In which the chairman hears the cock crow thrice, and nattering "Ned" denies him …(that's just to give proceedings an "our Gracie does Folau yet again" tone)

As if the reptiles could lure the pond away from nattering "Ned" with talk of the power of white supremacy and the joys and wonders of the Anglosphere!

Try selling history to today's vulgar youff. Try selling them the language of Shakspere ...

Nay, or neigh if you will, what the pond wanted was a good dose of doubters, doomsters and gloomsters, and how better to get it than through a luscious serve of gloomy "Ned"?

Um, actually a little credit where credit is due, please. Let us not forget the role of the Chairman and his minions …and if we're speaking of the Queen, it was the Sun wot done it …

  

  

Fair dinkum, the pond could have sampled dozens more headlines put out by the dirty digger's mob, and yet here's our nattering "Ned" sobbing into his teacup about the state of things (let's hope he spiced it with a dash of gin and bitters).

But it's what the pond ordered. As it's "Ned", there's going to be endless sighing and many mock turtle tears, and so the pond must get on with it ...

Oh fucketty wildly deluded fuck, all this talk of Churchill is so tiresome and abundantly silly, when in reality the pond has an explanation which is much more to the point. It's all been devised by the dirty digger to make the English feel as good about themselves as Americans currently do (fuck the Scots, the Irish and the Welsh, who cares about them?)

It's all made clear in these celebrations of the joys and wonders of the Anglosphere …

Sure Putin's given the credit in that last cartoon, but fair dibs for the dirty digger.

Will any of this dawn on nattering "Ned" as he dons sackcloth and ashes and wrings his hands, and sheds tears and laments to the silent lord of the clouds? Not bloody likely …

Our "Ned's" more likely to keep wittering on about Churchill, apparently disinclined to remember that the moment the war was over, only a couple of months after the guns fell silent, the restless mob kicked Churchill out and gave the gig to Clement Attlee … (Greg Hunters go here).

Ah, such gloom. How the pond quenches its thirst on nattering "Ned's" tears. As for the waving of the magic wand?

But see how Boris keeps US cartoonists happy, in direct proportion to "Ned's" wailing ...

Actually, since "Ned" decided to use inverted commas and make it a quote, the pond should point out that even the Geelong Advertiser managed to get it right. Please, "Ned", not the exact and proper wording …

The pond thinks it might even be better if spelled "they call him Briton Trump", but no mind, American cartoonists are celebrating the special relationship and the new man at the helm of the dirty digger's beehive …

But wait, "Ned" is still only warming up, and is determined to get even gloomier ...

Why on earth is "Ned" worried about the Donald's military abilities? Why, he said he could wipe out 10 million people in 10 days, and take Afghanistan off all the world's maps …

That's terribly heartening, and as Morning Joe reminds the world at least once a day, in his early briefings, the Donald kept asking the military a compelling question about having and using nukes, one he repeated on air:

When pressed on nuclear use by Chris Matthews of MSNBC in March 2016, Trump responded, “Let me explain. Let me explain. Somebody hits us within ISIS — you wouldn’t fight back with a nuke? … Then why are we making them? Why do we make them?” (Foreign Policy here).

Why indeed? And now the world has another swamp monster that scrambled out of the primordial slime, with a simple desire to be king of the world …(top of the world ma, top of the world).

And so the prospects for galactic co-operation are vast ...

(More Graudian cartoons here, showing that British cartoonists love the Boris as much as the Americans).

And so to a final gobbet from nattering "Ned" and the astonishing claim that English exceptionalism, and an English quest for sovereignty and cultural assertion is ….legitimate.

Well, the pond did note that the Irish, the Scots, the Welsh and all the riff raff that have migrated to the country, can either (a) get fucked, or (b) fuck off where they came from ...

Well good luck with all that, but here's the crucial distinction. America is at the moment a very bad reality TV show, while England is a very bad sitcom of the Little Britain kind …

Narrator: Britain, Britain, Britain. We've had running water for over ten years, we have a tunnel connecting us to Peru, and we invented the cat.

