Christian Kerr, Xavier Symons, and crumbs from the fifties re-surface in the antipodes ...

You know you're in the company of some amiable trolling when you come across this kind of line:

For two things are sure. The census will show that a clear majority of Australians believe in a god. And religion is a clear force for good in our society.

Not a clear force for good and bad in our society, and let's discuss the percentages, but just a clear force for good.

That's how Christian Kerr pokes the stick in Good God, you atheists are insecure, but you can do it to anyone:

For two things are sure. The census will show that a clear majority of Australians believe in football. And the Collingwood/Manly/Crows/Broncos/who cares about Perth football club is a clear force for good in our society.

Damn you Collingwood and Manly, damn you to hell.

Apparently Kerr had a mid-life conversion after wandering into a church one day at Bondi Junction , and good luck to him.

Truth to tell I have a mental, spiritual or physical conversion of one kind or another any time I visit the appalling junction. And then he goes and spoils it all:

Forget the supernatural aspects of religion if you want to. Human beings have created religion because it meets clear human needs.

Uh huh. So any religion in a storm? Delusion is a human created thing which meets the delusionary needs of humans, so it's all fine.

And that is why despite the shrillness of the proselytising atheists, a clear majority of us will have told the census we believe in God.

And from the header at the start announcing atheists are insecure, by end of tale they've become shrill proselytisers, and should instead embrace their delusionary needs for delusion. By golly I want some of that stuff they're selling at Bondi Junction.

Well Kerr scored a fine flurry of hits, and I guess it's another day of shrill carry ons at The Punch, but the silliness of Kerr is easily matched, and outdone by Xavier Symons' effort in Crummy artist left to pick up the scraps.

Symons, who advises in his profile that he is studying philosophy, with a keen interest in moral philosophy and virtue ethics and natural law, at Sydney University, has apparently just discovered the work of comic book artist Robert Crumb and is shocked to the core:

American cartoonist Robert Crumb has repeatedly depicted scenes of rape, incest, paedophilia and bestiality. Many of his works have racist overtones. We should be discouraging him from publishing, and I was relieved to hear yesterday that he had cancelled his Australian tour.

Robert Crumb is a self confessed “weirdo“, whose work promotes exploitation of women and minors. We should not be celebrating him.

Indeed. Forget the Christmas crackers, and ban him. Dance on his grave if you like.

As Christian Kerr would no doubt confirm:

The bible repeatedly depicts scenes of rape, incest, paedophilia, mass murder, torture, genocide and bestiality. Many of its chapters have racist overtones. We should be discouraging the bible from being published, and I was relieved to hear yesterday that there's a new campaign to remove all Gideon bibles from hotel rooms in Australia.

Christians are generally conceded to be self-confessed weirdos, whose main text promotes the exploitation of women and minors, and allows a role for slavery. We should not be celebrating them, or their fundamentalist calls for men to remain head of the household.

Ah you say, all very fine for a little trolling, but what about the bestiality? Well I know it's a stretch, but there's always Ezekiel 23:2o:

There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses. (NIV)

Donkeys' genitals. Why Crumb would make a meal of that.

As for 'weirdo', what a funny and charming term. It took me right back to the nineteen fifties and the world of Maynard G. Krebs in The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. And from there it's but a short step to Homer Simpson in Homer the Vigilante:

Herman: See, it's a miniature version of the A-Bomb. The government
built it in the fifties to drop on beatniks.
[Homer imagines a beatnik on the grass with a bongo]
Beatnik: Radiant cool, crazy nightmare
Zen New Jersey nowhere...
[A group of beatniks snap their fingers in time]
[Homer flies overhead in a plane]
Homer: Put this in your pipe and smoke it!
[Presses a button, but the A-Bomb doesn't fall]
Beatnik: How now, brown bureaucrat?
[Homer jumps on the bomb, and it falls with him still on it.
He cheers as though he's riding a bronco]
[It explodes, bringing us back to reality]
Take that, Maynard G. Krebs!
Herman: Hey...see the sign? ["Do not ride the bomb"]
Homer: Sorry.

Yep, Maynard still resonates in the culture, as does Dr. Strangelove, a movie which, besides celebrating armageddon, spends a little time with sociopathic generals anguishing over precious bodily fluids and mad Germans with arm disorders. Sounds like it should be banned or at least discouraged from appearing on dvd down under.

But back to the comedy stylings of Xavier, which reminded me of nothing so much as a conservative undergraduate trying to get some space Tharunka in the sixties, and damned near finding it impossible, what with all the perverted weirdo hippies hanging out with Wendy Bacon.

I find all of this very alarming. I think we need to wake up to the reality of this artist. His work is disturbing, and it flows from a warped mind. Crumb has labelled himself a “weird pervert”. I think this is a pretty good self-analysis. But even more alarming is his shamelessness. As he recounted in another interview, “I do these crazy cartoons…I have no defence. I just have to throw up my hands.”

