In which the pond wraps up another postmodern year ...

 

Of course the fix was in. This was always going to be the last pond post of the year. If reading the reptiles hasn't taught the pond how to nobble a contest, what's the point of it all?

And that allows the pond the chance up front to wish all the pond's readers all the best Xmas and Saturnalian wishes, and the best for 2021, because 2020 has sucked mightily ...

The pond has struggled with existential ennui and an overwhelming sense of tedium and repetition in its reptile handling this year, and it's only the comments that have kept the pond going. It's a select band of regular contributors, but how much more fun to read than the reptiles ...

The pond might stagger back into action in the New Year, but it did hope to leave a few memorable seasonal thoughts for anyone who stumbled past in the interim, and the Monday reptile A-team delivered ...

And so to business, and first the pond would like celebrate its favourite reptile word, a word intimately bound up with the deviant leftist march through the institutions, so feared and reviled by the reptiles: postmodern, and all that postmodernism breeds.

That's why, as a postmodernist, post-ironic, post-millennial, post-meaning blog, the pond was vastly amused by historian Charlotte Lydia Riley's piece in the Graudian, here.

Amongst her targets was the haplessly named Liz Truss, and interalia it went down this way:

...I would feel uncomfortable marking Liz Truss’s homework in public like this, except that she was never really trying to understand Foucault. In fact, on the right, it is a badge of honour not to understand or care about these thinkers – much as Dominic Cummings proudly dismissed “Oxbridge English graduates who chat about Lacan at dinner parties”. (In typical fashion, Cummings managed to signal both his own cleverness – he went to Oxford, don’t forget! – and his lack of familiarity with what actual humans discuss at dinner parties these days.) The Conservative party needs these lefty intellectual bogeymen, to act as a helpful shorthand for everything that they find most alarming and infuriating.
There are many ironies here – postmodernism was a response to Marxism, not an embrace of it, and in fact has been described as the “cultural logic of late capitalism”. In many ways, the defining condition of post-modernity is neoliberalism, so there is no reason for Conservatives not to embrace it. But for politicians, “postmodernism” has become one of those zombie ideas that cannot be killed by facts, no matter how many times academics explain that it does not in fact mean what they say it does. For a historian like myself, what is especially ironic here is that it is the contemporary right that tends to embody its own false caricature of “postmodernism”, falling back on interpretation and subjective feeling in response to uncomfortable accounts of our own history.
Truss’s speech came in the wake of unforgettable headlines in the rightwing press lamenting that a painting in the Queen’s collection of the Battle of Rorke’s Drift – in the 1879 Anglo-Zulu war – would now be described as “connected to colonialism and imperialism”. This is demonstrably a rejection of objective truth. Rorke’s Drift was unquestionably a battle in the empire, but the papers were horrified that it might be described as an act of “colonial violence” because that would involve challenging our idea of what the empire really was. Similarly, adding detail to National Trust properties about their connection to slavery is bad, because this undermines British identity as the good guys and changes our understanding of empire’s legacies in Britain today, even if it is entirely accurate. For the right, this is not writing history, but “rewriting” history – which is suspect, because it chips away at their interpretation of the past, even though what is being added in these acts of “rewriting” is true. It’s not what Foucault would have wanted. But it might be what he would have predicted.

Why start this way for the final pond post of the year? 

Because the enormous stupidity of the reptiles has led postmodernism to be a favourite reptile, and so pond, word. Oh sure there are many others in the lexicon of identity politics the reptiles love to play, but look at the evidence …

It's a favourite term of abuse by the Caterists, Major Mitchell, and such like. Here's the Major: 

Media sceptics fully signed up to the anti-colonialist, postmodern, identity politics view of history and literature should apply some critical thinking to the ANU as well as to Ramsay.

Here's the Caterist:

The roots of the crisis in empiricism run deep. The cult of post-modernism propagating the view that there is no objective truth accounts for some of the rot. (anyone bold enough can visit the cash in the paw institute for that one).

The pond would love to let Riley loose on them, but she'd flay them alive, and then the pond would have to hang their skins with the rabbits and the 'roos in the shed out the back, and who wants the bother?

Even though truth and knowledge is changeable over time - fewer believe these days that Eve was just a spare rib - the judges considered their verdict, and it was thought that were worthy reptile contenders who could stand tall and proud as discussion starters over the break, and give any passing stray reader moments of vast amusement, especially as time put an even greater distance between their thoughts and what might be construed as reality.

What do you know, the Caterist even joined in the pond's word game, though sadly he ignored the tremendous virtues of "postmodern" for other verbiage, but then when it comes to actually working out the movement of flood waters in quarries, we can always rely on the Caterist to fuck it up, and stick out his paw for another government grant, while bemoaning bureaucrats and their work...

 

 

Yes, as his contribution to the pond's joining the ABC in taking a break, the Caterist was going to play the word salad game too ...

 

 

Sadly the C****ist has thus far avoided joining the Major in celebrating a pro-colonial, pro-imperialist, anti-modernist reptile mindset, but to be fair, he did work in "word police", even if the judges had to deduct a technical point for his failure to link this to "Orwellian".  Sometimes the pond despairs at the reptiles' incompetent inability to live down to their standards of abuse ...

As for his celebration of coon, it shows that being a sociologist in England might have been inadequate preparation for the way they played (and probably still play) the game up Tamworth way, where "coon" has the same basic strength as "cunt", though it lacks the consonantal thrust ... 

Ah what fun it is to be in the company of a fuckwit one last time for the year ... (no, not a purely Tamworthian term, but one worthy of Tamworth) ...

