TRUE CRIME

I wandered into Sydney’s CBD today, for no reason other than to wander, to distract myself from the thought of applying to Centrelink for unemployment benefits for the first time in forty years of working life, an experience some I know have likened to a waking nightmare, and in my wandering I did find myself at one point late in the afternoon in a bookstore, a well-known and long-established bookstore.

I browsed, briefly, then ambled to the “Crime” section, the new releases, whereupon I spied about a half dozen copies of Paddy Manning’s biography of our Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, titled “Born To Rule”, nestled amidst the fictions and non-fictions about murderers, serial killers, rapists, thieves, thugs and villains in general, and I did laugh.

I laughed out loud, a satisfying laugh. A long laugh, from the gut.

Reassuring.

I realised then that, where Turnbull’s predecessor Tony Abbott, an oafish, simian-gaited sot who wore his testicles upon his shoulders, was regarded by most as a thoroughly stupid and ridiculous figure, an idiot’s idiot who could be relied upon to produce at least one or two “What the fuck?” head-scratch moments on a daily basis, Turnbull, it seems, has come to be regarded, in a shockingly brief span of time, with open contempt. By his own party, the media, and the public at large.

He seems a mite haggard these days, a little sallow of skin and drawn of the gills, sunken and shrunken and much diminished in stature, and his eyes have taken on a faraway glaze of frustration and disappointment that the glittering prize of “leadership” he did covet for so very, very long, has turned out to be nothing but an empty creamed-corn can, a tin can perched atop a pale and shabby pedestal of ossified excrement scattered with lurid glitter, discarded condoms and the fly-blown mucus and puke from the voided stomachs of millions, gutfuls had.

This tin can is a bauble he has well earned, and it is all he is, and ever will be due.

What a foolish man.

A useless man.

Intelligence is wasted on such as he, and how, how, how, how, can one man do nothing with nothing and still manage to fuck it up in such a spectacularly arresting yet banal fashion?

All show, no boat is our Malcolm, and the show you can’t give tickets away anymore unless your idea of entertainment is watching a middle-aged fully-clothed male hooker with nice teeth try to hump a brick wall, music by the organ-grinders monkey, the organ grinder fucked off up the pub weeks ago and won’t be coming back, and monkey’s now in the mood for murder.

Malcolm always had an eye for history, his place in it, he thought it was all but guaranteed, his birthright, but history has no eye for him, no more, no more, no more, no more, maybe a footnote here and there, a footnote to a footnote, an addendum on occasions, an obscure joke, a giggle, a snort, a “for fuck’s sake” memory, a “special presentation”, the “Fabulous Nobodies of Yesteryear” episode, 30 minutes maybe, at best, and an old yellowing copy of a long out-of-print biography gathering dust at the back of the “crime” shelf in an op-shop somewhere in Bumfuck City, Back-O-Nowhere.

THE EGO HAS LANDED

Andy Angry Pants Bolt is Angry.

Angry Andy, The Angryman, who can take any sunrise and sprinkle it with spew, is well and truly Angry today, Angry that his political party and government of choice, under the stewardship of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, went to an election, and sorta-kinda-maybe-maybe not fucked it up royally, leaving the country “damned”, “ungovernable”, and in a “catastrophic” state, Turnbull “destroyed” and “devastated”, “humiliated, “temperamentally unsuited” to leadership, a “disaster”, who had the temerity, the vicious temerity to treat people such as Angry Pants like “dirt”, “pathetic”, Malcolm don’t know how to play the game, he cheats, he lies, he makes Andy wanna cry, and if you wanna know what that sound is, darlin’, it’s the sound of his tears fallin’.

Who can take a rainbow, colour it with bile, soak it in a sewer and call it something vile, The Angryman can.

Veins popping, throbbing, and apoplectic with incandescent fury, Andy Angry Pants, Queen Bitch of Thundering Bluster and Bombast, imperious, delirious, and, forever true to his deform’d form, did rail and rage against the dying of the Right, and did issue a most stern ultimatum to its nemesis …

“RESIGN!”

God’s blood, this bumptious kvetch has been pissing and moaning, whining and whingeing, screaming at mirrors and screeching at clouds, night and day, day and night, ever since Tony Abbott, Captain Clownshoes, was unceremoniously pissed off from his brief stint as Prime Minister for being an embarrassing fucking idiot, yet Andy’s longing for Tony has yet to quit, oh no, oh no, it follows wherever he goes, like the beat, beat, beat of the tom-tom, there’s oh such a hungry yearnin’ burnin’, and its torment won’t be through, there’s a voice within him keeps repeatin’, you, you, you.

“I’s tired of not havin’ me a buddy to be with, or tell me where we’s comin’ from or goin’ to, or why”, bewails Andy Angry Pants, in bitter lamentations of woe, dire prophecies of downfall and moral decay, but fear not Andy, the ranks of The Sore Losers Club hath swollen today …

Miranda Devine’s face don’t move no more, Piers Akerman’s lost his drool-bucket, Gerard Henderson has phoned Philip Nitschke on account Lifeline’s too busy to take his calls, Paul Sheehan’s back on the magic water, slumped in a gutter somewhere singing “Sweet Adeline”, wishing someone would give him a job so he could tell people what to think again, Alan Jones is retiring to write a Lonely Planet guide to the public toilets of London, Eric Abetz wishes his ol’ Uncle Otto were here to sort this shit out, Cory Bernardi’s locked himself in the bathroom again and you don’t wanna go there, and Lyle Shelton’s reading Ambrose Bierce and watching “Cruising”, thinkin’ ‘bout leather.

And Malcolm?

Malcolm Turnbull’s been musing (again) on why his mother left him when he was just a wee lad, and he’s only just now figured out the answer.

FAHRENHEIT 5000

Do you own books? Do you buy them? Do you read them?

I have a suggestion for you.

Throw them out. Throw them out now.

Construct for yourself a wondrous and fearsome pyre so that you may purge your life of these vainglorious conceits, these words. Clean your mind.

Is there art on your walls? Originals, prints, posters?

Turn them to face your walls, and gaze on them no longer.

Dispose of your music, vinyl records, your compact discs. Delete your iTunes.  Throw out your devices. All of them. Films? Those too. Out, out. Your television, your radio. Everything. Out.

Objets d’art? Jewellery? Curios? To hell with them all.

Do you eat from plates, with cutlery, do you drink from glassware, do you sit on chairs or sofas, do you sleep on a bed?

Stop this now.

Visit no cinemas, no theatres. No galleries. Attend no concerts or recitals.

These things, these foul things, are but the disposable externalities of the human condition, depraved, a hollow and unprofitable condition of mankind’s docile and self-indulgent intellectual degeneracy.

You will live in a concrete box, a brick box. You will sleep on cardboard, and let newspapers be your coverlet. You will wake each morning, you will clean yourself, you will drape yourself in shapeless rags, you will go to your place of work, and when your day’s work is done, you shall return to your box, your pasteboard bed, your paper blankets, you will stare at walls, through windows, and nothing shall disturb, arouse or engage your senses.

Nothing.

Do you understand?

You are living in a world without art, without design. Without science. Nothing to capture your eye, nothing to turn your head in wonder, astonishment, no sights, no sounds, no words in which to lose yourself, all memories lost, all history dead, all life a grim parade of achromatic gloom, function without form, an aesthetic without aesthetic, to brutalism and beyond.

You will return to your box one night, you will take a knife, a sharp knife, and you will plunge it deep into your throat, draw it across your neck, severing both carotid arteries, and as your flesh splits, as your blood spills, you will write on the wall, this crimson scrawl, the only thought you have left, this …

“See that my grave is kept clean”.

……………………………………………………………………………………….

There is a tendency among the smug, sneering maggots of commerce and industry, and their chittering, conservative counterparts in commercial/tabloid media to dismiss and deride “the arts”, especially contemporary arts, as the mere follies and fripperies, the unfathomable and mystifying works of “luvvies”.

To these silver spoon-fed, elitist toffee-snots, anything which challenges, which confronts their preconceptions of what “art” is, or what it should be, is deemed either laughable or of no value whatsoever, mere entertainments. What they cannot comprehend is what we should not, and to defy their ignorance, to enter into an argument of defence, is to be branded a “luvvie” as well, which is pretty much all they’ve got, and ever have had, by way of comeback.

Poor Precious Petals.

These conservatives, or “libertarians” as many now brand themselves so as to avoid (perfectly justifiable) comparisons to far-right madmen like Anders Breivik (with whom they share so much in common), see fit to anoint themselves judge and jurors, willing and ready to gleefully indict any who trespass, who dare transgress against their safe, staid and stodgy tastes, the comforting pleasures of predictability afforded them by the classicism of Dead White European Males, where every note is known, where the rules are never broken, the authorities are always supermen, and all things are always reassuringly pretty and happy and gay.

“Luvvies”, indeed. Poor Precious Petals. So soft, so delicate in the sensibilities.

Irrespective of the discipline, our ruling classes, die führungsschicht, find “the arts” too harsh a mistress, too unforgiving an adjudicator, cruelly comic reflections of the grotesque banality which lay under their skins, skins so easily pricked, thin, grey and papery, prick them they bleed, outrage and offence, they howl, they squeal and they squeak, “Indecency!”, “Disgusting!”, “Criminal!”, “Barbaric!”, “Pornography!”, yet these, these leaders, these politicians, these stinking base whores to a fast buck, hypocrites all, thieves in our modest temples, kings and queens in theirs, these are the ones who’d think nothing of fist-fucking a five-month old baby in the backside on the off-chance there were a gold coin to retrieve for their efforts, the ends always justifying the means, they would argue.

It’s the economy, stupid.

Fuck the economy. Stupid.

Ingeborg Van Teeseling, from “The Big Smoke” …

“Not only does art momentarily release us from ourselves … It tells our stories, broadens our minds and makes us think. It fills us with ideas and feelings and, if it is really good, it empowers us. Those are all things politicians do not want in voters. They want us to focus on “jobs and growth,” on whether we can afford to buy a house (and negative gear another), on “the economy,” whatever that is. They don’t want us to think outside the box, or feel something different, because then we become difficult to manage … Art is, therefore, the scariest thing around for politicians. Art reminds them that they are temporary [a blip in human history] and, in the scheme of things, not very important.”

