A friend wondered the other day why the pond hadn't mentioned the undiluted racism of the latest Bolter outburst…wherein the Bolter made the mistake of talking about a Jewish ghetto in north Caulfield.
Well he didn't actually call it a ghetto, but it was clear enough they were part of a tidal wave of useless immigrants incapable of blending into the Bolter's unique brand of crypto-fascism - though strangely the perfidious Dutch got a 'get out of jail' card when it came to being part of the invasion.
Well the pond sometime ago made the joyful decision to give up on the Bolter, Miranda the Devine, Akker Dakker and all the other low-life tabloid narcissist attention-seekers in the Murdochian Augean stable, and what a relief it was.
As Amanda Meade's name was mentioned in the pond's comments section recently, the pond is pleased that she attends to this particularly dirty part of the reptile toilet, and made note of it at the Graudian in Andrew Bolt's 'tidal wave of immigrants' article prompts press council complaints …
Crikey also covered the beat, but for that you need to fork out to get behind the paywall.
Of course the Bolter made a particular mistake singling out Jews, and has since run desperately for cover ...
Of course the Bolter made a particular mistake singling out Jews, and has since run desperately for cover ...
Meade drummed up a few tasty quotes from Jewish representatives pointing out the inherent racism in the Bolter's scribbling, but don't expect the deeply racist Bolter to pay attention to any of that.
Singling out Jews and then hastily retreating is what faux controversialist, deeply racist attention-seekers do when tabloid muck-raking subs fail to do their duty …
Oh and Meade is also handy for mocking the Bolter's puny ratings numbers … 31,000 is too many, but up against 24 million, it puts the racist in the place where he belongs, an attention-seeking narcissist best left to his own devices.
Besides, all this is a distraction from the pond's self-assigned task of tracking the lizards of Oz, more than enough fun in the pond's semi-retirement, and Saturday the pond likes to indulge in its arcane taste for a whiff of prattling Polonius.
Look at the glum, humourless, dull pedant pictured above, always ready with a history lesson, and always ready to whine at the way that the ABC refused to make him the host of some utterly tedious program which would establish him as the most monotonous and repetitive conservative host ever to grace the televisual medium.
The reptiles like to hold him back for later in the weekend, but sometimes the pond just wants to start the weekend with an early look, and as always, Polonius's prattle was a doozy …
First a little scene-setting, because the pond adopted the time-honoured way of googling up Polonius's outing ...
What a hoot.
Google's first response was to offer an abundant array of Lenin T-shirts for the wearing thereof to parties so that Troy and Polonius could get agitated?
This at a time when the Murdochian reptiles are entranced by the Donald and his love for Vlad the impaler?
But then, however much he protests, our Polonius is stuck back in the 1950s and the DLP and is always standing by, ready to root out the slightest hint of heresy …
The pond couldn't help being bemused.
If wearing a Lenin T-shirt is a crime, what to make of attending the celebration of the centenary of the Bolshevik revolution?
What to make of heading off to the Russian embassy at any time?
Sadly the Russian embassy doesn't seem to have memorialised the moment, but it does make mention of other events around the time, full of subversives and fellow-travellers likely to attract Polonius's ire, including that dangerous Russia lover the Archbishop (most rev) Adolfo Tito …
And so to the history lecture ...
The funny thing in all this? Well our man Polonius has on a number of occasions had kind words for the Donald … exceptional lover of Vlad ...
Is there a chance that sometime soon Polonius will launch his full fury on the Donald for kowtowing to Vlad?
Is there any chance that Polonius would deplore those clowns who wear regalia celebrating the Catholic church, a vicious institution that has caused endless woe to children, gays, witches, heretics and complimentary women - Sydney Anglicans being incapable of handling this job on their own?
Nope, but it does give the pond a chance to run a cartoon or two, with Rowe in fine form, and with more fine Rowe here …
Now the pond isn't into wearing T-shirts with messages and much prefers invisibility cloaks, but if someone wants to wear a Disney T-shirt, the pond doesn't instantly hold them responsible for all the wickedness the House of Mouse has unleashed on the world, with its tiresomely inane insistence on a delusional suburban American never-never land …
Heck, if that was the case the pond would have instantly banned Dame Slap from the pond for her love of wearing of branded garments …
But you can't expect Polonius to see the mote in his fellow reptiles' eyes … seeing as how anyone who dares to make note of this sort of lickspittle, forelock-tugging Donald fellow travelling automatically joins the enemies' list ...
Speaking of Pipes, what did he say about Donald lovers?
Richard Pipes: Well, yes. They are participating in it. In my view, the Russians are friendly to a very bad candidate. Trump, if he’s elected, would be a disaster. And Trump is friendly to Putin and Putin is friendly to Trump and that’s not good. I hope that Russia changes its attitude to the rest of the world – that it becomes more cooperative and less hostile. But I am not very optimistic that this will happen. (here).
But it's unlikely that Polonius will prattle on about that, not while he can wander back down memory lane, a lane which always curiously never leads to stories of the cruel and oppressive behaviour of the Tsars and the Russian Orthodox church …thereby creating fertile ground for the Russian revolution ...
Speaking of the infantile, it seems that Polonius doesn't have the first clue about the way that the ruling classes frequently go to far, and having gone too far, produce an unholy and unhealthy response …
It's happening in the United States right at the moment, and perhaps Polonius would be doing himself, his very small readership and the pond a favour if, instead of reliving the 1950s, he paid some attention to what is going down …
As for the pond, a few cartoons will suffice …
"Well he didn't actually call it a ghetto..."
