So it Asks Questions.

Powered by an overwhelming desire to know The Truth, the bogan will diligently Ask Questions about the things that are troubling it in this crazy ol’ world.

“Oh, so you’re coming back from maternity leave?”

“What even are male hairdressers?”

Something something slush fund?”

“Ashby inquiry now?”

“This criminal government?”

The bogan will also, being the generous, community-minded soul that it is, Ask Questions on behalf of other bogans. It understands that not everyone has the ability to take their Important Questions That Need Answering to the proper forums, so will shoulder the monumental burden themselves.

Sometimes these bogans are, of course, Shock Jocks.

In pursuing Answers to these important Questions, perhaps then the bogan can clairify – even confirm – what it knew all along, shortly after it stopped pretending to have elected Australia’s first female Prime Minister, that she’s actually a misandrist bitch who stands against everything the bogan represents. Clearly, if the Questions are True, and her partner is a (sotto voce) ‘homosexual’, then all of this is proven, no?

These kindly, caring bogans will fearlessly pursue The Truth with their Questions. A voracious reader of Derrida and Foucault, the bogan knows that it cannot simply make assertions, as there are many forms of truth. But it needs to search.

“Tim’s gay. that’s not me saying it. But you hear it. He must be gay, he’s a hairdresser. It’s not me saying it. It’s what people…”

And now, having Asked Questions on behalf of people (bogans) the bogan can take a brief holiday, before resuming its job with higher ratings than before.

That’s right, the modern bogan is a seven-sided Rubik’s cube of mystery. Gone are the days where it would happily lunch upon a humble beef burger, a packet of salt and vinegar chips, and a can of Sunkist. This caused much hand-wringing in snackfood and fast food boardrooms around the nation. “Had the bogan become less ravenous?” one asked. No, the bogan had not become less ravenous. “Had the bogan become more tasteful?” another well-intentioned staffer enquired. No, the bogan had not become more tasteful.

A Contiki Tour in three 200 gram boxes.

The boardroom clocks ticked loudly, and a few board members shuffled their papers to distract from the fact that the meeting had ground to a complete halt. Others in the room awkwardly looked out the window, wishing for an urgent reason to be elsewhere. Out the window, down in the car park, a bogan was doing doughnuts in a fluorescent ute. Attached to the ute was a trailer, on the trailer was a Jet-Ski, and on the Jet-Ski was the bogan’s friend, riding with no hands. Seconds later, the Jet-Ski rodeo bogan was thrown off the Jet-Ski, landing in a puddle of its own elbow cartilage. Clearing his throat, a board member addressed the room. “The bogan has become much more deluded”. Yes.

Six weeks later, the snackfood company re-released its salt and vinegar chips. As “Rock Salt and Balsamic Vinegar”. Salt from exotic rocks. Vinegar from exotic… balsams. The bogan didn’t mind that the price was 50% higher. After all… rock salt! Sales soared. The constantly mutating vagaries of the bogan mind had once again been skewered by nonsensical branding. Soon, no bogan wanted a beef burger unless it was an Angus Beef Burger. And “blood orange” flavoured soft drink was seen as both more maxtreme and more prestigious than stupid old plain orange. It was thrillingly irrelevant whether there was any discernable difference in ingredients or taste. This is because the bogan wants to remain deeply within the comfort zone of its palate, whilst still projecting the illusion of fashion and progress.

The bogan craves these superfluous ingredient descriptors, and consuming something pointlessly, functionlessly overwrought adds additional layers of meaning to its existence. An Ed Hardy t-shirt for the mouth. If Arnott’s releases a gourmet version of Shapes called “Cracked pepper, Mediterranean feta, French onion, crispy chicken, flame grilled steak, roasted garlic and peppercorn” (all of these terms have appeared in Shapes names in recent years), the bogan’s biscuit-purchasing fervour could  only be heightened further if the product was also dubbed “limited edition”.

The bogan is a moron.

Contemplating its own constitutional right to eternity, the bogan intermittently sought refuge in the afterlife offered at its local megachurch. Returning to its McMansion, it would then ponder Buddhist reincarnation while focusing its eyes on the various pieces of Buddhist iconography that it had commandeered as domestic decoration. As the complexity of rebirth and multiple lives began to reveal itself to the bogan, it realised that it would need at least four of its child’s Ritalin tablets to complete this train of thought.

