With Monday now established as Moorice day, second prize is ... George Orwell ...

The reptiles have kicked off Monday in style, with the usual flurry of outraged indignation:

One-great Fairfax papers?

But surely there's more than one? Aren't we talking papers?

Oh wait, you mean "once-great"? Can the pond suggest a different splash?

"How much lower can the once-great Murdochian subs sink?"

Yes, yes, it's anal retention day at the pond, and self-examination of a media fetishistic kind, as the Fairfaxians continue to haunt the reptile mind. Oh and there's also the ABC:

Talk about the utter tedium of the one trick pony dog botherer.

Some days the pond feels up to it, and some days, the pond just wonders why they let some people out of the loony bin to put on display their obsessive compulsive behaviour. Would the dog botherer be better off with a compelling desire to wash his hands every five minutes, rather than write endlessly about the ABC? Quite possibly ...

Then there was the confusion of message. Another dog botherer, the Kerrish one, seemed to be in a celebratory mood:

But then it turned out that the lizard Oz's official stenographer is one of the sixty-something comfy-cardie Carlton types ...

Then there were the usual alarums and panics, and the reptilian Troy still resolutely pounding the drums of war:

Ah, that's the secret, invisible army no-one's heard about or knows about, except for the reptiles of Oz.

What next? Surely it's time for an exposé of the furtive lizard people who rule the planet ... (oh wait, it's been done, 12 Million Americans Believe Lizard People Run Our Country).

But the pond isn't fickle, the pond is loyal and faithful and true, and once it noticed Maurice, there was only one writer fresh from the loony bin who could dominate the day's proceedings:

Now being Moorice, there will be rich irony at play, and a befuddling stupidity. 

The pond always hopes, hope above hope, that the Orwell gambit, a serious breach of a sub-section of Godwin's many elaborate laws, will come into play.

And what do you know, it did:

Who else but Moorice could use Orwell, a life-long supporter of democratic socialism - albeit of a confused kind - to denounce the left?

First I spent five years in an unsuitable profession (the Indian Imperial Police, in Burma), and then I underwent poverty and the sense of failure. This increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working classes, and the job in Burma had given me some understanding of the nature of imperialism: but these experiences were not enough to give me an accurate political orientation. Then came Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, etc.... The Spanish War and other events in 1936—37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.

Indeed, indeed, but Moorice is adept at the language of enormous and fatuous stupidity, compounded by a double strength dose of chicken little alarmism.

Hmm, that sounds shocking, alarming, even terrifying. A budget catastrophe, government revenues dropping, workers daring to demand a living wage, inferior products from a one-great nation ...

After running around in satisfactory circles, with head lopped off chicken, what to do, what to do?

Oh thank the long absent lord, there's still time for a boondoggle and some pork-barreling. 

But do go on with the hysteria, and please, feel free to repeat yourself:

What? Not another breach of that sub-section of Godwin's many excellent laws? Poor Orwell's name once more taken in vain?

Oh well, at least it gives the pond a chance to sample a few more of Orwell's lines:

It’s so simple. The official holds the Burman down while the businessman goes through his pockets. Do you suppose my firm, for instance could get its timber contracts if the country weren’t in the hands of the British?… The British Empire is simply a device for giving trade monopolies to the English... 

 "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also"…. It was Marx who brought it to life. And ever since he did so the motives of politicians, priests, judges, moralists and millionaires have been under the deepest suspicion–which, of course, is why they hate him so much. 

Here was a man who had been half-blinded in one of the most useful of all jobs and drawing a pension to which he had a perfect right... Yet he could not...demand this pension.... He had to go to the colliery once a week at a time named by the company, and when he got there he was kept waiting about four hours in the cold wind. For all I know he was expected to touch his cap and show gratitude to whoever paid him. 

Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all. And it was here that those few months in the militia were valuable to me. For the Spanish militias, while they lasted, were a sort of microcosm of a classless society. In that community where no one was on the make, where there was a shortage of everything but no privilege and no bootlicking, one got, perhaps, a crude forecast of what the opening stages of socialism might be like. And, after all, instead of disillusioning me it deeply attracted me. The effect was to make my desire to see socialism established much more actual than it had been before.

And so on and so Orwellian forth, but I can sense some people wondering what to do with the diminishing buffers against external shocks and the Greek mindset and all the other economic matters that torment Maurice's mind.

Simple really.

And now, time please, ladies and gentlemen, please fill your glasses with kool aid for one last drink:

Or perhaps we should learn the language of Orwell:

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past 10 years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice.... I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.

Oh dear, could he be evoking the general humbug of Moorice?

Well there's a solution to that, chairman of the Prime Minister's Business Advisory Council:

When in doubt and the invisible union army is secretly and furtively marching on Canning, remember to bribe the populace so that the poll comes out the right way ...

And so to a Rowe cartoon, and more Rowe here:

Surreal or what? Some might feel like an Escher drawing after that or perhaps a wander through Bosch ... they'll certainly evoke what it's like to live in Moorice Abbott land with reptiles as your guide ...