dan wood facing dog

AUSTRALIAN TALL TALES

Spinning yarns from the wool of Australia’s zeitgest.

Hurrrrr, what’s that? Australia’s ignorant right-wing commentariat has been struck dumb with yet another case of Stupid Cunt-itis? Well, I guess it’s time for the next installment of:

GO FUCK YOURSELF (AKA Australia’s Next Top Bigot), with your host Dan Wood

Today’s contestants comprise a veritable “who’s who” of News Corp’s worst and dimmest* -- each one so pissed up on hate-injected dipshittery, it’s a kick in the sack of right-wing Australia that none have been nominated for the Eugene de Kock Lifetime Achievement Award.

In no particular order:

-Rita “I’m trying my best” Panahi; -Andrew “I’m not racist, I’m Dutch” Bolt; and -Miranda “Speeding fines are more oppressive than homophobia” Devine

All are worthy contenders for the mantle of Australia’s Next Top Bigot and have made their careers squirting small-bore snipes and Homebrand conservative philosophy out of their brain butts.

Recently, all three have exploded past “Knows fucking nothing” on the Aboriginal-History-o-Meter -- after belching a whole mess of certified idiocy in their coverage of the Adam Goodes booing saga -- and spun wildly off into whatever level of the Q Society harbours recidivist shit-for-brains.

It’s hard to tell whether it’s because they’re dumbing down for a Bay 13 audience, or their capacity for critical thought is just that spent, but all three have essentially made the same utterly pedestrian argument about Goodes:

"Crowds don’t boo him because he’s a proud and outspoken critic on the many and severe injustices perpetrated against Aboriginal Australians, it’s for Other Reasons!"

Yeah, right. And all those (white) talkback callers on 2UE bitching to Keating after the High Court’s Mabo decision in 1993 weren’t racist, they just wanted a “fair go” (waaaaahhhhh!). And Gamergate was about “ethics in gaming journalism”.

In June, Aboriginal academic and activist Gary Foley spoke as the warm-up act at Cornel West’s appearance at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre.

Foley said that he makes a point of teaching his students about powerful black historical figures, those with agency. Like the African-American boxer, Jack Johnson, who pummeled the absolute piss out of colonialist fucks the world over, at the height of America’s Jim Crow era. Whities seethed. They prayed for an Anglo hero, one who would defeat Johnson, and called him the “Great White Hope”. But Johnson kept fighting. And he kept winning.

Foley also spoke about the Freedom Rides of the 1960s:

“We [indigenous Australians and their allies] changed the world. The only problem was that we took our eye off the ball and the fascist bastards changed it back.”

Today, it’s Goodes who has his eye on the ball, he who is changing the world. I just hope he keeps pummeling those colonialist fucks, and that he doesn’t let News Corp’s fascist bastards change the world back.

The brazen misappropriation of historical counter-culture just reached it's zenith. I wonder, do people who sign up for this credit card recognise the contradiction?      

Perhaps they do. And maybe that's the target consumer: the Ironic Debtor, who has obviously heard of Poe's Law (duh, they know about everything on the internet) yet hasn't realised its upshots, irl.

Signalling your discontent with the market, while, at the same time, buying into its most impoverishing and destructive apparatus (debt) doesn't make you a wry, no-fucks-to-give Millennial. It makes you a fluffer for the banks.

To be fair, it's not really surprising, and hardly a capitalist coup. And I shouldn't romanticise the Sex Pistols' symbolic power. A fuckload has changed since those turbulent days when even Malcolm McLaren couldn't believe how big the band had gotten. Now, there is consensus re their mantle as "the greatest punk band ever".

But the very fact that the band's status as "the greatest punk bank ever" is unimpeachable in the mainstream means they can't be "the greatest punk band ever". And this transition to being a mascot of consumerism has been underway for some time. John Lydon (nee Rotten) capped that off when he decided to become the face of a butter company in 2008.

Rebelling against rebellion?

A belated thank you to all my birthday well-wishers. I would invite you all for a pub thing or whatever it is sociable people do. However, for the twin hurdles of geographic spread and my own crotchety reclusiveness, this simply isn’t possible. Instead, I proffer a quote for your consideration, in return for your kindness.

This, from everyone’s favourite 19th-century transcendentalist philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who, as it happens, shares a birthday with me (so it’s fitting):

“Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.”

Taken for a universal law, this is cynical and faintly ridiculous: the evolution of democracy is not inextricably flush with the gathering of bullies in Parliament. But that’s not to say it doesn’t ever happen. It can and does. In fact, it’s happening right now.

