Things Bogans Like

The bogan is a leading authority in many fields. If this is difficult to believe, please refer to the bogan’s job title of Executive Consultant Account Coordination Manager. See, authority. In fact by the time this article is published, the bogan will likely have floated listlessly on the currents of job title inflation to have been meaninglessly ordained Lead Executive Consultant Account Coordination Manager. More-thority!

 

Advanced trend modelling carried out here at TBL headquarters suggests that, should the bogan manage to avoid a repeat of last year’s office Christmas party ‘unpleasantness’ and rein in its habit of chucking sickies on days following major sporting events, another ‘promotion’/buzzword is likely by the end of the fiscal year. PHWOAR-THORITY!!!1!

Irregardless, the bogan as it currently stands has more than enough corporate-sounding words on its email signature to be able to confidently issue summary adjudications on the virtues of just about anything. And when it does so, something curious happens. The bogan appears to make a rare attempt at humility by adding the phrase: ‘if I do say so myself.’

“Your new Affliction fight-branded t-shirt really accentuates your vascularity, if I do say so myself.”

“I was at that new club, Platinum Lounge, last night. Pretty bangin’ if I do say so myself.”

“That new Nikki Minaj video is hawwwwt, if I do say so myself.”

But wait. Did the bogan design the tourniquet t-shirt? Did it have creative input into Platinum Lounge? Surely the bogan did not direct the new Nikki Minaj video!? How could there be time for any of this, what with all the leading, executing, consulting, coordinating and managing???

No, the bogan did none of this. Which means that the addition of ‘if I do say so myself’ is not humility at all. It’s, like, the opposite. By ‘saying so itself,’ the bogan is elevating its shitty opinion to seem as if it carries some sort of authority. It doesn’t.

We have been harsh on the bogan, in the sincere belief that we were also being fair. We told you that the bogan is an empty vessel, a gaping maw just begging to have celebrity-of-the-month gossip regurgitated into it. We dared to suggest that the bogan stands for nothing, falls for everything, and possesses no enduring convictions beyond the urge to demonstrate its own loathsomeness.

Lies. All of these were lies. The bogan is actually a classicist; a person of timeless taste. The bogan is a… candle in the wind. Because the bogan likes Marilyn Monroe.

Monroe, born as someone else 90 years ago, turned a string of “dumb blonde” movie appearances into a brief tenure atop a subway air vent, a few better movies, three husbands, and an overdose death at age 36. But to the bogan, Marilyn is not a 1950s actress. She is evidence of how the bogan is a good person.

 

Firstly, Marilyn Monroe embodies the myth of the “real woman”. The female bogan will confidently inform you that Monroe’s size 16 frame represents “real beauty” in the “real world”, and that it justifies the bogan’s unwillingness to exercise its restraint at the dinner table, or regularly exercise its body away from it. Sadly for the bogan’s excuse-mongering, a British fashion journalist who had the chance to try on some of Monroe’s clothing confirmed that Monroe blew out from a size 8 early in her career, to size 10 at her biggest. Using Marilyn Monroe as validation of being size 16 is like using Oscar Pistorius as validation of wearing socks and sandals together.

But it gets better. Not only does the bogan use Monroe’s 23 inch waist as permission to let itself go, it also uses her as a philosophical mandate to be a shit human in a general sense. Monroe has numerous well-known quotes to her name, but one of them has been embraced with far more fervour than the others, infecting Facebook walls, Tinder profiles, and anything else with a text box that stays still long enough for the female bogan to mash the quote into its keyboard.

“I’m selfish, impatient, and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I’m out of control, and at times hard to handle. But if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.” When recited to a non-bogan, it might be interpreted as a message encouraging humility, pragmatism, and loyalty. But to a bogan, it’s a massive green light for any and every pig-headed thought, utterance, or action that can possibly be imagined.

Unfortunately, the bogan will rarely exhibit the “best” which lends some sort of balance to the quote, but why should it have to… the Marilyn Monroe in the bogan’s mind has already commanded it to eat another burger, start another fight, and cut to the front of another queue. The bogan likes Marilyn Monroe.

“The future is a foreign country,” says the bogan wisely as it looks up from The Daily Telegraph, comfortable that it pulled that quote that it heard on A Current Affair that one time. Quotes always make you sound wise.

But deep down, it knows that actually the future is terrifying; a dystopian nightmare without royal babies, without taurine-fuelled drinks in infinite varieties, without Kyle Sandilands doing flips onto a shooting star.

The bogan is afraid. Always has been. The massive guns, the melanin, the colourful attire, the carefully rehearsed poses for those weird photos they take at the nightclub; they’re all a hastily constructed veneer to show the world that everything’s cool. But rather, the bogan is terrified; thirsting for knowledge. For understanding what comes next.

It’s no longer worried about its children now that they’re baptised and Ray Hadley tells it that climate change is rubbish. But what about its own future? Its job security? Its plans to retire at 53 without actually having saved anything, but chucked a few quid into Apple shares?

First, it turns to Ross Greenwood on Channel 9, who has some feelpinions about the future, then tells the bogan to stop spending so much on flatscreens and save some money. Disgusted, the bogan looks elsewhere.

Housing. The bogan knows there has never been a safer bet than throwing all of its money into a rental property, negatively gearing this shit out of it/renovating and ‘turning it over’, then counting the dollars.

But where to look? Who could provide that needed certainty? The hot tip on where to buy a house in that suburb that is a dead-set certainty to be the next boomtown but the bogan would never live in?

Enter: News Limited.

Enter: News Limited’s resident Australian Real Estate Psychic, Elisabeth Jensen.

In further incontrovertible evidence that no individual, organisation or business has its finger as firmly pressed to the bogan pulse as Rupert’s Australian outpost, the stable of tabloids and websites that fall under the News Corp banner have employed ‘2010 Australian Psychic of the Year’ Ms Jensen to provide a regular column answering readers’ (bogans’) questions about all things real estate.

“I was guided to the home I live in, I saw it in a vision, I went there to have a look at one I really wanted but couldn’t buy the unit.

“A month later another unit came up in the same block and that was much better because the other one had problems at a later date,” said the bogan whisperer Jensen.

News Limited feel confident in her ability to assist bogans in finding out the sweet place to buy, or whether “there’s a problem with any property.”

“People come to me to see me for a psychic reading, asking what’s wrong with a particular house, that it feels very strange, asking ‘are there spirits in this house’,” Ms Jensen says.

“I’ve sent away bad energy or difficult spirits, sometimes they’re lost souls, people who don’t know they’re dead.”

After consulting with the property medium, the bogan will then be consulted on the likelihood via binary online poll.

Looking up from its copy of the Tele, the bogan exhales, relieved. It has certainty again.

 

The bogan is perpetually curious. As the world rockets from dial-up porn to broadband porn to live-streaming HD NBN porn, from Carlisle to Gaga to Skrillex, from real politicians to ‘female’ politicians, it can all get a bit much, and the bogan periodically needs to take stock and assess the state of the universe.

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.