Piers Akerman, or how easy it is to get distracted from hypocritical dumbbells scribbling with forked tongues in cloud cuckoo land ...

Hypocrisy is probably the easiest charge to sustain against anyone wandering through this veil of tears.

Who at some time or another hasn't indulged in a little hypocrisy, if we take the standard dictionary definition as being the practice of professing beliefs, feelings or virtues that one does not hold or possess - in essence an act or instance of falseness.

Politics is littered with it, of course, charges and counter-charges, and I was intending to start out with another tract on that inveterate badger and pious hypocrite Piers "Akker Dakker" "the Billy Bunter of Greyfriars" Akerman, and his scribble A weaker kind of Kevin Rudd, if only because Akker Dakker is a sure fire way to fill in a dull Sunday.

But then I got distracted, because Akker Dakker is after all stupefyingly mind bogglingly tedious, whereas online dictionaries are getting better all the time, and naturally I'd gone off to check on hypocrisy.

Sure enough there were some excellent elaborations. I particularly like the expression "carry fire in one hand and water in the other":

To be duplicitous, to engage in double-dealing; to be two-faced, to speak with forked tongue. The expression comes from Plautus; it continues “to bear a stone in one hand, a piece of bread in the other.” Thus, the expression indicates that a person is prepared to act in totally contradictory ways to achieve his purposes.

This immediately led me to think about speaking with a forked tongue, used but not described by the dictionary, which led me to a wiki on the phrase, and this quaint bit of information:

According to one 1859 account, the native proverb that the "white man spoke with a forked tongue" originated as a result of the French tactic of the 1690s, in their war with the Iroquois, of inviting their enemies to attend a Peace Conference, only to be slaughtered or captured.

In turn the wiki provides a handy link to "doublespeak" which explains that it and "doubletalk" derive as coinages from Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four world "doublespeak":

Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled his lungs with air. His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them… - (Orwell, New American Library, 1981, p35)

And there's a handy link there to "unknown unknown" but we won't go there because we already know the known use of this knowingly delicious phrase, and we've already had to put a dollar in the Orwellian swear jar and the Rumsfeldian swear jar is full to overflowing, like the intertubes.

Meanwhile, the dictionary had tempted me back with "crocodile tears: and a dash of Shakespeare in Henry VI part II (thank the lord it wasn't part I):

Beguiles him, as the mournful crocodile
With sorrow snares relenting passengers. (III, i)

Throw in the exotic "give pap with a hatchet":

To do or say a kind thing in an unkind way; to administer punishment under the guise of an act of kindness or generosity. This expression derives from the title of an anonymous pamphlet published in 1589 and attributed to John Lyly. The image of an infant being fed with a hatchet gives the phrase its obvious ironic tone. The recipient experiences more harm than good, thus undercutting any illusion of good intentions and suggesting the possibility of duplicity at play.

He that so old seeks for a nurse so young, shall have pap with a hatchet for his comfort! (Alexander Niccoles, A Discourse of Marriage and Wiving, 1615)

Add in "mote in the eye", (Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brothers eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? scribbled Matthew), and the odour of sanctity (given a special odor if you use American spelling), and then the tasty biblical offering to strain at a gnat and swallow a camel:

Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel. Woe unto you … for ye make clean the outside of the cup and platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess. (Matthew 23:24-25)

Mention to talk out of both sides of one's mouth, which might take us back to the Roman god Janus or to the Hebrew bible, which makes a number of references to sword of mouths. Because I liked the concept so much, but couldn't handle the actual script for the concept, I clipped it (you can find it here in a purchase teaser):

Throw in a de La Rochefoucauld quote:

"Hypocrisy is a tribute which vice pays to virtue" [Duc de la Rochefoucauld Réflexions ou Sentences et Maximes Morales]

And wash it all down with an obligatory Oscar Wilde:

"I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy" [Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest]

And you can see what serendipitous fun the intertubes offers for language and phrase freaks, almost enough to make you forget the likes of that speaker with forked tongue, Akker Dakker.

Almost, because the pious cant and humbug of Akker Dakker still sticks in the craw, especially when he berates people about doing nothing about climate change, since he's spent these many years urging that people do nothing about climate change.

