In which the pond puts good old Baldy on a pedestal ...

The pond does its best to stay in touch with all that's good and heartfelt at the lizard Oz, but sometimes feels overwhelmed. So much ranting, so little time ...

And sometimes it's better not to curate pieces too much, but instead just offer them up for celebration ... and all that's needed for this one perhaps, is a few way stations, of the kind that sees cyclists and runners pick up a drink, and then get back into it ...

No need to rant back, just drink deep of the cordial, even if it might not be so cordial ...

Now around this point some might suspect that they're in the grip of a therapy session ...

Indeed, indeed, and so it's important to fix a glassy smile and listen on ...

Some might wish that at this moment they'd encountered one of those comical 404 signs the reptiles love so well ..

Others will recognise that this sort of wild-eyed rhetoric is just what we might expect from the pond ... bearing in mind its banner ...

So much anger, so much outrage, so little time ...

Well it's pretty much a compendium, from 18C to the dire threat posed by swamp creatures of all hideous kinds ...

Indeed, indeed, but it's back to those other swamp creatures ...

Now around this time, some might have paused and scratched their noggin and tried to look back into the dim distant past.

Baldwin, old Baldy, that name seems to ring a bell, and no it's not the North Carolina lighthouse, or the Battle of old Badly, or even General Meade's Gettysburg horse. It's this old Baldy ...

Well we were speaking of the universalist vision of the Enlightenment, and you can find much more about the Enlightened ways of the Labor party in Kate McClymont's lengthy piece here ... which remarkably concluded this way ...

Baldwin retired from federal politics in 1998. He told the Herald: "From the point of view of the perpetrators, whoever they were, the whole thing was monumentally counter-productive for their purposes. The whole composition of the Labor party in the inner city changed as a consequence. It completely removed the kind of criminally-oriented machines that held sway in the inner city for so long."

Oh no, don't say that it became full of hipster 'leets who thought bashing the shit out of each other might not be the best way forward ...

Sorry, they've drifted off to the greenies, so it's probably just as well if we put the whole universalist vision of the post-Enlightenment on hold for the moment and wrap up the rant.

And so to the final gobbet ...

Well the pond doesn't know what to say, but in a way, the comments section says it all, as to whom the column was pitched and as to whether they got the dog whistle ...

That'd be as opposed to the George W. Bush/Saudi Arabia Wahhabbist pact of our times ...

Indeed, indeed.

What's needed is a Donald Trump to come along and erect a universalist vision of enlightenment for angry old men ... a new kind of birtherism of the ages ...

Ah, the joys of western civilisation ...