(Above: Stephen Fry in Twitter rant, or how to generate positive PR with latte sipping Stephen Fry worshippers, Qantas Management 101).
If Alan Joyce is like Richard Nixon and a Senate hearing like a McCarthy trial, what's the suitable metaphor for Qantas passengers?
Lemmings going nowhere, not even over the cliff ...
The defensive reference to the late Joseph McCarthy by Joyce was a clever ploy, in the sense that any vague reference to forgotten historical events can be an astute way to defang an attack, but it does make you wonder if Joyce fancies himself as a persecuted left wing commie bastard under assault by the evil McCarthy-ites.
It's really quite strange to think of McCarthy's vigorous attacks on unionists and lefties and communists and book readers can be wheeled out to defend an eternally suffering and persecuted Qantas management. It's so reminiscent of Fox News's defence of the tormented 1% in America, as recently celebrated by Jon Stewart (you can catch an excerpt here).
McCarthy destroyed lives, and all Joyce has done is destroy travel arrangements and a once favoured national business.
Well it's understandable that Joyce wouldn't want to compare his suffering to the Salem witch trials - better to be a pervert commie unionist than a witch - but what's most amusing is that the Daily Terror takes up the chant in its header Qantas inquiry akin to McCarthyism.
The Terror chides Senator Doug Cameron for a nostalgic view of history, especially in relation to anti-globalisation, apparently forgetting that Barnaby Joyce will soon be a heart beat away from the Prime Ministership, and good old Barners got under Peter Costello's skin with his Jesuit-trained doubts about free trade (Blast from the past no longer the way of the future).
The Terror is now well advanced in its bid to become the silliest, most degenerate, hysterical and vicious tabloid in the country (well at least second after the eternal champion, the NT News), and thought that Joyce's historical reference made an "excellent point".
If you revert back to the actual McCarthy hearings, you have to think Joyce's McCarthy gambit is as stupid a play as a politician referring to him as Richard Nixon ...
Oh, and while we're fondly remembering the NT, today's editorial is a treat, right up there with the best of the Terror:
Put crudely, there is nothing a bully - whether a Melbourne greenie or a federal politician from Tasmania - understands more than a metaphorical punch on the nose.
Ah yes, those silly southerners with their silly southern ideas, what do they understand about anything. Fight back Territorians, punch 'em on the snout, take to the streets, but not in an Occupy way please:
Therefore it is important Territorians turn out in their millions - OK, in their hundreds - at today's "I Vote and I Float" protest at Stokes Hill Wharf.
Hundreds of raging Territorians taking it to the silly southerners. Funny, whenever I was in Adelaide, it was the easterners that were the problem. And of course if you live in Alice Springs it's the deluded northerners sheltering above the Berrimah line who ruin everything ...
But what got the pond brooding about silly historical references and wretched parochialism?
Well truth to tell, it's been the grating performance of Dr. No of late, supported by the Murdoch press in their usual routine way, but which has seen Tony Abbott receive a number of unwelcome notices in the press.
There was the stance on the IMF, which sent Bernard Keane into a frenzy in Abbott, Hockey trash the Coalitions economic credentials - again.
And today Laurie Oakes sounds almost tired and emotional as he rants in The Punch Who's feral now, Tony?
Politicians don’t come any more ferocious and brutal than Abbott. He reverted to the wild the moment he got his paws on the Liberal leadership. His style is pure attack dog, as feral as you’d get. Everything, irrespective of merit, has to be opposed and torn to pieces.
Dearie me, and throughout the piece it's 'feral this' and 'feral that', as Oakes makes the reasonable point that Abbott has behaved in an entirely irrational way in relation to the mining tax, and in such a perverse way that - should he accede to government - he will have created a rod for his own back. So many rods we probably should all start looking for cilices right now ...
The thing that got Oakes most hot and bothered was - like Keane - the IMF follies:
Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey, who sometimes shows a disturbing tendency to match his leader’s cheap populism, asserted that “the suggestion that we should be putting money into the IMF to bail out the Eurozone when not even the British are prepared to do so is extraordinary”.