There will be no clamour of crowds in attendance at the funeral services of former Prime Ministers Rudd, Gillard or Abbott, as there will be nothing to remember, nothing to commemorate. The books have already been written, there’ll be nothing but chapters left to write, perhaps nothing but paragraphs, “in the scheme of things”.  In “human history”.

No legacy. Nothing.

Poor luvvies.

Unlike H.L. Mencken, unlike Gore Vidal or Studs Terkel, there will be no “collected works” forever in print from the likes of Mark Latham, Andrew Bolt or Miranda Devine or Rowan Dean and their ilk, there is nothing to collect, nothing of substance at least, nothing of lasting import, no history, their documents record nothing beyond their own sense of bloated self-importance, their irrational fears and prejudices, madly and artlessly spat, shat, upon the pages of partisan political pamphlets published by a tweeting fool who fancies himself Emperor Of Our World, Master Of The Universe when, in reality, in “the scheme of things” he is little more than a flea in a sandpit.

Just another Dumb Cunt With Money, one withered fist clutching a bottle of hard-on pills, the other a pre-nup.

Poor old petal.

They all have our best interests at heart. So they say.

They would like us to know what is, and what is not, suitable for our consumption. What is valid, and what is not. What our chillun’ should or should not be a-learnin’. To disagree, to argue, to challenge their edicts is not something they take kindly to, these luvvies, and difference of opinion is not simply that, but a vicious smear, a foul slur, an assault on their right to hold an opinion, “My freedom of speech! My freedom of speech! I have a right to be free with my speech!”, they bleat, oblivious to the fact they have offered their opinion, they have been free with their speech, and a whole lot of people have heard and read same and have quite simply told them to take their opinion and their speech and blow it out their fat, fucking arses.

The conservative “elite”. They’re a little soft of belly, the poor dears.

The Age, May 26, 2016 …

“Books, plays and films studied for VCE will soon be screened to ensure they don’t offend religious and cultural groups.

Education Minister James Merlino has ordered the Victorian Curriculum Assessment Authority (VCAA) to review its text selection process for VCE English, literature, drama and theatre studies.

A spokesman for Mr Merlino said the Minister requested to “extend” the guidelines to “ensure that the views and sensitivities of cultural and religious groups are considered”.

President of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English Monika Wagner said challenging texts encouraged students to think critically. “It [the review] does tend to suggest that there would be a single homogenised heteronormative, culturally normative type of text that is considered acceptable. I don’t know what that text would be but that’s what I would be afraid of.””

Hanya Yanagihara, Author, “A Little Life” …

“I think if we go into the world of art with warnings, we stop looking at visual art, we stop listening to songs, we stop going to the movies, we stop reading fiction, and in the end, you end up cocooning yourself because you’re afraid of getting hurt. I understand that – I understand not wanting to put yourself in situations that are going to call back old traumas, but the fact is you’ll never know how you’re going to react until you start reacting.  I think trying to live life in a preventive way does no one any favours.”

The purpose of art, of science, all of it, is not to soothe, to pander to preconceptions, misconceptions, it is to fuck with your mind, to mess it up, or, as John Waters said, “wreck what came before”.

To a conservative, “critical thinking” is one thought too far, an offence to ideology, beliefs held so close to their breasts, and in their minds, that both heart and mind atrophy from lack of real-world experience, from genuine inquiry, inquisitive minds do not need to know, they need to be told what they must know, unquestioningly accept disciplined, righteous instruction on what is wrong and what is right, forget the why of it, curiosity kills cats, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, too much …

Edward Snowden.

Snowden, and others who came before him, Daniel Ellsberg, Jeffrey Wigand, Sherron Watkins; the doctors and workers from Manus and Nauru who have defiantly documented the horrors perpetrated (in our name) upon refugees in those criminal hellholes are, whether they know it or not, all engaged in the “art” of deconstruction, challenging the status quo, finger-fucking the lazy, hazy minds of those who complacently accept and obey it, hauling the sacred cows of authority to the slaughterhouse, fucking things up, and wrecking what has come before, what we thought we knew, they’re making life difficult, they’re making people think. Critically.

These are the enemies of the people, as are all artists, of the state, the Demonic Other, who would dare reveal “democracy” as nothing other than a polite and highly developed form of commercialised totalitarianism, where authentic forms of social consciousness must be ridiculed, marginalised, subjected and replaced by a chaste, Spartan ideology as promoted by the vainglorious conceits and unselfconscious hubris of extreme right-wing cultural fascists whose seething and resentful hatred of complexity, of thought, intellectual pursuits, honest reflection and creativity itself is their only aesthetic, the brute aesthetics of fear, of loathing, of the violence of body and of the mind.

A humane politic, which is to say, that capable of bridging the gap between reality and the mobilisation of spirit, is no longer possible, nor is it achievable. It is not even desirable, and so art, all art, in all its forms, must embrace the political, its memes and tropes, in order to kill what has come before, to transform it, to wreck it …

Peter Frankopan, The Sydney Morning Herald, May 25, 2016 …

“Societies that are inclusive, self-confident and successful go out of their way to promote the arts. Even the Mongols, whose reputation is considerably lower even than the present [Australian] government, singled out artists for particularly generous treatment. Those involved in creative arts had immense resources pushed in their direction to encourage them to create works of beauty that would frame their legacy. Cities and monuments across Asia bear witness to the funds lavished on culture by the Mongols and their successors. It is saying something when modern politicians stand up badly in comparison to Genghis Khan, Timur the Great (Tamburlaine) and those around them.”

We are not that society.

Richard Flanagan, The Guardian Australia, May 19, 2016 …

“The disenfranchisement of the imagination is ever the disempowerment of the individual. There is, after all, both a bitter irony and a profound connection in a government that would condemn the wretched of the earth as illiterate, while hard at work to rob its own people of their culture of words.”

$55 million to “settle” two refugees in Cambodia. $632 million to “maintain” refugee detention camps on Manus Island per year. $582 million ditto for Nauru. Per year. $50 billion to construct twelve submarines. So that we may defend ourselves against countries we cannot defend ourselves against.

In 2014, $100 million cut from the Arts sector. In 2015, $104 million.

Kate Mulvaney, Actor and Playwright …

“… knows there are “bigger issues” than the arts, with Indigenous people and refugees being “silenced”. But it’s the arts community that “historically has the guts to speak out on these issues”.

“Like so many of the characters and narratives that exist in society, there’s only so many times you can be told ‘You don’t meet our model of excellence’ before you start to get worn down and a very dark fear kicks in.

“Our community suffers. Our families suffer. Our culture suffers. That moral compass spins out of control, unattended. When these things happen, our stories disappear – sometimes tragically.”

The Guardian Australia, May 4, 2016 …

“Fairfax photographer Alex Ellinghausen snapped Australia’s immigration minister apparently emerging from the shadows to front to the media on Tuesday. [Peter] Dutton was holding a press conference about the self-immolation of a second asylum seeker on Nauru, which he said was the fault of refugee advocates.

Stephanie Peatling, Ellinghausen’s colleague and political correspondent, tweeted the photo with the caption “eek”. She was contacted by Dutton’s office, who asked that she take down the “unflattering” image.”

It didn’t work.

This did …

“Every reference to Australia was scrubbed from the final version of a major UN report on climate change after the Australian government intervened, objecting that the information could harm tourism.

[Will] Steffen is an emeritus professor at the Australian National University and head of Australia’s Climate Council. He was previously executive director of the International Geosphere Biosphere Programme, where he worked with 50 countries on global change science.

“I’ve spent a lot of my career working internationally,” Steffen said. “And it’s very rare that I would see something like this happening. Perhaps in the old Soviet Union you would see this sort of thing happening, where governments would quash information because they didn’t like it. But not in western democracies. I haven’t seen it happen before.”

You will see it happen again.

Perhaps you will not even notice. Perhaps you will not even care.

Then …

You will live in a concrete box, a brick box. You will sleep on cardboard, and let newspapers be your coverlet. You will wake each morning, you will clean yourself, you will drape yourself in shapeless rags, you will go to your place of work, and when your day’s work is done, you will return to your box, your pasteboard bed, your paper blankets, you will stare at walls, through windows, and nothing shall disturb, arouse or engage your senses.

Or.

You can go the polls on July 2^nd, and you can cast your vote to fuck things up, to fuck it up beautifully, to hang our parliament, to embrace chaos and dysfunction, to outrage and horrify, to make people nervous, fearful, distressed, discomfited.

Let transgression be your creed, deny respect to those of wealth and power who expect it be their birthright. Use ridicule and satire, be offensive, and laugh in the faces of those fools who would allow fear define their lives.

Cry Havoc! Solemnise and Celebrate it!

Returning once more to John Waters, “wreck what came before. Is there a better job description than that to aspire to?”

Kunst ist Kunst! Leben ist Kunst!

Glück Auf!

ONAN ALIVE!

Andrew Bolt, the Herald-Sun’s resident expert on Andrew Bolt hath “written” a screed. Its title is “Worth Fighting For” and it will be produced by Wilkinson Publishing – “Great books from the people you can trust” – responsible for such “great books” as “Face Secrets”, “Fast, Fresh and Natural Smoothies and Juices”, three books about Justin Bieber, “Kochie’s Best Jokes – Volume 5”, six books about One Direction, and “Stain Busters”, to name but a few.

During the course of this month, Mr. Bolt has been tireless in his efforts to inform his “readers” of his forthcoming literary masterwork …

May 17, 2016

I have a new book coming out in July, just in time to console you over the election result. From the publisher’s blurb:

Andrew Bolt is Australia’s most prominent and controversial commentator. In this second book of columns and reflections, Bolt is again in the front lines of our most urgent political and social debates, from Islam and immigration to the green movement and the rise of the slacktivist. But he also reveals his more personal side – the experiences that have shaped his values and love for this country.

For some this book is ammunition. For others it’s fair warning. But for everyone it’s a test of their own values – and the reasons they hold them.

The book doesn’t just contain what I think are my best columns since my last collection, but also diaries I wrote for Spectator Australia, blog items and reflections written just for this edition.

