A big pre-Oz day for the pond, and with an encouragement award for starters ...

 

Today the pond would like to begin with an encouragement award. 

Sure there are heavy reptile hitters out and about, and mighty issues abroad, and the reptiles are in a fine old frenzy, but please, spare a thought for the diligent worker bees that keep the hive turning over ...

The pond always thinks this when it watches the shelf stackers in action early in the morning, then fronts the till to exchange a word with whoever hasn't yet been replaced by a bot. 

And so, in their own retail way, are the diligent young lizards of Oz ... keeping the story of Woollies treachery alive ... not by price gouging, mind you, but by refusing to sell the sort of cheap trinkets that once attracted a patriotic mark-up. 

Come on down Rhiannon ... hit us with a variant on the "when did you stop beating your wife and stop selling cheap Oz day trinkets?" angle ... and any mention of cancel culture will guarantee you a bonus.

Now the pond thinks that the reptiles didn't help Rhiannon with the interrupting snap, which looks like a promo for Woollies, free to price gouge on pretty much anything else and nary a word from the reptiles or from Captain Spud, who wouldn't recognise a policy issue or a dead fish if it smacked him in the moosh ...

After that promo style snap, Rhiannon began to run out of steam, and the best she could do was a burst of anxiety about unpatriotic pets not dressed up in foreign-made trinkets ...

It was a brave effort, and so the pond offers this tribute to Rhiannon, diligent worker bee at the lizard Oz ... and looking painfully young in her snap...

Now back to the top of the page where the reptiles have found a new war ... the sacred right of the well-off not to be taxed ...

It was serious, because perched above Rhiannon in a position usually occupied by Dame Slap on a Wednesday - the far right top dog digital slot - there was a second groaning for the week from Dame Groan ...

Of course the header gave the game away from the get go ... as soon as populism came into the mix, it was black knight territory, and down hill from there ...

A vital reform and not populism.

Ah, fond memories, speaking of tax cuts and populism and Priscilla ...

Oh they were great days ... meanwhile, the Groaning continued, though the pond should note that in recent times, even the most devout cultists have been disappointed by the quality of the groaning ...

Not Scandinavia, not Denmark! 

Dammit, who'd want to end up top of the happiness list ...Finland took top honors—for the fourth year in a row—with an overall score of 7.842, followed (in order) by Denmark (7.620), Switzerland (7.571), Iceland (7.554), the Netherlands (7.464), Norway (7.392), and Sweden (7.363). (here)

The pond prefers the fond memories of populism at its finest ...

And so to a final short burst of groaning ...

Luckily Wilcox had a tip from the master ...

And then when the pond looked below the fold, it realised that there was still much to be done ant his was going to be a big prelude to Oz day ...

First there had to be that uplifting item from the lizard Oz editorialist, farewelling the liar from the Shire ... who finally decided to leave, years after he should have ...

Talk about the need for an uplifting tribute from the lizard Oz editorialist ...

Only in the lizard Oz, confusing history with their own taste for pandering platitudes, but the pond will concede some mighty fine memories ...

The infallible Pope made out like a bandit, but the lizard Oz editorialist was still in requiem mode ...

On the upside, it gave the pond a chance to revive old memories ...

And now to the serious, or at least, the solemn stuff, worthy of a "Ned" in full natter, and here there's a double-barrelled chore...

First up came this Oz day ready speech ...

Who doesn't like a Nazi illustration, especially as they come so cheap, and the pond was inspired by all this talk of freedumb, though it should be understood that doesn't extend to the freedumb of Woollies to decide what stock they might carry ...

Really? Does he know who he's scribbling this for? Is he aware it's GOP loving, Vlad the impaler soft News Corp? The ones that walk the talk, then cut the support?

Meanwhile, the reptiles slipped in a snap of the two dictators ...

Then it was back to the grind ...

By this point the pond had begun to nod off, as befits Oz day sermons, and then - spoiler alert - this Justin went the Winnie ...

Immediately the pond was on guard, remembering a piece it had referenced the other day ...Zoe Williams' How Winston Churchill became a mascot for anti-woke warriors ...

