To mangle Andy Warhol, shopping is more American than thinking, and so the pond now thinks of itself as a honorary American citizen, as bold and as brave as Andy himself.
Yes, the pond has stared into the heart of darkness - Black Friday and Cyber Monday - and Macy's grand parade - which featured the real Santa Claus, not some tawdry fake dressed up in gimcrack clothes in the name of commercialism.
"Look children", voices erupted around us, "it's the real Santa Claus", and so the lies begin and will continue forever. (Remember, Jesus and Tony Abbott saves).
Unless you go shopping, and so the pond went shopping, and saw a country allegedly in decline stuff itself full to its bloated obese gills at Thanksgiving. 45 million turkeys met their fate, or so the news ticker on the Babylonian empire across the road in the Macy's parade told us (that's News Corp folks), while there were a mere 42.2 million on food stamps.
Shameless bludgers who refused to take jobs, except there were no jobs, or if there were jobs, they were to act as sales drones in retail where the passive aggressive dumb insolence is guaranteed to turn shoppers to online acts of revenge.
Yep, at Wal-Mart you can work for US$8.81 an hour and get to live in abject poverty - below the nominal poverty line - and if you want to read more about the bizarre contradictions and dire contempt for workers to be found in shopping heaven, you can trot off to Who's Really to Blame for the Wal-Mart Strikes? The American Consumer.
Oh it's a fine world where there's no way to regulate the ways of the market, and people routinely get screwed.
But once you're into the swing of it, and the Australian dollar being strong, there's no place for conscience or care. It's time to get down and dirty, so the pond mortgaged the house for a couple of tickets to the Lincoln Centre and the revival of Aida, and what a satisfying performance it was (you can read a review of Liudmyla Monastyska and the gang here - no elephants, but a twitchy horse caught the eye).
What else to do with people that mix sex and politics and military matters than to entomb them alive?
Speaking of entombing clowns, the pond has returned to discover the media circus in full cry, with a full scale revival of that fine old opera, Ditch the Bitch (also known as Kill the Witch).
Apparently Dr. No now sees himself as Mr. Positive, and has left the dirty hatchet work to Julie Bishop, hiding behind her skirt while she trawls through the gutter. To mangle Oscar Wilde, while some lie in the gutter and see the stars, some are content to play in the mud and the muck and consort with fraudsters and deviants and perverts, and have most peculiar games of telephone tag with them.
Of course in the old days in Tamworth, a man who hid behind a woman's skirts would have been denounced as having a yellow streak a mile wide, or perhaps even more contemptibly, be called a cowardly, cowardly custard (though what was cowardly about custard never seemed quite clear).
Anyhoo, the pond is always in favour of men hiding behind women's skirts, but it's astonishing to catch up on a manufactured drama - until glimpses in sordid hotel rooms of Fox News reminded the pond that this sort of fabricated drama is in the DNA of the Babylonian beast, with each day given over to a fresh betrayal of the country by Democrats, climate scientists, atheists and heathens.
It seems Gillard's desire to tug the forelock to the US in the matter of Israel and Palestine - and help Israel maintain its very own walled-off ghetto - passed almost unnoticed when held up against the riveting, compelling spectacle of interviews with sleaze bags she'd fucked or associated with twenty years ago (yes, it's a particular crime to fuck the wrong man. Entomb her!)
Contempt? Yes, it's almost impossible to imagine the contempt the pond harbours for Mr. Positive, until you come across a clown like Steve Gibbons leading with gutless douchebag and narcissistic fool and bimbo, while attempting to maintain the high moral ground in relation to temperate parliamentary language (Labor MP Steve Gibbons calls Julie Bishop a bimbo then says sorry).
And apparently there have been endless titillations in the matter of Eddie Obeid in relation to corruption in New South Wales. But it's slipped off the pages.
And Geoff Dixon is at war with Alan Joyce, and perhaps is wondering why the pond flew on a 747 with an unserviceable auxiliary generator?
So many pleasures, so little time.
Steve, Steve, Tony Abbott might well be a gutless douchebag hiding behind a woman's skirt, but leave that to others, and don't sound like a twittering twit. But yes, you've won a place on the pond:
A woman! And she had the cheek to call Pell defensive and suggest he was a bad look and part of the church's culture of silence.
All that came to the pond's mind was custard ...
