In which the pond shares Polonius's Toorak conspiracy pain, dishes out a Dame Slapping and spends its bonus in little England with a very little mind ...

 

Each week the pond worries about poor old Polonius. What happens to a fastidious pedant when his best years of pedantry are behind him? What happens to an irrelevant tedious old fart when even the ABC, in search of a harmless conservative in his dotage, looked elsewhere for a sound bite and generated a kernel of bitterness that makes a hardened diamond feel like fairy floss?

What a relief to discover that the old zing has returned and Polonius is on fire, thanks to a kindly unionist ferreting around in the trash bin of history and restoring Polonius to relevance and glory  ...

"In that year ...1983", and it was Polonius wot done it, and talk about an outrageous conspiracy theory and could there be any better way to revive the aged, frail attack dog, and get his fragile teeth back to work savaging the unionist bone?

Carried live by the taxpayer-funded public broadcaster? How that kernel of bitterness has almost a graphene-like strength.

Now here, in relation to that wretched Toorak slur, the pond must be establish or at least confirm that Polonius these days is no longer a Toorak man. 

He's a Phillip street man, with more than a hint of facadism about him, of the kind that would make an RMIT trained architect seethe with envy ... yes, he's a member of the inner city 'leet and proud of it ...

Toorak is just a suburb - the pond still remembers the nightmares of jousting with Rollers for a space in the supermarket carpark, or perhaps a state of mind - whereas Phillip street is pure, distilled essence of all the reptiles spend their waking hours reviling  ...

So you can imagine Polonius's indignation at being lumped into the Lillian Frank set ... (oh and there's another serve of graphene-strength bitterness at being called posh) ...

Yes, he's innocent, damn you, and now he's just a tedious old bore, but what joy that a surge of relevance should surge through the loins again, a bit like Kudelka conjuring up the dinosaurs ...

Well it wasn't really to do with Polonius, but the pond is canny in how it leads stray viewers into the trap of reading the reptiles, and there's no more difficult task than persuading them to pay attention to Dame Slap.

In the old days, the pond would have favoured a forked stick attached to a long bit of string, with the stick holding up the box, and pellets of wheat leading the unsuspecting bird to its doom ...  but now the pond should just 'fess up, and say in a simple and ever so 'umble way, "remember how the pond moaned yesterday about the tedium of visiting planet Janet above the faraway tree? Well know this tedium can be yours, and for a knockdown price ..."

Of course the pond, and diligent pond readers, have heard all this bleating before, and the temptation to hie off to look for a decent neo-Gothic cartoon celebrating democracy in action was irresistible ...

And it wasn't just Rowson ... the usually cheery - if you happen to like a dose of sulphuric acid in your cocktail - Marina Hyde was sounding decidedly glum ... a

At the end of a piece about a Ruski doc series, she forlornly scribbled ...

...The one thing we can say with a general election possibly more than two years away is that no one but a tiny selectorate of 81,000 voted for this radical experiment. Is that democracy? Is that what keeps people believing in politics? Or are we entering a trauma zone of our own?

The pond suddenly felt pleased to be spending some quality time with Dame Slap railing in her usual way about catastrophic armageddons and the end of democracy as we know it and activist judges and all the rest of it.

As opposed to what's happening in Ukraine thanks to a sociopath of the Napoelonic kind, give the pond a faux war any day of the week: This is nothing! Piece of cake! Producing is being a samurai warrior. They pay you day in, day out for years so that one day when called upon, you can respond, your training at its peak, and save the day!

So it was back to Dame Slap, with good cheer, as she talked of the "entirely reckless" and savaged ABC journalists,  and talked of show trials - is there a Star chamber in the house? - and media watch hunts, all with the Dame Slap foaming and frothing that is her speciality ...

Are the police so hopeless at their job? Is Optus great at database security? How would the average plod feel going up against his minister, in league with his commissioner? Dame Slap not working for you? Wanting something more from her fellow MAGA cap wearers? Tried this?

Questions, questions, but credit where it's due.

In her own MABA cap donning way, Dame Slap does her best and is always ready for a sobbing and a sighing ...

At this point the pond was reminded it had already wasted a Wilcox, when it was probably more relevant here ...

Never mind, there's just one gobbet of indignation to go, with naturally Dame Slap keen to invoke the spirit of the meretricious Merritt ...

It goes without saying that Dame Slap doesn't posture or preen or insinuate. She'll just give you a smack across the chops and call it healthy democracy. Go on, put on that MAGA cap and deny climate science, you know it's the right thing to go.

But steady on, what with the mutton Dutton folding, did the pond detect in all this a spirit of resignation, an attempt to ameliorate the damage, a recognition that all the railing and the ranting had been futile, and now it was on with a rearguard action to tackle the details?

Well we all need someone to examine the minutiae, and it could keep Dame Slap out of mischief and harm's way for years to come, and put her in company with others looking at the detail ...

 

And that provides a segue to the pond's bonus piece, featuring a bigot with sundry phobias, shipped in from that desperate little island ...

Shouldn't Brendan have better things to do or to talk about? After all, it's not going that well in little England ...

Cervixes, penises? Wake up lad, you're on the Titanic, and there are only so many lifeboats, and even the lifeboats seem full of peril ...

But if you must show off your phobias, you must ... even at the expense of traducing Iranian women, busy with their struggle, and without an ignorant busybody feigning support for their cause ...

 

Fuck, he's an ignorant sod.

People with cervixes? Adult human females?

A total hysterectomy means both the uterus and the cervix (neck of the womb) are removed, whilst the woman keeps her ovaries. (here).

So if a woman has a hysterectomy she's no longer a woman? 

The pond's mother, after that operation, was no longer an adult human female?

There are many ways to understand gender, but the Brendan way is to be totally clueless. Of course that reference to cervixes was just by way of a preamble, so that Brendan could work his way up to a full blast of transphobia, and attitudes entirely in keeping with the mad mullahs of Iran, the bigots in the GOP and the Southern Baptists, and their kissing cousins in the Taliban ...

It is not transphobic to say men are not women? Yes, it is, it's fully bigoted tranphobia. It goes right against an understanding of gender dysphoria; it's demeaning, dismissive and profoundly offensive. 

It's all the weirder for the pond in terms of timing because just this week a friend of the pond's had to work out how to respond to his daughter requesting that from now on she be referred to as a man. And yes it would be just as transphobic to say women are not men.

Only half-joking, the pond suggested a reading of Eve Langley's The Pea-Pickers might help.

As for criticising Islam, be careful how you do it. There are some who follow Islam who are bit like Sunday Catholics. It's a comfort and a consolation, and Islam in some countries is vastly different to Islam in others, and ditto Catholics, just as you can find sensible Anglicans, generally anywhere else than in the flock known as angry Sydney Anglicans ...

There's a world of differences between theological disagreements, personal differences, and lumping everybody in with barking mad fundamentalists, or the next thing you know, an atheist such as the pond might end up in the company of a Stalin instead of an Epicurus ...

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then She is not omnipotent. Is She able, but not willing? Then Se is malevolent. Is She both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is She neither able nor willing? Then why call Her God?

What the people don't need is stupid, offensive, mindless bigoted freedumb in the Brendan manner. There's enough of that going around already to comprehensively fuck the planet ...

And so to end with a few cartoons, because the pond has no expectation that clueless Brendan will ever get to understand, let alone display empathy or sympathy, not when with a callooh callay, he can embark on another culture war ... (and women in Iran wonder what his little England hang-ups really mean in the scheme of things).