Yesterday the reptiles had a nightmare … the Catholic Boys' (and occasionally girls') Daily fell into a fainting fit at the prospect of a poofter-loving, climate science accepting Catholic getting a job in the Vatican …
The pond merely mentions the hysteria and the beat-up as an example of the lack of depth in the reptile pages during January …
There's no point in actually wading through the piece, because by the end, it concludes that the chance of the offender actually becoming the next Pope is simply a chance, and the use of the term "red Pope" is just a way of inducing a flashback to the 1950s in the geriatric readership.
But it does illustrate a deeper problem … because the pond this day anxiously looked around for examples of distilled essence of loonery, and had to give up.
Oh dashing Donners, in the pond's deepest, darkest hour of need, why have you forsaken it? Surely there was time to warn of the long march through the institutions before schools returned?
Instead there was Gra Gra being completely useless in the gra-gra way …
That meandering tour through a fading mind ended up with the hapless old SloMo lover blathering about not being able to park in his driveway …
There would have been more point to clipping a tram ticket than cutting and pasting the piece ...
There was also Karl Rove, who seems to have become the holiday season cockroach infesting the lizard Oz …but the pond refuses to rove with Karl.
It got so bizarre that the pond wondered why on earth the reptiles had decided to get one of the Craven mob to scribble in a cultural way about matters he might only know at third hand …
Ah, it's because the reptiles wanted a man with a gift for cliché of the "blut und eisen" kind, with a bonus of "dark warrior", seemingly put into inverted commas to avoid suggesting it was about a video game, a movie or, gasp, people of a swarthy complexion …because here no racism, no racism here, dark warrior of the swarthy kind.
Sadly, even before it began, the pond knew with absolute certainty that there would be nothing to see here ...
Phew, time for a cartoon already?
Never mind, the Craven stood for an infinite capacity for cliché, and he stood for it like a cultural colossus ...
Yep, this is a man with nothing to say and no insight to offer, and endless words with which to say it, but plenty of what was once termed "colour", with colourful use of words such as "bizarrely" and "man of flint" and "aftershock" and "dark brows under the white hair raised", and there's little doubting that this "old dear" is a complete waste of time, which is why the pond apologetically offers another cartoon …
And so to some rhetorical flourishes. Will the pond bash its brains out? Will the pond learn anything at all? Has the pond lured stray readers down the garden path? Is there any meaning to life, apart from a Monty Python sketch about the salmon mousse?
Who knows, but indications are that the level of brain damage is incalculable …
Oh for fuck's sake, Goering? What's he got to do with it? Everyone knows the classic sci-fi question involved Adolf, and such a devotee of the art of the cliché should have gone with his first instinct.
True, we have "flaming bloody horror" and "creepier aspects" and "supreme prize" and "dark warrior" yet again, and the "crown of martyrdom" and the beseeching of an imaginary friend, naturally the god who is likely to be on the reptiles' side, rather than all the other gods that litter the planet …
But please, look on the upside. At least the pond and innocent stray readers now know the answer to the useless question, what happens when you let loose a 'culture critic' to deal with a world at war?
The pond should have known the answer was 'stuff and nonsense', and yet all the pond can offer in compensation for this meaningless assault on the senses is another cartoon …
Not content to reduce stray readers to a meaningless pulp, there's another matter that's been tormenting the reptiles … why, it even took up the right hand side of the page in the lizard Oz …
So how did the reptiles cope?
Why the """ for contributor Gay? Why no thumb portrait in the reptile way?
Well spoiler alert, it's January and hes' from the WSJ, as so much of the lizard Oz has been this month.
They really are scraping the bottom of the holiday season barrel … and there seems to be no succession plan, no attempt to bring on bright young local things, but instead we have imported attempts at gaiety by gay blades…
They wasted the Lobbecke of the day on this? The master satirist, the awesome illustrator usually assigned to the likes of the bromancer and nattering "Ned"? Now reduced to a tiresome background drone?
The pond couldn't believe that the reptiles, and so perforce the pond, had suddenly turned into the Daily Beast, and was transfixed by an attempt at levity about minor royals …
Here, have another cartoon as compensation …
Such terrible food, and in such small servings ...
Sweet long absent Jesus, the reptiles are reduced to recycling this sort of stuff? Ross Campbell would be rolling in his grave, and for those who can't remember old Ross, what about Lennie Lower rolling in his grave?
Well here's luck to you, and another cartoon …
By now it should become clear that the pond is just putting up the gobbets and the cartoons in a desperate attempt to be done with it all ...
Sheesh, Karl Rove and the WSJ? And that's the reptile reader's lot in life?
