Henry Ergas, Oliver Hartwich, Sophie Mirabella, and somebody bring me a fuggin' shoe ...

(Above: more Newtown graffiti, conveying the feeling of a solid day's reading of the chattering classes).

Sometimes it's hard to avoid an existential crisis, a bout of ennui, at the sheer monotonous repetitiveness of it all.

Who could count the number of times Henry Ergas has scribbled an anti-NBN tirade for The Australian? Probably only the accountant who sends off the cheques.

Yet here he is again, faithful, loyal and extremely repetitive, doing right by Rupert, in We can't afford NBN without scrutiny.

Personally I can't afford the time to scrutinise another Henry Ergas column, even when he starts with such a tempting premise:

The trouble with life, Dorothy Parker observed, is not that it's one damn thing after another: it's that it is one damn thing over and over again. So it is with the National Broadband Network; frankly, I am heartily sick of it. But perseverance is required.

Too true Henry. We are heartily sick of your scribbles and come to think of it, in best Dorothy Parker style, no perseverance whatsoever is required.

As the real Dorothy Parker once observed, in relation to a novel, but which modified serves just as well, This is not a column to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.

But at least Henry reminds us that it's possible to start the day reading the thoughts of the real Dorothy Parker. The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue, she once said, and when confronted by the opinion pages of The Australian, would no doubt have let out a What fresh hell is this?

Which is a natural throw to Oliver Marc Hartwich's piece Trivial Twitter. Yep, Hartwich spends an entire column discovering that much of the twittering on twitter is trivial, which is a bit like discovering that the sun rises every day. Well I suppose it was good enough for Ecclesiastes and Hemingway ...

Even so, his own twitter - since his column breaks down into a disturbingly simple collection of tweets - is wonderfully contradictory:

The hopes of tech aficionados that the new world of social media would change the way we think, talk and work is a mirage.

Uh huh. Would that the mirage have prevented Hartwich from changing the way he thinks, talks and marvels at the way the sun rises every day, instead of yet another think piece bereft of thought on social networking.

Why if we just measured the strength and impact of social networking by the number of column inches generated by befuddled conservative commentariat columnists about it, we'd have the beginnings of a revolution. And more scribbles than the combined works of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and Mao ...

One thing's for sure, my breakfasts have been irretrievably ruined by twits twittering about tweeting, or for a variation, Facebook ...

If you want an alternative set of thoughts on social networking, you can revert to Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker, scribbling Small Change Why the revolution will not be tweeted.

Gladwell's anti-social networking crusade isn't entirely convincing. If social networking is so useless, why do the likes of China, and Iran spend so much time blocking and firewalling the Internet, or alternatively use the Internet to track down enemies of the state? (as detailed awhile ago in After the Crackdown, Jon Lee Anderson's August report on the state of protest in Iran).

But at least Gladwell puts some meat on his bones. Hartwich? Well he takes banality to a new level:

People remain people. They are still interested in the same things, talk about the same subjects and they still have breakfast.

By golly, that's a handsome 128 characters of devastating insight ruining my breakfast. More please:

Technology may be easier to upgrade than human nature. Now that's a thought. I better tell my 89 followers on Twitter.

Oh dear. 89 followers and he tweets about having breakfast like other people. Just another social network loser, who thinks nerdish irony is the way out of his isolation. A poser loser.

Perhaps he should embrace the wisdom of Dorothy Parker? Take me or leave me; or as is the usual order of things, both.

And if all this isn't enough to send a soul screeching to high heaven, that nemesis of a peaceful Friday, Sophie Mirabella, is at it again with Recent PMs haven't risen to fill Lazarus's shoes.

The real Dorothy Parker, in the interests of balance, might have added that recent opposition leaders haven't risen to fill Lazarus's shoes either, but then that would have involved contemplating Howard's successors, Brendan Nelson (remember him), Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott, and the current cavortings of Christopher Pyne and jolly Joe Hockey under the increasingly erratic Abbott.