ReplyDeleteNo, of all the things North Caulfield (I lived there once upon a time) might be called, ghetto would not be one of them.
But Polonius really does have a serious obsession with Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, doesn't he. And I can kinda sympathise just a little; Lenin isn't a great human being by any stretch of the imagination. But crediting him with "inventing" the totalitarian state is just a bit rich, I think. Though he did systematise it somewhat I suppose.
But given the Prattler's dedication to impartial evidence (at least so he claims), I'd really like to see his evidence regarding just how carefully Hitler, Mussolini, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Min, Pol Pot and Castro (and "many more besides") studied the Leninist and Stalinist society of Russia in order to admiringly copy it. Or maybe they had their own ideas anyway.
But that's not Polonius' only obsession: "From the time of the Bolshevik Revolution until 1968, the extreme left in Australia supported the communist regime...".
Yep, he always raves about "the Left" as though it is somehow just one entity. But I suppose that's how a dedicated Catholic would think, given the bloody history of a Church that imposed total conformity on its members. And I don't think Lenin invented the Catholic Inquisition, did he.
Hi Dorothy,
ReplyDelete“Lenin orders that the secret police “should submit a list of several hundred such gentlemen (intellectuals) who must be deported abroad without mercy”.
The funny thing is that you just know that Henderson spends his evenings compulsively compiling lists (meticulously cross referenced) of individuals who he considers ideologically unsound.
DiddyWrote
Heh, Polonius as an ideologically blinded listicle king. And I bet he'd "deport" them all at the drop of a hat too. And he'd excommunicate them as well, if only he could. :-)
DeleteI get the sense that most of the Pond's readership are old enough to remember Point of View and probably derive some humour from Polonius' inability to move on from old fears that never materialized. His is a binary world where any deviation from his orthodoxy leads inevitably to a Stalinist purge.
ReplyDeleteI'd love to know what my (adult) kids would make of the old duffer but I doubt they would bother to read more than a few lines of this stuff.
Oh wau, Bef, "Point of View" is going back a way (starting in the 1960s sometime) though I note there's a few video bits of it still surviving on Youtube - which, like the TV show itself at the time, I won't be wasting any of my remaining lifetime viewing.
DeleteSantamaria himself is "credited" with having changed his position late in life and, in the words of Paul Collins: "... praised for being an agrarian socialist and anti-capitalist." Oh yeah.
Of course, Hendo, Abbott and Pell (inter alia) never followed him down that strewn pathway.
[ See https://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=22823 ]
I had a quick look on YouTube and quickly blew retreat. I remember asking an adult about this strange little man talking without pause for breath on TV (probably about 1965). I was told he was associated with "the scab branch of the Labor Party". Tells you a bit about my family background as well as the divisions of the time.
DeletePS Santa looked uncommonly like the Paul Livingston character Flacco.
"scab branch of the labor Party" - nope, can't say I've ever previously encountered that precise description, but it surely fits.
DeleteAs to Flacco, well that's a likeness I'd not registered until now ... and not only a likeness to Flacco's facial appearance either.
Polonius refers to John Falzon as seeking pre-selection for "the safe Labor seat of Canberra".
ReplyDeleteSurely a stickler for detail such as Polonius should have noted that the existing two Federal seats in the ACT are being increased to three at the next election. While one of those three electorates will still be known as "Canberra", its boundaries are being substantially redrawn. Indeed, the reason that Falzon is seeking preselection is because the current Member for Canberra is moving to the new electorate of Bean, which will occupy much of the territory that previously formed part of the Canberra electorate.
Given these changes, it is difficult to see on what basis Polonius can claim that the new electorate of Canberra, for which Mr Falzon is seeking pre-selection, can be called "safe Labor" given that, apart from its name, it will be to all intents and purposes a completely new electorate.
Now the above may appear to be so much dry, dull pedantry - and indeed it is. However, this is Polonius we're talking about, who delights in churning out thousands of words at a time of dry, dull pedantry in response to perceived errors of even greater insignificance when they are made by others. Surely he should be called upon to issue a statement of clarification - and grovelling apology - for so egregiously misleading his tens of readers?
BTW, Gerry's sniffy comments about the appropriateness of a Lenin t-shirt as party-wear makes me wonder what the dress code is at Sydney Institute shindigs. Whatever it may be, I'll bet a swingin' time is had by all! I can just imagine Hendo putting a lampshade on his head after his third sweet sherry, and provocatively loosing his Windsor knot......
"A bit of fun. A bit of tongue-in-cheek with friends"
ReplyDeleteAnd there is the centre of Gerry's dart-board.
Having sat through his twisted, pained positioning on The Insiders couch, or reading his interminable waffle of a Satdee morning, nothing could be further from my mind than 'fun" of "friends".
Gerry is, bless his cupped palms, antithetical to both.
If i might add a Martin Flanagan tweet into the mix regarding the equally miserable Dr Andreas Bolt:
"When did Andrew Bolt ever write anything that showed he loved Australia? When did he write with affection & respect about a great Australian painting, book, sportsperson, historical figure, a great Australian place or personality. Imposter."
There's never been a more exciting time to read Murdoch's lackeys.
И вошел Иисус в храм Божий и выгнал всех продающих и покупающих в храме, и опрокинул столы меновщиков и скамьи продающих голубей,и говорил им: написано, --дом Мой домом молитвы наречется; а вы сделали его вертепом разбойников.
ReplyDelete