Why the pond might just as well take to recycling the Borowitz Report that pops up in its mailbox every so often …
Well there's always the Betoota Advocate … and back to weekend ponding … or as a last desperate gesture, another cartoon offering a strategic response, though the pond realises that nothing can compensate for the mind parasites already devouring stray readers' brains …
Talking about "the hysteria and the beat-up", DP, another series of events (aka Megxit) reminded me of some advice offered by another 'boys and girls own religious leader' to another royal:
ReplyDelete"it being less difficult to obtain forgiveness for it after it was done, than permission for doing it"
[Cardinal Baberini to the duchess of Modena, quoted by Agnes Strickland, 'Lives of the Queens of England', 1846.
Covers a lot of tricky ground, that one, doesn't it..
Goering was such a screw up(see Battle of Britain) that no, "we" would not want him "taken out" in 1937, rather we should have sent our finest doctors to keep him healthy.
ReplyDeleteCraven mentioning Sherman in the same breath as Cromwell, part of the same "flaming bloody history" is inaccurate and insulting.
First off he didn't burn Atlanta, the rebels started the fire. Sherman's army cut a swath
50 miles wide to the sea to demonstrate to the populace their illegitimate government couldn't
even defend the rebel heartland, causing thousands of CSA soldiers to desert and rush home while destroying morale across the CSA.
Yes it was a shame they burned down Massa's plantations and set people free, how awful. For 150 years after the war Southern historians dominated the historical retelling of the conflict, slurring men like Grant and Sherman. Only now has that ended(see the removal of CSA statues).
The once worshiped Bobby Lee has been exposed as pushing to have the Irish! enslaved instead as they were "more pliant" than the Blacks, who would be sent "back" to Africa.
Lee was penniless because of his whoring/gambling alcoholic father, till he married his rich wife. When her father died, he left Lee his estates with the direction in the will to free all the slaves.
Lee broke the law and kept them in bondage instead. These people weren't cavaliers, they were vermin.
Sorry to go off on this tangent, Aussies, but Sherman was one of the top ten generals in history(while loathing war), liberated untold thousands of souls in chains, and time and again defeated the enemy by maneuver instead of costly fighting.
But dimwit Craven takes crayon in hand and links him with Cromwell.
Sheesh, Jersey Mike, we don't expect any attempt at real history here! What would be the point? The pond lives in the myopic kool-aid drinking alternative reality of reptile la la land. Still, your contribution is appreciated ...
DeleteWell apart from thinking that the biggest thing in favour of the Allies in WWII was that Adoph was possibly even more stupid than Winston (and much freer to exercise it), then it can be said that the likes of Herman helped out no end.
DeleteBut, JM: "For 150 years after the war Southern historians dominated the historical retelling of the conflict".
Now why was that, then ? Did the Republicans have nobody who could, or would, tell at least some approximation to the true story ?
Hi GB,
DeleteUntil LBJ's Civil Rights legislation, and the ensuing "Southern Strategy" by Tricky Nixon, it was the Democratic leadership of the South that was responsible, though those same people eventually migrated to the GOP.
The Southerners after the war finally realized how bad they looked defending slavery, and that history would judge them harshly, so they pretended the war was about States Rights, predatory Yankees etc.
They made heroes out of Stonewall Jackson(by any standard an insane religious zealot)
and Robert E. Lee, they were saints as opposed to the "butchers" Grant and Sherman.
The North wanted to forget the war and move on, the Losers were obsessed with their loss and created an effective propaganda machine to win the peace, which they largely did on the backs of Black people.
How did this persist so long? Texas, with the other southern states that followed it's lead,had with it's allied states traditionally been the largest purchaser of American textbooks by far.
Thus the history presented in those books was skewed to curry favor with the Lost Cause point of view by the publishing houses. Combined with the fact the South supplied a out sized percentage of the American officer corp and thus future military historians,
plus the inherent racism of so many of these men, and you have the veneration of American traitors like Lee out to create an ever expanding empire of slavery, a Republic of the damned.
That's just a thumbnail sketch, but it will give you an idea.
Dorothy, you are the acme, no kidding. Battling the forces of Slobdom led by the Great White White Father from the Land of Cube, Scott Morrison, whose every utterance lights up the tilt sign, would drive a person of lesser character to a New Orleans gin joint, listening to the cool 88s as played by some old jazzbo as the Delta dawn breaks. Actually that's not a bad place to be, at least once in every person's life.
ReplyDeleteNo doubt this mysterious Tamsworth where the pond was spawned is akin to Bourbon street.