...This is my favourite kind of Churchill-eering, where politicians summon his ghost simply by adopting similar rhetoric. Penny Mordaunt’s fabulous “Stand up and fight! Stand up and fight!” before going on to add, “Never forget those who went before us and remember that without a Churchill, you can’t have a Zelenskiy” during her speech to last year’s Tory conference was a classic of the genre: a pitch-perfect throwback to “We shall fight on the beaches”, having first removed the beaches, the landing grounds, the fields, the streets, the hills, any obvious enemy, any clear sense of what was being defended and any endgame. Churchill here stands in as an all-purpose fighty-man, and as such wouldn’t make much of a cultural export, since everyone’s history has those.
It took Boris Johnson to repackage Churchill for an international audience, not so much with his book, The Churchill Factor, as in his strategically idiotic attack on Barack Obama in 2016. He was mayor of London then, when the most he could screw up was planning on the Vauxhall gyratory which, to be fair, quickly cohered as a literal and figurative shrine to the emptiness of late capitalism, and is probably the most coherent thing he ever did. But in his downtime, he wrote a column for the Sun, enraged that Obama had moved a bust of Churchill out of the Oval Office (a full seven years previously), contending that the “part-Kenyan president” was motivated by anti-colonialism, “ancestral dislike” of the British empire. To follow the logic, Johnson, having German heritage, would also have reason to dislike Churchill, but he is not doing logic, he is focusing on Obama’s race, which I feel Obama should have met with unending hellfire, rather than a mild: “No, we just moved Churchill to a different corridor.”
Too late to worry about that now: Churchill, in Johnson’s new frame, stood not only for nostalgia, a comforting world order with the posh at the top, but also for white supremacy and colonial brutality as an essential part of that past. Winston was now a mascot for the anti-woke warriors, the embodiment of their core principles: the past is better than the present; the world makes more sense with the posh at the top, just listen to their lovely cadence; the dicey bits – racist exploitation and carnage – are expiated by nostalgia (it was all a long time ago) and implicitly celebrated by it (weren’t things better then?), and anyone who disagrees hates their country.

And so on, and back in 2021 the Graudian ran Why can't Britain handle the truth about Winston Churchill? The pond has featured it before and hasn't got time to pay full attention, but this will serve as a sample ...

...even his contemporaries found his views on race shocking. In the context of Churchill’s hard line against providing famine relief to Bengal, the colonial secretary, Leo Amery, remarked: “On the subject of India, Winston is not quite sane … I didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s.”
Just because Hitler was a racist does not mean Churchill could not have been one. Britain entered the war, after all, because it faced an existential threat – and not primarily because it disagreed with Nazi ideology. Noting affinities between colonial and Nazi race-thinking, African and Asian leaders queried Churchill’s double standards in firmly rejecting self-determination for colonial subjects who were also fighting Hitler.
It is worth recalling that the uncritical Churchill-worship that is so dominant today was not shared by many British people in 1945, when they voted him out of office before the war was even completely over. Many working-class communities in Britain, from Dundee to south Wales, felt strong animosity towards Churchill for his willingness to mobilise military force during industrial disputes. As recently as 2010, Llanmaes community council opposed the renaming of a military base to Churchill Lines.
Critical assessment is not “character assassination”. Thanks to the groupthink of “the cult of Churchill”, the late prime minister has become a mythological figure rather than a historical one. To play down the implications of Churchill’s views on race – or suggest absurdly, as Policy Exchange does, that his racist words meant “something other than their conventional definition” – speaks to me of a profound lack of honesty and courage.

The pond has now done its best to soil the Winnie waters, and now Justin can ruin everything by going full impassioned Winnie ...

The sermon done at last, but there was still another sermon to go, because that's how it is on Oz day, endless, interminable speeches, down there with graduation ceremonies and with lots of cheap flag-waving, featuring the British flag ...

Sunburnt country? Dammit, did he have to bring up climate science, just when the pond was enjoying that snap of the young 'uns waving flags that they couldn't have bought from Woollies ...

Talk about the fat lady singing ...

But that was long ago, way back in 2018 ...apparently these days we're into The Mikado ...

Is this loon aware that in latter reptile days, "Enlightenment principles" is code for "Western Civilisation" is code for "white nationalism" is code for "white supremacy"?

Possibly. Anybody who could quote The Mikado in the lead-up to Oz day is looking for a fight ... or else is just some tragic old dodderer unaware he's scribbling the sort of stuff the reptiles love to here ... you know, blather about self-hated and Western Civilisation and hampered intellectual growth - quick turn to Faux Noise and Sky after dark ...