 

It is, of course, remarkably stupid of the Caterist to celebrate a refusal to wear masks, even as New South Wales goes into a panic, and the wearing of masks would be an obvious, medically endorsed response.

But that's how you get climate science denialism, and blather about flood waters in quarries and the joy of coal over renewables, and all the other Caterist games ... a vast horde of delusions and conspiracies so grand that only a few other grandmasters can play the game with more skill ...

 

 

And so to the final Caterist gobbet for the year ...

 

Pardon the expression, and pardon the pond for perhaps having observed it already, but what a fuckwit the Caterist is. 

As Mick himself was wont to say, that's not a moron, this is a moron. Or was that a knife raised in anger? Or as a deterrent? Or something?

Did the Caterist ever actually see the movie, or its sequels, with Mick regularly showing his virility by sending hoodlums and villains packing? Silly pond, that's like asking if the Caterist has a grip on reality and flood waters ...

As for that talk of reasoned opinions on virology, gender, climate and race, shove some bleach up your nose, and go tell it to the flood waters ...

The pond has its own favourite conspiracy theory as it hangs out for its shot ... (the Morrison government having set a very SloMo pace when it comes to the shots) ...

 

 

 

 

And so to the Oreo, because the pond couldn't help but notice that the NY Times had provided the pond with the perfect introductory graphic ...

 

 

 

Only in America would an allegedly mainstream newspaper worry about addictive shit of the Oreo kind, and yet down under we must ask, why does the Oreo keep on publishing the same old wearying tripe? No new flavours, just the same tired old brand of chewing gum left on the bedpost overnight.

Is this what happens when you become a recovering, perhaps even fully reformed, feminist?

 

Ah the Xians, the long suffering Xians, who've never done harm to anyone over the centuries, and instead, in the manner of Tony Perkins, sat wrapped in a blanket explaining how they'd never even hurt a fly as the movie came to an end.

How fitting is this, how right and true and just for a reformed, recovering feminist ...

 

The march of modernity!

Well it isn't quite up there with postmodernism, but the judges awarded the recovering, reformed feminist a few marks for trying ...

As for the rest, all that blather about assorted forms of sacred, and militant atheism, the pond was reminded of that old line by Richard Dawkins: "We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one good further."

Ricky Gervais re-worked that line in a debate with Catholic Colbert ...

GERVAIS: … Atheism is only rejecting the claim that there is a god. Atheism isn’t a belief system. So this is atheism in a nutshell. You say there’s a God. I say, “Can you prove that?” You say no. I say, “I don’t believe you then.” So you believe in one God, I assume?
COLBERT: Uhh…. in three persons, but go ahead.
GERVAIS: Okay. But there are about 3,000 to choose from… Basically, you deny one less God than I do. You don’t believe in 2,999 gods. And I don’t believe in just one more. (here)

But at this time of year, the pond does spare a thought for all the religious fanatics persecuted by other religious fanatics, and minorities persecuted by religious fanatics ...

 

 

Oh there's nothing like postmodernist capitalism, is there? And so to the last Oreo gobbet for the year ...

 

Yes, they shall overcome, and smite and smote non-believers and gays and women wanting to control their bodies, and there shall be complimentary women scattered throughout the land, and there you have it, there's where recovering from feminism, and reforming into a full blown reptile twit lands you ...

And now speaking of verschworungserzahlung, as it seems we must, the pond would like to honour the Major's attempt this day, but only with a headline ...

 

 

The Major lathered up a ripper of a conspiracy theory - it seems everyone in Victoria is somehow involved in the persecution of the Pellists - but the pond had its frock fest yesterday, and is now well over the Pellists. 

If only a scintilla of reptile energy had been devoted to the victims of the Catholic church these past few decades, how much better the world might have been ...

Instead the pond turned to the lizard editorialist for its last mystery of the year, and what a deep and teasing mystery it is ...

 

 

 

 

Well yes he did, the pond can swear to that ...

 

 

 

 

 

It raised a question that has taunted and teased the pond all year.

Just what has Vlad the impaler got on the Donald? 

He's clearly got something. The reptiles always walk around it, they never ask the question, but surely it's obvious by now, even in the dying days of the presidency. Is it money, is it a sex scandal, is it possession of sensitive paperwork? Did they pull a sting and land a bloated whale?

Likely enough, the pond will never know what it is. It'll go down as a mystery, just like the JFK assassination, too deep even to turn up in a John le Carré novel, if only he'd been allowed another year to write about the Donald ...

It's a bit like asking what Vlad has on Miss Lindsey, something he might have given to the Donald, which turned Miss Lindsey from an independent child (or so he would pretend) into the most craven and sycophantic of Donald supporters ...

 

 

 

Again the pond will likely never know, and it doesn't expect the final lizard Oz editorialist gobbet to provide an answer to these deep mysteries, but it does provide a timely reminder that the Donald is the result of all that News Corp has tirelessly worked for over these past decades ...

How funny that they should suddenly turn Frankenstein's doctor and bemoan their monstrous creation ... "perplexing" indeed ...

 

 

 

You know, once upon a time, the Donald's aversion to criticising Vlad was put down to his sensitivity to the way the Russians helped him win the election; now it seems his sensitivity is due to his election loss.

That's the way it goes in this post-modern world, and should, during this year's seasonal fun, Scrabble seem a bit taxing, might the pond propose Xmas decorations as a way of producing domestic peace and joy ...

 

And with that joyous thought, merry Xmas and happy new year to all, oh and fuck the reptiles too, just for the fun of it, because the pond is out of here, because surely next year can't get any worse, though the pond suspects it might manage it easily, if we keep on with the reptiles' and their rabid premodernist, coal-loving ways ...