It’s a good thing that Crumb feels offended by the comments made in the Sunday Telegraph on July 31. Maybe it will help him to be a bit more restrained in his comics. In any event, it’s caused him to cancel his trip to Australia. And this will impede the spread of the Crumb-cult.

Yep, Xavier's right up there, or right out there, with Jesse Phillips scribbling a beat up for the Sunday Terror a couple of weeks ago, and Hetty Johnson:

"These cartoons are not funny or artistic - they are just crude and perverted images emanating from what is clearly a sick mind," she said. "Of all the brilliant artists, cartoonists and writers the Opera House and council could have supported, you have to wonder why they chose Robert Crumb."

Only in Australia, really, and we look forward to Xavier joining with Hetty in fresh calls to ban James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Vladimir Nabokov, who had the sick audacity to write Lolita (don't get us started on Portnoy's Complaint, you filthy adolescent men).

Damned if Nabokov is going to be allowed to visit Australia's shores, or that we should in any way encourage the Nabokov cult. What's that you say? He's dead and he never visited Australia? Well that's a jolly good thing, because the last thing we need in the antipodes is a visit from a sicko, weirdo, perverted zombie ...

As for the Labor party's response to the crisis:

A spokesman for the federal Attorney General's department told The Sunday Telegraph that Crumb's work cannot be shown in Australia unless he submits his illustrations for classification. The spokesman said his work would almost certainly be refused classification.

Yep, there's an intelligent response. We haven't seen it, but we're agin it.

Not that it matters that much, because if you care, you can find Crumb's work on the full to overflowing intertubes, without classification and without respect for intellectual property rights.

What's astonishing is the way that wowsers and prudes keep cropping up in every generation, giving a lie to Christian Kerr's notion that religion is always a force for good.

For a moment there, I almost took Xavier's piece as a subversive bit of yippie trolling, a promotion for Crumb's appearance at the comic con, Graphic 2011 festival, but sadly the wowsers have had their day and the event is cancelled.

The always flighty Crumb has already tucked himself away amongst the perverted French, and these days I only occasionally catch glimpses of the odd panel in that perverted filthy vile rag cherished by sicko New York sophisticates, The New Yorker, and I guess sitting on a plane for hours to cop abuse and controversy that'd take him back to the sixties was a little too déjà vu ...

Naturally Xavier is appalled at the lickspittle Fairfax press, which dared to publish a piece by Charles Purcell celebrating Crumb, in I'm a very eccentric, oddball character.

Dearie me, poor alarmed, disturbed, upset, delicate Xavier, a petulant flower who probably gets an anxiety attack if a dog comes within ten feet of him in the rose garden of life ...

Funnily enough, when I was in Singapore, I went off to an exhibition of works by Salvadore Dali at the bizarre Marina Bay Sands arts science museum. At the time I was full of condescension - it wasn't a very good exhibition, made up of assorted castings scrabbled together, along with some curatorial touches, the odd print and much fuss about melted clocks.

But now it turns out that the soft fascist government of Singapore is more tolerant of, and more liberal about, aesthetic eccentricities than Xavier, Hetty and the Attorney General of Australia.

Ah well, it beats writing about the commentariat for a day, but lordy, how this country was fucked in the fifties, remains fucked today, and presumably will go on being proudly fucked well into the future ...

And by the way, why on earth doesn't the philosophy department at Sydney University insist that all their students take a course in aesthetics? You know, Phil2618 - Aesthetics and Art. Here are the questions, which let me get my 6 credit points easy peasy:

Why is art important to us?

It isn't, not when it's done by sicko weirdo perverts, and it's full of them doing vile things about vile things.

What is an aesthetic response to something?

I don't know. Send all the sicko weirdo perverts to France would be a good start.

What is the relation between art and aesthetics? Is there such a thing as objective interpretation of an artwork?

Yes, there are sicko weirdo perverts out there, and that's an objective fact.

Or is it all a matter of taste? Should we believe in "the death of the author"? What is the relation between art and representation, expression and emotion? We shall discuss these and other questions (e.g. modernity, metaphor) from the perspective of an historical approach to the philosophical study of aesthetics and art.

I don't know, but I do know that sick perverted humanity and its weird warped sexuality is no fit subject for art or artists. Send them all to France.

Golly, who'd have thunk philosophy was so easy.

Please just post the Ph.D in the mail, along with a note that youth is wasted on the young ...

(Below: a couple of rough snaps from the Singapore exhibition, perhaps not classified in Australia, but approved by the Singapore government for public viewing. Amazing.

Be prepared to faint at the quality of the snaps, taken in low light. You might even faint at the artistic abilities, or lack thereof, of Dali. But if you want to faint at the content, please go off and hide behind the skirts of the Attorney General, or hie yourself off to a nunnery. Or perhaps Bondi junction, where you might undergo a spiritual conversion to mammon and the giant mall).