May 18, 2016

The book contains not just my favorite columns since my last collection (a reprint out soon), but also diaries I wrote for Spectator Australia, blog items, an essay on my favourite books and many reflections written just for this edition – on what worked, what failed, my set-backs, my satisfactions and my hopes..

To pre-order your copy of Worth Fighting For with free delivery and a later special Bolt Bulletin update go here.

May 19, 2016

The book contains not just my favorite columns since my last collection (a reprint out soon), but also diaries I wrote for Spectator Australia, blog items, an essay on my favourite books and many reflections written just for this edition – on what worked, what failed, my set-backs, my satisfactions and my hopes..

To pre-order your copy of Worth Fighting For with free delivery and a later special Bolt Bulletin update go here.

May 20, 2016

The book contains not just my favorite columns since my last collection (a reprint will also be out soon), but also diaries I wrote for Spectator Australia, blog items, an essay on my favourite books and many reflections written just for this edition – on what worked, what failed, my set-backs, my satisfactions and my hopes.

To pre-order your copy of Worth Fighting For with free delivery and also – as a bonus – a Bolt Bulletin update of special material to be mailed out later go here.

May 21, 2016

The book contains not just my favorite columns since my last collection, but also diaries I wrote for Spectator Australia, blog items, an essay on my favourite books and many reflections written just for this edition.

To pre-order your copy of Worth Fighting For with free delivery and also – as a bonus – a Bolt Bulletin update of special material to be mailed out later go here.

May 24, 2016

Quadrant Online adds links to a column from my book, out next month. You may find them useful, but it is better I don’t comment. Sad, but our laws against free speech are dangerously and absurdly broad, as I know only too well.

To pre-order the book, plus a Bolt Bulletin update, go here.

The book contains not just my favorite columns since my last collection, but also diaries I wrote for Spectator Australia, blog items, an essay on my favourite books and many reflections written just for this edition.

May 24, 2016

More on the new morality in my latest book:

To pre-order the book, plus a Bolt Bulletin update, go here.

The book contains not just my favorite columns since my last collection, but also diaries I wrote for Spectator Australia, blog items, an essay on my favourite books and many reflections written just for this edition.

May 25, 2016

More on the new morality in my latest book:

To pre-order the book, plus a Bolt Bulletin update, go here.

The book contains not just my favorite columns since my last collection, but also diaries I wrote for Spectator Australia, blog items, an essay on my favourite books and many reflections written just for this edition.

May 27, 2016

My latest book will now be available from next month. It will be launched at events in Sydney and Melbourne in July (and possibly in other states, too).

Readers who pre-order will get Bolt Bulletin updates which will give them, among other things, priority booking for the launches. Details to follow.

But about the book:

To pre-order the book, plus a Bolt Bulletin update, go here.

The book contains not just my favorite columns since my last collection, but also diaries I wrote for Spectator Australia, blog items, an essay on my favourite books and many reflections written just for this edition.

I have nothing further to add but this …

Onanism – Hypochondriasis, hysteria, chorea, epilepsy, apoplexy, and palsy, constitute part of the list of dire maladies induced or immediately excited, by onanism and immoderate or ill-timed coition. The memory and intellectual faculties, in general, are enfeebled, and there are instances of complete idiocy, brought on by early and continued onanism, and of insanity from similar excesses later in life. — The Eclectic Journal of Medicine. Vol 3, No 4. Nov 1894.

Or, from Urban Dictionary …

to wank,
to tame the one eyed monster,
to make the cyclops cry,
man’s favourite outlet,
a date with mrs palm and her five lovely daughters,
toss yourself off,
etc, etc.

For example – “now on the subject of onanism…we don’t want to find you hunched double on the sofa bed pumping your fist”

Please feel free to draw your own conclusions.

I HAVE NO MOUTH AND I MUST SCREAM

“The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. Here, as so often in this world, persistence is the first and most important requirement for success.”

“Andrew Bolt is Australia’s most prominent and controversial commentator. In this second book of columns and reflections, Bolt is again in the front lines of our most urgent political and social debates, from Islam and immigration to the green movement and the rise of the slacktivist. But he also reveals his more personal side – the experiences that have shaped his values and love for this country.”

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.

“Macbeth” (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 17-28), William Shakespeare.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD

When I was made redundant last month after ten and a half years with the company, I did not spend the ensuing few weeks lurking and loitering outside the entrance to the office, scowling, sulking and skulking, singing my own praises to anyone entering on the off chance someone may take pity upon me and offer me my job back.

No. I did not.

To whom do you think I may be drawing a parallel?

/////// ?

SMELLY TONGUES will return in mid-April.

There will be blood.

And a t-shirt and a coffee mug.

DAS KAPITAL!

Thank you for your comments and for reading.

In the meantime, some of my most recent posts have been re-published on Australian Independent Media Network and for continued, informed and intelligent commentary on the rancid state of #AusPol, there’s always the Something Wonky podcast.

Until then …

Leben ist leben.

KRIEG IST KRIEG!

Abschied.

THE ARISTOCRATS

There are occasions, mostly moments of boredom or lethargy, when a perverse impulse takes me to Andrew Bolt’s Blog With No Name, where I quickly scroll down the numerous items he posts on any given day just to reassure myself that, in this ever-changing world in which we live, some things remain soothingly constant and shall be so forevermore.

In Andrew’s world, the song always remains the same, scratched-up old-timey tunes blaring from out his battered bakelite and neon conservative cliché jukebox, songs of woe, calamity and fear, Old Shep has died and someone’s stolen the truck again. Barbarians from the wilds. Dark savages at the door. Murther most foul. They wantonly defile our most sacred, revered institutions and traditions, they spit in the face of decency, they that are “they”. These people …

The Islamists. The blacks. The ABC. Women.

A race war cometh. A clash of cultures and civilisations. The white race satirised, vilified, shamed, abused, and by whom? …

You shall see the Lord of Life and Death,
You shall see Heaven in Hell,
You shall be blinded by light,
You shall see darkness.

In Andrew’s world.

Not so long ago, just last year in fact, and for almost two years, Andrew was on top of his world, he was in, he was connected, he had the ear of a Prime Minister no less, a true insider with a seat at the table, the table of power, true power.

Do you remember?

Then it all fell apart.

Tragedy struck, and it struck Andrew hard. As it did Piers Akerman and Janet Albrechtson and Miranda Devine and Gerard Henderson and Greg Sheridan and Paul Sheehan and Alan Jones and their pain, their loss, their rage reverberated throughout the land, column after aggrieved column, anguished comment upon anguished comment, they spat their displeasure and disappointment, their hurt, upon every stage whose boards they took to treading.

“Rupert? Wherefore art thou, Rupert?”, whimpered their Great Leader, their Chosen One to His Master’s Voice.

Nothing could be done. Nothing.

Rollover Red Rover.

A vile conspiracy of smears and black innuendo, of monstrous abuse and ridicule, a remorseless conspiracy of Brobdingnagian proportions had been orchestrated by the collective brute forces of Stalinist savagery to fell their Most Beloved Man.

O most heinous villainy, the very oceans and seas themselves did swell with the outpouring of so many bitter tears!

Blood did fall upon the wattle. The blood of Tony Abbott. Former Prime Minister …

“What are they going to say about him? What? Are they going to say he was a kind man? He was a wise man? He had plans? He had wisdom? … The man’s enlarged my mind. He’s a poet warrior in the classic sense. I mean sometimes he’ll… uh… well, you’ll say “hello” to him, right? And he’ll just walk right by you. He won’t even notice you. And suddenly he’ll grab you, and he’ll throw you in a corner, and he’ll say, “Do you know that ‘if’ is the middle word in life? If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you”

For one brief moment in time, one fleeting moment, they were no longer mere observers, they were Players in The Game, with a tumefied swag of Glittering Prizes within their grasp, they were Kings and they were Queens, and they could’ve been Heroes, forever and ever.

No.

Just for one day.

Where are they now?

Greg Sheridan lays a damp, cool cloth across the furrowed brow of his friend, a soft kiss upon the cheek to soothe his troublesome fevres, “It’s all right Tony, it’s all right, my friend”, and returns to his lowly position as foreign editor in a broadsheet nobody reads much anymore.

Gerard Henderson continues as Executive Director of a “tatty living room of a terrace house” called The Sydney Institute to regularly host “about 20-30 superannuated types who have driven their Daimlers over from Mosman for a nice talk and a few ports”.

Miranda Devine has taken a sabbatical from a Sunday night radio show nobody much knew she ever had, to “spend more time with her family”, and no doubt reflect upon the fate of her luminary paladin, her knight in tight red armour. Where once she did squelch, now there is only chafing.

And Andrew. Poor Andrew.

Andrew Bolt’s column continues to be syndicated in Rupert’s tabloids, and is still to be found just a few pages before the classified ads where you can find listings for young, busty Asian girls to satisfy your every desire, couples welcome. His show, “The Bolt Report”, television’s finest vaudevillian political comedy of our time awaits news of its fate and placement, possibly Sky News, because, well, everybody subscribes to Foxtel.

Don’t they?

Flow, my tears, fall from your springs!
Exiled forever, let me mourn;
Where night’s black bird her sad infamy sings,
There let me live forlorn.

Down vain lights, shine you no more!
No nights are dark enough for those
That in despair their last fortunes deplore.
Light doth but shame disclose.

Never may my woes be relieved,
Since pity is fled;
And tears and sighs and groans my weary days, my weary days
Of all joys have deprived.

John Dowland, 1596

MAKING PLANS FOR MALCOLM

Malcolm seems a pleasant man, happy in his work.

We only want what’s best for Malcolm.

Malcolm has a nice smile. A nice smile in a symmetrical face.

Nice.

Malcolm likes to speak.
And he loves to be spoken to.

Malcolm is the Prime Minister of Australia.

Turnbull. Malcolm Turnbull.

On February 8, 2016, Malcolm announced …

“$4 million each for the Little Scientists and Let’s Count programs as part of the National Innovation and Science Agenda. 350,000 more pre-schoolers will now have access to these programs which will help to inspire Australia’s next generation of innovators and entrepreneurs.”

