In which the onion muncher stars in a special late arvo edition of the pond ...

 

The pond wanted to start off this special late afternoon edition of the pond by having a go at the local graffiti artist who put this up not so far from where the pond lives ...

Really? You couldn't make the lettering a little smaller and find room for "Read Junk", or better still, "Read the Junk in the lizard Oz"? 

Sure, you caught Sky After Dark with the "Watch Junk" bit, but how can the pond introduce the legendary junk of the onion muncher. You have to read this junk to "Be Junk"...

Another aside. 

What with barking mad Xians all the go, the pond thought it might note a mournful cry in The Atlantic by Peter Wehner, The Evangelical Church is Breaking Apart, Christians must reclaim Jesus from his church ...

It's a truly extended wail by a true believer, but it resonates with recent pond postings ...

..Many Christians, though, are disinclined to heed calls for civility. They feel that everything they value is under assault, and that they need to fight to protect it. “I understand that,” Dudley said. “I feel under assault sometimes too. However, I also know that the early Christians transformed the Roman empire not by demanding but by loving, not by angrily shouting about their rights in the public square but by serving even the people who persecuted them, which is why Christianity grew so quickly and took over the empire. I also know that once Christians gained political power under Constantine, that beautiful loving, sacrificing, giving, transforming Church became the angry, persecuting, killing Church. We have forgotten the cross.”
Dudley, my high-school and college classmate, left me with this haunting question: How many people look at churches in America these days and see the face of Jesus?
Too often, I fear, when Americans look at the Church, they see not the face of Jesus, but the style of Donald Trump.
The former president normalized a form of discourse that made the once-shocking seem routine. Russell Moore laments the “pugilism of the Trump era, in which anything short of cruelty is seen as weakness.” The problem facing the evangelical Church, then, is not just that it has failed to inculcate adherents with its values—it’s that when it has succeeded in doing so, those values have not always been biblical.
But of course Trump did not appear ex nihilo. Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a history professor at Calvin University and the author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, argues that Trump represents the fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of many of white evangelicals’ most deeply held values. Her thesis is that American evangelicals have worked for decades to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism. (She defines Christian nationalism as “the belief that America is God’s chosen nation and must be defended as such,” which she says is a powerful predictor of attitudes toward non-Christians and on issues such as immigration, race, and guns...

What's this got to do with the topic of the late afternoon post? Well there's immigration, race and budgie smugglers on parade, and too often, the pond fears, when Australians look at the Church, they see not the face of Jesus, but the style of the Onion Muncher ... 

Du Mez told me it’s important to recognize that this “rugged warrior Jesus” is not the only Jesus many evangelicals encounter in their faith community. There is also the “Jesus is my friend” popular in many devotionals, for example. These representations might appear to be contradictory, she told me, but in practice they can be mutually reinforcing. Jesus is a friend, protector, savior—but according to one’s own understanding of what needs to be protected and saved, and not necessarily according to core biblical teachings.
“Evangelicals are quick to label their values ‘biblical,’” Du Mez told me. “But how they interpret the scriptures, which parts they decide to emphasize and which parts they decide to ignore, all this is informed by their historical and cultural circumstances.” That’s not simply true of this one community, she added, but of all people of faith. “More than most other Christians, however, conservative evangelicals insist that they are rejecting cultural influences,” she said, “when in fact their faith is profoundly shaped by cultural and political values, by their racial identity and their Christian nationalism.”
Gender plays a role here as well, according to Du Mez. Over the past half century, evangelicals have tended to depict men and women as opposites. “They believe God ordained men to be protectors and filled them with testosterone for this purpose,” she said. Women, on the other hand, are seen as nurturers. The fruits of the spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, and self-control—are deemed appropriate feminine virtues. “Men, however, are to exhibit boldness, courage, even ruthlessness in order to fulfill their God-appointed role,” Du Mez explained. “In this way, the warrior spirit and a kinder, gentler Christianity go hand in hand.”

And so, without further ado, on to toxic masculinity and the warrior spirit ...

After that rousing Xian intro, this onion muncher outing might seem like pretty small beer, the meandering aggrandising of an exemplary narcissist, a dropkick loser haunted by failure and irrelevance, but that's why it's in a late afternoon slot, where few will catch sight of the pitiful spectacle, dressed up by the reptiles with assorted visual reminders of all the onion muncher is not.

In the old days, the pond would have accompanied this sort of display with amusing visual asides ...

 

 

  

... or the pond might have headed off to The New Yorker, and Amelia Lester's September 2015 Tony Abbott's Long Demise, (possible paywall) because as a dropkick loser, he attracted international attention ...

