At last a paywall, and sweet oblivion and an absence of Kevin Donnellys for the pond ...

(Above: is there's a subbie in the house, or should that be subbies finds a new life outside Fairfax? The splash linked to Voter irritation finds a champion in Katter, but reader irritation finds no champion for literarcy at Fairfax).

Yesterday there was grand news for the pond, with the announcement that from October, at long anticipated last, antipodean Murdoch rags will disappear behind a paywall (Paywalls a premium model across News Corporation).

It's going to be a porous paywall, but still and all, there's every hope that the chattering commentariat will disappear up their fundaments, and punters will have to pay to access them.

There being many loons on the world-wide pond, the chance to avoid regular contact with Murdoch hacks is irresistible.

But what will happen to the boxing types leading with their chins at The Punch, the Murdoch blog which gives away commentary for free?

Sure it's stuff you'd want to give away for free, consisting as it does of scribbles by Murdoch staff, and contributions by politicians (or their ghost-working staff), and pieces by upwardly striving wannabe journalists willing to work for the smell of an oily rag.

But it's commentary, and in a world where basic news is awash in the ocean like an oil spill, commentary is about the only thing to justify the premium.

And what of all the blogs currently attached to the mastheads? What will happen to the 'think' pieces scribbled by commentariat names, which are then recycled into their blogs for bulk and hits?

Who'd pay for the chance to read a blog, or even the chance to go feral in the comments section of a blog?

Pay to make the world a safer place for the likes of Tim Blair, Andrew Bolt, Piers 'Akker Dakker' Akerman or Miranda the Devine? Off you go then ...

But it's The Punch that surely has the biggest question mark hanging over it.

Today, for example, Ian McPhedran's header surely offers the feeblest one line reason for staying in Afghanistan that anyone's managed to date: Afghanistan: We honour the fallen by staying the course.

It would seem more likely that we'd honour the fallen by actually doing something useful, for Afghanistan and the rest of the world.

McPhedran trots out the usual comparison to the Vietnam war, only so he can diss it, without realising that the world has moved on, and the trendy comparison is to the war in the Crimea.

A British officer wrote to me from Afghanistan last fall: "When the history of this war is written, almost everything we have done here until very recently will be discussed in the same breath as the Charge of the Light Brigade."

But then, as the pond has pointed out often enough, if you want some solid historical insights, why are you bothering with The Punch, when you can head off to New York Review of Books and Max Hastings, and his piece War by Fops and Fools, luckily outside the NYRB paywall.

It makes a remarkable comparison and contrast to McPhedran's routine blather about standing firm, and persevering and further sacrifice, as if fighting to keep Karzai in power is going to see Afghanistan somehow mystically transformed into an entrepreneurial democracy, as opposed to a tribal, corrupt, oppressive supplier of hard drugs to the western world ...

Moving right along, Stephen Minas sagely advises us in Political dream team unite to save the world that Bill Clinton that Bill and Mayor Bloomberg are anything but pissants, and somehow their informal two-man committee will save the world from climate change.

Uh huh. After you've sucked the fibre out of that Thomas Carlyle-inspired heroes and hero worship story in a second flat, it's time to move on to Murdoch staffer Andi Mastrosavas getting agitated about the medical system in Medicareless: Our two-tier, second-rate health system.

Mastrosavas performs the heroic intellectual feat of condemning an entire medical system because she hied herself off to a bulk-billing medical clinic - apparently for the first time because she's a slacker and it's within walking distance of her office - and got a little conflicting advice about fasting.

Sheesh, off to America Andi to experience truly two-tier health care, and don't forget to take your Amex card with you ...

By now you're probably feeling a little light-headed - lack of fibre, good exercise and a bad reading diet will do that to you - so you might want to skip Frank Zumbo's Sack the petrol commissioner - we're paying too much.

It's always satisfying when reading the header means reading the actual column is totally redundant.

And by now you're also probably asking where are the loons, there ought to be loons, and on any given day, The Punch is always ready to oblige.

Fear not. Drum roll please, and step forth Kevin Donnelly with 'Mad as a cut snake' as insulting as 'meow'.

If the Canberra-based media commissariat is fair and balanced, there’s no doubt that the ex-ALP Prime Minister’s snide and offensive description of Abbott would have received the same coverage and condemnation as Senator Bushby’s interjection.

Given the hue and cry against Senator Bushby’s catcall against Senator Wong, it only stands to reason that if critics are consistent they will also have to call old silver budgie to account.

Old silver budgie?

I say, steady on old chum, wot wot. If the Canberra-based media commissariat is fair and balanced, then they'll have to call you to account for using the offensive term 'silver budgie.'

Let's face it. Gratuitously labelling Hawke as a silver budgie is as insulting as Hawke labelling Abbott as mad as a cut snake is as offensive as Bushby and his defenders somehow thinking 'meow' is a witty interjection.

Donnelly goes on and on in ways that are quite bizarre and wonderfully hilarious and exceptionally funny. You'd almost think he was taking the piss, but if there's irony at work, it's so thick that Donnelly's attempt to do a Ben Pojbie fails miserably.

