Miranda Devine, Lara Bingle yet again, Germaine Greer and the feminists to blame, and a dash of Lortie and Ravel ...

(Above: is this the only column about Lara Bingle to also feature Louis Lorte, who last night was playing a Steinway at the Sydney Opera House?)

Last night being the start of the official rugby league season in Sydney - in other words, the official beginning to a new year of sex and drug and drinking scandals - what better time to head off to hear the Sydney Symphony at the Opera House.

Sure it was only the Berlioz warhorse Symphonie fantastique, and Franck doing an early bit of romantic cinema mood music in Le Chasseur maudit, but there was a genuine highlight in the playing by Louis Lortie of Ravel's Piano Concerto in G. I'd have liked to say he was great at the jazz inflections of the first movement, until he nailed the second movement with a strict kind of lyricism ...

But as I talk of kultur, I notice you reaching for your gun. Oops.

Where's the commentariat columnists, you ask, and what are they yammering about today?Attuned to the cycle of snake oil sales people and spruikers carrying on about the issue of the day, filling loon pond with their squawks, you know that today, as surely as the sun and the moon revolve, and shape the tides, yes today is Miranda the Devine day, and forget Lortie and Ravel, it's the Devine you must have.

Oh dear lord, say it ain't so, it's more about Lara Bingle, as in Ghouls shower Bingle with scorn.

We'd resolved never to write about Bingle again, but we're helpless when confronted with the Devine in full flight and massive contradiction. This is what makes Saturday in the Herald so rewarding for loon spotting.

Let's cut to the chase by quoting the Devine's final paragraph - spoiler alert for those who want the pleasure of following the serpentine logic to the end of the snake's tail:

In the end Bingle's downfall is also a salutary lesson for other young women that sexism still rules, 40 years after the publication of The Female Eunuch. Despite the best efforts of Germaine Greer and her sisters to destroy the value of female modesty, the fact remains that if a woman trades on her looks and body alone, she will eventually pay the price. Like young men who go to war or wreck their bodies in contact sport, young women don't fully comprehend the effect of the sexual war zone until it's too late. They end up with post-traumatic stress disorders of a different kind.

Isn't that the best double twist and pike you've read lately? The pike being to drag in Germaine Greer - to bring the Devine in line with Louis Nowra and Janet Albrechtsen by blaming her and the feminists by attempting to destroy female modesty - while at the same time bemoaning that sexism still rules, feminism has failed, and it's a sexual war zone out there.

Surely the Devine can't be calling for the introduction of the burqa? Perhaps she just wants the hijab as a symbol of female modesty? So Islamic of her to care so much about female modesty, and perhaps next week she can start off her campaign by calling for the banning of the bikini - with thongs requiring an on the spot six strokes of a rattan cane. That kind of Malaysian style approach to modesty could certainly stop young women from having a beer in public.

But I digress. Now that you know it's really deep down all the fault of the feminists, and Germaine Greer in particular, what about Bingle having an affair with a married man?

What might never have existed has a fearsome destructive force. Bingle is an object of hate forever, and claiming that she deserves it because when she was 19 she had an affair with a married man, the AFL player Brendan Fevola, is just post-facto justification.

Surely now you can see the intimate connection between Bingle and Germaine Greer. After all Greer got married in a fever, hotter than a pepper sprout, but pretty soon the fire went out.

Sure it was wrong, but since when have gossip-mongers been so moralistic? And anyway, he was the one with the wife and kids.

The quality of Fevola's character is revealed in the fact he took the photo of Bingle in the shower against her will and promised her he had deleted it after she protested.

Yep, female modesty consists of not having a shower in the presence of a footballer armed with a camera phone, a wife and kids while having an affair with him. Put it another way:

Australia is a huge rest home, where no unwelcome news is ever wafted on to the pages of the worst newspapers in the world.

Thanks Germaine, but as usual, you miss the point. You see, the real problem is the intertubes:

The problem with this kind of self-invasion of privacy is that the audience can be hateful. And the internet has made it possible for people to express that hate before their better instincts kick in, before the instant rush of blood to the head dissipates and is forgotten. Their primal viciousness is captured and congealed in digital form.

You know, because common scolds and gossips and tar and feathering had never existed before the intertubes. And to prove her point, the vile nature of gossip mongering these days, the Devine prints tweets between Bingle and Clarke on January 28th, and then January 29th, not to mention one on February 13th and yet another on February 21, which serves as the lead par in Devine's trawl into yellow press status.

Just in case you'd forgotten or hadn't been bothered to revisit their tweets or think this is the sort of thing best left to vile gossip mongers. Talk about primal viciousness captured and congealed.