On February 4, 2016, it was reported …

“Up to 350 positions at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) will be made redundant, with its climate research divisions to bear the brunt of the job losses.”

Because … “Successive federal funding cuts, including a $115m reduction in the 2014 federal budget, have seen the agency’s staffing levels shrink by 20% in the past years, equal to around 1,400 jobs.” and … “that science and research roles were hit hardest by the cuts.”

On October 21, 2015, at the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science ceremony, Malcolm said this …

“We have to recognise the central role of science and the work of scientists and people who follow the scientific method.”

Scientists, he insisted, were key to Australia’s goal to remain a “high-wage, generous social welfare net, first-world economy”. Science literacy was vitally needed not only in universities, but in primary and secondary schools.

Is Malcolm confused?

Once upon a time Malcolm “was a staunch supporter of marriage Equality, even publicly expressing his support for a free vote (conscience vote) in Parliament on the issue”, and on May 26^th, 2015 Malcolm said this …

“If you think about, say, the British Commonwealth, if you think of the old Commonwealth, the Dominions, they are all now supporting same-sex marriage.

“Australia I suppose is the odd one out or is the one that has not yet turned its mind in a parliamentary sense to reviewing the law.

“The point is the context has dramatically changed and we can’t be blind to that.”

However, “in his first speech to Parliament as Prime Minister, Turnbull wasted no time in casting a cloud over the prospect of marriage equality anytime soon. His decision to opt in to a plebiscite (national vote) instead of a conscience vote in Parliament highlights how politics can overshadow beliefs.”

Malcolm wants to spend $160 million to ask Australian folks all over a question, the answer to which is already known.

I’ve had pisses that have lasted longer than Malcolm Turnbull’s convictions.

In the five months since ousting Testicles Tony from the top job to the relief of a most happye nation, Malcolm has spoken long, and at large, on and about many things. He has spoken coherently and intelligently, on domestic violence, climate change and homelessness, science, research, medicine, all manner of things …

“In October last year, he told the New South Wales state council of the Liberal Party: “We are not run by factions.”

The line elicited more than giggles, in fact. It got great guffaws. And groans. And interjections – among them “Come off it!” and “Should have worn gumboots!”

Smiling uneasily, Turnbull took on the interjectors.

“Well, you may dispute that,” he said, “but I have to tell you, from experience, we are not run by factions, nor are we run by big business, or by deals in back rooms.””

Behold, Our Malcolm of The Immaculate Moral Equivalency.

A Proud Man, A Vain Man, and now a Man Captive to the antipathetic obsessions of those comically narcissistic conceits of pure political ideology and the men and women who BELIEVE them, the dog-eat-dog, fuck-your mother and I Spit On Your Father’s Grave No Frills trademark so historically beloved and embraced by his Firm, the Big Business and Billionaire Corporate Conglomerate otherwise known as The Liberal Party of Australia.

Malcolm ain’t nothin’ but the mongrel breeding bitch of the puppy farm now.

An Empty Man.

A Nowhere Man.

Doing NOTHING the best he can.

Malcolm speaks of “reform”, but there is and can be no “reform” from Malcolm for Malcolm is not in charge as much as he would like us to think, instead there continues, in the tradition of his predecessor, a cruel Calvinist covenant of neither works nor grace, but of banishment and desolation.

No law, no love, just a bleak oppression of body and soul, not entered into willingly, but thrust upon our heads and shoulders with a savage and relentless force under the guise of a new austerity, difficult “challenges”, unending “crises”, and a cycle of perpetual threats and constant dangers which are forever menacing our great state, may Advance Australia Fear.

Everything old is new again.

What does Malcolm stand for?

Malcolm.

He must be happy in his work.

His whole future is as good as sealed.

They’re making plans for Malcolm.

They only want what’s best for him.

He just needs a helping hand.

ABETZ MACHT FREI

Liberal Senator Eric Abetz, former Minister for Employment in the Abbott Government, wee nyaff, nudnik and vainglorious shtunk, has a degree in law and a curious habit of speaking factitious nonsense on matters he knows nothing about.

Starkly bereft and deficient in experience on anything resembling tangible matters of substance, oblivious to the realities of life in this, our real world, and who has, during his political “career” achieved nothing of benefit for anyone other than himself, this daft, dopey and nescient bed bug on the encrusted, befouled sheets of our nation has lately taken to the habit of inserting his splenetic and choleric self into conversations and issues of national import to hate-vomit his peculiar brand of dead-from-the-neck-up fatuous and asinine fuckwittery almost every day now since he was unceremoniously jettisoned from his ministerial position in September last year.

Herr Abetz is rapidly becoming the political equivalent of Mitchell Pearce, turning up to every party unannounced and uninvited to piss on the furniture, vomit on the rug, root the dog, call the Asian and black guests chinks and niggers and then, when asked to leave, loudly complains that he was just havin’ a laugh and that the world has been hijacked by “atheists, feminazis, homos” and political correctness gone mad.

There is nothing in his life, nothing in his so-called career which will ever be classified achievement enough to rate so much as a footnote to a footnote to a footnote’s footnote to any political history of this nation or time, and if, when the most blessed and hoped for day comes when he pops his clogs and shuffles from this mortal coil, the news of his demise shall probably be met with total silence or something like …

“Who the fuck was he?”

“Dunno. Politician. His uncle was a Nazi.”

Turn page.

Abetz is like a third nipple on a man. We already know that two of them serve no function, but are somewhat mandatory features, so what the fuck and why is this third one here for?

Like a eunuch turning up to a flophouse, prompting all the working girls to exclaim with wide eyes and dropped jaws, “Are you serious?”

He has claimed there is “a link between abortion and breast cancer”. There is not. In 2014, he proposed a plan that would have required the unemployed to apply for 40 jobs every month, and strip them of any benefits for six months, in other words, no income whatsoever, perhaps in the belief that poverty and starvation are character-building, a trait, possibly genetic, inherited from his Jew murdering Nazi uncle Otto.

He continues to rail, wail and whine against and about marriage equality, no doubt labouring under the delusion that if introduced, it will bring about the complete collapse of civilisation as he knows it, city walls will crumble, and towers fall, the sun shall plunge into the ocean, and the earth erupt in flame.

He has written “study after study, time and time again, shows that children benefit from having a father and mother”, and cites no such study because none exist.

He has also said this …

“Most people in a democracy believe social policy should be determined by the people, not by dubious interpretation by an activist judiciary”.

He has recently, however, altered his opinion about the “power of the people”, stating if a plebiscite on the matter is put to the Australian people, and they say “yes” to marriage equality, he will ignore it …

“There will be people in the parliament who could not support the outcome of a plebiscite whichever way it went.”

Eric does not like democracy when democracy does not suit Eric.

Eric is a schmuck.

A yokel.

Science has proven a link between Eric Abetz and total stupidity, and it did not take long.

Zolst zein vi a lomp-am tug sollst di hangen, in der nacht sollst di brenne.*

Don’t be an Eric.

*Yiddish: “He should be like a lamp, hang during the day and burn during the night”.

THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED

“Where is Tony Abbott?” “What is Tony doing?” “What has Tony done?” “What will Tony do?” “What has Tony said?” “Tony said what?”

“What does Eric Abetz think?” “What does Kevin Andrews think?” “What about Cory Bernardi?”

“Let’s write a column about it. Let’s write two. How about a couple hundred?”

“And two dozen editorials. And three hard-boiled eggs”.

The Guardian Australia runs a hagiographic fiction on Abbott by Tom Switzer who writes …

“As unfashionable as it is to say so, there are very few people in public life with finer personal qualities than Abbott.”

And this…

“Sneered at, patronised, condemned, he has battled on. Abbott, at 58, is relatively young and exceedingly fit, he is highly experienced, a man of enormous talent and a magnificent parliamentary performer and an adept and compelling politician.”

Greg Sheridan, Foreign editor at “The Australian” Rupert’s broadsheet comic book observes of Abbott …

“No politician in modern ­Australia, at least since Malcolm Fraser in 1975, has been subjected to such sustained, vitriolic and personalised abuse as Abbott.”

Think on that for a moment. There is something very wrong about it.

Sheridan continues …

“If he left politics, this would subside. The former prime minister is a strong and resilient person, but this kind of abuse takes its toll not only on the person ­directly affected but also on their family. It is also the case that the sooner he left, the sooner it was likely his record of substantial, perhaps historic, achievement would be reassessed.

No other prime minister could have stopped the boats.”

It is reported “that Tony Abbott has been “in mourning” after losing the top job and has been urged to remain in politics by his former chief of staff Peta Credlin.

“He appears from what people are saying to be quite bitter, quite resentful, in fact I think it’s got worse,” a Liberal source is quoted as saying.”

Abbott denies this. Of course.

Former Minister for Employment in the Abbott Government, Eric Abetz states “Tony Abbott has always been about one thing – namely the Australian people” and resident parliamentary whackjob Cory Bernardi “says it has been the custom of the party to allow former leaders to choose their next role” and warns “against efforts to “muffle” Tony Abbott’s future contribution in party debates.””

Abbott announced last week that he intends to re-contest his seat in the next federal election, and appears to under the impression this may pave the way for his return to the Prime Ministership.

And this week, Abbott will be jetting off to the United States of Murder to address a group known as The Alliance Defending Freedom, a gay-hate group which describes itself as “an alliance-building legal organisation that advocates for the right of people to freely live out their faith. Along with our work to defend human rights such as free speech and religious freedom, ADF affirms the good of marriage and the value of strong families around the world, particularly on behalf children, who flourish when society honours and promotes the roles of both mothers and fathers in children’s lives,” and “seeks to recover the robust Christendomic theology of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th centuries“.

Read, “defending human rights such as free speech and religious freedom”, as imposing their sexual and religious bigotry on others, abolishing abortion, burning witches at the stake and stoning gays to death in the public square. They probably believe Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” to be a guide on how to go about it.

Since Abbott was thrown from his job last September, and replaced by Malcolm Turnbull, the political “news” in our mainstream media (including the ABC) has concerned itself with little else but gasbagging speculation, gossip and rumours about what Tony is going to do with his life, will he stay or will he go, how he feels, how others feel about how he feels, and how we should feel about it all as well. In a country of over 24 million people, this is the political issue that should consume our attention and be of primary concern to us, according to our media and its commentators.

