In which dashing Donners does his usual neo-Marxist, Gramsci-laden rant ...

For a nanosecond the pond was worried … no Dame Slap on a Wednesday … but then huzzah, salvation was at hand at the top of the digital page…

Dashing Donners to the PC rescue!

Of course the pond could have spent quality time with the man child the reptiles worship …

But the pond is a specialist site, and only deals with the very best of reptile tropes and fears.

That's why the pond doesn't get agitated when the Terrorists, no doubt with creepy ScoMo skin, go into a TG front page frenzy …

Tush, Terrorists, dashing Donners will have it in hand.

All the reptiles and the pond have to do is set the clockwork toy in motion, and neo-Marxists will be everywhere, and there'll be post-ironic, post-modernist talk of paranoia, because a paranoid like dashing Donners is an authority on paranoia …

Ah yes the usual suspects, and how they shock and irritate dashing Donners, and how valiantly he fights back, with all this needless blather about man-made global warming.

Now remember, that's not woman-made global warming, or even person-made global warming, it's man-made global warming! Please don't undermine the male capacity for fucking the planet …

Back to the horror stories … and Donners arguing fervently that teaching students that 16 year old Romeo having a fuck with thirteen year old Juliet is a jolly good thing, and by golly, the pond doesn't mind, because it's a celebration of heterosexual love, rather than that other wretched, sordid stuff, of the kind that makes Donners go pale with fear …

Oh and have we mentioned Gramsci yet? As everyone knows the addled dashing Donners has Gramsci on the brain, it can't be a column without a mention of Gramsci ...

Is it just the pond, or is dashing Donners remarkably obtuse?

Academics and amateurs have been analysing children's folklore, playground ditties and games, fairytales, stories, myths and such like for centuries, and found a rich stew of Freudian and other Grimm fun …

And where's the harm in that? The pond fancies itself as somewhat of an expert on The Faraway Tree, having recognised assorted Blyton stereotypes amongst the lizards of Oz, most notably the stern Dame Slap (please, here no Snap, no Snap here) … but as Jeff Sparrow noted here, having a go at everything from Biggles to Blyton is jolly good fun, even if the names now mean little to a post-Potter, post-almost everything else generation …

...None of this concedes anything to the tedious Little Englanders (or their even more ghastly Antipodean equivalents) who hail Blyton’s gollywogs as emblematic of Britain’s vanished greatness. Of course teachers and parents and librarians should use passages about “gypsies’” for discussions about prejudice and bigotry. Of course they should! What’s the point of a book if you don’t talk about it? 
Nor should we fret particularly about editions rewritten to remove the more offensive passages. Rudd notes that Blyton herself, a writer who banged out 10,000 words daily, regularly recycled her stories, reshaping them to suit the changing mores. Johns did the same – Sopwith Camels became Spitfires, while later versions of the Great War stories replaced the whisky with which Biggles and his friends sedated themselves with more wholesome lemonade. 
Yet Dessaix’s example might serve to assuage the perennial anxiety about what kids read or watch or (increasingly) play. He attributes his love of travel to “The Famous Five, the first explorers I ever knew.” Blyton’s Kirrin Island is, he says, the prototype of the places and tongues he has subsequently investigated, both in life and in fiction. “In the end, what we’re all doing, we inventors of lands and languages, is refusing to accept the world as we’ve found it. We are utopians.” 
The Famous Five as a gateway to Utopia? Why not? People have got there from stranger places.

And so on. Thanks to the street library the pond is renewing an ancient acquaintance with Just William stories, and what a bizarre thing that is, rich in astonishing insights into long-lost days. Who knew William's family kept a grumpy servant around the house? The pond remembered him as a lumpenproletariat ratbag larrikin, but it turns out he was distilled essence of British upwardly aspiring middle class … (The pond also removed a copy of a Paul Sheehan book - carrying tongs and disinfectant for this sort of work is essential - but that's another story).

Not to worry, it's on with the final Donners' gobbet, though the pond confesses to reading it with an increasing sense of alarm.

The gobbet seemed to hint at Donners having some deep sense of concern about his masculinity. This wasn't just the usual Donners' paranoia, the pond got a whiff that Donners seems under constant threat,  in constant dire fear of emasculation …

Is there some richly Freudian fairy tale which might help him cope with castration anxiety and Marxian defilement?

What a funny old thing he is, how rich and rewarding the neuroses, but wait, Donners wasn't the only one in the field for the reptiles this day …

As golliwogs have been mentioned, it seems only fair to include Cut and Paste being ever so clever and funny …

Sadly the reptiles didn't feel the need to provide any illustrations, so here's a couple …

 

Oh aren't they cute. 

Can the pond take one home? Somehow they remind the pond of all the Aboriginal kitsch that used to litter Tamworth back in the day, in the garden, in the kitchen, and up on the wall in black velvet paintings …

 

Ah your good old Nat Geo style porn. 

Sssh, don't mention it to Donners, he's having masculinity issues thanks to the bloody neo-Marxists and Gramsci …but for more on Aboriginal kitsch, there's always The Conversation here, while the pond wraps up Cut and Paste ...

Fancy that, how astonishing to learn that different cultures at different times have placed a different emphasis on the meaning and purpose of toys, fairy tales, stories, playground activities and such like. Luckily dashing Donners will have none of that academic nonsense ...

And now for a final plea.

Please don't tempt the pond to rise up against Jeff Kennett, the most tedious loudmouth hectoring bore ever to emerge from Victoria, except possibly Sir Henry Bolte, and even that'd be too close to call if Bolte hadn't managed that last hanging …

And now as we've been speaking of fairy tales and imaginary things such as flying pigs, what a coincidence that Rowe should have introduced strange creatures into his cartoon this day, with more Rowe here …