O didn't we rejoice at the official Naming of Heroes by the man who towers above stink beetles, John W. Howard. Speaking at the 50th birthday of Quadrant, the journal the CIA helped with start-up funding, His Nibs also let fly the usual wan invective about how everyone who isn't a card-carrying Capitalist is a card-carrying Commie. That's our boy: up to date as a Pat Boone record.

But, say, who were those heroes, anyway? Winston Churchill? Mahatma Gandhi? Nelson Mandela?

Nope. They were Margaret "Social conscience is for sissies" Thatcher, Ronald "If I had a brain Nancy would've noticed" Reagan, and Pope "Let those liberation theologists eat lead" John Paul II.

Pee Wee John thinks he's a man of steel 'cause Georgie told him so, but we all know he's just a sterile little twit with the creativity quotient of a conservative, which is none above minus. That bit about the Pope was doubtless a last minute brainlet-storm to satisfy fascist Catholics like Pell Pot and Tony Abbott. And maybe he thought it would be cool to have three instead of just two heroes, when in fact he only has one, forget about Ronnie. And that's the Mad Thatcher, whose malevolent influence has to place her as one of the top ten evil beings of the 20th century.

What our Prime Homunculus loves most about the old bat is her "moral clarity". Hee-hee, moral clarity.

Like all conservatives, reactionaries and outright fascists, Johnny's and Maggoty's ideas of what is and isn't moral are to be found in the Dick and Jane guide to life on the planet Pleasantville. Here is a partial take on the Dick and Jane books Bill Bryson read in the Fifties (from his book The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid):

In the Dick and Jane books, Father is always called Father, never Dad or Daddy, and always wears a suit, even for Sunday lunch -- even, indeed, to drive to Grandfather and Grandmother's farm for a weekend visit. Mother is always Mother. She is always on top of things, always nicely groomed in a clean frilly apron. The family have no last name. They live in a pretty house with a picket fence on a pleasant street, but they have no radio or TV and their bathroom has no toilet. The children -- Dick, Jane and little Sally -- have only the simplest and most timeless of toys: a ball, a wagon, a kite, a wooden sailboat. No one ever shouts or bleeds or weeps helplessly. No meals ever burn, no drinks every spill (or intoxicate). No dust accumulates. The sun always shines.

Bryson likens these folks to the characters in a film of the time, the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. These are the kind of people conservatives want us all to be. Why? Because conservatives are cowards. Because the conservative dream (and what a tiny, insulting dream it is) is for there to be certainty. Simple values, family values and moral clarity all lead to conformity, the conservative ideal. In the conformity, and thus subservience, of the masses lies the road to power for the cunning and the clever, the little-picture people for whom mindless religion and commerce is the one true god.

Moral clarity? Conservatives are amoral cardboard cutouts, the kind who speak with lifeless platitudes while condemning real people to suffer. And that's what John W. Howard has achieved for his relaxed, comfortable and lifeless Australia: a nation forever at war with Iraq, with terrorism, with its own people. Orwell's Big Brother never had it so good.

-- Olney Garkle