The bogan, it did not sleep that night. Pacing between its rumpus room, its family room, its lounge room, its formal living room, its theatre, its dining room, and its informal eating area, concepts flew like lonely comets in the vast expanses of inky black sky. Karma, immortality, birth, death, lifespans, heaven, purgatory, rebirth. The first light of dawn brought no more relief than the three massive cans it had gasped down since 4am. It would need to drive its car. Driving its car would bring freedom. The ability to speed away from its troubles.

But going 80km/h didn’t work. Paralysing thoughts of universe still present. 100km/h. A slight improvement in wellbeing. But the bogan did not aspire to a slight improvement in its wellbeing. It wanted maxtreme wellness. To be so well that it shat multivitamins. At that moment rays of sunlight scrambled over the Bunnings Warehouse on the horizon, and everything was illuminated in the bogan’s mind. All of these big ideas about reincarnation and eternal life could be completely scrapped. You Only Live Once.

“Fucken YOLO!!!”, the newly liberated bogan whooped, plunging its foot into the accelerator pedal. The subsequent 8 minutes between this moment and the flashing lights of the police car were pure existential bliss.

YOLO neatly distils boganity into a blunt, four letter weapon that the bogan can use to attack anything that has a passing resemblance to a good idea, and embrace anything that is profoundly idiotic. Angry Angus burger with 56.5 grams of fat? YOLO. Interest-free finance with an interest rate of 20%? YOLO. Saving a portion of its salary each month? Nah, YOLO. 150km/h therapeutic morning spin through the suburbs? YOLO. Back alley Thailand tetanus tattoo of YOLO in gothic font? Well… YOLO. The bogan only lives once, and is determined to make that once as brief as possible.

Temporarily deflated by its run-in with the local constabulary, the bogan rolled back to its McMansion at 5km/h below the speed limit. Still jittery from the heady mix of Ritalin, caffeine, guarana, adrenaline, and a $400 fine, it resolved to pull a sickie, and soothe itself by watching the hilarious adventures of Leonard, Sheldon, and the whole Big Bang Theory gang on its Blu-Ray 3D LED LCD HD HDMI USB 100HZ TV. There would be no more troublesome thinking that day.

The bogan is constantly slighted against. It is always having its free speech restrained. It’s furious at moochers who receive unemployment benefits. It is mad as hell when the government considers reducing the first homeowners’ grant or baby bonus. It can’t believe that our Prime Minister would lie to them about introducing a carbon tax on everything. It can’t believe that our Prime Minister would lie to them about introducing a mining tax before watering it down to basically nothing.

The bogan is angry. But this anger is inchoate, ill-directed and convulsive. What the bogan needs is a rage vector. Something through which it can channel all of this pent-up fury and unleash it in a flaming burst of irate sanctimony.

Enter the idiot Muslim protester.

Ever since our diggers gave them a proper pantsing at Gallipoli, the Muslim has been an appropriate target for the bogan’s rage and self-inflated superiority. Most of the time, though, it’s simply the latest in a line of whichever minority group the bogan media sees fit to target with claims of laziness, criminality or general evil.

But when a bunch of fundie dickheads decide to trot around the Sydney CBD requesting that a person they can’t identify should be divorced from his head, the bogan outrage machine kicks into overdrive. Every politician seeking the bogan vote gets a free kick, indicating how un-Australian it is to stage a violent protest based on religious grounds.

Shock Jocks get a free kick, stoking the bogan flame, insisting that these people (to wit, all Mussies) have no place in the country and should leave unless they adopt Australian (to wit, bogan) values. Karl Stefanovic continues to say stupid things.  Strangely, Scott Morrison has been quiet.

The bogan can now sit back in its Gainsville chair, watching its Harvey Norman plasma, and bask in the magnificence of being Australian. It furiously condemns a religion of a billion people based on the antics of some fools from Sydney’s south west. It furiously yells in agreement with Ray Hadley on the radio. It furiously cracks open a Mexican beer and furiously slams it down.

It then goes to its room to furiously perform the stranger on itself in celebration of its Australian self-satisfaction.

Bylynda, curled up on the chaise lounge that she and Ben had just picked up from Gainsville for $5,000 interest free for 18 months*, quivered gently as E.L. James’ lucid, evocative prose coursed through her inner goddess.

While Ben sat in the study quietly fapped away on RedTube in the next room, Bylynda had her own moment of personal erotica.

‘His lips are parted – he’s waiting, coiled to strike. Desire – acute, liquid and smoldering (sic), combusts deep in my belly.’