Abbott, the nation’s fourth Prime Minister in five years, exhibited a feckless machismo, which often verged on eccentricity. Visiting a farm in Tasmania earlier this year, he picked up a raw onion and bit into it as though it were an apple. It was the gif seen ’round the world. “Better than any other onions I’ve eaten in a long time,” Abbott said, as the farmer stood dumbstruck. Soon after the result of the dramatic leadership challenge was announced, #putoutyouronions was trending on Twitter, and thousands of bulbs of all varieties were photographed on front porches, and even outside Parliament House, in Canberra. It was less a loving tribute than a door slam after a drawn-out breakup. Like Beyoncé might have said, “Everything you own in the box to the left,” Tony.

And then there was the record ...

..“Boat people” and the “carbon tax” were the issues that swept Abbott to power, and no one could accuse him of not dealing with them once in office. But, as Labor continued its infighting, there were signs that Abbott wanted to deal with other things, too—things about which Australians felt more fond, like the largely functional health-care system, the national broadcaster, and the progressive taxation system for repaying university fees. As a young man, Abbott had entered a seminary, for which the media called him the “Mad Monk.” There were fears in the fiercely secular electorate that he was letting his religion get in the way of governing, like when he was asked about issues such as gay marriage and abortion. He reintroduced knights and dames to the Australian honors system, and this year gave the nation’s newest, highest honor to Prince Philip, who in 2002 asked an indigenous Australian, “Do you still throw spears at each other?” The world’s most famous ex-Australian, formerly a supporter, complained. “Abbott knighthood a joke and an embarrassment,” Rupert Murdoch tweeted, and, shortly after, Abbott conceded, “I probably overdid it on awards.”

Last year, before the G20 summit, Abbott vowed to “shirt-front” President Putin over what he saw as Putin’s involvement in backing the rebels implicated in the MH17 tragedy; instead of following through on his threat of an aggressive Australian Rules football maneuver, Abbott apparently made sure that Putin was given a particularly anti-social koala to hug at the conference photo call. For a time, Australians, who revile politicians even more than Americans, and who are used to seeing their leaders run around in Speedos (or budgie-smugglers, as they’re known), were amused by his awkwardness, like when he said that no one is “the suppository of all wisdom,” or paused for a full twenty-eight seconds after a reporter asked him a tough question. But some of the gaffes were more revealing. The self-proclaimed Prime Minister for Indigenous Affairs said that it was right to cut funding for remote indigenous communities, because Aborigines practicing traditional ways were making a “life-style choice.” And, despite appointing himself the Minister for Women, Abbott seemed to grapple with how to speak to and about them, such as when he rated the “sex appeal” of a colleague running for office, or, in a Trumpian move, introduced himself on television as “the guy with the not-bad-looking daughters.” When he was asked about his government’s biggest achievements for women, he cited his “repeal of the carbon tax,” because “women are particularly focussed on the household budget.”

What a trip down memory lane, and yet he still walks amongst us, like a zombie or a vampire or some spectral spirit intent on haunting the living.

And how does this haunting continue in his latest narcissist outburst? Why by opening with blather about 'freedumb,' though more dumb than free ...

It's like an old hits and mammaries tour and the reptiles compounded it by featuring a series of snaps suggesting that the onion muncher was up there with the best and the brightest, or at leas the most enduring, when really he was just a sparrow's fart of time in office ...

It was the evocation of Ming the Merciless that most got to the pond ...

Please, he has an enduring visual legacy, celebrate it ...

Then you can approach talk of "apostolic succession" primed for the rich comedy ...

If you're not happy with his sporty surfing Ken image (admittedly the best thing in Barbie), why not celebrate his MAMIL status?

Then you can swallow whole the usual narcissist wandering down memory lane to "when I became leader", because that's all he's got, the hits and the mammaries ...

Still a useless tool and a climate science denying luddite to this day ... and completely without any capacity for any self-reflection or ability to change or admit error. Just the usual narcissist fluff gathering and puffer fish puffing of chest ...

Yep, he's had great triumphs - helping to fuck the planet - and who knows, this one time self-appointed one time Prime Minister for Indigenous Affairs and Women might yet still achieve his dream ...

Australia is a blessed country. Our climate, our land, our people, our institutions rightly make us the envy of the earth, except for one thing—we have never fully made peace with the First Australians. This is the stain on our soul that Prime Minister Keating so movingly evoked at Redfern 21 years ago. We have to acknowledge that pre-1788 this land was as Aboriginal then as it is Australian now. Until we have acknowledged that we will be an incomplete nation and a torn people … So our challenge is to do now in these times what should have been done 200 or 100 years ago to acknowledge Aboriginal people in our country's foundation document. In short, we need to atone for the omissions and for the hardness of heart of our forebears to enable us all to embrace the future as a united people.

Indeed ... what a capacity for delusion and destruction...

Say what the pond will about the ruins he left behind, the pond has to admit he was great for cartoonists and left a legacy worth preserving and celebrating ...