What if it contains an agile truth, readily applicable to other things in life?

What if God's awarding (through influence of His governments) of the most glittering of Queen's Birthday Honours gongs to some awful people tells us what He, God, really thinks of these arbitrarily bestowed baubles being given to ex-politicians?

Your columnist, like so many seething Australians, is still pale with dismay over last Monday's announced awarding of glittering gongs to undeserving celebrity Liberals Tony Abbott, Bronwyn Bishop and Philip Ruddock. Ruddock's sheer callousness towards asylum seekers while he was minister for immigration is fresh in my mind. I have just been refreshing it by reading news clippings of the shameful 2001 "children overboard" imbroglio.

Thinking Australians blushed for shame.

Today, aghast at the gongs, I have just sent Buckingham Palace a parcel of press clippings from the Ruddock/children overboard years. It won't surprise if Her Majesty, brought up to speed by this loyal columnist, in future thinks again about allowing her regal birthday stardust to be promiscuously sprinkled among Australia's all and sundry.

... and why is John Lennon's Imagine such a strong contender for that title?

Yes, what can it be about Imagine that makes it somehow even worse than such ostensible shockers as, say, Yummy Yummy Yummy and (really plumbing the depths now) We Are Australian?

The sheer awfulness of Imagine (long apparent to this discerning columnist) is suddenly in the limelight because of an entertainingly scathing piece about it that's just popped up online. Everyone is talking about it.

Here's Matthew Walther writing for The Week:

"In these horrifying and divisive times, all of us - progressives and right-wingers - need a cause around which we can unite. The question is what, though. On Wednesday, Bill de Blasio provided the answer: 'I don't mean to make light of this,' the mayor of New York City said in reference to the worst rioting America has seen in my lifetime, 'but I'm reminded of the song Imagine by John Lennon. I think everyone who hears that song in its fullness thinks about a world where people got along differently.'"

"Imagine," Walther continues, "is the worst song ever recorded. Thank you, Mr Mayor, for reminding us."

"Where do you even begin?" he marvels.

But then he does begin, going on to deplore such things as "the lyrics that insult the intelligence with such ferocity that I'm pretty sure singing it violates the Geneva Convention".

"The part where the rock star who wrote this song in one of several luxury homes he owned encourages you maybe to consider having 'no possessions', presumably including underwear and a toothbrush?" he wonders.

"The other part where the same guy not only confidently predicts a world in which the world is made up not even of a single country, but of literally no countries, and then triples down by suggesting that it's 'easy' to envision this?"

"I realise," Walther winds up, with a sarcastic flourish, "that some readers will disagree with this verdict. If that's you, in keeping with the principles of your favourite record I invite you to imagine a world in which this opinion column does not exist, along with the computer or mobile device you are using to read it ..."

Eerily, in a week in which I've been thinking hard about Liberal parliamentarians, discussion of Imagine reminds me it was somehow the very favourite song of the only federal Liberal parliamentarian I have ever liked. A minister then, he is no longer with us. Let us call him Peregrine (not his real name).

I knew him, liked him and occasionally chatted with him.

But, as a Christian believer and a rich man who loved possessions, his loopy fondness for a song that instructs us not to believe in Christian superstitions and to divest ourselves of all possessions was bizarre.

I would point all this out to Peregrine, but to no intellectual avail, for me an illustration of the banal song's sinisterly syrupy power to turn normally sharp, crisp minds to blancmange. Without question the worst song ever written.

I await next week's resumption of the COVID-interrupted English Premier League season (rapture!) with added interest.

That's because one can't wait if the EPL imitates our NRL's brainwave of using fake (recorded) crowd noises to pretend that the necessarily empty stadiums are packed with fans.

It is one thing to imitate the usual sounds made by NRL crowds (primitive undifferentiated roars, growls, snarls and general jungle noises) and quite another to imitate EPL crowds famous for their repertoires of songs, chants, and anthems mostly unique to the chorister-fans of the particular teams that are playing.

We shall see what we shall see the EPL do, but I suspect it will be too grown up and dignified to imitate the NRL's adolescent gaucherie in this. Meanwhile, I am trying to diagnose what it is about the NRL's crowd forgeries that feels SO wrong. Perhaps it is that the essence of the wonderful game itself is that it is so very authentic and genuine, a true test of true qualities (brute strength, brute speed, brute grit) of the gladiatorial brutes who play it. In that ruggedly honest context, perhaps the dishonesty of forged crowd sounds seems almost obscene.