In which the pond celebrates western civilisation with Kev, butcher of meaning ...

Naturally given a choice between the Bolter doing over the Triggs for the umpteenth time, or celebrating the West (capital, please), the pond would always go with Kev, if only because his first name always reminds the pond of Kev Kavanagh, the trendy butcher from the mighty 'Gong, a high point in western culture ...

Now the pond routinely celebrates all that's best about secularism and atheism.

Much has been done, but much, as the immortal cliché has it, remains to be done, especially on this front.

 It's rare that a day doesn't pass when some fool celebrates an act of god - say when She has spared people in a fatal accident - a miracle, the tabloids shout - without any thought to the fickle, arbitrary and cruel way She organised the very same accident in which some people died.

At the very least, they should berate Her for bunging on the do, and then only sparing a few while killing others ...

But enough of ordinary theology, let's move into the stratosphere with Kev, the man who makes the pond routinely think that the Australian Catholic University provides shelter for tosspots, weirdos and IPA style ratbags ... up or down there with the good old NCC Santamaria days ...

Indeed, indeed. The pond was pleased to learn that there is plenty of room for text in the left frame, and what we're gazing at, in a completely meaningless way, is an ancient statue in Rome, Italy ...

No doubt, using Terrorist logic,  because ancient statue... paganism rulez ...

Pulling a stock image off the shelf and running it because it's there is supposed to be a sign of civilisation at work, as opposed to a dumbwit Terror sub throwing in a pic for the latest serve of Kev's fine sausage?

Not to worry, let's get on with the celebration ...

Now it takes an enormous capacity for stupidity to manage to put "sanctity of life" and "fought for and died to defend" in the one sentence, but please, let it pass.

Let's accept, for the sake of the argument, that world wars one and two, organised by the west and indulged in by the west, while dragging many other countries into the conflict, has something to do with a clash of western culture with Islam. Let us agree that bombing the shit out of Vietnam, and dosing it lavishly with chemicals was a high point of western civilisation. Let us forget the Holocaust, because there's little doubt that Hitler was an acolyte of Islam ...

Let us marvel instead at a tyke attempting to demonise Islam as a theocratic religion, when the Holy Roman Empire was for many centuries a thing, and it's only the decline of Catholicism as a monolithic force that has seen some sense prevail against an aggrandising religion which still makes life hard for gays and others it disapproves of ...such as women wanting to exercise the right to control their bodies, rather a fundamental of a liberal democracy, the pond would have thought ...

If we're going to demonise one religion, why not demonise them all, and throw in fake, ersatz religions like scientology as a bonus ...

But the pond admits that religion does offer insights ... whenever the pond sees a large photo of the author accompanying a story in the Terror, the pond is instantly reminded of the biblical verse ...

Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,

vanity of vanities! All is vanity.

What does man (or woman) gain by the toil of Terror nonsense

at which he (or she) toils under the Murdoch?

All things are full of weariness.

the Kev cannot utter it;

Nor the ear filled with the empty braying of the donkey ...

Or some such thing. And so to the picture of Kev that set the pond going ...

Oh damn you, Terror sub, damn you to the fictional world of hell invented by western civilisation for the disciplining and terrorising of sundry miscreants of the pond kind ... the pond meant this rather grand and portentous photo ...

Dear sweet long absent lord, what a tedious old prat he is, meandering and blathering into his dry sherry, but the pond was pleased to be reminded of good Cardinal Newman and his life companion ...

Ambrose Saint John (1815 -1875) apparently met Newman in 1841. They lived together for 32 years, starting in 1843. St. John was about 14 years younger than Newman. He compared their meeting to a Biblical same-sex couple, Ruth and Naomi. 
In Newman’s own words, St. John “came to me as Ruth came to Naomi” during the difficult years right before he left the Anglican church. After converting together to Catholicism, they studied together in Rome, where they were ordained priests at the same time. When St. John was confirmed in the Catholic faith, he asked if he could take a vow of obedience to Newman, but the request was refused. 
Newman recalled their early years in this way: “From the first he loved me with an intensity of love, which was unaccountable. At Rome 28 years ago he was always so working for and relieving me of all trouble, that being young and Saxon-looking, the Romans called him my Angel Guardian.” (and more here).

Ah well, at least he was decently Saxon looking. No doubt Adolph would have approved, and besides, it would be terrible to do a Burroughs, Ginsberg and Paul Bowles and head off to Tangier ...

