In which the pond joins prattling Polonius for an early Sunday meditation ...

Poor old Polonius.

These days you have to look for him in the section devoted to lizard Oz columnists.

Oh sure, then the splash looks quite grand, with a studious photo befitting a Polonial personage, but Polonius rarely makes the front Oz digital page, full as it is of preening, parading reptiles ...

All too often he's banished from their august company, a kind of shunning and shaming, and many days Polonius almost slips from the pond mind ...

Google's about the only way that attention is paid as the old codger slips out to plant carrots in the vegie patch ...

And yet, Polonius has intrinsic charm and appeal, even as he slips into doddering senility, if only for the chance to spot an historical howler (to be fair, he can't be blamed for typos of the 'Ubniversity Press' unless the lizard Oz carried through on its threat to sack all the subs, and employ seagulls on the basis that they'd proof for chups).

And so in the nick of time, the pond realised that Polonius was just the thing for an early Sunday meditation ...

In his usual way, Polonius manages to conflate and confuse.

As noted here, because Australia didn't have nukes to dismantle, the main thrust of the NDP locally involved three policies. The first was to close nuclear war-fighting bases ... 

...together with stopping the passage of nuclear weapons through Australian waters or airspace and the mining and export of uranium. Many people involved in or supportive of the peace and nuclear disarmament movement felt that they had been betrayed by the ALP, which, besides its policy change on uranium mining, supported the Australian alliance with the United States that already involved, among other things, three US bases in Australia, US warship visits and the landing of US military aircraft at Australian bases.

Indeed plucky New Zealand managed to survive quite nicely while tackling the French and the US on nuclear matters, and now with Barners revealed as a closet rugger bugger sheep loving Kiwi, is it possible that the National Party will swing in that direction?

Never mind, it's worth bearing something of the actual history of the NDP in this country in mind ... after all it would only have taken a nanosecond to discover a pdf with tasty illustrations here ...

Now the pond was never involved with the NDP - as part of its determined alienation from all political parties - but the statement of the aims seems clear enough even now and at the time, if talking to NDPers, it was possible to find a range of views, from the extreme and the fundamentalist, who wanted all nukes banned by lunch time the next day, to those who accepted the three main aims, and the notion of keeping Australia nuclear-free ... as a way of doing what could be done locally, without worrying about de-nuking the rest of the world ...

The pond, having nothing against nuclear medicine, couldn't quite go there, but all the same, there's no reason to carry on in the Polonial way by confusing and conflating the NDP with pacifism and unilateral disarmament ...

And if the pond hears yet again from a man who works in the heart of Sydney in Phillip street rabbiting on about inner city elites, it might let out a soft scream or at least a muted howl of pain ...

By golly that looks inner-city 'leet enough for the pond ... why we'd have to get a new pair of sandals to visit ...

As for that reiteration yet again - will it never end, will it never stop? - of the domino theory, is it true that North Korea would have remained a brutal and bloody regime?

The pond isn't into alternative history, because who knows, but who knows if North Korea might not have been persuaded to follow China's path ... and ended up a censoring dictatorship but with materialist tendencies, where the next car or TV becomes more important than ideological rectitude ... and where everyone is up for a deal ...

This is the path that Vietnam followed, though without the same skill and without the same market blessings, but then with some considerable disadvantages thanks to the war.

There's little evidence that attempting to bomb the country back to the stone age or blessing the land with Agent Orange and rampant human destruction helped the Communist Party to eventually come to understand that the best way to stay in power was to do deals and distribute trinkets of a material kind amongst the citizenry ...

The pond preferred the theory enunciated by that rogue Sukarno, with the quote often attributed to Marshall McLuhan ...

McLuhan had a go at it in Understanding Media (both quotes are easily googled):

Well yes, all that was before the intertubes doubled down on everything, and you don't have to go the full fridge ...

The Seinfeld fridge will do ...

... which helps to explain the logic behind The Plot to Free North Korea with Smuggled Episodes of 'Friends' ...

The real problem, of course - apart from wondering if life is worth living if its full of episodes of Friends  - is that smuggled columns of prattling Polonius are likely to get people thinking he wants to nuke the shit out of them ...

Never mind, Peter Garrett himself is a prime example of the theory at work, because he himself became a fridge man ...

Whenever his name is mentioned, the pond follows tradition and recalls the movie Fame is the Spur, (Greg Hunt it in full dull Boulting Brothers length here), in which a left-leaning politician gets down a Peterloo sword and tries to pull it from its scabbard, only to discover it's rusted shut ...

Garrett had a sword too, but it rusted long ago. No doubt he now has a good fridge in its place, handy for a revival tour ...