...to the gutter.

 G'day Petals,

 Once upon a time being in the gutter meant that you were young, on your way home from school, that there had been heavy rain; and that you and your mate were racing twigs or leaves along in the rushing water to see which one would win by being the first down the drain at the corner.

Today it has other meanings

Rue Louis Blanc, 10e, Paris 

It was expected but the reality was a bit more confronting than expected

Rue St Maur 10e, Paris

Rue J. Dodu 10e Paris

Which, being said, is in no way a criticism, just an observation.

graffiti 10e, Paris

derelict building, Paris 11e

 Graffitti has its visual fascination as does the ruin and the arbitary nature of multiple torn posters

Poster site Paris Metro

Paris 10e

 But the street as pissoir is not art; only unhealthy and smelly.

Which leads to .......

Politics

It has also been an interesting fortnight in the Antipodean political gutter.

Starting from the minute Leigh Sales, (ABC 7.30, Report) having done her research on the topic of BHP and the Olympic Dam mine, savaged Tony “the rabbit” Abbott for his pathetic jingoistic “one-liner” answers and exposed not only his tenuous grasp of the truth but also his party’s lack of credible policy.

Flowing from this was Liarbril, Grahame Morris’ (“….one of Australia's most respected political commentators and government relations professionals……” (His words not mine) defence response on public radio, “Leigh can be a bit of a cow at times…” to be followed up by what was allegedly an apology next day, “Oh, perhaps I should have said hard-hitting”.

Sales’ rejoinder was a delight , “I’d rather be a cow than a Dinosaur”!

Why is it that Liabrils and good manners can never intersect?

Then there was Peter “Rottweiler” Reith exposing his humanitarianism on the SBS’s Reality/Doco “Go back to Where You Came From” maliciously supported by Angry “Bogan” Anderson.

They verbally wrapped themselves in the Aussie flag and defecated in it!

Reith’s comment on 774 “…you can run a laundry in a mining site and get $400,000.00 a year….” went unchallenged ‘til a small torrent of mine workers poured in to wash the record clean.

Could you trust a person who claimed that refugee parents were throwing their children into the sea or loaned out his government and taxpayer funded phone for his son’s use… as Reith did? 

Virginia Triroli’s commentary, “Reith re-writes history….” (The Age, Saturday Sept.1^st )  finished up with the paragraph: “If an untruth like this is deliberately left uncorrected, does that make it a lie? I’ll leave that to the ethicist to decide.  Etc”.

As it seems the Liabril’s have few ethics; I reckon if it walks like a Duck and quacks like a Duck …… ergo: Peter Reith is a Duck!

Anne Summers’ extract in the same paper from her 2012 Human Rights and Social Justice Lecture: “Her rights at work: The political persecution of Australia’s first female prime minister”, is worth reading as it coolly lays out the vile, malicious and sexist misogyny Gillard has been constantly subjected to by the tories and their bogan supporters.

Watch the Senate and see how Penny Wong (Labor) is treated by the Liabrils during question time.  Apparently they see no distinction between policy argument, policy effect and the person.

But I must admit to enjoying Senator Brandis’ apoplectic, pursed lip rage when Wong retorted with either a, “His” or “Her Majesty….” as part of a reply.

For the Liabrils, there is no intellectual level that can’t be lowered far enough to satisfy the “aspirational” bogans who Pavlovian-like, respond best to knee-jerk fear stimuli and ½ truths.

Howard deliberately let the “Race” genie out of the bottle and it’s since been fanned along by right-wing radio mouths (like Alan Jones with his infamous provocations to riot at Bondi) ever since. 

Bogan mentality has been empowered by the born-to-rule and consequently a race to the lowest level of the gutter.

Perhaps it was always mythical but Vale, Australian fair play and egalitarianism.

There’s an aphorism that when you’re young you're idealistic and “left” thinking and only become conservative with experience and age … well my local far right scribe has been his rollicking best of late, castigating teachers by penning an article where he starts with what was possibly meant to be a heart-warming identification anecdote of how he was suspended as a middle school student for not apologising to a teacher whom he had called “.. a left wing commie bastard”.

If I had been the Principal, I would have suspended him just for the tautology.

Seems the lad started as a repressed bogan and has just expanded to a repressed far-right one… hardly seems progressive.
And his scribblings suggest that better prose may have produced later by humbly and earlier, studying more.

Cheers Possums,

Shane.