Worms
Back at school, the bogan heard about the debating club. It wasn’t really certain that the club existed, but the constant, whispered rumours of a nefarious nerd collective that gathered in the bowels of the school to argue without weaponry were persistent enough to convince the bogan of its existence. Even so, it couldn’t fathom the notion of organised discussion being conducted in a contrived, non-impulsive manner.
Flash forward to today, and the bogan, faced with an election, and a choice between Moving Forward and REAL ACTION, finds that debating is Very Important. On Sunday, three million people watched the leaders of the major parliamentary parties duke it out with their minds on national television. They had a debate. Once every three years, bogans take an interest in debating. However, being unaccustomed with rational considered thought and balancing ideological and philosophical mores against each other, the bogan lusts after instruction as to what to think. The debate was most notable for its complete lack of animosity and gimmicks. Both party leaders seemed completely lost without a menagerie of budget-surplus-fuelled bogan bribes to refer to, and so they resorted to acting really nice in the hope that the bogan would not notice.
Lacking EmotionDrums™ or present-past-future tense commentary from Masterchef contestants, the major commercial networks nonetheless have striven to provide the bogan with appropriate thought fodder. In the form of the bogan’s favourite pixelated invertebrate, The Worm. For 35 months out of 36, the only worm that the bogan cares about is stranded under 700ml of tequila, yet in the weeks approaching election day, bogans everywhere prick up their ears for the first three minutes of the debate. Once both leaders began using words like ‘policy’, the bogan wandered off to order some beef avec blackbean to eat before the Masterchef final, and allowed the squiggly line determine the country’s fate.
The worm, offered via the twiddling dials of a bunch of unengaged bogans locked in a room without a worm to guide them, tells the bogan exactly how good everything the debaters say is. For some time, the worm was sufficient to tell the bogan what to think. However, as is its wont, bogans grew tired of the elegant simplicity of a single line. It wanted more. Naturally, channels nine and seven responded with a near-superhuman alacrity. This time, not only could the bogan be told what to think, but what it should think BY GENDER. Rapidly, The Worm validated the male bogan’s dismissal of a chick PM, and the femme-bogue’s desperate yearning to share genitalia with the nation’s leader. The bogan, however, doesn’t really care about these things, and is far more concerned with discussing which leader ‘won’ the debate, according to the worm.
The next day, as bogans across the land gathered at their various workplaces and schools, they sagely pointed out that ‘women only want to vote Labor ‘cos she’s a chick’, and that ‘the Worm hates Liberals’; two phrases that it heard immediately after the debate finished.