Although here, in Australia, the bullies of government aren’t so much tempered by editors as they are encouraged by them. Editors, nudged by Parliament’s leading eminence grise, Rupert Murdoch, too often march in step with our Bully-in-Chief, Tony Abbott.

Nowhere is this bullying so prominent as in Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers. We saw this most recently in Abbott’s response to Myanmar’s displaced Muslim Rohingya, thousands of whom are currently adrift in the Andaman Sea.

It’s hardly surprising that a man so stricken by Menzies-grade Anglophilia would have such callous disregard for major political events in south-east Asia. His fealty to England, compounded by the fact he is -- and has been for some time -- not a conservative, but a reactionary ideologue, leaves him blind as he stomps around our region’s geopolitics.

Abbott flits between two impulses: undue imperiousness (Bali 9) and buck-passing disinterest (Rohingya) -- hallmarks of a bully. On the latter, Abbott’s “nope, nope, nope” response to the question of resettling the Rohingya will endure as a symbol of his stone-hearted monoculturalism.  

<tangent>

In that same interview -- now more famous for the “nope, nope, nope” quotable quote -- some may have missed another absolute howler.

Says Abbott: "If you want to start a new life, you come through the front door, not through the back door."

Let us consider, for one very droll moment, this line stripped of context …

Catholic guilt can be very alienating, and in a nation that is 75% non-Catholic (including over 20% of people reporting no religion at all), those who buy into its severe marque of sexual repression can seem aloof to the average Australian. Witness the PM, who often forgets that not all of us are quite so clueless about the consequences of … *ahem* ... coming through the front door.

I first learned the significance of “forward entry” in Mrs. Cowan’s grade 6 sex ed class. Turns out it’s really quite simple: babies are made when, in the homophobic words of a fictionalised Keith Chegwin, you “pop knob in fanny, not up the arse”.

These were heady days for a pre-pubescent, officially “non-sexual” entity. After two days covering the whos, whats, whens, whys and hows of human plumbing, the class became more a study in modern anthropology … for the teachers, that is.

Rather than an instructive lesson in formal reproduction, Mrs. Cowin asked us (we, the stupid children!) to thrash out our colloquial perceptions of sex.

Now, unfortunately, I’d been off sick that day, but had come in the car with Mum to pick up my sisters. By coincidence, Mrs. Cowan was supervising pick-up. When she saw me sitting in the carpark as Mum fetched my sisters, she came over to conduct a one-on-one catch-up seminar.

She knelt down, eye-to-eye fixed me with the deadpan curiosity of an invigilator, and said, “I want five slang words for genitals”.  

How embarrassment.

Such words were for peer-to-peer horseplay, not pop quizzes! This was unheard of, not to mention a careless affront to the fourth wall of teacher-student civility and normative subjugation.

I hesitated. “Ummm, pussy … cock … cunt …” She counted them out on her fingers.

Wait, what’s after “cunt”? Shit. No, obviously not shit, I meant ... oh god. Doodle? Even in grade six that’s lame. Christ.

Increasingly panicked by this line of inquiry, I blurted “anus”.

</tangent>

Smutty double entendres aside, the true meaning of Abbott’s words hinges on a false premise: that there is something like a “front door” for asylum seekers looking for passage to Australia.

To be fair, there is something that kind of looks like maybe it was a front door once. But it is ever-shrinking and so obscured by obstacles, caveats and, in some cases, outright booby traps, you wouldn’t ever recognise it as a front door.

Slashing our humanitarian intake by 6000+; cutting funding to immigration centres that provide free legal advice to asylum seekers; the implementation of a draconian Code of Behaviour (the infringement of which is grounds for deportation) specifically for asylum seekers; secretive and illegal refoulement; 11 million refugees in the world with the UN capable of resettling less than 1%; etc etc.  

This is like sealing off all gates at the MCG on Grand Final day, replacing them with a single 1x2-metre doorway, and then criticising fans when they start climbing up and over the outside of Member’s Reserve because it’s three-quarter time and 75,000 of them are still locked outside.

(Obviously I haven’t properly crunched the numbers here, so the analogy likely isn’t “to scale”, but you get the point.)

Ever since Australian artists boycotted the Sydney Biennale over its ties to Transfied Holdings, Arts Minister George Brandis has had it in for every musician, painter, director, actor, photographer, composer, and orgy-mad papier-mache wunderkind who likes to challenge government and the status quo (i.e. just about every artist in the world ever).

So now, in budget 2015-16, Brandis has finagled himself a new arts funding body, the National Programme for Excellence in the Arts, which will siphon $105 million away from the independently administered Australia Council. Brandis will have hands-on oversight of the NPEA.