In his diary, the English playwright Joe Orton recorded a conversation at the Cafe de Paris in 1967. Orton was sitting at a table with friends beside a "rather stuffy American tourist and his disapproving wife." To further stoke their disapproval, the playwright began to talk about a sexual encounter. When one of those at the table reminded Orton that the tourists could hear every word, he replied, "they have no right to be occupying chairs reserved for decent sex perverts." (here).

And now back to very stuffy old Kev, as the pond began to wonder just why the old codger was going over exactly the same ground he's been tilling year after dull, pontificating year ...

Now almost every word in that bit of the tract verges on gibberish, and is full of distortions and misrepresentations, conflating Christianity with science, technology and reason, throwing in a bit of Americana and the usual rhetoric of the mindless conservative.

Why he bothers is a mystery to the pond. If Christianity helped bridges to stay up right, what were the Romans doing with their pagan gods? And between theology designing a plane, and an engineer, give the pond the engineer every time.

Well the reason why Kev's scribbling remains a mystery, but at least the mention of Orwell shows that as a scholar Kev's a bit of a dud, more a butcher than a seer.

You don't have to be much of a scholar, or even Greg Hunt Orwell's wiki, to know that Orwell was a lifelong, if somewhat confused and contradictory, supporter of democratic socialism, who had an intense dislike of Stalinist communism, only matched by his intense dislike of capitalism ...

To take from Animal Farm the notion that capitalism is far superior - as opposed to the notion that Stalin betrayed the revolution by substituting a new tyranny for the old one - is as doofus a misrepresentation as any fool claiming to be an academic might make ...

Socialists, at least those with Trotskyite inclinations still love Orwell, and he can be found being celebrated at the Socialist Party of Great Britain here ...

The anarchists tend to hold Orwell in high regard, appreciating his criticism of totalitarian regimes of both the right and left and his understanding of imperialism and capitalist values which can be seen in his earliest books, In 1933 he wrote: “Why are beggars despised? – for they are despised universally, I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living, In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic, the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable . . . Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised”, and one of Orwell's characters, Bozo, the Parisian tramp tapped his forehead and said: “I'm a free man in here” (Down and Out in Paris and London}.

Well yes, let's tiptoe past his homophobia, and instead marvel at how an alleged academic could so wilfully misread and misrepresent a fable which first of all is a satire of Stalinist Russia and the purge of Trotsky ...

In 1943 Orwell felt that the people in England, because of their admiration for the Russian war effort, consciously or unconsciously overlooked the faults of the communist regime in the USSR. He also felt that the English communists used their position as unofficial representatives of the USSR to prevent the truth from coming out - just as they had done in connection with the Spanish Civil War. "Indeed, in my opinion, nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of Socialism as the belief that Russia is a Socialist country. [...] And so for the past ten years I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the Socialist movement." [CEJL vol. 3 p. 458] 
That was why Orwell wrote Animal Farm which is the story of the revolution betrayed. The tale is based on Orwell’s experiences in Spain that had subsequently led him to study power structures during revolutions, especially the Russian. (and more here).

Never mind, it's the business of authors to be misunderstood, and readers will take from a book anything that reinforces their existing prejudices, rather than question or examine the prejudices, and the chances are high that misinterpretation will rule the roost when a dullard like Kev the butcher of meaning is on the prowl ...

And there at last, revealed, is the reason why Kev struts and poses in the Terror, seizing on gay cardinals and socialist writers and subverting their implications ... he's got his IPA book to flog, as well as celebrate past glories, when he was temporarily given the job of fucking over the education system in Australia by a transubstantive onion muncher.

It's almost up there with tone-deaf Barners berating communism while in company with an Ambassador for a communist country ...

Well as a king is alleged to have asked in other times, will no one rid me of these tedious prattlers who follow troublesome, turbulent priests?

Oh okay, maybe we should give it more exactly ...

...according to historian Simon Schama this is incorrect: he accepts the account of the contemporary biographer Edward Grim, writing in Latin, who gives us "What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric?" (here).

Never mind, as a low-born secularist and rampant atheist, the pond should celebrate the tremendous achievements of western civilisation - thank the long absent lord for multicultural diversity so that not everything is bland Kev white bread Catholic wafer bullshit - and can there be any better way of doing it than running a flurry of cartoons?

As usual, most of the Fairfaxians can be found here, (why the tag isn't on the front digital page is a Fairfaxian mystery) and Rowe here ...