Miranda Devine, Tony Abbott, uglification, derision and fainting in coils ...

Percy Grainger was as mad as a march hare, and a trifle eccentric as well.

Still, last night listening to the Sydney Symphony in full flight in the orgiastic fanfare that rounds up his proto-ballet music The Warriors, I had a sneaking regret that no one asked Percy to write a national anthem, instead of the dirge we currently use. Throw a daub of blood on a sprig of wattle, replace the Union Jack in the corner of the flag with a whip, and Percy's your uncle, a cultural makeover.

By warriors, Percy meant "lazy, pleasure-loving, self-indulgent men and women who would sooner fight for a living than work for a living."

Which immediately reminded me of the commentariat and the punditocracy, who spend their time busy decrying chattering elites, while scribbling on like the chattering well paid elites they are. They infest the eastern and northern suburbs, they carry on like toffs, and no doubt more than a few have a sneaking regard for coffee and good wine (let's not forget how John Howard stormed his way through a more than decent cellar while in power as a most excellent role model).

They rabbit on about ordinary Australians, but they're ponces, likely as not never killed a lamb or gutted a rabbit, or done an honest day's work in their lives, as opposed to preening in the opinion pages, or carving out sinecures in the private sector.

And all they offer, rather than work for a living, is an opinion. Some who offer these opinions are lawyer trained - say no more - but most of them have the education, skills and intelligence of a mock turtle, trained in reeling and writhing, and the different branches of arithmetic, which is to say ambition, distraction, uglification and derision.

Yep, opinion as a form of derision. Well everyone's got an opinion, and most opinions are worth the opinions to be found here on the pond, which is to say three fifths of fuck all.

Which naturally brings us to Miranda the Devine this fine Saturday morning, and Grisly thud of kneecapped Rudd.

The ever faithful Devine lathers up shock, horror and indignation in fine style, as she whips herself into a frenzy. It's a pity Percy isn't around to give her a good birching, though truth to tell Percy is more likely to have preferred the Devine doing the birching.

Not to worry, the Devine takes to the party line like an apparatchik doing a dance for Stalin:

... it is overlaid with a sickening sense that something very wrong has happened, that an elected first-term prime minister has been treated shamefully, assassinated by a cabal of unionists and ALP machine men, using media leaks to accelerate a murderous frenzy that may in years to come be seen as a colossal mistake.

Of course Tony Abbott only the night before tried this line and made a real goose of himself with Kerry O'Brien:

TONY ABBOTT, OPPOSITION LEADER: No, Kerry - for two reasons. First of all, I became leader because of a policy difference, and second, there is no equivalent on our side of politics of the Sussex Street death squads which are now stalking the Labor Party.

KERRY O'BRIEN: Death squads. Execution, death squads, Stalinist knocks at the door.

TONY ABBOTT: Kerry, they execute leaders who they don't like.

Naturally O'Brien went on to ask Abbott about Malcolm Turnbull, which quietened down the rhetorical stupidities a little, and then caught Abbott out in a lie as he admitted he had in fact prattled on about a glorious victory:

KERRY O'BRIEN: But you did say that. So you're confirming that you did say those words: "Victory is within our grasp. We are within reach of a famous victory."

TONY ABBOTT: There is no doubt we must have been within reach of a famous victory, otherwise the Labor Party would not have dumped their leader in a fit of panic about its prospects.

Put it another way, once again we're within the prospect of a famous lie. O'Brien spent the entire interview mocking Abbott, in a way sure to send the Ultimo haters in a frenzy, but reminding us once again that Abbott should simply avoid exposing himself on the 7.30 Report and stick to exposing himself in his biking and his budgie smugglers (transcript here of Abbott on his new opponent).

Is it any wonder that we get this news from the polls, Gillard saves Labor? Why I reckon a mock turtle makes more coherent sense than Abbott, and now - since Gillard affirmed rather than swore on a bible and lives in sin - he's the only Christian peddling his nonsense front and centre.

Meanwhile, the Devine gets terribly excited about the accidental leader Abbott claiming a scalp, when in reality the robber mining barons can claim their fair share of credit. But it's when she gets to the crocodile tears about ex-Chairman Rudd that the spectacle and the strong whiff of hypocrisy gets sickening:

For all Kevin Rudd's annoying quirks and policy failures, voters didn't hate him. And they are not happy at being cheated out of the right to vote out - or not - the man they voted in, judging by hundreds of grassroots comments posted on the Labor Party website.

