Of onion munchers and Caterists ...

 

Speaking of the glories of Western Civilisation, as the onion muncher is wont to do, the pond came across this reminder of terror and terrorism in the NY Review of Books, Pity is Treason by David A. Bell (sorry inside the paywall), which interalia said…

"… as Ronald Schechter shows in his remarkable new book, A Genealogy of Terror in Eighteenth-Century France …terror .. was once held to be quite an admirable thing in the Western world, not just as something to induce in one's adversaries but as something one should feel oneself. Writers often paired it with the adjective 'salutary.' Terror was purgative, restorative, and perhaps even salvific. Terror was good. When Robespierre declared, in the winter of 1794, that 'terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue,' he was not being deliberately perverse, paradoxical, or provocative. According to Schechter, he was expressing a belief that drew directly on centuries of European writing and thinking on the topic …"

After stuffing that in dashing Donner's pipe, the pond turned to the doings of that domestic terrorist,  the onion muncher, featured in the usual lizard Oz way on the front page, as he seeks to assassinate Malware, yet again …

The Brutus of our times made us aware he was available for leadership duties …

The blunt knife our Brutus was wielding in his assassination attempt was the usual one …and as usual the reptiles handed our simple Simon the spear-carrying duties ...

Some will blame the tedious onion-muncher for all this, but the pond understands that, much like the scorpion, it's in the terrorist onion muncher's nature.

The issue is why the reptiles keep giving him, and his usual blather, a free ride ...

How many times will they let the onion muncher blather on about dinkum clean Oz coal, oi, oi, oi, and climate science denialism and all the rest of it? 

Well, probably as long as they blather about Western Civilisation, perhaps in celebration of the way terrorism and assassination is a long and honourable tradition in western history …

But oh how tedious it is to read ...

Some days the pond suspects that it's a cunning reptile plot to generate sympathy for Malware, but deep down the pond knows that the reptiles are - on a daily basis - pretty much as silly as the onion muncher …

And so to the Caterist. The pond at one point thought of deliberately and provocatively ignoring the Caterist, but sending him to the late arvo specialist sin bin seemed a better punishment, and to have him follow the onion muncher's posturing felt like an even crueller penalty …

The reptiles clearly felt the same way because there was no cult attention from Lobbecke, just a dullard lizard Oz tweet carrying a standard block image, as if the trolling of the greens for having a good idea would remotely interest any sensible reader ...

It set the tone for the usual, up-himself preening condescension for which the Caterist is famous ...

Even when writing favourably about renewable energy, the Caterist in his smug simpering manages to be intolerable.

Take that cheap joke about "rational tree-huggers, if there is such a thing."

What a fuckwit, no really, how else to talk about that sort of snide aside? What, most days of the week, he's a rational tree-hater? Is there such a thing?

The pond will admit to hating the gum out the front, but only because the pond rather than the council has to attend to the leaves. But really, is it irrational to have an affection for trees?

And there's the usual stuff about holding hands and singing healing songs … and the pond could imagine the Caterist, stiff upper lip and stoic in the family home, as someone proposed a little hug for comfort's sake.

"Don't give me any of that lovey-dovey huggy shit," the Caterist would scream at the unfortunate who wanted a little holding of hands. We're bloody British, and even if we're in Australia, we must conform to the stereotype of being incapable of human feelings …how else could we appear as insensitive wretches lined up in queues to attend a movie of the Brief Encounters kind?

And the Caterist can't even get his jokes right. Surely the whales heading across the Bass Strait should be crippled lesbian whales?

Oh there's no way around it, really, what a fuckwit he is, and so to the wrap-up, though it won't be complete without a standard Caterist joke at the end ...

The problem with socialists, Margaret Thatcher famously said, is that you eventually run out of other people's money …??!!

Well the pond sees no signs of that coming true for the Caterists … they never seem to run out of other people's money …

And now, with that joke done, and in honour of the Caterists and the onion muncher, while the United States is sweltering, the pond chose to interpret this cartoon as having something to do with climate science …