It aint all bad. A grinning idiot on a UK Trade Board
From Ira, this compelling commentary on where we aren’t.
He writes….
‘It is scarcely to be wondered at that people all over the country are, during this lockdown, becoming depressed, anxious or even suicidal. We, as a species, are naturally gregarious and desperately need to be out and about, betraying our friends and insulting our neighbours,, laughing, arguing and engaging in shamelessly surreptitious extra-curricular liasons with breathlessly exciting, extra-marital partners. Without this, and we are, however temporarily, without this , the daily opportunity for Machiavellian intrigue is lost, dalliance is dumped, the centre cannot hold and we all are, not to put too fine a point on it, knackered.
Pauline and George still playing it for laughs in parliament.
And if this were not enough for you to consider taking the bread knife to your jugular, The Age newspaper, read by millions, I’m told, sees it as its Covid mission not, as you would expect, to bring us uplifting tales, slogans and speeches to raise our gaze to the sunny uplands of a golden tomorrow, but instead to add to the misery by heaping even more depressing statistical ordure on our madhouse walls.
Front page: A nice big photo of Pauline Hanson wearing an expression calculated to kill cattle.
Same page:
CBD job loss alarm (33billion GST shortfall)
Crown High Rollers given favourable treatment
ASIO quizzes Chinese reporter
Page 5
Our borders are still PROTECTED!
State faces 33 billion shortfall…
Hundreds…for lockdown protest
20 billion slump in [construction] projects.
Inner Melbourne to take huge {economic} hit
Page 7
Astra Zeneca….vaccine trial on hold
Page 10
‘…China’s surveillance state…’
Barnaby still going strong
The loss of economic ‘billions’ is reported in a manner which seems deliberately calculated both to heighten our already tautly stretched levels of anxiety and to suggest that the collapse of the economy is somehow our fault, (yes, you and I) because, presumably of our selfishness in putting our health ahead of the ‘National Interest’. Throw in China, spies and the vaccine hold-up and this stupidly insidious reportage has much less in common with news and much more to do with a profession having lost all sense of its essential responsibilities.
Construction has ground to a halt and the State finds itself short of about 33 billion dollars.
SO WHAT?
The alternative is utterly unacceptable . To pound us over the head with these astronomic’ losses’ only adds an unnecessary extra level of subliminal misery to an already existing burden of depression. In reality these ‘billions’ are not really lost at all but will be made up in a few years when the virus has run its course. All countries have the virus which, theoretically, when the horror is over, should provide the usual suspects with the economic game as before.
This is not 1929. People are not flinging themselves from rooftops or taking their old service revolver into the library..
Angus still looking after himself
Reporters should, where they can, minimize negativity, bolstered by the knowledge that post Covid, the economy will bounce back.. Instead these clowns, seemingly unaware of the devastating physical and psychological effect this virus has already had on people, plough blithely on, without imagination or compassion, piling up negative facts and figures to the point where the only thing left to do is to go out and kill yourself.
‘JOY! Show some joy, you bastards, lest you find your teeth falling out of your [Catholic] arse!'(The Ginger Man, by JP Donleavy)
Same old oligarchs, giving the kleptocracy a whiff of respectability.
Ahem, not perhaps a wholly appropriate paraphrasing but not so far off the mark just the same