The Australia Council has its problems, yes, but it is, at least, a body that operates at arm’s length from Canberra’s ideological power games -- in particular, Abbott’s berserk Culture Warriors. The NPEA, on the other hand, will function like a ministerial vehicle for Brandis’ own pet projects.

It is a sidelong attack on free expression. It is soft censorship.

Looking at the bigger picture, too, it becomes ever clearer that Abbott et al are not a party of small government. Sure, Hockey/Cormann continue to scrap public sector jobs, and jettison government land holdings apace. But, elsewhere, changes like this one are implemented that concentrate ministerial power, or indirectly incorporate and homogenise services at the expense of marginalised Australians, without necessarily increasing personal freedom.

Consider:

1. Earlier cuts to the ABC were zealously pursued, even though politicians knew management would have to centralise production on the east coast (i.e. leading to swingeing cuts to rural and regional services) (Chris Pyne’s disingenuous, NIMBY protests at the time were total bollocks);

2. Scott Morrison’s obscurantist fiats, issued without qualm during his time as Immigration Minister;

3. The subsumption of the role of Minister for Women;

4. The (thankfully) failed GP co-pay, ostensibly leveraged to establish the Medical Research Future Fund, which many commentators presciently agreed would emerge as a snake-oil product of smoke-and-mirrors accounting and/or disproportionately accrue health benefits to Australia’s well-off middle class. For my money, I had high odds on the Health Minister directing the Fund to focus research on “diseases” that posed political problems for the Coalition (e.g. Jihad-itis, Climate Believer Fever, etc); plus

5. Any one of Abbott’s captains’ calls.

These, and many more, evince an administration fanatical about micro-managing Australia from the Hill. Abbott is a bulldozer of a centralist, and anyone who thinks the Libs are a party of small government is sorely mistaken.

Mad Max: Fury Road is as misandrist as Sam Armytage is racist. That is to say, not fucking very. Unless “misandry” now means enjoying the violent comeuppance of a malefic tyrant, who literally milks women to feed his rape babies, and withholds abundant drinking water from his desiccated subjects, all in a wildly improbable land of make-believe.

I guess misandry could mean that ... one day … maybe? If Return of Kings et al keep up their whingeing, the boffins at Macquarie could formally redefine it. They’re fickle like that.

It would be confusing for a time, because suddenly I’d have to go around calling myself a “misandrist”, being someone who’s trenchantly opposed to authoritarianism, rule-by-fear and the indiscriminate application of capital punishment (I’m a bit of a bleeding heart like that). And if, on the flip side, misandry also describes a steadfast belief in constitutional liberal democracy then fucking colour me doubly entrenched! OH YEAH, I’M ALSO PRO THE RULE OF LAW IF CAN YOU BELIEVE IT PISS OFF AUNG SAN SUU KYI YOU’RE BUSH-LEAGUE SOMEONE BRING THIS GUY AN O.A.M!

P.S. It’s a great film. My review of it goes like this:

“Shit, mate, that was spot on like those epic dreams I have after I eat too much brie before bed time.”

This article was originally published at Crikey as part of my “contribution” to coverage of the 2014 Victorian election.

Listen, Dan, I just wanna say, as a former Daniel who’s also made “the transition”, I think you’ve got a name problem. That is, no one knows yours.

The “Actually, I go by Dan these days” makeover was supposed to remedy all that, but I’m afraid you’ve been misled. For the sake of objectivity, let’s break this down in economic terms: in rebranding from Daniel to Dan, you’ve imposed a seemingly large efficiency dividend on your own first name. You’ve trimmed 50% of its syllables, hoping a leaner name might translate to a less stuffy public identity. But the truth is that reducing your vowel count by 66% isn’t nearly as radical as it sounds. Rebrands like this have, historically, been a waste of time and money. A minor name change won’t efficiency dividend the mustard here.

True, things could’ve been worse. I’d like to commend you on avoiding the pitfall of skewing too casual by not insisting voters call you Danny. Unless you’re an actor (e.g. Glover), fictional bad boy played by an actor (e.g. Zuko), or a woman (e.g. Minogue) any variation on the “Danny” theme is frothy nonsense. Furthermore, and you can trust me on this, suffering the daily indignity of being harangued by grubby kids (or, in your case, opposition MPs) chanting “Show us your capital works, Fanny Andrews!” is a PTSD time bomb you do not want to detonate.

So, what to do?

It’s one of the advertising industry’s oldest truisms: you don’t need to convince everyone to buy your product, only the taste-makers. The upshot is that if you fail to induce the cool kids, your product will stale before it ever gets off the shelf.

