One nation, one culture, one horse race ... or so the bien pensant cry ...

Wasn't the irrepressible Captain Flint in fine form yesterday (and more Rowe here) - as fine an example as any of the pond's thesis that when when you flip a Marxist you end up with a different form of fundamentalist ratbag - but the pond has other fish to fry, because last night it was transfixed by Media Watch.

Firstly the dog botherer wasn't mentioned; secondly the Terror's approach to reporting crime, Sensationalism Sells, was beguiling; and thirdly the Caterists, along with the parrot, scored another mention:

Nick Cater—a columnist on The Australian and former editor of The Weekend Australian—is also being sued by the Wagners in relation to the Grantham floods for comments like this made to Alan Jones in March: 
NICK CATER: ... it's very hard to escape the conclusion that if it was not for the quarry wall, 12 people would not have lost their lives that day ... — 2GB, The Alan Jones Breakfast Show, 17th March, 2015 
Cater made similar comments to Nine’s 60 Minutes, which led to the Wagners lawyer calling him a ratbag, vigilante and a fool. 
Cater has already defended his journalism in a long letter which you can find on our website , but he told us that he believes the legal action will have a: 
... chilling effect on investigative journalism. It will also prompt citizens without corporate backing to think twice before expressing honestly held opinions on talkback radio. — Nick Cater, Response to Media Watch, 2nd November, 2015 
[Senior Hydrologist, Dr Phillip Jordan acted as an expert witness that provided advice to the Queensland Floods Commission of Inquiry. He has responded to Nick Cater's claims] 
We prefer to think it will make commentators more careful to have real evidence before they shoot their mouths off. That’s what investigative journalism is actually about.

Epic stuff, and all this forms a fitting framework for the idle chatter that has filled the work of the bien pensant commentariat this week ...

Sorry, the pond knows that borrowing from French is the favourite Caterist word - later there'll be an easter egg search for its usage - but the pond finds it piquant to use the plundered verbiage in relation to commentariat columnists, in the sense defined by wiktionary:

Someone who accepts and/or espouses a fashionable idea after it has been established and maintains it without a great amount of critical thought.

How does this play out? Well at the start of the week, we learned that Rowan Dean, back in the day, deemed Cat Stevens a frigging musical genius. You can google it if you doubt the pond ...

Which says more about Dean than the pond ever dreamed or yearned to discover.

Of course it was all about the fandom's 'me, me, me' syndrome, whereby the artist is put on earth to satisfy the fans, and woe unto said artist if they develop peculiar ideas. (And let's face it, Cat Stevens did develop peculiar ideas, and did disgrace himself in relation to Salman Rushdie).

Dean wandered through a variety of mild secularism - describing an incident of torture very similar to one once endured by the pond at the hands of a very loopy nun - before ending up with this insight:

Same, same, same, in some mystical culture, as if the notion of "one culture" was a simple definitional issue.

There's another bit of music from way back when that describes Dean's vision of "one culture":

Of course the pond could have broken Godwin's Law while marvelling at "one culture" syndrome...

... by rattling off a bit about the unifying genius of German culture and how it might be defiled, but there's more than enough of that in Mein Kampf ...

But it's time to shift attention to the master bien pensant, who - despite the legal action against him - is still bravely fronting up to make the lizard Oz the rag that's known and loved around the nation ... by a select and falling few ...

Now for those who resolutely refuse to read the pond's carefully curated gobbets, there's a chance to have a coffee, but that will involve missing out on layers of irony ...

Now there is much to marvel at here, not least the notion that the inclusive approach has prevailed for centuries, as if the White Australia policy just vanished in a Caterist haze of delusions, as if the treatment of Aboriginal people involved an inclusive desire to give everyone a fair go, and as if standing up to sing a song to an absent Queen was the kind of integration many Australians yearned for ...

As for trust, that invaluable commodity essential to commerce and civility ... does that include taking legal action against blowhards?

Well the pond promised a certain level of irony, not least the bien pensant's assumption that his culture should be their culture.

But how pleased black activists must be that disputed views of history and of anthems and of who was here first must now be swept aside and national values shared. Speaking of such shared values, perhaps it's time for another Tasmanian genocide ...

But the pond digresses. It would be wrong to harp on about ten pound, or even vastly more expensive, Poms, and the notion that they are the ones to land here and to define shared national values ... because that's the only way there can be trust, and there will be no actions in the courts, such is the harmony in the land ... and hey nonny no, on we go ...

Of course integration here is code for "why don't they become like Caterists, perfect in every way, blended and united and integrated and melded and welded and moulded", which, considering the costs involved in certain court cases, offers that further layer of irony the pond promised.

And so to the final gobbet ...

And so gobbet haters missed out on the bien pensant easter egg hunt, with the words cunningly hidden in that last gobbet.

Of course it might only be the Caterists desire for an even deeper irony that this piece should culminate with a fulmination that suggests we should challenge the notion that nationalism might on occasion be akin to racism - remember, the White Australia policy never existed - along with confronting the pieties of cultural relativism, while celebrating the triumphalism that some cultures are more successful than others, which might lead some people off on a by-path to marvel at how the British were successful at exploiting vast areas of the planet, only to leave behind devastated countries and cultures when they were forced to retreat to their island state ... except when forming irritating diasporas that refused to integrate with any style or grace into their new cultural surroundings ...

It would of course be far to easy to reference again that chapter in Mein Kampf, Nation and Race, which is all about the way nationalism - in its extreme form - is more than akin to racism ... it is deeply and profoundly racist ...

Never mind, the pond learned long ago that it was different kind of egg - "the alien other, the Fenian menace"-  that's the way it was for Irish originating folk in the old days, and that Protestants and Masons and the English ran the show, and each wave of migration to this country has gone through the same sort of pecking routine, demanding that old cultures must be abandoned and newcomers must conform to banal stupidities, whether it be football, beer, barbecues or dumb horse racing ...

That's what happens when you keep the company of dull bien pensants, who think that there is one Australian culture - though they can never define it - and so the pond must revert to a life of three vegetables and meat overdone ...

Meanwhile, there is but one certainty. The notion that the pond must conform to a culture defined by Rowan Dean and the Caterists is the surest way to revive alienation in the pond, and bring on a dangerous radicalisation, such that when the pond is asked what it is rebelling against, the only answer can be, what are Dean and the bien pensant Caterists touting this week ...? And if they can manage that for the pond, what happens when others read their thoughts? Are they the ones tearing apart the fabric of this country.

Food for thought, as they say, and it was rather the same when the Captain was in charge, and seemed to think the entire country should be in the grip of his royalist delusions, and so thanks to Pope, and more Pope here, we end up where we started, with a migrant Pom flogging a head horse ...

Just on a hunch, the pond googled Nothing Leica Dame, and what do you know, Nothin' Leica Dane exists ... but that's enough of horses, and no the pond won't be watching the Cup, on the off chance that Rowan Dean and the Caterists will ...