Friday, September 02, 2016

Three days late, and in such small quantities ...is reprinting Bret Stephens the future for the reptiles of Oz?


The pond is singularly unimpressed by the reptile effort this day.

If this is the future imagined by Chris Mitchell, the reptiles might be better off organising an Order of Lenin medal hunt as a way of filling in their days ...


Dead-set old duffer? Could the AFR get any crueller?

But back to that question asking about all asking...

Before we get on to the content, can the pond just check the date first ...?


Uh huh, September 2nd at the crack of midnight.

Now let's check the original ...


August 29th, say hello to September 2nd ...

Sheesh, who did that to the reptiles? Are they running a new version of the Wayback Machine?

It seems the reptiles haven't yet caught up with Puck, let alone the full to overflowing intertubes ...

Puck: I'll put a girdle round about the earth 
In forty minutes ...

Or as the learned academics advise:

I'll put ... round ...
I will circle the earth; probably, as Steevens says, a proverbial expression for circumnavigating the globe. He quotes Chapman's Bussy d'Ambois, i. 1. 23, "To put a girdle round about the world."

Indeed, indeed, though these days you probably only need forty nanoseconds rather than forty minutes.

And what did the punters wait for in their tree-killing edition when Stephens finally rode into down under reptile town?

Well let's hope it ended up killing a few trees, because otherwise it's just a load of digital bollocks of the patented Stephens kind ...

Could it get any more simplistic and simple-minded, this American exceptionalism which insists on a binary kind of self-pity up against self-help?

Well yes, it could ...


Okay, the pond can see where this is heading ...


Say what? How did dinkum diggers get caught up in this? Well it did set the pond to wondering ...


Hmm, must have been a really big rush back to the old mater this year, or perhaps we could count Austrians as Australians ...

But all this is by way of random amusement, because the real crunch is coming very soon ...


Never mind the bizarre logic that sees Stephens roaming the mid-west like a can do cowpoke from the nineteenth century, never mind that he manages to sound like a paternalistic, condescending adult patiently explaining to the children in the room that they just need to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, in the same way that Stephens heroically managed.

There was something else that caught the pond's eye like a caber-sized mote.

The Trump voter.

They simply can't say it, can they?

The Trump voter is the Republican voter. 

And in turn, the Republican voter is the Roger Aisles, Fox News, Wall Street Journal, New York Post, Murdochian informed and agitated voter ...

The idea peddled for yonks by these merchants of fear is that Americans are one giant victim class ... victims of Hillary, victims of Democrats, victims of the named and nameless other ... progressives, libruls, pinko perverts, whatever. 

The list is long and endless and filled with mind-numbing distractions of the 'war on Christmas,' 'Christians and white folk are being persecuted' kind ...

And now Stephens steps up to the plate to explain how it's wrong, wrong, wrong ...

With an adept sidestep, explanation and excuse, that somehow this rich, ripe, festering paranoid mentality has been magically transformed into a new explanation of all that's wrong with the world: "the Trump voter."

The pond swears that Stephens seems to be deep in the grip of a classic, giant, finger-pointing victim class ...

As if that will sweep away the likes of Sarah Palin - an actual Republican candidate for the vice presidency of the United States - or the birther movement or Michele Bachmann or Ann Coulter or the climate denialism or  all the rest of the craziness cultivated in recent years by tea party gopers and Murdochian mopers ...

Why not call it as it is?

The Republican voting Fox News watching WSJ reading citizen if you please ... and next time, please let's not wait a long three days for such a silly analysis ...

If you're going to recycle digital pulp, reptiles of Oz, please, do it in a nanosecond. The days of getting a wire from London with some copy from The Times for a leisurely reprinting down under have surely gone (perhaps you might tell this to the Fairfaxians as well when they recycle the Washington Post and the New York Times - no wonder the NYTimes think they can come down and do a takeover).

As for that other pressing question which set it all running ... who did this to us? 

The answer's clear enough if you read the runes or the cartoons ...








4 comments:

  1. What would Garrison Keillor say about Mitchell, though?
    The cap does not look good on you, it's a duffer's cap, ...

    Funny thing is, DP, my last prowl round the shelves at the Salvos turned up Bruce Guthrie's 'Man Bites Murdoch' AND Pamela Williams' 'Killing Fairfax'. From those two, it sounds like the same small circle of media types have been poncing about in the same small cage for three decades or more. So busy either knifing each other it's a wonder they find the time to groom each other for parasites.

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  2. Bret Stephens says:
    "... there is no moral agency in the black community, no choices African-Americans can make for themselves to shape their own destiny for good or ill."

    Well, they could maybe drag out the pitchforks and start a revolution. Or perhaps they could reinstitute the Black Panthers and make use of NRA 2nd Amendment resources to engage in some self defense.

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  3. Bret should have dropped by Oz on his world tour of blamesplaining. Malcolm's election night speech was worth a three rampant scapegoat rating, for mine.

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  4. Hi DP, love ya work but you missed the important question: what the hell is that beside Chris Mitchell's left ear?

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