Dan is an affable, youthful name, even a little bit sexy. Dan is accessible to the everyman. Dan’s downfall, however, is that he exudes hardly any sophistication. And remember, Australia’s captains of culture — artists, tech entrepreneurs and boutique media bosses (aka industry “cool kids”) — have no truck with the unsophisticated.

So while Brian from Doncaster might think Dan is a “top bloke”, and Stacey* from Chemist Warehouse “wouldn’t kick him out of bed”, news editors don’t think he’s a particularly erudite policy strategist. What I’m saying, Dan, is you need to consider how you’ll appear to those who influence public perception. I’m saying you need to not be a Dan, Dan.

You need a name that will serve as a panacea to your reputational ills. You need something livelier. You need a name with real zing, pop, and spunk — but please avoid using any of those words specifically. Spunk Pop Andrews sounds like a fun guy, but he’s no statesman.

As a Dan who is fond of his moniker, I wouldn’t recommend abandoning the Dan thing entirely; in your case it just needs some exotic tweaking. But think Snoop Dogg to Snoop Lion rather than Amanda Rogers to Portia de Rossi. The latter sort, a total overhaul, is too jarring and will only confuse voters more.

With all that in mind:

It’s no secret that the Greens continue to wedge you on the youth vote. You can prattle on in Parliament about public holidays and TAFE cuts all you want. But when Gen Y voters habitually hit refresh, refresh, refresh on The Pirate Bay of a Monday night, they aren’t waiting for a torrent of the previous week’s Hansard. They’re not listening, Dan.

If you want this demographic to notice you, you first need to remodel yourself based on the kinds of people they do notice.

Which leads us to …

While the Greens try to carve out the youth vote, the Coalition is busy trying to grease Victoria’s migrant communities. As Crikey reported on Monday, the Liberals have been running non-white candidates in unwinnable seats, which smacks of a party desperate to shore up its multicultural credentials. This is known as “brownwashing”. An ethically dubious practice, no question, but politically shrewd, at least in theory. But because this brownwashing is isolated mainly in outer-suburban seats, the majority of voters probably won’t even notice. You know what voters will notice? A premier who brownwashes himself.

Introducing …

So there you go, Dan: just two rebrand strategies for you to consider ahead of (most probably) taking the reins as Victoria’s premier this Saturday. Mash a pun with a pop-culture reference, or exploit a sensitive social issue and you’ll be the Arthur Fonzarelli of Victorian politics before you can say “there will be no garden parties under the government I lead”.

MAYWEATHER REMAINS UNDEFEATED!

So screamed the headlines, variously phrased, praising boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr’s victory over Manny Pacquiao in the so-called “fight of the century” last Sunday.

There’s just one problem: Mayweather has been defeated, at least five times in the past 14 years. Not that any of his fans like to be reminded of it. 

Since 2002, Mayweather has either been found guilty of, pleaded guilty to, or been charged with domestic violence crimes … five times. He has been handed a suspended sentence and, on another occasion, served jail time.

These are all facts duly pointed out by Clementine Ford in a piece published at Daily Life, and this issue, overall, one on which Ford and I are in complete agreement.

So, what more is there to add? And how can I avoid saying that which has already been ably said or, worse still, voicing that which is so matter-of-fact as to seem naive?

I can’t. It’s all been said. And yet so many people still aren’t listening.

Perhaps, then, the question should not be ‘what to say?’ but ‘how to say it?’ Hone the message to reach people like baseballer, Minnesota Twins outfielder, Torii Hunter, who tweeted on May 2:

“Don’t let emotions clog ur judgement. What Mayweather does in the ring is business. What he does outside the ring has nothing to do with me.”

This kind of ill-conceived binary is a favourite of Mayweather supporters. And while I believe the boundaries between public and private life are very much in need of clear re-demarcation in this hyper-vigilant digital era, Hunter’s reasoning is bullshit. (He has since apologised.)

Sadly, Hunter isn’t an aberration. In a CNN video package, Mayweather fans are asked their opinion on his history of domestic abuse. One fan, Janie Enriquez, says, “I don’t support domestic violence, but I support team Mayweather.”

Again, this is a false distinction, analogous to saying “I don’t support environmental destruction, but I support Shell”.

Elsewhere, not far from here, men and boys (and probably some women) conflate issues: they blame the victim, mutter about the culture wars and GTA V, and stick pins in dolls. On the penultimate point, I would, ordinarily, find some common ground with them, given my fondness for social libertarianism and Enlightenment principles, overall.

But not here. Never here.

