On a Friday, it's the pond's duty to trudge off to the Speccie mob, but how depressing it is to discover that the indefatigable dashing Donners, having flooded the Murdochians with copy about the crisis in Western Civilisation, is now filling the Speccie mob with his fury …
There's other usual suspects, of the Ian Plimer kind, and if the pond had bothered to go there, it would have been able to provide a link to this story in The Atlantic, After Decades of Losing Ice, Antarctica Is Now Hemorrhaging It …
That would have allowed the pond to feature a nifty graph …
But dashing Donners called, and the pond had to respond - call any vegetable and the chances are good it will respond to you - even though the pond could scribble an imitation of dashing Donners in its sleep …
After the cheap use of the Droeshout snap of Shakspere, there'd be mentions of T. S. Eliot, and Ryckmans and cultural relativism and such like, and the pond would wonder how Donners managed it …the incessant, monotonous repetition, the pounding away, the barely repressed hysteria …
After the cheap use of the Droeshout snap of Shakspere, there'd be mentions of T. S. Eliot, and Ryckmans and cultural relativism and such like, and the pond would wonder how Donners managed it …the incessant, monotonous repetition, the pounding away, the barely repressed hysteria …
These days the pond looks for distractions along the way … it could, for example, have scribbled how, thanks to the local street library, it's currently well into Anthony Burgess's entertaining, wildly speculative "biography" of Shakspere, a work noted here …
But "Western Civ" is the subject, a grotesque shortening it should be noted, and so the pond was reminded of something else, a piece about Ethiopia by David Holden in the CIA-funded Encounter, about Ethiopia … (February 1973 issue, also thanks to the street library).
The unfortunate Holden began by writing about the way his political awareness had been raised as a child …
… I can more or less date my birth as a political animal from one Saturday night, when my father pulled out, as he often did, a topical plum from his week-end reading. It must have been, I think, an entry in a New Statesman clerihew competition and it ran something like this:
Halle Selassie
Said, "The air smells gassy
"It's clear
"Civilisation is near."
Not long afterwards the little Emperor left his country for Europe and exile, il Duce's new Roman Empire was proclaimed in Addis, Evelyn Waugh wrote Scoop, and the world slid swiftly towards the most widespread war in history. The romantic, mediaeval world of Abyssinia, as I had dimly imagined it through the mists of propaganda and poison gas, vanished into the limbo of unregarded history. The tiny figure in the black cloak, with the sad eyes and the trim black beard, disappeared in the turmoil, to be glimpsed only occasionally by zealous photographers, waiting in lonely pathos for the London train on the up platform of Bath …
It's little remembered that Italy - home to the Catholic church - used mustard gas during the Ethiopian conflict … though the Red Cross remembers it here, and all-round, for Greg Hunters, it was an ugly affair, as noted in the war's wiki here…though even there the dissembling Italians are given a Monopoly card for their war crimes ...
The pond thought that limerick recalled by Holden might well serve for Donners:
The air and the writing smells gassy, it's clear that dashing Donners' western civ is near …
Now the pond has nothing to add to all this, the routine demonising of Raelene Francis and others, and the absolute stupidity of absolute beliefs based on Christianity …
Mustard gas to all that crap, the pond says, with the main duty to find another distraction, perhaps a cartoon celebration of current Western Civ glories …
Mustard gas to all that crap, the pond says, with the main duty to find another distraction, perhaps a cartoon celebration of current Western Civ glories …
Ah yes, Western Civ, and now the pond must preempt Donners because it's always amusing when Donners purports to be in favour of liberal humanism, the Renaissance and all that stuff, and scandalised by approaches to a writer such as Patrick White, when for years White had to live down the whispers about him being a poofter, albeit happily married in all but name …
It seems Donners hasn't caught up with the alternative …
Oh they're cunning, these Catholics, in the way they take over a word like "humanism", and then seek to deploy it against minorities, be it a woman's right to control her body, or gay people seeking to declare their love in marriage … though the news from Argentina this morning promised a small advance in Western Civ against the barbarism and tyranny of the Catholic church …
But enough distractions, the pond must get the next gobbet of Donners done and dusted ...
Thank the long absent lord that T. S. Eliot scored a guernsey.
The pond would have been shattered if the thousand monkeys at work on the thousand typewriters had failed to pick up this aspect of the litany…
Or perhaps the pond got that metaphor wrong … perhaps what the pond is dealing with here is this sort of diabolical scribbling machine …
Here, have another 'glories of Western Civ' cartoon …
And so to the final Donners' gobbet ...
Well it might be better than the pond being doomed to founder in the shallows of inane, incessant, mindlessly repetitive, shouting at clouds nonsense by dashing Donners …
For some ineluctable reason, down there with transubstantiation, the pond was reminded of another image in that Marshall McLuhan themed The Medium is the Massage …
The pond has no idea where dashing Donners lives, but it must be a depressing place ...
It takes a lot of cartoons by the real Pope to shore up the pond's mind against this sort of incessant inanity, but fortunately there are many papal missives here in a much better formatted gallery … and by a pleasant coincidence, this day the real Pope makes a comment with some bearing on the glories of Western Civ …
Well now, NH, I submit 'Broady Boy' Donners as a perfect example of what one would do with a Ramsay 'Western civilisation' degree.
ReplyDeleteOne would, of course, hold dear all the blind faith that the likes of our Donners believes. I was looking up N David Mermin just before (author of 'Boojums All the Way Through') and his recall of some discourses: "I participated in the old controversy between scientists and sociologists who study the growth of scientific knowledge, trying, with limited success, to explain to each side why the other thinks they are idiots." [ http://www.lassp.cornell.edu/mermin/ ]
The trouble is that in this case, Donners and his fellow delusionists really are idiots - and ignorant, simplistic, unreachable idiots at that.
Hi Dorothy,
ReplyDelete“Absolute beliefs, based on Christianity or liberal humanism, became unfashionable.”
I know little of the long march of the cultural-left through academia but I would think that having “absolute beliefs” would limit the scope for any new research or fresh perspective in any subject.
This is the key problem with the Ramsay Western Civilisation project. When you have already established that your subject is brilliant, the best and can’t be improved you quite quickly run out of anything new to say.
DiddyWrote
Three comments Austen Ivereigh is an opus dei propaganda hack.
ReplyDeleteConnor Court the publisher of donners new book is very closely associated with opus dei too.
Re the famous phrase "the medium is the message".
What kind of very powerful message do bombs communicate!
So far up to July 30th under herr trumpenfuhrer the peace-loving Amerikans have dropped 20650 bombs on Islamic countries.
By contrast under Obama the o-bomber) in 2016 the USA only dropped 26,000.
Speaking of you-can-forgetting and absolute crap, what ever happened to the eloquentia perfecta spruiksmanship of that 'cadre of leaders', formed in the Jesuit scholastic tradition, as envisaged by the St. Ignatius' Old Boys, Kev? How's neglecting a grand narration of that pivotal piece of Western civilisation's legacy preparing the "e.g. BA/LAW" wunderkind for their righteous places in the Capital and in Capital, à la the gazetted great liberal arts feeder universities to Congress, Appellate Courts, and Wall Street? Done Right, one of the select cohort's suppositories of all wisdom might even make a half-decent Primus inter pares, 'ey?
ReplyDelete