To call it ‘victory’ no matter what; to redefine ‘success’ as whatever happened; to call yourself a leader though none will follow you anywhere; to be wrong every minute of every day yet wear the calm expression of one who is always right: these are the tricks of the Right in these latter days of their fading propaganda, tricks taught by Karl Rove, Don Rumsfeld, John Howard, Hannity, O’Reilly, Henderson, Jones.
Thus Iraq was a success though suicide bombings kill hundreds a month and the Prime Minister is trying to hang his deputy; Afghanistan is nearing success though our trainees kill their tutors and the urinated-on corpses now mean the Taliban win the negotiation; our floated dollar was a superb idea though an unfloated currency, China, now rules the world; a Mormon who likes firing people is an ideal candidate for Leader of the Free World; the Global Free Market is a success though twenty thousand children die of it a day.
‘Success’ is whatever happens. There was no alternative. It’s all good. It all shakes down. It adds up in the end. If everyone is greedy, why, the better guys win. The duds, the has-beens, the evolutionary also-rans like Stephen Hawking will be weeded out.
Has ever a way of thinking and predicting and rewarding and punishing been more intellectually bankrupt in world history? Capitalism is a wasteland, a snakepit, a poisoned river, a fight of jackals over dry bones, yet the righteousness continues. The way to create jobs is by sacking people from government jobs and bringing billionaires’ taxes down, way down. That should do the trick. Julia Gillard is all in favour of it, cutting back government jobs and taxes to get nervous working people spending again. How can it be wrong?
It’s very much like Catholicism after tens of thousands of priests were shown to have buggered children last century and nuns to have enslaved unmarried mothers whose babies they stole in tens of thousands and gave away: these are but a few bad apples and Christ forgives them and God is on our side, we were told. And now we are told that it kills nine hundred infants an hour, but capitalism works. And sure Gaby Giffords got shot in the brain, but handgun ownership in Arizona is a civil right for everybody without exception including the deranged.
How dare these people — O’Reilly, Hannity, Akerman, Henderson, Bolt — keep saying these awful things? I mean, you can go to gaol for inciting terrorism, which kills five thousand innocent victims worldwide a year. And they incite capitalism, which kills twenty thousand a day. Should they go to gaol? Should they, too, go to gaol for incitement of mortal harm?
…Well, I myself don’t think they should, frankly. Freedom of speech to me is pretty important (an inalienable human right, you might say, like handguns in Arizona), just so long as all the microphones are turned on, and all who speak are heard speaking.
And the turning on of the microphones in this past year — by the Facebook-driven Arab Spring, by wikileaks, by the revealed craziness of the debating Republican candidates week after week, and the Tea Party cranks who last August in Congress wrecked the economy — is as big a change in the way we live now as was, in its day, the motorcar. The lunacy cannot be hidden anymore. It turns up on phone cameras wherever protestors are shot at, and ships go onto rocks and sink and captains desert them, and al-Jazeera keeps broadcasting the truth twenty-four times a second, and more and more of the Third World tune in.
This combination brought down Mubarak, Ghaddafi, Berlusconi, Perry, Palin, Bachman, Huntsman, Gingrich. It will bring down Santorum, Putin and (maybe) Netanyahu. The fruits of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil are everywhere on offer, and the serpents bewhispering fresh new thought in ears no longer ignorant of the West’s vile crazy ways. America is tottering and its Missionary Wars in the Muslim World look ever more block-headed as the money runs out and it begs the Taliban’s forgiveness for pissing on the dead and al-Jazeera stays on the air and the Third World watches.
Nowhere in the world in seven years has America made a new friend. No-one sings ‘I want to be in America’ anymore, except illegal Mexican meatworkers maybe and Russian whores.
It’s time the Right opened its eyes, as the Catholic Church has done, and took stock, and asked forgiveness, and started apologizing all round for massive harm done thus far on earth to the living and the dead.
Gerard Henderson, a good Catholic, should go first.
Over to him.
Name:
BobEllis, I’ve been mulling this over for quite some time now….my second cup of morning tea is getting cold…and am having great difficulty in expressing my thoughts, my reservations regarding articles such as the one before me.
You deliver a beautiful; poetic and inspiring, display of pugilistic wordsmithing. There are jabs and metaphor, uppercuts and allusions, there are hooks and questions, a cross straight and correlations.
They’re all there.
But one.
Bob Ellis, you have no king-hit.
Fix it.
For adversaries such as this you need a king-hit.
Do not scatter your blows.
Localise them.
Find a spot and pummel it senseless.
The Dull Brutes of the Right will not go down otherwise.
Do not squander your time, your words, your vitriol, your punches, on the Williamson feud.
Do It Now!
Write it.
I’ve done fifteen more drafts and put the sixteenth up and you should read it. But I take your point and will think on these things.
I shall read it when it appears.
Think hard BobEllis.
Whilst we discuss theatre and art, cultural politics, movies and personal feuds, the Rancid Curs are considering…. operational plans:
(the quote is full and direct),
“Actually, fiddling around with nuclear blast templates and maps (the blast ground draping’s a bit tricky), you can indeedy take out Cairo and Damascus with very high precision, minimum damage to the Christian quarters, and of course bugger all fallout.
