First to a genuine crisis confronting western civilisation.
An extensive survey of video clips by the pond on the weekend revealed shots of VU meters, four and two track tape recorders, cassettes, boom boxes, record players, black and white television sets, transistor radios, and extensive use of slow motion effects and nineteen seventies psychedelic visuals right out of period Countdown special effects boxes.
Even worse, bands, including but not limited to, the hosts Tame Impala are playing music which sounds just like Cream, or Black Sabbath, or worse.
And so the crimes of the past return to haunt the innocents of the present.
And now to no crisis at all.
"We're all in trouble", squawked the parrot this morning, confusing - with typical arrogance and hubris - himself and 2GB with the world.
We're not in trouble, it's the parrot and the station that are in trouble, and ain't it grand to see. Talk of corporate sabotage and cyber bullying is just verbal window dressing for a growing sense that this is more than a one-day wonder. It might last the whole week, or even longer ...
Ain't it grand to see a verbal bully whinge and whine about bullying, and dress it up as cyber-bullying as if that's somehow worse than plain old-fashioned radio-bullying.
But the pond really suspects the breaking point was the potential loss of the Mercedes Benz that Jones drives.
The first blow came from the corporate communications manager for Benz, David McCarthy, as reported in Alan Jones to lose his sponsored Mercedes and this morning, as reported in Alan Jones points finger at cyber bullies, Jones began to sound desperate:
...to pretend that I’m out there as some kind of bludger driving a car that they gave to me and ‘we want it back’ and 'if we don’t get it back', says this bloke McCarthy, 'then we’ll be the first person to come along and we’ll repossess it by the end of the month'.
"I repeat: these people ended a contract with 2GB, the contract had nothing at all to do with me.
"The contract provided that we advertised their product on this program, which we did. They got very significant benefit from the product and they provided a vehicle.
"Honestly, how many untruths can be told in order to achieve some kind of advantage?"
Oh the suffering, oh the humanity.
Jones' idea of civilised discourse? To call McCarthy on air a "gutless wonder". Wow, way to court your sponsor and head towards reconciliation down the track ...
The pond hasn't heard "gutless wonder" since the good old days in the playground at Tamworth High School, when the jocks bullied the nerds as gutless wonders. Ah memories ...
What's even more irritating is the way some members of the commentariat have attempted to save Jones by comparing and contrasting his behaviour with people on ABC radio.
Now Macca on a Sunday irritates the hell out of the pond, but to suggest he - or many others at the ABC - are in any way comparable to Jones' bullying, and marching on Canberra, and squawking and moaning and apocalyptic pronouncements and sheer woeful ignorance in matters of science and fact is to go beyond the comical into absurdity ...
Speaking of comical absurdity, it seems that goose Robert McClelland has joined in the debate in relation to personal attacks:
Tony Abbott has said that Julia Gillard must take responsibility for the personal campaign against him, as former attorney-general Robert McClelland at the weekend attacked the vilification used in current public debate as ''un-Australian''. Mr McClelland also suggested that political advisers to the prime minister and others should beware of encouraging personal attacks. (Climate of 'vilification' declared un-Australian)
Is calling McClelland a goose a personal attack?
Why yes it is and the pond apologises profusely to geese everywhere and putting them in the same company as a man accuses all and sundry of being "un-Australian" while decrying personal attacks.
'Un-Australian' is the sort of term you'd expect to be flung about by the bluntest knives in the drawer.
What's worse, McClelland dropped his clanger in front of the Australian Christian Lobby, which has made a living out of vilification (some might even call it the un-Australian Christian Lobby) of everything and anybody they don't like, with head honcho Jim Wallace recently comparing homosexual "lifestyles" to the dangers of smoking. Just one of many assaults on people and their personal attributes ...
As for Tony Abbott moaning about the personal campaign against him, where was he when he spent months personalising the campaign against Gillard and her government?
It boggles the mind that he should continue to indulge in childish petulant rhetoric, as if "Ditch the witch" can now be conveniently ditched.
Naturally everyone at the lizard Oz is rushing to the front line to defend Alan Jones (They vote and listen to Alan Jones - illustrated with a fine, cliched stereotypical portrait of your average Jones listener),
and amazingly a couple of opportunistic pieces that seize on the Jones matter to brood about media regulation, as in Mark Day's Jones affair stirs up issues of free speech.
Has everyone forgotten that it was the Sunday Terror, a News rag, that poked at the hornet's nest?
