What a shame that our current options for Dear Leader of Orstraya are Beige and Beiger. We are most unlikely to be hearing anything about drover’s dogs, or mouths filled with Achilles heels, or even a statement as relatively mild as that the other party’s policies are opportunist claptrap. There will be a definite deficit of conga lines of suckholes. The best we can expect is a few desiccated coconuts, all-tip-no-icebergs and floggings with warm lettuce from our nation’s ratbag emeritus Paul Keating.
The campaign will still absorb our attention of course, but it’s not going to be very entertaining on the insults that make one gasp in appreciation front. This is not just an Australian phenomenon, it has been noted earlier this year by The Times’ Ben McIntyre, concluding that the decline of the art of public invective is a by-product of the rise of the spinmeister.
In ten years Tony Blair has not delivered a single one-line public insult worth remembering. Even the insults aimed at Mr Blair seem pallid. Thatcherâ??s reign left her festooned with nasty labels: Rhoda the Rhino, Attila the Hen, Virago Intacta, Petain in Petticoats and La Pasionara of Privilege. Poodle Blair just doesnâ??t have the same bite.
[...]
The British political insult started to die in May 1997. The age of spin required that slighting remarks be delivered sotto voce, anonymously, though the planted story and the sly aside. Politicians were just as rude as ever, but seldom to each otherâ??s faces: this was called â??civilityâ??.Today, to get our fix of bile, we must turn to the television diatribes of Simon Cowell or Alan Sugar, professionals churning out confected insults aimed at people who do not matter and cannot defend themselves.
I’m totally with McIntyre on the hypocrisy of the idea that simply avoiding invective amounts to civility. This misconception is often paraded in the blogosphere by prating numpties who deserve to grow unsightly warts as they lead apes in hell, the fawning, hedge-born, wheyfaced fleas (to paraphrase that master of the art, Stratford Bill).
What a waste that Glenda Jackson hanging up her thespian boots for a turn at climbing the slippery pole coincided with her losing her reputation for delivering stinging rebukes as few have done before or since. Westminster sounds far too tame these days. Thank goodness for bloggers who eschew faux civility and the subtle art of spin is all I can say. The best insult I’ve read this week came from Kyso Kisaen:
…your stunning self-absorption and barely masked loathing of the fairer sex means that you actually do deserve to be alone. So very alone. Quite honestly, if I was your right hand Iâ??d refuse to form a fist. Thatâ??s how alone you should be.
Ahhhhh.
What’s the best insult you’ve come across lately? And your favourite ever political insult? Alternatively, what is the most entertaining invective your fertile minds can devise for the cohorts of the Beige and Beiger campaigns?
I’m just hoping that if and when we’re finally treated to the Election debate, the first question that’s asked is, “so, which one of you guys is which?”
“Poodle” has transcended insult. It’s an epitaph.
You know, considering the amount of pixels the blogosphere chews up on a daily basis, we are probably doing even worse than the pollies here. Sure there are a few good nicknames thrown at particularly useless members of the msm but the best one liners still come from the traditional sources.
I blame the comments policy of most major blogs. Particularly this item
How can we complain about the quality of political insults if we refuse to practice the art ourself? We’re seeing time again in various areas that the blogosphere leads the msm which then leads the politicians. Instead of complaining lets do something about this.
I propose a modification of the comments policy regarding purely abusive comments being unacceptable to include the qualifier unless they are really funny
I know this is subjective, but the phrases “vexatious” and “purely abusive” are subjective as well.
And frankly I’m getting a bit tired of arguments being reduced to objective facts and being decided by who makes the most reasonable post. How about, at least once in a while, the wit of the writer being the decisive factor i a debate ?
An oldie, but surely no man ever has less reason for bemoaning l’esprit de l’escalier than John Wilkes.
Marcia Langton, years ago on Late Night Live, her voice dripping with contempt on Howard ‘ ‘This evil government.’
Eddie Ward and Jack Lang came up with some beauties and so did Menzies.
Whitlam’s put-down of the Libs – something along the lines of “This lot are like the Bourbons – they have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing’, is memorable but his description of McMahon as “Tiberias with a telephone” was one of the best.
Good old John Wilkes – a true revolutionary. One of the mote fascinating characters of the 18C.
Someone posted this one not long ago (apologies if I have the participants wrong)
Liberal party MP: ” I am a country member!”
Whitlam: “Yes, I’ll remember.”
Not all of them well crafted, but I wish Mr Rudd would take a few lessons anyway:
Keating Insults Archive
“He has now been treasurer for 11 years. The old coconut is still there araldited to the seat. The treasurer works on the smart quips but when it comes to staring down the prime minister in his office he always leaves disappointed. He never gets the sword out.”