That’s using a standard W88 350kt, airburst at 550m (350kt = 330m fireball radius, so it does not touch the ground – very important that). If you use a pattern of 5 on Cairo and 4 on Damascus using height attenuation for 2 and 1 warheads respectively you can get a really fine tuned result.
Not bad for 350 kt bursts. Have not got the right details for 150kt, but I think you’d get a more economical coverage with them and a pretty good safety factor for the Christian quarters.
I’ll flick the results over the pond to a retired strike planner I know and see what rsults he can generate (be less kilotonnage and more damage, knowing him)”.
And all under the warm fuzzy parental, solicitous, eye of our IPA stalwarts and Right chieftains.
There is, of course, little reason for them to dirty their manicured North Shore nails and their South Yarra and Toorak coiffures hardly need a ruffle….what, with such dutifully sycophantic and Dull fodder about.
I do believe you saw one of them here last week.
Hello Abu….remember, no teeth and screaming for your mother.
You’ll call for your beloved “Sinc” but he’ll be long gone….sitting on his mother-in-laws chesterfield seducing the next minion with promises of….Libertarian Glory!!
Anyway,
It ALWAYS reminds me of something Hilary Clinton said when asked about her “politics”;
“I’m a Democrat, I don’t belong to a party”.
Think on it …..HARD, Bob Ellis.
Write it.
A good polemic, Bob, but unfortunately the Right will never apologize for the death and inhumanity they condone, by sheer nature of their inherent ideology. Any more than they would apologize for the generations of stolen children here in Australia (especially ironic and contemptable, given their supposed opposition to state interference in people’s lives).
Well they should be hounded and like the One True Church made to.
There should be more and more things like this in print, and more and more great polemic like Stuff Happens on stage.
And films like Syriana.
and there we have it BobEllis!
I present you with a trade.
I offer this.
and I expect your article shortly…….in return.
the Dull buffoons took but but ten hours to flick a synapse!
But the wait was worth it.
worth it indeed!
first, the comic – bathos AND pathos…..it’s all there!
In the soft walled confines of his blog…..surrounded by the Witless, this Bombastic Buffoon takes on the authoritative persona of one who has the stink of……fission…..in his nostrils…..one who breathes Life into those anticipating electrons, every morning and before breakfast…..one whose every syllable inspires the spittled awe of the asinine.
but out here, in the crispy white light of the world he becomes just a “bloke messing about with ropy old blast data derived from industry”!?!
It is a profoundly sad spectacle to see a man dishonor himself so.
Denying oneself…….a true Conservative genome.
Second, he imagined my words “operational planning” to actually have meant something other than a provocation!?!
“operational planning”? Really mk50? I”ll be ready at umm….ummm…1400.
Cretinous.
Ah,Bob Ellis do you see?
Do you see the task before you?
“Australia’s leading centre right and libertarian blog” has as its mission statement the censure, the abject erasure, of ALL dissenting opinion.
It seeks no conversation…..nor entertains the possibility of such.
its methodology is abuse and ridicule…..then IP bans.
a token few are kept on.
I pity them their foolishness.
I admire their resolve.
And there you will find enough material to look into the true heart of Australia’s Right.
write it.
In an effort to spare you I offer them my email address for any further…….correspondence.
I await.
Ultracon266@gmail.com
bob, I shall refrain from introducing the subject on your blog in this manner again.
I owe you a drink.
cheers old man!
Remember, write it.
JGC.
ABu
That’s hilarious. JG Cole over at whatever site that is is the biggest schlong-sucker since fellatio was invented. Bob Ellis must enjoy his company.
A bloke messing about with ropy old blast data derived from industry is thought by them to be operational planning.
Curses, Abu, they are on to us! Quick we must flee! Load the ICBMs into the Klingon Warbird!
They have to be the dumbest whoresons ever to draw breath.
Mk50 of Brisbane
18 Jan 12 at 8:49 pm
Not funny. Fuck off.
You can go to gaol for impersonating another, so I’ll leave it up till the cops arrive.
Enjoy the rest of your sleep. I hear it’s a dawn raid.
“impersonating another”?!?!
What on earth are you talking about?
Riotously funny, JG, but it takes a few readings to figure out that you are re-quoting the absurd right wing post from the neo-nazi blog.
(When all we have is the written word, we must strive all the harder for precision . . .)
Thank you Doug Quixote. It makes me very happy that you persisted in following my, admittedly serpentine, pursuit of Absurdity.
It was an exercise in teasing out the implicit/explicit foundations and expressions of the Right’s (blog + attendant posters) episteme. A student is undertaking her dissertation and there seemed no better place (outside of literature and theory) to examine such….formations.
This particular Right blog proved to be ground for interpretation and exegesis beyond her (and my) wildest expectations. We discovered all Doug Quixote! Fallacy, abuse, ideology, buffoonery, deductive failures….
All!
A gold-mine!
I had imagined that I had seen every known…tottering and muttonhead…argument there was to know from my time on the Drum….I was wrong Doug.
Very wrong.
And yes, you are quite right….I shall be more precise in the future.
Thank you for the reminder.