The Little Prick From Down Under

It’s fun to speculate about how things would be these days if certain historical outcomes had been different. What if Hitler had gotten into art school? What if Dick Cheney had been shipped to Vietnam instead of receiving five deferments? What if Henry Kissinger had remained a history professor, content to admire his great hero Bismarck in brief, solitary spasms in the corner of some dank archive, rather than enter public life in order to try and become another Bismarck? Sigh. Of all the words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: it might have been.

I indulged in this pointless exercise today concerning the following question: What if Australia had remained a British penal colony?

Well, let’s see. No Crocodile Dundee, that’s good. No Mel Gibson, even better. And, wait for it … no Rupert Murdoch. Long live Botany Bay!

So what prompted these Australia-phobic ruminations? Nothing against Australia or its people, I assure you. That country remains high on my list of places to expatriate myself after America suffers her final stroke and the carcass morphs into a full-blown fascist dictatorship. It was, rather, just something I read:

Rupert Murdoch to limit Google and Microsoft’s access to his newspapers

Rupert Murdoch, News Corp chairman, said Google and Microsoft’s access to his newspapers could be limited to a “headline or a sentence or two” once he erects a pay wall around his titles’ websites.

The News Corp. chief said “we’re going to stop people like Google and Microsoft and whoever from taking our stories for nothing.”

[…]

He dismissed concerns that readers used to getting news on the Internet for free would be reluctant to pay.

“I think when they’ve got nowhere else to go they’ll start paying,” he said.

There’s very little love in this world, but there’s no shortage of rich, power-hungry pricks who just can’t be happy unless they’re screwing things up for the rest of us. They spring from the human genome like mushrooms from manure. They are the cause of all the world’s problems, I tell you. Ambition is the root of all evil.

What more can Rupert want? He shits gold coins and wipes his ass with thousand dollar bills. He has a beautiful trophy wife, and his great gift to humanity, Fox News, will be around like a puss-filled chancre on the body politic for many years to come. Can’t he just retire and take up golf? Can’t he just leave the rest of us long-suffering humans alone? No, he can’t. He needs to extort a few more pennies and, in the process, ruin a little piece of the Internet. The dehydrated old bastard won’t go to his grave until he’s left his hoof print in every corner of our culture. Such is the way of all “Great Men.”

Would that poor Rupert had been born with a bigger penis. Ah, but that’s another one of those historical what-ifs.