In which the reptiles offer up a major meditative Sunday moment ...

Each Sunday the pond hungers, yearns, for a reptile rant worthy of a meditative moment … but while the hunger is great, rarely do the treats satiate …

This Sunday comes an exception, a grand reptile rant, apocalyptic in tone, righteous in fruity, frothy tones of denunciation, a preaching from the pulpit of the old reptile media, a return to the old religious style worthy of an Elmer Gantry …

Is there anything better than a preacher deploring the indignant outbursts of others, by indulging in a remarkable outburst of pious indignation?

The reptiles knew they were on a winner, and so they gave it the full splash, with big images of all that haunt them in one way or another …

Such is the tyranny of opinion that the tyrannical John Carroll thought nothing of unloading the tyranny of his many righteous opinions …

Let us first start sotto voce, setting out the case …

Indeed, indeed, and needless to say the reptiles are experts in this area of shocking conspicuous consumption…

What a brand, what a chance to indulge in conspicuous consumption, what a promise of prestige, what many ways to establish status anxiety.

Join the Murdochians and you will be a precious, loved member of the retail community, a fellow traveller with all sorts of brands and branding. Become a refusenik, and suffer, you useless bloody peasants …

And now the pond has established its conspicuous consumer credentials - forget the AFR pitching to the big end of town, piss money against the wall on the lizard Oz today - let us begin the meditation and the rant …

Hmm, bored already? So soon? Another Murdochian lecture on all that's wrong with the world?

Sorry, the pond is resolute, and anyway is suffering from a shortage of up to date cartoons, so instead of a little visual relief, how about an alternative read. 

Here's the first few pars from an Adam Gopnik piece for The New Yorker, still outside the paywall at time of writing …

Dictatorship has, in one sense, been the default condition of humanity. The basic governmental setup since the dawn of civilization could be summarized, simply, as taking orders from the boss. Big chiefs, almost invariably male, tell their underlings what to do, and they do it, or they are killed. Sometimes this is costumed in communal decision-making, by a band of local bosses or wise men, but even the most collegial department must have a chairman: a capo di tutti capi respects the other capi, as kings in England were made to respect the lords, but the capo is still the capo and the king is still the king. Although the arrangement can be dressed up in impressive clothing and nice sets—triumphal Roman arches or the fountains of Versailles—the basic facts don’t alter. Dropped down at random in history, we are all as likely as not to be members of the Soprano crew, waiting outside Satriale’s Pork Store.
Only in the presence of an alternative—the various movements for shared self-government that descend from the Enlightenment—has any other arrangement really been imagined. As the counter-reaction to Enlightenment liberalism swept through the early decades of the twentieth century, dictators, properly so called, had to adopt rituals that were different from those of the kings and the emperors who preceded them. The absence of a plausible inherited myth and the need to create monuments and ceremonies that were both popular and intimidating led to new public styles of leadership. All these converged in a single cult style among dictators.
That, more or less, is the thesis of Frank Dikötter’s new book, “How to Be a Dictator: The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century” (Bloomsbury). Dikötter—who, given his subject, has a wonderfully suggestive, Nabokovian name—is a Dutch-born professor of history at the University of Hong Kong; he has previously written about the history of China under Mao, debunking, at scholarly length and with a kind of testy impatience, the myth of Mao as an essentially benevolent leader. “How to Be a Dictator” takes off from a conviction, no doubt born of his Mao studies, that a tragic amnesia about what ideologues in power are like has taken hold of too many minds amid the current “crisis of liberalism.” And so he attempts a sort of anatomy of authoritarianism, large and small, from Mao to Papa Doc Duvalier.
Each dictator’s life is offered with neat, mordant compression. Dikötter’s originality is that he counts crimes against civilization alongside crimes against humanity. Stalin is indicted for having more than 1.5 million people interrogated, tortured, and, in many cases, executed. (“At the campaign’s height in 1937 and 1938 the execution rate was roughly a thousand per day,” Dikötter writes.) But Stalin is also held responsible for a nightmarish cultural degradation that occurred at the same time—the insistence on replacing art with political instruction, and with the cult of the Leader, whose name was stamped on every possible surface. As one German historian notes, you could praise Stalin “during a meeting in the Stalin House of Culture of the Stalin Factory on Stalin Square in the city of Stalinsk.” This black comedy of egotism could be found even among neo-Stalinist dictators of far later date. In 1985, Nicolae Ceauşescu, Romania’s Communist leader, ordered up such television programs as “The Nicolae Ceauşescu Era” and “Science During the Nicolae Ceauşescu Epoch.” By law, his portrait was featured at the beginning of every textbook.
Dikötter’s broader point is that this manner spread to the most improbable corners of the world. His most interesting chapters, in some ways, are on the “tin-pot” dictators—like Duvalier, in Haiti, and Mengistu, in Ethiopia—who, ravaging poverty-stricken countries, still conform to the terrible type. The reason his subjects exhibit a single style is in part mutual influence and hybridization (North Korean artists made Mengistu a hundred-and-sixty-foot-tall monument in Ethiopia), and in part common need. All share one ugliness because all bend to one effect: not charm but intimidation, and not persuasion but fear.

