In which the pond has to endure ABC bashing by the precious as its Sunday meditation ...

 

 

 

Over the years, Polonius has become more and more obsessed ... and repetitive ...

So the pond can understand by why passersby might prefer to spend a Sunday meditation with Marina Hyde,  even if it means thinking about cricket, in a little paine at the moment, or catch up on the venerable Meade's Weekly Beast ...

Obsessions can be unhealthy, and lead to weird magical thinking, or even remarkably silly "believe it or not" lines ...

 

 

 

Polonius's obsession with the ABC is on a level of weirdness all its own, but the more general reptile paranoid fear and loathing of  the ABC, on view this weekend - as seen yesterday in the pond with Dame Slap - has a simpler explanation, as noted by the venerable Meade ...

 

 

 

 

 

Ouch. The lizard Oz not even in the top ten. No wonder the pond's own numbers are in the gurgler ...

But back to the bee buzzing around in Polonius's bonnet...

 

 

 

And so to a moment which, if the pond could be bothered trawling through the Polonial archives, would reveal the heart and nub of the problem, which is deeply Freudian and psychological ...

How many times has Polonius deplored in lizard Oz print the absence of a conservative presence on the ABC? It must be at least a squillion ...

 

The pond can't be bothered trawling through the archive to compile a dossier but here he was with the Bolter droning on a few years ago ...

 

 

 

 

 

 

That image gives new resonance to "unprepossessing" ... the resemblance to that painting is becoming more unnerving by the day ....

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aand yet we all know what the Polonial code really means. 

 

As the premier conservative commentator, at least in his own mind, Polonius has a sense of deprivation and of deep loss resulting in ongoing mourning ...

 

 

 

 

The pond isn't a licensed Freudian but we all know what Polonius means - it's a bit like that lost teddy bear in Citizen Kane.

Polonius should have been the Media Watch presenter; nay, Polonius should have had his own show on the ABC, and in prime time at that, an insightful update on B. A. Santamaria's splendid telly performances. 

 

And yet the ABC has always treated him cruelly ... and like Miss Havisham, he must wait beside the rotting wedding cake, still dressed in his commentator togs, waiting for the call to a wedding that will never come ...

 

And yet, to pick on one Polonial pro-mango Mussolini point,  in all the murk and mystery and intrigue, who knows ... 

 

The Donald might have been too incompetent to truly enter into a conspiracy, but perhaps Vlad really did want a knave and a fool for a president ...

 

Or perhaps it was just an elaborate scam to shake down suckers, now that Trump university, Trump steaks and assorted other Trump brands are a tad tainted ...

 

 

 

Daily Beast that Axios yarn here, and with that early bit of the war on Xmas out of the way,  the pond can now move on to the next round of ABC bashing, this time courtesy of the dog botherer ... (just remember the stats and the real motive) ...

 

A whining child?

 

But has there ever been a more needy, whining and precious child than the dog botherer? 

 

Donning its amateur Freudian hat again, the pond wondered whether projection or transference best captured the phenomenon ...

Transference describes a situation where the feelings, desires, and expectations of one person are redirected and applied to another person.

Projection is the process of displacing one's feelings onto a different person, animal, or object. The term is most commonly used to describe defensive projection—attributing one's own unacceptable urges to another.

Perhaps a bit of both ...

 

 

 

As the reptiles most compleat climate science denialist, could the pond just pause to offer the dog botherer a Kudelka award? With more Kudelkas here ...

 

 

That felt like a timely interruption and now back to the unseemly ranting ...

 

How precious? How fucking precious? 

Why there's a fucking cheek. How about this for precious?

How about this for precious?

 

Yes, the dog botherer in the past has been big on cancellation and precious legal action, which brings the pond back to those notions of projection and transference ...

 

Oh fuck a duck, the precious one channeling Polonius about conservatives ... from the intellectually shallow, ideologically homogeneous sheltered workshops of the lizard Oz and Sky News after dark, refuges  for precious bullshit artists in the bosom of the Chairman,

 

It wouldn't be a dog botherer piece without mention of climate alarmism ...

 

 

Uh oh, the pond could sense that the whining, petulant, foot-stomping tone was building to a mention of Lord Downer, and when that happens, the pond either reaches for its Glock or a transcript lost in the ABC's archives, but saved in the pond, when the dog botherer and Lord Downer were at one in war mongering ways ...

 

 

 

Yes, that was a pre-emptive spoiler, but it had to be done because there was just one gobbet to go ...

And the pond just wanted to celebrate the end of another dog botherer rant with a Wilcox ...

 

 

 

And so to the bonus, and sadly the pond had to rule out our Gracie, off getting obsessed with trade unions.

But that left the bubble-headed booby ...

So be it ...

Give me assisted living? That sounds dangerously socialist. No doubt Dame Groan and other reptiles would have a word or two to say about that ...

But in what's meant to be a touchy feely piece, the reptiles started out with the right sort of illustration, one suited to the manly men style of the times ...

 

And so to talk of keeping a man in a coma for three days while dying, just because it can be done ...

As we're getting personal, at this point the pond must sidetrack off to the deaths of its own parents. Its father was assisted by a kindly doctor, who delivered a shot to speed him on his way. It was a kindness, a way out on a really hard journey that was about to end ...

But it was more problematic with the pond's mother. She ended up in a home. It wasn't a bad home, with good rural views just outside Tamworth, and a caring staff in the country manner, and yet even on a good day, it could turn to bedlam.

There were the demented ones, shouting obscenities without knowing they were doing it, and there were the ones howling in pain ... and there was the pond's mother, caught in physical and mental agony, and knowing she was shortly going to die a painful death, while in the interim trapped in a meaningless hell ...

In that hell, the pond is always reminded of a short film by Paul Cox, We Are All Alone My Dear, featuring Jean Campbell, a woman trapped with people with whom she has nothing in common ...

Jean: “…And as I sit here, amongst these people, who’ve all had … mostly been wives and mothers of children, it seems to me it’s almost like a living death, and we’re all sitting here, you know, putting it melodramatically … (the camera begins to move in on her face) …waiting for the final call.”

My mother, realising that the final call was close, one day clutched at the pond's arm, and with tears streaming down her face, begged for a solution: "Just kill me, just kill me ..."

Of course the pond couldn't do that, so she lived on a little while and died in agony, and doubtless would have been happier to go off a little earlier and a little easier, instead of enduring that agony to satisfy the pieties of religion and social norms ...

Speaking of which ...

How churlish to think that your faith and your world view should circumscribe what others think, feel and might want to do as they reach the end of the roads ...

 

 

 

Well yes, palliative care is a good thing, but there will always be limits to it, and the preposterous naivety of that question "what price a life?" entirely misses the point.

It's not a question of pricing life, it's a question of how to die ... with dignity or in agony. The pond was reminded that it isn't always simple when it recently attended a Covid funeral. It was an ugly, isolated death ... and yet the partner had lucked in to a good death. A social event followed by a meal with family and friends, off to bed, and then a quiet death while asleep ...

Sometimes assisted dying is the only way to go out in style, and if the pond ever finds itself in the sort of home in which its mother ended her days, the pond is hoping that someone will take pity on the pond, and drive it out to the Gap ... so that in its final moments, the pond can enjoy the prospect of a free fall through featherless flight ...

And so to end on a cheerful note thanks to Kudelka ...