(Above: a portrait of Miranda the Devine at rest).'The sky is falling in' is the strategy of Chicken Little, and lately, it seems, Tony Abbott in consort with the minions of Murdoch. It seems Bob Brown is the Prime Minister of Australia, which might come as a surprise to some, but which also carries with it the implication that Dr. No is definitively not the current Prime Minister of Australia ...
Today The Australian is full of it, the terror of the Greens and the carbon tax and Bob Brown, since after all, climate change isn't a matter of science, it's merely a matter of faith.
Naturally the anonymous editorialist seeks expert advice in Who listens to the radio? from a man full of sage wisdom ... Mr. Graham "Swiss bank accounts" Richardson. Naturally Richardson doesn't give a toss about actual climate change ... it's the numbers, just the numbers, that make him dance ...
Just across the commentary aisle, not satisfied with his fear mongering furphies about gay marriage looming like a spectre in Canberra, there's Dennis Shanahan kicking the green can in PM sees green while her MPs see red. It is of course just a predictable echo of Dr No's line of attack yesterday ... though replete with even more preposterous metaphors:
Like a wily brown trout? Does that metaphor make Shanahan some kind of flathead?
Meanwhile, Kenneth Wiltshire jumps to the only logical conclusion, Early election the only way out.
The good professor displays a singularly cloth eared sensitivity to politics, as he too bemoans the evil greens, and a constipated COAG, and the well being of the nation.
But here's the thing. The feral performance of Dr. No has done more to ensure the stability of the unstable coalition than anything Gillard might manage.
Everybody in the rocky boat - the greens, the independents - realise that if the tent folds, they'll lose their preferred position, so they need to cling to the masthead. And the likes of Wiltshire calling for an early election are just part of an irrelevant sideshow, and much like Dr. No himself, whistling in the wind.
If bringing on an early election requires a few independents to jump ship and side with Dr. No, none seem to date to be inclined to enter the wolf's lair ... And I rest my defence for that mixed metaphor on Dennis 'the flathead's' Shanahan and his troutish ways ...
Yes, it's just another day roaming the feral foam flecked commentary pages of The Australian, while over at the Daily Terror Miranda the Devine offers No sympathy for sooky independents.
Well that's no surprise, the Devine hates sooks, she likes to hang people from lamp posts as a kind of tough love, when not running over lycra clad louts if they dare to litter the roads. That's why she's so sticks and stones about names like Muammar Gaddaffi or Comical Ali being deployed in Australian politics. Such idle abuse can't hurt anyone, and to get upset about it is a kind of confected outrage (Australia's Comical Ali).
Her love for Barners spills over as she celebrates yet another tortured metaphor from the man with the stumble bum mouth, involving teeth pulling agony and a big fluffy white dress. Truly, it wouldn't have cracked a laugh in the West Tamworth Leagues club.
Never mind, the Devine's permission to use absurd political references is a great relief for the pond, which tends to resort to Shakespeare and other literary figures like Lewis Carroll with a taste for comic absurdity.
Now we can call the Devine a crypto fascist scribbler with gryphonish Gaddafi tendencies, and she'll no doubt take it as a kind of affectionate nickname. (The Gryphon, as Alice lovers will know, is inclined to be somewhat overbearing and dismissive of the obsessions and dismays of the other characters, in much the manner of Colonel Gaddafi and the Devine).
Meanwhile, the heat seems to have gone out of the NBN amongst the minions of Murdoch for the moment. Perhaps that's because the Amazonian constrictor is resting, digesting its consumption of the large goat BSkyB, offered up by the British government in ritual sacrifice to the anti-Christ (I'm assured such metaphors are okay for everyone but sooks and trouts and flatheads) ...
It's getting so that the intertubes will be the only way to consume information and entertainment outside the belly of the Murdoch beast, which is no doubt why he hates the idea of the NBN so much ...
