In which the pond happily prattles along with Polonius ...

Oh dear, google couldn't even find a picture of the lad lurking behind the arras ...

There, that's better - the pond hasn't forgotten Polonius this weekend.

Who could overlook the prattler when he turned up on The Insiders, as proud as punch and pleased to express his disdain for the wretched organisation by boycotting the show, and his chance to do a tellyvisual preen and display his enormous knowledge ...

Oh okay, that probably doesn't make sense, he'd most likely turn up on the ABC if they offered him a job to spin the wheel in a Plucka Duck segment ...

But until KFC calls to revive the prattling Polonius character beloved by all, the pond continues to hold grave fears for Polonius, so low down on the totem of reptile prattlers at the lizard Oz has he slipped ...

His weekly column is frequently buried, and so it takes a triumph of the will to find it, and then to read it to the very end.

This week Polonius got stuck into the greenies, and it's true that the whole Senate mess can be sheeted home in part to Richard di Natale, who now must pretend that letting loose the rabid Hansonites, including a barking mad, devious, disingenuous sovereign citizen climate denialist - how his tune has changed now that the hawk has said hello to the handsaw as it travelled north by north west - was just good old democracy at work, and the people had spoken, and never mind the Greens dropping a seat or the the way that the Senate has further slipped into rabble territory...

Never mind, it'll all be better in three years time they say ...

You might be able to sell that sort of guff to the innocent young greenie the pond had sharp words with recently - she was so sweet, and so beguiled, and so completely unable to understand how the party had wandered up a dry gulch and got pinged in NSW - but naturally Polonius cranks the pond up to eleven...

Now the pond has been down this path before with Polonius, and this sort of ancient history is about as relevant to the discussion as noting Polonius's long and enduring dalliance with the loons led by the Franco-worshipping B. A. Santamaria, who had an alarming tendency towards fascism.

Somehow this reminded the pond of Guy Rundle's review of Polonius's profile of Santa (not the sort of red you want coming down the chimney), which can be found here at Crikey, and which included the immortal line ...

Reviewers and previewers have praised it, but with the tone often reserved for someone who has made a model of St Patrick’s Cathedral out of matchsticks, the credit due to the solid execution of a task that is utterly incomprehensible.

And then, waltzing past all the inconvenient matters omitted by Polonius but noted by Rundle, this summary of Polonius and Santa together, which would be sure to rouse Polonius's ire:

That’s Henderson at his best/worst, ignoring inconvenient facts. There’s no other way to write it, since Henderson himself joined the organisation in 1966. By then a spiritual and political malaise has started to grip the NCC, Santamaria’s key organisation. The long and indefinite alliance with capitalism was starting to eat into its soul, as the very decadence Santamaria had predicted it would bring was now coming to pass, with the rise of the consumer culture, the youthquake and everything that we now call the ’60s (or to use the Australian term, the ’70s). Soviet communism may have fallen into torpor, but all the energy was with the new Third World variety, from Havana to Hanoi. That the war against complex and hybrid forces — anti-imperialist, nationalist, communist etc — was turning into a vast atrocity was of no import. B-52s, the bloody coup in Indonesia, the apartheid-era South African government, the Pinochet coup that restaged Franco’s victory 40 years on — all was supported in the pages of News Weekly, the NCC’s wacky/bloody flagship publication. 
None of it gets a mention here. Instead there is a deep examination of the NCC that occurred in the 1970s, based around Santamaria’s increasing megalomania — by the late 1960s, he was coming to be the sole speaker at NCC and other Movement group conference, giving eight of nine papers across the course of a weekend. Many of those from the non-Catholic anti-communist movement, and not bound up in the mystique, found it exhausting. “Like Fidel Castro,” Peter Coleman observed. This is also the point at which the author enters as subject. Henderson had been attracted to the NCC in the mid-’60s as a student at Melbourne University, and rapidly became a rising figure within Santa’s organisation. But over the years he claims he became disenchanted with Santamaria’s autocratic style, and also his oppositionism and kulturpessismus — his sense that he was fighting a losing battle against the forces of atheist nihilism, and that the Christian West had already been lost. Others have suggested — amazingly, this doesn’t appear in the book — that it was Santamaria who became disenchanted with Henderson, seeing in him not someone who could take up the struggle, but a young man on the make, already looking for a chance to rise in the political mainstream. This all culminated in a 1974 conference at which seven of the nine papers were to be given by Santa, with Henderson permitted to give a dissident view of internal organisation, and someone else speaking on “Hope”, a topic Santamaria was happy to delegate because, as Henderson remarks in one of the occasional moments of dry wit in the work, “he believed there was none”. At the last moment, Henderson’s paper was cancelled, and he left the organisation, ending up in the Fraser Liberal government. It’s not impossible that, by this time, Santa was using one of the many techniques one develops in such small group organisations, encouraging someone, of their own accord, to fuck off.

Phew by the end of all that, the pond almost forgot about Polonius whacking Lee Rhiannon. That saga sounds suspiciously like a satirical Python sketch about splitters ...

Now the pond should declare it has some sympathy for Bob Brown in this matter. Rhiannon has never been a good fit, and she is out of touch and should go, and the disaster of the Grayndler campaign and the tone deaf suggestion to preference Fred Nile ahead of a gay lawyer for the crime of being Liberal (as opposed to being a barking mad bigot) are just a few of the stumbles that the NSW Greens made in the election ...

But this has nothing to do with the family she grew up in, or else we would have to stop Polonius from writing columns because of his one-time affiliation with a crypto-fascist fundamentalist Catholic organisation that would render a Python speechless ...

Never mind, back to the last gobbet which is, for Polonius, mercifully brief ... no need for Santa to cut him off, though admirably the prattler slips in a note about Fairfax and the ABC, because apparently his boycott of the ABC and his resolute refusal to endorse the organisation by appearing on it has failed to change  the direction of the wretched greenie lovers ...

Oh dear, the pond's got a little befuddled again ... look there he is surrounded by the infidels ...

... making strange gestures ...

... and keeping most excellent company ...

Because the ABC is full of festering greenies ...

Oops, and the prattler, and once again we almost completely forgot that last gobbet ...

Oh yes, to be an Arab in the democracy of Israel. Now there's an ambition, a bit like wanting to be a black caught up in the NT's correctional system ...

Never mind, graduates of the Santa school are a tough lot. Don't expect Polonius to take the pond's advice to "go now" before you disappear completely from the digital front page of the lizard Oz. Polonius seems destined to be invisible for years to come, except when the ABC invites him over for a Plucka Duck segment ...

And so a couple of the cartoons you could have sighted on the Talking Pictures segment here ...

Now there's a steaming pile of something ...