In which the pond gets back into a decent frock, suffers with prattling Polonius, and hums kumbaya with our Gracie ...

 

 

 

 

 

 

The pond happened to be reading The New Yorker's What Makes a Cult a Cult? (outside the paywall for the nonce), and became nostalgic for the good old days, when the angry Sydney Anglicans in search of complimentary women, and the frock-loving Pellists filled the Sunday pond with joy ... 

Of course what makes a cult a cult isn't as interesting as answering the question of how cults survive, and the pond bets that longevity and familiarity have something to do with it.

Few people within the Catholic cult have the first clue what transubstantiation is supposed to mean in a literal sense, and yet they happily troop off for a dose of human blood and flesh on a Sunday, apparently unaware of the pagan tradition they're following ...

It's a struggle for modern cults to get their shit together, in a way honed by a couple of thousand years of shaping and moulding and developing a good line in frocks ...

...The good news is that rational objections to flaws in cult doctrine or to hypocrisies on the part of a cult leader do have a powerful impact if and when they occur to the cult members themselves. The analytical mind may be quietened by cult-think, but it is rarely deadened altogether. Especially if cult life is proving unpleasant, the capacity for critical thought can reassert itself. Rothschild interviews several QAnon followers who became disillusioned after noticing “a dangling thread” that, once pulled, unravelled the whole tapestry of QAnon lore. It may seem unlikely that someone who has bought into the idea of Hillary Clinton drinking the blood of children can be bouleversé by, say, a trifling error in dates, but the human mind is a mysterious thing. Sometimes it is a fact remembered from grade school that unlocks the door to sanity. One of the former Scientologists interviewed in Alex Gibney’s documentary “Going Clear” reports that, after a few years in the organization, she experienced her first inklings of doubt when she read L. Ron Hubbard’s account of an intergalactic overlord exploding A-bombs in Vesuvius and Etna seventy-five million years ago. The detail that aroused her suspicions wasn’t especially outlandish. “Whoa!” she remembers thinking. “I studied geography in school! Those volcanoes didn’t exist seventy-five million years ago!”

Whoa, what about burning bushes?

And so to a trip down nostalgia lane, thanks to the angelic one ...

 

Now the pond fully expects the hapless, persecuted Pellist to turn up at some point in this sorry saga, but let us not forget that the Pellist himself, apart from his love of frocks, had a taste for luxury and being surrounded by supportive young male priests (or so the gay priest in the pond's extended family used to say) ...

There was that classic 2015 hit piece in Espresso Repubblica, for which you'll need a paywall key, and if your Italian is as good as the pond's, a google translation ...  George Pell, quanti lussi per il moralizzatore vaticano
Mezzo milione speso in pochi mesi dal porporato australiano incaricato della spending review. Tra arredi e voli in business class ...

Or ...

George Pell, how many luxuries for the Vatican moralizer
Half a million spent in a few months by the Australian cardinal in charge of the spending review. Between furnishings and business class flights

Or ...

"We went from the frying pan to the grill," murmured senior prelates disappointed by the homo novus who came from the land of kangaroos. If Bertone was crucified for moving into a mega apartment with a panoramic terrace, George's first act was to hire his personal bursar, Danny Casey, for 15,000 euros a month. Tax free, of course. The monsignor wants the best for his protégé. So the Secretariat also rented him a house for 2900 euros per month in via dei Coronari and paid for quality furnishings for the office and home: the tables show 7,292 euros under the heading "upholstery", almost 47,000 euros "Furniture and cabinets" (including the "sink" for 4,600 euros), as well as various jobs for 33,000 euros.
Sifting through the confidential data, the cardinal also put on the expense report the purchases made at the Gammarelli shop, a historic tailor shop that since 1798 has dressed the curia of the Eternal City: in general the cardinals pay their tunics and beret out of their pockets, but this time the secretariat has billed dresses directly for 2,508 euros (who had the Magna cape sewn, the dress with a kilometric train worn on solemn occasions?). The new Vatican boss has spared no expense even for travel. The "ranger", as Francesco called him when presenting him to the press, spent 1,103 euros to go from Rome to London on 3 July. A business class price. His companion, the Australian priest Mark Withoos paid only 274 on the same plane: Pell probably placed him in economy.
When he flies, the cardinal never gives up on luxury: four days later he was reimbursed by his ministry for a flight from Rome to Dresden, in Germany, for 1,150 euros, another to Munich for 1,238, while last September the School of the Annunciation of Devon, of which the ultra-conservative has become the "patron", had to pay 1,293 euros for a Rome-London. Pell and Casey sit in business even when they have to leave for Malta, where they go to listen to the advice of the financier Joseph Zahra. But all the men close to the cardinal are flying in first class: from Lord Christopher Patten (former president of the BBC who should reform the communication of the Holy See) to Singapore industrialist George Yeo, on airplanes Pell pays champagne and canapés to everyone. Someone in the Secretariat tried to point out to him that in the Vatican "whoever preaches well must scratch very well," seems unsuccessful. He is one who does his own thing, and it is no coincidence that both Cardinal Reinhard Marx, head of the Council for the Economy, and the secretary of the ministry Alfred Xuereb matter very little.
 

It's always the greedy fat cats arguing over the spoils, or so a reading of Animal Farm might suggest ... but then the pond lost it with the reptile snap picked up from AFP ...

 

But before we get on to enterprising thriller writers, the pond must deplore that reptile illustration. It entirely misses the point of a decent frock, or preferably a gaggle of frocks with funny feathers ...

 

 

 

 

Come on reptiles, don't forget to rock with the frock ...

 

 

You see, the moraliser had to make an appearance, and yet like all cultists, he was just as much into the spoils, and how he loved to wear a good frock ...