As for that illustration, here you go:
Happily all the lizard Oz stories are behind the paywall, and they can stay there, along with their portrait of a female frump doting on Jones. (Though you might like to breach the paywall to read Sunday Telegraph reporter demands an apology from Sydney Morning Herald, with accompanying threat of legal action to produce the apology, just to remind yourself it's time to have morning tea with the Mad Hatter and the dormouse).
Speaking of childish petulant rhetoric, Monday is generally grumpy Paul Sheehan and he's in ripper form, spending an entire abusive column abusing others for being abusive, as you can read in Abuse is Treasurer's stock in trade.
Here's how the abusive potty mouth begins abusive his piece:
One member of the federal cabinet is the Member for Gutter. Another is the Member for Sewer. One resides permanently in the gutter, the other resides permanently in the sewer.
Oh yes, that's how to lift the public tone and the state of the debate.
Sheen's targets are Wayne Swan and Anthony Albanese, and his indignation and his hypocrisy are palpable.
How's this for lifting the tone?
The nastiness coming from the top of the federal government reflects the hollow moral core of a government that operates as a front for the unions and depends on the support of the moral Frankenstein of Australian politics, Craig Thomson. If Albanese resides in the gutter, and Swan the sewer, Thomson occupies a public prison of disgrace.
And out of that hoppy toad comes a reminder, the relentless campaign against Thomson and the association of everyone in the government with him, as sewer gutter residents, guilty of enormous crimes against humanity and western civilisation.
It was only months ago, but it feels like years, years of tireless nattering negativity and personal abuse from Abbott and his team and his cheerleaders, and now it's caught up with them.
And Sheehan is still doing it! Show us how it's done, generally grumpy Sheehan, slur everyone and everything in sight.
This is the moral foundation of the Gillard government. It is little wonder that the party grassroots are withering. Labor is about self-interest. It is about big unions and big public service bureaucracies staffed with public sector unionists who vote Labor.
Want some equally childish rhetoric of the most simplistic kind coming back at ya?
This is the moral foundation of the Federal opposition. It is little wonder that the party grassroots are withering. The Liberal and the National parties are about self-interest. They are about big business and big subsidies of the agrarian socialist kind for corporate capitalists and moaning farmers who vote for the Coalition.
Stupid childish rhetoric. Sheehan's gutter conversation is about on the level of football barracking, biting the reader on the ear.
But then it gets even worse as Sheehan peddles the notion that the Greens, GetUp! and Change. org are part of a vast conspiracy, as if people can't make up their own minds in relation to Alan Jones - and demand any time they catch a taxi and are exposed to the deadly virus, that the driver changes the bloody channel.
So how does Sheehan end up his valiant defence of Jones?
... as one reader wrote, with revealing candour, in a letter published in the Herald last week: "We do not want Alan Jones on the air."
That is also what the Member for Gutter and the Member for Sewer want.
Which leads us to a cure – attempted ruin and suppression – that is worse than the disease.
Actually it leads us into the gutter with Sheehan, scribbling about sewers and gutters, and a column which is a simplistic traducing of people tired of Jones' bullying.
The irony in this? Show the pond one member of the commentariat who actually listens to Jones and his demagoguery, as opposed to listening to advertising-free ABC radio so they can take pot shots are harmless, leather elbow-patched, hand wringing, worrying, scones and tea, soft-shelled, softly spoken ever so careful not to offend liberal broadcasters ...
If Jones had just kept to his followers, the rusted-on ancients that constitute his major demographic, it would be fine, but he must get out and about, gadding around, campaigning and lobbying and marching on Canberra with the inept convoy of no-confidence, and standing alongside offensive signs, let alone making vile remarks about Gillard's father...
And chattering about Ju-liar and chaff bags and democracy being dead, and getting maths and science hopelessly and stupidly wrong, and yet still preening and bullying and arrogantly asserting in his pride and his arrogance and hubris that he knows it all, while others know nothing about anything, and the world being full of gutless wonders, and ... well enough already, enough of the bile and the hate and the vile rhetoric.
It's time the gutless wonders took a stand.
Here's the truth of it. The world and radio can get along fine without Alan Jones. And even if 2GB were to go down, hey it's just another radio license. Does anyone care that 2SM continues to exist? Sorry Mad Mel, your days are long gone, along with idle chatter about gutless wonders.
Come to think of it, the world could also get along fine without Sheehan rabbiting on about sewers and gutters.
Make it so Jean-Luc Picard ...
(Below: the real crisis confronting western civilisation. You can catch the tune here on YouTube)
It's Sunday in the US...so here's a little hymn for Alan Jones
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