One of my favourite all-time movie / TV lines was in Blind Ambition the 1979 mini-series about the life of John Dean, special counsel to Richard Nixon during Watergate.
Dean is played by Martin Sheen, who also played Captain Willard in Apocalypse Now in 1979.
At the start of Blind Ambition we see Dean late at night hunched over a coffee table with a full ash tray, he says, sounding a bit like Captain Willard, "there I was climbing to the top of macho mountain when the whole damn shit heap blew up underneath me".
The imbroglio involving Alan Jones and dragging a whole range of deeply unpleasant characters who tend towards mediocrity, self-importance and bullying like John Laws, Paul Sheehan, Ray Hadley, Mike Carlton and many more in the media and politics (pretty much an all-male crew) railing and whining about the alleged infamous behaviour of others and moaning about the slings and arrows reigning down on their heads is a bit like Dean's macho mountain blowing up.
These bonfires of power, fame, money etc are always combustible, usually kept from general outbreaks by containing the occasional flare-up with the usual insincere apologies.
This time it all went weird (in the Hunter S. Thompson sense), and it went weird because hundred of thousands of people (cf Newsfront) reached for their computers and said we're mad and we're angry and we're not going to cop it anymore.
It got so crazy that by the end of the week Tony Abbott had his wife out to say how really nice Tony is (and definitely not part of that awful macho shit heap at all oh no) and Simon Berger the chaff suit man from Woolworths resigned (perhaps feeling a little bit like Martin Sheen's John Dean himself).
But it didn't stop 2GB beating a strategic retreat on Sunday. The 'retreat' is delicious with Jones and his colleague Ray Hadley, and the whole faithful audience bleating about the horrors of bullying. These are the same people who have led a two-year campaign of vile personal attacks on the Prime Minister.
Oh how has our winter of discontent been made glorious summer!
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