That “country member” gag came from the British Parliament. Almost all of that Great Age of Parliament stuf from Haylen, Killen, Whitlam et al involved them having a few lemonades during the dinner adjournment and re-enacting pieces from some book they stumbled across in the Parliamentary Library, during a particularly dreary debate. They relied on people like Mungo MacCallum and Laurie Oakes not being old enough to know the original. Resort to cliche is a sign you’ve stopped thinking: witness Costello’s histrionics in Parliament are less impressive once you recognise them as Keating left too long in the bain-marie.
The wider point about scorn is well made, especially when the line between someone who cops this and someone who is on the receiving end of effusive praise is so
thinnebulous.Tigtog, I beg to differ – the Old Coconut Araldited to the Seat was only recent, and I was in the car when I heard it, nearly drove into a power pole.
That’s not a bad contender Andrew.
I got a fantastic comment on a Worst of Perth House. (Bentley is a crap Perth suburb)
from Not for Prophet
a bronzed nipple on the swelling belly of the sow christened Bentley
http://perthworst.wordpress.com/2007/10/03/blame-it-on-the-boogie-nights/
Thou eunuch of language; thou butcher, imbruing thy hands in the bowels of orthography; thou arch-heretic in pronunciation; thou pitch-pipe of affected emphasis; thou carpenter, mortising the awkward joints of jarring sentences; thou squeaking dissonance of cadence; thou pimp of gender; thou scape-gallows from the land of syntax; thou scavenger of mood and tense; thou murderous accoucheur of infant learning; thou ignis fatuus, misleading the steps of benighted ignorance; thou pickle-herring in the puppet-show of nonsense.
ROBERT BURNS: Memorandum on an unidentified critic, c. 1791
Not political, but I always remember :
Society lady (being self-deprecating) : Oh, Mr Wilde you’re looking at the ugliest woman in England.
Oscar Wilde (deadpan) : In the world, madam.
Helen, I know the remarks on coconuts and icebergs were only recent, which is why I thought the best we can expect is the occasional sideline commentary from Keating.
It’s more entertaining if it comes from the contenders though.
For my taste, there is not nearly enough alliteration in politics these days, those mewling minnows of maudlin, meretricious, mendacious microbes!
Clare Luce Booth to a certain Hollywood actress who mispronounced her middle name as “Luc-ee”:
“Jean, the “e” is silent, like the “t” in Harlow.”
Bloggers – Dennis Perrin
“Winston, if I were married to you, I’d poison your tea!”"Madam, I would drink it!”
Whitlam on Joh: “that Bible-bashing bastard” [thereby losing approx 5% of the vote, in a flash]
Whitlam on his Cabinet Ministers, “They can be prima donnas, as long as they recognise I’m la prima donna assoluta.”
Whitlam privately (reported by Clyde Cameron) on possible Vietnamese Southerner refugees coming to Australia, “I’m not having f***ing Vietnamese Balts coming in!”
Whitlam (upset) on Fraser, “…who will go down from Remembrancve Day 1975, as Kerr’s cur!”
someone on Andrew Peacock, “the souffle that never rose”
someone on John Howard, “that lying little rodent”
Billy McMahon on Whitlam, “that feline creature”
Premier Asking on protestors in front of his motorcade, “Run the bastards over!”
British PM on doctors’ vocal opposition to nationalsed medicine, “Stuff their mouths with gold!”
John Howard on the Australian people, “We will govern for the whole nation.” [2004]
Arthur Calwell on Asian immigration, “Two Wongs don’t make a white!”
I’m dissapointed. No love for George Galloway?
savaging Jeremy Paxman & David Lammy:
devouring Norm Coleman and the entire US senate whole:
Mungo Maccallum’s Two-headed beast slouches pollwards” – Byron Echo
SIR TOBY: (to Malvolio) Go, sir, and rub your chain with crumbs.
* * *
MARIA: Marry, sometimes he is a kind of puritan.
ANDREW: Oh, if I thought that, I’d beat him like a dog.
TOBY: Thy exquisite reason, dear knight?
ANDREW: I have no exquisite reason for’t. But I have reason enough.
* * *
JACK KEROUAC: Why do you hate me so much?
FRANK O’HARA: Oh, I don’t hate you at all. It’s only your work that I hate.
* * *
CINNA: Truly, sirs, my name is Cinna.
MOB: Tear him to pieces! He’s a conspirator!
CINNA: I am not Cinna the conspirator! I am Cinna the poet!
MOB: Tear him for his bad verses!
* * *
(I wonder if maybe this one doesn’t somehow summarize all of politics…)
GREGORY: Do you quarrel, sir?
ABRAHAM: Quarrel, sir? No, sir.
SAMSON: But if you do, sir, I am for you. I serve as good a man as you.
ABRAHAM: No better.
GREGORY: (whispers) Say “better.” Here comes one of my master’s kinsmen.