Because unlike Michael De Santa, Franklin Clinton or Trevor Philips, Floyd Mayweather is real. Because unlike a shirt with semi-naked cartoon women on it, or a comedian telling a rape joke, or a Mark Latham op-ed, Floyd Mayweather’s abuse has an enumerated, tangible impact -- and I mean beyond indignation.

Here it is: violence is violence is violence.

That may read like dumb repetition and, as an argument, flagrantly begging the question. But the point is physical* violence has an objective negativity -- it is what it is. It exists beyond whatever brain-fart outrage Benedict Cumberbatch has stirred in whatever week (they’re all the same for the self-righteous swarm). Domestic violence is too important to be lost to the rabble and attendant postmodern media critique.**

Extreme physical abuse is not endlessly interpretable and impossibly relative. It is an issue on which commentators -- the shrewd and the reactionary, the professional journalists and the hobbyhorse bloggers -- must quit their predilection for holding tragedy as an inkblot test, half-done canvasses to be coloured in with their exercises in partisan thinking. 

Take Salon’s Joan Walsh, who wrote a think piece on Toya Graham, the Baltimore mum venerated nation-wide after she physically reprimanded her son when she spotted him charging about with a group of rioters. Walsh’s wild conjecture peaks:

“... anyone white who’s applauding Graham’s moment of desperation, along with the white media figures who are hyping her ‘heroism,’ is essentially justifying police brutality, and saying the only way to control black kids is to beat the shit out of them.”

Right. Or maybe those white people are pointing to Toya Graham to show their racist peers that rioting is not endogenous to black people. Or maybe they admire it as a heartbreaking example of our desperate and flawed humanity. Or perhaps they do support corporal punishment, but do so across the racial divide. A skilled op-ed writer could swing it any way.

In any case, we long ago reached (over)saturation point for this kind of self-serving cultural criticism, and are now spluttering, neck deep, in what I’m beginning to think of as the antinomies of pure reason for abstract social philosophy. The real question is: can you die from cognitive dissonance?

Anyway, back to Mayweather ...

You don’t need to be an “over-educated Feminazi” to get it. An explanation of a punch needn’t exhume some dusty Continental philosophy, dreamed up by a tertiary cabal; theses that only begin to ramify miles beyond the limits of concrete experience. To understand a contusion, we needn’t invoke spurious causal relationships, be backed into a corner on questions of empiricism, and breathlessly squeak about a “continuum” or lamely accuse solid thinkers of “missing the point”.

(I’d be very happy to debate anyone who hypes the “but it contributes to a culture!” retort, but now is not the time, nor is this polemic, overall, directed at such people … quite the opposite. It is for the many who spit “Social Justice Warrior” as a slur. In truth, this little digression was really more for them, too -- a contrivance that I am now impelled to point out because I worry it’s so plain to see and don’t want to seem condescending and/or massively up myself.)

Here it is again: violence is violence is violence.

It’s so fucking clear.

But if harm, here, is a simple matter of truth, why won’t Mayweather sob and beg forgiveness and swear to do right, and then honestly live his regret? Establish a trust fund to support battered-women’s shelters; lecture at high schools on how deeply unmasculine and cowardly it is to punch and kick women; lobby professional sport to encode real and damning punishment for abuse? Perhaps then, after a penance, we could accept his mantle as the best pound-for-pound blah blah whatever, it’s irrelevant. Because he hasn’t done any of that. Worse. He continues to deny any wrongdoing whatsoever, dribbling that internet-famous maxim, whose insouciance is, in this context, so needlessly heartbreaking: pics or it didn’t happen.

His fans echo his excuses, they get their information from Mayweather’s own PR … and there’s the rub.

So here’s a straight up and down, no-academic-historicism-funny-business causal relationship for you: dollars spent attending/watching a Mayweather fight are yet more dollars to plump his fat stacks of cash; for him to arrange, Scrooge-like, in neat rows, and record to Instagram, a modern shrine to Mammon, for his young fans to idolise. These are dollars spent encouraging the worship of a man whose crimes are not a representation of violence, but are violence; not symbols of oppression, but are oppressive.

The privileged and educated will continue to debate violent video games, comedy and free speech generally. And I’ll bet London to a brick that Clementine Ford and I will dig in on very different sides of no man’s land then. But, on this issue, it’s time to stop waxing academic, and time to stop fucking around. To support Floyd Mayweather is to support domestic violence.

