So the all-rounder Andrew Symonds may not now play Test cricket again after being seen drinking beer at a State of Origin football match, something all adults are allowed to do.

Keith Miller could drink beer, punch spectators, roger the Royal Family and failed to turn up to training when hung-over but suffered no like fate. Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull can publicly insult each other in vituperative personal terms in parliament and are acclaimed for it. John Singleton can drink and curse and bust up furniture and still keeps his radio licence.

Alexander Downer can call the torture victim David Hicks a "trained killer" when he has done less harm than the average Kings Cross bouncer and not lose his parliamentary pension for it. Why then is Andrew Symonds fined millions, publicly shamed and brought perhaps to the brink of suicide, or at the least self-harm, by a few loose words and some beers at a football match?

One might think there is a racial component in it, but similar punishment was meted out to Shane Warne too, and Matthew Johns and, this week, Tony Zappia. One might think it applies to sportsmen only, until John Brogden, Troy Buswell, Joe McDonald (expelled by Rudd from the party for saying "I'll be ba-a-ck!") and Joel Fitzgibbon (flew free to China, the beast) come to mind.

One might think it applies to men only until one remembers Belinda Neal (upbraided a waiter, it seems), and, a while back, Cheryl Kernot (whose crime was to have had sex in her early 20s with a 19-year-old male and thus lose her chance, and it seemed pretty big back then, of becoming Prime Minister).

And Jacqui Smith, whose husband spent 10 taxpayer pounds hiring a porn movie, a mortal sin, it seems.

Why is this happening? Why is this happening now?

I call it the New Wowserism.

By its rules, some people are ruined forever by their minor breaches of etiquette while others bomb Gaza, upend the world economy, order the machete-killings of hundreds of thousands and manufacture cigarettes unpunished.

The first group commit no war crimes, or crimes, or misdemeanours, or mostly even sins, and yet are smashed in their careers and dispirited forever and their families shamed. Why is it happening? And why is it happening now?

Why, in 2007 and 2008, has wowserism returned?

One should ask here Lenin's sharp question: Who whom? Who benefits? Who is making hay out of this persecution of the ill-kempt and grumpy celebrity? And one will come then, like Lenin, to an unsurprising answer: the high lords of greed in Wall Street and Newscorp, that's who.

For the rulers of global capitalism have lately come to fear the jig is up. They have been publicly proved to be not just environmentally toxic, and likely to end with their smoke and avarice the planet Earth, but economically toxic as well, and likely to bankrupt not just Iceland but Wall Street, and they need to take the heat off themselves, and beam it somewhere else.

And they've turned up an adequate alternative target and scapegoat, the bad table manners of certain visible celebrities. Sure, we've ruined two hundred million lives, they say, and caused half a million suicides, but Jacqui Smith's husband watches porn.

Sure we've pumped filth into the atmosphere and ended four thousand species, but Troy Buswell sniffs chairs. Sure, we've bombed and killed eighty thousand children, and denied AIDS drugs to five million more, but Andrew Symonds once said something sharp to an umpire, and was seen drinking beer at a football match. Go after him. Go after him.

We're entirely comfortable with our eight million dollars a year, our thirty dollars a minute day and night for the rest of our lives on the interest alone, and our fifty million dollar share portfolios in return for our worldwide toxic incompetence, go after Andrew, punish the golliwog, go after Joel, he's friends with a Chinawoman, she paid his air fare once, go after the sporting hero and the politician, that's the way it works.

Go after them. They're hiding their harm and greed, their vast harm and vast greed, under the lesser harm and the lesser greed of politicians and sportsmen.

And it's no accident that Gordon Brown, the principal architect of the renaissance, through re-nationalisation, of the social democracy that so scares the bejesus out of them, is the principal victim of this new wowserism in Britain. He threatens capitalism itself, of course he does, but hey, that's not why we're after him.

We're after him because his ministers are greedy. Not him, his ministers. That's why he has to go. The good guy has to go. And though David Cameron is greedy too, look what he claimed in expenses, he has to stay. the bad guy has to stay. Makes perfect sense, doesn't it? Elect the greedy one, and spifflicate the ungreedy one, because of the sin of greed.

Zounds, Hamlet said at a certain point, do you think I am easier to be played upon than a pipe? But we are, it seems. We are.

Follow the thread, I beg you.. Murdoch, who personally makes billions, and helped rig with his early call the 2000 US election and made billions more from the illegal wars that followed on his early call, is now pursuing Rudd for the use of a ute. Channel Nine, which supported the War on Terror and the persecution of David Hicks, has illegally bugged Tony Zappia and ruined him for what, in a court of law, would get him a small fine. Crimes against humanity don't matter, the high lords of Wall Street and The Wall Street Journal say, but table manners do, and bad table manners - why wouldn't they? - merit professional destruction and the shattering of the lives of the children of the accused, the humiliation of their wives and parents, the despair of their teams and communities, the ending of chapters of history. A breach of etiquette can be readily understood, a crime against the planet less so, a crime against the world's economy not at all, it seems.

Am I drawing too long a bow here, as Annie my wife alleges? Not unless you agree that meltdown capitalism's chief defender Rupert Murdoch has no power, no power at all, and no desire at all, to change the subject from Gordon Brown's heroic rescue of Britain's economy to the misuse of piddling sums of money, not by Gordon Brown but politicians in general. Not unless you agree that the London Sun and the New York Post and the Herald Sun and Fox News are not in themselves misuses of power. Not unless you think the torment of scores of millions of children who are dying for want of AIDS drugs is less important than someone slagging an umpire in the heat of a vital game, or sending an SMS to a girl in the crowd he fancies, a misdemeanour now punishable by professional extinction.

I spent a long night yarning and drinking with the sinful Keith Miller once, in 1988, and found him a wonderful, various, intelligent, thoughtful man. If he had been driven out of cricket in 1946, when he first donged a spectator, his life would have been less inspiring, his art less acclaimed and his memories less crowded with glamorous delight.

And so would Australia's memories. And so as it turns out would mine.

How many future Symonds and Millers are being driven out by this corrupt, nit-picking targeted wowserism, I wonder, driven off the field of honour for good and all? How many Browns and Kernots and Fitzgibbons and Brogdens and Edwardses and Clintons and Kennedys and Martin Luther Kings discouraged from even considering taking part in public life?

Just asking.