I could not give a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut or a wrinkled rat’s arse if the idiot threw himself off a fucking cliff, and I suspect I may not be alone in that.

However, within the closed minds of the ageing anal polyps on the arse of journalism that comprise the Canberra press gallery, this is the best they can come up.

We don’t do policy. We don’t do analysis. We don’t report on the de-funding of TAFE’s across the country, the shrinking pool of teachers and students, the discontinued courses, the ones which remain priced so far out of reach denying a generation of youth who have no wish to attend university to learn a trade. No. We don’t do that. We don’t report on the slow and inexorable dismantling of Medicare. No. We do not report on the cuts to community legal services, family violence prevention centres, charitable organisations and mental health services. No. We don’t do that.

Not on our front pages. Not in our headlines. No.

NSW Premier Mike Baird removes over 40 century old fig trees in Sydney’s Moore Park to make way for a light rail system as a sup to the gambling and racing industry so they may have quick and easy access to their club in order to watch horses run around in fucking circles, and there’s barely any scrutiny of the decision in our media. A couple reports, a column, a few letters to the editor, and it’s over and done with.

Nice work if you can get it. Why not concentrate on Mr. Baird’s chummy tweets instead? Too easy.

Demonise the poor. Stigmatise the single mother. Disenfranchise the young. Reduce penalty rates. Reduce the minimum wage. Axe the aged pension.

We are being hugger-muggered and carom-shotted into a world of black darkness and confusion. The rising of this century will not bring catharsis. The rising of this century shall not bring salvation. The crack is getting deeper, the flames are rising higher, and the political predators of this great divide shall cut our throats, slice our flesh, and drink our blood.*

Existence as we know it is over.

The End of Democracy. Only the illusion remains.

The Ascent of the Idiocratic Oligarchy is here.

Gore Vidal once remarked that the greatest, most grievous error the Ruling Classes ever made was teaching the Underclasses how to read during the Industrial Revolution, essentially so as the Underclasses could comprehend the instructions for operating the machinery of the time, and it is an error the Ruling Classes have been attempting to correct ever since.

He was right.

And they’re winning.

*Apologies to Laibach

NO, WE DO NOT NEED TO “TALK” ABOUT ISLAM

Just recently, I spied yet another column of commentary in one of those comic books with horoscopes oft referred to as “newspapers” imploring us, we, the populace in general, to “talk” about Islam, which is to say, talk about terrorism and the small clutch of adolescent sots who, on occasions, take leave of the little sense they have to gibber about blowing people up and other such nonsense. That, on occasions, they succeed in their aims provides perfect fodder for Rupert’s comic books – a squawking headline about SO BIG, an appalling pun, and the throwing about of words like “evil” and “terror” and “threats” to public safety lurking ‘round every street corner.

The “We need to talk about Islam” meme typically comes from opinion pieces compiled by the typing monkeys who work for these aforementioned comic books and boils down, in most cases, to this …

“I don’t like your religion, and I don’t like you and I wish you’d all piss off because you’re all fucking crazy”.

These monkeys are often aided and abetted in their cause by various politicians and public figures of a conservative bent, such as former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, a man seemingly now intent upon going the full vagina every time he plops himself into public view to rattle his sabres and flap his budgie at us all.

The “We need to talk about Islam” meme is similar in tone, if not downright identical at times to the “We need to talk about multiculturalism” topic which crops up occasionally, because the person wanting to “talk” thinks – nay – knows it (multiculturalism) doesn’t work and besides, they get nervous ‘round niggers, chinks and spicks and such and keep wondering where all the white folk have gone, which is probably down the local Thai joint for a larb gai and lassi for tea.

There’s also the “We need to talk about abortion” thing, a thing usually “talked” about by those self-styled warriors for the unborn who, when they’re not banging on about the sanctity of life, have a tendency to lurk outside family planning clinics harassing anyone who dares enter, or, depending the country you’re in, blowing holes through people’s heads with shotguns because, well … sanctity of life and all that.

As one of those individuals who comprise a “we”, I do wish these other “we’s” would shut up and keep their chatter between their silly conspiratorial selves and leave the rest of us the fuck alone.

But, alas no.

Article after article, column after column, commentary piled atop commentary, all of it essentially urging “we” should all “talk” about the same damned thing, even if we don’t know anything about it … but, goddammit, we sure as heck need to do some talkin’ ‘bout it because, well … some of them folks are doing some mighty crazy shit and, well … you know, talkin’ an’ shit.

I cannot “talk” about Islam simply because I know nothing of it, or any other religion, and have no inclination, and never have to find out. This is not a statement I make in contempt of religion or those of faith, but the likelihood of my engaging with a religious community to learn of religion is about as distant as the likelihood of my buying a Taylor Swift album, not because I have any issues with Taylor Swift, but because, well … it just ain’t for me.

I care not what religion, colour, race or creed you may be, it’s whether or not you’re a flaming fucking arsehole that will determine whether I engage with you or not.

Those who wish to “talk” about Islam as a “problem” for us all have allowed themselves, and actively seek to encourage others, to feel terrorised, panicked, by a small but noisy pack of attention-seeking, brain-dead, hoofwanking bunglecunts whose sole purpose in life, aside from pulling themselves, is to fuck other people up, deadshits representative of nothing at all, no faith, no country, no race, no colour.

They are nothing.

“We” do not need to “talk” about Islam.

Shut the fuck up.

Watch this instead …

Filzmoos Power

 

THE YEAR IN REVIEW – TERROR, TRASH-TALKING AND TONY THE TALKING TESTICLE

Such a year.

For a brief (very brief) period of time, Australia was governed by an inarticulate, unintelligent and deluded madman and his far-right minions until it became perfectly clear this was no longer sustainable or viable, and they were told, in no uncertain terms, to pack their swags and bugger off.

That’s the type of “leadership” best left to the United States. It comes natural to them. Down under, it all became just a little too weird.

After September 2015, posts were few and far between (about 7 or 8) due to personal matters (the illness, hospitalisation and subsequent death of my father), so my heart was not really in it and still isn’t. Besides, everything that needed to be said has been said, and then said again and again by all manner of people.

Please note that, come the New Year, there will be no posts made on this blog about Donald Trump. Ever. At this point in time, I have less life ahead of me than behind me, and I refuse to waste so much as a billionth of a nanosecond on such a yatebedam.

“The man who establishes his argument by noise and command knows that his reason is weak.” – Michel de Montaigne

And so, without further ado, here are some of things I ranted, raved, and swore about (profusely) during 2015.

Good night and good luck.

“The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.” – Carl Jung

January 30, 2015

“YOU’RE FUCKED, TONY”

From awful to fucked in the space of one brief week, Prime Minister Tony Abbott, our Dear Leader, the walking, talking testicle of contemporary Australian  political life, and embodiment of everything that is, and has been wrong with it these last several years, has morphed toot sweet from the once proudly simian gaited and throbbingly tumescent Cock ‘O’ the Walk and King of the Hill to flaccid impuissance, an instant noodle body-slammed into a bowl of his own steaming hot faeces.

February 12, 2015

“SOMEBODY OUT THERE LOVES YOU, BUT WE THINK YOU’RE A CUNT”

You’re a cunt, Tony.

You have no policies, only punishments. You do not seek to govern, you seek to rule. You thrive on the disorders and despairs of others, fear is your aphrodisiac, loathing a love letter perfumed with the blood of disabled babes, the chaos of the underclasses a contemptible slander on your strivations to the Übermensch. You are The Overman, and in your world, everyone knows their place and keeps it, and if they do not, one will be found for them, and that place shall be decided by the heft of their wallet, the rattle of their chains, the number of their slaves, and the avarice that glints in their eyes, they who whisper sweet visions of many little murders of the soul, to bring the great unwashed to heel, to their heel, so they may be crushed for base entertainments, to satisfy the savage indulgences of The Rich and The Powerful in their habitual fits of cruel whimsy.

February 27, 2015

“I AM A GOD”

Previous observations I have made, of predictions, clairvoyant in nature, that have subsequently proven to be true, have convinced me that I have now become a God. And therefore, and thusly, I do say unto you, take heed of the following …

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull shall inform Federal Treasurer Joe Hockey that his services are no longer required, and they will now be performed by Scott Morrison, with Foreign Minister Julie Bishop retaining her position. Mr. Hockey shall spontaneously burst into big, wet tears and shout, “IT’S NOT FAIR! IT’S NOT FAIR AND YOU KNOW IT AND YOU CAN ALL GET FUCKED I’M NOT PLAYING ANYMORE I’M NOT IT’S NOT FAIR AND YOU CAN ALL GET FUCKED!”, after which he will be forcibly escorted and removed from the premises by security. Mr. Hockey will subsequently resign his seat, and retire from politics altogether.

March 6, 2015

“EVERYTHING IS SHIT”

I have seen the sights, the sounds, and the shape of the Future and it is Shit.

The Intergenerational Report released yesterday by the Abbott Federal Government has made it perfectly clear to us all, in the starkest possible terms, that this country faces challenges ahead, in all aspects and walks of life, that must, and can, only be met by all of us willingly engaging in a broad, national conversation about the sacrifices and pressures we must all endure in order to remain a strong, secure and economically sound nation into the near and distant future, for the sake of our children, for the sake of theirs, and for all that lies ahead, all that can be ours, all that can be theirs, if only we, all Australians, men and women, are willing to grasp the opportunity to do so now, before it’s too late.

In short, there are far too many old cunts fucking it up for the rest of us.

March 11, 2015

“SICK OFS”

Since 1972, when I was thirteen years old, I have observed Prime Ministers from the late Gough Whitlam through Paul Keating through to the shambolic dysfunction and shrill, shrieking chaos of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years, but of the current incumbent, Tony Abbott, I have now come to the sad, but somewhat predictable, one could say inevitable, conclusion that Our Prime Minister’s Brain Is Missing.