Which was followed by the extraordinary news that David Cameron called for a boost in IMF funding right after jolly Joe let his tongue off its leash, just one of a number of mis-steps and goosey goosey gander mistakes in the IMF follies:
Abbott knew - or should have known - that Australia’s contribution to the IMF would be in the form of a loan, with no impact on the Budget bottom line. In fact, it will earn interest.
It's all fine feral fun, a hot contender for the pond's 'shoot off your big toe with your loud mouth' award, but while The Punch pretends that every Saturday is Oakes day, in reality Oakes is resident at the Daily Terror, with his piece dubbed The scary world of attack dog Abbott.
It's all part of the Murdoch recycling of material, and while it must be truly scary for the readers of the Daily Terror to have their world view disturbed by interloper Oakes, it's even scarier to contemplate the fate of The Punch should the paywall clang down on other News Limited titles in the new year ...
And speaking of the paywall, how goes it in the garden of eden, from which the unwashed have been expelled, languishing outside nirvana. We mean The Australian of course:
Well it seems that Janet 'Dame Slap' Albrechtsen has been boosted to the Saturday pages because Christopher Pearson's lunacy wasn't strong enough as a lead, wasn't cutting the commentariat mustard, so to speak.
Naturally Dame Slap is on the side of Qantas management, because self-interest is driving the unions and the government. Unlike the complete disinterest or uninterest or indifference that leads Alan Joyce to make out like a bandit.
Well you can bet that Dame Slap's rhetoric will fly in the face of reason, as if that hero of the commentariat Adam Smith didn't have a few words to say about self-interest. And then there's Christopher Pearson rabbiting on about the ALP leadership, yet again, for perhaps the umpteenth time:
And it came to the pond that the trembling hands, the shaking and the sweating were now completely gone, and what was behind the paywall could stay behind the paywall and good riddance.
True nirvana came from eating the apple of the likes of Laurie Oakes and getting a balanced, rational portrait of Tony Abbott as a raving, feral, alley cat, or perhaps a wild, rabid dog ...
Oh and you can find out Laurie Oakes' taste in music if you head off to the ABC FM podcast here, and his anecdote about Paul Keating and Richard Strauss's Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D minor is most engaging.
Is it possible to imagine Oakes' trotting around to the Lodge to share a classical music moment with action man Tony Abbott? Not when Abbott wants to be an antipodean Vladimir Putin ...
Which brings us back in a nicely circular way to where we started, with political metaphors and political references, and it just leaves us time to note that the pond has come across startling evidence that Senator Ian Macdonald was right on the money to expose GetUp! as the Hitler Youth wing of the Greens.
Sure the Senator's McCarthy style slur created an unseemly fuss - Nazi youth slur creates a furore - but it turns out the fiends have their own badges and their own song, way worse than the Junior Woodchucks to which Huey, Dewey and Louie belonged.
Reveal all, First Dog ...
(Click to enlarge, and you can catch the full First Dog cartoon here, but at the moment it's behind the paywall. But then if you pay for something you enjoy, as opposed to Pearson and Albrechtsen and suchlike, can that be so bad?)
Dottie said "The Terror is now well advanced in its bid to become the silliest, most degenerate, hysterical and vicious tabloid in the country"
ReplyDeleteWell. Yes. But how do you define tabloid? I know the standard definition is that it's a particular size paper but i think when we talk about modern 'tabloids' we're talking something else - sensationalism, a cavalier regard for the truth, a particular populist line...
If you look a little further than literal definition of 'tabloid' you'd have to have The Australian as a hot contender for "silliest, most degenerate, hysterical and vicious tabloid".
Well yes the word tabloid is these days just an exercise in nostalgia, and harks back to the time when a person wrestling with a kipper at breakfast might choose to wrestle said kipper clumsily with the aid of a broadsheet, or in the working class way, with a smaller, more manageable rag.
ReplyDeleteAs you say, these days tabloid is a state of mind rather than a physical condition, especially on the intertubes, and everything in the Murdoch world is tabloid in its gutter trawling, bottom feeding, flatfish mud sucking ways, and no finer example of the rush to the bottom of the bottomless pit can be found than The Australian in its current form ...
I still have a copy of the very first edition of The Australian in storage in the house, but these days I never get it out, for fear that in the reading of it, I might begin to weep ... and now thankfully I don't have to worry about it online, for fear the redback in my purse might begin to shriek ...