the soliloquy of a shopworn prostitute whose goods in trade are nearing the end of their shelf life. Marr manages to tell us little of the debate and, because he quotes only a solitary line, even less of himself. If only he had continued, what a frank and open admission we might have had of a life and literary career devoted to pleasuring the Left's whoremasters, who hand out nice jobs and prominence to those who know when it is best to moan.

...Of course as you go through the years
The love market becomes easier
And you embrace them by the score.
But your feelings
Grow oddly cool
If they’re rationed far too little.
(After all, any supply has to come to an end.)...

....And also if you have learned the trade well
In the measuring of love:
To transform desire into small change
Still is never easy.
Now, you’ll make it.
Meanwhile you become older.
(After all, you can’t stay seventeen forever.)

What the next debate will bring to Marr's ostentatiously cultured mind remains to be seen, but "I'm in with the in crowd" would not need translating.

UPDATE: Readers' suggestions as to appropriate soundtracks for Marr's further melancholy are welcome in comments.