In its place, an organ of purely intuitive compulsion, which, when prodded or stroked, no matter how strongly or gently, spawns an instantaneous stream of insensate gibberish, his words like spores from a brooding coral, jerkingly spat into the wider atmosphere layering everything beneath it with a thin, cream layer of oozing slime which, rather than reproduce, suffocates and destroys all that lay before it.

This organ, if it were donated to science, would probably reveal itself to comprise something resembling a lone, mushy pea atop a small, grey ball of gnarly gristle.

April 22, 2015

“FASTER, FASTER, YOUNG AUSSIE TEEN “SAND ‘N’ SANDAL” DESERT EPIC ENTHUSIASTS, KILL, KILL!”

Somebody’s left the gate open at the cunt farm again …

A terrifying troupe of terrorist teen tots and twenty-somethings had been planning to launch an extreme assault upon the Australian public on our nation’s finest and most revered of days, Holy of Holies, Oh Woe are We for We are Besieged by Evil!

They were going to go at it with a knife and a sword somewhere to avenge the death of some other dickhead with a name that sounded like a brand of Turkish nougat who bought a knife to a gunfight outside a police station a while back and got himself shot for his troubles.

As you would.

May 26, 2015

“PEACE IN OUR TIME”

We are in a War.

We do not understand this War.

We did not ask to be in this War.

We should not be in this War.

We are now the Enemy of Government and the Enemy of Each Other in a War that is being sold to us shrouded in the weasel words of Nationalism, Fiscal Austerity and Personal Sacrifice. Team Australia. Leaners. Lifters. Enemies. Friends.

Government has now fully abnegated its responsibility to govern on behalf of the citizenry, and has, instead, fully embraced and expressed its desire to Rule, to Dictate, and to Command.

We are a nation now fully divided into strictly delineated class structures. The weak, the poor and the aged are to be vanquished through neglect and shamed for their impositions upon us. The young and the meek shall be inculcated to abide by and unquestioningly obey the New Rule of Universal Law that is the “Cult of Work,” a cult in which, once enlisted, you shall never leave, you shall never think of leaving. Dissent from the Proletariat will not be tolerated, and will be met and dealt with by threats and intimidation, by force if necessary, until silent submission to this New World Order of Infinite Productivity and mute and grateful  service to the state can be restored and maintained.

Sklaverei ist Freiheit!

We are in a war.

Humanity preys upon itself, like monsters of the deep, and here we sit at safe distance, dispassionate and incurious of mind, steadfast in resolve, and with smugly imperious certainty know what may seem cruel abominations to minds less rigorous in thought than our own, are in fact tender mercies and blessings from the wings of doves delivered with the sweetest of charity, and in the name of peace, and of love, and safety of passage.

July 2, 2015

“WHITE TRASH ON HEAT”

We can stunt and dull our senses with the psychological thalidomide of asinine entertainments and “moral” panics, we can redact our hearts and hide our minds from themselves, we can spit our collective contempt upon the faces of the feeble, the frail, and the a’feared, we can choose to live every minute of our future as a memory of our past, but nothing, nothing, will ever, wipe these sordid stains from our history or from our souls.

September 2, 2015

“PETER FUCKING DUTTON”

As the former Federal Health Minister, he was regarded, by health professionals, as “the worst health minister in 35 years” and “will be remembered as the dullest, least innovative and most gullible for swallowing the reforms from his think tank … Although I am glad he has been demoted, it would have been good if he was still around to take responsibility for the current chaos he has caused.”

To put it unkindly, the man’s not worth a pinch of shit, and we all know it.

Let us also not forget that, as the current Immigration Minister, Dutton joins a long and undistinguished line of callous and unfeeling arseholes who have, for almost 15 years now, been enabling the rape, torture and physical and psychological abuse of already seriously damaged men, women and children by flinging them off to corruptly governed foreign islands so as to sate the primal fears of a nation whose populace now seems consumed and diseased by cowardice and new tribal hatreds, hatreds lovingly nurtured and fed by the frenzied illogic of the white trash on heat in our tabloids, and their political equivalents.

Stay sane. It’s not you. It’s everyone else.

BRATS IN THE RANKS

In the decade during which I have been in the employ of a corporate concern, a multinational, I have witnessed people, too many to name, who have suddenly found themselves rudely and unceremoniously shuffled into irrelevancy, unemployment, deemed excess baggage or incompatible with whatever budgetary constraints are constraining the budget at whatever time, after working five, ten, twenty, even thirty years of their lifespan for said “concern”.

“Redundant” is the weasel word applied in such circumstances, which typically come about when a company undergoes or announces it is to undergo a “restructure”, which, as those of us living in the real world know, means one thing and one thing only – they’re going to sack a shitload of people and ship the work offshore where it’s cheaper.

When such news is delivered, recipients can react in a variety of ways. Anger. Resentment. A sense of betrayal; in some cases, even grief, that the work they do, that they’ve done, how they have gone about the doing of it, is no longer required, is no longer useful, and is no longer of value.

It is hard news to take.

Yet none (at least, to the best of my knowledge) ever reacted by trying to wreck the place before they left it.

There was no dancing on tables during spontaneous piss-ups, or breaking of legs, or the removing of shirts and beating of hairy man-boobs with clenched fists whilst bellowing how everyone can all get fucked. No, there was none of this. No foul-tempered, sulky, sooky ‘n’ sour spoilt-brat hissy-fits were sprayed at whoever may have been unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity at the time the news was given.

Most thought it unfair, which of course they would. Some simply shrugged with resignation, having expected it anyway, and some just didn’t care much at all, as they’d been there so long they’d grown sick of it. Some people in management got called “cunts” I suppose (especially the Americans), and a few may well have told a power-that-is on the odd occasion to take his/her job/company and shove it where the sun don’t shine, but everything and everybody soon settles down and gets on with business, either the taking care of it or the leaving of it, and doing so with a necessary modicum of restraint and decorum.

Which brings me to this small knot of squealing dickheads we’ve been hearing of, from and about the last couple months, a small knot of squealing dickheads from the rank of our body politic who were turfed from their jobs not long back because they were shit at them, and they haven’t shut up since.

Tony Abbott, Joe Hockey, Eric Abetz, and Kevin Andrews.

In less than the two years they held them, these men were sacked because they were crap at their jobs.

Not redundant.

Sacked.

They were incompetent in their work.

In the weeks since those events, we have borne embarrassed witness to the childishness of Abbott in the immediate wake of his usurpation, all glowering scowls and dark, sullen glares; we have listened to Joe Hockey’s specious delusions of grandeur, his sense of self-importance, and we have heard how both men, by their own assessment, were blessedly infallible in their words and actions, all of them, and how their untimely demise sprang not from any faults or failures of their own, but from grim and grubby deeds of treachery done dirt cheap on the sly by forces of pure evil.

Former Minister for Something I Can’t Remember Anymore Because He Was Crap At It, Eric Abetz, has had a few petulant grumbles to make on these shenanigans among other matters, as has former Defence Minister, Kevin Andrews, who still hasn’t quite managed to come to terms with the description “former”, and who yesterday saw fit to gift our nation his sage and sound advice – no doubt gleaned from years upon years of arduous study – on how to correctly prosecute a ground war against IS in Syria, advice that shall no doubt be pounced upon and devoured with gusto by the gormless gits currently in charge of the world’s military, because socially conservative, anti-gay, rabidly anti-abortion suburban Christian barristers are really shit hot at planning wars in desert ratholes they can send other people’s children to die in.

It’s the sheer gall of their ego’s, the fictions they’ve fed themselves as facts, the absorption in their own self-righteousness, the wilful ignorance on world matters they insist on showcasing and sharing as hard-won wisdom, the indulgent parade of bruised egos and damaged pride, and the conviction they seem to have that this, that they, still matter to us, and should matter to us, when most of us would prefer they just shut up and leave us all the fuck alone, we’ve been there already, enough, enough.

What a sad and sorry quartet of sore losers are these; graceless, bitter and undignified in defeat, still dishing up the same old hits ‘n’ memories to an audience who’ve long since changed channels.

I rack my brain trying to remember what it was they did when they had their jobs, and can think of nothing significant, nothing of real, tangible, substantive purpose beyond the chanting of clichés and the peddling of stereotypes, of clumsy and bellicose vindictiveness, of cruel judgments made and swingeing corrections imposed; these mutts could dish it out alright, but dish it back, they’re off like a bag of ha’penny crackers.

Here in the real world, where lives, not ideologies are lived, where the work we do is not just an abstract notion or mere statistic under consideration for a report, the likes of Andrews, Abbott, Abetz and Hockey may do well to reflect that, aside from themselves and a few like-minded, mouthy muppets in the media, no one gives a fuck about what they think on a thing anymore or why, nobody wants their opinion, and above all, nobody is in the least concerned about how they felt or still feel about losing their jobs (because they were rubbish at them), so could they suck it up, shut up and shove the fuck off and stop giving us all the shits.

You are no longer in the game.

Stop playing.

Go. Away.

THAT’LL DO, PIG

Malcolm Turnbull is addressing the media.

I am sitting at the kitchen table in the dining room of my parent’s home in Sydney’s south-west, my mother is in the living room watching a murder mystery on ABC One titled “Vera” when the program is interrupted by a “flash” of news, news that Malcolm Turnbull will shortly be addressing the media.

He does.

He will be challenging the incumbent Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, for the leadership of the Federal Liberal Party, and for the Prime Ministership of the country. He will be challenging tonight.

This “flash” of news becomes rolling coverage and keeps a-rolling for the rest of the night, thoroughly pissing off my mother who shall now never know who murdered who or why in the show she was watching, and she makes her feelings about this known to me more than once over the next few hours (as mothers are wont to do), whilst I am left to my own thoughts, chief amongst them this, “He (Malcolm) would not be doing this if wasn’t absolutely certain he had the numbers.”

He has the numbers.

You’re fucked, Tony.

I feel a sense of relief at this turn of events, a great sense of relief, and, about 11.30pm, I finally bed down for the night to the baying of various callers on ABC Radio 702 lulling me to satisfied slumber with howls of betrayal and outrage and anger over what has been done to “their” Tony, and how none of them, ever, ever again, will be able to bring themselves to vote for the Liberal Party, ever, ever again, not after this, and I think, “So, you’ll all be switching to Labor and the Greens now, will you?”, how I wish they’d take their oh-so-righteous, instant knee-jerk apoplexy and moral “outrage”, shove it and shut up.