And now we have the Donald, and his Fox worshippers.

Of course you can also praise Chairman Rupert during a reading of the Chairman's lizard Oz in the Chairman's HQ in Surry Hills too, but perhaps that's enough distraction for the moment … because woe and weary is the western world ...

Uh huh.

So soon back into familiar denialist territory. Too soon?

Well, it's not the pond's fault. The pond didn't write "whatever the truth about climate change", the sort of half-baked bullshit moral equivalence of a fuckwit - if the pond might resort to an earthy Tamworth style - when it comes to the sort of ersatz climate science denialism to be found in that last par, which manages to reduce science to a branch of astrology …

What did the scribbler say about 'in the end, if you accept nothing, there is nothing to accept'?

Here's a blatherer who isn't a scientist, throwing out saucy doubts and fears, carping out unreliability, in a manner that would make the dog botherer proud.

Well the pond won't rise to that bait, and will press on … because, you guessed it, social media ...

The pond recognises the style. Another old fart, angry at the inevitability of old age and death and irrelevance, and a world whizzing by, not giving a flying fuck, while the ancient mariner tries to stoppeth one or two of three and tell them all that's wrong with the world …

How long has this been going on? Please pardon the pond's impudence, but it harked back to a very old book for a reminder …

The words of the Preacher, the son of Chairman Rupert, king of media.
Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun and spendeth his dayeth on Facebook? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth and the cell phone abideth for ever. The sun and the Instagram also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to her place where she arose. The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to her circuits, and foundation stones of the modern West crack. 
All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again, lacking measured reflection. All things are full of labour; woman cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing, especially after watching that useless clip on YouTube. The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun, unless you saw the Donald’s last tweet, rapturously greeted with awe by the reptiles. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new?, as if reptile whining about social media was old hat, but it hath been already of old time, which was before us. There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after, and let us not forgetteth that dependency on approval, which will deprive them of any memory, unless they use the Wayback Machine.

And so on, and on, and on ...

Oh dear, he's not going there, is he?

Well, it is a Sunday meditation, and the pond's got all day, so here's the statement of belief at barking mad Margaret Court's church …

Now you'll note point two, that "existent in three persons" routine, which brings up the unfortunate matter of Folau as heretic …

Splitter, heretic! There's a heck of a lot more here, but the pond hasn't had this much fun with feuding, fussing fundamentalists since the days when the Pellists in their frocks were a regular feature …

The Pellists?

Folau's cousin Josiah - a member of the congregation - has claimed the Catholic Church is a "synagogue of Satan".

"Roman Catholicism is masked devil worship," he also said. (here)

Indeed, indeed, but enough of traditional values and the founding rocks of the West - heretics, Satanists, burn them at the stake, conduct a couple of world wars, indulge in a Holocaust - because the pond must return to the ranter, still ranting away ...

Marie Antoinette knew about that kind of logic …

You see, you can mock the modernists while at the same time dismissing the rather quaint and feeble old schoolists …

As a result, you sound like you believe in nothing, and accept nothing - the shallows of cynicism - though there's the lurking suspicion that actually you might be an old fart inclined to laughable, ludicrous views …

Well the pond made it to the last gobbet with only one cartoon … not bad, all things considered ...

Virtual shallowness?

By writing a piece so full of virtue of a reptile kind, and yet so shallow, has the emeritus prof done a QED?

Okay boomer, if the pond might resort to another form of Tamworth speak, what an apocalyptic doom saying wanker, displaying all that he deplores …

Well the pond has its own crisis, and it's time for an urgent plea. 

We last heard from David Rowe on 19th December 2019, at least on that deplorable medium known as Twitter, and here it is, the 19th January 2020, and all we have had to clutch at in the interim is this cartoon …

The silence is unendurable, it is now merry impeachment trial 2020 … and it is beyond time for the rising of the Rowe, and the return from the dead, and a cartoon or three, a holy trinity if you like …

The Sunday meditation is over, the meaning of words in dispute,  the hour of need at hand …