Dear sweet lord, what a man of pious platitudes. 

What's this blather about constructive dialogue rather than a battleground for divisive narratives, when your last gobbet, sir, was devoted to the battleground of divisive narratives, with assorted Enlightenment lines drawn in the reptile sand?

And what's this quoting of The Mikado? In the old days, there'd have been a Henry Lawson quote ...

...So we must fly a rebel flag,

As others did before us,

And we must sing a rebel song

And join in rebel chorus.

We’ll make the tyrants feel the sting

O’ those that they would throttle;

They needn’t say the fault is ours

If blood should stain the wattle! (There's a whole flock of them here for the quoting)

Never mind,  time for a few concluding bits of pious humbug ...

First Winnie, now King? He went the King?

Could we just leave the pair of them out of it? Or else it'll lead to more quoting ...

His dream’s been weaponized into his nightmare’: how Martin Luther King Jr’s words have been co-opted

Sixty years on, Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech remains a rhetorical paragon, pushing the civil rights movement into the law books while transforming the rabble-rousing preacher into a global icon for freedom and equality. The speech did such a good job of capturing lofty American ideals that King’s name is regularly taken in vain.
Vivek Ramaswamy harks back to King while making the case for dismantling critical race theory and DEI initiatives. (“What bothers the heck out of me is right when we’re close to that promised land … [we] then obsess about systemic racism and white guilt,” he told NBC earlier this month.) Ron DeSantis claims King would have been for book bans. (“He said he didn’t want people judged on the color of their skin, but on the content of their character,” the Florida governor said while stumping for his Stop Woke Act in 2021, stressing a responsibility to “protect our people and our kids from some very pernicious ideologies”.) Nikki Haley, slow to concede the civil war’s origins in slavery, says she was inspired by the civil rights icon.
“It’s apparent that Dr King’s dream has been weaponized into his nightmare,” says Hajar Yazdiha, a sociology professor at the University of Southern California who studies race and equity.
These days, King’s words are being twisted with a straight face by arch-conservatives seeking to unravel the very progressive measures King fought so hard to secure before his assassination in 1968. In her book The Struggle for the People’s King, Yazdiha traces this trend to the institutionalization of Martin Luther King Jr Day under Ronald Reagan. “He was opposed to civil rights, hated Dr King and blamed him for his own death,” she says. When Reagan realized he couldn’t stop Congress from passing the King holiday in 1983, he turned the political defeat into a legacy-making opportunity. “He decides that if he can link his legacy to King, he first of all can ward off claims that he’s racist, and second – and this is really critical – he makes sure that we remember a particular version of Dr King that is colorblind, a vision of American exceptionalism, of states’ rights, of the individual capacity to pull yourself up from your bootstraps,” Yazdiha says.

And so on and on, and again ... How the distortion of Martin Luther King Jr.’s words enables more, not less, racial division within American society

The misuses of King are not accidental.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a sanitized version of King was part of a conservative political strategy for swaying white moderates to support President Ronald Reagan’s reelection by making King’s birthday a national holiday.

Even after Reagan finally signed the King holiday into law in 1983, he would write letters of assurance to angry political allies that only a selective version of King would be commemorated.

That version was free of not only the racial politics that shaped the civil rights movement but also of the vision of systemic change that King envisioned. In addition, Reagan’s version left out the views that King held against the Vietnam War.

Instead, the GOP’s sanitized version only comprises King’s vision of a colorblind society – at the expense of the deep, systemic change that King believed was needed to achieve a society in which character was more important than race...

This interpretation of King’s memory would become a powerful political tool.

Increasingly through the 1980s, right-wing social movements – from the gun rights and family values coalitions to nativists and white supremacists – deployed King’s memory to claim they were the new minorities fighting for their own rights.

These groups claimed that white Christians were the real victims of multicultural democracy and in fact were “the new Blacks.”

This false version of social reality eventually evolved into the “great replacement theory,” the far-right conspiracy theory, espoused by public figures like Tucker Carlson on Fox News, that white people are being demographically and culturally replaced with nonwhite peoples and that white existence is under threat.

In these distortions, gun rights activists called themselves the new Rosa Parks, anti-abortion activists declared themselves freedom riders and anti-gay groups claimed themselves protectors of King’s Christian vision.

And so on and on, but let's not let divisive narratives of Winnie and King get in the way of a winning birthday party ...