Friday, 24 April 2020

Melville Metaphors

When I was a kid, I used to watch the Looney Tunes cartoons and have a good old laugh. I didn't especially like Pepe Le Pew because the gropey stinking rodent deliberately ignored the cat's refusal of his advances. I know the cat didn't talk, but her body language was positively clamorous (not amorous, but clamorous), and she didn't want the skunk groping her! She should have kicked him in the stones. But I did watch Wile E Coyote in his pursuit of the Road Runner, and I would marvel at his wonderful paintings of train tunnels. He tried all manner of tricks, but usually resorted to some faulty Acme brand explosive, in his futile quest. Time after time, a mistimed detonation would leave him looking like a crisped and blackened puffball, but I had the common sense to 'not try this at home', and so did my contemporaries. Being blown up and pounded by falling anvils did not stop Wile E in his grim and dogged shadowing of that bird, and his determination was Captain Ahab-like in terms of sheer monomania and obsession. That analogy does seem a bit over-the-top, but bear with me because when I was mentally mind-mapping this blog posting, Captain Ahab and his single-minded, dangerous pursuit of Moby Dick presented as something of a theme in my mind's vagaries.

As I said, we knew to not fiddle around with precarious booby traps (hint: anvils are not good to have hovering near the fulcrum). But to my horror, yet also resigned acceptance, this evening I saw an extract from a statement issued by Reckitt Benckiser, the company that manufactures Dettol, wherein they pointed out that their disinfectants should NOT be ingested, injected, or internally administered via any other means as a weapon against COVID-19. Most reasonable people would hear this advice and groan, 'Well, dur-UURRRRRR!'. Problem is, we have this orange gronk in the White House making statements with comments like this: 'I see disinfectant...injection...inside or almost a cleaning...you see because it gets in the lungs and does a tremendous number on the lungs...", and then we get dunderheads injecting themselves with disinfectant! It's all well and good to take the view that people injecting themselves is just Darwinism at its finest, but these clowns could also inject their children. And I must say, I don't really want people to needlessly die.  Getting back to my Moby Dick motif, from what I can recall, Ahab's first mate Starbuck argued with the Captain about his relentless and ridiculous pursuit of a 'dumb brute' (and Trump is something of a dumb brute, now that I think about it), and I think Starbuck wanted to invoke the regulation that allows for a mutiny if the ship's captain has become mentally incapacitated and is unable to run the ship.

Running with this metaphor, Trump is more than mentally incapacitated. His cheese has completely slid off the cracker. He has blown his wheels. Not only are the kangaroos hopping around in the top paddock, they are riding dodgem cars over landmines. So why in the blue blazes can't those with the authority invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment and have this dangerously ultracrepidarian blob of swamp froth removed from office on the grounds that he is incapacitated? It's bad enough that he brags about grabbing women 'by the pussy', and that he his main defence against criticism is to bleat 'fake news' and 'look at my ratings', but this sort of twaddle is beyond the pale. How many people have to perish because he's champing at the bit to end social distancing, and is dishing out potentially fatal 'remedies'?

Oh well, that aside, I haven't had too bad a day. Got some work done on an assessment I need to complete. Oh, and I got blocked on Twitter by Peter Dutton! That made my day; it gave me a much needed belly laugh. I haven't had a good belly laugh for so long. Gee, Spud, what did I say?

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