                                  _______________________________

*I understand there is an important distinction to be made between physical attacks, on one hand, and other forms of domestic violence (e.g. the persistent verbal slurs that undermine self-confidence) on the other. Non-physical domestic abuse is, at the moment, a foggy beast. As Jess Hill explains in The Monthly and on Background Briefing, many men don’t realise that extreme manipulation and strategic putdowns are a form of domestic abuse. And it’s fantastic that the Jess Hills of the world are enlightening the public in this respect. But my point here is that we shouldn’t need an incisive journalist like Hill to explain to us that literally punching women is harmful. That’s basic. NB: Jess Hill is not representative of the non-specific cultural studies grad/commentator I’m criticising in the subplot of this piece.

INT. NIGHT, HOTEL BEDROOM

EMMA and DAN are watching Judge Dredd.

EMMA: [incredulous] That's not how judges work.

EMMA turns off the TV.

FADE TO BLACK

___________________________________________

This article was originally published at Daily Review.

My first car was a 1976 Holden TX Gemini coupe. Dad bought it from Old Gary, who lived across the street and down a bit, on the corner — a little 1.6 litre buzz box arrayed in aftermarket “extras”: its faded blueberry coat; its bronze and yellowed trim; its cracked dash redolent of sunbaked vinyl. I hadn’t thought about that car in years, not since I sold it to a bloke from Wandong, about 12 Ks south-east of Kilmore, in 2008 …

But then, wandering through the National Gallery of Victoria’s new Shifting Gear automotive exhibition, I was arrested by something ineffable — almost an abreaction. I swear I could smell that dash; the boiling oil as it coursed through the bog-standard Isuzu motor while I fanged it out of central NSW — straight shot, from Moree to Ballarat in one leg — with a brief pitstop in Dubbo for a chicken schnitzel roll, and then another in West Wyalong for an iced coffee. A lonely slog 1300km down the Newell Highway, blowing past the lilting heads of the Northern Tableland’s sunflower fields, the chassis rattling like an arthritic tradie’s toolbox …

Jesus. What was this? Oh, right, of course: wistful sentimentality, the emotional ninja (you ambushed me again, you prick). Just to be clear, for anyone who’s ever loved (or even hated) a car, this exhibition is a potently nostalgic experience.

Shifting Gear, at NGV’s Ian Potter gallery from March 6 to July 12, traces the evolution of motorised personal transport in Australia. It begins with the Phaeton, an 1896 steam-powered coach, whose creator, Herbert Thomson, made Australia’s first interstate motor-car journey in this six-seater “horseless carriage” in 1900 — from Bathurst to Melbourne, 794 Ks at 14km/h.

Why? Just coz, it seems.

And because the literal function of cars — shifting us from A to B — was long ago transfigured into a poetic vision; one in which we see them as enablers of modern self-hood and independence. Watch any car ad, as far back as we’ve been making car ads, and you’ll know we idealise them as something grander; not just as vehicles, but as vessels into which we pour our thirst for upward mobility, and our most arbitrary goals. Like the 28-year-old Chinese fella who built a jerry-rigged Lamborghini from scrap iron sheeting and an old Nissan van.

The dapper boor Jeremy Clarkson described it thus: “Whatever it is you’re into — whether it’s racing through Tasmania or belting through the English countryside or sitting in south Los Angeles with your car (bouncing) up and down pointlessly — the car is still the basis for a billion kids’ dreams.”

In his car, the individual is sovereign — so says the myth anyhow. Of course, in practice, driving never really allows for the perfect exercise of libertarian free will. The modern driver is beholden to myriad bureaucratic and legalistic obligations. He is surveilled by speed cameras, infantalised by compulsory insurance, and is forbidden from filleting, tenderising, marinating, or in any way preparing for barebecue, mammals struck and killed in the process of driving.* Still, the Aussie zeitgeist renders owning and driving a car as the most common and accessible manifestation of the liberal spirit. Nowhere is this more apparent than in our love of the ute, connoting, as it does, the hard and honest work of the autarkic tradie. And Shifting Gear has a beauty.

The 1934 Ford coupe 302 ute was designed in Geelong by a draftsman named Lewis Bandt. He had been working to a brief solicited from a farmer’s wife, which called for a car that could be driven to church on a Sunday, then haul livestock about the farm come Monday. Smart but tough, and truly utilitarian.

There’s more than a little irony, then, in contemplating the 302 as it is now, so wholly dislocated from the pragmatism that inspired it. After being rediscovered in the 1980s, sheltered under a peppercorn tree in an overgrown paddock, the ute was never restored. Its twisted wire mesh springs out from the roof of the cabin, and splintered wood panels frame exposed nails in the tray. Curators preserved its dilapidation in a massive petri dish, itself sat on a temporary plywood floor that NGV constructed to protect the gallery’s real floor, all so people could come to look at Lewis Bandt’s decrepit triumph of function.

