The Bolter test ...

(Above: Fairfax buried its cartoon tag - who knows why, apart from an infinite capacity for self-destructive behaviour - but it can be found here).

The pond shamefacedly admits that it routinely fails the Bolter test.

There's only so much hardcore phobia that the pond can take on any given day in any given week, month or year.

But reading the Bolter occasionally is cleansing, a bit like that old Indian yoga trick of swallowing muslin cloth (twenty foot long, three inches wide, please wash and disinfect prior to use, if you die, sue someone else).

The idea is to cleanse the body of toxins and flush out all accumulated impurities from the digestive tract. At the end of the process, one can feel mentally alert, healthy and rejuvenated. Or perhaps you just choked on the bandage and turned a bright pink before expiring ... if you die, make sure your lawyer sues someone else.

Never mind, it's awe-inspiring to see how the Bolter is delighted at the way a blonde doing her best for blonde stereotypes fell into his cunning trap ...

You see, she went too far, and the Bolter would never go too far, even she thought she was parroting the Bolter line, but it's all the fault of the ABC that she went too far.

It's got nothing to do with her or with the Bolter that she went too far, it's all the fault of everyone else and vicious people on the ABC for daring to point out that she went too far.

Yes, of course, she dared to go too far, but how fair or right or just is it to note that she went too far?

It's splendid stuff, a perfect form of disingenuous dissembling, which manages both to shop the hapless Kruger and yet allow the Bolter to mount an assault on his usual array of enemies, and in the process display a carefully controlled capacity for not going too far, and yet going far enough in the world of phobic fear-mongering and frothing and foaming that in a dog whistling way, he yet again goes too far.

This capacity to stay within the legal guidelines - how good is court experience as a teacher - is a mark of the wise far right wing pundit, as opposed to hapless blondes caught up in striving to achieve perfect blonde-ness and consummate blonde stereotypes.

Let us admire how it's done ... the pond will skip the photos of the evil enemies, we all know who they are, so we can just admire the outraged text, but let us at least put an acknowledgment of the sponsor at the top of the text ...

     
  

You see, it's all in the interest of a debate.

Yes, Kruger went too far, but going too far is a debate we must have ...only by going too far will the debate be meaningful. Those that urge us not to go too far are by definition going much too far.

Friends, countrymen, Channel Nine viewers lend me your ears; 
I come to bury Kruger, not to praise her. 
The evil that women speak lives after them; 
The good is oft interred on a morning talk show; 
So let it be with Kruger. 
The noble Soutphommasane 
Hath told you Kruger was ambitious blonde who went too far: 
If it were so, it was a grievous fault, 
And grievously hath Kruger  answer'd it. 
Here, under leave of Jonathan Green and the rest-- 
For Green is an honourable ABC man; 
In the sense that dung beetles have honour;
So are they all, all honourable men-- 
Come I to speak in Kruger's media funeral. 
She was my friend, faithful and just to me: 
She quoted me, even if she went a little too far
In a debate we must all have, in which we might all go 
A little too far ...
But Green says she was an ambitious blonde Nine bubblehead
Who went a little too far; 
And Green is an honourable man. 
He hath brought many captives home to Ultimo 
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill: 
Did this in Kruger seem ambitious? 
When that the poor have cried, 
Kruger hath wept
Or at least danced: 
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff: 
Yet Green and Soutwhatever says she was ambitious; 
And Southwhatever is an honourable man... for a former ALP staffer
Generally with the honour of assembled staff dung beetles 
You all did see that in the HUN
I thrice presented Kruger a kingly crown, 
Which she did thrice refuse
Having been punished in a show trial: was this ambition? 
Yet Green says she was ambitious and went too far; 
And, sure, he is an honourable man. 
And she did indeed go a little too far.
I speak not to disprove what Green spoke, 
But here I am to speak what I do know. 
You all did love Kruger once, not without cause: 
Her dancing, her dazzling blonde insights
Her confirmation that stereotypes still had a proud place
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for her? 
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts, 
Who fail to understand the point of going too far,
And men (and a few women) have lost their reason. 
Bear with me; 
My heart is in the coffin there with Kruger and with Nine, 
And I must pause till it come back to me.

Of course the Bolter chose to end with a different poem, a different quote, and that is part of his most peculiar skill.

It takes some considerable brass to seize on a line used by James Baldwin (you can find a pdf of the first part of his essay for The New Yorker here).

It takes considerable skill to seize on a line from a pre-Civil war black spiritual, Mary Don't You Weep, and to distort the meaning of the original and its implications.

The very moment I thought I was lost 
The dungeon shook and the chains fell off.

It's a peculiar achievement to transform a song about liberation into a dire, foam-flecked fear-mongering threat of doom, in the manner of a black-clad Calvinist preacher ...

And what was Baldwin himself singing about?

Amen to that. That early reference to a Black Muslim preacher was a tad unnerving for the Bolter, no doubt, but the pond can go with the notion of dropping assorted false gods.

If the concept of the Bolter has any validity or use, it can only be to make us larger, freer and more loving. If the Bolter cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of him ...

Sadly this might also mean having to get rid of references to Lucifer and Satan and the rest of the gobbledegook, even if that noble creation in his original deed turned out to be a tea partying revolutionary Republican ...

Go Donald, teach that damned establishment and Ted Cruez a lesson ...