Ian Warden: An affliction I can't take lying down

Alas, I cannot myself see any progress and I was in quite a Morrison-triggered state when I arrived in Jezebel's consulting rooms one morning last week.

Sitting up animatedly, anxiously, in a chair while Jezebel as usual lay down on her room's couch and closed her eyes, I gibbered that I had just suffered media coverage of Morrison's speech in the eloquently empty House of Representatives.

In his speech Morrison had told the nation why it must vote No to the Voice.

As he spoke, the veneers of reason in his arguments not concealing the truth that they came from the usual cold, dry, unchristian, empathy-bereft cellars of his hard heart, I felt my soul's knickers tightly knotting.

Early in our sessions, Jezebel put her finger on the core of my disorder.

It is that because of some ethical Anglican quirk I cannot abide "Christians" like Morrison who make a big thing of their devout Christianity but who seldom say or do anything in imitation of the dear man (a radical and compassionate activist) their faith takes its name from. Theirs seems one of the worst varieties of hypocrisy there is.

In designing the government's callous "stop the boats" anti-refugee "border protection" policies when he was immigration minister in the Abbott government, Morrison could never once have truthfully asked himself while making a decision, "What would Jesus do here?"

Instead it was as if, if he looked at all for a biblical role model, he instead asked himself, "What would Herod do in a case like this?"

"And here it unchristianly goes again with the Voice!" I lamented to the prone, reposeful Jezebel.

"From the Bible it's obvious that Jesus is spiritually urging us all to vote Yes to the Voice as the loving and empowering-of-the-underprivileged thing for good-hearted folk to do.

"For example it must distress Our Redeemer terribly as someone who in the Bible shows such empathy with those in prison (see Luke 4:18 and Matthew 25:31-46) to see that Australia's First Nations people are the most incarcerated people in the world.

"And yet," I seethed, pacing the consulting room now, "public 'Christians' like former prime ministers Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison are campaigning, with our nation's worst Pharisees and Sadducees, for a cold, unchristian No!

"God, give me strength, therapist Jezebel!"

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Jezebel sat up on her couch (signifying she meant serious psychotherapeutical business now). Looking into my wild eyes with her wise, composed (and eerily green) ones, she counselled a look on the bright side.

"It's a wonderful thing when deeply awful public figures champion an indecent No to the Voice," she trilled.

"Hitherto undecided but deeply decent people, seeing it, instinctively know that the swine have got it wrong and that they, the decent, must vote Yes."

And in time, Jezebel assured, I will be able to block out all thoughts of Morrison in the same emotionally self-preserving ways in which most of us eventually learn to block out all thoughts of a malignant ex paramour.

I thought this a flawed analogy, but I had no time to say so to her, for her discreet end-of-the-session bell had jangled and her next troubled client was at hand, audibly gnawing the waiting room's wallpaper.

But methought that of course one is helped to get over malignant exes by the way in which (unless one has sunk so low as to romantically hobnob with celebrities) one is never angst-triggered by mentions of them in the news media. Meanwhile, though, triggeringly, the news media keeps reporting every little thing malignant ex prime ministers (like Howard, Abbott and Morrison) ever say and do.

Why, even as I write, the media is reporting that Morrison has signed a book-writing deal with HarperCollins Christian Publishing for a book of "religious reflections".

Coincidentally my This Week In Literary History post informs that in this very week in 1936 John Steinbeck's dog, Toby, ate the only manuscript of his master's draft novel.

It is spiteful and unchristian of me (but typical of the bad side that Morrison brings out in me and that I am seeking therapy for) that I find myself praying that Morrison's dog Buddy will similarly intervene to delay, hopefully for ever, his master's uncalled-for book.

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