From the 302, the exhibition winds through ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s-era racecars, like the Chamberlain Special, Elfin Streamliner and Maybach Mk 1. From these sleek, dorsal-finned bullets, the exhibition moves to what is, in my opinion, the main event: ‘70s muscle cars. Including my personal favourite, and one of few car models ever to be christened with a truly apt name: the Charger. First unleashed in 1972, it sure looked like one. And it certainly fuckin’ acted like one.

Clocking 100km/h in 6.1 seconds flat, the VH Valiant Charger R/T E49 was the fastest-off-the-mark five-seater in Australia (and maybe the world), which probably explains why Lawrie Nelson thrashed about Sandown in one looking like a greyhound dropped down a luge track: flat stick on the straights, sliding out at the corners. On sheer acceleration, the Charger wouldn’t be beaten for 27 years.

It was beasts like this that sparked the so-called “supercar scare” of 1972, after journalist and former rally driver Evan Green wrote an article for The Sun-Herald on June 25, 1972, entitled “160MPH ‘Super Car’ soon”. A raging tempest of moral panic ripped the roof clean off the supercar industry once the New South Wales minister for transport Milton Morris (aka Mr Road Safety) realised the bent 8s tear-arsing around Mount Panorama were specced exactly the same as the models punters were buying off showroom floors. Old Milton shat a brick and called for a ban on the production of muscle cars for retail sale. Of course, you could still find them … if you knew where to look.

In 1981, Dad bought a second-hand, one-off 1978 Ford XC Fairmont GXL. Custom-made for a Melbourne businessman looking for a bit of rough and tumble, it rolled out of the factory with near-perfect Ford Falcon GTHO Phase III specs. Meaning it went like shit off a shanghai strapped to punctured NOS canister — though not quite so lively as the Phase IV, the planned mass production of which was aborted during the supercar scare.

Dad also owned a ‘72 HQ Monaro. Not content with the stock 4.2L Holden engine, he dropped a small-block Chev V8 into the nose, making it about half as powerful again. Why? Just coz. He sold it five years later to put a deposit down on our first house. Or so he says. I suspect it might have also been because Italian and Greek men, positively brimming with hubris, often propositioned Mum whenever she drove it alone: “Oi, sweetheart, nice wheels, you wanna get married?”

Speaking of, Shifting Gear has one just like Dad’s — a 1974 HQ Holden Monaro GTS coupe, dressed in aftermarket window louvres. That this is the “youngest” production car in the exhibition is telling, because the story of our car industry — indeed, of manufacturing in the Western world generally — from the early ‘70s onwards is that of a moribund runt, mercilessly ripped from Mother Government’s teat.

As Whitlam, Hawke and Keating — and, to some extent, Fraser — unpicked the jingoistic quilt of protectionism stitched together by Barton, Deakin, and Gorton-era nationalism, manufacturing floundered. Today, the Abbott government continues that legacy by signing free-trade agreements to phase out tariffs, and by sending formerly localised manufacturing jobs out to internationally open tender (or is it a “competitive evaluation process”?).

This economic transition dovetailed with a dramatic recasting of the labour market. The creative class was established as a major new socioeconomic stratum, as knowledge-based and service-sector jobs proliferated, changing the culture with it as people traded Chryslers for Audis.

In 1966, 46% of the Australian workforce was employed in typically blue-collar production industries (construction, manufacturing, transport etc). At September 2013, that number was 22%, the difference having emerged from a demographic chrysalis. Of course, the mining boom came and went, creating 145,000 mostly blue-collar jobs between 2005 and 2013. But we could never hitch our identity to rocks we ripped from the ground in the same way we did our cars — a dragline excavator simply can’t produce the same of kind of social glue as a Monaro (seriously, ask Mum).

Chrysler left years ago. Now, Ford, Holden and Toyota aren’t long for it. Global auto-manufacturing is writhing in a liminal space. Naturally, Shifting Gear probes this space by touching on the future of car design, including Australia’s transition to a more design-focused role within it. But the exhibition mostly looks back. And I’m still gripped by that nostalgia. Fittingly, I left the gallery feeling like Catherine Ballard in the David Cronenberg film Crash (not the one about racism; the one about sex perverts attracted to auto accidents). There is a scene early on in the piece, where she and her husband, James, discuss the death of a man who died in a car crash James caused:

“You should’ve gone to the funeral,” he says.

“I wish I had,” Catherine replies. “They bury the dead so quickly. They should leave them lying around for months.”

Here, they have. And I recommend you take this opportunity to go see the dead, while they’re still lying around.

Those who marched in support of the Nazi-ish Reclaim Australia rally last weekend rebutted accusations of racism by pointing to several “part-Aboriginal” people in their ranks. And so the term “racist mob” might be more fitting (and oxymoronic) than we knew.