Providing the self-incriminating evidence that subsequently proves her point is part of the Devine masterly game plan:

Who could forget the Mimi Macpherson sex video of the late 1990s which her sleazy former boyfriend allegedly spread around town as a get-square.

Um, actually, who but the Devine could remember, or want to remember? One of the lesser Macphersons, she's as easy to forget as the lesser Baldwins. But do go on:

At the time, it was great sport in the city for stockbrokers, investment bankers, and journalists to share their copies and watch it in groups. It was a gross assault on her dignity, an invasion of her privacy and tantamount to a psychological gang rape.

Why that's shocking and shameful, and surely every stockbroker, investment banker and journalist should hang their heads in shame. Not to mention grubby journalists disinterring the bones a decade later.

But surely this clearly establishes that VHS led to the downfall of civilisation as we know it:

It shamed everyone who participated. But people then had to physically possess the VHS tape or know someone who had it. It was before YouTube and the social networking revolution that allows people's reputations to be shredded in a nano-second - whether with the truth or lies is immaterial. It seems we have an insatiable hunger for characters to assassinate.

No, no, no, it isn't VHS, or even seedy photographs distributed via the King's mail.

Damn you intertubes, damn you to hell. Like moths to the flames we're lured to you so that you can expose our follies to the world in a nano second. And let's not have any feigned hypocrisy and attempts to pretend a lack of interest:

The story of Bingle and Clarke has dominated the news all week, despite the loud protestations of those who feign boredom while lapping up every word.

Indeed, and the Devine certainly doesn't pretend to feign boredom while scribbling every word, not while she can drag Germaine Greer, the feminists and the intertubes into the squawk down.

Never mind. I know that some amongst you are sighing and shaking their heads impatiently and wondering how long this Bingle fuss will go on. But the Devine is just warming up:

What is wrong with Sydney that we have this peculiarly misogynistic history of vicious mob takedowns of young, pretty minor female celebrities?

Now it's Sydney's fault! As evidence, the Devine cites the Jo Beth Taylor saga as proof that Sydney is dedicated to chewing up and spitting out women.

Which reminds me - a big shout out to South Australia, now just a week away from an election, which has been dominated by news of Michelle Chantelois and Mike Rann, and led one former crow-eater Dennis Atkins to scribble:

The fall from grace was sudden and "very Adelaide".

It was a sex scandal that had simmered in the background, feeding the ever-active rumour mills of a town whose "city of churches" reputation belies a southern gothic underbelly.

At a wine industry function – where else? – Rann was approached and assaulted by an agitated man who announced: "My name's Rick and I was married to Michelle."

As he said these words, Rick Phillips hit the Premier with a rolled-up souvenir Winestate magazine.

Assault charges and a media frenzy followed. (here).

Phew, it's not just Sydney, it's Adelaide, and oh the poignant irony. A souvenir copy of Winestate magazine, and they do such good copy of such good wine. No wonder that deviant pervert Nick Xenophon has gone off with another woman, and exchanged vows with Isobel Redmond:

"She has always been honourable with me. She's kept her word and that is important to me. She hasn't dudded me."

Oh okay he was talking about government advertising and good governance, but you catch the drift:

"I have a warm and cordial relationship with Isobel Redmond; unfortunately that hasn't been the case with Mike Rann," he said. (here).

Phew, it's a great relief sometimes to leave the hothouse incestuous atmosphere of Sydney journalism.

But before we go, we really must spare the time to award Julian Lee the prize for prize git, an honour earned for the most offensively gratuitous link to Bingle we've spotted in recent days, in what is dubbed a Herald "exclusive" under the header Brand Australia lines up to say g'day to another Bingle bungle.

The exclusive? In a throwback to the days of Paul Hogan, one pitch involves the line "Say G'Day to the Lucky Country", and one of the agencies involved in the pitches for the new campaign is M&C Saatchi, which was involved in the Lara Bingle "So where the bloody hell are you campaign."

As you can see, the slogans are astonishingly similar, never mind the reference to Donald Horne, and the presence of Saatchi allows, permits, perhaps even requires an obligatory Bingle bungle jibe.

Well between the Devine rabbiting on about female modesty and feminism, and this kind of profoundly silly Julian Leenonsense, perhaps Greer is right after all. Sydney is the rest home to the worst newspapers in the world, and as a result, Sydney-siders who read them end up with post-traumatic stress disorders of a different kind.

But there's always Louis Lortie at the Opera House. They can't take that memory away from me ... not till they wrench the souvenir program from my cold dead hands ...

(Below: and in a bid to complete the double, is this the first time a column about Lara Bingle and Miranda the Devine has featured the composer Ravel? Well he's more relevant to the human condition than a couple of lines in advertising copy).