Talkin’ shit on the tee-vee

The AIM Network

10 years ago

By Ross Sharp

“The ABC is out of control and must be reformed!”, howls Andrew Bolt, the Herald-Sun’s resident expert on taste and restraint, and O! how he doth howl, often and most loudly. His frequent allies in this noble quest – from the mighty Gerard Henderson, to stout and doughty Piers Akerman, from the audacious Janet Albrechtsen to the staunch daring of Miranda Devine and beyond, gallants all – steadfast and true in their brave crusade. This fearlessly outspoken consortium of Brothers and Sisters in Adjectival Febrility remain unwavering in their pursuits and arrayed, united and opposed, to the multiple perfidies of progressive advocacy that have lodged deep within the bowels of the nation’s public broadcaster and must, now and forevermore, be purged.

Begin position …

The ABC has consistently and wilfully betrayed its charter and its key, core constituents, those men and women of Australia on whose behalf it is expected to serve, to educate and inform – the Common Man and Common Woman of this land, the working man and woman, the mother, the wife, the modest and the humble.

The ABC’s news and current affairs content, on all platforms, has revealed itself repeatedly, and over time, to be fatally biased toward a disruptively radical “left-wing” liberal-social agenda by embracing and promoting without question positions of extreme anti-capitalism, anti-industry, and anti-family agitprop, to name but a few, as the preferred, prevailing paradigms of our time.

The nation’s public broadcaster has arrogantly forsworn its clear responsibilities to this charter by engaging in, and encouraging, base rumours, confected smears, slurs and vile slanders against the government of the day and the current Australian Prime Minister in particular, and elevating such things to the status of “news”, which they are clearly not.

The established orthodoxies which have served as the foundation and bedrock stones of our nation, and the nation’s citizens since Federation, are sneeringly dismissed as merely the antediluvian obsessions of naïve bumpkins and yokels, their traditional values, mores and morality reduced to the stuff of parody and satire, and sheer common decency regarded as a joke out of fashion and out of time, a fetish for simple-minded fools.

End position.

Nothing is ever what it simply is, or of its times, according to these, and countless other diligent Media Hounds for Truth, Justice and Wanting Everything Their Own F*cking Way All The Time, but rather, each item of “news” and the manner in which it is presented must be assigned, by them, a context serving some underlying political, religious or social ideology, whether that context be deduced from a facial expression, a random turn of phrase, or the sandwich and coffee someone’s just had for lunch.

To their critics, the ABC charter is an unholy mash of Marxist screed and Gaian enviro-ganda, its intent and ambition to thwart our minds with the language of misunderstanding, to alter our perceptions with catastrophic visions of our futures, to blind us with science, to expose our most senior government members to ridicule and scorn, seed our minds with doubt and mistruths, and to arouse and pervert our desires just to prove we’re depraved.

It is not just an organisation, mostly a broadcaster of news with news in it, and occasional entertainments of widely disparate quality and interest, but a “movement” now, an ideological concentrate of pure “leftist” evil and irresponsibility, a grotesque malformation of orthodox mores and virtues, an amorphous accretion of base tumescence, smearing its fusty scent across all things decent, and of righteous virtue, upstanding temperance and unostentatious reserve.

The ABC’s latest vile crime against propriety and couth occurred on June 22^nd’s episode of “Q&A”, a program of negligible quality and import which usually comprises a bunch of heads talking at and over each other about the issues of the moment, mostly in what appears nothing more than frenetic pursuit of achieving “quip of the night”, or making a headline the next day for being the biggest dickhead on the show.

On this momentous occasion, a brief and tepid exchange of words between a dickhead in the audience and a government minister on the panel resulted in said dickhead having a “Who? Ya muvver?!” moment, tetchily saying the type of thing one would expect a dickhead to say, which was promptly ruled out of order by the show’s host, who then quickly wrapped up and called it a night.

“O, what a fall was there, my countrymen!
Then I, and you, and all of us fell down,
Whilst bloody treason flourished over us.”

“What side are you on?!” bellowed our Prime Minister in discombobulated outrage by way of response to this event, all a-flutter in his mind with choleric vapours, and, soon enough, his rallying cry was dutifully picked up and echoed through the august journals of the people and of the land, demanding action be taken, apologies issued, investigations launched and retribution sought to ensure that our ABC shall never again be taken hostage by such barbaric forces of pure evil, and that our nation’s citizens shall never again be subjected to such expressions of deviant tyranny on the national broadcaster at the expense of Team Australia.

Or dickheads saying stupid shit on the tee-vee.

“Pollies get away with spouting rubbish because we let them. If we as a society have the collective attention span of a gnat, and obsess more about who’s stabbing whom in the back on the reality programme du jour than the future of our country, we can’t complain if politicians talk down to us or treat us as mugs, and if the media reports name-calling as serious political news.” – Terry Barnes, The Guardian.

Never let it be said that the White Trash on Heat who currently comprise our body politic and their media cohorts won’t abandon all sense of perspective on a thing in a heartbeat in favour of inchoate squeals of beleaguered rage and protestation over trivialities to deflect any substantive discussion or debate about issues of actual import, those things that affect real people out here in the real world.

No, let us not be thinking, let alone speaking, of the wholesale trashing of industries, the destruction of jobs, the demonisation of the young, the criminalisation of unemployment, and of poverty that our government are so enthusiastically engaged in; let us not be thinking of the shattered cheekbones of battered women denied refuge because funding no longer allows it; let us not think of our abandonment of human rights, the tortures and travails we inflict on the confused minds and soft bodies of women and children fleeing foreign conflicts; let us not think of the desecration of our lands and environments when we can be thinking of the money to be made from them; let us think not on these, or any other such things when we can find lazy solace in the easily confected outrage of the righteous where reality exists solely as a means of fulfilling an ideological end, and if it does not, reality will be duly denied.

You can’t handle the truth.

So let’s make some shit up.

Beat those drums of terror, dance to the discordant rhythms of fear and of loathing, come comrades, sing songs of battle, of defeat and of glorious victory over our most loath’d enemies, for they are closer than we think, much closer, and they do walk among us, in stealth and in silence …