(Romeo & Juliet, I.i)
Saddam Hussein on the gallows.
Filthy Liberal.
Says it all about Kevin.
Ah, good old Razor, obviously the dullest one in the box sadly.
Compared to your deep lustre, hey!
No fair Razor, no compliments allowed in the thread.
Oh Jeebus. Let’s not go to Homertown now.
WHORE: How well you know the Latin. Perhaps you are a spoilt priest?
HOGAN: A spoilt bourgeois social democrat.
(Brendan Behan)
[Shortly after becoming famous, Andy Warhol was the guest of honor at a posh Park Avenue dinner party, where he notoriously sat still throughout five whole courses, without eating a single thing...]
RICH SOCIETY MATRON: Mr. Warhol, you haven’t touched your dinner at all.
WARHOL: Oh… I only eat candy.
[After finishing up a blistering live version of one of their early hits, R.E.M. basks in applause from the concert crowd...]
EXCITABLE CONCERT-GOER: (screams) Rock and rollll!!
STIPE: (wanly) Correct.
It was not to be so easily charmed
That we sent you to school, to be harmed.
(Frank O’Hara)
Keating on John Anderson (I think) Cream – thick and rich.
Bob Ellis on John Hewson – the feral abacus.
I think that was Bronwyn Bishop (the cream bit), and I think it might have been Bob Ellis, however, I could be wrong. And perhaps they both said it in different contexts.
Keating’s ‘rolled-gold’ comments were all class.
A slap in the face and then an exploding cigar placed in the pocket by way of apology for those that thought the ‘rolled-gold’ part was a compliment rather than gold cladding.
Check out Hewson’s effort.
Thanks, steve. Not only enjoyed Hewson but the next video that came up was this one
“Success as an authoritarian moderator comes easiest to those who are differently humoured.”
from The Fascists Guide To Weblog Etiquette
Whitlam, “That was a good speech. You should go back, comrade, and get yourself an Honours degree.”
Keating, “What for? Then I’d be like you.”
This is getting to be like Jack at the SMH.And well I miss him and didnt know why he left,perchance it doesnt happen here.
Samuel Beckett
In the history of invective and sheer bitchiness, can anything ever top William Hazlitt’s 1819 letter to William Gifford, editor of the Quarterly Review?
It is astonishing to read this in 2007 and to think of how many prominent public figures, in particular media commentators starting with P and ending with Kerman, or starting with K and ending with Onnelley, to which a letter such as this could apply:
Big ups to Wiliam Hazlitt! I’m sure the response of other readers to his letter was the Victorian-era equivalent of “pwned!”
Yairs, JPZ. But slowly, slowly, you know.
Andrew E:
Heh, and when scorn’s actually effective, the thread gets shut down.
Still smarting, Liam? That’s not very generous of you.
Not very, no.
…
Best scorn (generous) I’ve read lately was Stuart Macintyre on Gerard Henderson. Though he remained a good friend, he said, Henderson gave the impression that all you needed to do history was “strong views and a filing system”.
A backhander after my own heart. Or some other organ.
And a heap of corporate donors?
When it comes to insulting people, you dullards are just a pissweak pack of castrated hamsters on generic prozac.
“…pegged on an ant-bed with their bellies opened, their fat taken out, rendered, and poured down their throats boiling hot will be cool to what pleasure I will give some of them.”
“You fish-based enemy of the people.”
“Not even wrong.”
“You asinine Ostrogoth”
â??So young and already so unknown.â??
“You’re just the kind of person who thinks Polonious is the hero of Hamlet.”
“His knowledge on any topic is only power point deep.”
“Is there no beginning to your talents?”
Stale bean soup
â??You couldnâ??t count your balls twice and come up with the same number each time.”
“Not so much well-rounded as bulging in odd places.”
“You’re the type of person who will end up dying in your own arms.”
â??You make stalking seem so rightâ??
“If I piss in your ear, you’d better make sure the other one is next to a urinal.”
“If I wrote like that, I’d be you.” Clive James to an Observer subbie try to edit his work.
“A shiver looking for a spine to run up.”
“He often lets his mind go blank, but then forgets to turn off the sound.”
“Anyone who reads their verse in public may have other nasty habits.”
“I can see that when the brain-eating zombies attack, you’ll make out just fine.”
“Who died instead of you?”
“Men of Rome, keep close your consorts, here’s a bald adulterer.”
“If you’re so smart, how come you don’t realise how dumb you are?”
Stuart Macintye sure wields a mean polemical sword. Not.
Gee Nabs, don’t pull any punches do ya?
In defence of my own powers of invective I offer this excerpt from long ago e-mail corro, some of which later appeared on a Catallaxy open forum:
It’s Fanny’s World, party time, excellent.
