It's Tuesday so it must be time to make fun of Australians!

And to help us in that worthy endeavour, their Pry Minster Tony Abbott has been over here in New Zild, unveiling the new War Memorial.

Now our War Memorial Park is an itty-bitty affair and a very recent addition to the scene. It is no match for the Norstrilian equivalent, which stretches the length of Anzac Parade in Canberra, in which heroic statuary -- commemorating the futility and the brutality of previous military involvement-- is interspersed with empty plots designed for coming generations to erect and learn from future monuments to the futility of current military involvements.

They generously invited NZ to contribute a memorial for their Parade... it looks like a borked bronze MacDonalds logo, but is in fact intended to represent the handles of a giant handbag buried beneath the avenue. In return we were behooved to invite the Ozzies to contribute their memorial to the new War Memorial Park in Wellyton.

The architects describe the design -- an array of stone chimneys * -- as a "landform of Australian red sandstone, forming an iconic and appropriate place of memory and reflection, embodying the Australian character and responding to the urban and heritage qualities of the site". Are the blocks pivoted so they can revolve in the wind? ARE THEY BOGROLL. Anyway, real Australian rock was expensive so they elected to cut costs by outsourcing the icon source to India. But this is to commemorate the centennial of the Gallipoli campaign in World War I, and every single component of the Anzac Tradition -- our National Identity Forged in the Crucible of Foreign War -- is bullshit and mythology, and what could be more appropriate than inauthentic mendacity?

Right: Ataturk Monument
with bogus inscription

The fragility of the mythos requires us to treat it gently so the Anzac Brand is protected in the manner of Olympic or World Cup logos to prevent people cheapening it with unauthorised merchandising. Everyone wants a slice of the intellectual property, no-one wants to pay, we might as well be in US glibertarian politics. Bad Woolworths! Bad Scientologists!

Fortunately the prohibition and the fines do not apply to politicians. Abbott was free to co-opt the war-memorial-opening ceremony as a propaganda exercise for his decision to send troops to Iraq (to help clear up the mess created by the last intervention in Iraq).

Mr Abbott several times made pointed comparisons between the old Anzac campaign in Turkey and the joint deployment to Iraq which should be established in Camp Taji near Baghdad by the end of May.
"It is a remarkable thing to look back 100 years to that terrible baptism of fire that our two countries had on the Gallipoli peninsular [sic] on the 25th of April, 1915," Mr Abbott said.
"I think it is quite fitting that 100 years on, Australians and New Zealanders are again working for our values and our interests together in Iraq in the Building Partner Capacity mission that we are jointly engaged upon and will shortly be operational in the Middle East."

That total débâcular balls-up when soldiers went off to the Middle East to die for some other country's pointless war? That blood-in-the-sand balls-up from which we have spent a century extracting every last drop of cultural ressentiment to foster a Never-Again spirit of national independence? Tony Abbott thinks it is the perfect comparison for the current deployment to the Middle East for some other country's pointless war. Also, he and NZ's own Pry Mincer Key reckon it's everyone's patriotic duty to attend the Anzac ceremony on Sunday so they can cite the turn-out as a show of support for their policies.

Bless their hearts.

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* Similarity to Anselm Kiefer = TOTAL COINCIDENCE.

Similarity to Paul Dibble's memorial sculpture and Berlin Holocaust Memorial = TOTAL COINCIDENCE.