Sainted gnats and swallowed camels, how loonish can you get? I mean, sure, if you happen to believe climate change is real and deserving of action, get upset by Julia Gillard's fobbing it off with a specious citizens' assembly.

But if you happen to have made a career out of peddling saucy doubts and fears - oh okay blind ignorance and unscientific hokum and prejudices - surely you should be dancing in the streets, or reminding us all that Tony Abbott thought, like Akker Dakker, that it was all crap, and therefore nothing should be done, and so all was good.

But lo, and most amazingly behold, suddenly somehow, Tony Abbott has become a man of action on climate change, by sending off an army of noble environmental warriors, full 15,000 strong, to swallow the carbon as it belches from the coal-fired smoke stacks:

Since coming to office in 2007, Labor has done little but set up ongoing consultations with a seemingly endless series of committees when it once promised action.

Could it be, oh forked tongue camel, that there is no action to be taken, since the problem doesn't exist? Wrong, it requires Action Jackson:

It is to be hoped that Opposition leader Tony Abbott enunciates his position clearly and succinctly in this evening’s debate, and doesn’t cloud his message with a blizzard of confusing provisos and caveats.

Well we know what that forked tongue said, climate change is crap. And so over many years has Akker Dakker. And suddenly it's wheeled out as a way of applying a bit of 4 be 2 to Gillard over not taking action? At least leave that to people who have the credential of consistency of thought and belief ...

The only good thing to emerge from the column is the way that Akker Dakker is still brooding over the way Tony Jones cut him off during Q&A, yes, even though he was the token conservative doing the right thing by the ABC by showing up and honouring them with his presence.

To which we can only repeat: If only they cut him off for good, or he left in high dungeon ...

Oops, I see I meant high dudgeon, which curiously is a word whose origin has been lost, but seems to have been coined around 1600, and which you can find scribbled out in detail here, including the word endugine and a reference to Macbeth:

I see thee still,

And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,

Which was not so before.

It seems we also don't know the origins of bludgeon and curmudgeon, but I reckon if we could only track back to Akker Dakker's ancestors, the issue would be fixed QED.

Meanwhile, no such problems with Tim Blair. He's constantly delighted nothing's happening about climate change, since he and science are at one ...

And so the Labor party caters to the likes of Blair and Akker Dakker, while Action Jackson promises to fix the planet.

Second thoughts, I shouldn't have got sidetracked by the word hypocrisy. I should have settled for surrealism or bizarro land, or looney tunes, or cloud cuckoo land. By golly, that phrase has its own wiki too, here:

Cloud Cuckoo Land refers to an unrealistically idealistic state where everything is perfect. ("You're living in Cloud-cuckoo-land.") It hints that the person referred to is naïve, unaware of reality or deranged in holding such an optimistic belief. The reference is to the play, The Birds by the Athenian playwright Aristophanes, in which Pisthetairos (which can be translated to mean "Mr. Trusting") and Euelpides (which can be translated to mean "Mr. Hopeful") with the help of Tereus, tired of the Earth and Olympus, decide to erect a perfect city between the clouds, to be named Cloud-Cuckoo-Land (Νεφελοκοκκυγία or Nephelokokkygia).

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer used the word (German Wolkenkuckucksheim) in his publication On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason in 1813, as well as later in his main work The World as Will and Representation and in other places. Here, he gave it the figurative sense by reproaching other philosophers for only talking about Cloud-cuckoo-land.

Well at least he had other philosophers to reproach. Here on loon pond we've only got dumbbells like Akker Dakker and Tim Blair. Did someone mention dumbbells?

"Dumbbells" as a word originated in Tudor England – athletes used hand-held church bells to develop the upper body and arms. These bells ranged in weight from a few ounces to many pounds. The bells were flourished in various ways. This would have made a great deal of noise, so the athletes would take out the clappers so they could practice quietly; hence the name "dumb", as in "no sound", and "bell" – dumbbell. When strongmen started to make their own equipment, they kept the name, even though the shape changed. The etymology of the word "kettlebell" is similar.

I'm sorry. Did someone mention action on climate change? Let's put a clapper on that quick stix.

Never mind, here's a special edition of Action Jackson. Here's hoping you like the mod, radical hair: