I have an interest in American politics. It goes back to my late teens, when I used to devour Newsweeks and tune in to The Voice of America. Of course, teenagers should probably be doing other things, like hanging out with a wine cask in a dimly-lit room. There were lots of things I should have been doing, but alas, the ancient music of John Dowland and the poetry of John Keats kept me from them. And other things too, like tinkering with old Ford Cortinas or puttying-up geriatric rusted-out Valiants. Clapped-out cars kept me busy for such were the cars that I could afford.

But US politics filled a gap. My despair at the dismissal of the Whitlam Government meant I needed a surrogate and politics in our biggest ally was red meat, for the most part. I followed all the Presidential races from Carter on. I'm still doing that, and you can add the primaries too. These days I have the luxury of podcasts and online newspapers and commentary to fill out the details, for there is much commentary and considerable detail. There is an awful lot of everything, though it's pertinence is not always apparent.

Now, with the mid-terms in the US, the Republican Party has majorities in both houses in Congress. It's hard to know whether the party of Abe Lincoln will decide now to start governing or continue with their inexplicable Get Obama campaign. I can understand a conservative party being pro-enterprise and business-minded, fiscally-prudent and so forth, but I don't get the weird climate-denying, anti-government, Obama-is-a- Kenyan-Muslim bullshit. A little bit of it has caught on here too, as if being a conservative these days entails becoming an irrational nutcase as an adjunct to all the other more grounded signifiers.

It's important too. Look around the globe. We need Washington to function because the alternative is a policy vacuum, or something even less appealing.