This is what Ukraine is fighting for!
Dear reader, we find ourselves once again in peril.
People in the Solomons will regret not having a satellite hook-up!
With seconds ticking evil forces arrayed on either side are determined to destroy what’s left of a free thinking group of individuals who still believe in integrity, egality and the rule of law. They find themselves cordoned, isolated, quarantined and about to be liquidated. Does this sound like an average day in the Ukraine? Sounding like those who still believe in the overarching concept of a Commonwealth in the upcoming Federal election? Sounding like those poor citizens benighted by not knowing the right mates in the private medical supplies racket during the Covid crisis? Or those unaligned who just pay taxes so that Barnaby and his mates can parachute them onto obscenely remunerated boards paid for by those dolts who actually pay taxes. Does it sound like those poor denizens in seats who don’t get the taste of pork or ride in a barrel? Or just the ordinary citizen who can’t afford a lobbyist?
Anything can happen at election time, and it’s worse in other places. Take Japan for instance, where you can get into a whole lotta trouble just for saying ‘Erection time’.Yes folks all of this and more, for with the federal election coming, all these trenchant issues will be tested and we can guarantee that nothing will change. But for our heroes? Stuck beneath the irradiated wastes of Maralinga. Is there hope yet? Perhaps a glimmer of hope and in finding that hope a chance. A slim chance?
IT’S COMPELLING!
It might be one in a million, It might be more remote than incarceration and punishment as the principle policy objective for first Australians by both parties, but therein, still lies hope. ‘To give up is to give up on yourself’ as the famous Luftwaffe Ace Hans Ulrich Rudel said of life. And for the ghost of Ukraine the spirit is the same, ‘prevail, because if you don’t, you FAIL’!
So set the controls for the heart of entropy and drive with us past the short -termism of the Federal election and back to the only contest that counts, the contest between good and evil. Between our heroes and Sophie and Dutto, and the conflicted thoughts of our greatest soldier ever, Benny-boy Roberts Smith. As he, V.C still emblazoned on his chest wades through the imponderable, the implausible and the impossible beyond his own recollections of what really happened on the frontline, where he buried the USB’s in his own backyard.
IT’S IRREFUTABLE!
‘’I don’t believe it’, muttered Ces, She’s still alive, she must be made out of’? Ces paused for a suitable descriptor. ‘Kevlar’, whispered Benny- Boy, and ‘Titanium’? Quent interjected. Whatever she was made of Terry had the final word. ‘She’s unstoppable, made I should actually say of spent uranium. She’s tougher than a T 72’.
We thought about this and mused as to why the T72 the mainstay of the former Soviet Union was now not so tough a nut to crack. And before we could say ‘ Stinger” Ces raised the possibility that perhaps like the T72 the turret armour, (in this he implied Sophie’s head) was probably softer than the body armour. Whilst we thought about this and determined perhaps another strategy to get out of this mess, we were distracted by the drama unfolding before us. Dutto, now the full half crustacea, his antennae crushed by a well-aimed jack-boot to the head, and his eyes now gleaming, sinister red from stalks protruding from his head bellowed a triumphant challenge to Sophie.
‘You’ll never gain the upper-hand’, he emphasised this determination with a wave of his crab claw hand, severing the jack-boot in two as if it were cheese. ‘I have the formula’.
Some people just don’t understand Freedom’s bounty
‘Formula’? We asked.
‘And I alone have the combination to set this place off, and you, you pathetic piece of confected rolly polly, cannot stop me’!
Some people don’t get a very simple message!
‘Wanna bet you’, and pausing just long enough to make the insult stick ‘Crab-Man!! Are you gonna try and stop me? Once I leak your true identity to the press, you’ll be about as popular as Barnaby in the Western Australian National party women’s auxiliary! You’ll be more reviled than Dyson’s way with women, Tudgeys way with secretary’s and Christians track record on former debating team members. You’re finished Dutto!! And get used to it, your era of hiding in Queensland is almost over. You wont have to wait till the election. You’re FINISHED’! And with that another jackboot came hurtling through the air and hit Dutto on one of his eye stalks, which escaped damage by popping in to avoid severe ocular damage.
‘Wanna bet’?… In one swoop of his crab-claw, Dutto picked up an old wheel hub, possibly from a Humber Hawk and threw it in the direction of Sophies utterances. We heard the clang, and from behind the building; ‘missed me crabby’!
Some people wilfully ignore a message for their own GOOD!
This made Dutto absolutely iridescent with rage. And clattering sideways, (as all crustaceans do) he grabbed the door he’d smashed through from the warehouse and with one almighty heave tossed that also in Sophies direction. It made a deafening roar as the entire apparatus smashed into the facade of another drab building enveloping the entire streetscape in dust and rubble. ‘Missed again, Mr Potato head’. This was too much! Twisting and turning, Dutto put caution to the wind and sideways scuttled at incredible speed, ( some crustacea have been known to propel themselves very quickly indeed) ‘Missed again Chrome dome’.. But Dutto was gone. Off down the street, determined to do Sophie once and for all.
From the cavernous building that Dutto had opened we could see form within a vague light. ‘This is it’! Benny Boy whispered, ‘to the light, it’s our only hope’! And without waiting to qualify the decision, we leapt for it, across the dusty street, with the raucous crash of obscenity and objects being thrown from where Dutto and Sophie were, we clambered out of our niche and sped into the building.
They Must WAKE UP and LISTEN!
At the far end, amongst packing cases, dissecting tables, bottles of formalin filled test jars, where objects in the half light, looked vaguely human and some more sinister. We crept to the only salvation that may provide deliverance, a cold grey door, begrimed and smeared with rust, and above it a flickering light, like the flickering of democracy’s flame in parliament, we saw the word ‘EXIT’. Benny was first to it, giving it an almighty heave it creaked and groaned, and we witnessed movement. ‘I can’t do it alone, you’ll have to help me’, and with all four of us, rebelliously. Resentfully, recalcitrantly the door by inches opened, and from beyond, all we could see were stairs going upwards to who knows where?
‘Last one in, close the fucken door’, and as we heaved it shut. Perfect silence.
Otherwise, they’ll end up in Jail!
‘Quick up these stairs before Dutto finds were gone’. From the rear we could hear Terry humming the opening bars of ‘Stairway to Heaven’. Heaven or hell there was only one way down and it was upwards. Will Dutto sort his differences out with Sophie? Will he find his own stairway post parliament? Or is he just a permanent fixture of what’s not quite right about the ‘Drums of War’. Are those drums upbeat, or down beat? Find out in the next compelling episode, ‘Dutto always rings twice’, or, ‘Sophie aint into Sophistry, but she’s sure into sinecures’.