Keep reading Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, and wondering if I'm choleric. Those lines about the centre not holding keep running through my mind. Damn you Yeats, surely some Gina is at hand, with a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun ...
Oh okay, the pond could only guess at the contents of the savvy Savva's diary this day, and must instead resort to her column for a full dose of the gloom ...
Wherever the pond looked, at Savva, or the NY Times here, or Krugman, it was the time of the great unravelling ...
Socks, cardigans, jumpers, Malware, all unravelled, and even worse, as things fall apart, people spending endless hours gazing at navels, gathering fluff and arguing whether it should be 'unraveling' or 'unravelling' ... and so a rough beast, by name Comrade Bill, slouches towards Canberra to be born ... and who can stop him?
Oh heartbreak, oh existential despair direct from Malware's desk to the readers of the lizard Oz ...
Not one journo!
Instead what do we get on a daily basis? The braying of Bolter donkeys ... look, there he is again in the Terror this day ... giving counsel, advice and kind words to Comrade Bill, comparing him to the onion munching master in a way that can only elevate the Kenyan born devious Marxist in the eyes of conservatives ...
He's like the onion muncher? Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, the falcons are in the field, mere anarchy is loosed, the blood-dimmed tide drowns the innocent, poor Malware lacks all conviction, while the Bolterish worst are full of passionate intensity ...
Only cricket has the power to unite us all? Why then we're truly stuffed ...
See, see how the insouciant Bolter brays and mocks and leaks ...
How can a single savvy Savva stand against this sort of carry-on? Free passes handed out willy-nilly, free kicks given by one-sided refs, and it was ever thus ...
Indeed, indeed, and speaking of the drollest of ironies, isn't it a marvel that the savvy Savva scribbles for a rag which has a commentariat currently in a unity ticket with Islamic fundamentalists on social matters ...
No wonder there's an uneasiness, and the second coming is at hand. Spiritus Mundi reptilians!
There are only a few Spartans left as the hordes gather ...
Oh stranger, tell the dinkum that we lie here, and lie often, obedient to their words ...
The government will disintegrate, and so will whatever semblance of unity remains ...
The splitters will spit and split ...
A Monty Python sketch about splitters looms ...
Defeat guaranteed, a fracture precipitated, the onion muncher shattered in his own back yard ... and who knows who will be left to pick up the fragments, perhaps it will be a raving loon of creationist young earth stock slouching in from the west ... and twenty centuries of stony sleep are vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle of savvy despair ...
Frankly the pond has no idea where all this gloom is coming from. Didn't Barners just win a spiffing award, and didn't Rowe celebrate it this morning?
Buck up, Ms Savva, cheer up, and enjoy more cheery Rowe here ...
Savva: about Northcote: "... not one journo all that day -- or since -- thougjt it worth asking about a more than 10 per cent swing against his [Shorten's] party."
ReplyDeleteAnd nobody thought it worth asking the Savva why she can't grasp that the majority of the apparent "swing" against Labor was due to the Liberals not standing a candidate. If the Liberals had stood a candidate Labor would have won yet again - with a reduced two-party margin it's true, but at least some of that would simply have been due to the loss of a popular candidate's personal standing.
Yes, Labor's primary fell below 50% in 2010 and it has needed Liberal preferences to win ever since, so Labor's vote is down and falling further over the long term, but not at the rate of 10% in a single byelection (where protest voting is common anyway). But then the Liberal primary, in turn, has fallen below the Green's over the same timeframe so why not also ask about the long term swing against the them too ?