Nabakov, I notice you’ve got two of Keating’s on your list, but left off my favourite of his about Hewson—like a lizard on a rock, he was alive but looking dead.
Gummo, I hear on the grapevine that your correspondent is now the LDP candidate for Dobell.
Another LDP candidate who’ll keep the Socialist Alliance dirt unit busy scouring TEH INTERTUBES.
Oh, please God, let there be a Green Left Weekly stall on the same polling booth as Graham on the 24th. That’s not too much to ask, is it?
Physical scorn: there’s an elderly woman in my electorate who’s famous for her lone act of scorn every polling day. When she comes down to vote, she brings a glass of water from her house, carried in her non-walking stick hand, and picks out one of the major Party volunteers—different every time—and lets them have the contents down the front of their t-shirt.
Every single election.
I just had this surreal vision of the LDP candidate for Dobell as Speaker of the House of Reps.
I reckon they should put that in their party platform.
“Is Ringo Starr the best drummer in the world?”
John Lennon: “He’s not the best drummer in the Beatles”
Birdy for Dobell. Birdy!!!!
P.S. What is the LDP policy on Tourette’s Syndrome?
(PPS. This is my entry for the scorn quote.)
Who was it that said that, “Puccini is the Wagner of opera”?
You could fill in a, b, and c, and make it suitable for almost any occasion.
Mark Latham’s Diaries. Works just like classical tragedy. Cathartic, hilarious, deadly.
This quote stays with me whenever I am subjected to bad writing or dull meetings/presentations/speeches:
Yes, it’s Mencken; no, posting this does not mean that you can hang Mencken’s misogyny/ racism/ conservatism/ philistinism/ dandruff on me.
Same person who said Wagner’s music “is better than it sounds” perhaps?
I loved Dorothy Parker’s comment on some actress’s performance:
“She ran the gamut of expression from A to B.”
Read a fabulously scornful critique of a would-be author today over on Making Light, in response to another reader complaining that the would-author’s prose stylings were hurting her eyes, but “maybe it is just me”.
My favorite movie review of all time… (NB, this is the entire review as published.)
“Batman Forever” is aptly titled. I thought that it would go on forever.
(Stanley Kauffman, I think)
Performance critics are in a league of their own when it comes to scorn. I love the (possibly apocryphal) story of the performance of Anne Frank’s Diary that was so diabolical that one wit in the audience yelled out “She’s in the attic!” when the Nazis arrived to search the house. The rest of the audience took up the call as well.
Ouch.
In terms of a really fine spray of invective for our dearly soon to be departed PM, I wish someone could come up with an epigram along the lines of Gore Vidal’s description of Ronnie Raygun as “a triumph of the mortician’s art”. We can’t appropriate it wholesale, as Howard doesn’t have quite the same pink waxiness that Reagan displayed, but surely there’s the perfect phrase floating through the ether if we could only perceive it.
“Disputes in universities are all the more bitter, because the stakes are so low.” – Herbert Hoover (?)
Apparently in some quarters, the brief and waspish phrase: “This book fills a much wanted gap in the literature” is used to PRAISE. Begorrah.
Thanks, Nabakov, Mencken & Hazlitt. I imagine the old Vladimir Nabs hisself was a dab hand at scorn.
Anecdote from an American Litt Dept in the 60′s where Vladimir N (Pnin)was teaching. Colleague bustles into staff tea room exclaiming, “Do you know, two of my students were spooning in the tutorial just now!” Vladimir: “These days I’d say you were lucky they weren’t forkng.”
On the radio this morning Bob Ellis delivered an oldie but a goodie when Tim Ellison suggested, that Labor should respond to the “fear the union bosses” ads by emphasising how the Coalition front bench is lawyered up the wazoo.
tigtog wrote:
It has to be something to do with the eyebrows. Maybe characterise the silly old bugger as the “embodiment of everything that’s wrong with the personal grooming industry, that started with his his eyebrow brazilian and ended up with the PM giving us an anal bleach via his immigration policies.”
I think that one is actually, “University politics are so intense because the stakes are so low”, and has been attributed to everyone from Kissinger to Laurence Peter. Apparently it was first used by Wallace S. Sayre, in the early 1950s
I always loved the review of Spinal Taps ‘Shark Soup’, which read simply: “Shit Soup.”
Even better (from enemy combatant at the Poll Bludger):
“King Kirribilli Coconut”
“King Coconut with Eyebrow Frosting”?
Like drinking Malibu, his coconut flavour was appealing at first, but became increasingly a bitter aftertaste as the evening wore on. The hangover, in the harsh light of day, was thundering, thick mouthed and nauseous.
@ Tigtog. Apparently the Anne Frank in question was Pia Zadora, who was so excruciatingly whiny that the audience were rooting for the Nazis by the end.