This is fucked. Things Bogans Like is in no way a bastion of literary merit, and pretty much every human is guilty of slinging Dan Brown his 78c royalty at least once, but honestly DESIRE CANNOT BE LIQUID, SMOULDERING AND THEN COMBUSTIBLE. It simply can’t. Not even metaphorically.

Yet bogans the world over – millions of them – have somehow been convinced that some low rent, fairly inoffensive,  S&M fiction bearing the sentence construction of a 15 year-old LOTE student is worthy of two sequels and a reinvention of the femme-bogues’ concept of feminism.

‘”You’ve really got a taste for this, haven’t you, Miss Steele? You’re becoming insatiable,” he murmurs. “I’ve only got a taste for you,” I whisper.’

Did we mention that the protagonist’s name is Anastasia Steele? Because it is. It’s the Max Power of femme-bogue porn books.

Ms Steele is a barely-post-teen naïf who has never been with a man in any capacity (yet is somehow fully aware of how enormous her new beau’s cock is without need for comparison). Naturally, she is ‘caught in the web’ (without proof, it is certain this phrase exists either in the book or blurb) of Christian Grey, a ludicrously handsome 27 year-old millionaire who proceeds to tie her to various things and have tame, vaginal intercourse with her, during which she successfully climaxes every time, with stunning realism and exquisite prose.

‘I close my eyes, feeling the build up…pushing me higher, higher to the castle in the air.’

“CASTLE IN THE AIR”

‘Oh my…I didn’t know it would feel like this…didn’t know it could feel as good as this. My thoughts are scattering…there’s only sensation…only him…only me…on please…I stiffen.’

The she-bogan…is suddenly aware of…the existence of porn that can be…accessed in public…with…ellipses. Read on a train…at work…anywhere, really….all the while successfully raising the femme-bogue’s expectation…that her home-bogue will be…able to sustain his…mountainous erection for…long enough to bring her to climax…using…only his…knob…end and…terrible text.

‘Christian follows with two sharp thrusts, and he freezes, pouring himself into me as he finds his release.’

Christian can freeze and pour at the same time. This is impenetrable, hence deeply appealing to the bogan’s inner goddess.

‘My inner goddess is beside herself, hopping from foot to foot. Anticipation hangs heavy over my head like a dark tropical storm cloud. Butterflies flood my belly – as well as a darker, carnal, captivating ache as I try to imagine what he will do to me.’

…

‘That’s the bottom line. I want to be with him. My inner goddess sighs with relief. I reach the conclusion that she rarely uses her brain to think but another vital part of her anatomy, and at the moment, it’s a rather exposed part.’

…yes, that inner goddess.

‘We pick up the rhythm…up, down, up, down…over and over…and it feels so…good. Between my panting breaths, the deep down, brimming fullness…the vehement sensation pulsing through me that’s building quickly, I watch him, our eyes locked…and I see wonder there, wonder at me. My insides practically contort with potent, needy, liquid desire.’

The presence of so much liquid in this book is something of a reassurance to the bogan. Once it has accepted that it has a tenuous grasp on the concept of metaphor (need we remind you of the merengue at the top?), any metaphor becomes instantly salacious and literary.

 ‘”Look at me,” he breathes, and I stare up into his smoldering gray gaze. It is his Dom gaze – cold, hard, and sexy as hell, seven shades of sin in one enticing look.’

After serenading the bogan with E.L. James’ wondrous elicitation of forbidden poon tang, let us serenade you with the bogan literary review, overheard in a Melbourne workplace:

“I’ve been reading heaps lately, just finished 50 Shades of Grey” 

 “Yeah, that’s on my bookshelf” 

“Can’t wait for the next one, I’ve got it on order, 50 shades of Darker I think it is” 

 “I’ve heard it’s just as good”

Eat your heart out, E.L., if that is your real name (protip: it isn’t).

The bogan is, however, rebellious. It don’t take no guff from no one. It does what it wants when it wants. If the bogan’s parents were lawyers and judges, then HELL NO the bogan won’t work to achieve those things. The bogan will sink bulk piss, glass some cunt at Lucky Coq, then slip into a life of blissful mediocrity, in a location where it is suitably less mediocre than those around it.

This would not have been the bogan’s life direction if it was Tom Waterhouse. Had it been, the general approach to adulthood and career would have involved sinking bulk piss then glassing some cunt at Lucky Coq, before arriving at the door of Freehills and insisting that because its relatives going back into the distant past could cobble together a half decent ambit claim that it should undoubtedly become a Freehills gun-for-hire post-haste.

