A long time ago, Paul Cox made a film about an elderly woman trapped in an old folks home, where she had absolutely no affinity with the other residents, still being alert of mind, interested in the arts and interested in the world.
It was called "We Are All Alone My Dear", and anytime the pond gets melancholy, that title still swims around in the mind.
The pond has no political party and no religion, and in melancholy mode looks at all the others in the world running around with certainty and wonders where it comes from. It's not much of a country either, what with dropping its refugee solution on another, still developing, country ...
This being Sunday, it's meditation day, and while the pond loves Yeats, it was a wretched thing for him to capture in a few lines the essence of the problem, in a way which has long haunted the pond:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
The pond was never likely to vote for the Labor party, but its latest flourishes of policy in relation to refugees and other matters makes it a certainty - this falcon can't hear the falconer, at least not if its the Ruddster. As for its local rep, Albo, the member for useless reports ... if this falcon caught a mouse, it would only be so it could drop it down Albo's useless pants ...
As for the thought of contemplating a vote for Tony Abbott and team, how to live with the shame? The ignominy? The sheer implausibility and impossibility...
And the Greens, led by Christine Milne? So severe ...
Is it wrong to judge this way? Guilty as charged - but at least Bob Brown showed a sense of humour at the same time as setting up interesting initiatives (and why not listen to Off Track's tale of Naree Station as a heritage site on the ABC here).
What's even more appalling in its own way, is the response of baying right wing loons to the Ruddster's lurch to a tougher position than even the Liberals imagined:
Yes, suddenly the hardliners baying like hounds have turned sook, as you can discover if you can summon the stomach to read Miranda the Devine in Kevin Rudd just created another boatload of humanitarian problems.
Is it possible to imagine the Devine as a bleeding heart?
Of course not, she spends the entire piece attacking bleeding hearts for not attacking Rudd, and then comes the real comedy:
In the end, if Abbott wins the election, Rudd may have done him a favour. No matter what policy he implements, it can't possibly be crueller than Rudd's PNG solution.
Abbott has a conscience and this will lighten his load.
Abbott has a conscience? Abbott welcomed the policy, only pausing to note that he was the best gauleiter to run it ...
The pond has at last come to understand why many don't bother to enrol, why those that do then evade voting, and why those who get inside a voting booth deliver a donkey vote or scribble abuse on the paper, making it invalid.
The pond can even understand Alan Langer, and why he came up with the Langer vote, though when you remember the jail sentence he copped, it might be best to speak of it in hushed tones. In his day he first Australian prisoner of conscience in twenty years ...!
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world ...
Ah well, at least, we've still got mere anarchy!
And a goodly dose of comedy, and again it features the Sunday Terror.
A long time ago - well it seems a long time - and in another country, John McTernan wrote a piece for the UK Terror, the header for which says it all: Julia Gillard: Australian blokes have done their country down, Julia Gillard has been driven out as Australia's prime minister by a brutal and unfair misogynist culture.
Fair enough. And rags like the downunder Terror were front and centre with this sort of stuff:
Yes, McTernan was routinely abused as a spin doctor and a spin meister of the lowest and most pathetic kind, a rogue 457 ratbag smuggled into the country to fool the natives. News Corp hacks spent a considerable amount of time demonising him as an out of touch Scot who'd ruined things in the UK for Labor, and was now ruining things in a foreign land ...
At the time of the 'Spins and Needles' cover, the Terror opined in an editorial:
Six prime ministerial staffers accompanied her at the photo session, which was the idea of her senior adviser, John McTernan. Consider the public expense, all just to present a positive angle at a time when Ms Gillard's political stocks are in freefall.
Rather than being positive, the image suggests a prime minister who is completely out of touch with the electorate and who cannot read the public mood. It also supports the view of critics who claim Ms Gillard misunderstands the seriousness of her office. (here)
Ah that McTernan, coming up with a grand idea that showed how completely out of touch Gillard was, completely incapable of reading the public mood, in the grip of a profound misunderstanding about everything ...
So who turns up in today's Terror scribbling what?
Not to worry, people on a 457 have to have an employer and make a living if they're to hang around, but if you actually click on The Julia I know and love but you never really met, you'll find an astonishing pile of guff of the most fawning kind.
What's even worse is if you click on it to read it, you might get a news+ demand for money before being able to proceed ...
So why is the Terror finally on board with Julia worship? Why hire McTernan?
Well it's mischief-making and hypocrisy of the first water, and all that we've come to know of the Terror and its ways ...
To deal with it, the pond had to turn to a little Popery to get through this Sunday. More David Pope here.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments older than two days are moderated and there will be a delay in publishing them.