In which the pond must get past to the groaning to discover the bromancer making everything perfectly clear ...

 

A little housekeeping. Tomorrow the pond has early morning back to back meetings, a rare occurrence, so if the pond sleeps in - which has been happening of late - herpetological studies might only land late in the day.

But that's tomorrow and today is today, and reading Nesrine Malik's piece for the Graudian, It doesn’t matter if a girl identified as a cat (she didn’t). The issue is how post-truth politics exploits it, the pond stumbled through the snappy Tom nonsense and then arrived at this ...

...Sarah Lyall, who once covered London for the New York Times, described the Daily Mail’s unofficial motto as “What fresh hell is this?”, and that aptly describes how we are primed to react with hostility to those who do not conform to a strict identity and economic profile. You must not need, you must not be different, you must not imagine or demand new ways of being, all while being reassured that we are out of the woods, that Britain is in fact, an exceptionally tolerant and liberal place...

Instantly the pond felt an affinity. Each day the reptiles' official lizard Oz motto is What fresh hell is this?, disguised as "for the informed Australian" (in this case, "informed" is code for "eternally damned").

When the pond followed the link to the NY Times story, it was disappointed to find that it was about the Olympics ...

...Meanwhile, The Daily Mail, whose unofficial motto appears to be “What Fresh Hell Is This?” has published articles noting that hundreds of thousands of tickets are still unsold, that no one wants to watch women play soccer and that some of the paths for the mountain bike competition will not be finished in time. “Security Shambles Could Cause Chaos for Spectators,” the paper said this week, next to an article with the headline “London’s Transport System Fails Again.”

Well yes, the Olympics is as close to hell as the pond cares to get when it's not reading the reptiles, but back to Malik, who tried to finish up on a positive Chris Marlowe note.

...Which it is, when it is allowed and encouraged to be. When it’s not, that paradise of tolerance may, to some, seem to be all around, but to others it’s constantly just out of reach. That state calls to mind the anguish of Mephistopheles, Satan’s emissary to Doctor Faustus, when he is asked how he can be damned when he is on Earth. “Why, this is hell,” he says. “Nor am I out of it.” Nor are we. But we could be. Which is why it’s important to learn about the things that never happened.

Should the pond reveal that at this point the pond identifies as a fish, as all Pisceans should do?

Never mind, the pond spends each day learning about things that never happened, except in the fevered mind of an overactive reptile imagination, and being of the pompous Henry inclination, the pond looked up the quote from Doctor Faustus and thought it sounded vaguely familiar, if a little odd:

MEPHASTOPHILIS: Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of journalism,
And tasted the eternal joys of accurate reporting,
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells
In being deprived of everlasting bliss?
O Faustus, leave these frivolous demands,
Which strike a terror to my fainting soul.
FAUSTUS: What, is great Mephastophilis so passionate
For being deprivèd of the joys of caring and careful hacks?
Learn thou of Faustus manly fortitude,
And scorn those joys thou never shalt possess,
And this day sup deep of yet another tedious groaning ...

Cue Dame Groan ...

At this point, the reptiles interrupted with a snap designed to terrify the readership ...

As Dame Groan groaned away in her usual style, the pond wondered why the monomania and the fixation only ran the one way ...

Why no mention of other really bad ideas, of the kind celebrated by the immortal Rowe?

Sorry, it's not the way of the Groaner ... the groaning is a one way street, and nothing should distract from the joys of the private sector ...

Now how soon before we get on to the real problem? Migrants, funny furriners coming here and ruining everything ...

Thar she blows, and you don't need an economics degree to know that when seeking wisdom, Dame Groan knows only one kind ...

On the upside, what a relief not to have to worry about being homeless. You can always rely on a home with the Groaning ... just as you can rely the Groaner standing solid with vested interests. What's the point of being a member of the 'leet if you can't blithely talk about pharmacies offering free deliveries?

Not just free deliveries, but blister packs?!

Around this point the reptiles inserted a huge snap of the villain of the day ...

But the pond was keen to get the rest of the Groaning over with ...

It may well be that the Groaner almost admitted that she was resorting to the standard refuge of the bureaucrat, with the urgent need for careful analysis and comprehensive consultation, perhaps over decades, with Sir Humphrey cheering her on from the wings ...

Sir Humphrey Appleby : [Talking about Government reports]  it could be argued that the Sermon on the Mount, were it a government report, would never have been published ...All that nonsense about the meek inheriting the Earth...It could do irreparable damage to the defence budget!

It may well be the case that the policy might be worth implementing, but it may well be much better to endlessly navel gaze and fluff gather ...

And with that in mind, the pond delicately stepped around Dame Groan's eternal yearning for the return of coal so it could survey the rest of the reptile scene, and what a disappointing bunch, with the lizard Oz editorialist again acting as filler, like sawdust in a tasteless sausage ...

There was the bouffant one beating the "no" drum yet again, and useless speculation about Wagners in China, and naturally more talk of war with China, but luckily the bromancer had been given a perch at the top of the page ...

At last a chance to find out what's really happening in Russia ... and instead of consulting a psychiatrist, naturally the pond consulted the bromancer ...

Well that's all perfectly clear then, and the pond supposes that deadlines meant that the bromancer had to rush into print before Vlad the Impaler made everything even clearer in his latest speech ...

At this point, just to help make things even clearer, the reptiles dropped in a snap ...

But that talk of giving Ukraine better kit made the pond wonder if the bromancer had dropped the plot and strayed from his people, out and about and featured in the Graudian in March  ...

And so on, and so it was a little surreal to turn back to the bromancer, talking dirty about Faux Noise folk ...

Oh dear, and yet the mango Mussolini could have sorted it all out in 24 hours ... 

"...I'm telling you, within 24 hours – that's what I did. I became very rich by doing deals. Very rich. And you know what? Much more so than people even understand. And that's what I do," Trump said. "I would have a deal done in 24 hours from the time we started. And I would tell Zelenskyy something and I would tell Putin something, and I'd get him into a room, and I'd tell him again, and again," Trump said. He added: "I would have a deal done very quickly. And you know what? The death would stop, and the destruction would stop ..."

And you know what? Just yesterday, Trump's GOP lead grows after latest indictment, poll finds ...

Is it wrong for the pond at this point to note that the deep state has been bugging Marge, heroic freedom fighter and Vlad the impaler devotee?

Show more? Of course the pond will show more ...

But was it the government, or was it the Freedom Caucus voting her down, or was it Lauren Boebert or was it Barack Obama or was it Jewish space lasers or was it Zelensky and the Ukrainians or was it Kevin McCarthy, upon realising that Marge was setting the pace on US policy in relation to Vlad the Impaler?

Who can say, and the Graudian shed no further light on the matter by preposterously reporting a suggestion it might have been a neighbour trying to screen cast to the wrong TV ...

It's all pretty weird, but is this even weirder?

Perhaps realising that he might have strayed into the land of conspiracy theory cuckoos, the bromancer hastily averted his gaze from the lunar right infesting Faux Noise and the lizard Oz, and turned to blaming the left ...

Did  the pond just read that? Defence will only give junk, so the best way to help is to give the Ukrainians junk tanks that are likely not fit for purpose? And that's supposed to be a serious contribution to the discussion, as opposed to yet another insight into the bromancer's deeply weird tank fixation, which proposes that tanks are completely useless, so why not give completely useless tanks to the Ukrainians to uphold the international rules-based order?

Well there are flaws all over the place, and perhaps there's the odd flaw in the bromancer's ability to make sense ... no wonder the Ukrainians are finding it tough going.

And speaking of flaws, why not close by celebrating the rules-based order currently on show in the US?