Or maybe there's a more general question to ask, as A. A. Gill once did:

Is it a particularly British trait to so utterly adore truly appalling men, from Tony Hancock through to Steptoe and Alf Garnett, Captain Mainwaring, Rigsby, Del Boy, Victor Meldrew and on to David Brent from The Office? The most deeply adored characters are all simply vile.

Well good luck with all of that …

And now for a quickie, because the pond is seriously disturbed by our Gracie's ongoing interest in the Folau matter ...

Thanks to the partner scoring a copy of The Monthly, the pond was able to read Malcolm Knox's Hellraiser How Israel Folau lit a fire under the culture wars.

Knox did his best to lather himself up into a culture war frenzy, talking of social media lighting up, hate speech, lurking divisions, the Devine warning of coercion and bloodshed, David Marr, angry Sydney Anglicans of the homophobic Archbishop kind (sack the teachers, sack the kids!), and Rorschach tests for culture warriors, and so on and so forth, until he eventually gave up and concluded:

By mid-winter, a Folau-fatigue had set in (though any Folau stories continued to draw big numbers on media websites). 

Well the pond is beyond fatigued, and no longer draws big numbers, but if our Gracie has maintained the rage, why dammit, so will the pond ...

Say what?

Keep the workplace an idiot-free zone? But with the lizard Oz, that's completely impossible, and besides it's against the mission statement of maximum idiocy, maximum climate science denialism, and maximum celebration of the Anglosphere ...

Does anyone at the lizard Oz remember anything?

How to win Twitter featuring assorted loons, and the bald one himself? Why yes, the pond was rolling on the floor, laughing, but back to our Gracie ...

Now the pond has to say that our Gracie is right out of bounds here. There will be a culture war, there must be a culture war. As the Devine has said, there will be bloodshed …

The logical conclusion of this trajectory is a radical reordering of our society and institutions which only could be achieved by coercion and bloodshed. (See the Cristero War in Mexico in the 1920s, as immortalised in the Graham Greene novel The Power and The Glory and the Peter O’Toole movie For Greater Glory, for one historical example which ought to give pause to Christophobes among us.)

Indeed, indeed, and Knox promised deep forces rumbling on, which will "be with us long after one footballer's name has faded from memory."

And  what's our Gracie offer? Jibber jabber about terms of employment!

Sheesh, what a killjoy. The pond has, of this date, forthwith, without delay or hesitation, determined that our Gracie must be cast out of the league of reptiles, banished into the wilderness, or perhaps sent to hellfire, to dwell there amongst the wicked …and learn that scribbling for the reptiles isn't about industrial relations, it's about fucking the planet, stuffing Britain and the United States, and perhaps wiping Afghanistan off the map, while dancing in the streets, celebrating the wonders of the Anglosphere, and waiting for the rapture to arrive! Please, more speaking in tongues of the biblical kind, less speaking like lawyers ...

The pond can offer no consolation to our Gracie's long suffering readers, but can at least offer a note from the infallible Pope, though there's no point linking to him now he's hidden behind a paywall …

In which the pond cries out to the ABC to give Polonius some Lebensraum ...

Oh dear, Polonius still watches Q and A, and gets angry and shouts at the clouds or at the vulgar youffs on the lawn, or even worse, Alastair Campbell …but the really tragedy?

How is it that that bloody ABC refuses to acknowledge a legendary intellectual in their midst? Why isn't Polonius on every week? Home grown is best by far, and think of the ratings, you silly programmers …

Frankly, Campbell should go back to where he came from and the sooner the better ...

For some strange reason, the pond was immediately reminded of Polonius by this quote from the LRB that a friend sent along during the week ...

“I used to think that the interesting issue was whether we should have a monarchy or not. But now I think that question is rather like, should we have pandas or not? Our current royal family doesn’t have the difficulties in breeding that pandas do, but pandas and royal persons alike are expensive to conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment. But aren’t they interesting? Aren’t they nice to look at? Some people find them endearing; some pity them for their precarious situation; everybody stares at them, and however airy the enclosure they inhabit, it’s still a cage.” (here, may be paywall affected).

Yes, it's hard to grasp the notion of Polonius and pandas in then one sentence, but for anyone in search of an airy mental cage …

Before moving on to Polonius however, the pond wants to congratulate the reptiles yet again for their excellent climate science work.