 

 

 

 

 

The pond never used to tire of looking at a good frock, but back to the paranoia, and an unfortunate line, "there is still no evidence of that", when in fact there's a good deal of evidence the Pellist loved his frocks and his first class travels and expensive taps and whatever ...

 

And that's the thing about cults ... the way that dedicated cultists love to gossip, even when a considerable distance from the action taking place inside their favourite cult's volcanoes ...

Forgive the pond, what with the lockdown, it's a hard time, and there must be some relief, and unfortunately prattling "Polonius" doesn't offer any with his tedious, relentless, obsessive compulsive war on the ABC ...

 

 

 

 

 

The pond already had a good dose of this yesterday with Dame Slap's cat fight, as the reptiles add a new figure to their pantheon of fear and loathing ... 

Why Polonius keeps banging on about the ABC, the pond has no idea. It would be terribly easy not to watch the ABC, instead of carrying on like a fundamentalist, righteous, sanctimonious moraliser, but there's something of the hypocritical Pellist about Polonius's railing from the lofty retreat of the Sydney Institute ...

 

 

 

The pond doesn't want to get pedantic in the presence of an ultra-pedant, but coup has a number of meanings, and as well as coup d'état, it might stand for  a brilliant, sudden, and usually highly successful stroke or act, as in "people were startled that a moronic man from marketing might suddenly produce a highly successful stroke or coup against a complete NBN ruining dud of the Malware kind ..."

Instead the pond would like to chivvy the reptiles about the way they insist on interrupting Polonius with clips, aware that his anal retentive obsessive compulsive, incessantly repetitive style is low on entertainment value ...

 

There's also something vaguely repulsive and schoolyard bully about calling someone a quitter, as if it's not alright to say I've had enough of this shit and I'm out of here ... much as if the pond finally came to its senses and said, I've had enough of reading Polonius's weird shit, and I'm done with it, and sayonara pompous pedant ... but alas and alack, the pond kept reading ...

 

 

More to the point, how to explain that the reptiles then served up another video, this time material filched from the ABC? It's been safely neutered here by way of a screen cap ...

 

The point of course is that Polonius would prefer a hive mind in a one party state, where people all obsequiously go around agreeing with Polonius and his world view, and become attendant lords, or if there's too many of them, obsequious vassals, and  anyone crossing the Polonial worldview must be denounced by all as a vile heretic ...

 

 

But what if she'd named her groper? What if there'd been another Xian Porter affair? The pond can leave others to write the bizarro column that Polonius would have furiously and indignantly scribbled ... please, the only condition for the exercise is that it must be full of frothing and foaming, and fey irrelevant snatches of history, preferably with a few errors to produce a tang of authenticity ...

And so to a final Sunday treat, featuring our Gracie ...

 

 

 

 

 

The pond has of late taken to noting how much our Gracie has strayed from the reptile path ...

 

When it comes to the virus, the usual reptile path is to blame the victim, or to forget about the victim, and worry about the future of Scotty from marketing, pace these two weekend offerings ...

 

 

 

 

 

The pond doesn't feel dangerously complacent, and it refuses to take a deep breath, especially when the deep breathing is proposed by a fuckwit of the oscillating fan kind, determined to keep SloMo in the chair, because we can never have enough incompetence ...

And that's why the pond prefers to stick with the transformed Gracie ...

Poor old Brad, he's had a rough few days ...

 

But these days our Gracie is a forgiving soul, and always ready to sing a verse of "come together, right now ..." ... or is she? Is she more inclined to give our golden Gladys a bit of what for, a bit of the old Victorian stick across the rump ...?

 

Indeed, indeed, and if their wish was granted, the cockroaches of Sydney would suddenly be joined by a pariah state gone out on a limb ...

But our Gracie really does want to be kind, and it's not in her nature to do a Victorian gloat about cockies in cock-up mode ...

You see? Our Gracie is an alternative universe, apparently unaware that she's appearing in the lizard Oz ...

She lives in hope, and the pond hopes that her hopes are not cruelly shattered by her actually reading the lizard Oz ...

And to so wrap up with a Kudelka, as can be found at the Saturday Paper here ...

 

 

 

And that sent the pond off. It will be remembered by some that Scotty from marketing was in charge with the Bingle dingle took off, and it's haunted him ever since, as here ...

 

And in turn that reminded the pond of an even deeper mystery, unsolved to this day ... despite speculation, as here ...

...Scott Morrison was sacked as managing director of Tourism Australia in 2006 with a year left to run on his contract. For 14 years the reason for the sacking has remained one of the best kept secrets in Parliament, with the Liberal tourism minister at the time, Fran Bailey, never revealing what led to the sacking of the man who went on to become Prime Minister of Australia.
There has been considerable conjecture, but it is clear that the lack of transparency and accountability surrounding the $180 million tourism campaign – the oft-ridiculed “So where the bloody hell are you?” – and the awarding of a contract to M&C Saatchi played a key part.
The campaign’s tender process was heavily criticised by the advertising industry, with players bemoaning that the tender criteria were skewed towards a particular agency.
Following repeated calls by the opposition for more probity, word leaked to the media that KPMG had been called in to conduct a “probity audit”. The Age declared that KPMG had been hauled in to “give an impression that the selection criteria is kosher”.
No media release announcing KPMG’s appointment as probity auditor exists in the archived websites of Tourism Australia, the department of industry, and that of the minister, Fran Bailey.

And so on and on, as the smell of off eggs permeates the ether ...

But enough already. The pond has been out and about in frocks, shared a pedantically precise two minute boiled ABC egg with Polonius, and explored the depths of our Gracie's heresies, and that's enough for a Sunday ...

Instead how about sending a cheerio to the bromancer and cackling Joel with a First Dog?