Things Bogans Like

#66 – Glassing Cunts

Bogans, in their search for dominance over others, will always seek out the weapon of maxtreme violence. However, the impulsive nature of the violence, when filtered through the constraints of their congenitally limited concentration span, dictates that the weapon must be sourced within arms’ reach. Also, while many male bogans believe they have a close, personal connection to Australia’s (now celebrated) underworld, they lack access to anything beyond a kitchen knife. Thus, the shattered beer glass was elevated above the pool cue – the tool of the early bogan – to the nouveau bogan’s weapon of choice.

And the bogan won’t glass just anyone. In order to justify, in its strangely twisted moral compass, the commission of x-treme violence, the victim must be… a cunt. This appeals to the bogan’s reptilian desire to take things to the x-treme; physically, sartorially, linguistically. The bogan has run out of swear words. This is odd, because the bogan, while a late adopter in almost all things, is nothing short of a national market leader when it comes to expletives.

Once upon a time, the bogan could toss around ‘dickheads’ and ‘wankers’ with gay abandon, yet remain on the cusp of swearing trends. But today, despite being the member of several Facebook groups advocating proud nationalism and decrying the cultural creep of the US via TV, the bogan embraces whichever foul word is uttered by Eminem in Eight Mile.

While lacking the creativeness of other foul-mouthed subcultures to invent curses, they simply adopt whichever curse word finds itself on the tube. For example, as soon as Bruce Willis quoted old Westerns to some German motherfucker in Die Hard, the bogan had an entirely new weapon in its arsenal.

Soon enough, motherfucker was passé. Pretty much all swear words became banal, losing their threatening, offending impact. There was only one left. Thus, in short order, and prompted by its brief appearance in two films about criminals, the bogan had no choice but to start labeling everyone who it disliked/disagreed with a ‘cunt’ (or a fag/homo/poof. This is a separate strain of Freudian boganism which merits a post of its own at a later date). Then glass the cunt.

The only real option the bogan has today when spewing bile at its intended victim is to bludgeon them with sheer volume and weight of vitriol. ‘What the fuck’s your fucken problem you fucken cunt?’ screams the enraged, inebriated bogan, simultaneously shattering his half-empty schooner and brandishing it unsteadily in the face of some guy who came perilously close to bumping into him on his way to empty his bladder discretely. ‘You got a fucken problem? You cunt?’