Waterhouse, scion of Gai and Robbie (son of Bill), is attempting to parley his family heritage at setting profit-making odds for mug punters or training large mammals to run fast while bearing a diminutive, whip-toting pilot into a suave, 21st century gambling empire. The bulk of this is done through plastering every sporting event in the world with his plastic, smirking mug via any medium possible.

Watching ads for tomwaterhouse.com.au is the worst thing in the world.

The detestable little pustule even roped his poor mum into the ad to try to give him some kind of credibility, even though she is not actually a bookmaker but a horse trainer. This is pretty much like applying for a job as a RBA economist, then offering your qualifications as ‘my mum taught a TAFE course in household budgeting’.

He also decides to trot around the betting ring toting a big white bag with his name on it, clearly forgetting the number one lesson of stranger danger – children (and adults with the stature and appearance of pre-pubescent polo players) should NOT go out in public with clothing and accessories which have your name on it. Should Tom be abducted by a lolly-bearing murderess, this fundamental error will surely be to blame.

In essence, the Tom Waterhouse pitch is thus:

Some people to whom I am related have a history of taking money off people under the mistaken impression that they have knowledge about something that is effectively a crapshoot. In particular, the womb that I squelched out of 30 years ago has some tangential relationship to gambling. Therefore if you give me money to bet, you will lose less of it.

Never mind the fact that if reprehensible arsehat actually does have any greater understanding of how gambling works, it would be in his interests to offer the bogan odds that are MORE likely to lead to his garnering bulk bogan bucks.

The ads he puts together give the bogan the distinct indication that his services will provide it with some kind of insight – assistance in making the bogan the Mahogany Room hero it was always meant to be. Looking at the site indicates that he is a bookie. A bookie with a solipsistic fetish for slathering all of his communications with that eminently, eminently punchable face.

Waterhouse tells the bogan that he has ‘betting in his blood’. The bogan, overlooking the fact that it would be much better off betting against someone who wouldn’t know Black Caviar from Furious D, goes to the aforementioned website, and puts all of its money, again, on Cunning Stunt.

Tom Waterhouse, sitting in his hypobaric chamber to keep his rubbery maw rubbery, clasps his hands together and smiles.

Your average, garden variety bogan knows and cares very little for the events that occurred in an American hotel in the early 1970s, which effectively caused the only resignation of a US President. Indeed, its first mental association towards the name “Deep Throat” came courtesy of aforementioned Gates’ operating system, and the bogan’s white-knuckled forays into digital adult entertainment. The other legacy of this American political scandal that did impact profoundly on the bogan’s lexicon was the realisation by journalists that things sound more notable when suffixed with “gate”.

Last week’s ill-advised but unremarkable babble about a soldier on daytime television was notable to the rest of us because it drew our attention to the fact that George Negus needs to sack whoever told him that this was the next leap forward in his career. But for the bogan, it became an exciting saga called Yumi-gate, where its initial rage at the sayer of inane rubbish spiraled into a week-long serial of drama, hatred, and eventual benevolent forgiveness.

Unsurprisingly for such a repetitious creature, this is not the first time that journalists have slammed the gate on an otherwise uninteresting story for the bogan. Countless other half-stories in years gone by have been made into complete stories by an ambitious journalist managing to paper over yawning chasms of relevance, significance, or rigour by stapling on this shithouse suffix. The fact that we can’t even list any of them is testament to how forgettable and tenuous this maneuvre truly is.

Ok, here’s one. In round 5 of the 2006 AFL season, a match went for 20 seconds too long because the siren wasn’t loud enough for the umpires to hear it. A goal was kicked during those 20 seconds, causing SIRENGATE, which journalists, football and non-football alike, trilled about giddily for the following 96 hours. No heads of state handed in their resignation, but for the bogan, Sirengate changed their lives forever. For a week.

One more. During the half time entertainment for the 2004 Super Bowl, Justin Timberlake tore off part of Janet Jackson’s costume, revealing parts of her breasts that had been seen before, along with a circular shield covering the part that was less well known. This created a furore known variously as Nipplegate, and Boobgate. Journalists couldn’t agree on what to call it, but knew that it had to end in gate. While uninterested in the Super Bowl, the bogan spent much time reviewing the footage online, as well as speculating in food courts, lunchrooms, and Irish-themed pubs nationwide about what “what this all means”, a phrase it borrowed from an earlier, more credible George Negus.

Do not show this entry to a bogan. It will trigger gategate, gategategate, gategategategate, and so on, a feedback loop that will exponentially gain enough idiotic mass to suck the universe into itself.

