Sunday, May 13, 2018

In which the pond tugs the forelock with our Gracie ...


The pond was incredibly moved to see our Gracie at the top of the digital opinion heap, and with an incredibly moving and poignant message … though sadly her social media message was given glum, stolid treatment by the reptiles - no digital flash for her plea for the cashed-up …when surely it cried out for a Lobbecke, showing the leftie weasels and stoats showing proper respect for their betters ...

And in the usual way of the leftist twitterati - how the pinkos and the perverts have ruined social media - there were lashings of hate, or fear and loathing ...


The most excellent thing, of course, was that our Gracie started off with a goodly dose of hate, berating the ignorant, and the whinging graspers in the audience. 

Oh you pathetic wretches, with your wet whoopee cushion grimaces, feel our Gracie's hate ...


The pond broke into a fit of deep sobbing at the unfairness of it all, and looked at the leftist twitterati response, and was desolate at all the hate …


On and on the comments rolled, and it seems that others are adopting the idea of trolling the reptiles on social media … including a classic love it or leave it routine. So much hate:


The pond could have used up acres of digital ink charting the hate that our Gracie had produced with a simple, humble, poignant column, as if there was something wrong with tugging the forelock ...


Sheesh, what an outbreak of hate... with cries of leave the country, and spare us the bleeding heart story, and so on and so forth, and all our Gracie was asking was that the wretched ignorant poor, toff their lids, tug the old forelock, and do a little curtsy to their betters, perhaps accompanied by a 'top of the morning to 'ee guv'nor, and would you like your boots blacked?' or 'would madam like a little more caviar on the toast?' …


Admiration and healthy respect?

Sad to say, our Gracie doesn't seem to have caught up with the new vibe around the world, promoted with much gusto by the Murdochians …

For some strange reason, the new vibe reminded the pond of the class warfare on view in The Wind in the Willows …cunningly disguised as a children's story ...

It will be remembered, by those who've read this tribute to the ruling class, and the proper ordering of society, with the poor in their place and the indolent rich free to be toads, that dreadful weasels and stoats took over Toad Hall, and in their ignorant, buffoonish, working class way, did terrible things to the right and proper order of things … and then when Toad is restored to his proper role as a Wodehouse ruler, he does very Donald things …

The Donald hurried to the writing-table. A fine idea had occurred to him while he was talking. He WOULD write the invitations; and he would take care to mention the leading part he had taken in the fight, and how he had laid the Chief Weasel flat; and he would hint at his adventures, and what a career of triumph he had to tell about, and perhaps even be invited to accept a Nobel prize; and on the fly-leaf he would set out a sort of a programme of entertainment for the evening—something like this, as he sketched it out in his head:— 
SPEECH. . . . BY THE DONALD. (There will be other speeches by the DONALD during the evening.) 
ADDRESS. . . BY THE DONALD
SYNOPSIS—Our Prison System—the Waterways of Old England—Horse-dealing, and how to deal, the art of the deal—Property, its rights and its duties—Back to the Land or perhaps to the Donald's university —A Typical English Squire, or a typical braggadocious frequently bankrupt New York property developer...
SONG. . . . BY THE DONALD. (Composed by himself.) 
OTHER COMPOSITIONS BY THE DONALD will be sung in the course of the evening by the. . . COMPOSER. 
The idea pleased him mightily, and he worked very hard and got all the letters finished by noon, at which hour it was reported to him that there was a small and rather bedraggled weasel at the door, inquiring timidly whether he could be of any service to the gentlemen. 
The Donald swaggered out and found it was one of the prisoners of the previous evening, very respectful and anxious to please. He patted him on the head, shoved the bundle of invitations into his paw, and told him to cut along quick and deliver them as fast as he could, and if he liked to come back again in the evening, perhaps there might be a shilling for him, or, again, perhaps there mightn’t; and the poor weasel seemed really quite grateful, and hurried off eagerly to do his mission.

And there you go, there's gratitude for a shilling, or maybe not …

Maybe there's hate and envy and warfare all ready to erupt, and our reptiles in the thick of it … and our Gracie completely clueless and imagining that the real end to the book, available at Project Gutenberg here, in some way approaches a possible reality …

In the end, the pond thought there was perhaps only one duty that our Gracie was capable of performing … holding the Donald's Nobel … as evoked by Rowe here



4 comments:

  1. It would appear that Our Gracie hasn't quite registered that many of the higher salary incomes are adjusted upwards to account for the amount of income tax. And that indeed, as far back as 1950, the Australian top income tax level was 75 % - since very significantly reduced to 45 %. So even now, many of the higher nominal salaries paid by large companies are, at least in part, actually company tax, not individual income tax.

    When quite a bit younger I was amused to read the story of the salaries of the CEOs of General Motors and Ford back in the 1920s and 30s. The GM CEO was paid US$500,000 per annum and the Ford CEO was paid US$450,000 per annum. But because the US top income tax rate was 90 % - and the highest salaries (eg the GM CEO's) attracted a surtax on top of that, the Ford CEO actually had just a little more take home pay than the GM CEO.

    So, GM could have decreased their CEO's nominal salary to pay him more, but neither he, nor GM, wanted to do that and lose the inestimable prestige of paying the highest nominal salary in America, if not the world. So it goes.

    In reality, the worst case is a salary from around $125,000 to $250,000: too big to get many (if any) government handouts, but too small to be able to profitably pay for tax 'minimisation' (aka 'avoidance') schemes.

    Oh, and don't forget:
    The top 1 per cent of Australian earners amassed an extraordinary 9 per cent of Australian income in 2013
    https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/they-get-438k-you-get-just-48k-figures-show-the-uberrich-are-earning-more-and-more-20160401-gnvm8o.html

    Top 1% of Australians own more wealth than bottom 70% combined
    https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/jan/22/top-1-per-cent-of-australians-own-more-wealth-than-bottom-70-per-cent-combined

    But then, I don't imagine that includes our supplicant weasel Gracie.

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  2. Our Gracie was too excited, pumping her fist in the air and shouting Yes! Yes! Yes! at Wilson's brilliant answer, that she missed the reply from the GetUp! man, that the money would be available if the government didn't give a tax cut to corporations.

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    Replies
    1. Some interesting pointers there, thanks Anony. Especially the 'rolled gold' tradie.

      I do wonder if any of our pollies - especially Bill and Mal - actually understand what 'rolled gold' is - a thin layer of gold 'rolled' over a body of base metal (in short, what we used to do until we invented chemical gold plating). Basically then. Bill's guarantee really was 'rolled gold' - a thin patter of glitter covering a big dark deceit.

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