That's the trouble with the kind of simple-minded column that Mirabella delivers, berating former chairman Rudd and newly minted valiant leader Gillard. Sure, they have their flaws, but it doesn't always involve a tendency to gibberish - as when Mirabella gets down to celebrating the wonders of John Howard:

He spoke plainly about his beliefs and his convictions. He stood his ground. He invoked passionate responses.

Invoking passionate responses is a sign of greatness, and a better path to follow than blandness?

By golly, where's a shoe, someone, I need a shoe and I need it now.

As for the rest? Well Mirabella the parrot exceeds herself, in a way well suited to a tweet of a column. Roll out the cliches:

Love or loathe John Winston Howard, you always knew what he stood for.

Yep, it's mind boggling stupidity on the march.

You knew he was motivated by core beliefs and that the bedrock of his policy decisions was his assessment of whether they were “in the national interest”. You might not always agree with his assessment, but you knew he was fair dinkum about it.

Uh huh. This is the man who famously invented the division between core and non-core promises, and who most recently was given the image of 'mean and tricky' by his long serving deputy.

Mirabella demeans the art of politics, and the craft of politicians like Howard, with this kind of simple-minded Orwellian blather about leadership, and how wonderful life was on the farm when Howard was in charge.

I see I've absent-mindedly used the word Orwellian.

Should I throw some money in the swear jar? No, no, no, I claim fair dibs, because along with talk of Labor's ruthless machine men, Mirabella deploys the "O" word and imagery as she celebrates Doug Cameron's cry for freedom:

It was a startling admission that brought to mind a zombie army of Labor MPs and Orwellian visions of “thought police” controlling them – and it painted a bleak picture indeed of the internal workings of the ALP.

Cameron’s cry for freedom was swiftly batted down by “Big Brother” Gillard.

Sheesh, reality television strikes again.

Never mind of course that Howard himself ran a very tight ship, and battened down the hatches any time that weak-kneed actual liberals in the Liberal party began to get sentimental about a republic, or gay rights, or reconciliation, or anything else that might have provided a shard of light in Howard's monotonously grey vision of the world.

Funnily enough, it was Gary Johns - now so far right that the Liberal party looks like a mincing set of Christopher Pyne poodles to him - who only the other day berated Cameron as a kind of Scottish cracker union thug lacking party discipline.

From former union thug to staunch seeker of freedom from big brother in a day ... and no doubt back to being a former union thug tomorrow.

In the end, what's most astonishing is that Sophie Mirabella attracted enough votes to become a member of parliament. Why if there'd been a rottweiler standing, surely the canine would have scored a famous victory. Much barking and slobbering and posturing, and not a single policy position required in the old noggin as the attack dog goes about its daily business ...

Meanwhile, the punters have to go about their daily business, and every day some innocent might make the mistake of ruining their day by wasting time on one of Mirabella's Friday tirades.

Ducking for apples - change one letter and it's the story of my life, said Dorothy Parker, before delivering this uppercut to Norman Mailer:

"So, you're the man who can't spell 'fuck.'"
Dorothy Parker to Norman Mailer after publishers had convinced Mailer to replace the word with a euphemism, 'fug,' in his 1948 book, "The Naked and the Dead."

If only the real Parker was around today to dish it out to the likes of Mirabella:

Four be the things I am wiser to know:
Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.
Four be the things I'd been better without:
Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.
Three be the things I shall never attain:
Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.
Three be the things I shall have till I die:
Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.

Well we'd settle for a sock in a shoe soaring over the head of Sophie Mirabella, and a final Dorothy Parker poem:

In youth, it was a way I had,
To do my best to please.
And change, with every passing lad
To suit his theories.

But now I know the things I know
And do the things I do,
And if you do not like me so,
To hell, my love, with you.

And so we say farewell to Henry Ergas, Oliver Hartwich, and Sophie Mirabella this Friday, and to hell with the fuggin' lot of 'em, as Norman Mailer might have said, before Dorothy gave him a sharp jab, resulting in a tweet about the NBN and an explanation of why 12mbps is enough for a nation while the world moves along to a 100 ...

(Below: and now a couple of xkcd cartoons about twitter - click to enlarge - with more xkcd here).