It's worthwhile mentioning a piece by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker recently, The Information How the Internet gets inside us, which is fortunately outside the paywall, and which does much to remedy a lot of the hysteria that surrounds the new ways we connect to the world (who can forget the Devine's salmon-ish swimming upstream addiction to Susan Greenfield?)
Gopnik is a reminder that, as an alternative to all the white noise to be found in the Murdoch rags, a white noise which just goes up and down daily in terms of shrillness, full of ear piercing jagged, mind numbing frequencies, there's also good writing to be found.
Gopnik has a relevant word or two regarding the tendency these days of politicians and commentariat scribblers for the mainstream media to sound like anonymous bloggers, throwing around silly, irrelevant comparisons, whether to police states in North Korea or Colonel Gaddafi:
.... things that were once external and subject to the social rules of caution and embarrassment—above all, our interactions with other people—are now easily internalized, made to feel like mere workings of the id left on its own. (I’ve felt this myself, writing anonymously on hockey forums: it is easy to say vile things about Gary Bettman, the commissioner of the N.H.L., with a feeling of glee rather than with a sober sense that what you’re saying should be tempered by a little truth and reflection.) Thus the limitless malice of Internet commenting: it’s not newly unleashed anger but what we all think in the first order, and have always in the past socially restrained if only thanks to the look on the listener’s face—the monstrous music that runs through our minds is now played out loud.
That's how the Devine can defend the gormless ways of politicians shouting at each other in intemperate ways, then launch an all out attack on anonymous bloggers for lowering the tone of political debate. But then we always knew she was a contradictory gormless gryphon ...
Just one further thought from Gopnik, since he's there to be read, and only a click away, and that's the recent redemption of television offered up by critics of the internet, as the new anti-christ 666 beast from hell bringing down western civilisation as we know it ...
... When William Powers, in “Hamlet’s BlackBerry,” describes the deal his family makes to have an Unplugged Sunday, he tells us that the No Screens agreement doesn’t include television: “For us, television had always been a mostly communal experience, a way of coming together rather than pulling apart.” (“Can you please turn off your damn computer and come watch television with the rest of the family,” the dad now cries to the teen-ager.)
Yet everything that is said about the Internet’s destruction of “interiority” was said for decades about television, and just as loudly. Jerry Mander’s “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television,” in the nineteen-seventies, turned on television’s addictive nature and its destruction of viewers’ inner lives; a little later, George Trow proposed that television produced the absence of context, the disintegration of the frame—the very things, in short, that the Internet is doing now. And Bill McKibben ended his book on television by comparing watching TV to watching ducks on a pond (advantage: ducks), in the same spirit in which Nicholas Carr leaves his computer screen to read “Walden.”
Now television is the harmless little fireplace over in the corner, where the family gathers to watch “Entourage.” TV isn’t just docile; it’s positively benevolent. This makes you think that what made television so evil back when it was evil was not its essence but its omnipresence. Once it is not everything, it can be merely something. The real demon in the machine is the tirelessness of the user
Oh TV, all is forgiven, I can go back to watching you with fondness and affection, and all that rotting of the brain you produced was just the fish stinking from the head ...
Yep, a sense of history usually puts everything into some kind of perspective, and just as the flood levy was yesterday's hysteria, so today's confected hysteria in The Australian will be digital fish and chip wrapping by week's end, and the chance of an early election retreats the more the baying hounds demand it ...
And the more that Abbott jumps up and down and drives up the volume and manufactures a fresh crisis on a daily basis, the more surely we will grind our way to a full term, and no, I don't care if Gerard Henderson made that observation first. There's only so many moral panics to be endured, while real devastation goes down in a country like Libya (or hapless New Zealand).
So enough with the trout fishing and the sky falling in and the greens and the trout.
Sometimes it's necessary to get out the axe handle and go eel bashing, but with the weekend approaching, better to spend some time with interesting writing, rather than inflamed gryphonish rhetoric ...
(Below: all the same did I mention the green wolves with their red-flecked foaming lips lurking at the window?)
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