Chris Gardiner, moral guardians at the gate, and Houston we have an fcuking problem

(Above: careful sweet young things. You start off wearing an fcuk T-shirt, and the next thing you know you've turned into a dangerous radical denouncing the status quo, rioting in the streets, abusing police horses, and perhaps most alarming of all, listening to Kyle Sandilands).

I write on the ongoing matter of Kyle Sandilands from a position of firm, unshakeable, invincible ignorance.

I have yet to hear a minute of the lad on air. Not a minute. Not a millisecond. Not even a nanosecond. He may as well be broadcasting in bizarro world for all I'd know or care, or in an exotic language. Say Urdu. Which isn't exotic in the Punjab or Uttar Pradesh, but is to me.

Which gives me naturally a tremendous amount of expertise, allowing me to sound off on the matter of Kyle, like Big Ben sounding the hour.

Because it seems to me that - whatever his on air sins - we have the familiar sounds of a lynching party at work, never mind the scale or quality of the crimes.

So it is with Chris Gardiner's rant What Kyle says about the death of our civility.

Now what this kind of rant allows is the use of a couple of Kyle related incidents to announce the death of civility in western civilization as we know it, just as the likes of Don Watson wants to announce the end of English as a result of a few terminological inexactitudes. People being economical with the truth or imprecise with their deployment of the lingo.

Here's Gardiner's predictable opener:

A radio personality returned to the air this week after time out to recover from an unfortunate incident arising from a social disability before now not previously categorised – he is, I have concluded from the incident and his lack of remorse, ‘civically challenged’.

The ‘civically challenged’ person is so self-absorbed or insensitive as to be oblivious to the social and cultural impact of his or others’ egotistical or crass behaviour.

Well you might argue that the civically challenged - especially if inclined to turgid pomposity -goes on kicking a downed dog with steel capped boots, even after the chastened dog has returned to air, thus far without having managed to piss on the aspidistra in the corner or made yet another on air blunder. Sure, that's likely a matter of time, but for the love of the lord, leave the dog alone.

But Gardiner has other fish to fry than just Kyle. It's all of us, who somehow lack civic virtue and sensibility. And there's no way out, no recourse from this hideous condition:

The basic condition is compounded by an instinctive defensiveness that, when the offensive behaviour is highlighted and there is the risk of embarrassment or shame, allows him to dismiss critics as humourless and priggish and ‘politically correct’, rendering self-reflection, therefore, as unnecessary.

So you might in fact have someone sounding like a classic humorless, priggish politically incorrect turkey - like Gardiner - but that's no excuse. Oh no, no, no, and it's not just Kyle, though let's recount his sins yet again, because The Punch might not love the sinner, but boy do they love repeating his sins:

Of course, it is not just the disc jockey who thinks morning radio is better for broadcasting a masturbation competition, or dismisses an unexpected disclosure by a child of sexual abuse as one of possibly many sexual experiences, or who commends concentration camp life as a weight loss option, that I have in mind in establishing this new category of social deficit.

Yep, there's Kyle's sins laid out yet again for all to see. So now let's get on to the other sinners and their social deficits (and if you see a sinner, remember, pick up the first stone and throw it, lest the other bugger smash your glass house first):

I am thinking also of the egotists who keep our Police and accident and emergency units busy as a result of their regular drunken binges and unquestioningly assume the cost of their ‘fun’ should be borne by the public, or the attention seeker who wears a FCUK t-shirt to the supermarket, or the foul-mouthed parent at the football match who put his coprolalian outbursts down to passion for the game.

What the fcuk?A smart arse T-shirt is suddenly a sign of uncivil armageddon? Okay, another disclaimer. I don't wear Fcuk clothing, never have, never will, but some sweet young thing wearing a t-shirt with 'fcuk' draped over it isn't quite the same as kristallnacht (here).

For that matter, it isn't the same as a punch fest at a rugby league game, nor should it be led in the same breath as a passing out drunken binge of the kind favored by media types. It's in that stretch, that reach too far, that Gardiner joins all the other 'jump up and down on the spot' loons always making a splashing and a squawking in some corner or another of loon pond.

Now you think I might have gone a little too far - broken Godwin's Law yet again - by evoking kristallnacht as a real sign of civically challenged behaviour. But bear with me, because soon enough Gardiner moves away from T-shirts to people lying in pools of blood:

There is also a form of ‘civically challenged’ character that is essentially one of passivity.

It was recently expressed in the mindless betrayal of a bashed off-duty police woman left lying in her blood whilst people journeyed on their way to work – our very own Kitty Genovese experience.

Naturally the media have to be brought to account, held to blame:

The civically challenged, of course, sometimes hold positions of power and influence in business and professional life.

They can be seen in the TV producers who pass off Big Brother voyeurism or slogans like ‘bring back the biff’ as harmless popular culture.

Heck, the whole world is to blame:

They can also be seen in the bonus fixated businessmen who have recently destroyed the life savings of so many.

And yes, I'm glad you stayed with me, because Gardiner can't resist bringing up the Nazis:

The condition at its worst has recently been portrayed in the self-absorbed character of Professor John Halder, played by Viggo Mortensen, in the film Good.

If you haven't seen this dull self-absorbed movie, a half baked adaptation of a stage play - often quoted by self-absorbed people concerned with pious ethical issues - Mortensen plays a university professor who joins up with Hitler's Nazi machine to once again illustrate the banality of evil. So we move from T-shirts to Hitler.

Now of course this kind of argument requires a 'but', so Gardiner offers up a standard 'but':

I do not put the idiocy and offensiveness of the on-air comments of our now returned morning DJ, of course, in the same category as the ultimate betrayal of morality and personal responsibility by the character Halder.

No, no, they just happen to be part of the same wide ranging column.

But what's worse is that Gardiner then withdraws the 'but' he's just offered up, instead putting in a variant 'but':

They do, I think though, sit at one end of the spectrum of the character type I want us now to describe as ‘civically challenged’.

Yep, start with Kyle, or maybe an fcuk T-shirt or a dire Big Brother television program, and the next thing you know, you've got spewing in the streets, police women bleeding to death, and some new rough beast, Adolf Hitler reincarnated, slouching towards Bethlehem.

Well there's some civically challenged behaviour going on in Gardiner's hysterical column, but for once I'd let Kyle Sandilands off the hook, and look to the author of the article.

If he keeps banging on about it this way, likely as not western civilization as we know it will come to an end by lunch time Friday ... and Gardiner can take all the credit. Because putting anyone in the same basket or lineage as Hitler's men isn't civilized discourse. Unless of course it happens that they are (hello Stormfront).

As the farmer used to say to the blue heeler, settle, settle ...

(UPDATE: oh, I see Kyle isn't scheduled to be back on air until 7th October. Whatever. I won't be listening, but does it also suggest that Chris Gardiner doesn't know what the fcuk he's talking about?)

(Below: see, see, didn't I warn you. Now we've got all these fcukers down under).