After laboriously working in a reference to the Emerald Isle and Saint Patrick (but ignoring New Zelund's snake-free status), Donnelly comes up with this:

Corner a snake in the woolshed, under a bale of hay or under a bit of corrugated tin and you only need to cut its head off with a shovel to see how acrimonious and offensive Bob Hawke’s description of Abbott is.

To be labled as “mad as a cut snake” for an Australian man is an offensive and low insult, it suggests, like a headless snake that you are out of control, totally pissed off and a danger to all.

If women find being described as cat-like offensive and insulting then equally as insulting is being associated with the venomous, deadly creature that silently slithers when preparing to attack.

Uh huh. You get the sense that this is Donnelly doing comedy. Is there a lead brick in the house?

To denigrate and vilify the leader of the opposition in such a way on the nightly news, with Prime Minister Julia Gillard standing along side and giggling like a school girl in response, only adds salt to the wounds.

Read Henry Lawson’s The Drover’s Wife and you will quickly understand and appreciate how offensive the insult is. Left alone in her bush shack, caring for her young and vulnerable children the story recounts how the deadly serpent that once tempted Adam and Eve threatens the family’s safety, peace and security.

And so on and on and interminably on:

As feminist, postmodern, cultural studies students understand it is also true that the signifier ‘snakes’ is phalocentric in nature. In a patriarchal, Eurocentric and binary culture, where men dominate and oppress women through physical and emotional coercion, it’s clear what ‘snakes’ alludes to.

Oh the mordant wit and the irony. And along the way Donnelly delivers even more insults to the silver bodgie:

Deconstruct the description “as mad as a cut snake” and it is obvious what Bob Hawke is really trying to imply. By using the insult Hawke, the ex-trade union womaniser and heavy drinker, is questioning Tony Abbott’s manhood and capability as a potential Australian Prime Minister.

Calling someone a womanising drunkard, and Donnelly's getting agitated about mad as a cut snake in a post ironic way?

Enough already.

Let's cut to the end of the chase before we end up with a discourse on D. H. Lawrence's poem Snake, and its phallocentric implications:

In the Australian vernacular there is no greater insult than to be abused as being “as mad as a cut snake” and I wait in anticipation as the commissariat in the Canberra press gallery calls Bob Hawke and Julia Gillard to account.

No greater insult? How about the simple pejorative 'what a bloody fuckwit'?

Still, budgies being all the go, we'll settle for calling Donnelly a wanker and a goose. And enough with the commissariat, that dull leaden joke about the Russian army, when commentariat does quite nicely and still gets in the wanker joke about the proletariat ...

By the time I thought about moving along to the column by The Angry Cripple, I was too exhausted, and really couldn't see why The Punch existed now, let alone why it might continue to exist in the world when the Murdoch press slams down a paywall on its commentary section.

Would any of these offerings make the cut, and lurk behind a paywall, and extort money from those eager to read choice offerings, like the incredibly abusive Donnelly tirade about the evils of snakes?

Based on the entirely faulty premise that snakes are wicked creatures, suitable subjects for the ire heaped on them by indolent Christians over the centuries, falsely tagging them with having something to do with the loss of Eden (when it's really women, isn't it Kevin, it's all their bloody fault).

Let's turn again to that Lawrence poem, as he contemplates killing the snake.

Now as someone who's killed a few snakes - I don't say it with pride, but with regret, and with knowledge that in the bush, a snake about to strike is an uncomfortable companion - Lawrence turned my view of snakes on its head, as he contemplates killing a snake come to drink at a water-trough, and settles for throwing a log at it:

I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste.
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.

A pettiness. The perfect word for Donnelly's piece.

Petty, in its abject ridiculing of snakes, whether cut or not, and silver budgies and the commissariat, and womanising drunkards, and worst of all, not funny, not even in a post-modern, post-ironic sort of way, but unfunny in a kind of goosey, feathery way ...

I guess that has its upside as explained by Master Francis Rabelais in Gargantua and his Son Pantagruel, in one of the pond's favourite works:

Afterwards I wiped my tail with a hen, with a cock, with a pullet, with a calf’s skin, with a hare, with a pigeon, with a cormorant, with an attorney’s bag, with a montero, with a coif, with a falconer’s lure. But, to conclude, I say and maintain, that of all torcheculs, arsewisps, bumfodders, tail-napkins, bunghole cleansers, and wipe-breeches, there is none in the world comparable to the neck of a goose, that is well downed, if you hold her head betwixt your legs.

And believe me therein upon mine honour, for you will thereby feel in your nockhole a most wonderful pleasure, both in regard of the softness of the said down and of the temporate heat of the goose, which is easily communicated to the bum-gut and the rest the inwards, in so far as to come even to the regions of the heart and brains.

And think not that the felicity of the heroes and demigods in the Elysian fields consisteth either in their asphodel, ambrosia, or nectar, as our old women here used to say; but in this, according to my judgment, that they wipe their tails with the neck of a goose, holding her head betwixt their legs, and such is the opinion of Master John of Scotland, alias Scotus.

What a pity The Punch is digital, and so avoids the primary function and usefulness of a physical tabloid newspaper in any outback dunny tended by snakes lurking in the grass ...

(Below: and to keep the arty stuff going, Gary Shead doing Freda and Lawrence in Australia, more in the series here).