So precious. So very delicate.

I do not own a computer, and my phone is not smart, and I am in Sydney for two weeks (unexpectedly) “managing” my elderly parents, one of whom is in hospital, so I am spared the incessant white noise of social media during all of this, and I am spared the views of people whose views don’t count to me; I am spared tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of words explaining to me what has just happened and why, what context I must place it, how I must feel, and who I must feel it for, and instead, all I am left with is a sense of relief.

What has just happened and why?

A tiresome and tedious fool has been expelled from the Palace, banished from the Kingdom, he had no hand to eye co-ordination, his slapstick was shit, and every time he flicked the switch to vaudeville, the auditorium exploded.

Tony was a silent movie star playing to a dark theatre, and the rest of us had all long ago fled to the talkies.

Tony was a fucking idiot, and he had to go.

It was reported, by whom I cannot recall, that upon being told he was to be challenged for the leadership by Turnbull, Abbott asked, “What do you think I should do?”, and this, this forlorn and bootless plea, this pitiable yelp alone stands as a simple, yet exquisite measure of this “man” made as he always was and always will be, in the image of a child.

“What do you think I should do?”

“You’re in charge. Don’t you know?”

The tabloids fired up Photoshop after his deposition, doing a few tricky things with Turnbull, with Shorten, and they cranked up their pun generator for a couple days, but overall, it really did feel as if their hearts were not truly in it, and now that their boy was gone, not only did Rupert have no one to order around anymore, neither did they have to continue their desperate defences of Abbott’s unrelenting talent for saying and doing things that made both him, and the country, a laughing stock and embarrassment across the globe.

The obituaries have not been kind …

“He will not be missed. He should not be praised. He was a failure selfishly wishing that the world would fail with him. We can only hope his like will not be seen again.” The Saturday Paper, Editorial

There will be more of them, at least of the ones that matter, but it may take some time for these to fully develop, to ripen, for all the tawdry facts and fantastic fictions of these last two years to be laid bare, and to fully explore his failure as a man, and as a government, to do him the justice he so truly and richly deserves, to dish back at him the contempt he so freely and frequently dished out at us, a contempt ably illustrated by his assuming the portfolio of “Minister for Women”, a ministry he did nothing with, but claimed purely as a juvenile, middle-finger “Fuck You” to every  woman in his past personal and political life who had ever dared take issue with his infantile brand of lip-smacking, nod-and-wink patriarchy.

That’s Abbott, the little fella in the kitchen banging away on a saucepan with a wooden spoon, driving the adults crazy but they won’t shut him up lest he have a tantrum; his entire life and political career one long, continuous “Fuck You” to anyone or anything that challenged his view of himself as some Golden God on high, wise, noble, all-knowing and just, infallible, in charge or taking over, and, as former PM Paul Keating once noted, “wrecking the joint if you don’t give him the job”, then proceeding to wreck it anyway because he can’t think of anything else to do.

“The man does not want to be who he is, and thus, when he can do anything he wants, he became a force of destruction and failure.” Guy Rundle, Crikey

Thank God that’s over.

Of course, there are some in the media, print media mostly, who have been moved to decry his fate, the usual suspects; they have turned to poetry and prose, hymns, elegies, and soaring symphonies of praise they have offered up in honour of their favoured saviour, but nobody with eyes or ears or who has been conscious in this world over this brief time is buying that shit anymore, not least without laughing a lot. Andrew Bolt, the Herald-Sun’s resident expert on Andrew Bolt, went all Jodi Picault a couple days ago and made himself cry.

People laughed a lot.

Former Liberal Minister For Something I’ve now forgotten, Eric Abetz, marked the occasion of Abbott’s removal by declaring “The King is dead, long live the King”.

No.

Rather, let’s grab a shovel, dig him a hole, and dance on his fucking grave.

Fuck you, Tony Abbott.

You were shit.

THE INTERRUPTED TONGUE

Three weeks ago, my 87 year-old emphysemic father did topple, in a most unseemly and indelicate fashion, face-first onto a heavy wooden dining table, and then did flip backward onto the kitchen floor, causing two bones in his neck to fracture, necessitating a quick visit to the hospital via ambulance where stitches were sewn across the bridge of his nose, and a neck brace fitted to him which looks like something from a science-fiction film – “Alien” came to mind first time I laid eyes on it.

He did lay there for two weeks, looking like one big, bruised, broken vegetable until, early last week, he was transferred to an aged care transitional facility where he is to be slowly re-introduced to the novel concept of walking without falling over (firstly, stand up while hanging onto something), and moving his head about.

This little episode did require my presence in Sydney for an extended period to deal with all manner of things (not least, a 77 year-old mother who is deaf, and cannot hear anything across a phone line), and during which time I had no computer or internet access (because I do not own a computer and my phone is not smart, not so much the affectation of a Luddite as it is my continued penchant for exploring the uncharted and challenging extremes of mind-numbing procrastination within the known – and unknown – dimensions of this, our infinite universe ).

This is about the fourth or fifth fall he has had in as many years, and if things keep going on like this, I may suggest to him that if he likes acrobatics so much, why doesn’t he just go join a fucking circus?

So.

I understand we have a new Prime Minister, that his name is Malcolm, and he speaks in complete sentences.

How’s that working out for people?

INCONVENIENT CATASTROPHES

Melbourne, today …

MOTORISTS and passengers can expect a hellish ride into the city Friday morning with roads jammed, trains cancelled and trams packed.

Metro workers are walking off the job between 10am and 2pm but services will start thinning from 8.15am and are not expected to resume to full capacity until 4.30pm.

VicRoads and Public Transport Victoria have urged those who can stay home to do so, with road congestion to be at peak hour levels all day long.

The stoppage will bring seven hours of chaos with 300,000 passengers disrupted and almost 700 train services cancelled.

Europe, now …

I see millions of hands
They are raised to the sky
I see millions of hands
They are raised to the sky
I see visions of outrage
I see visions of outrage

We are questioning peace
In the absence of god
We all pray to police
Oceans of people
Oceans of souls
Oceans of people
Oceans of souls

Europe is falling apart

“Eurovision” Laibach, 2014

The Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, comments …

 “We saw yesterday on our screens a very sad, poignant image of children tragically dead at sea in illegal migration,” Mr Abbott told ABC radio. “Thankfully we have stopped that in Australia because we have stopped the illegal boats.”

Such a mensch.

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee. – John Donne

PETER FUCKING DUTTON

Federal Immigration Minister Peter Dutton was on the television yesterday morning, on two channels that I noticed, twice, his gape-mouthed, dead, dull-eyed stare its usual blank and impenetrable fortress of vapid dumb, he’d been wound up with his talking points for the day and nothing, nothing, would sway him from his course, an insistent stream of hollow nonsense, bullshit and bluster, weary clichés and sulkily defensive hostility.

At one point Dutton accused Fairfax and the ABC of conspiring to topple the Abbott government by reporting news with news in it, such as the Australian Border Force fuck-up in Melbourne last Friday, another one of those masterstrokes in public relations our government has come to specialise in and which we, the citizenry, so abjectly fail to appreciate them for time and time again.

I stop listening, and the words “taking responsibility” come to mind. I leave the room, go have a shower (an apt thing to do after hearing or seeing Dutton at any time), and get ready for work. By the time I get there, Dutton’s all over the fucking internet, being rightfully lambasted and widely mocked for his remarks, and for generally carrying on like a sooky cunt.

To date, Dutton’s career as a government minister has not exactly been covered in glory, his exploits have heralded no fanfares and inspired no heroic monuments be established in his name; instead, as one Fairfax scribe noted “in a government which prizes making a goose of oneself, Dutton excels.”

Let us also not forget that, as the former Federal Health Minister, he was regarded, by health professionals, as “the worst health minister in 35 years” and “will be remembered as the dullest, least innovative and most gullible for swallowing the reforms from his think tank … Although I am glad he has been demoted, it would have been good if he was still around to take responsibility for the current chaos he has caused.”

To put it unkindly, the man’s not worth a pinch of shit, and we all know it.

Let us also not forget that, as the current Immigration Minister, Dutton joins a long and undistinguished line of callous and unfeeling arseholes who have, for almost 15 years now, been enabling the rape, torture and physical and psychological abuse of already seriously damaged men, women and children by flinging them off to corruptly governed foreign islands so as to sate the primal fears of a nation whose populace now seems consumed and diseased by cowardice and new tribal hatreds, hatreds lovingly nurtured and fed by the frenzied illogic of the white trash on heat in our tabloids, and their political equivalents.

Let us not forget this …

“The story of Beth, a young refugee who was released into the Nauruan community in May. Allegedly Beth, whose name I have changed, was sitting on the beach with some other women when local men gave her a drink. Beth began to feel woozy, before being dragged into bushes by two or three men and raped. They then poured fuel on her and set her alight. I have seen photographs of her after the assault. Her left breast is so badly burnt that the skin has blackened and lifted from the flesh.

As a result of the rape, Beth became pregnant. A solemn Christian, the thought of abortion appalled her but she decided to go through with it. Beth was flown to Brisbane for the termination where, not long after, she attempted to hang herself with a bed sheet. She is now back on Nauru.”

Let us not forget this …

“We, as a country, are effectively running overseas prison camps filled with people who have committed no crime, camps where abuse and neglect and maltreatment are routine, where the exercise of power is arbitrary and accountability is non-existent.”

Yet on such topics, Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has this to say …

“In Australia, the Department of Immigration and Border Protection, and the minister’s office, did not respond to detailed questions about the sexual assaults …  and conditions on Nauru for settled refugees.”

Not worth a pinch of shit.

Given that our government of the day has always argued against gender quotas in parliament, insisting that ministerial positions within it are accorded on “merit”, and, as one person put it, “being the worst [at something] is the best you’ve got”, as it is in Dutton’s case, the definition of “merit” becomes as shaky, flaky and psychosis-inducing as our onion-eating, coal and chimney-sweep fetishist Prime Minister, and one realises, one knows, that no media report of any kind, from any channel, could wage a better “vendetta” against the current government than its own members.

