Surely after this crisis, it's time for the death of writing about Western Civilisation ...

The pond begged and pleaded, asked for sick leave, or just long weekend time off, anything but the ongoing crisis in Western Civilisation …

The pond suggested that the reptiles' ongoing discovery of a filthy, vile greenie renewable energy power crisis - the real threat to Western Civilisation - should surely be covered by the pond …

But the boss wouldn't hear of it, and taking a dim view of unions, pinko perverts and all the rest of the time-serving wretches, insisted that the pond must keep covering the ongoing crisis in Western Civilisation until it dropped, or the reptiles stopped, and if that meant the twelfth of never, so be it …

The pond pointed out that the oscillating fan was himself an academic, and a mealy-mouthed scribbler who purported to be balanced and something of a centrist, and was told that didn't matter. It was all grist to the mill, a crisis was a crisis, and all hands had to be on deck … even if the oscillating fan tried to blame the onion muncher for the crisis …a move that was dead certain to enrage the reptile base …

Oh yes, the oscillating fan is on the nose …

But the fan had been blessed by the venerated Lobbecke. The boss was right, attention simply had to be paid ...

Oh damn you oscillating fan, how dare you blame the onion muncher, how dare you infuriate the base ...

Yes, be sneaky and tricky, you know, like the CIA funding Quadrant and keeping mum about it … just as they did for Encounter, the back copies of which from the street library are still providing much fun for the pond, as Italian socialists lined up to speak their mind about the difficulties of capitalism, courtesy the CIA dime ...

You see, you useless numbskull of an onion muncher, that's how it's done. You should have heeded the oscillating fan ...

How unkind he is, and how cruel, and he too also refuses to take up the ACU option …

But heading into hard yakka weekend overtime the pond was delighted to discover a kindred soul who knew that the Vatican's model of 'no women' was the right one for Western Civilisation deep in crisis mode …

Now it's true that the illustration of Peterborough Cathedral might put some punters off the scent, but it should be remembered that it was solid tyke right up to Henry VIII, and Greg Hunters can discover it had the sixth-largest monastic income in England, with 120 monks, an almoner and all the rest of the godly requirements of a decent Western Civilisation fit-out, including a cellarer …

Now any passengers intending to go forward should buckle up … this is going to be a long and tedious ride, a bit like crossing the Nullarbor ...

Graceful town planning? Me thinks this prof hasn't lived in Sydney …

Resign Tanya Davies … just resign. Go now, go quickly, go far away and take your former Minister for fucked-up public transport with you …

Sorry, where were we?

The pond was by now too tired to deal with this sort of nonsense … there's only so many hours in the day to deal with the crisis in Western Civilisation, and besides the pond has a confession to make.

You see, the reptiles included an illustration at the end of the first gobbet, and the pond is only now getting around to running it …

The pond suspects that some clueless, hapless reptile sub yanked it off the intertubes … though it would surely have been simple enough to mention that Raphael had something to do with it …

The pond isn't a big fan of Raphael, but he does offer an opportunity for devotees of the crisis in Western Civilisation to count the number of women involved in it …

Uh huh …seems women need not apply, and can certainly rule out being Pope ...

The pond began to suspect that the blithering Prof blathering in a Thomas Carlyle way about Western Civilisation might be from the patriarchal school of argument ...

There's inordinately high proof that some academics can manage to sound sublimely silly when scribbling about history, or the history of ideas…

Please allow the pond to recall how that gobbet started …by implication that it was Marxist ideology that led to a hundred million corpses.

For its sins, the pond was made to study the causes of the first World War, and be buggered if the pond can see how Marxist ideology persuaded the Germans, the French, the British and sundry others to invest huge amounts of money in an armaments race, and then bung on a do which the ruling classes thought would be over in a couple of months, like an extended game of cricket or perhaps hockey …

The pond could go on making other points, like quoting the syphilitic Nietzsche to suggest that (a) the worst people become intellectuals but (b) that means the good Prof refuses to be an intellectual, except (c) anyone quoting the syphilitic Nietzsche must surely be an intellectual or a ponce of the first water …

But by now the pond just wanted to punch the clock and get out of there … and yet the Prof was determined to keep rabbiting on in a way that made the pond suspect he was the worst of all people, devious and rancourous and argumentative ... 

Hang on, hang on …wasn't it aeons ago that the good prof boasted of utilitarian benefits, and if the pond's not mistaken, graceful street planning and hygiene?

And now he's got something against urinals?

Well the pond will take a urinal in the house over many other things (though a shower with a decent and proper shower head, and a step through design which makes access to beautiful hot water a thing of transcendental wonder and joy are also essentials) … and if you've ever had to squat over a hole to have a crap, you too might take a Rabelaisian joy in Sir Thomas Crapper's work … (don't forget the goose feathers).

As for Duchamp, someone still hung up on modernism holds no interest for the pond. There's no point in trying to persuade an aesthetic luddite still blathering on about goodness, beauty and truth … if the pond wanted a dose of Cardinal Newman, it would go to the source …

Things have moved on a bit since Ode on a Grecian Urn, but the bloody Prof has still got two gobbets to go ...

Dear sweet long absent lord, enough with the faltering priests and the Orwell, and the left, and all the usual fatuities of this sort of discussion …

And so to the final gobbet, which begins with a classic piece of dissembling, with the remarkable ability to dismiss a couple of world wars and a reasonably decent and encompassing Holocaust as "negative episodes …", strangely not followed by, "tell that to the Vietnamese, Cambodia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria …etc etc"

Phew, at last it's over …

And there it was, as bold as brass, that fatal word, 'sociology' … the pond should have noted it in advance,  but that would have been a spoiler and ruined all the fun.

Come on down Malcolm Bradbury, and remind the pond of Howard Kirk (here):

..the subject he taught wasn't history at all, but something vastly more 'trendy' (as everyone said then). Howard taught Sociology. And sociology was the most fashionable, radical and popular of all subjects in the academic canon of the day. 
In new universities like mine it acquired special place, as one of those inter-locking, inter-disciplinary subjects that allowed us to widen and re-integrate the great map of learning. It united philosophy, political science, anthropology, economics, history, cultural and popular studies, literature and art in a spirit of quasi-scientific objectivity.  
It was high theory, the most conceptual of subjects – and yet it was data-based, empirical, very hands on. It was a master subject, offering an over-arching account of all social phenomena, entire historical epochs or ideologies – yet it was fascinated by the topical and the ephemeral. It was a 'value-free' approach to the world – yet it was also political. It stood beyond ideology, yet was a super-ideology. Sociology had a glorious heyday in the Sixties and then began to fragment and die -- not as a discipline among others, but as the great discipline, the key to all knowledge. In this process it seems I played a part. In an interesting article in the January issue of Prospect, "Return of Sociology," Ian Christie, deputy director of the think-tank Demos, says the turning point was clear. 
It was the appearance of The History Man in 1975 that led to the backlash against sociology, when "Bradbury's demolition of his anti-hero's hypocrisies and pretensions was hailed as though he headed up an army relieving a city beseiged by Marxist academics." In fact I had no armies, and even I don't believe novels make that kind of difference. But out went the baby with the bathwater, says Christie, and sociology has not really recovered its authority since.

Indeed, indeed, say no more. The pond understands why the good Prof has tilted endlessly at windmills this day, and why he avoided mentioning Freudian analysis …

But enough of all this, it's time for the pond to get on with the real joys of Western Civilisation …

And that, for the moment is that. Come tomorrow, the pond will talk of anything other than the crisis in Western Civilisation … reptiles willing …