In which the pond drifts away from Dame Slap to contemplate alternative realities ...

Given all that was going on this morning in the lizard Oz, it seems perverse to pay attention to Dame Slap, but that's the pond's lot.

Two man babies threaten to nuke each other, while our own man baby threatens to nuke political correctness, and somehow Caroline Overington imagines all be well and the dinkums will bring the bacon home.

Speaking of bacon, as the pond often does, the pond has absolutely no dog in any fight about development in the eastern suburbs, especially while Mike Baird's successors continue with his plans to rip the heart out of the inner west and turn the town into LA ...

But on a surface level, it sounds like the Dame is doing her broken clock routine, and getting it right ...

But before contemplating the broken clock, it seems this time might be as good as any to head off to read Kurt Andersen, scribbling How America Lost Its Mind, for The Atlantic, in which, inter alia, he wrote (online here):

…reams of survey research from the past 20 years reveal a rough, useful census of American credulity and delusion. By my reckoning, the solidly reality-based are a minority, maybe a third of us but almost certainly fewer than half. Only a third of us, for instance, don’t believe that the tale of creation in Genesis is the word of God. Only a third strongly disbelieve in telepathy and ghosts. Two-thirds of Americans believe that “angels and demons are active in the world.” More than half say they’re absolutely certain heaven exists, and just as many are sure of the existence of a personal God— not a vague force or universal spirit or higher power, but some guy. A third of us believe not only that global warming is no big deal but that it’s a hoax perpetrated by scientists, the government, and journalists. A third believe that our earliest ancestors were humans just like us; that the government has, in league with the pharmaceutical industry, hidden evidence of natural cancer cures; that extraterrestrials have visited or are visiting Earth. Almost a quarter believe that vaccines cause autism, and that Donald Trump won the popular vote in 2016. A quarter believe that our previous president maybe or definitely was (or is?) the anti-Christ. According to a survey by Public Policy Polling, 15 percent believe that the “media or the government adds secret mind-controlling technology to television broadcast signals,” and another 15 percent think that’s possible. A quarter of Americans believe in witches. Remarkably, the same fraction, or maybe less, believes that the Bible consists mainly of legends and fables—the same proportion that believes U.S. officials were complicit in the 9/11 attacks. 

And so on and, it's an epic rant, though it has to be said he has a wealth of weird material to work with.

And to be fair to Andersen, he dishes it out to both left and right and hippies as well as conservatives, but irrespective of political bias, who could argue with this line (or the weirdness of a nuke-happy, clearly pagan president promising fire and brimstone and destruction, and attracting the support of fundamentalist Christians):

Starting in the 1990s, America’s unhinged right became much larger and more influential than its unhinged left. There is no real left-wing equivalent of Sean Hannity, let alone Alex Jones. Moreover, the far right now has unprecedented political power; it controls much of the U.S. government. 

Here, it's not quite so extreme, and yet, the onion muncher and the mutton Dutton wag the tail of the Malware dog, and the far right control print media in Australia, or a substantial, dominant part of it ...

And then, explaining how it's all turned weird:

The right has had three generations to steep in this, its taboo vapors wafting more and more into the main chambers of conservatism, becoming familiar, seeming less outlandish. Do you believe that “a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government”? Yes, say 34 percent of Republican voters, according to Public Policy Polling. 

 It struck a chord with the pond, knowing that Dame Slap would be out and about this day, and knowing that no matter what the issue, what the matter to hand, Dame Slap would at some point revert to a vast international conspiracy:

Now if the grounds involved terrorism, as opposed to public amenity, parking, access, utility, complementarity with neighbours and the local environment, the pond has no argument with expressions of dismay.

Was it standard eastern suburbs anti-semitism, dressed up in new guise - the pond never forgets that it wasn't so long ago that traditional conservative clubs were still black-balling well-off members of the Jewish community wanting to become a part of the establishment (okay, the Myer affair was a Melbourne do, but it happened in Sydney too).

Not knowing and not much caring - in the western suburbs the fuss would be all about a mosque - the pond will leave it to others to decide. 

But as usual, that last line by Dame Slap heralds the jumping of the shark by the Dame. She went on to produce, in her usual way, one of her epic conspiratorial rants, derived from what might be one foolish decision.

It's that litany of complaint, that regular compilation of grievances, that angry shouting at clouds, which is the sure sign of the fanatical...

Every day obsessed members of the reptile commentariat go into a full whine and moan, a railing and a whinging ... rehearsing a long list of slights and suffering ...

Naturally it's all the fault of the left ... and possibly the Jews too ... and suddenly we're off in that haywire world observed by Andersen, where 'Orwellian' is yet again dragged out and dusted off, and yet without a hint of Godwin's Law post-modernist irony ...

Where does all this come from, this weirdness, or as Andersen would have it, how the world went haywire and we ended up with the Donald, and Dame Slap sounding like Daesh when it comes to gay marriage?

How is it that she can manage to sound so intolerant about others expressing their displeasure at intolerance towards them? Margaret Court's a fundamentalist bigot. Where's the harm in saying it?

At this point the pond would like to hark bark to long ago, when the pond began to understand the deeply weird conspiratorial thinking that lurked in Dame Slap's badly wired brain.

It is pure Andersen:

Now if the pond had written this, this talk of world government, it would have decided on reflection that perhaps a rest, a cure, a holyday was what was needed ... and a little later, an apology and a retraction for writing, and endorsing gibberish, it being plain that the UN couldn't organise a chook raffle, let alone a world government ... but no, on and on Dame Slap pressed, doubling down ...

Now the pond could just as easily have reverted to Dame Slap's column about sneaking out on to the streets of New York proudly wearing a Donald cap promising to make America great again ...

But this climate denialist column takes on an added poignancy because of current reporting in the United States, as in The NY Times, Climate Report Could Force Trump to Chose Between Science and His Base ... 

Andersen is particularly evocative regarding the way both left and right have tended to abandon science for relativist fantasies. This is hardly news - after all, Lysenko was Stalin's favourite agrobiologist way back in the 1930s ...

Reading Dame Slap makes it only too clear why we've ended up with the Donald, and with talk of nuking the North Koreans and with the onion muncher madly mouthing off about the need to nuke political correctness ...so take it out on the gays.

There's no longer any real in all these forms of alternative reality - which is of course to assume that there was at some time, some kind of shared reality at the best of times, as opposed to butterflies having coincidental dreams.

After his epic rant, Andersen did try to offer a grain of hope to end his piece:

It will require a struggle to make America reality-based again. Fight the good fight in your private life. You needn’t get into an argument with the stranger at Chipotle who claims that George Soros and Uber are plotting to make his muscle car illegal—but do not give acquaintances and friends and family members free passes. If you have children or grandchildren, teach them to distinguish between true and untrue as fiercely as you do between right and wrong and between wise and foolish. 

We need to adopt new protocols for information-media hygiene. Would you feed your kids a half-eaten casserole a stranger handed you on the bus, or give them medicine you got from some lady at the gym? 

And fight the good fight in the public sphere. One main task, of course, is to contain the worst tendencies of Trumpism, and cut off its political-economic fuel supply, so that fantasy and lies don’t turn it into something much worse than just nasty, oafish, reality-show pseudo-conservatism. Progress is not inevitable, but it’s not impossible, either.

The pond isn't so sure. Each day it's involved in questionable hygiene, recycling reptile regurgitations ....

There's so much shit in the Augean and Murdochian stables that even Hercules would be shrugging his shoulders and walking away ...

And besides, this pathology of hate is so weird and wonderful, it's like each day discovering a new Freudian casebook ... and what a chance it provides to run a few soothing cartoons ...