In which the pond makes an obligatory trip to the deep north to spend quality time with the Currish Snail, the toads and Rowan Dean ...

The pond has to issue a solemn warning to the reptiles of Oz ... beware an even greater loss of readership.

It turns out the toads to the deep north are now the ones maintaining the flame.

While the lizard Oz has turned touchy feely, and wishy washy, and has the limp rag quality much admired by the cardigan wearers of the ABC and the Fairfaxians, sold out to and degutted by Malcolm Turnbull's love of public transport, and while the pond might love big Mal's willingness to hop on a train or a Queensland light rail carriage - can't we just call it a tram? - it's a certain sign of the end of the world, and the arrival of the apocalypse and the rapture.

What we need is the maintaining of the rage, and it's the Currish Snail that now each Monday presents the thoughts of that vigilant warrior, that mighty hawk, Rowan Dean .. watch out reptiles of Oz, you're being outgunned at alarmism and a yearning for a return to the old days of division, and hate, and bigotry and bile ...

Indeed, indeed, and first a quick refresher course ...

(And more to be found thanks to the Jesuits at Eureka Street here).

Fortified? Good, let us press on ...

Oh wait, did anybody think to round up the stalwart troops?

What a handy bunch. They look nicely thonged with attitude.

Now, da dah, let us plunge in, nicely primed ...

Oh dear, the pond forgot it was still comedy week at the Currish Snail ...

Never mind, let's at last get to the hard-hitting actual text ...

Indeed, indeed, because there's nothing better than a bunch of boat and plane people running around telling each other they should leave the joint and arguing about which boat and plane arrived first ... though in the case of the original Australians you have to go back a few thousand years ...

Still no doubt Team Dean has the right sort of mob standing by to do the job ...

Indeed, indeed, and what's wrong with visitors from the Bronx telling Australians to leave the bloody country, or followers of Satan expressing a desire to rid the country of evil?

But back to the text of the day.

Sorry, it's a long rant, but it does make requisite use of Orwellian, and therefore deserves a Godwin's Law tick, and it does yearn for Team Australia, and so means there's a chance for a sequel to Team America ... preferably with fornicating puppets, because there's nothing so funny as seeing wooden things go at it hard ... and at the end of it, the pond will seek to summarise a few of the more marvellous moments ...

Did you spot the bit that the pond loved ... this society cannot be changed by violence, that its values are eternal and not up for negotiation ...

Oh sure, there were many other fine moments, with talk of bleeding hearts and nattering about death cults and maintaining the rage, and demonising Islamics for not doing enough, and so on and so forth ...

But the infinite stupidity of that bit about violence really cost the pond a lot of spilled jaffas ...

It couldn't be topped, could it, given the way the country was founded on a violent campaign of extermination, Bligh was forced to hide under his bed so the rum might flow, and we proceeded to partake in every decent major war doing the rounds, at least since the NSW Contingent headed off to Sudan in 1885,  long after we'd indulged in race riots on the gold fields, and got such a taste of rioting that it built up to the Eureka Stockade, and thereby produced a flag now beloved by the hard right and the hard left, and so on and so endlessly violent forth ...

And yet ... its values are eternal and not up for negotiation ...

Which is such a sublime bit of total idiocy and complete nonsense and infinite stupidity that the whole box of Jaffas flew out the window ...

Now the pond can trace one side of the Irish ancestry landing here in 1842, and can advise for a fact, that the values then doing the rounds turned out not to be eternal, and certainly were up for negotiation ...

Now Rowan Dean, for whatever personal reasons, might yearn for the old days ...

And the pond has a deep affection for some of the music of the old days celebrating the notion of a decent lashing ...

But values are never eternal, not in this society nor in any other, nor in the bible or the Qu'ran (not with all the astute cherry-picking and variations they allow), and so the question becomes not some simplistic, simple-minded chant that this was how it was in 1788, and that's the way it must stay, but hopefully some more coherent and intelligent discussion of what values, as a multi-cultural society, we might aspire to ...

But you won't find any of that in Rowan Dean. He's just an addle-head bubble-headed booby, content with his two and three word slogans, and his capacity for scribbling pure unadulterated nonsense ...

And what's more he has the cheek to berate Malcolm Turnbull for waffle ...

The pond's wafflemeter melted down when it hit this snag:

And it turns out it was just a repeat of an original ineffable monstrous stupidity ...

Ah well, since we're in the territory of Dean, it's time for a repeat of the slogan that we started off with, plus bonus text ...