Donald Trump is everything that the bogan wants from being a bazillionaire: he started by investing in residential real estate, and then became max celeb. Eventually, he scored a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, walked past countless velvet ropes, and now co-owns the Miss Universe beauty pageant. The bogan is also inspired by the idea that Trump gets to be an arsehole to people without repercussions. The 65 year old New Yorker was in Australia recently to record a cameo appearance in Celebrity Apprentice, reminding the bogan that its reality television-driven admiration of Trump is based on solid bogan philosophy.

While the bogan will normally glass any cunt who even utters the term “layoffs”, there are few ways to make a bogan happier than showing it footage of Donald Trump arbitrarily firing people who are striving for reality television excellence. Aside from the TV cameo, and appearances at a glorified business lunch, Trump’s core message to Australia was bogan catnip. It was almost like he knew of the bogan male’s ongoing failings to screw hot Asian chicks in Australian bars. “Screw China”, Trump thundered, referring to the partial pricing power that Australia’s commodity producers currently enjoy over their exports to developing countries in Asia. Screwing a billion Chinese people is like… a billion times better than screwing just one.

Just as Hugh Hefner has grown plump on mass-marketing trashy products carrying a logo that represents high end decadence, Trump is also unsatisfied with merely selling luxury to the very wealthy. $12 Trump cologne, “Trump Ice” bottled water, Trump vodka, Trump steaks (Trumprump?), Trump magazine, a forthcoming Trump online casino, Trump neckties, Trump home furniture, even short courses at the illegally named “Trump University” have followed. Trump sells the idea that looking rich is the pathway to immense wealth, an idea that appeals to bogans more than an interest-free, Hummer-branded Jet ski endorsed by David Guetta. Well, maybe not more than that. But, despite his periodic lawsuits, bankruptcies, and scandals, the Donald looks set to retain his hegemonic relationship over the bogan’s mind and wallet. Trump that, bogans.

In the meantime, here is a list of things that happened that we could have written about, should we have had the motivation. Please feel free to add suggestions.

• Teenager arrested in Bali for purchasing marijuana.
• Bogans assume he is guilty
• Bogans then assume he is innocent
• Bogans decide to wait until he’s sold his story to 60 Minutes
• Shane Warne gets engaged
• Shane Warne burns finger
• Trashmedia pay equal attention to both events
• Interest rates dropped
• Bogans took the opportunity to lament how Tough they are Doing It
• Kyle Sandilands something something
• Andrew Bolt was found to be a racist in a court of law
• Bogans blame political correctness gone mad; claim loss of free speech

What else happened?

On one hand, it secretly agreed that it was indeed being swamped by Asians (who couldn’t drive), was having its taxpayer dollars siphoned off to layabout aborigines (who were all alcoholics) and that it was subject to reverse racism because it was neither of those things and didn’t receive sufficient support in Making Ends Meet. On the other, it was not racist. The result was a strange kind of mental stagnation, as the bogan’s rigorously programmed brain was confronted with an unsolvable paradox. The result was that Pauline Hanson really attracted only the votes of those completely happy to be racist – old people.

But that was then. The past five years has given the bogan every chance to engage in Hanson’s very public rehabilitation, as the trashmedia, short of anything it could legitimately call ‘celebrities’ settled for people that were at least ‘recognisable’. Midway through realising that her 2004 attempt to re-enter federal politics was doomed, she instead opted to fail more generally at life, by featuring on Dancing with the Stars. Immediately sensing the chance to ‘forgive’ a ‘celebrity’, the bogan instantly propelled her to the final, only to be confronted by a choice between a forgiven Hanson and an ascendant Hewitt.

After that, Hanson released an autobiography called Untamed and Unashamed, two things the bogan, rebellious Underbelly viewer that it is, certainly considers itself to be. Less mentioned is Hanson’s earlier book called The Truth, which suggested that Aborigines routinely engaged in cannibalism. Nonetheless, Hanson’s journey to bogan forgiveness is now complete, as she competes alongside a series of utterly failed semi-public figures in Celebrity Apprentice, a program that is effectively designed to see which low-rent, feckless Australian is most willing to debase themselves in order to garner a few more moments in the public eye.

Today, Pauline Hanson is comfortably ensconced in the bogan pantheon, with a lifetime of income to be drawn from her continued public exposure for no reason beyond the fact that the bogan recognises her. Once, she was (allegedly) driven to electoral fraud in order to make a crust, but from now on, she may suckle on the nourishing, engorged teat of the bogan’s ignorance. And she will.