All they have to do is talk.

And we respond …

“You people are shit”.

Or …

“Peter fucking Dutton”.

“Bit of a dickhead, that one”.

“Reckon”.

TONGUE OF WHAT?

Dr Kevin Donnelly is a Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Catholic University and the co-author of the Review of the Australian Curriculum. Donnelly taught for 18 years in government and non-government schools and was a branch president of the Victorian Secondary Teachers Association. In 2004 he was chief-of-staff to Liberal Party Minister Kevin Andrews.

Here is Dr. Donnelly on ABC’s The Drum holding forth in support of our Prime Minister’s latest example of Mad Cunt People Skillin’  by doing his “Nope, Nope, Nope” thing on marriage “equality” …

” … many of the arguments in favour of same-sex marriage are flawed. Those wanting change argue that defining marriage as involving a man and a woman discriminates against lesbians and homosexuals.

Ignored is that there are many examples where society and the law allow discrimination to occur. Women-only gyms and clubs are allowed to exclude men and those under 18 are not allowed to view X-rated films and videos.”

I’ll just leave that “logic” lying there for you people to ponder on, because it’s got me fucked.

HANDS UP WHO WANTS TO READ ANOTHER FUCKING ARTICLE ABOUT THE FORMER (HOORAY!) SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE BRONWYN BLOODY BISHOP AND HER HELICOPTER HABIT BECAUSE I SURE AS SHIT DON’T

No matter how many tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of words have been written or spoken about this woman and her history of immoderate extravagance, there is no “sniff test”, no “pub test”, no context one need put it in, no perspective to be applied, there is only this, and always has been only this ….

“You spent $5000 bucks chartering a fucking helicopter to go a ninety minute car drive because you were late to a fete?  OH, DO FUCK OFF, YOU STUPID FUCKING CLOWN!”

If only that were the headline the first time, and for the few days after, we would not have had to endure the last three weeks of front page photographs and footage of the woman, looking like The Joker playing Cruella deVille in a bawdy vaudeville pantomime – “Bite your pillow Australia, I’M STRAPPIN’ ON AND GOIN’ IN DRY!”

“BOOOOOOO!” the audience respond and recoil in unison. Some even flee the theatre.

A few weeks before all these shenanigans, the host of ABC News Breakfast interviews former Liberal leader John Hewson on various things, and asks Hewson if he is disappointed, if he despairs, the current level of policy debate and discussion in politics, its lack of substance.

Hewson replies that he does, and that he has observed its slow and steady degradation over the past twenty years or so, and I think to myself, “Yes, I too have noticed”.

Not too long before this, Creepy Rupert’s stable of News Corp arse-rags were all a-flutter with excitement that Federal Opposition Leader, Mr Brown Paper-Bag, had been summoned before a Royal Commission into something-something unions and asked questions on matters nobody but they seemed to give a flying fuck about, a matter that has since incuriously and understandably disappeared from the news cycle to make way for all these  lurid tales of the aforementioned old bat Bronwyn and her ratty delusions of aristocratic grandeur.

And while Mr. Paper-Bag’s Royal Commission appearance provided the work experience folk at the Photoshop and Pun Departments of Rupert’s papers oodles of jolly good fun for a day or two, a rather subdued announcement was made at that same time that a whopping great open-cut coal mine is to be constructed on a food bowl, and I think to myself, “Are you fucking kidding me? Really?”

Our Prime Minion also declared war on “wind” a while back, but unfortunately for the rest of us, the opening salvo in this war on wind would not consist of blowing his and Joe Hockey’s head off with an air rifle.

Nobody’s perfect.

Tony got the shits with windmills, and he’d like the rest of us to have the shits with them too.

Jesus H. Christ.

Imagine a run-down, dilapidated amusement park.

In that park is an out-of-control carousel, spinning and spinning and spinning, careening this way and then that, a kaleidoscopic frenzy of speed, tawdry colours and bright lights, and on that carousel are the cast of inmates from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, all of them drunk or off their medications and whooping it up something wild, hanging on to their horses for dear life, laughing, screaming, waving their arms, the organ music’s at max volume and it’s always out of tune.

Welcome to Australian politics.

Each day, it lurches from deliriously, impenetrably weird to full-blown shrill psychosis and back again; one moment it sits quietly in a corner cackling to itself in a warm puddle of its own pee, and the next it’s flinging it’s poo at anyone and everyone in  sight, barking at shadows, hollerin’ batshit crazy things at random passers-by, it’s where “Medication Time” never comes, never has and never will, for there are no pills for this.

Waleed Aly writes a column in Fairfax’s Sydney Morning Herald, observing …

“Labor refuses to prosecute a difficult argument. The Coalition cannot prosecute one without finding an enemy to prosecute along with it. But no one is inviting us into a civil exchange. Perhaps with our instant online outrage and shallowing media cycle we’re not the best guests. Sure, I’ll accept that. But politicians aren’t merely self-interested combatants. They’re custodians of our political culture. And on that score there’s a problem because it’s never been easier to win politically by destroying politics.”

Aly notes that “Our disillusionment with politics is now complete”.

When 70% of Australians polled think leaders of both major political parties are about as useful as a couple eunuchs in a flophouse; when only 8% of Australians get their news from traditional print media, and almost 50% of those do not trust that media; and when the influence of this media is so rapidly declining that its public persuasion factor is almost nil, one may be more inclined to think that it not so much disillusionment with politics, but outright contempt, and a large, sloppy return serve of it to those in government and media who regularly see fit to regard the Australian public with same.

As Rodney Tiffen noted in his Inside Story article from June …

“ … the main medium that picks up on the tabloids’ coverage is commercial talkback radio, which then amplifies the papers’ sense of outrage even further. It should be remembered, though, that their elderly listeners are quite similar to the readers of the tabloid newspapers. Together, the two media form a self-aggrandising and self-referential noise machine, and their volume and bluster should not be mistaken for outreach.”

Tiffen goes on to add …

” … there is an increasing sense of editorial desperation among the Murdoch papers as their commercial plight worsens. Like a one-trick pony, they try ever-bigger versions of the old sensationalist ploys. Politically, the result is even less willingness to report fairly on parties and views they don’t support. Where there was once a populist touch, now there is just a grinding predictability. Where there was once a profitable balance between sensationalism and credibility, now the confected outrage and the beat-ups rarely hit home.”

None of these trends and statistics come as any surprise, for they perfectly reflect my own attitudes toward politics as it is played today, and those in the media who “report” on it, and confirm that I am, most definitely, not alone.

Which begs the question – Who are these people writing for?

Themselves and each other.

And the politicians who still think we’re paying attention to what these alleged “influential” columnists and “opinion-makers” have to say.

As Hadas Gold and Michael Hirsh noted in Politico last year …

“The combination of hyper-polarization and social-media frenzy has created a situation where it seems every spin-meister’s message and TV ad is exaggerated to such absurd lengths that they’ve effectively become meaningless—especially because they’re addressing audiences that are either (a) already fully committed on one side or the other, a choir that doesn’t need preaching to or (b) such sophisticated users of social media that they just don’t buy the crap any more.”

Nobody need read an entire column by anyone in (as Tiffen describes them) “our media’s stable of largely interchangeable and wholly predictable columnists” to know which way they’re whistling and how goes the tune. The headline, the byline, a quick glance at content, reliably daffy keywords are guaranteed to crop up every time, repeatedly, like “leftist” (whatever the fuck that means), and you’re done.

Why bother?

I have often wondered of these so-called “commentators”, the likes of Paul Sheehan or Andrew Bolt or Janet Albrechtson, precisely who they think the fuck they are that their opinions are supposed to matter to anyone who’s not already going to agree with them on a thing, because those who don’t never will.

My opinion on a thing is not fed by the opinions on that thing of others, but by facts, reportage, statistics, peer-reviewed, certified, actual information. WHAT. WE. KNOW.

When Federal Employment Minister Eric Abetz writes a column for Fairfax Media all a-frettin’ and a’fearin’ on the certain moral delinquency that shall arise in the wake of marriage equality (should it ever come to pass), not only shall I not read it, I shall also be inclined to briefly despair at the state of a media whose dearth of talent is such these days, that it would choose to publish such shit.

Or when the likes of Rowan Dean are given space anywhere in a nation’s mainstream press media to air their simple-minded and insubstantive sniggerings, or former political parrots Amanda Vanstone or Peter Reith in The Sydney Morning Herald, and don’t even get me started on Maurice “You Can Call Me The Space Cowboy” Newman in the “The Australian”, not paying attention becomes mandatory.

When “the politics of policy” matters more than the policy to the players, when it becomes nothing but an unending bellowing ululation of frenzied irrationality and fear, when criticism becomes treason, when the tactics are always dirty and the umpire’s always on the make, the audience stop listening, the game is rigged and we know it, it’s a sting, a gyp, a monkeyshines hustle, we know when we’re being diddled and played for patsies and we just ain’t buyin’ this crap no more.

“The Abbott government’s failure to implement so many of its own pre-election promises has contributed to a perception of it as an inefficient government. It has also experienced some very public reversals and botches on policy, including the Medicare co-payment, delaying payments for unemployed young people, cuts to the age pension, race discrimination law, jobseekers applying for 40 jobs a month, deregulation of higher education, and Tony Abbott’s signature paid parental leave policy.” – Sally Young, The Sydney Morning Herald

We do not perceive these things in the context and perspective from which our politicians and their pimps and panders in the mainstream press would like us to, we perceive them in the context and perspectives of our lives as we live them, and as we know others do, and the perception has lead us, has led a great many,  to the conclusion that this government is shit, and there ain’t nothin’ no-one can do or say that will change that as long they continue to keep proving it to us every day by carrying like a pack of full-retard fuckwits.

Goodnight and good luck.

The above image was auto-generated based upon Facebook information, and you can get your very own front page here. I must say when mine turned up, I did laugh. Aloud.

TONGUE OF THE DAY

From the letters page of “The Age”, July 22nd, 2015 …

The last time I took a helicopter to a Liberal Party function was during the Vietnam War. – Les Anderson, Woodend

Ouch.