In which the pond explores some offensive concepts, and we're not just talking braying alleged British Marxists of the Tory kind or Miranda the Devine ...

Before we get to the genuinely potentially offensive material - please, and seriously, stop reading if you're easily offended - the pond offers this light-hearted bit of offensive tweeting ...

Well we all know what suck on that means, and we're not talking popsicles or sherbet sticks ...

Yes, urged on by the wise words of the Order of Lenin hunter, the pond has been tracking assorted twitter feeds - you just google, don't you know - and surely that effort by Miranda the Devine has to be one of the silliest and most tragic and pathetic twittering tweets of recent times ...

The News awards are the awards that the disconsolate reptiles award themselves because they can't get enough awards when competing out in the wider world.

It's about as meaningful and as useful as that employee of the month award you might spot while heading to the toilets in a McDonald's ... at least if you're inclined to slowly poison yourself by ingesting crap, which the pond does on a daily basis by tending to the reptiles' need for attention to be paid ...

Naturally it produced a fine old frenzy of tweets back ...

There's plenty more but the pond just had to honour that reference to Monty ...

But enough dilly-dallying, fiddle-faddling, delaying and equivocating, because it's time for the main feast, which this day is one Brendan O'Neill, legendary Marxist in his own conservative, supinely religious, establishment Tory way ...

Yes, the old colonialist has once again decided to visit Australia's shores, and he's taken up the cudgels on behalf of Bill Leak, because as well as awards, there must be high praise for middle finger flipping ...

Somehow it reminded the pond of that noble ancient tradition in Australian films, the "silly ass" who comes out from the old country to discover a rapport with the bush and to set the colonials on the straight and narrow ...

And so to the silly ass's piece in this day's lizard Oz ...

Is it possible to say at braying length something that might be best reserved for the length of a tweet? Admirable in a way for O'Neill to prove that there is ...

But instead of being temperate and short - why, in a tweet we might have able to lay off after "twitterstorm" and "narcissism" - we're asked not to worry about the peculiarity of a man defending a dodgy cartoon, while managing at the same time to deplore the dodginess of tweeting ...

Now can the thought police and thought crimes, and a mention of Lomborg and assorted other received bits of Tory wisdom be far behind?

The pond routinely thinks that O'Neill is offensive, but that's his schtick, that's how he grafts a living.

Being offensive keeps him in the public eye, and keeps him notorious and keeps him fed, writing newspaper columns, and just like drawing racist cartoons and pretending it's a contribution to a solution to the problem, it's a living.

At least in that bit of the read we didn't bump up against Orwellian.

Not to worry, the libertarian free speech routine might be a grand form of bullshit, but the pond doesn't mind a bit of idle posturing of the silly ass Tory kind.

And then we came to this:

Say what? So shocking it couldn't be described here?

But it's actually easy enough to describe. It's a poem about gay necrophiliac sex with Christ. The case is easy enough to link to, it has a wiki here,  and it involved a poem by James Kirkup, The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name, which has a wiki here.

And then the pond began to wonder why, for all his libertarian blather and posturing, O'Neill said he was so shocked that he couldn't possibly describe it there, or here, or wherever.

Well there's one explanation, which the pond likes to think of as the grandmother reason.

There are - were now - certain things that one didn't do with one's grandmother in Tamworth.

One didn't swear - even bloody was on the edge -,one didn't talk about sex acts, missionary or wilder, and one didn't say or do other indelicate things - heck, one grandma even put hands over pond's eyes so that the pure vessel wouldn't be spoiled by the sight of lewd rock 'n rollers doing their vile, hedonistic rituals, one step short of actual coupling on the dance floor ...

So when it came to heading away from Tamworth, the pond discovered many things that couldn't be mentioned to grandmas, like Henry Miller and William Burroughs and James Joyce and ... (here's where genteel readers should avert their eyes) ... scenes like this from The Naked Lunch, though the book is now regarded as something of a classic, and heck they even made a Hollywood movie out of it, though the pond can't remember this scene in the movie ...

Okay now we've established that reptiles are mugwumps in disguise (here's where genteel readers must avert their eyes) ...

To put it gently, the pond was mildly astonished.

There'd been nothing like this in Tamworth, and truth to tell, there was nothing much like it in Armidale either ...

As a result, mugwumps have haunted the pond ever since. That piece of prose seared into the brain and never left ...

