Can you imagine trying to have a sensible conversation with a redneck? Matt Hurley considers how it might pan out.

It’s not an unusual sight to see a ute with a plethora of nationalist, jingoistic sentiments and country pub stickers plastered all over it. Today I saw such a ute with several hundred of these stickers, some of which got me thinking. I wondered how a conversation between myself and the driver might play out.

“I see your sticker ‘If you don’t love it, leave!’ on a wavy Australian flag. Tell me what is meant by this.”

“Yeah, nah, mate, it jus’ means anyone who don’t like our way of life should just go back to where they came from, ay”

“What if I told you that I don’t like our way of life? Should I leave too?”

“Whadayaonaboutmate?”

“Well, after much observation and subsequent introspection, I have concluded that I don’t much care for what it is to be Australian. Essentially, as a whole we are a nation of lazy, apathetic philistines.

We allow ourselves to be governed by psychopaths who will knowingly place an infant in a third world prison camp, and no one seems to give a shit. Those who do give a shit because they have witnessed it, and have the courage to speak up, do so facing mandatory prison sentences under the Border Force act. Our leaders lie through their teeth and tell us this infant was an ‘illegal’, as though that justifies it, and we believe it.

They know we don’t give a shit and will believe their every word, so every day they erode our scant liberties little by little, to the point we will hardly notice our transition to slaves under a fascist totalitarian corporatocracy. Don’t believe me? Within the last few years we have gained data retention laws, website blocking anti piracy laws, a whole swathe of absurd terrorism laws, and various anti association legislations across the country, just to name a few. Google the TPP. They’ll sign it. And that will be the final nail in the coffin of democracy.

Why don’t we give a shit? Because we are well provided for and very well distracted. We have food and shelter, so we want for nothing, and we are entertained by a hopelessly bland culture of celebrating mediocrity and worshipping celebrity. We are scarcely afforded a chance to simply observe and think with all this stimuli. We are merely a product, being constantly advertised to, in the most insidious of ways, manipulated and implored to consume more and more.

We have an obesity epidemic and global warming crisis imminent but it’s OK, we just have to keep consuming. We must press on with this unchecked capitalism thing, give it ‘fair go’, give the Gina Rineharts and corporate multinationals a ‘fair go’, because the ‘fair go’ is part of the Aussie character, yeah? Our perceived national character of the larrikin Aussie is an absolute joke.

We are miserable dobbers and beige do-gooders with a raging fetish for law and order. Utterly submissive to and grateful for an increasingly militarised police force, we seem to get off on seeing others on the receiving end of a dose of fascist oppression. How else would you explain the proliferation of vapid bullshit TV like “Highway Patrol”, “RBT” and “Gold Coast Cops”?

Ned Kelly, Australian icon? Rubbish. If he were alive today we’d all be masturbating furiously to TV footage of the cops tazering him half to death. We are the exact opposite of what we think we are. If we had a modicum of the national character we claim to, there wouldn’t be an infant in ‘detention’, and we certainly wouldn’t be glad about it.

So if that’s what I have to love, count me out. As I can trace my roots back to the colonial era, and according to your philosophy I should leave, where is it I should leave to, exactly?”

“Yeah, nah mate I’m jus’ talkin’ bout them bloody ragheads, ay.”

It is probably better if I don’t cross paths with him or his ilk.

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