Truth to tell, it all came as a profound culture shock. The pond hasn't thought of Dr. No being Mr. Positive Custard or the circus or the rest of the clowns for a couple of weeks - remember, Austria barely exists in the hive mind of the American media - and suddenly there was the whole enchilada, the whole barrel of hogwash on parade.
The pond still hasn't plucked up the courage to visit The Australian - the last it remembers of this offshoot of the Babylonian beast was flinging aside a free copy - oh how the airport is papered wall to wall with free bird cage liner - before stepping onto the plane. Give it time, give it time ...
But at least there today is the familiar sight of the rabid Generally Grumpy Paul Sheehan getting agitated about regulation.
Apparently Gina Rinehart is upset about regulation, and so naturally is her little pet squirrel (oh those squirrels are just so cute).
Anyhoo, you can read the usual nonsense in Labor patronises women and burdens business,
Apparently Sheehan, a life long journalist, has an intuitive empathy for business, an empathy that's denied unionists and such like, and then produces an exemplary piece of nonsense, wherein he moans how Australia has slipped over five years in a table recording the ease of doing business from eighth to fifteenth, and yet in 2013 is likely to bounce back to tenth! Conclusion?
The distinguishing characteristic of the Rudd/Gillard Labor governments has been a mania for control, with a spectacular increase in compliance obligations that wrap enterprises in red tape, green tape and black tape.
Uh huh. But it seems the mania for control has produced a completely perverse result. Go figure. Entomb her!
The bad news is there are now more than 8000 pages of federal legislation, with new impositions being added all the time, creating a social and economic burden with no relief in sight.
Put it another way.
The bad news is there are now more than 8000 pages of Paul Sheehan rambling on about women and regulation up on the intertubes, with new impositions on readers being added all the time, creating a social and economic and literary burden with no relief in sight.
If only Sheehan could be sent to work in Wal-Mart for a couple of weeks to experience a decent minimum wage and the real meaning of absence of regulation, which is to give everybody and anybody who passes in front of business a right royal screwing, shafting or fucking over (insert non-sexist, non-sexual language here if writing for Crikey).
At least the one thing that pond learned is that hubris has its own reward.
When or if Tony Abbott, Mr. Positive, becomes the leader of this country, he will have done so via the black arts and the gutter and the mud, and like Macbeth he will have to deal with the poisoned chalice and the venomous fear and loathing, and big Mal will be on the prowl at the first slip. And with any luck Mr. Positive will also experience entombment, preferably alive.
Ah well, it would be nice to say it's good to be back, but truth to tell, shopping is way better than thinking, and Fox News has such a clear understanding of the world, and Chairman Rupert is such a fine leader of a pack of feral crusading ratbags and Tony Abbott is such a wondrous Mr. Positive ...
Quick, quick, pass another glass of that HFCS (that's high-fructose corn syrup to you), and fill that kool-aid to the brim. And don't forget the cowardly custard ... it looks yummy ...
(Below: but along with the corn syrup, lordy how the Americans have looted the art world. The Met had an Andy Warhol homage exhibition celebrating the work of the fraudster - there are selected highlights here - and while it had an insulting Koons on display, it had a couple by Hans Haacke which reminded the pond of the good old days when Haacke got up the nose of Charles Saatchi with a splendid portrait of Margaret Thatcher in the style of a Victorian (Charles and Maurice Saatchi are featured on the plates in the top right hand corner. There's an interview with Haacke here).
And here's a bonus Haacke:
DP, how do reckon Julie Bishop is shaping up in her emulation of Ken Starr? Was she the best choice of casting in the role? Are the Libs capable of running their own game, or has this play been fully scripted by Fox? If it flops at the box office, will that be the end of the Credlin? Then, would the Libs do better with a Hobbit in the CoS chair?
ReplyDeleteI think it's yes, yes, yes and yes to all those questions Trev - there's simply no way I can bring myself to say "no".
ReplyDeleteBut I do think that Peter Jackson scandalously wasted a fine box opportunity to cast Tony Abbott in The Hobbit as Gollum and I predict the film will fall short of box office expectations.
Apparently he proved he was wonderfully adept at using the cloak of invisibility offered by the ring, his preciousss, in his relentless quest for power at any cost. And if not Ken Starr, then surely Julie Bishop, with her steely glare, could have played Smaug the dragon. Oops, I see the mood of the Liberal party is catching ...