#28 – “Holdens”

18 11 2009

Not to be confused with the Chav, the bogan’s British cousin, the new bogan male now wants to be a Chev. This utterly confusing phenomenon involves the removal the Holden badging from a Monaro or SS Commodore, replacing them with badges from a bankrupt American company. While the bogan will sometimes profess a desire to visit the vacuous crassness that is Las Vegas, it has generally been unfashionable during the last decade for the aspirational Aussie bogan to be overtly pro-American. Except on his Australian car.

The entire Holden Commodore range is designed in Australia, and built in Australia. The Australian operation designs and builds an engine that is exported to numerous other countries in which its parent company operates. In the same manner, some Holden cars in Australia use a V8 engine originally designed overseas by General Motors, and also used in Hummer, Buick, Chevrolet, Saab, Vauxhaul, Pontiac, Cadillac, and GMC vehicles. The bogan has a fundamental craving to be seen as tough, and somewhere along the line he incorrectly decided that the V8 engine in his car is a Chevrolet. Making the entire vehicle, by rational extension, actually a Chevrolet. The bogan is seemingly ashamed to drive Australian. This logic flaw is not applied to the VL Commodore from the late 80s, which used a Nissan engine. Because Japanese people aren’t tough, and the bogan needs to be tough.

The term “The Stranger” was coined for the process of sitting on one’s hand until it goes numb, and then browsing pornography. The lack of sensation in the hand simulates the experience of receiving manual assistance from someone else. In the same way, the bogan will drink locally brewed, foreign label beer until its brain goes numb. It will then disregard its otherwise rampant Australian nationalism, enthusiastically ripping the Holden badges off its car, and replacing them with a set of Chevy logos. With its car suitably enhanced, the bogan endlessly prowls the roads of nightclub districts, attempting to trick similarly uninformed bogan females into believing that he is an exotic lothario; a rare and irresistible sexual force from across the seas. All too often, the evening ends with the bogan covertly performing The Stranger on itself in a nearby carpark.