While others were printing stories of the 'No doubt left' about scientific consensus on global warming, say experts, and talked of the heatwave sweeping sundry parts of the world, and showed videos of wildfires in the Arctic, and though Amazon deforestation had reached a tipping point, and so on and etc, our Lloydie was on the job …

Those bloody satanic mills, how the reptiles hate them, and earlier in the week, they'd sent out Al to do his duty …

The pond was thrilled by Al's work, but deeply disturbed that the reptiles paid a nanosecond's attention to the hysteria being lathered up by BHP …

Say what?

Foolish man. Lloydie and Al and the reptiles have Oz have got it all worked out, and everything's for the best in the best of all possible climate science denialist worlds, and so the pond could turn to Polonial prattle for its undiluted pleasure and the usual history lesson …as he berated Campbell and sent him back where he came from ...

Shocking, this worship of FIFOs, given to sexting up the text. Why anybody would pay attention to some pesky furriner when we have our own most excellent commentators and intellectuals here, wrapped in cotton wall and insularity, escapes the pond.

Why on earth should we, at any point, interact with anyone from abroad? Think of the mind contamination and the mental impurities they bring! Insularity, provincialism and parochialism forever!

That's why the pond only flosses its mind with Polonial thoughts, and even then, only once a week, because too much flossing is a waste of time and energy … the brain will in time sag, and there's no point fighting it …

Let's see our homegrown lad take on the blow-in blow hard ...

He scoffed at the Caterist?  How shocking! It might even have been a sneer? Clearly that buffoon import knows nothing of the movement of flood waters in quarries!

Thank the long absent lord, this alien's arrival did give Polonius a chance to indulge in his usual history lesson, and a chance for the pond to run a few cartoons …

By golly, it's not often that Polonius gives the pond a chance to break Godwin's Law so freely and cheerfully, but the pond apologises for interrupting Polonius's history lesson, just when he was getting wound up and right into it …

You see, our Polonius is a closet Donald man, and he simply can't abide the thought of his hero being compared to other authoritarians or despots …

Actually, it would seem that there weren't free elections in 2016, and there's a goodly chance there won't be free and fair elections in 2020 …

As for all that negative coverage …

As for racist remarks …

The pond had thought at the beginning that it might have to spend time talking about Campbell, and given his role in the Bleagh era and the Iraq war, that was a chore the pond would have found tiresome and difficult.

But Polonius's closet infatuation with the Donald made it all terribly easy. Who else would manage in such an artful way to excuse the Donald's line about people going back to where they came from?

The pond was reminded of that bit of Andy Borowitz humour in The New Yorker …

(Here)

According to the sources, Trump summoned Pence to the Oval Office and commanded him to find “somewhere in the Bible” where Jesus “tells people that they don’t belong here and they should beat it.” 
 Pence, who seemed startled by the request, asked Trump if he meant the time when Jesus expelled money changers from the Temple, but Trump shook his head angrily. “No, not that. I don’t want to piss off Deutsche Bank,” he said. “I want something where Jesus tells the poor and the meek or whatever to go back to the shithole places they came from.” 
After a shaken Pence said that he would “see what I can find,” Trump reportedly demanded that the Vice-President also locate a passage where Jesus calls journalists “the lowest form of life.”

Indeed, indeed, and now to Polonius's true triumph, the reason why we don't need any uppity, pesky difficult furriners coming down under. 

You see, in an astonishing act of imagination, our Polonius can't see a jot or whit of racism in his Donald ...

The economy is doing well? The pond hopes that Polonius remembers those words a few years down the track … because speaking of history, the United States is currently in a bubble that brings back fond memories of the 1920s ...

Yes, the pond also feels biblical, and thinks there's a hard day coming, and soon enough, when the bubble bursts ...

And so pond can't thank Polonius enough for this day's work … what a splendid domestic intellectual he is, how wrong of the ABC to ignore him, when will they give him his own program?

The pond already has a good title for it, and a direct, no nonsense straight to camera form of presentation that will transform television …

 

Yes, we don't need no blow-in blow hards, not when we have Polonius to hand to assure us that the Donald isn't a racist, and all's well in the United States …