Now the pond understands the notion of multiple tongues, multiple discourses. 

Artists are generally thought to have a little leeway. You can get away with something in art that might cause trouble in more mainstream publications, unless of course the mainstream can feast on you, as they did on Bill Henson, as a kind of succulent carrion ...

Blogs aren't mainstream newspapers, and with or without warning, they can print all sorts of things, just as Twitter and YouTube can be full of idle abuse - it's astonishing how much the comments on YouTube make a cesspit seem like a latrine.

So the pond can understand why O'Neill, for all his mock bravado, didn't want to go any further.

But that's surely the point. Bill Leak and the reptiles of Oz did go further, and they printed an offensive, racist cartoon, as they've done with Leak a number of times in the past.

When it comes to a comparison between Burroughs and Kirkup, the only significant variant is the presence of Christ ...

Well you can read the rest here if you like, but the pond reserves the right, on aesthetic, rather than Orwellian grounds, to cut the damn thing short ... in much the same way that the pond was never really taken by Piss Christ, in much the same way as it was never really taken with a pissy shark in formalin ... in much the same way that it won't join Xian and Islamic fundamentalists going around smashing up temples they don't like ...

But if we're talking about conceptual things, how is necrophiliac sex any weirder or stranger than people who kneel down and imagine that they're consuming the actual body of Christ and swallowing the actual blood of Christ, in a sort of cannibalistic ritual that stretches way back into the pagan mists of time? Yes, the pond finds the notion of cannibalism offensive and disturbing (there being no evidence it helps with strength, fertility or brain power ...)

Here's the thing. If it gets too much for the reptiles of Oz, if they're worried about their freedom - no, their splendid right - to insult and offend, why are they so soft on Christians peddling the most offensive ideas imaginable?

While talking up a mean game about Bill Leak's right to offend the most hapless, excluded and abused members of the Australian community?

Well don't expect any answers in the last O'Neill gobbet ...

Which is, it has to be said, complete bullshit. There will be no breakthrough in relation to indigenous issues because Bill Leak drew an offensive cartoon. He's been drawing offensive cartoons for years, and it hasn't changed anything,  except for a substantial increase in the number of people he's offended.

Art, offensive or inoffensive, doesn't actually change much, and hasn't managed to change much in the past few thousand years.

All the pacifist art in the world didn't stop two world wars, and there are some that propose if artists want to send a message, they should use a telegram. A pivot on that suggests that the best art depends on the quality of the villainy and the evil ...

But if you're going to be a cartoonist, why embrace the role of villain with such relish?

Which is why it's nonsense to propose that the reptiles have the slightest interest in a breakthrough of some unimaginable, intangible Leakian kind. 

All that fancy dressing, that wheeling in of Shaw and Copernicus, as if it's got some relevance or justification for Leak is so much nonsense.

All the blather about daring over conformity is just so much blather from a man who didn't even dare to specify the subject matter of a poem, while defending Bill Leak's right to defame black fathers, who have no recourse except to petition a government bureaucratic for a reprimand which, if offered, will be published, and then disappear into the ether...

What on earth does O'Neill say to his grandmother about all this?

Leak's cartoons evoke the behaviour of mugwumps, which is to say reptiles ... and if there's a breakthrough in that, it's probably just a chance to appear in a sequel to The Naked Lunch.

There are alternatives of course, and not just the song at the end of Life of Brian:

Lady Presenter: [briskly] Well, that's the End of the Film, now here's the Meaning of Life. 
[An envelope is handed to her. She opens it in a business-like way.] Thank you Brigitte. [She reads.]... 
Well, it's nothing special. Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations. And do try not to publish racist cartoons, it would be ever so nice and kind.
And finally, here are some completely gratuitous pictures of penises and a bit of William Burroughs to annoy the censors, and to hopefully spark some sort of controversy which it seems is the only way these days to get the jaded video-sated public off their fucking arses and back to reading sodding blogs.
Family entertainment bollocks! What they want is filth, people doing things to each other with chainsaws during tupperware parties, babysitters being stabbed with knitting needles by gay presidential candidates, vigilante groups strangling chickens, armed bands of theatre critics exterminating mutant goats - where's the fun in blogging? 
Oh well, there we are - here's the theme music. Goodnight.

No, no, wait, wait, oh please wait, here's the special award for excellence to Brendan O'Neill ...