“I’m part Aboriginal.”

Ipso facto, not racist.

I suggest the Men’s Rights crowd could use a similar strategy to rebut their critics:

“I’ve got an X chromosome, so really I’m part woman.”

Ipso facto, not sexist.

This isn’t a joke so much as an opportunistic misapplication of logic, a Eureka moment for my budding entrepreneurialism. I see in this a business model: arguments are weapons, and should be commodified as such.

I propose to sell arguments, retorts, rebuttals, denials, refutations, invalidations, rejoinders, ripostes and expostulations, just like the X chromosome bit, to the highest bidder.

I figure both sides of the debate would have in interest in buying my pithy, soundbite sortie: those who might raise it as a shield, and those who would rather that shield stays locked away in their own armoury, if you will.

I will be the Lockheed Martin of rhetorical devices:

While I mostly couldn’t give one scantling of fried shit about who takes over The Daily Show, the recent false controversy over Trevor Noah’s “offensive” tweets has fucked me right off.

For those who haven’t been playing at home, The Daily Show host-in-waiting Trevor Noah was lambasted after people found some old, flippant and admittedly pretty uninspired jokes in his Twitter feed. The criticisms leveled at Noah inspired an “epic Twitter rant” from Patton Oswalt satirising “call-out” culture, which I took, foremost, as an excoriation of the moral grandstanding performed by many of Noah’s critics, and now common amongst advocates of popular soft social liberalism.

Now, former editor of The Onion Joe Garden has weighed into the debate with his own Twitter rant, seemingly repudiating Oswalt’s satire. Here it is, with a brief overture from Sam Adams.

Firstly, as for Sam Adams’ introductory pars to the tweets: I can’t even. The vilest scourge of contemporary thought is the notion that empathy, supported by awareness raising, is sufficient to pull apart institutionalised exclusion and oppression. It’s basic KONY 2012/School of Life lunacy.

Even so, Oswalt was never saying that empathy was “someone else’s problem”, nor retreating along the “path to enlightenment” -- a phrase now popular amongst people who like to think life imitates art to such an extent that it might be "egalitarian" comedy that delivers us from evil, or that Eden follows “nicer” discourse; especially popular amongst Silicon Valley types championing Wisdom 2.0 to balance their emotional keel, just so they can more effectively go about gentrifying poor people out of their homes and ignoring the devastation wrought by conflict minerals.          

Oswalt wasn’t denouncing cultural criticism as form, rather the popularisation of its contemporary mode. Oswalt was criticising a growing movement of lay deconstructionism that takes as its rubric a rudimentary Cartesian plane of broad identity markers (gay, straight, white, black, etc) onto which complex individuals are mapped as dot points, indexed for easy reference whenever that individual says something we want to dispute.

It is a tool we might use to literally “check our privilege”, but also an enabler of such neurotically self-reflexive auto-policing it either paralyses us (given no one can ever objectively measure their own prejudice, and so we defer and vacillate endlessly for fear our own naivety might incidentally lead us to say something “uninclusive”) or compels us to bizarre protests of dubious efficacy, when we project our own expectations of bigotry onto the words of others. That is, the prevailing tendency to hyper-vigilance has taught us to indulge personal inferences at the expense of contextual understanding (see Cecilia Devlin’s recent brain explosion at Ray Badran’s pretty boring rape joke).

Patton Oswalt was criticising what is fast becoming a universal expectation that arguments and cultural processes should come second (if at all) to the maintenance of the “safe space” as it rolls out across every corner of the public sphere.

Joe Garden’s account of “growing as an individual” is all very well and saccharine, but it actually has very little relevance to Noah or Oswalt. Garden’s anecdotal account of coming to realise his own privilege in private conversations with his friends is fine, but has no value at all in instructing PUBLIC communication on a mass scale, nor establishing a universal morality.  

To elaborate: as I said, on one level, what happened between Joe Garden and his black designer is an instructive moment, and exactly what should be happening, everyday. The dynamics of offense and etiquette at the micro-level (that is, between individuals) should be negotiated ad hoc, precisely to allow for the innate particularity of individual relationships.  

But, to extrapolate anecdotal lessons to the macro level, and to subsequently insist upon a rigid one-size-fits-all model for communication, is folly. Because, when we do that, we’ve just externalised the process of building relationships, having sacrificed it to a new form of paternalism, no less insidious for it having been foisted upon us by a “grassroots” mob of cultural studies enthusiasts.

Finally, the next person who refers to a ~500-word rant as an “essay”, will forever become the object of my wrath.