Yes the Devine couldn't talk this kind of tosh directly herself - it would then shift from sickening to revolting - so she resorts to quoting comments on the website.

What other move? Well of course wheel in those trainwrecks Mark Latham and Morris Iemma, and blame it all on Mark Arbib, when as noted by others if Malcolm Fraser is wheeled out as an old fashioned wet squatter, it's suddenly no fair and out of bounds.

In the end, the Devine can't help herself:

In the end, perhaps, we should be thankful for the naked demonstration of power for its own sake we have seen exercised this week by the faceless and not so faceless handful of men who provoked their party to dispatch a first-term prime minister, like it was just another game.

Ah yes, the faceless men riff. Except of course if you spend a par demonising and explaining how it's all Mark Arbib's fault (forgetting that the Victorian right and Bill Shorten had a hand in the pudding, if not a fist), you can hardly talk about the faceless men.

And then of course there's the athletic flexibility required to explain why you're appalled at the demise and departure of former Chairman Rudd, when you've spent years bemoaning his style and denigrating his track record and his legislative activities.

The Devine doesn't bother about that kind of nuance. She just reflexively slips in the slipper in her usual way:

And we should be thankful for the many failings of the Rudd government over such a short time. They have demonstrated spectacularly, in the home insulation debacle, in the sinful waste of Building the Education Revolution, in the farce of the ETS, in the risky and ill-considered resources tax, how useless and incompetent big, bureaucratic government really is.

So given this litany of sins, aren't you glad to see him go? No, no, blubbers the mock turtle, it's a tragic day for democracy as the Sussex street death squads roam the streets.

So we should be thankful for fuck ups!? Yes, yes, the more fuck ups, the more apparent it is as to why Australians are grieving the death of democracy, and alarmed by the Stalinist death squads stalking the streets.

Is that why we should read the Devine? We should be thankful for her fucked up logic traps?

Never mind. There's more to life than the Devine. Last night the Sydney Symphony were in fine fettle, and knocked over not only the Grainger, but Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé, with his great wellings and lush sounds reminding me of just how much Hollywood composers borrowed from this work in particular and Ravel in general. I wasn't so convinced by Schubert's Unfinished being on the program when the other two made Stravinsky or a bit of Bartok seem more like what was needed, and it was treated a little staidly, but after it was over, things erupted.

Like Ravel, Grainger is a miniaturist, and even though a world citizen with neurotic Nordic tendencies, he's also Australia's very own sado masochist with a mother complex, and well worth a moment of your time, with the Grainger Museum at the University of Melbourne here, his own wiki as a good starting point here, and his biography by John Bird well worth the read (a pity the same can't be said about the Australian feature film Passion based on his life).

And I guess it's a month late, but the world recently lost someone who helped change my life, which is to say Martin Gardner. I wore out his copy of the annotated Alice and had to buy another one, so beguiling was he as a guide to the fertile philosophical musings of Lewis Carroll, which some think a children's book but others know is as close to surrealism, zen Buddhism and the meaning of life as anyone got during the Victorian era in England. You can catch his NY Times obituary here, Martin Gardner, Puzzler and Polymath, Dies at 95.

At least Gardner was honest in saying he played all the time and was fortunate enough to get paid for it. If only the average elitist member of the chattering commentariat class had that kind of honesty. And so to a reading of Alice, in memory of Gardiner and with thanks to the SSO for another good night of music, and no thanks to the Devine for her total uselessness and lack of expertise at fainting in coils.

“I never heard of ’Uglification,’” Alice ventured to say. “What is it?”

The Gryphon lifted up both its paws in surprise. “Never heard of uglifying!” it exclaimed. “You know what to beautify is, I suppose?”

“Yes,” said Alice doubtfully: “it means—to—make—anything—prettier.”

“Well, then,” the Gryphon went on, “if you don’t know what to uglify is, you are a simpleton.”

Alice did not feel encouraged to ask any more questions about it: so she turned to the Mock Turtle, and said, “What else had you to learn?”

“Well, there was Mystery,” the Mock Turtle replied, counting off the subjects on his flappers—"Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography: then Drawling—the Drawling-master was an old conger-eel, that used to come once a week: he taught us Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils.”

“What was that like?” said Alice.

“Well, I can’t show it you, myself,” the Mock Turtle said: “I’m too stiff. And the Gryphon never learned it.”

(Below: enough already with the mock turtle tears).